It’s no secret that healthcare is a hotbed of anti-American ideology. Medical educators and providers have thoroughly embraced DEI, with all its demands for indoctrination and discrimination. But it also seems increasingly clear that employers across the medical establishment are favoring foreigners over Americans, too — potentially in direct violation of federal law.
On Monday, our organization filed a civil rights complaint with the Trump administration, asking it to investigate this situation and remedy any illegal discrimination against Americans.
This seeming preference for foreigners is particularly apparent in medical residency, a key part of the training process for physicians in the United States. Right now, about 25% of all residents come from foreign medical schools, up from 8.6% in 1981. That’s concerning enough on its own, but what’s worse is that residency programs may be turning away Americans to hire foreigners.
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Federal anti-discrimination laws explicitly bar hiring candidates based on national origin, and residency programs fall under these laws because they’re employers and recipients of federal funding. Put simply, residency programs may not consider national origin to favor foreign applicants over U.S. applicants.
But that’s exactly what appears to be happening. For instance, the internal medicine program at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center at Amarillo has 39 residents. All but two, or 95%, were hired from foreign medical schools. And among the foreign medical school graduates, 59% come from predominantly Muslim countries, with eight from Pakistan, five from Bangladesh, two each from Egypt, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates, and others from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and elsewhere. If that’s not a strong indication that the program may be selecting candidates based on national origin, it’s hard to see what is.
The Texas Tech program is not unique. Many other medical residency programs have predominantly hired foreigners as well. In Dearborn, Michigan, the internal medicine program at Corewell Health has 33 residents; all of whom but one, or 97%, were trained in foreign medical schools. Once again, the vast majority come from predominantly Muslim countries. Nine of those residents are from Sudan, eight from Pakistan, four from Jordan, and others from Bahrain, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
The internal medicine program at HCA Florida Brandon Hospital near Tampa has 58 residents, of whom 71% were hired from foreign medical schools, and in the most recent cohort, 100% of residents went to medical school overseas. This program has 15 residents from Pakistan, three from Libya, and others from Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey. It strains logic to believe that this happened naturally — not when there are so many qualified Americans applying for residencies, too.
It’s possible that some residency programs may not generate interest from U.S. medical school graduates, thereby prompting residencies to take graduates from countries with substandard medical training programs and practice standards. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain the sheer number of foreign-trained doctors being hired, especially from a region with substandard healthcare. The odds of having at least 14 foreigners in a U.S.-based cohort of 15 are less than one in a million. Common sense points to a simpler explanation: Residency programs may be preferentially hiring foreigners over Americans based on certain illegal nationality preferences.
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Given the facts, the federal government must investigate further. Do No Harm has filed a federal civil rights complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services, requesting that it look into whether these programs are violating the law.
Few institutions matter more to Americans than healthcare. Any intentional favoritism in medical residency programs based on race or national origin is wrong and illegal. It’s absolutely essential that we do not allow U.S. healthcare to be taken over in this way.
Jay P. Greene is director of research at Do No Harm. Ian Kingsbury is the director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine.
