Forbes magazine has just run one of the more egregious examples of "the rest-of-the-world-be-damned, all-that-matters-is-us" approach to the global pandemic crisis.
Andy J. Semotiuk writes his appeal under the headline, "Solving The Covid-19 Crisis Will Require More Foreign Health Care Workers".
According to Shari Dingle Costantini, president of the American Association of International Healthcare Recruitment, her organization has as many as 12,000 nurses abroad who could fill these (U.S.) jobs, if only they could enter the U.S. Even though they have a request for 5,000 nurses in New York, evidently the foreign nurses are unable to immigrate here. 'We have the nurses with all the credentials and ready to come into the country but they can't because there are no visas,' she said."
A similar plea was heard by NPR listeners from Gregory Siskind, the nationally known immigration attorney who can always be counted on to make the case for more clients for himself and his fellow lawyers who live off the efforts of businesses to hold their wage costs down.
Does anything reveal more about the ugly strain of American arrogance and entitlement than calls by immigration enthusiasts to use the pandemic as an excuse to further raid the health professionals of underdeveloped countries?
Many nations around the world already have a large percentage of their doctors working in U.S. hospitals instead of helping the woefully underserved populations of their homelands.
A pandemic is by definition global. In case it has escaped the notice of the immigration expansionists, doctors and nurses are needed everywhere.
A more sensible example of a solution to an acute medical personnel issue is New York, where over 50,000 retired medical professionals have come back to work and where med students are being graduated early to assist.
And for the longer term, let's figure out how we can train doctors out of the large number of young Americans who want to be doctors and qualify but are rejected because there aren't enough medical school slots for them.
As a matter of international ethics, let's stop using our immigration system to wave around wads of cash to deny the world's poor their doctors and nurses.
-- ROY BECK is Founder & President of NumbersUSA
