Texas Tech residency program favors foreign-trained doctors, medical group says

A recent report by medical advocacy group Do No Harm revealed that Texas Tech University’s internal medicine residency program is staffed almost entirely by residents who attended medical school outside the U.S., raising concerns about discrimination.

The group’s findings show that 95 percent of Texas Tech’s residents are from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria, among other countries. The program’s directors completed their medical education in Iraq, according to the report. 

Following this discovery, Do No Harm filed a federal civil rights complaint against the school.

Since the programs receive federal funding, Do No Harm’s complaint alleges that the programs violate Title VI and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act by discriminating against American students.

The College Fix made multiple attempts via email to contact the Texas Tech residency program and its directors for comment regarding the high number of foreign students but did not receive a response.

Do No Harm Chief Medical Officer Kurt Miceli told The Fix that the main concern is the apparent discrimination against American graduates.

The residency program appears “to be discriminating against graduates of U.S. medical schools, limiting qualified applicants’ access to valuable training opportunities,” he told The Fix.

“Medicine must not be political. Rather, hiring for residency positions should be awarded based on a candidate’s ability to deliver high quality patient care, not one’s national origin,” he said.

“The quality of patient care is not dependent on a physician’s race or national origin, but shaped by the rigor and excellence of the training that underpins clinical competence,” Miceli said.

A quote from Miceli included in Do No Harm’s report states that this “national origin discrimination is both unlawful and inconsistent with the broader American commitment to equal treatment.”

This could create a significant problem for doctors trained in the U.S. who are trying to fulfill their residency requirements, the medical expert states.

This unequal treatment prevents qualified Americans from obtaining the learning opportunities they deserve, he states

“We urge HHS to thoroughly investigate these programs and address this alarming display of foreign favoritism,” Miceli stated.

Offering another perspective, Cato Institute fellow Dan Greenberg told Fox News that the large number of foreign students could be “explained without resorting to national-origin discrimination.”

“It is possible that the set of applicants from other countries to these particular programs are generally more qualified than the set of applicants from the USA,” he said.

In other words, foreign-born applicants may have had stronger qualifications overall, such as higher board scores, better letters of recommendation, or more experience, he said.

Further, non-U.S. students might simply show a disproportionately high interest in the field of internal medicine, he told Fox News.    

The question is whether the complainants can prove that equally qualified American applicants were rejected in favor of foreign-born applicants. However, determining what “equally qualified” actually looks like will require a lot of research into how each applicant is evaluated, Greenburg said.

Texas Tech isn’t the only medical school suspected to be discriminating against certain students. 

The U.S. Department of Justice recently launched a probe into three medical schools to determine whether they are discriminating against applicants based on their race, The College Fix reported.

Stanford University, Ohio State University, and the University of California, San Diego are currently under investigation.

Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon asked the schools to provide admissions data or risk losing federal funding.

David Seres, professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, told Inside Higher Ed that due to Trump’s crackdown, “The best and brightest are going to be less likely to apply to medical schools and medical care will suffer as a result.”