Intermediaries and transnational regimes of skill: nursing skills and competencies in the context of international migration

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Abstract
Market-based migrant intermediaries play an important role in skilled migration. Skilled workers, especially in regulated professions such as nursing, face increasingly complex testing and credential assessment systems. ‘Regimes of skill’ control and filter membership to these professions by reproducing already existing power imbalances in the global regulation of skilled labour. This paper examines these processes in the case of Indian trained nurses who use educational brokers to enrol in Canadian post-graduate programmes with the intention of practising in the Canadian health care system. The study elaborates on the ‘regime of skill’ in nursing, revealing its maintenance through interactional and transnational connections between intermediaries, educators and regulators in terms of codifying and translating skills and competencies between jurisdictions with different cultural and professional histories and norms of nursing. Findings reveal that intermediaries operate transnationally in a symbiotic manner with more powerful actors in order to exploit regimes of skill and expand their market share.

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