Sprouting Like Mushrooms: The Proliferation of Nursing Schools and the Deterioration of the Quality of Nursing Education as the Causes of an Open-door US Immigration Policy

Abstract

Nurse migration from the Philippines is continuously becoming a trend in the same way that the number of students who take nursing and other related health science courses continues to increase. In terms of absolute number, the greatest exodus of Filipino nurses was to the United States (US). It is interesting to note that the US still needs an estimated 600,000 nurses between now and 2020. The US Immigration policy served as a channel to facilitate the mass exodus of nurses from the Philippines to the United States. Although nurses can voluntarily choose to go to the US, the number of Filipino that could immigrate and the manner by which they could enter to America was determined by the laws that the US implement. While labor is free, meaning, that it flows in accordance with the demand in a market-driven globalizing economy, actually, labor-importing countries determine the flow of migrants through their immigration policies and employment structures as receiving countries. Therefore, the study determined that a direct causal relationship between the US immigration policy and the proliferation of nursing exists if and only if there is an increase in the demand for nurses in the United States and more students take nursing courses because of that increasing demand. Given the fact that the US immigration policy is a '"regulatory instrument" that facilitates or restricts migration of labor to the United States, it is still dependent on the demand for labor. Thus, because of the increasing trends in the domestic and international demand for nurses, "this trend was picked up by the nursing education market and gave rise to the phenomenal increase in the number of nursing schools and nursing students (Lorenzo, et al. 2000)".