Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in American Studies
Episode: Eram Alam, "The Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare" (JHU Press, 2025)
Description: For more than 60 years, the United States has trained fewer physicians than it needs, relying instead on the economically expedient option of soliciting immigrant physicians trained at the expense of other countries. The passage of the Hart–Celler Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 expedited the entry of foreign medical graduates (FMGs) from postcolonial South Asia and sent them to provide care in shortage areas throughout the United States. Although this arrangement was conceived as temporary, over the decades it has become a permanent fixture of the medical system, with FMGs comprising at least a quarter of the physician labor fo...