Healthcare Executives Import 1,000 Nurses a Month for American Jobs

U.S. hospitals and staffing companies are extracting roughly 1,000 nurses each month from poor countries instead of recruiting and training Americans for the nursing jobs, say media reports.

The New York Times newspaper described the extraction migration process on January 24:

About 1,000 nurses are arriving in the United States each month from African nations, the Philippines and the Caribbean, said Sinead Carbery, president of O’Grady Peyton International, an international recruiting firm. While the United States has long drawn nurses from abroad, she said demand from American health care facilities is the highest she’s seen in three decades. There are an estimated 10,000 foreign nurses with U.S. job offers on waiting lists for interviews at American embassies around the world for the required visas.

This medical migration of nurses and doctors “ultimately is about the money” for the medical sector, said Kevin Lynn, founder of Doctors Without Jobs.

The New York Times article admitted the central role of economics in the healthcare migration with a headline saying: “Rich Countries Lure Health Workers From Low-Income Nations to Fight Shortages.” That’s a sharp break from the newspaper’s usual migration coverage, which overwhelmingly focussed on migrant family dramas rather than economic impacts.

“The medical establishment, just like any other corporation, is looking for efficiency — faster, cheaper,” said Lynn, who campaigns for American medical graduates who lose vital training slots in government-funded residency programs to imported foreign medical graduates. – READ MORE