ABSTRACT
In view of the growing female employment rate, ageing societies, and the decline in the benefits offered by the welfare state, European countries are attempting to make up for deficits in care (Dussault et al., 2009; Gerlinger and Schmucker, 2007) by employing migrants in geriatric care and nursing. International research into care focused for a long time on migrants working in private households, investigating the living and working conditions of migrants responsible for child care, elderly care, and housework. However, the transnationalisation of elderly care (Torres, 2013) is not limited to private households. A growing proportion of workers in nursing homes and the health services possess credentials acquired abroad (Connell, 2008; Kofman and Raghuram, 2006; Yeates, 2009). Recently, Germany too has made efforts to recruit non-EU migrants to work in care and nursing, by means of bilateral agreements. At the same time, some sending countries are offering special preparation courses for migrant care workers. With this in mind, Kofman and Raghuram (2006) warn that the research focus on informality makes it easy to overlook other forms of work and the presence of qualified migrants on the labour market. They criticise the fact that research into care migration is confined to the unqualified sector of private households, and call for the recognition of the qualified care work carried out in the institutional sector. In doing so they point out that migrants are not only employed as domestic workers in elderly people’s private households but provide care at state-run or private institutions as well. Yeates (2009), too, calls for transnational care migration and concepts such as global care chains to be used and taken into account in the case of qualified migrants, with the analysis of global care chains extended to include ‘skilled migrant care workers’ (Gabriel, 2011, p. 42) and other forms of care work such as ‘health, educational, sexual and religious’ (ibid.) care. Here, state regulations play a major role, not only for recruitment but also for certification and admission to care labour markets. However, it is known from research into nurse migration and from studies of various professions that migration often involves ‘brain waste’ (Vouyioukas and Liapi, 2013; or for Germany: Englmann and Müller, 2007). This means that qualifications are not always recognised, and migrants work at a level below their actual qualifications.
