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UBC Theses and Dissertations

Spaces of expertise and geographies of ethics : health worker recruitment and migration from the Philippines to Canada Santiago, Mark Lawrence

Abstract

Spaces of Expertise and Geographies of Ethics: Health Worker Recruitment and Migration from the Philippines to Canada is my contribution to the contemporary academic and policy interest on the issue of international recruitment and migration of health workers. Through the discipline of human geography and using global ethnographic methodology, my thesis fulfils four overlapping aims and objectives: (1) I explain the role of state institutions in the recruitment and migration of registered nurses from a major sending country context, the Philippines; (2) I illustrate how private recruitment agencies’ strategic partnership with Philippine state institutions facilitate the migration of Philippine nurses to Canada and other migrant workers globally; (3) I describe the work of Canadian state institutions that sustain and support the current dependence of a receiving country like Canada on immigrant health workers through one province’s “ethical recruitment” drive and the daily work of one provincial recruitment firm and finally; (4) I analyse how bilateral agreements, international instruments and ethical institutional design facilitate international health worker recruitment and migration. Through historically informed, ethically orientated and empirically grounded socio-cultural and political geographic analyses, I narrate stories of local, transnational and global policies circulating and flowing through the knowledge, action and expertise of individuals across multiple institutions and state border that affect and frame the issue of health worker recruitment and migration.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International