America First Legal Files Petition to End Foreign Physician Visa Monopoly and Put American Medical Graduates First

America First Legal (AFL) has filed a formal petition for rulemaking asking the U.S. Department of State to end a nearly 50-year regulatory monopoly and ensure qualified American medical graduates, not foreign medical graduates, fill U.S. residency positions.

Every year, thousands of qualified American medical graduates are left without residency positions, while thousands of non-U.S.-citizen international medical graduates are brought into this country and secure positions in the same limited, federally subsidized residency system. Because residency is the gateway to physician licensure and practice, an American medical graduate who fails to match may never enter his or her chosen profession.

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The current system is justified by America’s physician shortage. But every residency position taken away from a qualified American and given to a foreign medical graduate removes an American graduate from the domestic physician workforce. The current system thus creates the very physician shortage it purports to solve.

“For too long, the current system has displaced American medical graduates by importing thousands of foreign medical graduates to fill taxpayer-funded residency positions,” said Megan Redshaw, Counsel for America First Legal. “The result is a self-perpetuating pipeline that sidelines America’s future physicians and fuels the very physician shortage invoked to sustain it.”

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