Philippine and Indian nurses have been emigrating for many years, but Portuguese nurses and other South and East Europeans have recently started to replace them in the UK. This study focuses on the recent migration of Portuguese nurses – both as emigrants and immigrants – within the European area.
The research mixes extensive and intensive methodologies. Health agencies started to recruit heavily among Portuguese nurses after 2008, which often led to their decision to leave the country with a guaranteed job abroad. In turn, this dynamic of emigration being motived by institutional and recruitment networks was caused by a structural factor: the barriers erected in 2010 by UK immigration policies against the contracting of nurses from outside the EU, which led the job agencies to search for nurses inside Europe. The chapter’s main finding is that although the push factor of economic recession and increased unemployment that hit the European periphery after the 2008 financial crisis played a role in the outflow of Portuguese nurses, it was the pull factor that was more significant. The second finding is that this new mass emigration of nurses is not just a Portuguese phenomenon but rather is in keeping with other Southern and East European peripheral countries.