Learning to care: work experiences and identity formation among African immigrant care workers in the US

Showers, Fumilayo

doi:10.1332/239788218x15187914933434

Cited by 5 publications

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“…Though at first lacking other options, unfamiliar with institutionalized long‐term care, and ambivalent to enter the health care field, West African immigrants almost always indicated that they had grown to love and connect with their charges. The disability professionals elaborated on a transformation, which they attributed to the positive emotions of affection, empathy, and understanding that they developed from their long‐term work with people with severe intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities (Showers 2018). The nurses also spoke about learning to care, or growing to love their jobs, the longer they stayed on the job.…”

Section: Findings and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving Onward and Upward in a “Dead‐End” Job: Extrinsic Motivations and Rewards in Health Care Work

Showers

2022

Sociological Forum

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What motivates people to enter health care occupations? What are the rewards of these jobs? What are the paths of mobility from low-paid, low-prestige, health care jobs to higher paid, more professional ones? This paper attends to these questions through interviews and ethnographic observations among West African immigrant nurses and disability support professionals in the US. I find that extrinsic motivations, (racial discrimination in other segments of the labor market), and the quest for extrinsic rewards, (wages, immigration status benefits), played a role in the decision-making of West African immigrant health care workers. I show how West African immigrants were able to parlay low-wage, entry level positions in the health care industry into more professional, highly paid, and secure ones. These workers also reaped material benefits, and developed intrinsic rewards (love/affection, job satisfaction), and the desire to help others after being immersed in their jobs. I posit an understanding of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards of care, as complex, layered, and intersecting. I prove that a m elange of motivations is in play, intrinsic and extrinsic rewards work in tandem, and one can enter health care for money and remain for money and for love.

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Section: Findings and Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moving Onward and Upward in a “Dead‐End” Job: Extrinsic Motivations and Rewards in Health Care Work

Showers

2022

Sociological Forum

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The Experiences of Migrant Care Workers in Long-term Care Facilities: A Scoping Review

Huynh,

Le,

Hapsari

et al. 2024

J Immigrant Minority Health

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The Migrant Care Work Regime and the Making of the Constant‐Care Worker Among Indian Immigrant Nurses

Banerjee,

O. Thomas

2024

Gender Work & Organization

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Indian nurses coming to the U.S. on H‐1B visas that tie them to employers are often the breadwinner for spouses and other family members on dependant visas, where the dependant spouses do not have the ability to work due to visa regulations, thus upsetting complex gender dynamics in the household. In this paper, we investigate how Indian immigrant nurses in the U.S. navigate their status as the primary migrant and, family breadwinner with the incessant feminizing discourse of immigrant nurses as selfless healers. The paper is based on in‐depth interviews with 30 Indian migrant nurses and their husbands, 10 immigration experts such as lawyers, legislators and activists, 3 years of ethnography in nursing conferences that Indian nurses in the U.S. attended, and in the homes and churches that the nurses and their families attended. Using the construct of “the caring self” our analysis shows that the nurses are continuously subjected to the discourse of nursing work as healing work in formal and informal contexts such as, by recruitment agencies, at nursing conferences, by superiors and peers at work, in their churches and at home. The internalization of the discourse of immigrant nurses as healers often prevent the nurses from processing and verbalizing their gendered and racialized experiences at work, demands of caregiving at home and the community at large. Nursing work as healing work becomes their path toward making of the caring self in the new country. As such, we argue that immigrant nurses operate in a “migrant care work regime” which is bolstered by the intersections of migration policies and a feminized and racialized discourse of migrant nursing work, creating the trope of the constant care worker that shapes the material realities of nurses as immigrant women care workers in the U.S.

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Learning to care: work experiences and identity formation among African immigrant care workers in the US

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

Moving Onward and Upward in a “Dead‐End” Job: Extrinsic Motivations and Rewards in Health Care Work

Moving Onward and Upward in a “Dead‐End” Job: Extrinsic Motivations and Rewards in Health Care Work

The Experiences of Migrant Care Workers in Long-term Care Facilities: A Scoping Review

The Migrant Care Work Regime and the Making of the Constant‐Care Worker Among Indian Immigrant Nurses

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