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SAN FRANCISCO
Ruling on immigrant doctors overturned
- Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, June 9, 2006
A federal appeals court has overturned government rules that made it harder for immigrant doctors to qualify for permanent legal residence by working in inner cities and other areas where medical providers are in short supply.
A lawyer for immigrant doctors who sued over the rules said the decision would help hundreds of physicians and their patients.
The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said Wednesday that regulations adopted by immigration officials in 2000 conflicted with a law Congress had passed a year earlier to encourage noncitizen doctors to practice in areas that were designated as medically underserved.
The law allows a doctor who is in the United States on a temporary visa to qualify for a green card, and permanent legal status, by working for five years in an underserved area, typically in an inner city or a rural community. The requirement was limited to three years for doctors who had applied to a previous version of the program before November 1998.
By meeting the requirement, an immigrant doctor avoids the need to be certified by the U.S. Labor Department as filling a job that cannot be taken by a qualified U.S. resident.
Eight doctors sued over the regulations in 2002, saying that one of the rules wrongly denied them credit for time they had spent working in a medically needy area before the government approved their applications to take part in the U.S. residence program. The rule would cost the plaintiff doctors two to five years of credit for their work, the court said.
Another regulation that the doctors challenged required those who had applied for the previous program before November 1998 to work five years, instead of three, if the government had rejected their applications by November 1999. A third regulation gave doctors who entered the program a limited time to qualify.
The appeals court overturned a ruling by a Los Angeles federal judge in the government's favor. It said none of the three regulations was authorized by the law they were supposed to implement.
In particular, the denial of credit for work while an application is pending subverts the very intent of the law by undermining the incentive that Congress created "to attract immigrant doctors to health professional shortage areas,'' Judge Harry Pregerson said in the 3-0 ruling.
Carl Shusterman, an attorney for the doctors, said Thursday that the ruling would affect hundreds of doctors immediately and thousands in future years. He said the federal regulations have made the 1999 law virtually useless.
"A lot more physicians will use this program, and it will really work to help Americans who are stuck in areas where they can't get medical help,'' Shusterman said.
Sharon Rummery, spokeswoman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in San Francisco, said the agency was reviewing the ruling and had no comment.
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
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URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/06/09/BAG1BJBH3E1.DTL
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