By Roxanne Torres
Two guards stood outside the main entrance of Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, the oldest public hospital in United States. Two Filipino nurses in their blue medical scrubs nodded to the two men in a show of familiarity.
These nurses have been working in one of the busiest hospitals for roughly 23 years. Once, they were immigrants, part of the great influx of nurses coming from the Philippines due to America’s nursing shortage. These two nurses earned work visas within three months.
Two decades later, the nursing shortage is still prominent. But while some Filipino nursing graduates wait roughly two years to earn nursing positions, others wait far longer, as their hopes and patience diminishes.
Jennifer Cabero, a 46-year-old registered nurse at Bellevue Hospital, was one of the immigrant Filipino nursing graduates who were hired by agencies during 1990s.
“The agency that I applied for took care of all the visa processing and all other papers I needed in order to come to this country and everything was free,” she said, as she turned the combination to her locker in the nurses’ changing room. “Even airplane tickets were paid for by the recruiter.”
According to The International Migration of Health Workers by John Connell, 61% of trained nurses from the Philippines attained jobs and migrated to other countries in the early ’90s. According to the Philippines Overseas Employment Administration, 1,987 Filipino nurses migrated and found jobs in the United States.
The numbers continue to increase until around 1996, when the number of nurses obtaining jobs in United States dropped to 270. These are nurses who not only passed the nursing exam, Commission of Graduates of Foreign Nursing School, but also had experience in hospitals in the Philippines, which is part of their collegiate training.
Since the early 1970s, there had been a global demand for highly skilled nurses, according to the National Student Nurses Association. Filipino nurses saw this as an opportunity to work overseas in countries including Saudi Arabia and the United States.
During that time, American working visas were traded for lower wages and dangerous working conditions, especially with the discovery and the increasing cases for HIV/AIDS. To counter this, Filipino nurses began forming nursing organizations, such as Philippine Nurses Association of America to unite and protect themselves.
As of 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2.9 million registered nurses were employed in the United States. Roughly 210 or 7.3% of those are Asians and not specifically Filipinos. By comparison, a total of 3,690 Filipino nurses were migrating and obtaining jobs in 1995.
Anna Pineda, an honor graduate of LaGuardia Community College, feels the constant disappointment of rejections. At age 46, Pineda managed to complete numerous college term papers, study for exams and work two part-time jobs to pay her apartment bills, all before attaining her citizenship.
“It was hard for me because being out of school for fifteen years and not being able to speak the language like you know, the kids in my class,” Pineda said.
Despite her status as a nursing graduate and American citizenship, she is still unable to find a nursing position. “Most of my classmates who were younger got a job, but the ones like me, who are old don’t,” Pineda said, “though I know hospitals now can’t hire as many nurses because of the nursing shortage.”
Many nurses today blame the decrease in hiring Filipino immigrant nurses to the currently shrinking job market or as they call it, “nursing shortage.” The shortage began around 2008 when hospitals started closing due to budget issues. Some of these were based in New York such as St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan, North General Hospital, and St. John’s Queens Hospital.
“Back then, there were eleven RN’s working during the day shift,” said Aleth Abadilla, a 50-year-old staff nurse working in Bellevue. “Now, we are happy to have six or seven.”
Abadilla is not only sympathetic towards her fellow Filipino nurses who are unable to obtain working visas, but she is also feeling the immense pressure of having her responsibilities increased since the time she arrived in the 1990s. Both Cabero and Abadilla are no longer serving the usual one patient per shift; they are now dashing between at least three patients at a time.
While Pineda continues to pursue her goal of finding a nursing position, others simply let go. This is the case for Joseph Lopez, a 23-year-old graduate of LaGuardia.
“I said that if I keep pursuing nursing without getting the requirements, I would just be wasting time,” said Lopez.
Like many other Filipino nurses, Lopez migrated to United States to study nursing and find a job in the field. The main difference is that he arrived a decade late at 2005. Now Lopez is pursuing a different medical career path as a physical therapist assistant.
But not all Filipino nurses in America are stuck with the choice of waiting or changing paths.
“Instead of coming to the U.S., Filipino RNs explore the possibility of looking for employment in other countries like, the Arab and European countries,” said Natalie Garcia (who asked that her real name not be used), a 56-year-old RN who was once an Assistant Director of Nursing at a New York hospital.
Like many others, Garcia is very much aware of the shortage and its impact in the hiring process. “There was an influx of Filipino RNs coming to the U.S., then a few years later, due to the retirement of RNs, the shortage became a problem nationwide,” she said.
For Anna Pineda and those who refuse to see their journeys end, the future is not entirely doomed. “Perhaps in the next 10 years, America will be in great need of nurses again like before,” Jennifer Cabero said, as she tied her shoelaces and pocketed her ID, “because many will retire, including myself.”