Immigration and Ethnicity: Implications for Holistic Nursing

International labor migration has increased the day-to-day encounters of persons from different cultural groups. The concept of ethnicity, its historical development, its ambiguity, and its role in the interactions between persons of different cultural groups are explored. The arena of health care for migrants brings to the fore issues of providing culturally competent care. In an ideal world, all nursing care of migrants would be delivered by skilled transcultural nurses; but in the real world, this is not yet the case. A case study of a Mexican migrant woman and a non-Hispanic Midwestern nurse is used as a background for examining the role of ethnicity in determining care needs and expectations and for providing nurses with a perspective that can improve nurse-client collaboration.