OPINION:
Are foreign doctors “critical to our national interest”? So says the American Medical Association as it tries to persuade the Trump administration to exempt medical professionals from the new $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, many of which are awarded to doctors from overseas.
It’s true that 1 in 5 U.S. doctors were born and educated in other countries, and many of them do outstanding jobs. It’s also true that many foreign-born doctors are actively pushing America toward socialism and other Third World ideologies.
Conventional wisdom holds that highly skilled immigration doesn’t pose a threat to American values. Doctors, in particular, are presumed to possess sophistication and intellect. Still, those characteristics do not ensure belief in American exceptionalism, equality or liberty. In fact, highly skilled immigration can produce greater cultural friction because professionals such as doctors arrive with fully formed, and sometimes also odious, values and political preferences.
Earlier this year, we documented how doctors born primarily in the Middle East and South Asia play an outsize role in supporting the socialist members of Congress known as the “Squad.” During the 2024 elections, the Squad’s six members received an average of 18% of their campaign donations from foreign-trained doctors, almost all of them from majority-Muslim countries.
Ilhan Omar, Minnesota Democrat, received 27% of her campaign cash from these foreign physicians. Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Democrat, got 25%. Cory Busch, Missouri Democrat, and Jamaal Bowman, New York Democrat — both of whom have since lost their seats — received 20% of their donations from doctors trained overseas. Although Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received 6%, that’s still significantly more than most other members of Congress, who typically receive little to no money from doctors who move to the U.S. after medical school.
In a separate report, we observed that foreign-trained doctors (particularly from Muslim countries) are disproportionately represented among individuals profiled by StopAntisemitism, an organization dedicated to naming and shaming those who publicly traffic in Jew hatred. Specifically, doctors were 26 times more likely to be profiled by the organization relative to their prevalence in the workforce, and half of those doctors received their medical degrees overseas.
These are more concerning trends than most Americans realize because it means that a European phenomenon is beginning to manifest here. Across the Atlantic, Islamists have made common cause with socialists in what is known as a “red-green alliance.” Red stands for the socialists because of their closeness to communism, while “green” applies to Islamists because of the symbolic importance of the color in Islam.
What unites these disparate groups? Both despise Western ideals, such as equality, freedom and the rule of law, and both seek the power to implement their vision of society. It’s true that their respective visions differ at the end of the day. Islamists want the state to impose Shariah, whereas socialists want the state to impose draconian control of the economy. Yet they are willing to work together in the short run to secure electoral victories and the demise of the West.
The red-green alliance cannot be allowed to metastasize in America the same way it has in Western Europe. President Trump’s H-1B visa policy is a step toward sanity, making it much harder for Middle Eastern and South Asian physicians to immigrate. Forcing those who want to move to the U.S. to pay $100,000 apiece will necessarily mean fewer potentially dangerous people are able to do so.
The United States will still need doctors, especially because the country is facing a shortage of medical professionals. It is therefore equally important that federal and state policymakers reform — or rather, transform — medical education to cultivate more American-born doctors who believe deeply in American ideals.
Even as the American Medical Association lobbies for more foreign doctors, it is largely responsible for the physician shortage. It has successfully limited the domestic training of doctors, having long argued that the U.S. produces too many doctors. Yet the AMA is doubly wrong: We don’t train enough doctors, and we don’t need to fill the resulting shortage with foreign doctors.
The Trump administration should reject the AMA’s request for an exemption to the new H-1B visa policy while pushing for medical schools to expand their capacity and recruit more Americans, and indeed be more American. Although the AMA disagrees, the real national interest is in ensuring that our doctors don’t undermine our nation, as too many foreign-born doctors are already doing.
• Ian Kingsbury is director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine at Do No Harm, where Jay Greene is a senior fellow.
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