Lopez: If caregivers are deported for our elderly, who takes their place?

She rides three buses from her Panorama City house to her job as a caretaker for an 83-year-old Sherman Oaks woman with dementia, and lately she is worried about taking federal agents.

When I asked what she will do when she is deported, B., who is 60 and asked me to keep her name behind, paused paused to put together herself.

“I don’t want to cry,” she said, but losing her job of $ 19 hours would be devastating because she sends money to the Philippines to support her family.

The world turns grayer every day thanks to an epic demographic wave. In California, 22% of the state inhabitants will be 65 and older by 2040, by 14% from 2020.

“At a time when it seems that less and less of us wants to work in long-term care, the need has never been greater,” Harvard Healthcare Policy analyst David C. Grabowski told the Los Angeles Times’ Emily Alpert Reyes in January.

So how will millions of older Americans be able to afford to physical and cognitive decline, especially in view of the big beautiful proposed cutbacks of President Trump for Medicaid, who comprises about two -thirds of the nursing home residents? And who will take care of those who don’t have family members who can get up?

There are currently no good answers.

Shrinking workforce

Deporting care providers can be useful if there was a plan to make the jobs more attractive for home -grown replacements, but none of us would be a day old donut.

National and in California are the vast majority of employees in healthcare institutions and private institutions citizens. But employers already had problems recruiting and keeping staff to do jobs that are low -paid and difficult, and now the policy of Trump’s administration could further reduce staff.

Earlier this year, the administration ordered to put an end to programs that offer temporarily protected status and work authorization, and the last goal in the action of Trump against illegal immigration is to perform 3,000 arrests every day.

“People are worried about the threat of deportation … but also about losing every job they have and are unable to secure other work,” said Aquilina Soriano Versoza, director of the Pilipino Workers Center, that estimated that about half of the members of its interest group was not documented.

In the past, she said, employers did not necessarily ask for work authorization documents, but that changes. And she fears that, given the political climate, some employers ‘have the feeling that they are impunity to exploit employees’, many of whom are women from Southeast -Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Mexico and Latin -America.

That can already happen.

“We have seen a lot of fear, and we have seen employees who no longer want to pursue their affairs” When it comes to theft of Loon, Yvonne Medrano, a lawyer for working rights at Bet Tzedek, a non -profit for legal services, a non -profit organization.

Medrano said the employees are worried that the pursuit of justice at the courts will expose them to a greater risk of being started out of the country. In one case, she said, an employee owed a final salary for a terminated job, but the employer made a veiled threat and warned that it appears to pick it up expensive.

Given the hostile environment, some employees give up and go home.

“We have seen an increase in employees self -aged,” said Medrano.

Conditions for elderly care staff were gloomy enough before Trump took office. Two years ago I met documented and without paper care providers and although they are in health care, some of them did not have health insurance for themselves.