October 25, 2018

Richard J. (Rick) Pollack

President and Chief Executive Officer
American Hospital Association
800 10th Street, N.W.,
Two CityCenter, Suite 400,
Washington, DC 20001-4956
Phone: (202) 626-2363
E-mail: rick@aha.org

Dear Mr. Pollack:

I respectfully write this letter on behalf of Immigration Voice to express our sincere regret and
dismay that the American Hospital Association has openly and brazenly chosen to adopt a
position advocating for the continuation of legal discrimination against the foreign-born doctors
currently working tirelessly every day at your hospitals to save patients’ lives.

Immigration Voice is a national grassroots non-profit organization representing the rights and
interests of over 115,000 legal, highly skilled immigrant members living in the United States,
including over 10,000 physicians working at your hospitals who were born in India and China.
Its advocacy is primarily responsible for getting 329 House Members and 17 Senators to co-
sponsor the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act on a bi-partisan basis.

These doctors at your hospitals have been working for you for many years and are currently
stuck in decades-long backlogs waiting for an employment-based green card. Many of them are
ready, willing, and able to start new health care research that will cure diseases and create jobs
for American workers on the very day they receive their employment-based green card.
Unfortunately, under the current immigration system, because they are from India or China, a
person from another county who might not even be born yet will receive their green card many
years earlier than these hard-working doctors currently working at your hospitals.

This is because under the current employment-based immigration system, green cards are not
awarded on a “first-come, first-served” basis. Instead, foreign nationals are prohibited from
obtaining an employment-based green card in any year where more than 7 percent of the total
number of available green cards in any year have already been given to individuals from that
person’s native country. This has resulted in an indefensible situation where Indian and Chinese
doctors must wait anywhere between 25 to 70 years for a green card while individuals from other
countries have no wait at all.

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3561 Homestead Road #375, Santa Clara, CA 95051-5161

T: (202) 386-6250 F: (202) 403-3853 E: info@ immigrationvoice.org
Because of these backlogs, the doctors in your hospitals are constantly living in fear of
deportation, as they must renew their temporary visas every year in order to remain the United
States while waiting for their green cards. Each year, this discretionary process causes dozens of
your doctors to lose their immigration status and have to painfully uproot their families back to
India and China—many of these families having U.S. citizen children who know no other home.
Moreover, these discriminatory backlogs also mean that your doctors currently cannot travel to
India or China for funerals, health emergencies, or other urgent issues without either losing their
immigration status or missing months of work waiting for their visas to be stamped at a U.S.
consulate.

Nevertheless, despite all of the pain and suffering that the current system causes to your doctors,
on October 19, 2018, your organization sent a letter to Congressional Appropriators asking them
to consciously continue their suffering so that you can continue to bring in nurses without
college degrees into the United States on the very same green cards that your doctors have been
patiently waiting for decades in line to receive. Rather than recognizing the loyalty and hard
work of your doctors and pleading that the immigration system stop discriminating against them
on the immutable basis of the country of their birth, you have brazenly chosen to take the other
side and advocate for their continued discrimination in order to increase your profits. Although
we have asked your organization to support our cause, we would have understood had you
remained neutral. It is completely shocking, however, to see that not only have you not
remained neutral, you have actually taken a position that seeks to continue to harm and
discriminate against the hard-working and loyal doctors who have been tirelessly working at
your hospitals.

Please be advised of three things. First, the backlogged doctors working at hospitals who are
members of the American Hospital Association will soon be talking to their hospital
administrators urging them to boycott your organization over its brazenly discriminatory
position. Second, we will systematically work to publicly highlight any hospital who does not
renounce your discriminatory position so that the most talented doctors from India and China
know not to choose these hospitals when seeking employment. Third, history will not look
kindly on the American Hospital Association’s decision to promote discrimination in order to
choose profits over the welfare of its physicians. There is no doubt that, in the long term, this
advocacy to maintain discrimination will bring great shame to your organization and will lead to
future Indian and Chinese Administrators of these hospitals wanting to have nothing to do with
your discriminatory organization. We are very sorry that it has come to this, and we hope that
you will reconsider your position before all of this damage is irrevocably caused.

Sincerely,

Aman Kapoor
President of Immigration Voice

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3561 Homestead Road #375, Santa Clara, CA 95051-5161

T: (202) 386-6250 F: (202) 403-3853 E: info@ immigrationvoice.org