Filipino nurses face trumped-up charges in New York

The attack on these skilled and relatively higher-paid immigrant workers highlights the precarious conditions and lack of basic rights of millions of immigrants in the US, even those, like these nurses, who come with badly needed skills and full legal status.

The nurses were brought to the US in November 2005, after being recruited by a Filipino agency closely associated with SentosaCare, a large for-profit chain of nursing homes in New York. They were part of a federally sanctioned immigration program largely designed to deal with a critical shortage of nurses in the US. Filipino nurses, highly trained and English speaking, have helped to fill the gap. In the US they have the chance to earn about $5,000 monthly, compared to only $200 in the Philippines. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data cited by the New York Times, 30 percent of the 215,000 Filipinos in the New York area work as nurses or other health care professionals. Counting their families, these health care workers make up a majority of the immigrant Filipino population.