Carleton hosts public lecture on The Immigrant Doctors Project
The organization aims to educate the public about the important role played by immigrant doctors in the American healthcare system.
Harvard University Professor of Economics Valentin Bolotnyy will present “The Immigrant Doctors Project: Research Activism in Practice” on Wednesday, April 18 from 7 to 8 p.m. in Boliou 104 at Carleton College. Bolotnyy is a principal figure in the Immigrant Doctors Project, which aims to educate the public about the important role played by immigrant doctors in the American healthcare system.
In 2017, after President Trump released his first executive order on immigration, Bolotnyy and several colleagues in the Harvard and MIT economics departments began thinking about how they could respond. As economics scholars, they wanted to educate the public on both the social and economic impact of the ban. Challenging the premise that the executive order aimed to make Americans safer by banning immigrants from countries with perceived ties to terrorism, the team chose to study immigrant doctors and the safety and health they provide for millions of Americans.
Bolotnyy and the team found that more than 7,000 doctors who received their medical training in Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen are currently working in the US and provide an estimated 14 million medical appointments each year. A website with an interactive map of their data was released after Trump signed the second executive order.
His presentation will seek to answer the questions of what role immigrant doctors play in the American healthcare system, what the potential consequences of immigration restrictions are on healthcare, and how data can be used to inform contemporary political discourse.
This event is sponsored by the Carleton Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge (QuIRK) initiative, a project designed to create curriculum and practice around the teaching of quantitative reasoning. The QuIRK initiative has been supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education(FIPSE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the W.M. Keck Foundation.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, including disability accommodations, call (507) 222-4380. Boliou Hall is accessible via Highway 19 in Northfield.