You can be a doctor without becoming an American citizen, people move here all of the time and go to medical school.

They just do it legally. The US president has used an executive order to grant amnesty to an unknown number of illegal aliens currently residing in America and now a group of scholars writing in Academic Medicine contend that not only should people in the US be able to go to medical school if they apply, it is an ethical mandate.

Not allowing these illegal immigrants - the government calls them "Dreamers" - to attend medical school "represents a kind of unjustified discrimination and violates the basic ethical principle of the equality of human beings," write co-authors Mark G. Kuczewski, PhD and Linda Brubaker, MD, MS of Loyola University Chicago Stritch of Medicine. 

In 2012, Loyola became the first medical school in the United States to amend its admissions policies to include qualified students who have received Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and are legally recognized as U.S. residents. In August, 2014, Loyola admitted seven under that provision to the class of 2018.

The students are known as Dreamers because of a failed bill called the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education of Alien Minors).  The DACA gave blanket legal status to people who did not arrive in the US legally and one benefit is that even though the DREAM Act failed to become law, the DACA program makes medical training, licensure and even medical practice possible.

The authors write that three main ethical principles and policy considerations support their beliefs:

"First, a belief in equality, perhaps the fundamental value in contemporary democratic society, means that these potential applicants must be considered - just like others - on their merits. Second, the medical profession's duty of beneficence, the obligation to help patients, means that medical schools cannot turn away a significant pool of diverse talent in developing the physician workforce. Third, and related to beneficence, the value of social justice requires that medical schools seek to produce a physician workforce that better serves those communities that have been traditionally underserved, such as ethnic minorities and recent immigrants."

Equality does not mean what they think it means. There is nothing in US law that says all 7 billion people on earth are legally entitled to be US citizens without using legal channels, nor does any developed nation make that possible. In some European nations, immigrants can't be citizens even generations after loving there legally. They instead are re-framing equality as a legal concept to mean their subjective idea of social justice. Their brand of social justice that says anyone who got into the United States should be allowed to become a doctor, provided they don't have a felony conviction. 

The problem for applicants is that the political supporters who demanded President Obama undo everything President Bush did will want no future president to undo President Obama's executive orders - that is the nature of partisan beliefs masquerading as ethics. If someone enrolls today they could be deported in 2017 and they will most certainly be found in the system if they are in medical school.