Recruitment of nurses from the Philippines. Managed migration through the lens of border regime research.

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Robert Pütz
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 434616829

The proposed project examines the "Triple Win” recruitment program for nurses between the Philippines and Germany. Recently, Triple Win has become the primary recruitment program. It stands paradigmatically for a current trend in migration policy towards maximizing potentials of migration through managed schemes. The proposed project draws on insights from past work on care migration, but goes beyond the empirical focus on managed migration and nurse migration by conceptualizing these fields through the lens of border regime research. From this perspective, borders hold a twofold relevance in recruitment processes. On the one hand, they are understood as productive in the sense that migration is supposed to take place only in specific and "desired” ways through their functioning. On the other hand, borders themselves are only temporarily stable as nurse migration bears relative autonomy, even in formalized recruitment processes. Attempts to govern and control these processes are thus confronted with the migrants’ own agendas and practices. The proposed project thus analyzes firstly which political-economic developments guide recruitment program Triple Win: Which actors are in participating, in what way and how is the necessity of nurse recruitment framed discursively? Secondly, it studies how "desired migration” is constructed through Triple Win and how this entails specific subjectivation processes. In managed migration projects, migrants are configured as bearers of labor power in demand, thus affecting their biographies. Thirdly, it explores how migrants are able to resist and subvert the interpellations and requirements within Triple Win as well as how migrant knowledge can induce change in actors and architectures of the recruitment program. Empirically, the proposed project is based on the analysis of documents and participatory observations together with problem-oriented and narrative interviews.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants