Empire of Care

“In U.S. hospitals today, nursing is no longer exclusively practiced by white and black women in white uniforms. Between 1965 and 1988, more than seventy thousand foreign nurses entered the United States, the majority coming from Asia….Philippines is by far the leading supplier of nurses to the United States [at least 25,000 Filipino nurses migrated to the U.S. between 1966 and 1985]…. Filipino nurses provide a critical source of labor for large metropolitan and public hospitals primarily in the states of New York, New Jersey, California, Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts. In New York City, Filipinos comprise 18 percent of RN (registered nurse) staff in the city’s hospitals. Filipino nurses are also geographically clustered in Mid-western urban areas, in particular Chicago.”

Quoted in Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 2-3.