Importing Latin American nurses would be a good fit for New Mexico
Many people in the health care industry have expressed concern about an acute shortage of nurses, which has resulted as older nurses retire and others leave the profession due to burnout.
There is a practical solution that should not be too difficult to implement if people are reasonable and appreciate the tremendous contribution immigrants can make to our country: import nurses from other countries.
Foreign-born nurses have come to the USA to work as nurses for years — I have been treated by a few. Those from the Philippines and India have the advantage that they already speak English.
I think we should encourage more immigration of nurses from Latin America. Many of them are out of work, so it would be difficult to argue that we would be fixing our problem at the expense of their native country by importing them.
Many of them do not speak English, and some of them may need additional training to meet our standards. Those are soluble problems: put them through an intensive English-as-a-secondlanguage course while giving them the additional medical training we would like them to have.
Organizations like the New Mexico Hospital Association, the University of New Mexico, and Central New Mexico Community College working together could implement such a program quickly, and six months to a year of such training would produce pretty capable help. The cost would be small relative to the benefits, and we would be able to substantially increase the pool of staff available in a relatively short amount of time.
The cost of such a program could be kept to a minimum by having much of the training done in the country of origin, where the cost would be much lower than in the United States. To avoid harming existing nursing schools in these countries, we might pay the tuition of students in those schools, providing that the schools meet certain standards.
According to 2020 census data, the primary language of almost a quarter of New Mexico’s population is Spanish. The staff employed through the program I have described would be better able to care for these Spanish-speaking patients than the monolingual English speakers.
Moreover, caring for others is an important part of Latin culture. Employing nurses like these should help New Mexico health care providers to offer better care to all patients, and especially to these Spanish-speakers, while at the same time freeing up more English-speaking nurses to care for other patients.
The language barrier should not be as high as one might think, as the nurses in those countries are already familiar with medical terminology, and many medical terms are almost the same in Spanish as they are in English. Some examples: medicine = medicina, therapy = terapia, tumor = tumor and hospital = hospital. The main difference is in pronunciation.
During my extensive travels in Latin America I have been treated for a variety of ailments, including injuries suffered in a car wreck, kidney stones, broken ribs, etc.
In all cases I was completely satisfied with the treatment I received. Do not assume that the standard of practice in those countries is inferior to ours.
I believe that nurses can be imported with relatively little difficulty via the State Department’s H-1B visa program, though it might require some modification.
Let’s get on with the program.