The migration of healthcare professionals from Turkey to Germany: Reasons, challenges, and navigating migration

This article examines the growing migration of Turkish-trained healthcare professionals to Germany, arguing that it reflects a fragmented and weakly institutionalized configuration of migration infrastructures in which mobility is sustained not through bilateral agreements or standardized policy frameworks but through individualized coordination, peer networks, and intermediary actors. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 16 Turkish-trained doctors and nurses based in Germany and four independent consultants, the study analyzes how migration becomes actionable and how regulatory, linguistic, and adaptation-related challenges are navigated under conditions of fragmented governance. The findings show that while deteriorating working conditions in Turkey generate migration readiness, mobility unfolds through layered social, technological, regulatory, and commercial dimensions. Workplace networks first normalize migration as a viable option, but fragmented recognition regimes create uncertainty that is partially compensated by intermediaries. Independent consultants emerge not as formal recruitment agents but as gap-filling coordination actors who provide procedural guidance, information consolidation, and emotional reassurance within a decentralized system. By demonstrating how coordination work is displaced onto migrants and intermediaries in the absence of institutionalized pathways, the study contributes to debates on health workforce mobility, migration governance, and the infrastructural organization of skilled migration. • Turkey emerges as a new source country for Germany’s health workforce • Push factors include unfavorable working conditions, violence and hierarchy • Migration of healthcare professionals from Turkey to Germany unfolds through individualized and weakly institutionalized pathways • Independent consultants operate as gap-filling coordination actors under fragmented governance