Another critical U.S. nursing shortage on the horizon?

According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, the nursing shortage in the US will intensify within the next decade, with California, Georgia, Washington and Michigan, among a slew of impacted states, expected to bear the brunt of the crisis.

The situation is dire enough that it merited special coverage on America’s ABC News.

Key factors to blame, per ABC News, are the strict immigration policies, visa processing delays, and the lack of clear direction on domestic manpower creation.

As things currently stand, while immigrants comprise about 10 percent of the overall American workforce, when it comes to healthcare jobs 17 percent, or almost one of every six positions, are occupied by migrant workers.

Reportedly, a number of legislative proposals had been introduced over the years to create or increase the number of visas specifically reserved for healthcare jobs, especially for nurses and doctors.

In fact, one such bill — introduced by a bipartisan group of legislators in 2023 — directly proposed the creation of 25,000 special visas for foreign healthcare workers.

Unfortunately, the bill never made it past the committee level.

To the bill’s opponents, foreign recruitment was not the solution — augmenting the workforce from within was.

Exacerbating the problem is the large number of baby boomers retiring from the nursing profession, as well as the percentage of college-age and working age populations gravitating away from healthcare careers due to the pandemic scare.

For the young and not-so-young Filipinos with US migration dreams, there is no better time to explore a career in nursing than the present.

To recall, the US nursing shortage had become so dangerously critical during the 1980s and ‘90s that the US Congress was forced to create a special type of working visa for foreign registered nurses (RN) called the H-1A, and later H-1C, visa.

Although covered by annual quotas, these special nonimmigrant visas helped alleviate the critical nursing shortage, serving as a temporary fix until the country’s domestic nursing output had improved to satisfactory levels.

While a few sponsors tried to leverage the standard H-1B work visa to expand the sponsorship opportunities for nurses, successful migration via this route was hampered by the visa’s strict bachelor’s degree requirement (generally not applicable to US nursing jobs for which an associate degree is the usual entry-level requirement).

When the H visas became unavailable after the ‘90s, US employers pivoted to using the relatively longer but more stable immigrant sponsorship process under the employment-based third-preference (EB-3) category for skilled/professional workers.

As part of the Schedule A shortage occupations, foreign RNs are statutorily exempted from the labor certification process and its accompanying job market test.

Although an RN/EB-3 sponsorship case can take years to process (as opposed to the old H visa sponsorships which took only months), the upside is that the foreign RN will arrive in the US as a full-fledged immigrant with an easier path to American citizenship.

Current processing timelines for an RN/EB-3 case range from two to four years, depending on visa availability. Thus, the sooner one applies, the better.

Considering that the US licensure exams (NCLEX-RN) are now available in the Philippines, the process is now relatively smoother as compared to years past.