2024/01/01 by Reynaldo Capucao · 1 voice
Health Professions · Psychology · #Global Health Workforce Issues #Migration, Health and Trauma
paper · doi:10.5325/nursinghistory.32.0165
openalex publication_date 2024/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/12/23
The importation of foreign-born nurses has historically served as a temporary solution to address nursing shortages in the United States. Yet it remains a contentious subject across local and national discourses. As the demographic composition of foreign-born nurses is primarily of Asian descent, their social positioning within U.S. hospitals reflects entangled histories of race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, and imperialism. In Importing Care, Faithful Service, Stephen Cherry explores the subjectivities of Filipino-born and Indian-born nurses—the two largest ethnic groups of foreign-born nurses in the United States—within the nursing profession and U.S. hospitals. More specifically, foreign-born nurses, whether previously or currently employed, were recruited at the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital in Houston, Texas. This site is significant in juxtaposing the cultural dissonance between national values embodied within the government hospital system and those of the imported nurses who are often considered “foreign bodies” of the state.In the study, Filipino-born and Indian-born nurses must care for veterans who, at times, perceive these nurses as the enemy. The distrust of these nurses is often associated with veterans’ post-traumatic stress disorder following tours in Asia and the Middle East during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thus, race and ethnicity become points of tension, as veterans may dismiss these nurses’ claim to an American identity (all employees of the VA hospital must be U.S. citizens) based on their physical appearance and surname. Filipino-born and Indian-born nurses at the VA hospital provide a case study of the hidden experiences of foreign-born nurses enclosed within U.S. hospitals. Cherry limns these engagements within hospitals as “new American battlefields” and explores what leads to these nurses’ decisions to occupy the trenches and remain there to care for those who may perceive them as enemies. But more importantly, what motivates these nurses to do so?In answering these questions, Cherry revisits the place of religion and spirituality within professional nursing, which harkens back to the time of Florence Nightingale. He argues that the shared Catholic faith of Filipino-born and Indian-born nurses has shaped their perspectives on life and their perception of nursing practice as both a patriotic duty and a religious calling. He contends that the cultural frameworks of these nurses have allowed them to view patients, hospital staff, and the community as an extension of their families to overcome any vitriol hurled at them. Following a grounded-theory approach, he collected an array of qualitative data: interviews, surveys, and online blogs and forums for foreign-born nurses and veterans. His data collection and analysis purport an intimate glimpse of Filipino-born and Indian-born nurses’ experiences.Foremost, Importing Care, Faithful Service provides a much-appreciated history of foreign-born and Asian American nurses still underrepresented in the historiography of nursing. Filipino-born and Indian-born nurses are crucial not only to the functioning of the U.S. healthcare system but also to an understanding of the development of professional nursing. Cherry collected a plethora of personal accounts to demonstrate the continued role of religion in shaping the global processes of immigration and (neo) colonialism.Regarding colonialism, however, one point requiring correction is the claim that the Philippines has never been at war with the United States. The Philippine-American war ensued following the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, and the former had a significantly higher number of casualties. This claim in the book dangerously reifies the notion of “American benevolence” and omits the history of U.S. imperialism. Nonetheless, the book advances the study of nursing into the scholarly arenas of colonial and care studies. It inserts professional nurses into the discussion on global care chains that often focus on domestic and sex workers.Furthermore, the book intervenes in political discourses regarding the separation of church from state. The VA Hospital, as a government institution, abides by the legal separation and the disestablishment of religion in public institutions, but Cherry counters a black-or-white reading of the law, as nursing care must tend to the spiritual needs of patients. The book presses on to demonstrate how faith may be integral to the social identities and nursing practices of foreign-born nurses. It thus contemplates what the role of hospitals is in confronting forms of racism and xenophobia to create a healthy environment for both recipients and deliverers of care.