Why Trump Quietly Carved Out Doctors From His Own Visa Freeze

Since returning to office last year, President Donald Trump has imposed numerous immigration restrictions that he argues will benefit the American people. The Trump administration recently amended one such measure, a development that suggests it might not be having its intended effect.

Starting in January, the Trump administration froze “decisions on visa extensions, work permits and green cards for citizens of 39 countries,” The New York Times reported. A presidential proclamation cited the need to protect Americans “from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks, threaten our national security and public safety, incite hate crimes, or otherwise exploit the immigration laws for malevolent purposes.” It outlined very narrow exceptions—for example, “any athlete or member of an athletic team” traveling “for the World Cup, Olympics, or other major sporting event.”

In May, the Trump administration tacitly admitted this broad restriction is not in the national interest. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services quietly updated its website “to indicate that physicians are no longer subject to the processing hold,” and the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that it would “resume issuing visas and work permits for the group,” The New York Times reported.

Foreign-born professionals are critical to the country’s medical workforce: A quarter of American doctors are international medical graduates. Rural counties and communities are especially dependent on foreign-born physicians. They will prove even more important during the next decade, because the U.S. will face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036, according to an estimate from the Association of American Medical Colleges. The visa pause was “forcing physicians who’ve lived in the U.S. for years to stop working and exacerbating staffing shortages that are a longstanding headache for hospital administrators,” Politico reported in April.

Plenty of obstacles remain for foreign doctors. Delays in processing visa waiver applications for a program run by the Department of Health and Human Services could mean that “hundreds of foreign doctors about to complete training in the U.S. will have to leave the country” imminently, KFF Health News reported in May. Hospitals are also having a hard time sponsoring international physicians because of the $100,000 H-1B visa fee that the Trump administration introduced last fall. “Canada and other countries are trying to recruit these doctors away from the U.S., offering incentives like fast-tracked permanent resident status,” Axios noted in March.

The foreign doctor carveout is a positive development, but it is a narrow solution to a bigger problem. Imprecise immigration restrictions harm the country in ways that decision makers can’t—or won’t—imagine.