Zuhal Yeşilyurt Gündüz is an associate professor in the International Relations Department at TED University in Ankara, Turkey.

“Even though it’s paid well, you are sinking in the amount of your work … . It [is] also very depressing. The only thing you can do is give all your love to [the two-year-old American child]. In my absence from my children, the most I could do with my situation is give all my love to that Child.”

—Vicky Diaz, domestic care worker in Beverly Hills,

who had to leave her children in her home country1

“I’m living here in this hostel, and my classes are fine, but I can’t talk to my mother. I can’t tell her things. I can’t see her face. I can’t hug her … . My mother misses me, too. My mother will retire at some point, but how old will I be then?”

—Priya, Keralian (India) college student, whose mother

works as a foreign domestic worker2

Migration, Care, Care Drain, and Care Chains

The history of migration is as old as the history of humanity. Since the very beginnings humans have migrated to build a new, more hopeful existence somewhere else. Today migrants often break away from their home countries as a consequence of warfare, political repression, or severe poverty. Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller write that “migration has become a private solution to a public problem.”4 Migrant labor is also of course associated with a myriad of other problems to which such workers are subjected.

Employers, recruiting agencies—as well as both sending and receiving states—profit from migrants’ hard work and contributions. For the sending countries, migration is a successful development and growth policy. It not only decreases unemployment rates, but also brings in remittances. Some states market the image of female migrants by praising them as “‘economic heroes’ who not only sacrifice themselves for their families but also for the nation.”5 Receiving countries, too, gain from the hard, but low-priced, work of migrants. These states are able to reduce labor shortages in sectors such as information technology or health and domestic care and provide upper-middle-class families the possibility of private child or elderly care as a kind of limited recompense for the shrinking welfare state. They also benefit from the brain drain of sending nations—the siphoning of highly educated professionals from their home countries, where they received their education, towards the economically developed countries. And of course by taking advantage of the availability of low-cost, migrant care workers, relatively privileged families in the rich countries are able to acquire a higher standard of living.

The astonishingly high number of women migrating is a new global trend. In the past it was mainly men who went to countries far away; women came as followers. In the last twenty years, however, this has changed so much that today over half of all migrants are women. Furthermore, female migrants have often become the main or single wage earners of their families. Saskia Sassen calls this the “feminisation of survival”—societies, governments, and states more and more depend on the work of women in the labor force. Thus the necessary conditions of work and survival fall increasingly on the shoulders of low-waged, deprived, and exploited migrant women.6

Driving the “feminization of migration” are global social and demographic trends in developed countries such as aging populations in general and the elderly in specific, and the growing number of women in paid labor (over 50 percent overall, and close to 70 percent of women in some developed countries). This all contributes to the increasing demand for “care work”—in sectors like health, nursing, food service, hotels, housework, and care for children, elderly, or ill people. Care work—also called intimate labor—includes care and nursing of children, sick, or elderly people, as well as housework and housekeeping.7 It is private and public simultaneously, therefore breaking down this dichotomy.

Selmin Kaşka lists five drivers of the escalation of demand for domestic work globally: (1) in many European states neoliberal policies are dwindling the welfare state, which include cuts in free public-services provisions; (2) demographic factors, such as the aging of population; (3) the transformation in the socioeconomic role of women with the feminization of labor leads to a need for help to cope with the accomplishment of both family and career; (4) the further commercialization and commodification of domestic work, which used to be (and often still is) unpaid labor—and when not is almost always very poorly paid labor; and (5) the fact that in some countries, especially in the Middle East, “taking and having foreigners” for domestic work is a status symbol that many women, whether they are part of the paid labor force or not, desire.8

Not only do many employers explicitly seek foreign women, specific nationalities are often sought-after, such as Filipinos. Sometimes migrants with undocumented status are preferred, since this increases employers’ control and power over them.9

Foreign domestic workers around the globe can be found in all kinds of relatively privileged households—in the homes of upper-middle-class and above families; single people, single mothers or fathers; and the elderly or ill. Migrant workers perform what Bridget Anderson calls the “three C’s—cleaning, cooking, caring.”10 Domestic work can be divided into “practical,” that is performance-oriented, and “social,” that is care-oriented branches. The first requires one to “care for” and includes work such as cooking, washing, or cleaning, while the latter consists of “care about” and embraces care and love as emotional work. This emotional work necessitates emotive engagement and cannot be realized without affection and fondness. Care workers improve the home’s quality of life and convey an emotional surplus for their employers.11

