What I Have Sometimes Called “The United Nations of Caregiving” Is Under Attack

The New York Times offers a detailed account of Channing House in California, a well known Life-Plan Community (also known as a Continuing Care Retirement Community or CCRC), where residents are confronting “a problem they felt powerless to fix: the sudden loss of their caregivers to immigration policies.” Miriam Jordan is the journalist covering this national immigration issue.

I was a witness to the realities of families disrupted by increasingly strict immigration rules as early as 2017. I wrote a blog post about the experience that I titled the The United Nations of Caregiving.

On a parallel track, one of my longest time friends (we became friends back in the days when we were both in 4-H in Arizona), once made the observation to me that he could “solve” the immigration crisis with his experiences as a dairyman. He said, “I know the workers personally. I know they want to be able to work lawfully, pay their taxes appropriately, and return safely to their families outside of the U.S. on a regular basis, including for holidays and when they retire. The U.S. needs a real guest worker program.” Ironically, President Trump is reportedly responding to the worker crisis in the dairy industry by posing the possibility of expanding the H-2A Temporary Agricultural Worker Program to include year-round dairy operations. That’s a bit late for my friend, who sold off his once-huge dairy herd at the start of the second Trump administration.

But, if we can be realistic about the value added by foreign workers to the wider range of our core communities in the U.S., perhaps there is some hope for lawful immigration opportunities to include foreign workers as caregivers.