Nursing facilities have lost more than 200,000 nurses and aides since the start of the pandemic, according to federal labor statistics. Some say foreign nurses waiting in the wings to fill those vacant positions are stalemated by their inability to obtain green cards.
By April, US Citizenship and Immigration Services had received enough petitions to reach the congressionally mandated cap for the additional 16,500 H-2B visas made available for returning workers for the early second half of fiscal year 2023 for foreign workers.
“Recruiting nurses from abroad has come to a halt because the type of green card that healthcare institutions use to hire nurses has become so oversubscribed that the State Department this month stopped processing applications from anyone who applied after February 2022,” the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
“Tech companies are able to hire employees on temporary visas while they wait in the green-card queue — often for years — but hospitals and nursing homes can’t bring over employees at all until a green card becomes available,” the media outlet reported.
One solution languishing in Congress is to reclaim unused green cards from previous years to bring over more immigrant nurses. The bipartisan Eliminating Backlogs Act of 2023 proposed in the House of Representatives would recapture unused employment-based green cards accumulated since 1992. The bill also would exempt those recaptured green cards from the 7% per-country cap. No action has been taken on the bill since it was introduced on March 10, however.
Meanwhile, as the McKnight’s Business Daily previously reported, of 524 nursing-home providers surveyed by the American Health Care Association earlier this year, 84% said that they are facing moderate to high levels of staffing shortages; just 3% said they are fully staffed. Forty-three percent said that their workforce situation has gotten worse since the middle of last year. At that pace, AHCA predicted, nursing homes won’t see a return to pre-pandemic workforce levels until 2027.
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