Number of Pinoy nurses seeking US jobs declining

MANILA, Philippines - Only 863 Filipino nurses sought employment in the United States and took the US professional licensure exam from January to March this year, a lawmaker said yesterday.

The number is down 40 percent compared to the 1,454 Filipino nurses who took the US exam in the same quarter in 2011, Rep. Arnel Ty of the party-list group Liquefied Petroleum Gas Marketers Association said.

“The number also represents only 17 percent of the 5,076 Filipino nurses who took the US test in the first quarter of 2007 at the height of the nursing boom,” he added.

He said the numbers obviously indicate that every year, fewer Filipino nurses seek US jobs, which remain difficult to come by since America has nursing graduates sufficient for its job requirements.

He added that it would take many years before the present generation of US graduates retires and American employers would again consider recruiting foreign nurses.

Ty disclosed that while Filipino nurses find it hard to get US employment, physical therapists (PTs), on the other hand, continue to be recruited by American healthcare providers.

The problem is the US embassy is giving PTs a hard time in getting tourist visas so they could take the US National Physical Therapy Examination (NPTE) in America, which he said is the only place it could be taken.

He said he received complaints that licensed PTs who are single are automatically being denied their visa applications even if they have documents showing that their potential US company-employers were sponsoring their trips with assurance that they would repatriate the examinees after the exam.

He appealed to US embassy consular officers to be more thorough and examine the documents of visa applicants and not to deny their applications on the basis of their civil status.

If it is their policy not to trust visa applicants, the embassy officers should trust their own companies in the US, he said.

At the same time, Ty denounced Washington council member Marion Barry Jr., one-time mayor of the US capital, for his racist remarks against Filipino nurses in the US.

“Mr. Barry’s offensive remarks were totally uncalled for, especially coming from a US Democratic Party member closely identified with the American civil rights movement against racial segregation and discrimination,” he said.

“Filipino nurses provide a great service to America. They should immediately make their presence felt by writing directly to Barry and his colleagues in the US capital’s lawmaking-body,” he said.

In a recent DC council budget hearing, Barry said: “It’s so bad that if you go to the hospital now, you find a number of immigrants who are nurses, particularly from the Philippines. Let’s grow from our own nurses, so that we don’t have to be scrounging around in our community clinics and other kinds of places, having to hire people from somewhere else.”

It is estimated that some 116,000 Filipino nurses have obtained employment in American hospitals, clinics and nursing homes since 1995, Ty said.

But the number of Filipino nurses seeking to practice their profession in America has been on a decline since 2009, he said.