As Congress Requested: Supposed Shortage of Nurses Turns Into Actual Shortage of Jobs For Nurses
The Boston Globe’s Megan Woolhouse has an article today on how that shortage of nurses that had politicians and hospital directors scrambling to bring in as many foreign nurses as possible predictably has turned into a shortage of jobs for nurses.
Writes Woolhouse:
When Katharine Barron enrolled in Boston College’s school of nursing in 2005, everyone – family, friends, college officials – assured her hospitals would be “banging down her door” with job offers.
…
Turns out Barron will be lucky to land work in Boston after she graduates later this year. The 22-year-old Newton native will be saddled with more than $100,000 in student loans and anticipates moving back to her parents’ home.
Whenever there is an imbalance in the labor market that favors workers, Congress is quick to bring in foreigners to hold down wage increases for native workers. It doesn’t matter whether the work in question is writing code in Burlington, making beds on Cape Cod or nursing at a hospital in Boston.
2005, the year Ms. Barron entered college to become a nurse, was also the year Congress dramatically increased the number of visas for health care workers.
What else did uber-patriotic Republicans do between then and now to harm the career prospects for American nurses? Let’s take a look at a couple of examples, shall we? In 2006 there was Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas who introduced a bill to waive limits on the number of foreign nurses American hospitals could hire. That was the Senator’s amazingly far-sighted solution for the shortage of nurses that near-sighted Americans like Ms. Barron tried to fix by going to school to become nurses. In Brownback’s defense, the only legislative course of actions he knows is to demand laws that increases the number of foreigners in America, so why would his solution to a worker shortage be any different? Fortunately, Brownback’s bill – which was strongly supported by Democrats – stalled in Congress thanks to the tireless work of common-sense immigration-restrictionists.
In 2007, another stand-up Super-American Republican legislator, Congressman John Shadegg from Arizona, filed what he called the “Nursing Relief Act of 2007.” Here’s the relief Rep. Shadegg had for Ms. Barron and her fellow foolishly striving Americans:
There are more vacant nursing positions in the United States than there are qualified registered nurses and nursing school candidates to fill those positions.
According to the Department of Labor, the current national nursing shortage exceeds 126,000.
States in the West and Southwest have a disproportionate number of nursing vacancies because of rapid population growth, which exacerbates a widening gap in the number of facilities and staff compared to patients that need care.
Foreign countries such as the Philippines, India, and China have an oversupply of nurses.
In other words, Shadegg told Ms. Barron to fuck off and die because who needs Americans when there are hordes of Indians and Chinese available?
The funny thing is that most of the rapid population growth in the West and Southwest was and is because of immigration. So Shadegg’s solution to the problem is to add to to the problem. That’s true statesmanship.
Fortunately, Shadegg’s bill withered since 2007 turned out to be a spectacularly bad year for those who want to swamp America with supposedly cheap foreign labor.
Yes, money was what motivated Shadegg’s backstabbing of American workers:
This cost [for paying American nurses market-rate wages] is passed on to consumers and adds to the rising cost of health care.
To people like Rep. Shadegg it would be a terrible thing if people like Ms. Barron actually make some meaningful dough once they start working. Can’t have the cost of health-care labor compensation add to the cost of health care, can we?
Of course, Woolhouse doesn’t mention how hospitals used foreign workers and leaned on politicians to get access to even more of them. Instead she leaves the readers with this:
For most of the last decade, nursing shortages were the rule. Hospitals frequently offered $5,000 to $10,000 sign-on bonuses, and many promised cars or generous vacation packages to attract nurses just out of school. At the same time, [Vanderbilt University Professor] Peter Buerhaus said, nursing programs at colleges proliferated to help fill the void.
(Kudos to Prof. Buerhaus for having expressed concern over the “ethical, moral, and economic issues” of the foreignization of the health care work force).
But reality is what it is. In 2007 Indian-American Little India Magazine quoted a director at an Indian nurse recruiting agency as saying, a year after Brownback’s bill stalled:
There has been lot of active lobbying happening with the American Hospital Association, immigration attorneys and groups like ourselves. There is a huge lobbying effort to exempt nurses, physical therapists and other Schedule A workers from any numerical limitation, so there’s a high degree of confidence that this will happen over the course of the next six months.
(Emphasis added)
Maybe the Globe didn’t want you to know that, but now you do.
Some of the boom in hospital employment over the last few years is quite frankly just another aspect of the debt boom that temporarily lifted the rest of the economy before painfully imploding. At this point nurses are merely facing the end of job growth, soon they’ll have to cope with outright job losses. It’s likely to get very ugly. An administrator recently explained to me his hospital’s revenue plan, which is more like a revenue hope. It’s going to get ugly in the health-care industry.
