South-North Nurse Migration and Accumulation by Dispossession in the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries

Abstract

Using David Harvey's notion of “accumulation by dispossession,” this article brings systematic understanding to the connections between two widely observed contemporary phenomena: growing inequality on a world scale, and the rapidly increasing shortages of nursing and other health labor in the global South. Through an exploration of the dynamics of late 20th-and early 21st-century nurse migration, it is demonstrated that the increasing flow of temporary migrant skilled labor from African and other countries of the global South, to the global North, is a new form of accumulation by dispossession. Socialist feminist notions of caring labor and the Marxian concept of unequal exchange are used to articulate how the disproportionate accumulation of global nursing labor in the global North represents a dispossession of yet greater proportions in the global South.

Background check: Spatiality and relationality in Nancy Fraser's expanded conception of capitalism

“…And most crucially for our purposes, this global crisis has also had several knock-on effects, on capital's other hidden abodes. Not only has it placed downward pressure on wages in the foreground of exploitation and given rise to a growing population of “surplus humanity” (see, for context, Benanav, 2019; Clover, 2019; Sanyal, 2007); according to Mezzadri (2022: 384) and Valiani (2012), it has also led to new forms of “unequal reproductive exchange,” which have intensified the reproductive burdens of women in the Global South. 16 Cheap reproductive work increasingly flows from South to North precisely in order to meet the needs of those populations “experiencing declining wages” in the North (see Mezzadri, 2022: 383).…”

“…16 Cheap reproductive work increasingly flows from South to North precisely in order to meet the needs of those populations “experiencing declining wages” in the North (see Mezzadri, 2022: 383). Meanwhile, in the South—and in social reproductive labor-exporting countries in particular (see Valiani, 2012)—this has produced a marked depletion in the availability of social reproductive work and the intensification, therefore, of reproductive burdens (Mezzadri, 2022: 384). Put otherwise, we are currently witnessing new and highly complex forms of expropriative shift in which a falling ecological surplus and declining wages (particularly in the Global North) have produced new burdens where it remains a (political) possibility.…”