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David Weigel | May 30, 2006

Kerry Howley investigates whether the US is "stealing" nurses from abroad.

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|5.30.06 @ 1:56PM|#

FWIW, most of the lesser paid health workers where I am at are from Africa. I assume the Philipino nurses get snatched up before they make it this far east, either that or they are not willing to be paid the wages we pay here.
Community Services (mental retardation, mental health) in Northern Virginia would be in pretty poor shape if we were not able to hire these people. It's the kind of job the locals seem unwilling to take on. Vacancie have a tendency to stay open for quite a while.

|5.30.06 @ 2:26PM|#

I love the NYT this morning having a fit about letting in skilled workers, in an area of great need, legally. This the same NYT who is all for letting in millions of unskilled workers from Central America illegally. I guess if the immigrants are ripe to turn into an oppressed prolitariate demanding welfare benifits, the NYT doesn't want them.

|5.30.06 @ 3:00PM|#

A free flow of RNs may seem like sound policy for a country in the midst of a severe nursing shortage, but opponents claim it's parasitic, emblematic of a ruinous American practice of stealing skilled labor from poor countries that can ill afford to export their most educated workers

And that actually makes sense, until you look at the other side of the coin and realize that this attitude basically says "Skilled workers in poor countries are obligated to stay where they are; their lives are not their own."

I found a Website that had a collection of East German propaganda, and was very interested in the speeches and pamphlets used to justify the Berlin Wall to the East Germans. I'd always thought they used the excuse "we had to build the wall to keep out Western invaders", but no--the government of the GDR came right out and told its people "We are building this wall to keep in all those selfish doctors and teachers and engineers who would go to the West rather than stay here and serve the state like they're supposed to."

|5.30.06 @ 3:41PM|#

Jennifer,

Can you post a link to the East German propaganda website? Or paste the url in? Sounds very interesting.

|5.30.06 @ 3:47PM|#

Mitch--

Here you go.

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/

|5.30.06 @ 3:52PM|#

4th CONSIDERATION. What did the wall prevent?

We no longer wanted to stand by passively and see how doctors, engineers, and skilled workers were induced by refined methods unworthy of the dignity of man to give up their secure existence in the GDR and work in West Germany or West Berlin. These and other manipulations cost the GDR annual losses amounting to 3.5 thousand million marks.

|5.30.06 @ 4:23PM|#

Danke. Lots of very interesting stuff.

|5.30.06 @ 4:33PM|#

Soooooooo, OK to allow unskilled, uneducated poor people who may suck your social services dry to "steal" into the USA but not OK to allow people to legally immigrate to the USA of their own free will?

|5.30.06 @ 5:34PM|#

Yeah, the NY Times would be against flooding the country with cute little foreign nursies. What a bunch of fucking killjoys.

|5.30.06 @ 6:02PM|#

I, at this time, would like to register my vote in favor of importing Filipina nurses. The more the better:)

|5.30.06 @ 6:17PM|#

No one mentioned the Animaniacs reference. How sad. "This is the middle...the middle of the story...the middle..."

|5.30.06 @ 10:10PM|#

My reading of various articles on this subject (not the NYT, BTW) is not that skilled immigration should be restricted, but that encouraging it is a bad idea in the long term because 1) it depresses salaries here; 2) blurs the line between skilled and unskilled medical labor (ie, RNs vs. CNAs); and finally, encourages a reduction in investment in nursing schools.

Or: why pay an American with a mortgage and two kids $60,000/year when you can hire a Filipino at $12/hour? And how good was the nursing school she went to, anyway?

|5.31.06 @ 10:07AM|#

Or: why pay an American with a mortgage and two kids $60,000/year when you can hire a Filipino at $12/hour?

Umm, can you answer that? That is, can you answer that without claiming that an "American with a mortgage and two kids" is in some way superior to a Filipino?

Interesting what happens when you scratch the surface.

|5.31.06 @ 4:48PM|#

"why pay an American with a mortgage and two kids $60,000/year when you can hire a Filipino at $12/hour? And how good was the nursing school she went to, anyway?" quoth zandoz.

The pilipina nurses aren't paid suppressed wages. They get the same $60k as the other nurses. As for their education, many of them are PHYSICIANS who immigrated and too the NCLEX because being a nurse in the US pays a helluva lot better than being a doctor in the PI.

As for importing skilled workers to the US, that's how my family got here in the first place. My dad says the plane he was on was chock full of doctors (including him) emigrating to the States. And mom was an imported nurse. Thanks to the US's policy of stealing other countries' best and brightest, I get to exist :)

As for Howley's claim that at some point the immigrants will return to their homelands, that's seldom the case. My parents always talked about going back to the old country to retire. But now that they're old and set in their ways, they have decided that they like American amenities like air conditioning and McMansions. We're settling in for the long haul.