Towards a Healthcare−Education−Migration Nexus: How Healthcare Worker Mobility Becomes Entangled in the Australian International Education Sector

Healthcare worker migration and international student migration have received extensive attention in public, political and scholarly discourse. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted Australia's fraught relationship with students and healthcare workers from overseas and these tensions persist. Despite these parallel tracks of concern, the connections between healthcare and education migration have been underexplored. Building on Robertson's ‘education−migration nexus’ and grounded in Wyss and Dahinden’s ‘entangled mobilities’ approach, the paper proposes the healthcare−education-migration nexus as a framework for understanding the interdependencies of international education and Australia's healthcare workforce. Drawing on in-depth interviews with overseas-trained healthcare workers, this paper presents five ‘exemplary entanglements’ between these two domains, often characterised as operating under different structural, regulatory and discursive regimes. The findings show that international education underpins the mobility pathways of healthcare workers in Australia. With policymakers proposing restrictions on student migration, this paper points to potential unintended consequences for Australia's struggling care economy.