Theories of waiting have created interest and discussion among migration scholars and especially in studies of asylum seekers, where imposed waiting is a key part of the experiences studied. ‘Skilled labour migrants’ such as nurses are privileged in many ways, and their migration-induced waiting, although significant, may be less evident to others. This paper uses waiting as a lens to help understand the experiences of nurses coming to Norway for work. We wish to contribute to the discussion about waiting by showing how experiences of waiting in migration may be less determined by structural conditions than has been suggested by the evidence so far. We argue that the experience of waiting arises at the intersection of politically imposed structural conditions and the messiness or complexity of individual, ordinary human lives. For nurses educated in Sweden, the process of registration is straightforward and takes little time. Nurses educated in the Philippines, on the other hand, meet major obstacles in the process, slowing down and sometimes permanently blocking their access to nursing jobs. While one might imagine an ideal, linear career that nurses could be expected to follow or want to follow, real life is not necessarily lived in a linear fashion. We use our material in this article to show how life happens and which role different forms of waiting may play in the deviations from any expected linear career. Viewing individuals from the two groups through the lens of waiting, we find similarities in the complexities of their lives, experiences, and reflections that it would otherwise have been easy to overlook or dismiss.

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Informal caregiving can have detrimental consequences for physical and psychological health, but the impacts are highly heterogenous. A largely ignored question is whether these impacts differ with migrant backgrounds, and whether caregiving and a migrant background combine to create double jeopardy. We explored these questions using large-scale data that allows stratification by sex, regional background, and types (inside vs. outside of household) of caregivers. We used cross-sectional 2021 data collected from two Norwegian counties as part of the Norwegian Counties Public Health Survey (N = 133,705, RR = 43%, age 18+). The outcomes include subjective health, mental health, and subjective well-being. The findings show that both caregiving, especially in-household caregiving, and a migrant background relate to lower physical–psychological health. In bivariate analysis, non-Western caregivers, women particularly, reported poorer mental health and subjective well-being (but not physical health) than other caregiver groups. After controlling for background characteristics, however, no interaction exists between caregiver status and migrant background status. Although the evidence does not suggest double jeopardy for migrant caregivers, caution is warranted due to the likely underrepresentation of the most vulnerable caregivers of migrant backgrounds. Continued surveillance of caregiver burden and distress among people of migrant backgrounds is critical to develop successful preventive and supportive intervention strategies for this group, yet this aim hinges on a more inclusive representation of minorities in future surveys.