According to a NY Times article, poor nations are complaining about a provision in the new immigration bill which allows an unlimited number of trained nurses to immgrate to the United States.
There's some irony here. The same countries that are joyously happy for us to absorb their least productive people get mad that we will allow their productive citizens to immigrate.
In order to immigrate here as a nurse, the immigrant must pass an English test and a nursing test. The nursing test is surely correlated with intelligence. Immigration of intelligent people who speak English sounds like a better idea to me than immigration of stupid people who don't speak English.
Having been an RN for nearly 30 years, my experience with foreign-trained RNs is that there is little correlation between actual knowledge, skills, and abilities and the pass rate for the state licensing exams (called 'boards'). The two issues facing nursing from the massive influx of foreign nurses are 1) the quality of education, training, and preparation is woefully under American standards and 2) these nurses will work for substantially lower wages. Both of these problems affect nursing and healthcare, generally, especially as hospitals and other health care services companies do not allocate funds for actually training foreign nurses to bring them up to American standards of nursing and health care practice. Additionally, the flight of nurses from their home countries puts their own nations' health care systems at dire risk. The USA needs to properly infuse a massive amount of funds into preparing future nurses, otherwise we all stand to suffer from the loss of American nurses. This is already being felt in many parts of the country, where RN wages are pitifully behind other vocations' with less responsibility, accountability, and skills.
Posted by: James | March 12, 2007 at 10:39 AM