How America Turned the Philippines Into Its Nurse

In 1898, America bought the Philippines for $20 million. One of the first things it built there wasn't a road or a railroad — it was a nursing school. That wasn't charity. It was engineering. This is the story of how America spent a hundred years manufacturing the nurses it needed: building the schools, setting the curriculum in English, creating the scholarships, and writing the immigration laws that would bring them over. By 1989, nearly three out of every four foreign-trained nurses in American hospitals came from a single country. When COVID hit, Filipino nurses were about 4% of the US nursing workforce — and nearly a quarter of the nurses the virus killed. That number didn't happen by accident.