Follow the money… to the land of milk and honey? Tracing the transnational political economies of nurse migration from the Philippines to Finland

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

International nurse migration and the related processes of recruitment form an economically multi-layered phenomenon that affects national political economies, private households and public health systems at both ends of the migration trajectory. This is evident also in the nurse recruitment from the Philippines to Finland. Previous research has explored the political and postcolonial economies of these recruitment processes from various perspectives, revealing the multi-stakeholder networks that both invest in and benefit from the brokering of Filipino nurses to Finnish labour markets. The complex monetary flows that sustain and feed from these migration trajectories are yet to be systematically mapped. This is what the FOLLOW€ project sets out to do. With the aim of producing a research-based feature-length documentary film as well as other research outputs, FOLLOW€ conducts a multilayered follow-the-money analysis of the transnational financial flows that feed from the migration and deskilling of Filipino nurses recruited to Finland. The project explores and further develops methodologies for follow-the-money analysis in migration research, beyond the case study of Finland-bound Filipino nurses. Combining research with documentary film, FOLLOW€ not only produces and presents knowledge on money flows but also explores how it is possible to follow “the thing” called money in the first place, as it flows with the emergent transnational spaces of international labour recruitment. While the project will expose injustices and patterns of exploitation, this is not done for the sake of exposure. Rather, in revealing the power relations and financial interests that sustain the recurrent injustices in existing recruitment practices, FOLLOW€ seeks to simultaneously identify open spaces and possibilities for doing international nurse recruitment otherwise: in ways that promotes antiracist justice in the practices of both migration and care.