US health care needs its Filipino nurses, so why is the system stacked against them?
With the existing workforce ageing, a historic shortfall looming and Trump limiting immigration, the system’s best hope lies with the nurses themselves
There is a moment in Jo Koy’s 2012 stand-up special, Lights Out, when he asks the California crowd how many of them are Filipino. What sounds like most of the audience applauds. “Somewhere in Glendale …” the Filipino-American comedian quips of the Los Angeles suburb, “there’s an empty hospital.” The theatre explodes with laughter.
Every Californian – or at least those who have ever been sick – would get the joke. Like good Mexican food or being allowed to make a right turn on red, depending on the expert care of Filipino nurses is something of a Californian birthright.
Californians of every political stripe face a stark truth: hospitals need immigrants, especially those from the Philippines, more than ever. Without them, American health care, for all its glaring flaws, would cease to exist.
What began as a way to educate so-called ambassadors in the US to send back to the Philippines was exploited as a way to shore up an American nurse shortage
Hope lies, at least in part, with the Filipino workers themselves, who are stepping up and assuming positions of power in unions, colleges and on hospital boards, and driving the conversation around American nursing and health care. And not just in California.
But while Filipino nurses are finding their voices and exercising their power, they are also ageing. There are more than a million nurses in the US over the age of 50, which means one-third of the workforce will reach retirement age in the next 10 to 15 years. Without comprehensive immigration changes that encourage more foreign health care workers to settle in the US, the country is set to learn a hard lesson about how dependent it has become on immigrants for its most vital – literally life-sustaining – needs.