Due to inadequate green card quotas, a skilled foreign professional could wait 5 years or more to immigrate legally to the United States. In the high tech sector, some professionals and researchers can gain entry on temporary visas, particularly H-1B visas, although the supply of those has been exhausted before the start of the past four fiscal years. Today, the vast majority of nurses cannot enter the United States and work on temporary visas. Congress recognized the labor supply problems with nurses when in 2005 it allocated 50,000 extra green cards (for permanent residence) with a priority for foreign nurses and others who qualified under Schedule A (DOL designation of shortage occupations) to be sponsored by employers in the United States. That extra green card allocation has been exhausted. Immigration alone cannot solve the nursing shortage but it can alleviate many of its most damaging impacts on patients.