Can Migration Cure Nurse Shortages?
PROLOGUE: The intermittent nurse shortages in the world’s richest countries have created a steady flow of nurses from the developing world, breeding a cottage industry of immigration brokers and sometimes leaving a tattered health care system in source countries. These two papers by the top U.S. researchers on the nurse workforce analyze the trends in nurse migration but then stop to ask the broader questions about the ethics of luring nurses away from their home countries when the shortage is caused by breakdowns in the medical education system of the developed world. In the first paper Linda Aiken of the University of Pennsylvania nursing school and her colleagues demonstrate the extent to which foreign-born workers are filling the gaps in several English-speaking countries and how, despite the immigration of foreign-born nurses, nurse shortages are expected to grow. Foreign-born nurses are increasing as a percentage of the nurse workforce in the United States. The United Kingdom saw
