President Trump’s June proclamation suspending most employment-based immigration has impacted the already-strained U.S. hospital system by slowing the flow of desperately needed new medical residents as COVID-19 slams health care systems across the country. “At hospitals where many incoming residents are visa holders, even a delay of a few weeks in arriving in the U.S. creates a staffing crisis. Doctors and administrators are afraid that the repercussions will last for the rest of the year — leaving them overworked and ill-prepared even before a second wave of the virus hits,” Dara Lind reports for ProPublica. While the proclamation makes an exception for doctors treating COVID-19 patients, the guidance issued to consulates in charge of approving visas has been “slow and inconsistent” — consulates in at least five countries are still not processing doctors’ visas, and hospitals face a staffing crisis as their incoming residents remain stuck abroad. “If someone is getting acutely ill, who will see them? … I’ve got my poor residents running around trying to make sure everyone is seen in a timely manner. And residents are great, but they can only be in one place at one time,” said one hospital administrator. 

Immigrants working in health care are indispensable to the nation’s COVID-19 response: They represent nearly 17% of all health care workers in the country, including 21% of all doctors and around 16% of nurses nationwide.

Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Noorani’s Notes. I’m Joanna Taylor, communications manager at the Forum and part of the Notes team, filling in for Ali today. Have a story you’d like us to include? Email me at [email protected].

CUT IN HALF – By 2021, President Trump will have succeeded in cutting legal immigration to the U.S. by nearly half, Stuart Anderson writes for Forbes. A new report from the National Foundation for American Policy, where Anderson is executive director, projects that the number of legal immigrants will have declined by 49% between fiscal year 2016 and fiscal year 2021, mainly as a result of the president’s “executive and administrative authorities, some of which are being challenged in court.” The economic fallout will be severe: “Less immigration is likely to hold back America’s economic recovery from Covid-19. Economists at Oxford University and Citi concluded that without immigrants contributing to the quantity and quality of the labor supply, the majority of the economic growth gains America saw between 2011 and 2016 following the last recession would not have happened.” For a bigger-picture look at how legal immigration — and backlash against it — has shaped the U.S., check out last week’s episode of “Only in America.”

ESSENTIAL WORKERS – Virginia has issued temporary emergency standards requiring businesses to protect their workers from COVID-19, making it the first state in the nation to do so, Lulu Garcia-Navarro and Christianna Silva report for NPR. The new standards come after poultry plants on the state’s Eastern Shore have been linked to more than 260 cases of the coronavirus. “Advocates say that before the new safety guidelines were announced, companies had few safety precautions at all … despite the fact that poultry workers work closely together, which makes it difficult to socially distance on the line. Moreover, the workers are largely Latinx, a community that is four times more likely than non-Hispanic whites to contract COVID-19, according to the CDC.”(Read the Forum’s new explainer on immigrant access to COVID-19 testing and treatment here.) Related: Tonight on PBS, Frontline airs its investigation into the toll the virus is taking on the essential agricultural workers — many of them immigrants — who are “the coronavirus pandemic’s invisible victims.”

IRREPARABLE DAMAGE – Even though the Trump administration rescinded its short-lived policy requiring international students to attend in-person classes amid the pandemic, university leaders fear that the administration’s repeated attempts to restrict immigration have irreparably damaged the country’s reputation in the eyes of students abroad, Collin Binkley writes for the Associated Press. “All those great scholars, wherever they are, India, China, Europe, may now elect to go elsewhere or simply to stay home … We will see its effect four, five years from now. It’s not falling off a cliff, but over time you have this creep down the slope toward mediocrity,” said Denis Wirtz, vice provost for research at Johns Hopkins University. Universities in Canada, Australia and beyond see this as an opportunity to replace the U.S. as the top destination for higher education, and international students tired of the fire drills are taking note. “I’m also exploring options abroad now, because you never know what’s going to happen,” said Áron Ricardo Perez-Lopez of Hungary, who’s currently studying computer science at MIT. “I don’t want to be worried about this for another five years.”

15 TIMES MORE LIKELY – According to data from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Texas Department of State Health Services, people held in Texas immigrant detention centers are 15 times more likely to have COVID-19 than the rest of the state’s population, Elizabeth Trovall reports for Houston Public Media. Despite the staggering statistic, detainees say that ICE is failing to provide adequate medical care and prevention measures: Israel Rodriguez, who was released from a Texas ICE facility in June, said that when he asked for testing after running a fever, a nurse “specifically told me ‘no’, that ICE had told them that they should not test us, that they should refrain from doing so and it only should be done so in the most severe or dramatic of cases.” ICE says it has released more than half of Texas detainees since February, but current detainees still face cramped, high-risk conditions. “The best way to stop the spread of this virus in the detention centers is to get people outside of the detention centers, so they can quarantine at home with their families, with relatives, with whoever they may be able to live with,” said Houston-based immigration attorney Julie Pasch.

Thanks for reading,

Joanna