'To leave in order to leave?' : Filipino Nurses and their Narratives of Migration to Finland

The international recruitment of healthcare professionals remains to be viewed as a plausible solution to address the needs of the aging population in highly industrialized societies. This thesis examines the migration experiences of the Filipino nurses recruited to work in Finland. Coming from the Philippines, a country that is known to implement one of the working models of institutionalized labor migration, how do the Filipino nurses make sense of their migration experiences in the context of Finland? Combining the theoretical tenets of social constructionism and narrative psychology, the aim of this study is to provide a more dynamic and holistic perspective of migration by taking into account the personal narratives of the migrants who are at the core of the migration phenomenon. This thesis compares the narratives of two groups of Filipino nurses. The pre-migration group consists of the potential nurse recruits anticipating their future migration to Finland and the migration group involves the recruited nurses who already live and work in Finland. The indigenous Filipino psychology research method 'paali-aligid' or casing was utilized in order to prepare the ground for the data collection. The narratives are collected through unstructured, in-depth interviews and a two-fold narrative analysis is applied in order to systematically examine both the content and the structure of the nurses’ narratives. Three (3) core narratives that characterize the meanings that the Filipino nurses gave their experience of migration to Finland were identified: migration as a dream, migration as a family project and migration as a personal adventure. Within the core narratives are particular thematic elements situated in four (4) temporal periods: pre-migration, transition, migration and post-migration. The findings of this study suggest that migrants are active agents in the migration process and that there is a complex interplay of psychological, social and structural factors that influence how migrants make sense of their migration experiences