In 1999. Congress passed the Nursing Relief for Disadvantaged Areas Act to help precisely these kinds of hospitals. This legislation created a new H1C temporary registered nurse visa program with 500 visas available a year. To be eligible to petition for an alien nurse. the employer must. one. be located in a health professional shortage area as designated by the Department of Health and Human Services. two. have at least 190 acute care beds. three. have a certain percentage of Medicare patients. and. four. have a certain percentage of Medicaid patients. The H1C program adopted protections for American nurses contained in the expired HlA nursing visa program. For instance. for a hospital to be eligible for HlC nurses. it has to agree to take timely and significant steps to recruit American nurses. then H1C nurses have to be paid the prevailing wage. The program also contained new protections such as the requirement that H1C nurses cannot comprise more than 33 percent of the hospitals workforce of registered nurses. and that a hospital cannot contract out HC nurses to work at other facilities. This bill would reauthorize the H1C program for an additional 3 years. Our goal in creating the H1C program was set out in the Immigration Nursing Relief Advisory Committee which recognized the necessity to "balance both the continuing need for foreign nurses in certain specialties and localities for which there are not adequate domestic registered nurses. and then the need to continue to lessen employers dependence on foreign registered nurses and protect the wages and working condition of U.S. registered nurses." The H1C program reflects this balance. I urge my colleagues to support this reauthorizing legislation. Mr.
Keywords matched
visa visas Immigration