Bekki Holzkamm has been trying to hire a lab technician at a hospital in rural North Dakota since late summer.
Not one U.S. citizen has applied.
West River Health Services in Hettinger, a town of about 1,000 residents in the southwestern part of the state, has four options, and none is good.
The hospital could fork over $100,000 for the Trump administration’s new H-1B visa fee and hire one of the more than 30 applicants from the Philippines or Nigeria. The fee is the equivalent of what some rural hospitals would pay two lab techs in a year, said Holzkamm, who is West River’s lab manager.
West River could ask the Department of Homeland Security to waive the fee. But it’s unclear how long the waiver process would take and if the government would grant one. The hospital could continue trying to recruit someone inside the U.S. for the job. Or, Holzkamm said, it could leave the position unfilled, adding to the workload of the current “skeleton crew.”
The U.S. health care system depends on foreign-born professionals to fill its ranks of doctors, nurses, technicians, and other health providers, particularly in chronically understaffed facilities in rural America.
But a new presidential proclamation aimed at the tech industry’s use of H-1B visas is making it harder for West River and other rural providers to hire those …