FilAm History: Filipino nurses vital to U.S. healthcare

DID YOU HEAR the joke at the Emmy's last month about Filipino nurses?

One of the best jokes of awards show came from the opening monologue by hosts Colin Jost and Michael Che who questioned how the popular television show ER could go on for 15 seasons without a single Filipino nurse.

“TV has always had a diversity problem I mean, can you believe they did 15 seasons of ER without one Filipino nurse?" asked Che. "Have you been to a hospital?

That acknowledgement, even if it was part of a comedy routine, has been long overdue.

Considering that through the years, tens of thousands of Filipino nurses have moved to the U.S. to help fill in the perennial nursing shortage. In some urban hospitals it would be hard to miss them.

We might also point out that this gross oversight plagues practically all U.S. TV series. Grey's Anatomy, in its 15th season, mentioned a Filipina nurse only once. Nurse Bokhee, a Korean American nurse, has been in almost every operating room scene over the show's 15 years, 

Adding insult to injury, Grey's Anatomy is set in Seattle, home of the fifth largest concentration of Filipinos in the United States. Except for that one instance, the absence of Filipino nurses  in Grey's Anatomy is a glaring omission for a show that prides itself on its diversity. 

As Al Jazeera cites in a video the news agency produced last year, Filipino nurses make up about 20 percent of California's nurses.

Filipino nurses began arriving in the U.S. as early as the turn of the 20th Century, under the Pensionado Act of 1903, which funded American educations for citizens of the Philippines, a U.S. colony at the time. The migration streams continued in waves throughout the 20th Century.

During the 1970s, the U.S. and other industrialized countries experienced nursing shortages, as more work opportunities began to open to women, making nursing, with its long hours and high stress, a less appealing option. But well-educated and English-speaking Filipino nurses provided the perfect (but, underpaid) replacement workforce.
 As a result, Filipinos on H1-B visa helped make them the fifth-largest foreign-born immigrant group in the United States in 2015, and they're overrepresented in certain industries like nursing. 

Filipina nurses have been coming to the U.S. since the start of the 20th century.

The flow of nurses from the Philippines, continues today. According to recent statistics by the US National Council of State Boards of Nursing, the Philippines again topped the number of foreigners applying for the U.S. nursing licensure exam in 2017. A total of 7,791 nurses applied for the first time – 23% higher than the 2016 figure of 6,322.
________________________________________________________________________________