‘US health care industry unlikely haven for aspiring OFWs’

KIMBERLY JANE T. TAN, GMANews.TV

MANILA, Philippines - The United States health care industry is an unlikely haven for aspiring overseas Filipino workers amid the global financial crisis, a recruitment consultant said on Monday.

According to the assessment of recruitment consultant Emmanuel Geslani, at least 10 percent of OFWs are expected to return to the Philippines in 2009 due to the financial crunch, contrary to statements made by labor officials that the installment of US President Barack Obama will result in the entry of thousands of nurses to the US.

“We should not be giving false hopes to our health care professionals that the US will allow them to enter the USA in huge numbers in the next two years," he said in a statement on Monday.

“Health care staff are having overtime and benefits cuts and as in other occupations, migrants are finding the cost of living too high with some opting to return to their own country," he said.

In addition, he said the deployment of nurses to the US has dropped steadily during the last five years because of a backlog in work-based and immigrant petitions.

Data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) showed that only 187 Filipino nurses entered the US in 2007.

It now takes a minimum of three to five years before a Filipino nurse can transfer to her assigned hospital in the US.

Geslani said that nurses applying for work in the United States are also still restricted by a “stalled" US immigration legislation, which is reportedly still at the initial committee and subcommittee stages, making it unlikely to be passed in 2009.

Since 2001, he said that the Department of Homeland Security has imposed strict control measures over the entry of all foreign workers to the US.

“The Department of Homeland Security will not open the gates immediately for our nurses and that Filipino nurses still hoping to get jobs abroad should look into the Middle East for employment abroad," he said

Moreover, he said that recent recommendations by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman to speed up the processing of nurses petitions might not take effect within “the near foreseeable future."

Geslani said that nurses deployment did not even reach 10,000 in 2007 and a majority of nurses have been going to the Middle East while only a few hundreds go to work in the US, United Kingdom and Ireland. - GMANews.TV

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