Integration and disintegration, home and placelessness: reorganizing the social embeddedness of Eastern and Central European migrant nurses

Abstract

Abstract After the regime change, post-socialist workers have been able to enter the global household industry, to get access to foreign funds, and to break out from previous roles and develop a new identity. The social and economic characteristics of the country of origin and the host country activate such dynamics that keep open this sector for cheap labor coming from the global East. The employment pattern of migrant nurses results in stratified inequalities due to the structural factors and gender characteristics of this job, so this specifically defines the quality of life and opportunities of employees in this domain. Though migrant care workers are affected by many compulsory and structural constraints, they have an impact on their own migration paths, thus they can be looked at as influential actors. This approach makes it possible to observe how East and Central European migrant women make their choices within the given framework, how they expand and reframe these or even how they are affected by the constraints. Moreover, we might discover how they have impact on the global phenomenon of migration, and how all these reformulate their previous relationships, practices and interpretations. In this paper, I intend to understand the role of the migration stage in the life spans of these women, to describe how it relates to earlier life stages, and experiences, how it shapes individual life opportunities, how migration reorganizes the social environment of an individual, and how the categories of home and stranger/other are constructed. That is, what kind of paths are taken by Eastern and Central European household employees during their migration career during integration into the host country and the inevitable distancing from their society of origin. Keywords: female migration, integration, stratified inequality, informal economy, elderly care, global household industry, home, otherness-concepts