A new coalition that includes the American Health Care Association, LeadingAge, the American Seniors Housing Association and more than 400 other national and state-level business groups is calling on Congress to enact measures to improve border security, update the legal immigration system and take action on a bipartisan compromise to break immigration reform gridlock.

In a May 1 letter to members of Congress, the Legal Immigration and Border Enforcement Reform This Year (LIBERTY) Campaign asked legislators to look for ways to fix the immigration system, which it said is “broken” and “outdated.”

“Immigrants already are significant contributors to the long-term care workforce: over 30% of all home care aides, over 20% of all nursing assistants, 20% of RNs in nursing homes and over 15% of licensed practical nurses (LPNs) in nursing homes are foreign born,” LeadingAge said in an online post. 

LIBERTY is calling on Congress to compromise on immigration reforms with solutions that include expanding the scope of essential worker programs, specifically allowing employers to meet temporary labor needs in non-seasonal jobs and creating options for visas covering other high-demand workers to help employers meet workforce needs.

The State Department’s recent cap on employment-based (E-B) 3 visa petition filings was a “gut punch” for providers, LeadingAge said. 

As McKnight’s previously reported, only green card petitions for international nurses filed before June 2022 may proceed to the interview stage for EB-3 visas, according to federal officials. All other petitions waiting for interviews have been paused, likely until 2025, some immigration experts warn.

“When we create backlogs for international nurses to come to the US, we create backlogs for seniors to access the long-term care they need,” Clif Porter, senior vice president of government relations for the National Center for Assisted Living and AHCA, said last week in a statement. “At a time when the administration plans to propose a federal staffing mandate for nursing homes, Washington should not simultaneously create barriers to recruit the nurses we so urgently need.”

Critics say, however, that immigration reform will not solve the nursing shortage in the United States.

“Recruiting internationally educated nurses (IENs) to fill vacancies is a popular solution that seems easier than fixing problematic organizational cultures that are unsupportive of nurses,” researchers Y. Tony Yang, ScD, LLM; Roy A. Thompson, PhD, MSN, RN, MPH; and Allison P. Squires, PhD, FAAN, RN, wrote Thursday in Health Affairs. “It will not, however, solve the underlying problem of poor management practices that result in high nurse turnover rates and contribute to the current staffing crisis.”

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