The world's nurse migration corridors.
Most flows run South to North, but a few cross-currents matter. Filipino and Indian nurses increasingly stop in the Gulf en route to the US, a mediated route created by visa retrogression, and African source countries are rising fast.
Major migration flows
Major corridors, ranked
The 2025 picture, in numbers
The world is short 5.8 million nurses, but the burden isn't shared. Roughly 78% of all nurses serve countries containing less than half the world's population, and rich countries continue to recruit from regions that can least afford it.
Foreign-educated nurse share by region
Top destination countries
Three dynamics shaping the next decade
Where US-bound nurses train.
The Philippines still dominates by a huge margin, but its share is slipping, and Kenya has just leapt past Canada to become the second-largest source country.
Top 5 countries of education
Applications peaked in 2023. Now they're falling.
VisaScreen volume hit 25,935 applications in fiscal year 2023, then dropped 23% over two years. The decline is partly procedural, nurses are postponing applications to avoid certificate expiry, and partly political.
VisaScreen applications and certificates
Most US-bound nurses come on green cards.
Permanent residency dominates at 72.3% of FY2025 visas, but the H-1B share, at 12%, is the one to watch given recent fee changes and selection-process reforms.
Visa categories used
What each visa type means
EB-3 (green card), Permanent residency, employment-based. The route most nurses take.
TN visa, Expedited work authorisation for Canadian and Mexican professionals under NAFTA/USMCA.
H-1B, Temporary specialty-occupation visa. Now subject to a $100,000 fee on new applications.
Other, A residual mix including dependents, exchange visas, and special categories.
Europe and Southeast Asia are absorbing more.
The traditional US-and-UK monopoly on migrant nurses is loosening. Foreign-educated share of the workforce is climbing fast in Europe and Southeast Asia, while it has dropped in the Eastern Mediterranean and African regions.
Foreign-educated nurse share of regional workforce
Indian nurses wait twelve years for a green card.
Visa retrogression, when more applicants apply in a category than visas available, has created multi-year backlogs. The November 2025 Visa Bulletin shows the worst delays sitting on India's EB-2 and EB-3 categories.
Years of backlog by country and visa category
Final action dates by country, November 2025
Eighty-eight percent of certificates are for nurses.
TruMerit certifies nine healthcare professions for US occupational visas. Registered Nurses dwarf every other category combined, clinical lab scientists are a distant second, and the rest are in the low hundreds or single digits.
Certificates issued by profession
The big two
Smaller specialties
Ethical recruitment, where it works.
TruMerit's Alliance for Ethical International Recruitment surveyed nurses recruited through certified ethical agencies. The results are mostly positive, but with one notable gap.
Ethical recruitment outcomes
Eight policy recommendations.
The report concludes with eight recommendations, each addressing a specific failure point in the global nurse migration system. They range from highly actionable to ambitious-but-vague.
Permanent global forum
Create a multilateral, multistakeholder body dedicated to nurse migration. No such forum currently exists despite migration being inherently transnational.
Bilateral agreements
Use bilateral agreements as model frameworks for nurse migration that respect nurses' rights, provide an ethical baseline, and deliver mutual benefit to sending and receiving countries.
Portable credentials
Enable digital, portable, recognisable skills and rapid identification of competencies, so nurses' qualifications travel cleanly across borders.
Standardised terminology
Develop a global, harmonised nursing terminology to enhance the visibility of nursing work, improve quality of care, and make qualifications comparable across systems.
Better data sharing
Improve collection, treatment, and sharing of nurse migration and workforce data. Today's data is patchy enough to prevent serious cross-country analysis.
AI-aware fraud detection
Build credentialing systems that combine human expertise with AI fraud detection. Gartner expects 1 in 4 candidate profiles to be AI-fabricated by 2028.
Global certifications
Promote globally recognised certifications that validate the knowledge, skills, and qualifications of nurses against shared frameworks rather than fragmented national ones.
Ethical recruitment tools
Develop tools and policies, like certification programs, to ensure ethical recruitment practices align with global standards. Survey data shows certification works.