The State Department has essentially frozen visas for foreign nurses for the rest of the fiscal year due to high demand, and health groups warn it threatens to increase pressure on staff at hospitals, nursing homes and other large healthcare employers.
The agency, in its July Visa Bulletin, announced that almost all available green card slots for which nurses are eligible have been filled. Only people who applied before December 1, 2021 would be eligible to continue with visa interviews, even if the candidate already had a job offer in the US.
Given continued high demand, the State Department said it will likely be necessary to further delay the action end date or make the “Unavailable” category in August.
Health groups said the rollback creates significant delays, meaning longer wait times for nurses to get their visas and begin working in the US.
This comes amid a major nurse shortage, and as federal health regulators were finalizing a staffing rule requiring nursing homes to hire more than 20,000 new registered nurses over five years.
“We are reaching a dangerous inflection point where acute nursing staff shortages are fueling burnout in a force-multiplying cycle that gets worse every day,” said American Association for Healthcare International Recruitment (AAIHR) President Patty Jeffrey, in a statement.
“This latest visa freeze disrupts the flow of qualified international nurses when American hospitals need them most, and the only way to fix this is through congressional action,” Jeffrey said.
Foreign nurses make up about 15 percent of the nursing workforce. They are eligible to enter the country on an EB-3 visa, a permanent residency green card that includes all occupations that require at least an associate’s degree but not a master’s degree.
But the immigration share has not changed since 1990, despite economic and population growth. The State Department limits the total number of EB-3 visas to just 28.6% of all employment-based visas, about 40,000 in each fiscal year.
According to the Department of State, the immigrant visa must be available to the applicant both at the time of filing and at the time of decision on the application.
The monthly Visa Bulletin lists deadlines and informs applicants when they are eligible to receive permanent resident status. Applicants who have a priority date – the date the green card petition is first officially filed – before the cutoff date are eligible to apply for permanent residency.
When more people apply for a visa in a certain category or country than the number of visas available, the eligibility date moves back or back.
Since virtually all immigrant nurses who applied on or before December 2021 will have already passed through the processing queue, this setback amounts to the closure of the entire international talent pipeline, AAIHR said.
Health groups are pushing for Congress to pass legislation with broad bipartisan support that would recapture unused immigrant visas and grant them to nurses and doctors. But immigration policies are making it difficult to pass any kind of solution, so the path forward on the bill, called the Health Care Workforce Resiliency Act, is unclear.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
