Trump’s travel ban sows uncertainty for healthcare and medicine

Dr. Saif Muhsin started thinking about Canada after President Donald Trump issued an executive order Jan. 27 barring people from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Muhsin’s native Iraq, from entering the U.S. for 90 days.

Muhsin, 34, is halfway through a four-year nephrology fellowship in Boston in a joint program of Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He sees patients and works in the lab of Sylvie Breton, a Canadian-born cell biologist, who has made recent breakthroughs in acute kidney injury. Muhsin plans to continue both medicine and research after he finishes his fellowship.

The travel ban is casting a pall of uncertainty over Dr. Saif Muhsin’s future as well as the medical and scientific community in the U.S., which depends heavily on immigrant and foreign-born students, researchers, and faculty.

But the travel ban—which the Homeland Security Department says applies to people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan—is casting a pall of uncertainty over not just Muhsin’s future but also that of the medical and scientific community in the U.S., which depends heavily on immigrant and foreign-born students, researchers and faculty. The community is reeling over the order, fearing that it will have devastating repercussions for research and advances in science and medicine.

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