Happy New Year!
As the last issue for this year, I would like to thank our dear readers who have been following this weekly column. I appreciate your emails with your reactions and questions and I take note your suggestions as we enter in to the coming new year. Happy New Year to all of you. I pray for a blessed and prosperous 2018 to you and your families.
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The election of Mr. Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, along with his nativist-leaning policies, has created an atmosphere for 2017 as a year full of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty within the immigrant communities. Just this year alone, the Trump administration has issued a number of executive orders involving immigration issues such as the imposing travel ban, clamping down on sanctuary cities, tightening employer-based petitions, reducing the number of refugees, overturning the DACA, and increasing the number of arrests and deportations.
The year 2018 does not look to be promising either as there is a continuing push to revise and reform the immigration system by introducing merit-based immigration while limiting family-based immigration, building the border wall while the "dreamers" or DACA recipients are still in limbo. We can only hope that politicians in Washington will come into a bipartisan agreement to formulate an honest-to-goodness, much-needed, long-overdue immigration reform as an untold number of lives and futures are at stake in this very important issue.
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To end the year, let us answer a question posed to me just recently. A reader asks: I am a registered nurse in the Philippines. What is the outlook of the Nursing profession in the US as far as recruitment of Filipino nurses? To answer this question, it is important to point out that the US is presently experiencing a very high rate of nursing shortage. Hospitals all over the US are scrambling to find highly skilled, experienced, and well-trained nurses to fill in their vacant nursing positions. It is projected by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics that by 2024 there will be 1.09 million nursing job openings in the US. Whether or not Filipino nurses will be able to grab a share of that pie is another question. But definitely, if past experience serves a guide, the Philippines has always been the major source of nurses for the US and all over the world.
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