NFAP: Nursing Shortage Has Deadly Consequences

The independent and highly-regarded National Foundation for American Policy has just published a Policy Brief in which it explains and documents how the American nursing shortage has dire consequences for the American patient.

The Policy Brief, “Deadly Consequences: The Hidden Impact of America’s Nursing Shortage,” draws two conclusions:

For policymakers it is best to focus on the two most practical solutions to alleviate the impact of the nursing shortage on U.S. patients. 1) Increasing nursing faculty and school infrastructure and 2) Raising immigration quotas to facilitate the entry of foreign nurses.

The Brief also does an impressive job explaining the unique immigration challenges facing nurse immigration:

Due to inadequate green card quotas, a skilled foreign professional could wait 5 years or more to immigrate legally to the United States. In the high tech sector, some professionals and researchers can gain entry on temporary visas, particularly H-1B visas, although the supply of those has been exhausted before the start of the past four fiscal years. Today, the vast majority of nurses cannot enter the United States and work on temporary visas. Congress recognized the labor supply problems with nurses when in 2005 it allocated 50,000 extra green cards (for permanent residence) with a priority for foreign nurses and others who qualified under Schedule A (DOL designation of shortage occupations) to be sponsored by employers in the United States. That extra green card allocation has been exhausted. Immigration alone cannot solve the nursing shortage but it can alleviate many of its most damaging impacts on patients.


The final line of the Brief is candid and entirely accurate: In the case of nurses, current immigration restrictions exacerbate the nursing shortage, contributing to increased death and illness for U.S. patients.

All Americans should hope that Congress wises up and heeds the call.