Kenosha Reporter

Air Wisconsin issued the following announcement on August 5.

In April, when East Coast hospitals were being overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, health care workers from all over the country took temporary assignments in New York City and elsewhere to help respond to the pandemic. As the nation's highest infection rates moved to states like Texas and Arizona, hospitals there needed extra help from outside physicians, too. The same need could come to Wisconsin.

But for hundreds of thousands of doctors practicing in the U.S., pitching in like that isn't possible.

"I cannot even move next door," said Dr. Sonal Chandratre, a pediatric endocrinologist in Stevens Point. "Even if I'm qualified, even if I'm volunteering — it doesn't matter what we are willing to do. We are not able to do it."

That's because Chandratre, like more than 200,000 other doctors practicing in the U.S., is an immigrant who got her medical degree abroad. The inability to move is just one of the many obstacles in the way of immigrant doctors in the U.S. The pandemic has made some of these challenges worse, and it has given a new context and urgency to others. 

Now Chandratre, coauthor with her husband of a new paper for the Wisconsin Medical Journal entitled "COVID-19 Poses Challenges to Immigrant Physicians in the United States," is speaking out about the risks U.S. rules pose to her own family, to the lives of other foreign-born physicians here and ultimately to American patients as well. 

Chandratre, who was born in India, left that country when she was 22. She practiced medicine in the United Kingdom for several years, and completed her U.S. residency in New York. They initiated their move to Wisconsin when her husband, internal medicine specialist Dr. Aamod Soman, found a job in Stevens Point. She's now been practicing medicine here for close to a decade. 

Today both of them are doctors at Ascension St. Michael's Hospital, and Chandratre teaches at the Medical College of Wisconsin-Central Wisconsin campus. Their two daughters, ages 9 and 14 months, are U.S. citizens.

But Chandratre and Soman are not. And despite their status as well-paid professionals, the fact that they are in the U.S. on temporary work visas makes their lives here precarious. Before the pandemic, they worried about the fact that, if they were to visit family abroad, they could be barred reentry into the U.S. 

COVID-19 has made the risks of practicing medicine without citizenship or permanent-resident status seem much more present, much more real. 

"My husband is a frontline worker," Chandratre said. "He takes care of patients in the intensive care unit who have COVID-19. What if he dies? Instead of mourning, in the first 24 hours I would be frantically searching for options to pack my bags and take my kids to a country where I would be considered a legal citizen."

Their family's status is predicated on his work visa. Chandratre, though she is working legally as a physician herself, would be subject to deportation overnight if her husband died.

Original source here.