To keep hospitals open, we need to close our border

OPINION:

Hospitals are buckling under the strain of America’s illegal immigration crisis.

Consider one hospital in the border city of Yuma, Arizona — an area where the daily number of illegal crossings has skyrocketed from roughly 40 to more than 1,000 over the past two years.

Hospital administrators recently pleaded with a visiting congressional delegation for relief, explaining how their modest 406-bed facility has been forced to provide over $26 million in uncompensated care to illegal immigrants in just one year. So many pregnant illegal immigrants are flooding the hospital that doctors have had to delay planned deliveries for American mothers.

The Yuma hospital, just miles from the border, certainly has it worse than most. But hospitals nationwide are struggling to cope with the record influx of foreign nationals. At one point in December, more than 80% of U.S. hospital beds were occupied — a level not seen since January 2022, the peak of the omicron wave. But this time, only about 6% of beds went to COVID-19 patients. This past winter, near-record numbers of patients — including many recently arrived illegal immigrants — needed care for a far wider variety of ailments.

The scale of border crossings is without precedent. From October through January, law enforcement agents recorded over 874,000 encounters with illegal immigrants at the border — 30% more than the same four-month stretch the prior year, and almost double the number of encounters in the entirety of fiscal 2020, the last full fiscal year before President Biden took office.

Due to immigration — both illegal and legal — the nation’s population is growing far faster than hospital capacity. In 2021, immigration, rather than net reproduction (births outpacing deaths), accounted for a majority of U.S. population growth for the first time in history. The U.S. population is expected to increase by over 70 million in the next 40 years.

Our health care system can’t keep up. As of 2017, we had only 2.9 hospital beds per 1,000 Americans — down nearly 70% since 1960, even though the population has nearly doubled since then.

Given this rapid population growth, it’s hardly surprising that nearly 40% of emergency rooms across the country report that they’re overcrowded every day. Overcrowding leads to longer wait times to receive care. In fact, between 2017 and 2021, the percentage of patients who left before receiving any care whatsoever nearly doubled.

Not coincidentally, a majority of Americans think U.S. health care is poor or fair at best for the first time in decades.

Among the nonelderly population, illegal immigrants are more than five times as likely to be uninsured as U.S. citizens. Thanks to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, uninsured illegal immigrants can receive emergency medical services via emergency Medicaid. Emergency rooms, as overcrowded and understaffed as they already are, are the only place many illegal immigrants turn to when they need medical services.

If we’re going to right the proverbial ship in our hospitals, we need to curb the immigration-driven population boom. That status quo is simply unsustainable.

• Mike Hanauer is an environmental activist with more than 30 years’ experience. He is a speaker for the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy and has served on the National Board of Zero Population Growth and co-chaired the New England Coalition for Sustainable Population.