We don't want immigrants...well, at least not some

This article in the New York Times is stunning. I guess while we are shutting the door on folks who are willing to make hotel beds and mow lawns, we are working to drain the rest of the world of it's nurses.

As the United States runs short of nurses, senators are looking abroad. A little-noticed provision in their immigration bill would throw open the gate to nurses and, some fear, drain them from the world's developing countries.

The legislation is expected to pass this week, and the Senate provision, which removes the limit on the number of nurses who can immigrate, has been largely overlooked in the emotional debate over illegal immigration.

So our answer is to steal everyone else's???? Could we just maybe, oh say, TRAIN OUR OWN?? It appears the answer is NO.

The exodus of nurses from poor to rich countries has strained health systems in the developing world, which are already facing severe shortages of their own. Many African countries have begun to demand compensation for the training and loss of nurses and doctors who move away.

The Senate provision, which would remain in force until 2014, contains no such compensation, and has not stirred serious opposition in Congress. Because it is not part of the House immigration bill, a committee from both houses would have to decide whether to include the provision on nurses if the full Congress approves the legislation.

Public health experts in poor countries, told about the proposal in recent days, reacted with dismay and outrage, coupled with doubts that their nurses would resist the magnetic pull of the United States, which sits at the pinnacle of the global labor market for nurses.

[...]

The nurse proposal has strong backing from the American Hospital Association [management!], which reported in April that American hospitals had 118,000 vacancies for registered nurses. The federal government predicted in 2002 that the accelerating shortfall of nurses in the United States would swell to more than 800,000 by 2020.

[...]

The American Nurses Association [labor!], a professional trade association that represents 155,000 registered nurses, opposes the measure. The group said it was concerned the provision would lead to a flood of nurse immigrants and would damage both the domestic work force and the home countries of the immigrants.

"We're disappointed that Congress, instead of providing appropriations for domestic nursing programs, is outsourcing the education of nurses," said Erin McKeon, the group's associate director of government affairs.

Holly Burkhalter, with Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group, said the nurse proposal could undermine the United States' multibillion-dollar effort to combat AIDS and malaria by potentially worsening the shortage of health workers in poor countries. "We're pouring water in a bucket with a hole in it, and we drilled the hole," she said.

This is ridiculous and short-sighted:

There are now many more Americans seeking to be nurses than places to educate them. In 2005, American nursing schools rejected almost 150,000 applications from qualified people, according to the National League for Nursing, a nonprofit group that counts more than 1,100 nursing schools among its members.

[...]

Senator Brownback, who has been an advocate for programs to combat AIDS and malaria in Africa, said he did not think lifting the cap on nurse migration would have much effect on Africa because the infrastructure of companies that did recruiting for the United States market was not set up there, nor did African nurses have a big community there to plug into.

[...]

But Eric Buch, the top health adviser to the New Partnership for Africa's Development, an Africa-wide undertaking initiated by the continent's heads of state, said he expected that recruiting agencies would set up in African countries where nurses were trained in English and that they would advertise the change in the American law.

And back to my original point:

Based on surveys, Dr. Galvez Tan estimates that 80 percent of the country's government doctors have become nurses or are enrolled in nursing programs, hoping for an American green card. "I plead for justice," he said in a telephone interview. "There has to be give and take, not just take, take, take by the United States."

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