Ninth International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society

Abstract

Recruitment of foreign-trained nurses is used as a strategy to ease nursing shortages in the U.S. healthcare industry over the past 30 years. In this paper, I examine whether there is any particular movement in the employment of native registered nurses by the influx of the foreign-educated nurses before and after the Great Recession. I use data on local labor markets, states, and divisions from the Census and the American Community Survey over the period 1980-2015. To avoid conflating the short- and long-term reaction to the entry of new immigrants, a “multiple instrumentation” procedure is exploited. Adding a lagged past settlement instrument to the regression separates the initial response and the long-period effects of the increase in foreign-educated nurses on native nurses. The preliminary results suggest that relying heavily on foreign-educated nurses to fill the gap in the U.S. healthcare workforce can be a convincing policy in the long-run although domestic nurses may be suffered from the influx of their counterparts in the short-run.