February 3, 2006

'Nurses on the Move: Migration and the Global Health Care Economy'

By NINA C. AYOUB

Enter an American hospital and there's a good chance your care will come from a foreign-born nurse. In parts of the country, it's not unusual for 60 percent to 70 percent of a facility's nursing staff to consist of international migrants, says Mireille Kingma, the author of Nurses on the Move: Migration and the Global Health Care Economy (Cornell University Press).

But what has been salvation for the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and other major nurse importers has often been