40,000 immigrant visas for nurses and doctors proposed in the US Senate

One of the realizations that people learn during this COVID-19 pandemic is the importance of healthcare workers and the crucial work that they do being the frontliners in this health crisis. Never has the job of a nurse, doctor, respiratory therapist, medical technologist, and all the support staff of hospitals been so appreciated and given thanks until this time. Governments are now beginning to realize that simply giving thanks to these medical professionals is not enough. More should be done to address their long-neglected concerns of higher wages, safer workplaces, security of tenure, and more incentives for them to stay in their professions.

This epidemic has also highlighted the need for more healthcare workers. In the US, there is a pending bill now before the US Senate entitled Healthcare Workforce Resilience Act (S. 3599) principally sponsored by Sen. Purdue of Georgia which has garnered a bipartisan support of the other 13 senators. Specifically, this proposed legislation seeks to recapture 40,000 unused immigrant visas from previous years and divide these to 15,000 visas for doctors and 25,000 visas for nurses. And since this is an immigrant visa classification, spouses and children are also included. I suspect that this would not only be made available to nurses and doctors but would also extend to other healthcare professions. If passed, this bill would surely boost the number of foreign healthcare workers in the US which, at this time, they surely and sorely need. Let’s wait and monitor how this bill shapes up in the coming months.

* * *

As the modified Enhanced Community Quarantine gets extended and the economic recovery is projected to be slow, I hope the middle class will also get its due. The rich can always take care of themselves and the government always takes care of the poor. Even the generosity of the middle class pitches in for the latter. But the longer this crisis goes, the more stretched the middle class will become. Whatever it has now can only take so much.

At this time, care and attention must be given to the middle class as it is being asked to work more, pay more taxes, serve more, do more, and sacrifice more. If it gets stressed out by the risk of losing jobs, depleting reserves, and rising costs, economic collapse could burst from the middle. Up to now, the middle class is performing a delicate and arguably an unfair balance of holding both ends together --carrying the elite on its shoulders while pulling up the poor up.

The middle class deserves better.