Posted on 03/26/2018 9:08:05 AM PDT by spintreebob
People living with disabilities, serious illness and the frailty of old age are bracing to lose caregivers due to changes in federal immigration policy.
About 59,000 Haitians live in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a humanitarian program that gave them permission to work and live here after the January 2010 earthquake devastated their country. Many work in health care, often in grueling, low-wage jobs as nursing assistants or home health aides.
Now these workers’ days are numbered: The Trump administration decided to end TPS for Haitians.
In Boston, the city with the third-highest Haitian population, the decision has prompted panic from TPS holders and pleas from health care agencies that rely on their labor. The fallout offers a glimpse into how changes in immigration policy are affecting older Americans in communities around the country, especially in large cities.
Ending TPS for Haitians “will have a devastating impact on the ability of skilled nursing facilities to provide quality care to frail and disabled residents,” warned Tara Gregorio, president of the Massachusetts Senior Care Association, which represents 400 elder care facilities, in a letter published in The Boston Globe. Nursing facilities employ about 4,300 Haitians across the state, she said.
“We are very concerned about losing dedicated, hardworking individuals, particularly at a time when we cannot afford to lose workers,” Gregorio said in a recent interview. In Massachusetts, 1 in 7 certified nursing assistant (CNA) positions are vacant, a shortage of 3,000 workers.
Nationwide, 1 million immigrants work in direct care — as CNAs, personal care attendants or home health aides — according to the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute. Immigrants make up 1 in 4 workers, said Robert Espinoza, PHI’s VP of policy. Turnover is high, he said, because the work is difficult and wages are low. The median wage for personal care attendants and home health aides is $10.66 per hour, and $12.78 per hour for CNAs. Workers often receive little training and leave when they find higher-paying jobs at retail counters or fast-food restaurants, he said.
The country faces a severe shortage in home health aides. With 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day, an even more serious shortfall lies ahead, according to Paul Osterman, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management. He predicts a national shortfall of 151,000 direct care workers by 2030, a gap that will grow to 355,000 by 2040. That shortage will escalate if immigrant workers lose work permits, or if other industries raise wages and lure away direct care workers, he said.
Nursing homes in Massachusetts are already losing immigrant workers who have left the country in fear, in response to the White House’s public remarks and immigration proposals.
“What people don’t seem to understand is that people from other countries really are the backbone of long-term care,” said Sister Jacquelyn McCarthy, CEO of Bethany Health Care Center in Framingham, Mass, which runs a nursing home with 170 patients. She has 8 Haitian and Salvadoran workers with TPS, mostly CNAs. She already has 6 CNA vacancies and can’t afford to lose more.
“There aren’t people to replace them if they should all be deported,” McCarthy said.
In addition to seeing Dicenso, Nirva works 3 shifts a week at a chiropractor’s office. Five nights a week, she works the overnight shift at a rehab center in Boston run by Hebrew SeniorLife. CEO Louis Woolf said Hebrew SeniorLife has 40 workers with TPS, out of 2,600.
It’s not clear how many direct care workers rely on TPS. PHI calculates 34,600 are from Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras. 11,000 from countries affected by Trump’s travel ban, primarily from Somalia and Iran, and about 69,800 from Mexico.
The “totality of the anti-immigrant climate” threatens the stability of the workforce — and “the ability of older people and people with disabilities to access home health care,” Espinoza said.
A DHS official said “economic considerations are not legally permissible.” TPS designation hinges on whether the foreign country faces adverse conditions, war, environmental disaster.
The biggest hit to the immigrant workforce may come from another program — family reunification, said Robyn Stone of research at LeadingAge, an association of nonprofit groups that care for the elderly. Trump is seeking to scrap the program, which he calls “chain” migration, in favor of a “merit-based” policy.
Osterman, the MIT professor, said the sum of all of these immigration policy changes may have a serious impact. If demand for workers exceeds supply, he said, insurers may have to restrict the number of hours of care that people receive, and wages may rise, driving up costs.
“People aren’t going to be able to have quality care,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to stay at home.”
Angelina Di Pietro, Dicenso’s daughter and primary caretaker, disagreed. “There’s not a lot of people in this country who would take care of the elderly,” she said.
especially in large cities.
