"Work Permits on Hold for Foreign Nurses"
By LAURA WIDES, Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES - New limits on fast-track U.S. work permits for foreign nurses may add to a nursing shortage in American hospitals, health officials say.
http://us.news1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/ap/20041210/thumb.cadd10212100403.foreign_nurses_cadd102.jpg
AP Photo
Beginning Jan. 1, immigration officials will block a shortcut that allowed the foreign nurses, predominantly from the Philippines, to get fast-track work permits, the State Department announced.
According to a department bulletin issued Wednesday, the government will not process applications filed after January 2002 until further notice. What has been a 60-day wait could now take up to three years or more.
"It's basically going to cut them off," said Charles Oppenheim, head of the State Department's immigrant visa control division.
The new quota limit is actually the indirect result of a more efficient immigration process. After Sept. 11, 2001, the system became backlogged due to updated security measures. Many foreign workers from the Philippines, and to a lesser extent India and m
ainland China, got by on temporary work permits as they waited for their "number" to come up for a green card.
Now those cases are being processed, and the government said beginning Jan. 1 it will no longer issue new temporary work permits for workers from these countries until it deals with the backlog, which could take several years.
The change could leave a gaping hole for hospitals across the country that increasingly rely on foreign-born nurses to reduce their nursing shortage.
U.S. authorities have warned that the country could face a shortage of roughly 275,000 nurses by 2010, though exact estimates are difficult to come by. Technology will likely reduce the number of nurses needed in the future, but the aging U.S. population
will require more.
Nurses in the United States said they hope the new limits will help refocus attention on training and recruitment of nurses within the country.
"If the industry has ready access to nurses from whatever, then they ease their shortage and never address why we don't have a sufficient domestic nursing work force," said Cheryl Peterson, senior policy analyst for the American Nurses Association.
Peterson said federal and state government need to do more long-term work force planning in the health care industry and improve pay and work conditions to avoid future shortages.
But in the short term, the change will hurt hospitals, health economist Len Nichols said.
"The Philippines are our major source of imported nurses, and we've been doing that at a clip of thousands a year for a while now," said Nichols, vice president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan Washington D.C.-based think tan
k.
Gwen Matthews, a senior vice president for Glendale Adventist Medical Center just north of Los Angeles, said she is worried because the 430-bed hospital plans to open a new wing in two years and will need 90 new nurses.
"I'm doing a lot of local recruitment, but we do expect it's going to take foreign employment as well," she said. "We anticipate we will have more than what the local market can provide."
Nurses are not the only workers affected by the change. They fall in a category that also includes doctors and tech workers, but their work permit options are more limited under immigration rules.
Robert Salasar, 31, a nurse from the Philippines, began working at a Los Angeles area hospital in July and is awaiting his green card.
"It's much better pay and less patients," he said of his job here, "and you can have it personalized and individualized for each one."
Salasar now worries about friends and family back home who will have to wait years to get the chance he had.
Recruiters have long sought nurses from the Philippines, where schools train nurses to work in the United States.
Canadian and Mexican nurses can also obtain visas to work in the United States under the North American Free Trade Agreement, but not enough Canadians opt to come south, and Mexico doesn't produce sufficient numbers of U.S.-qualified nurses, Nichols said.
Immigration attorney Carl Shusterman, whose firm represents hospitals throughout California and helps about 350 Filipinos nurses a year find jobs in the United States, said he frequently obtains a work permit for qualified nurses in 60 days, allowing them
to work as they wait the roughly three years for their permanent residency.
"There's no way for us to keep a nurse here for three years until we have the job," Shusterman said. "It's like meeting some guy, falling in love and saying you can't be together for three years."