Nurses’ Migration and a Crystallizing ‘Culture of Exile’ among Young People in Nigeria

This paper seeks to explain the exigencies of a crystallizing ‘culture of exile’ among Nigerian youths. It examines the lures and motivation of training as a nurse among these youth as a direct result of the fortunes of nurses’ migration abroad and the trends these have produced over time in the local society. It shows how a society’s significant population, especially the young females, with their families’ encouragement and peer influence, take to the nursing profession with the aim of migration to the developed economies for better opportunities. It further reveals how the everyday living of each hopeful migrant was a ‘life in transit’, in pursuance of the ultimate fantasy of future travel. The paper also notes three important implications of this development: an emerging change in traditional worldviews on gender roles,reinforcement of horizontal inequalities and the further impoverishment of the society’s medical systems due to the continuous brain drain.