Gender, Health and Migration: Filipina Caregivers and Registered Nurses in Canada since the 1970s

The growing importance of transnational care work has prompted historians and social scientists to reflect on labour of care and intimacy that migrant women workers perform in the past and the present. Filipina women make up the number one providers of both low and high ends of health care work in Canada. Since the mid-1970s they constituted the largest group of nannies, domestic workers and caregivers in the country, surpassing the arrivals of the Caribbean women who until then had represented the largest number of Canada’s domestic workers and caregivers. As of 2005, Filipina caregivers made up 95 percent of all live-in caregivers in Canada. (Ethel Tungohan 2012) At the same time, the Philippines is the leading exporter of registered nurses in Canada, as elsewhere in the world, which experience a nursing shortage. About one third of the growing proportion of nurses who hailed to Canada from abroad in 2007 were Filipina/os. (Lisa Little 2007) What is the relationship between the migration of Filipina caregivers and the migration of internationally educated nurses to Canada? I seek to offer reflections on the intricate relations among migration of female health professionals from the global south, the shortage of nurses in the global north, and the growing need for caring labour globally.