Abstract
This paper draws on research conducted in New Zealand from 2009 to 2011 with overseas-qualified social workers as members of a global profession experiencing both great international demand for their skills and unparalleled flows of professional transnationalism. In line with the international social work literature, this cohort of migrant professionals offers a range of needed skill and expertise as well as unique challenges to local employers, client communities, and the social work profession as a whole. With a specific focus on mixed-methods data dealing with participants' induction experiences and engagement with professional bodies, this paper argues that migrant social workers have created in New Zealand a transnational professional space that demands a response from local social work stakeholders.
Highlights
Through the 1990s, the migration studies literature began to address what was interpreted to be an emerging phenomenon of transnational migration, in which “migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders” [1, p.ix]
With regard to their induction into New Zealand social work practice and their engagement with the professional bodies in New Zealand, we argue that the transnationalism of this cohort of professionals continues to challenge governments, health and social service employers, and the profession itself, to develop adequate means to understand and engage with transnational social work as a complex transnational professional space
Though likely only a subset of the numbers of the migrant social workers working in New Zealand [34], this figure closely corresponds to the proportion of overseas-qualified social workers registered in the UK [25] and in the Republic of Ireland [17]
Summary
Through the 1990s, the migration studies literature began to address what was interpreted to be an emerging phenomenon of transnational migration, in which “migrants establish social fields that cross geographic, cultural and political borders” [1, p.ix]. The argument put forward by in this literature is that, as transnational migrants engage in such patterns of intense contact and exchange between both sending and receiving societies (and perhaps others as well), the engaged social fields merge and create opportunities to pursue alternatives to the conventional path of settlement and “gradual but inevitable assimilation” [5, page 228]. For immigrants involved in transnational activities and their home country counterparts, success does not so much depend on abandoning their culture and language to embrace those of another society as on preserving their original cultural endowment, while adapting instrumentally to a second (ibid., p.229)
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