Why the US has so many Filipino nurses

The Philippines has a problem besides fighting the spread of the corona virus. Hospitals face another crisis. They are short more than 20,000

nurses

, but the fact is that tens of thousands of

nurses

graduate every year in the Philippines. This 2010 swearing-in ceremony included more than 35,000 graduating nurses and this is a class from 2017 and this is from 2019, so how can the Philippines have so

many

nurses and be dealing with a shortage at the same time? This story begins in 1898, when the Philippines became an American country. The Filipinos in the colony fought back, but were eventually conquered by American troops.

More than 200,000 Filipinos died as part of the colonization of the Philippines by the U.S. They created a policy called benevolent assimilation that was intended to protect the rights and freedoms of Filipinos. They use this to justify the colonization of the Philippines by arguing that it was a different type of colonialism and imperialism. This was a good kind of colonialism that would bring educational and public infrastructure. Health United States began to take over institutions and education and began to develop a medical workforce in the Philippines. They built more than 10 nursing schools in less than a decade.

Filipino nursing students had to learn Western medical practices from American teachers and were forced to learn in English year after year. year new classes of American-trained English-speaking Filipino nurses graduated from nursing schools what this did was it inadvertently prepared Filipino nurses to work in the United States the nursing training system continued until the Philippines gained its independence in 1946, but even though the Philippines was liberated, the United States soon found a way to bring in Filipino nurses starting in 1941, after the U.S. When World War II entered, millions of Americans joined The Armed Forces and thousands of nurses were enlisted to treat wounded soldiers in the field and American hospitals began to empty, so the government funded programs like the Cadet Nurse Corps to fill the gaps and provided millions of dollars to a lifetime education for free and encouraged American women in particular to enlist in a proud profession.

As a result, nearly 200,000 American women became nurses for the military and civilian hospitals with the same purpose of easing the pain of war and helping save lives, but that all changed in 1945, when the war ended, once they finished the fighting, there was less support for nurses, government funding dried up and

many

women left nursing hospitals and began to see an increase in vacancies and that meant America needed to find nurses to fill the gap again instead of improving wages and working conditions to encourage American nurses to return to the U.S. looked beyond its borders to fill jobs that Americans would not accept and turned to a new temporary visitor program as a solution.

American hospitals began using the exchange reserve program to recruit Filipino nurses because they already had Americanized nursing training and it worked. Filipino nurses dominated the program for about a decade. More than 10,000 Filipino nurses came to the US to work, but the real reason so many left their homes has to do with what was happening in the Philippines at the time, after centuries of oppressive colonial control and its own battles. In World War II, the Philippine economy finally began to stabilize. Cities were flourishing and tourism was booming, but wages, especially in rural areas, were still low for almost everyone and that included nurses who, despite having formal training, were often paid less than janitors. or couriers and that pushed many to go abroad in search of better opportunities, but when they arrived in the US many sponsoring hospitals simply used them as expensive labor, assigned them extensive nursing work and only They paid a minimal stipend after their temporary placements ended.

Many Filipino nurses returned to the Philippines, while many others managed to stay longer and build a life in the US. Strong Filipino communities were formed, but the exchange visitor program was not the end of American dominance over Filipino nurses, It was just the beginning, the 1960s brought great changes to America, there are certain historic events, new Great Society programs such as the establishment of Medicare and Medicaid, there are civil rights and social movements. American women have more opportunities to enter other types of occupations. All of these things are converging to increase demand for nursing services, but also to create even more nursing shortages in the United States in just three years.

Nursing vacancies nearly doubled, with nearly one in four nursing jobs vacant to fill the new shortage in the United States. He turned to the Philippines once again, but this time it was different. Immigration policy in the United States changed dramatically in 1965 with the new Immigration and Nationality Act. For the first time, people from around the world were able to apply for immigrant visas and then, in addition to sponsoring hospitals, labor recruiters. and travel agencies began targeting Filipino nurses with advertisements promising a bright future in America. One ad in particular featured a basket decorated with the Filipino flag and addressed the Filipino nurse saying dear nurse, if she is not happy with where she is now, please contact us. and we can't promise you happiness from it, but we can help you chase it everywhere, so Filipino nurses began to fill the huge shortage across the United States, but soon many experienced discrimination.

The American Nurses Association added licensing requirements to limit the entry of nurses who passed those requirements, came to the US, and ended up in lower-paying, lower-paying positions, but it is this phase of migration that lasted to this day and transformed the US healthcare industry, the temporary path established 20 years earlier became a permanent migration route and hospitals now had a way to learn nurses whenever they wanted, but focus on what attracted so many nurses to The United States overlooks the forces that continued to drive them out, which brings us Back to the Philippines, this is Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled the Philippines with an iron fist in 1972 under martial law.

He began to rule as a dictator. He was behind more than 3,000 extrajudicial executions and tens of thousands of torture and imprisonment as a result of the riots. The economy that was beginning to stabilize fell into a recession and unemployment soared, but instead of addressing the lack of jobs, the Philippine government actively promoted and advertised the export of labor, the export of Filipino workers to countries around the world. the world, and that's because overseas Filipino workers were starting to send hundreds of millions of dollars to their families and the Philippine government wanted to keep that money coming over time.

That government push sparked a global migration that turned the Philippines into the world's largest exporter of nurses. Nearly 20,000 nurses leave the Philippines every year. they go to Saudi Arabia or Australia, the UK, Germany, but many of them ended up in the US where almost a third of all foreign-born nurses are Filipinos in the US recruiting nurses on the one hand and the Philippines pushing them to work abroad on the other, both governments have benefited from the Filipino workforce over the decades, a total of one hundred and fifty thousand Filipino nurses have come to work in US hospitals and after years of exploitation and discrimination.

Filipino and Filipino-American nurses have organized in the US, rejected exploitative practices and fought for better working conditions, but surveys show that large numbers of Filipino nurses are still concentrated in critical and bedside care, one of the most dangerous and exhausting nursing jobs; It's the kind of job that puts them disproportionately on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus, the pandemic has taken a huge toll on Filipino healthcare workers. Of the 318 healthcare workers lost to the corona virus in May, at least 30 are Filipinos and thousands still remain on the frontlines as of April 2020. A corona virus spread across the Philippines and shortage of nurses in hospitals became an issue, the government temporarily banned healthcare workers from going to work abroad, although it might seem like an appropriate idea for Filipino nurses to remain in the Philippines, it is also important to remember that The Filipino nurse oversees migration is a phenomenon long-standing one that has been actively promoted by the Philippine government, although the ban was eventually lifted, points to the instability that Filipino nurses on both sides of the push-and-pull migration route between countries have to live with.

Filipino nurses continue to be caught in the middle even as they struggle to work on the frontlines providing critical care as they always have.