Filipino Nurses, Healers in Trouble

THEY are recruited in their homeland with perks like free airfare. Some have been offered thousands of dollars in bonuses to relocate. And in the process, they have become a mainstay of the New York area’s hospitals and nursing homes.

Juliet Anilao and Claudine Gamiao, right, two of the nurses.

Avalon Gardens Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Smithtown, N.Y., where nurses are accused of resigning without sufficient notice.

They are nurses from the Philippines, and they are highly prized here because they speak English, are trained in American-caliber medicine and enjoy a reputation for tender care — the legacy of a society in which families tend to their own sick and aging relatives.

“We’re honest, industrious and don’t complain a lot,” explained Elmer Jacinto, 32, a registered nurse.

His voice, however, carried a palpable note of sarcasm. He and nine other Filipino nurses on Long Island did complain, and now they find themselves caught in what he called “a nightmare” — a disturbing new chapter in the upbeat story of one of this nation’s most successful immigrations.

The 10 nurses are under indictment in Suffolk County on charges of endangering the welfare of five chronically ill children and one terminally ill man. They are accused of walking off their jobs at the Avalon Gardens Rehabilitation and Health Care Center in Smithtown in April 2006 without providing sufficient notice for the nursing home to replace them on coming shifts.

Although their resignations were prompted by a seemingly commonplace dispute with their employers over what the nurses say were broken promises and shabby working conditions involving a total of 26 Filipino nurses and a physical therapist, the 10 defendants could each be sentenced to a year in jail and lose their nursing licenses. Their trial was scheduled to start Monday, but it appears that it will be put off until March.

The district attorney’s office conceded that the patients suffered no harm, and acknowledged that it could not recall a similar prosecution against nurses in the state. But it said the nurses’ crime was serious: four of the children they left behind were on ventilators that demand round-the-clock monitoring.

“They walked off their jobs, and the critical care patients didn’t have the health professionals to attend to their needs,” said Robert Clifford, a spokesman for Thomas J. Spota, the Suffolk district attorney.

The case has drawn wide attention and outrage in the Philippines, where legislators have held hearings into how the nurses were treated by the company that recruited them. Filipinos there and in the United States have rallied to support the nurses, joined by the American Nurses Association, which has said in a statement that “the real patient endangerment lies in the deplorable conditions that led the nurses to leave.”

The pushback has even taken on a political tinge. Commentators in both countries, citing an investigation by Newsday, have questioned whether favoritism was shown the nursing home owners because of their political influence and campaign contributions, and because of letters written to the Philippine president and other officials by Senator Charles E. Schumer. The senator and the owners have denied exerting any unusual pressure.

But what no one denies is that the case is a startling anomaly in what has been a remarkably successful migration of people seeking to work in a single occupation. More than half of American nurses trained abroad are from the Philippines, and they alleviate a perennial shortage of nurses in this country.

Of the New York area’s 215,000 Filipinos, 3 out of 10 work as nurses or other health-care practitioners, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Susan Weber-Stoger, a Queens College demographer. Many of the rest are their spouses, children or aging parents. That migration explains the large colonies of Filipinos in places like Jersey City and Bergenfield, N.J., a middle-class suburb, where Robert C. Rivas, mayor from 1999 to 2003, claimed to be the only Filipino mayor in the Northeast.

The indicted nurses pose a strange counterpoint to that success: the image of highly educated legal immigrants complaining about being exploited as green, overly trusting newcomers.

“You were treated like dirt,” said Juliet Anilao, 36, a mother of two and another of the nurses indicted. “All we wanted to do was work and send money home.”

MR. Jacinto, a soft-spoken native of a small Philippines island, saw medicine as his ticket out of poverty. He not only received a nursing degree, but also graduated from medical school in the Philippines in 2004 with stellar board scores.