President Bush, as expected, wasted no time upon his return from Russia to sign the Emergency Supplemental Funding Bill, H.R. 1268, which contained quite a number of amendments, the most important of which is the recapture of 50,000 unused EB-3 visa numbers to be used exclusively for Schedule A jobs (Nurses and Physical Therapists). The bill became law yesterday, May 11, 2005.
The Coalition, our lobbyist and the lobbyist for the American Hospital Association worked tirelessly to make this happen. We have a whale of a story to tell about the last 6 days where our amendment was in grave jeopardy of falling off the bill. It was literally saved at the 11th hour.
Some unknowns at this time are (1) how quickly the State Department will begin issuing visas numbers to the U.S. Embassies in India, the Philippines and Mainland China (and elsewhere in the world like Kuwait, Riyadh, Singapore, and UK where RNs are in the queue to be processed); and (2) how quickly the National Visa Center begins transferring cases they have been holding since mid-December 2004. As reported in the last advisory, we did have some cases move to U.S. Embassies in April; they were to Embassies in the Middle East (Riyadh and Kuwait).
We have cases at various Embassies and at the National Visa Center. As we begin to see movement we will advise you as to what we see happening.
We are urging existing clients and new clients to select RNs for placement. Placements have been extremely hard to come by during this period of uncertainty. It has been very tough to get them to commit to hiring but things should start opening up now.