U.S. visa options for Pinoy nurses

It all started during the 60s and 70s. It leveled off during the eighties and reached its zenith during the 90s when the nurse recruitment boom exploded all over the US and zoomed like a wayward missile across the Pacific towards the Philippines.

A scattering of recruitment detritus made it through the skies of India, China, and even Africa, but the Philippines was a direct hit, metaphorically speaking.

Since then, the Filipino nurse has become the symbol of foreign nurse recruitment in the US. From nursing homes to hospitals to medical clinics, from the East Coast to the West Coast, from the wintry Bronx to the scorching Phoenix heat, the image of a Pinoy nurse tending to a patient, answering calls at a nurse station, or doing rounds in a hallway, has become the dominant theme in every recruitment conversation.

How did these pioneering Filipino nurses migrate to the US?

Prior to 1989, most nurses from the Philippines arrived under either the general H working visa category or the general immigrant visa category.

In 1989, to address a critical nursing shortage, the US Congress created a special type of working visa called the H-1A visa for foreign nurses who passed the Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools examination.

This event ignited the 1990s recruitment boom, which resulted in thousands of Pinoy nurses and their families migrating to the US, many of whom eventually became American citizens.

After the H-1A visa category expired in 1995, a new category called the H-1C visa was created in 1999 to address the lingering nursing shortage, which expired in 2009. 

At present, the only viable US visa options for Pinoy nurses are the H-1B visa and the EB-3 immigrant visa (under the third preference employment-based category).

However, because the H-1B visa category is specifically reserved for jobs that normally require a bachelor's degree or higher, it is seldom utilized in foreign nurse sponsorships for the reason that most entry-level US nursing jobs only require an associate degree in nursing.  Thus, it is only used to sponsor high-level nursing jobs such as Nurse Manager, Nurse Educator, or Quality Assurance Coordinator, among others, for which a BSN degree is the customary requirement.

Occasionally, an H-1B petition is used to sponsor highly-skilled nursing jobs such as ER Nurse, OR Nurse, Telemetry Nurse, etc., if the employer can justify the job's BSN degree requirement.

This leaves the immigrant visa (EB-3) category as the only viable option for most Pinoy nurses.

Before the pandemic, the EB-3 visa category was an excellent sponsorship vehicle because at that time, the waiting period only ranged between one to two years, the process being smoothened by the existence of a labor certification waiver and the availability of a premium processing option.

Back then, a kababayan nurse only needed a BSN degree, a Philippine RN license, plus a CGFNS certificate or a US-NCLEX certificate, or alternatively, a US state RN license, as well as a VisaScreen certificate, to realize her dream of migrating to the US.  Finding a US-based sponsor was a piece of cake, especially for those with a US-NCLEX certificate.

Then Covid-19 happened.

While the same set of requirements still applies even post-pandemic, the inflation-induced difficulty of finding a US employer willing to expend a ton of money for sponsorship costs has been exacerbated by the current visa retrogression crisis that has soured the recruitment appetite of would-be sponsors.

Yet, all hope is not lost. With the lingering US nursing shortage and the anticipated visa oversubscription stabilization on the horizon, it is just a question of when — not if — a capable Pinoy nurse will be able to migrate to the US.