The Provider’s Role in Immigration Reform

September 19, 2024

BY Katie Smith Sloan

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Immigration reform will never be successful unless providers worldwide work together to make it successful, writes President and CEO Katie Smith Sloan.

For many years, LeadingAge has been calling on Congress to implement reforms that would expand the number of foreign-born workers with a legal pathway to join aging services care teams around our nation.

A few weeks ago, we reiterated our call for immigration reform by releasing a new white paper, The Immigration Imperative: Recommendations for Strengthening the Aging Services Workforce. The paper presents a compelling case for redesigning our immigration system to address the demographic crisis that providers of aging services face.

Simply put, the population of older adults with complex needs is growing by leaps and bounds while the pool of available workers is declining at a dangerous rate. This mismatch is harming older adults and their families.

Our report urges national policymakers to take bold action to help providers welcome more foreign-born caregivers to their organizations. We called on Congress to raise immigration caps, expand visa programs, and help us support newly arrived foreign-born caregivers. These and other actions will help ease workforce shortages.

But make no mistake. Policymakers are not the only ones who have a role in ensuring that our immigration system is efficient, effective, and respectful of the skills and talents that foreign-born workers bring to our nation and our organizations. Immigration reform will never be successful unless providers worldwide work together to make it successful.

LeadingAge and the Global Ageing Network (GAN) are committed to this effort. I'm asking you to join us by taking three initial steps:

Recognize we are not alone. Providers around the world are grappling with the same workforce issues you face daily. We have much to learn from one another. For example, our GAN colleagues in Australia tell us they are recruiting nurses from Papua New Guinea with the expectation that these caregivers will "learn, earn, and return home." Would this approach work well in the U.S.? Our Canadian colleagues report that a lack of housing threatens their country's efforts to welcome foreign-born workers. Is this a challenge we must anticipate and prepare for?

To answer these questions, we must talk with and listen to our international colleagues. Participating in GAN's in-person conferences or virtual gatherings is a great way to begin these critical conversations.

Take foreign-born worker retention seriously. Making our immigration system more welcoming to foreign-born caregivers will be challenging. Retaining those workers after they join our care teams will be equally difficult.

Retention efforts are most likely to succeed if we offer foreign-born workers meaningful support as they acclimate to their new living and working environments. We must help these new arrivals access housing, transportation, food, and language assistance. Most importantly, we must ensure that team members at all levels of our organizations receive the cultural competency training they need to welcome foreign-born workers into the workplace and make them feel at home.

Help increase our understanding of foreign-born workers. Our colleague Zuzana Cepla at Labor Mobility Partnerships (LaMP) recently suggested that we must take deliberate steps to understand the experience of foreign-born workers currently employed in our sector. Only then can we implement "win-win-win" policies that benefit employers, foreign-born workers, and care recipients.

To build this understanding, GAN and LaMP launched a survey to gather information about the experience of foreign-born workers in aging services. The Foreign-Born Worker Survey is available in all languages and can be submitted anonymously. I hope you'll consider distributing the survey to your current foreign-born employees who are not U.S. citizens. The submission deadline is October 13.

As we approach the end of National Workforce Development Month, I want to assure you that LeadingAge will continue working tirelessly to ensure that the U.S. immigration system supports our efforts to develop a highly skilled and compassionate workforce that can meet the growing needs of our growing older population. We welcome your input and support.