Lawmakers Zero in on Immigration to Address Caregiver Crisis

McKnights Home Care | By Diane Eastabrook

Momentum could be building in Washington to address the troubled immigration system as a way to solve the nation’s caregiver crisis. 

Last week, both Republican and Democratic senators acknowledged that current immigration policy is making it difficult to recruit and retain foreign healthcare workers during a hearing in Washington. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and Border Safety, said there continues to be a backlog in processing green cards for critical healthcare workers and caps on employment-based visa categories.

“Many of the federally recognized central workers that we relied on at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic still risk uncertainty with their legal status in America,” Padilla said during the hearing. “In our hour of need, the United States is effectively discouraging potential healthcare workers from trying to come to and work in the United States. That needs to change.”

Last year, Padilla and Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) introduced the Citizenship for Essential Workers Act, which established a mechanism for immigrants who worked as essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic to apply for and obtain permanent resident status. To be eligible, the workers must have earned income at any time during the pandemic that was deemed essential by the Department of Homeland Security or a state or local government. New York is one state that deemed home- and community-based caregivers as essential under a bonus program the state enacted over the summer. 

Home care advocates, including the Home Care Association of America and LeadingAge, have been aggressively advocating for immigration reform as a way to address the shortage of caregivers. However, both groups favor the establishment of a new visa category for direct care workers that might allow agencies to either sponsor workers living outside the U.S. now or currently working here under another visa category.

An estimated 30% of the nation’s 2.3 million home care workers are immigrants, according to PHI National which tracks the direct care industry.