Between Recruitment And Deportation

Cultural anthropologist Prof. Dr. Urmila Goel asked me if I could design the visuals for her upcoming workshop. I always enjoy working on projects that are related to my mother’s migration story.

In the 1960s and early 1970s there were not sufficient nurses in Germany. The gap was filled by young women from South Korea, India and the Philippines. They were recruited as skilled nurses or nurse students and worked in West German hospitals and nursing homes. In the late 1970s, the „yellow“ and „brown angels“, as they were called in many newspaper articles, were denied an extension of their work and residence permits. Against this threatened deportation, the nurses from Asia fought more or less successfully.

The workshop „Between Recruitment and Deportation – The Migration of Nurses from Asia to Germany“ is dedicated to this migration history. Scientists and activists from Germany, Austria and Korea will be discussing at the Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen the connecting and separating aspect of recruitment from South Korea, India and the Philippines. In particular, they look at recruitment conditions and look at transnational networks, family relationships and gender roles as a result of migration.