Benevolent Capture: Care as Retention Infrastructure in the Nigeria-UK Nursing Corridor

International recruitment of healthcare workers is conventionally analysed either as an economic transfer, under the brain-drain frame, or as a regulatory problem, under the ethical-recruitment frame. Neither accounts for what holds a migrant nurse inside a corridor once she has arrived. Drawing on interviews with Nigerian nurses, recruitment professionals and policy actors in the Nigeria-UK corridor, this paper develops the concept of benevolent capture: the process by which genuine care becomes the medium through which a subject is bound to a system that extracts them. Recruiters assemble what one calls a "pastoral passport", arrange housing and churches, construct cohorts so that nurses do not arrive alone, and remain reachable years after any contractual obligation has ended. That care is sincere, feminised, largely uncosted, and institutionally harvested as retention. Its governing effect is legible in the possessive vocabulary recruiters use about nurses who might leave, in the retention rates they cite with pride, and in the gratitude with which nurses themselves narrate their passage. The paper specifies three conditions under which care becomes capture, distinguishes the concept from coercion, from elite capture in the development literature, and from adjacent work on the entanglement of care and control in mobility governance, and states the evidentiary limits within which the claim holds. The contribution is to relocate the analytical problem of health worker migration from the moment of departure to the architecture of attachment that follows it.