a huge fraction of nurses and other hospital staff are immigrants on work visa, particularly Filipinos. they are not undocumented but many would like citizenship.
I don't understand why you excluded immigration as one of those choices.
In fact, nurses have been trickling in from Philippines and elsewhere. This program could be expanded considerably soon, as we have already seen with retail, construction and other sectors.
Nursing is a different problem altogether. A vast majority of healthcare staff in USA is immigrants. Nurses from Phillipines, India etc. Doctors primarily from India, Pakistan, Iran etc.
Trump's war on immigration definitely hurt these groups massively followed by the green card backlog for Indians. Thousands of Indian doctors and nurses left their jobs and went back to India creating a major stress on the healthcare sector and especially the rural areas. H1B visa is oversubscribed by 8x these days and Doctors and Nurses get pushed out by tech companies. No one wants to hire a doctor with only 1/8 probability of joining due to visa issues.
As more people age and we have young people moving out of smaller towns, this problem is going to become even bigger.
If have a nursing degree it's easy to immigrate to USA, in fact you will be coming in with a green card unlike tech worker. So to your point, US does prioritize nurses over others. Doctors are different and it's incredibly difficult for a doctor with a foreign degree to practice in US. I know this for a fact since I come a place where almost every other house has a nurse working in Europe/US
There is "lack of interest by the native population" only because wages have been pushed down by people from the Philippines. Even with odd hours, people will gladly do the job if the pay is good.
The elderly, with failing ears and minds, have enough trouble understanding the speech of the native population. Subjecting your elderly to nurses that can't be understood at all is elder abuse.
Regarding nursing here, the video makes the point that Japan values racial homogeneity to the point that they will let robots take care of their elderly. The flip side of the racial side is that despite bringing in approximately 300 Filipino nurses on a study program to become Japanese nurses, after the three years of their program, only 2 or 3 nurses passed the (kanji-based) test that let them become fully-fledged nurses. This was with one girl religiously studying to 1am in order to cram the necessary kanji.
The point that's missing from the whole nursing debate is that there already is enough qualified nurses in Japan, just that they don't stick around at the hospitals due to the harsh working environment and long working hours. If the hospitals were able to introduce a more flexible working system there wouldn't be as many problems.
Because you mentioned nursing, I'll respond to that. The issue with nursing positions is that they often are not considered H-1B positions. This is why years ago there was a special visa (the H-1C) for nurses to deal with the shortage. Other than the H-1B, there really are no options for nurses.
Nurses make more in the us, then most doctors outside the us. There is a shortage of people in general in the usa, and we have the INS artificially limiting immigration for everyone.
Oh, it's perfectly sustainable. It allows wealthy hospital shareholders to continue reaping huge profits without having to improve conditions, wages, or staffing ratios. Unlike America, which has a finite supply of people willing to be nurses, we can simply hire immigrant nurses and replace them as they burn out.
> Nurses make way less than 700k and should probably be the absolute top of the list.
actually, nurses are. The process apple discriminated in from the article, nurses are considered by statute to be "approved" so they just move on to the next step (i140/i485 or visa) which is just a rubber stamp assuming all the documents are in order.
> nurses to bypass the PERM certification process is the Schedule A designation. Schedule A is a list of pre-certified occupations that the Department of Labor (DOL) has determined there are not sufficient U.S. workers who are able, willing, qualified, and available. Because of this, employers seeking to hire foreign workers in these occupations do not need to go through the labor certification process, which is what PERM involves.
>This is exacerbated by an aging population and restrictive immigration policies.
Sans the covid anomaly, immigration has never been higher in Western nations. The issue isn't restrictive migration. It's that we're not treating nurses well. That means fewer people pick this career, and more nurses leave prematurely. Suggesting that we need to import more nurses is only admitting that migrant nurses are willing to work for worse pay and worse working conditions, and I don't think that's fair to anyone.
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