BOOK REVIEW: Showers, F. (2023). Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in US Health Care. Rutgers University Press. 209 pages

The migration of Ghanaian nurses abroad has been the subject of much scholarly interest over the last two decades beginning perhaps with the work of Nyonator, Dovlo and Sagoe (2005) who highlighted the numbers that were leaving and the negative implications for the Ghanaian health care sector. The experiences of Ghanaian migrants, be they originally nurses or otherwise in the care profession in the global North has, however, not received much attention. Exceptions have been the work of Donkor (2017) who focused specifically on live-in caregivers and Coe (2019) who focused on home care workers. The wider ambit of carework including both the paraprofessional and professional segments has, however, not been systematically presented with a sociological lense. This is an important topic given that as Showers (2023, p. 4), points out, Africans are much more likely to work in the US healthcare sector than other immigrants to the US. Her book fills the lacuna in the literature by offering us a macro, meso and micro understanding of the work of five immigrant groups from West Africa (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon) in the healthcare industry in the Washington DC area of the United States. The data for this book comes from interviews with 66 people (54 women and 12 men, 63 of whom were first generation migrants and 3 second generation migrants) as well as participant observation as an unpaid intern and home health aide. Access to the sample was made possible largely through migrant churches in the Washington DC area, but the author sought to ensure that her sample was not biased in favour of Christian nurses by drawing on her own networks as well.