Nursing homes, health centers, and hospitals across the United States rely on immigrant workers every day to meet their staffing needs and sustain this multi-trillion-dollar industry. An April 3, 2025 research letter published in JAMA — co-authored by ICH and LZC Epidemiologist Sharon Touw and ICH board member Dr. David Bor, among others—estimates that over one million noncitizen immigrants (one-third undocumented) who work in healthcare are at risk of restriction or deportation under the Trump regime. The authors point out “their ranks include skilled personnel who would be difficult to replace, especially if legal immigration is further restricted.”
This analysis honors and extends the legacy of Dr. Leah Zallman, whose scholarly work explored the vast contributions immigrants make to the U.S. healthcare system. With her colleague, Sharon Touw, Dr. Zallman demonstrated that undocumented immigrants prolong the life of Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund and contributed a net surplus of $21.3 billion to Medicaid in 2017. The Leah Zallman Center for Immigrant Health Research (LZC) was founded by the Institute for Community Health in 2022 to conduct research at the intersection of immigrant, economic, and health justice and to ensure that immigrant voices are amplified to the state and national level as part of evidence-based policymaking.
“Leah was a fierce advocate for immigrants and worked to counter the false narratives about immigrants in our communities by highlighting their many contributions. Immigrants play a key role in our healthcare workforce, especially in care for the elderly and disabled. The policies of the new administration will place more pressure on the organizations serving these populations and will likely result in lower quality of care.”
– Sharon Touw, MPH, Epidemiologist III, Institute for Community Health
“For these workers, their families, and communities, the threat of deportation, let alone actual deportation, creates continual anxiety and potentially, broken families and impoverishment. Foreign-born healthcare workers contribute greatly to US healthcare. They were often highly trained before emigration and brought valuable skills in addition to serving as cultural and linguistic interpreters. Leah would be proud to see her dream realized—highly impactful, policy-relevant immigration health research.”
– David Bor, MD, Chief Academic Officer, Cambridge Health Alliance
The administration has already revoked humanitarian parole for 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans and moved to terminate temporary protected status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants —many of whom have been working in health care. More recently, a physician with a valid H-1B visa was deported without due process. In a health care system already constrained by critical staff shortages, these attacks on immigrants put everyone’s health at risk.
Read more coverage of the letter from NPR and Medpage Today.
