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)".