Note how no mention of the fact that most of this is Medicare and Medicaid money. Only a small part is private money and LTC insurance.
Those tough on immigration need to solve (at least partially solve) this problem. Currently ex-cons are one major source of citizen workers for LTC-Long Term Care and HH-Home Health. Should we increase the steering of convicts into this field? They have a higher rate of abuse in this field than do immigrants.
Work US Citizens won't do needs to be taken seriously. If the working poor did not have so much taken out for their, and their employer's, payroll taxes, they would have more attraction to working. If welfare programs did not pay more than the take home pay of the working poor, then more would work and not go on welfare.
And are the elderly and disabled expecting too much of the workers? Should we just tell more elderly and disabled Sorry. There is nobody paid to help you?
Would the church and Christians and Jews and humanists who claim to care show up and do more volunteer work?
Women, children and the elderly hurt worse.
Rule of Law or Not?
I choose rule of law.
Remove ALL illegal aliens.
I have family and friends who are “immigrants.”
People being lost to laws are only illegals. NOT immigrants.
Take back the language!!
If they are here legally, they won't be departed. What a bunch of crap.
deported.
I wonder if illegal immigrants working in health care conforms to HIPAA laws.
Bound to cause global warming to increase as well! And no more chocolate or tacos!
So immigrants are the ONLY ones able to provide elder care???
The elites rely on the cheap labor express. Temporary Protective Status means “permanent” to these vermin.
Kaiser - another deep state, bought-and-paid-for crony capitalist organization who sold themselves for Obamacare.
“There aren’t people to replace them if they should all be deported,” McCarthy said.
Once the welfare rolls get cleaned up, and welfare is no longer a generational career, we just might have ‘enough people’ to replace those deported.
~~~~~~~~~
If they are here legally, they won’t be departed. What a bunch of crap.
Exactly! If they’re not illegal, then nothing to worry about. Is McCarthy saying we only employ ILLEGALS for our elder care?
What do all of these illegal healthcare workers use for a SS number?
I’m confused.
.
OMG. Who is going to mow my lawn? Fix my roof? Bus the tables?
LOL. If we don’t have illegal immigrants working as caregivers for the elderly for $2.00 per hour, they’re all gonna die!!!!!
Then again, under Obamacare, isn’t that the goal? So the Libs should be happy.
Well now. This IS a clever spin. Had not heard this lame approach before.
Trump wants to deport all illegals. Leaving no one to care for poor old Mom and Dad.
Gee. How heartless.
Dad had LTC insurance that provided enough per day for me to have coverage for about 12 hours depending on how much I paid.
I never had to hire illegal immigrants. And I rarely had trouble finding anyone to work.
However, I did worry about the fact that the solutions I proposed for our country, closing the border, restricting immigration, deportation of illegals, tariffs to bring the good jobs back home, all of which would raise wages, would directly impact me in a negative way because of the caregivers.
Didn’t stop me from proposing what was right for the country.
I want wages for everyone to go up, including the poorest of our working poor. Is that going to hurt employers. Depends. If you are selling more, you can offset that cost. If you have no revenue like elderly needing caregivers, then yes, it’s going to hurt.
But maybe the end result is that more people can afford LTC insurance, and LTC insurance can afford to pay a higher amount.
Anytime you change anything in the economy. Somebody wins and somebody loses. Our country will be better off. Elderly on fixed incomes, probably not.
One most strongly suspects (if examined on a net basis) that illegal aliens "take" ever so much more than they "give" to our society;
...and, that their presence is ever so much more of a "cost" in terms of services provided to them, money benefits provided to them, and outright theft of our very fine (but fragile) language and culture.
As just one example, illegal aliens are not helping our senior citizens by crowding them out of hospital emergency rooms.
As a seasoned citizen, I’m not worried. Our free market system will find a way to fill that gap, hopefully with US Citizens, which will give them employment instead of welfare handouts at tax payers expense.
It’s just a win win.
I don’t give a rats rear end about illegals being chased out.
I also don’t care about Kalifornia losing migrant workers, which was another issue recently brought up. This is what got the whole mess going in the first place. Again, technology and/or the free market system will find a cure.
If these facilities paid a decent, living wage, those jobs would be filled by US citizens. The owners and execs would make less money. Where's the downside?
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