Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Hits Senior Care Work Force

Nursing homes and home care agencies have lost workers as the Trump administration has moved to end deportation protections for migrants with temporary legal status.

by Madeleine Ngo for the New York Times

President Trump’s immigration crackdown is beginning to strain the long-term care workforce, raising concerns about how the effects could ripple across the nation’s senior population.

Providers that operate nursing homes and home care agencies say they have lost staff members as the Trump administration has moved to end deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants with temporary legal status. Republican critics of those programs say that they have allowed migrants to stay longer than intended, and that ending them “restores integrity” in the country’s immigration system.

But the long-term care industry already faces persistent challenges in recruiting workers. Providers say the reduction in staff could threaten the quality of services they are able to offer to the nation’s senior population. Some said they would have to raise wages to attract more workers to fill positions, and they were set to pass on cost increases to people receiving care.

The issue underscores the critical role that foreign-born workers play in the long-term care industry. Immigrants make up about 28 percent of the workforce directly providing that care, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data from KFF, a health policy research group. In comparison, foreign-born workers account for about 19 percent of the entire U.S. civilian labor force.

Katie Smith Sloan, the president of LeadingAge, an association representing nonprofit aging services providers, said the Trump administration’s immigration policies were already starting to disrupt facilities across the country as providers moved to terminate some caregivers in recent weeks. She said some employees had stopped showing up at work out of fear for themselves and their families.

The biggest impact so far has stemmed from the Trump administration’s decision to end various programs that grant migrants temporary legal status, which authorizes them to live and work in the United States. In late May, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration, for now, to end a humanitarian program that gave temporary residency to more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

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