How to get more foreign nurses

The Hanlon Law Group, specializing in immigration law, has a suggestion: Immigration Reform Needed to Meet Nursing Shortage Needs.

Once a nurse's immigrant EB-3 visa application is processed and approved, it can still take three to seven years before the nurse works through the queue with all the other EB-3 visa applicants and can begin work:

One of the easiest ways to increase the number of nurses and decrease the waiting time in the immigration process is to create a special priority category just for nurses. Under US immigration law, only an act of Congress amending the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) or an executive order issued by the President can create this new category for immigrant visas.

Additionally, the federal government could take action to increase the number of immigrant and nonimmigrant visas available to nurses. This number is set each year by Congress. Currently, there only are 140,000 eligible visas for all five of the EB immigrant categories. By increasing the number of available visas and providing nurses with a special priority category for attaining a visa number, the federal government can take significant steps towards addressing the nursing shortage.