LOS ANGELES—Immigration officials beginning January 1 will block a shortcut that allowed thousands of foreign nurses, predominantly from the Philippines, to get US work permits, the State Department announced.

According to a State Department bulletin issued Wednesday, until further notice the government will not process applications filed after January 2002. The change means that what has been a 60-day wait could now drag on for three years or more.

"It’s basically going to cut them off," said Charles Oppenheim, head of the State Department’s immigrant visa control division.

Recruiters have long sought nurses from the Philippines, where nursing programs train nurses for work in the United States, and the change could leave a gaping hole for hospitals across the country that increasingly rely on foreign-born nurses to bridge a nursing shortage.

US authorities have warned that the country could face a shortage of about 275,000 nurses by 2010, although exact estimates are difficult to come by. Technology will likely reduce the number of nurses needed in the future, but the aging US population will require more.

Nurses in the United States said they hope the new limits will help refocus attention on training and recruitment of nurses within the country.

"If the industry has ready access to nurses from whatever, then they ease their shortage and never address why we don’t have a sufficient domestic nursing work force," said Cheryl Peterson, senior policy analyst for the American Nurses Association.

But in the short term, the change will hurt hospitals, health economist Len Nichols said.

"The Philippines is our major source of imported nurses, and we’ve been doing that at a clip of thousands a year for a while now," said Nichols, vice president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C.,-based think tank.

Nurses are not the only workers affected by the change. They fall in a category that also includes doctors and tech workers. But the work-permit options for nurses are more limited under immigration rules.

Robert Salasar, 31, a nurse from the Philippines, began working at a Los Angeles hospital in July and is awaiting his green card.

"It’s much better pay and fewer patients," Salasar said of his job here.

But he now worries that friends and family in the Philippines will have to wait years for the same opportunity he had.

Canadian and Mexican nurses can also obtain visas to work in the United States under the North American Free-Trade Agreement. But not enough Canadians choose to come south, and Mexico doesn’t produce enough US-qualified nurses, Nichols said.

The new quota limit is the indirect result of a more efficient immigration process. After September 11, 2001, the system became backlogged owing to updated security measures. Many foreign workers from the Philippines, and to a lesser extent India and mainland China, got by on temporary work permits as they waited for their "number" to come up for a green card.

Now those cases are being processed, and the government said beginning January 1 it will no longer issue new temporary work permits for workers from these countries until it deals with the backlog, which could take several years.

Immigration lawyer Carl Shusterman, whose company represents hospitals throughout California and helps about 350 Filipinos nurses a year find jobs in the United States, said he frequently obtains a work permit for qualified nurses in 60 days, allowing them to work as they wait three years for their permanent residency.

"There’s no way for us to keep a nurse here for three years until we have the job," Shusterman said. "It’s like meeting some guy, falling in love and saying you can’t be together for three years." (AP)