A Permanent Solution: Filipino Nurses and the U.S. Immigration Nursing Relief Act of 1989

Andre Rosario, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing

In the 1980s, amid a severe nursing shortage in the United States, the Immigration Nursing Relief Act of 1989 was ratified. The law made it easier for foreign-educated nurses to stay in the U.S. as legal permanent residents and to continue to work in hospitals that were otherwise short-staffed. Legislators recognized that the majority of foreign-educated nurses migrated from the Philippines, and during a Congressional session, one even called the bill the “Philippine Nurses Bill.” However, Filipino American nurses’ perspectives on the bill and their political action to support it have received scant attention from historians and health services researchers. In this presentation, I reframe Filipino American nurses as political stakeholders. Using Congressional records, organizational archives from the Philippine Nurses Association of America, and opinion pieces published in nursing journals, I blend approaches from social and political history to examine Filipino American nurses as they supported the Immigration Nursing Relief Act. I show how their political action (specifically, organizing in Filipino American professional organizations and testifying in Congress) has been central—not peripheral—to policy related to foreign-educated nurses. Finally, I explore how the 1989 law marks a debut for a particular class of Filipino American nurses: an elite among this migrant group that wields political agency. By tracing the formation of a Filipino American nursing elite, this presentation complicates overgeneralizations of immigrants and nurses as powerless or passive to policy.

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 Presented in Session 35. Labor Migrations in North America