Views from the Edge, by Ed Dionko
Health experts say — or should we say, they “hope” — the coronavirus pandemic will reach its apex in the United States this month but COVID-19 will linger much longer probably into 2021 when it is hoped that a vaccine will be developed.
In the meantime, those frontline troops – US nurses – are taking a beating, literally and emotionally akin to the PTSD suffered by battlefield soldiers.
Waiting in the wings to offer relief to tired and drained medical personnel who care for coronavirus patients each day in 12-hour shifts and many without proper protective gear are a cadre of nurses in the Philippines, according to Melanie N. Beckham, president of Vintage Health Resources Inc. in Germantown, Tennessee, who specializes in helping hospitals throughout the southeastern US hire nurses from the Philippines, with its large population of English speakers and a long history of sending health-care workers abroad.
Vintage has hundreds of Filipino nurses in various states of the company’s applicaiton process, according to Bloomberg News. More than 100 nurses have passed the licensing and language exams. They’ve completed background checks and are ready to head to the US. Yet they are stuck because they can’t get their visas processed.
“They could come tomorrow,” Beckham tells Bloomberg News. “The demand is overwhelming right now.”
Donald Trump’s restrictive and short-sighted immigration policies is thwarting hundreds — perhaps. thousands — of Filipino nurses from coming to the US to assist in caring for coronavirus patients.
“Filipinos as a whole are very compassionate, very caring people,” says Zenei Cortez, a Filipino American nurse and president of National Nurses United, the United States’ largest nurses’ union. “We have utmost respect for our elders. There’s a saying that every Filipino is related. We call someone else’s mother ‘mother’, someone’s aunt ‘aunt’. We treat our patients like they are our own family and that’s what I think makes Filipinos the best caregivers.”
There are dozens of recruiting agencies like Vintage who plumb Philippine nursing schools for recruits. Some US hospitals have their own teams in the Philippines competing with the agencies with the lure of guaranteed jobs, high pay and the possibility of extending their special work visa.
Even amid the coronavirus pandemic, the chance to work to the US and earn American wages is still a strong lure for nurses in the Philippines, whose nurse education program, like much of the country’s educational system, was patterned after the US as one of the side effects of being a US colony for almost 50 years.
Even though the Philippines gained its independence in 1946, for over a century, the image of the United States as the land of opportunity has been hammered into the Filipinos’ psyche from infancy to adulthood and that belief is still being reinforced through the deeply ingrained mythology surrounding the Philippines’ former colonial master and the enormously influential soft power of America’s pop culture.
Since Donald Trump took office on a promise to crack down on immigration, nurses from the Philippines have faced more red tape. Officials return about 50% of Vintage’s applications and demand additional paperwork, up from just 5% of applications during the Obama administration, Beckham said.
Nurses from the Philippines could make a significant dent in the nursing shortage, said Leo-Felix M. Jurado, chair of the Dept. of Nursing at William Paterson University in New Jersey and a board member of the Philippine Nurses Association of America.
According to Jurado, there are about 150,000 nurses from the Philippines working in the US, up from approximately 120,000 in 2013. Even though Filipinos make up about 1% of the total US population, they make up about 4% of the nation’s nurses.
In some states, the impact of Filipino nurses is self-evident. Together with the US-educated Filipino American nurses, in California, where the Filipino segment of the population is around 4%, they make up about 20% of the nursing workforce; in Hawaii, they comprise about 31% of the nurses.
In 2019, about 5,100 people from the Philippines received the EB-3 visas commonly used for nurses, down by a third from 2015, reports Bloomberg.
“It’s absolutely been harder in the Trump administration to get people in,” said Costantini, who is also CEO of Avant Healthcare Professionals, a recruiting company in Florida. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “has been delaying and denying visa applications that were once easily approved.”
US hospitals and recruiters are finding increasing competition for Filipino nurses from other countries. In Australia, Great Britain and in the Middle East, Filipinos make up a significant portion of their nursing workforce and they are also in demand in Italy, France and Canada.
One recruitment agency in Germany reportedly had a goal of finding 200,000 nurses from the Philippines over a four-year period from 2016 to 2020.d
However, the nursing shortage in the US shows no signs of abating as the Baby Boomer workforce moves into retirement and nurses burnout from COVID-19 The US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 11 million additional nurses are needed to avoid a further shortage.
“It would be really, really bad for health care in America if the country turned its back on immigrants,” says Dahlia Tayag, a Filipino American clinical nurse at UC San Diego Medical Center. “Hospitals and other health care agencies are filled with immigrants. If they limit that and there’s not enough people going into the field of nursing, it would be a disaster for our patients. There would be no one to take care of them.”
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