JOBS WHITE PEOPLE WON'T DO:

The Trump administration's anti-immigration policies could worsen workforce shortages.

 

The Trump administration's immigration policies won't just impact immigrants. It turns out, they could make it harder for people to avoid spending the later years of their lives in nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

According to a study published this month in Health Affairs, immigrants make up nearly a quarter of the long-term care workforce, which struggles to retain labor.

 Immigrants comprise 23.5 percent of the long-term care workforce, including family caregivers. Almost 12 percent of that workforce are naturalized citizens, 8 percent are legal noncitizens and 3.7 percent are undocumented immigrants. The numbers are similar for "direct care," a subset of long-term care that provides services to people in their homes.

"What this study shows is we need that low-skilled workforce, particularly in the industries that take care of our family. Any policies that scare that workforce are going to have large ramifications in caring for our aging population," says Leah Zallman, the director of research at the Institute for Community Health and lead author of the study. "What we see are immigrants filling in the gaps in the low-skilled labor market."

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