Review
Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care by Fumilayo Showers (review)
Social forces, v 104(4), e7
2026
Abstract
Migrants Who Care is a timely and beautifully written qualitative study of middle-class women and men from West Africa who migrated to the United States in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, settled in metropolitan Washington, DC, and found entry-level jobs in health care. Ultimately, many moved into professional careers in nursing or became business owners or managerial employees in health care and long-term care agencies. Using in-depth interviews and ethnography, Showers identifies the macro-, meso-, and micro-processes that intersected in West African migrants’ lives. She explains why, after initially experiencing discrimination in the US labor market and downward mobility, these unintentional healthcare workers and unlikely entrepreneurs established a “labor niche,” learned an assemblage of caring skill sets, found meaning and dignity in their work, and achieved upward mobility. The book avoids a simplistic or romanticized portrait of the American dream by including migrants’ own words, which illustrate the complexity of their lives and the costs of navigating through stressful and difficult conditions at work, while systemic and structural forces transformed them into health workers.
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Details
- Title
- Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care by Fumilayo Showers (review)
- Creators
- Susan E Bell - Drexel University
- Publication Details
- Social forces, v 104(4), e7
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Number of pages
- 3
- Resource Type
- Review
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Sociology
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:001611182500001
- Other Identifier
- 991022180805304721