Contribution short abstract:

This paper investigates the international recruitment of health care workers as a response to Germany’s nursing crisis. It examines systemic challenges and precarities faced by Vietnamese nurses, highlighting the unsustainability of migration-focused solutions to structural issues in health care.

Contribution long abstract:

The nursing crisis in Germany reflects two interrelated issues: the country's struggle to compete with international recruitment efforts and the deteriorating state of its health system. The nursing shortage calls for collective solutions and government intervention, but current responses often rely on private-sector approaches. This paper examines the recruitment of Vietnamese nurses, highlighting the systemic challenges they face in care facilities, including overwork, staff shortages, and precarious working conditions. I aim to understand the affective and emotional dynamics shaping the everyday interactions of recruited workers, nursing school educators, and clinics. My research explores how policy responses to the crisis intersect with broader conceptualizations of health care and migration as un/common phenomena. Challenges are experienced as an individual responsibility or burden, although recruitment efforts are presented as serving the common good. Still, structural and bureaucratic barriers hinder to work and care. Instead, private service agencies promise quick and easy solutions, but not all are reputable which intensifies precarities and dependencies for Vietnamese nurses. My study uncovers structural inequalities that hinder the integration of international workers into the German health system and society. These barriers contribute to high dropout rates and perpetuate exploitative practices, raising critical questions about the sustainability and fairness of migration-driven solutions to the nursing crisis. By examining the recruitment of Vietnamese nurses in Germany's nursing crisis, this research highlights how health care as a "common good" is contested and fragmented, revealing the tensions between commodified labor practices and the collective aspirations of equitable and accessible health systems.