Pipeline of Foreign Nurses Freezes After Green Cards Exhausted

Hospitals and other health-care employers are facing added staffing pressures after the State Department announced that available green cards for foreign nurses this year have been nearly exhausted.

Only those nurses who applied for a green card before June 2022 will be eligible to continue with visa interviews for the remainder of this fiscal year, according to the May Visa Bulletin. That means the number of new nurses arriving from overseas will slow to a trickle, and those with more recent applications will face months longer in green card backlogs.

The pool of new international nurses is being closed ...