Immigrant health care workers sidelined amid coronavirus: Study

America’s strict medical licensing regime has left hundreds of thousands of health workers on the sidelines — immigrants who earned degrees in the field overseas but have been shut out of the business because they haven’t been able to transfer their credentials to the U.S., according to a new study Tuesday.

The Migration Policy Institute calculates that there are 165,000 immigrants or refugees who trained overseas but who are being underutilized here. Another 98,000 immigrants trained in the U.S., but also aren’t working to the full potential of their degrees, MPI says.

Nurses are the most common, with many of them reduced to working as personal care aides or domestic help rather than nursing.

The immigrants are part of 1.1 million people in the U.S. whose health-related degrees aren’t “fully utilized,” MPI says, calling it “brain waste.”

“These immigrants represent a potentially important source of staff for the U.S. health corps. And because these immigrants tend to be younger than their U.S.-born counterparts, they represent an important pool of responders to a disease that is particularly dangerous for those 60 and older,” wrote Jeanne Batalova and Michael Fix, authors of the MPI memo.

Immigrants’ role in the coronavirus crisis has been heatedly debated.

Some analysts point to American agriculture’s resilience, arguing foreigners — whether here legally or not — are the backbone of farm workers.

The Center for American Progress says there are 29,000 illegal immigrant “Dreamers” here under the Obama-era DACA program working in health, too. Many are home health aides, others are medical assistants, and 3,400 are registered nurses.

On the other side of the equation, advocates for American workers have called on Homeland Security to put off expansion of some guest-worker programs, arguing that with millions of Americans pushed out of work, there is a surplus of labor that can do those jobs without importing more people.