Nigeria Abroad
With American hospitals facing a dire shortage of nurses amid a slogging pandemic, many are looking abroad for health care workers.
And it could be just in time.
There’s an unusually high number of green cards available this year for foreign professionals, including nurses, who want to move to the United States — twice as many as just a few years ago. That’s because US consulates shut down during the coronavirus pandemic weren’t issuing visas to relatives of American citizens, and, by law, these unused slots now get transferred to eligible workers.
Amy L. Erlbacher-Anderson, an immigration attorney in Omaha, Nebraska, told AP she has seen more demand for foreign nurses in two years than the rest of her 18-year career. And this year, she said, it’s more likely they’ll get approved to come, so long as US consular offices can process all the applications.
“We have double the number of visas we’ve had available for decades,” she said. “That is kind of temporarily creating a very open situation.”
As coronavirus cases rise and fall in the US, hospitals are filling the gap by hiring traveling nurses, but that can be expensive. And hospital administrators say not enough nurses are graduating from US schools each year to meet the demand.
Some hospitals have long brought nurses from the Philippines, Jamaica, and other English-speaking countries, and more are now following suit. And both longtime recruiters and newcomers are trying to take advantage of the green card windfall before the fiscal year ends in September.
The US typically offers at least 140,000 green cards each year to people moving to the country permanently for certain professional jobs, including nursing. Most are issued to people who are already living in the United States on temporary visas, though some go to workers overseas. This year, 280,000 of these green cards are available, and recruiters hope some of the extras can be snapped up by nurses seeking to work in pandemic-weary hospitals in the United States.
The State Department told consulates last year to prioritize applications for workers at facilities that are responding to the pandemic, an agency official said.
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