Here's an article that shows what happens when a reporter is lazy. All too often, journalists simply quote stakeholders on an issue and don't actually bother to fact check. They write down the quote and then, voilà!, the assertion becomes the truth. It must be true, after all, if it's in print. In this case, columnist Dean Calbreath simply accepts as a fact that foreign nurses are depressing wages for US nurses based on complaints from nursing unions. What is the basis for this? Why if the nursing union represenative says it is so, it must be so.

There are a few statistics quoted in the article itself, however, that should give Mr. Calbreath a hint that the unions are on a different planet. First, average salaries for nurses in San Diego are around $67,000. How many entry level jobs requiring only an associates degree do you know that pay that kind of money? And as Mr. Calbreath notes, only 4% of the nurses in the US are immigrants while 8% of positions are unfilled all together. Logic dictates that the shortage is having a much greater impact on salaries than foreign nurses already here. How much are salaries inflated on account of the shortage versus deflated on account of the supposedly cheap foreign labor? Of course, there is no evidence either that foreign nurses make less, but that's probably not important either to Mr. Calbreath.

One is left to question the motivation of nursing unions in this case. Worsening an already bad shortage to artificially inflate salaries could actually result in people unnecessarily dying as was clearly demonstrated in the recent NFAP study on the subject.

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