Religion and Indian Nursing Employment in Italy: Three Cohorts of Migrant Women

The international mobility of nurses represents an important lens through which to understand the socio-economic determinants and effects of migration. The global demand for health workers is expected to grow significantly in the future, due to intersecting demographic, epidemiological and technological factors. International recruitment has also produced significant changes in sending countries. The latter have responded to global trends by investing in the production of qualified healthcare workers, but this has often been at the expense of educational quality and workers’ rights. This work focuses on the migration of Indian nurses to Central Italy in order to analyse the role of religious networks and institutions in shaping the inflow of foreign workers into the italian public and private ehalth sector. Firstly, it highlights how private/semi-private religious institutions have historically complemented the state provision of care labour in receiving contexts through transnational labour recruitment. Secondly, it discusses how religion contributes to frame specific gendered occupational cultures, skills and ethics, and how this translates into the construction of Christian Indian nurses as valorized yet subordinated subjects.