By Violet Ikong
In January, the United States imposed a blanket visa ban on 39 countries, including 26 in Africa. It reversed course about four months later, exempting physicians from the policy. President Donald Trump said the ban was aimed at protecting national security. But the sweeping policy also impacted doctors already living and working in the U.S., leaving many unable to renew or extend their visas.
Following this, more than 20 health organizations wrote to the U.S. Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security in April, warning that communities served by foreign doctors were struggling to access healthcare. “Any policy done on a big scale, and very quickly, like this one has consequences,” Jeanne Batalova, Senior Policy Analyst at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in Washington, told Amjambo Africa.
With applications frozen, hospitals were forced to place some doctors on administrative leave, while others faced the possibility of losing their jobs. “Some doctors who came on the J-1 visa to work as medical residents were unable to transition to full-time positions due to the visa restrictions,” Batalova said.
Even physicians unaffected by the ban felt its weight, forced to see more patients as colleagues were sidelined. “It’s very tiring, and physician burnout has been a big issue already,” Batalova said. While the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did not publicly announce the policy reversal, it quietly updated its website to exempt physicians, leaving affected doctors uncertain about what the change meant in practice.
How Immigrants Contribute to Healthcare
A 2025 report by the American Medical Association (AMA) found that about 25% of physicians in the U.S. are foreign-trained, with close to 325,000 of them practicing. In 2021, states like California, Florida, Maryland, Arkansas, and Texas had immigrants constituting more than 30% of physicians and surgeons, according to data by the MPI.
“In some specialties like nephrology and geriatrics, the share of foreign doctors is higher than half. So it matters a big deal for many patients and hospitals, whether they have access to foreign doctors,” Batalova said.
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Many rural and underserved areas in the U.S. have one physician for as many as 3,500 people, and most of these doctors come from countries like India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Nigeria. Some hospitals in these places rely entirely on immigrant doctors. A joint letter AMA and some notable organizations sent to the federal government in 2025 reiterated that because 64% of foreign-trained physicians practice in Medically Underserved Areas and 21 million Americans rely on them for at least half of their medical workforce, keeping these doctors sidelined due to administrative delays directly harms American patients.
“[Foreign physicians] bring a kind of cultural competence to these communities. So if you have, let’s say, an international population in an urban area, international physicians help bridge that cultural gap and help understand people from different cultures,” Dan Berger, a medical immigration expert and academic fellow at Cornell Law School, New York, told Amjambo Africa.
“Extremely Contradictory Policies”
By 2034, the U.S. is projected to face a shortage of up to 124,000 physicians, requiring IMGs to help fill workforce gaps. “We need both immigrant and domestic physicians, because the shortages are serious,” Berger said. “The U.S. trains many physicians, but they’re just not enough for the size of our population.”
Yet foreign doctors remain constrained by restrictive immigration policies. For the first time in about 50 years, the country recorded a net negative migration in 2025, following the implementation of harsh policies.
According to Patrick Taran, President of the Global Migration Policy Associates based in Geneva, Switzerland, fewer people coming to the U.S. poses a threat to the country’s healthcare sector, as well as its economic growth, competitiveness, and fiscal stability over the next few decades.
Last year, Trump admitted that the country needs foreign skilled workers, saying the U.S. lacked individuals with “certain talents” to fill domestic roles. “The U.S. and Western countries in general are pursuing extremely contradictory policies. If you need the workers and you’re chasing them out and not encouraging [them] to come in, you’re inevitably going to have some huge economic consequences,” Taran said.
He noted that foreign-born workers already represent nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce, a share that will only grow more critical as the domestic workforce ages. But beyond the economic contradiction, he suggested anti-immigrant policies may serve a deeper political purpose. “There is an intent to blame problems on foreigners, to criminalize and make them the devil, so the real problems are not recognized. It also allows for increasing control over the workforce, particularly its large immigrant proportion,” he said.
It remains uncertain whether the decision to exempt physicians from visa bans is a temporary fix or evergreen policy. However, Taran stated that the reversal reflects the government’s response to growing public concern over the cost and availability of healthcare. “If you don’t address the problem as a whole and have a very different migration policy, the problem isn’t going to be resolved. You’re only going to dig the hole deeper and wider and make it all the more difficult to climb out of,” Taran said.
Unpredictable Future
The U.S. policy reversal may have proven that immigrants are important to the country’s healthcare system, but it could also influence how future decisions are made regarding skilled workers coming into the country. “It’s a little bit hard to predict. On the one hand, we already see that the United States is losing access to international talent, if we talk about international students more broadly, or the number of doctors and nurses coming to the country, as opposed to other countries like Canada, Australia, and European Union countries,” Batalova said.
According to her, the country is still of great interest to international healthcare professionals due to its large market, but there could be a bigger outflow of people to more tolerant countries with attractive visa policies. However, this would depend on what U.S. policies are adopted and implemented, she said.
Simi, a Nigerian public health physician and general medical practitioner in the United Kingdom who asked to be addressed by first name only, advised that future decisions around physician mobility should go beyond migration policy to include continuity of care, workforce stability, and the long-term resilience of healthcare systems.
“Broad visa restrictions that do not take workforce needs into consideration can inadvertently affect patient access to care and place additional strain on an already stretched healthcare system,” Simi said.
For Batalova, a more forward-looking approach would strengthen the domestic workforce while recognizing the role immigrants already play in healthcare. For now, the exemption offers temporary relief, but the broader tension remains unresolved between a healthcare system that needs foreign doctors and immigration policies that create uncertainty.
