Immigrant nurses challenge

By Sandra Feldman
President, AFT Healthcare

U.S. hospitals hired 100,000 new nurses in 2002.  The bad news is that nearly two-thirds of the new hires were over 50 years old and the number of nurses under age 35 actually decreased by 8 percent.

So where will the new nurses and health professionals come from? Many are being recruited from English-speaking countries in Asia and Africa, and many more are likely to be drawn here in the coming years. This isn’t a new scenario. A significant number of our union’s members are foreign-born and educated. But given the likely influx into America of an unprecedented number of health professionals, this is a good time for us to re-examine the challenges they face here—as well as the problems created in the countries they leave behind.

First, we need to ensure that foreign-educated health professionals aren’t being brought into this country as a way for employers to avoid fixing the problems that produced shortages in the first place. The best way to do that is to make sure these workers new to our nation have the rights and protections they deserve. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case.

Immigrant nurses are too often recruited for one position, then hired at a lower level, paid less than their colleagues and forced to do the dirtiest and heaviest jobs. They’re denied overtime pay, required to live in substandard housing and threatened with deportation if they complain about any of it. Foreign-educated nurses have shown great courage in the face of this extraordinary intimidation and discrimination, but such treatment is completely unacceptable, and it must end.

The second issue has to do with the countries from which these nurses are being recruited. While some nations, such as the Philippines, graduate more nurses than their country needs, we and other Western countries also are recruiting from nations that have far more serious healthcare shortages than our own. The number of nurses that some African countries lose to emigration each year is more than double the number of new graduates—and, as we know, many of these countries are suffering from terrible AIDS epidemics. India’s nurse-to-patient ratio is one nurse for 30 to 100 patients. Vietnam has lost more than half its nursing workforce in just a few years.

Of course, no one would fault a person for choosing to leave her country for a better life. Our country was built by people who made exactly that choice. But the AFT has always actively supported the types of rights and protections that help train and keep a skilled workforce in developing countries.

AFT Healthcare’s program and policy council has adopted a policy statement on the recruitment and rights of foreign nurses. If you haven’t read it, I would urge you to go to the AFT Healthcare Web site (www.aft.org/healthcare/) and do so. These are issues that will clearly grow in importance as we struggle to address the shortage of health professionals in every occupation.

Finally, on a personal note, this will be my last column. As some of you may be aware, I have had a recurrence of breast cancer. The need for weekly treatments makes doing the job of AFT president with the justice it deserves impossible. I want you to know that I have loved being your president and fighting to achieve our goals. But I know I’m leaving the union in good hands and our fight will continue. And you know I’ll be there with you—even if I’m now in a different role.