Loss of legal immigrant caregivers puts America’s seniors at risk

The quality of long-term care depends heavily on appropriate staffing levels and continuity of care, as residents fare best when they are routinely treated by the same trained caregivers who know their needs and notice warning signs.  

Many documented instances of elder abuse and neglect trace back to facilities that either lacked sufficient staffing or could not maintain a stable, trained team over time. In fact, that pattern that shows up repeatedly in lawsuits involving vulnerable residents.

What often goes unspoken in these cases is the identity of the caregivers themselves. In skilled nursing homes and assisted living facilities across the country, a large share of the workforce providing hands-on care to aging residents is made up of legal immigrants, including visa-holders, green card-holders, naturalized citizens and workers who hold lawful humanitarian status such as temporary protected status. 

That workforce is now shrinking. The elder care industry should move swiftly to address current and future staffing gaps — something it has been slow to address previously. 

Roughly one in three home care workers and one in five nursing home workers are immigrants, according to research from Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester. The same research found that, when the immigrant population increases in a metro area, elderly mortality in long-term care facilities measurably declines. This is because a larger immigrant population........

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