Foreign doctors may lose U.S. jobs after visa program suspension
While much of the drama surrounding the Trump administration’s immigration policy has centered on the so-called travel ban, changes to a specialized visa program may have a bigger impact on foreign doctors in the United States and the employers who hope to hire them.
Starting April 3, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is temporarily suspending its expedited processing of H-1B visas, a primary route used by highly skilled foreign physicians and students to practice and train in the United States.
Under the existing “premium processing” system, foreign medical graduates – usually sponsored by a U.S. institution – pay an extra $1,200 when submitting an H-1B petition to ensure a response from USCIS within 15 days. Standard processing of H-1B applications takes 6-10 months. USCIS is terminating the expedited reviews for up to 6 months to address long-standing H-1B petitions and to reduce backlogs, according to a March announcement by the agency.
In the meantime, many foreign medical students and physicians will lose top training spots and jobs as their H-1B applications linger in the system, said Jennifer A. Minear, a Richmond, Va.–based attorney and national treasurer for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
“As a practical matter, the percentages of physicians coming into the U.S. who are accepted into residencies or fellowships, those are the top of the top for medical graduates around the world,” Ms. Minear said in an interview. “Most of them who stay afterward wind up working in underserved areas of the United States. It really doesn’t make much sense as a policy matter to create obstacles to attracting those people to the United States that would prevent them from getting here, obtaining U.S. education, and then remaining in the U.S. and providing urgently needed care to populations that would otherwise go without.”
Changing rules, uncertain futures
The H-1B processing change has left Amr Marawan, MD, unsure if a job offer may fall through and if he will be able to work in the United States at all over the next year.
Dr. Marawan, a native of Cairo, Egypt, will finish his internal medicine residency at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, in June and had planned to pursue a cardiology fellowship under a continuation of his J-1 alien physician visa. After the 2016 election, he decided instead to take a position as assistant professor of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Among his reasons: A J-1 visa requires foreign trainees to return to their home country for 2 years following the completion of their training. With that requirement, he said there would be a gap in his career progression and that he might face challenges returning to the United States.
However, if Dr. Marawan accepted the job at VCU and received approval to waive the 2-year home country requirement from the Virginia Department of Health and the U.S. Department of State, he could apply for a 3-year H-1B visa through the premium processing program.
To get the home country requirement waived, physicians must agree to be employed full time in H-1B status at a health care facility within a designated health professional shortage area, medically underserved area, or medically underserved population.
“The main reason I switched my plan was after the presidential election, there was a lot of talk about changes to visas, so I thought it might be better to take this step now and do the waiver and hopefully this will help me to be more secure while working in order to pursue my medical career,” Dr. Marawan said.
Like many foreign doctors, Dr. Marawan now faces a conundrum. His J-1 visa expires in June and his position at VCU is slated to start in July, but the premium processing program terminates in April. If forced to wait the typical 6-10 months for standard processing, he may lose the position.
“There’s no way we can finish the [state approval] before June,” he said. “And now if we wait and file the H-1B in June, it will take months to get approved. During that time, I cannot work.”
Immigration attorneys have been inundated with similar stories and concerns by physicians regarding how to move forward after the H-1B premium processing suspension, said Adam Cohen, a Memphis attorney. USCIS has delayed premium processing in the past, but not to this extent, he said. [polldaddy:9710548]
This change “was dropped on us with no warning and it’s left us with less than a month to get all of these H-1B [applications] together,” he said.
While foreign physicians and students are scrambling to file their H-1B petitions before April 3, there is no guarantee that the applications will be expedited, Mr. Cohen added. It’s possible USCIS will be unable to get to every application and will simply refund the premium processing fee, he said. The applications would then be subject to standard processing.
USCIS says the suspension will help to address the accumulation of older applications, but the change will only shift the backlog, according to Washington attorney Allen Orr Jr.
USCIS spokeswoman Carolyn Gwathmey said officials cannot speculate whether they will get to every application filed before April 3.
“As noted in the agency’s announcement, we will continue to premium process form I-129 H-1B petitions if the petitioner properly filed an associated form I-907 before April 3, 2017,” Ms. Gwathmey said in an interview. “We will refund the premium processing fee if the petitioner filed the form for an H-1B petition before April 3, 2017, and we did not take adjudicative action on the case within the 15-calendar-day processing period.”