The transnational labor market leads to a new trend “as women who normally care for the young, the old, and the sick in their own poor countries move to care for the young, the old, and the sick in rich countries, whether as maids or nannies or as daycare and nursing-home aides. It’s care drain.”12 Care drain, with its “importation of care and love from poor to wealthier countries”13 leads to a global redistribution or even a maldistribution of women’s care labor power—since now what the rich states have on a fairly large scale, especially in their more privileged sectors, is largely missing elsewhere.14 Brain drain has its drawbacks—but care drain will lead to far-reaching and even irreversible consequences.

Many migrant women, hoping to improve their families’ fates and lives, leave behind their families and children, sometimes even their babies, for years to come. However, their migration leads to “the distortion and erosion of the Third World commons. Indeed, as whole villages…are emptied of mothers, aunts, grandmothers and daughters…a desertification of Third World caregivers and the emotional commons” takes place.15

Still, even from far away, mothers keep on caring. They send money, gifts, listen to and talk to their kids on the phone, and keep doing care work. But as this cannot be enough, others have to step up. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas underlines that when husbands migrate, women take over the roles of mother and father. But when wives migrate, fathers frequently step out and let female relatives care for their kids. Parreñas therefore invites husbands of migrating women to quit traditional patriarchal gender roles and take responsibility for their children and homes.16

If they do not, however, other women take their places and duties: grandmothers, aunts, cousins—even nannies. Thus female migrants who work in household and child care in affluent countries sometimes engage nannies for their own homes in poor countries. These nannies in turn leave their own children in the care and protection of other women. This way, international care chains of care workers in the global South and the global North are developing as transnational networks enabling the reproduction of daily life.17

Care chains include a “series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring,” with each care worker being dependent on the work of another care worker.18 The result is the “globalization of mothering.”19 The commodification of care connects women by gender, but separates them by race, class, and ethnicity. With its commodification, the already very-low value attributed to reproductive work wanes further. Barbara Katz-Rothman writes: “When performed by mothers, we call this mothering…when performed by hired hands, we call it unskilled.”20 Although care is socio-emotional work that should be expensive—domestic workers do care work for their employers’ most beloved, their children, their parents, their homes, and this they do with affection—this tough work is devalued and obtained for a cheap price.

These women were already doing care work in their home countries without any payment. Now they perform similar work in developed countries, this time in exchange for low wages, although higher than those available back home. States, such as the Philippines or Sri Lanka, even promote female migration by providing easier access for legally required permits or papers or by providing institutional support; for example, the six-month course at the Philippine Women’s University grants a housekeeper diploma. In the Philippines alone there are over 1,200 agencies that find “appropriate” domestic workers for the first world’s moneyed families.21

Life as Domestic Care Workers

In all kinds of social groups care has to be organized, realized, and provided, because “human life as we know it would be inconceivable without relations of care.”22 In cases of deficiency or disruption of care activities and relations, human well-being is endangered.23

In some cases care workers are compelled to co-reside in the houses of their rich employers to guarantee twenty-four-hour availability. This, however, isolates them from the outside world and renders socialization and integration into their new society nearly impossible. In many cases the relationship between the employing family and the domestic worker may be similar to a “master-and-servant” one, which disgraces the migrants’ human rights, talents, and expertise. Notwithstanding their educational background and skills, a change of occupation and move up the career ladder for these women becomes mostly unattainable.24

Even more detrimental is the fact that cohabitation makes domestic workers nearly helpless in cases of discrimination, exploitation, and abuse—including incarceration, violence, sexual harassment, and/or rape.25 Removal of legal documents, under- or non-payment, as well as denial of resting times (even sick leave) or overtime pay, are more the rule than the exception. Due to the private nature of houses, locating women at risk of enslavement is nearly impossible. As many female migrant workers work without a residence or work permit, the fear of deportation aggravates their situation and makes it even harder to proceed against the culpable.

Coping with Migration

Migrating women are in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, their home countries praise them as “heroes” for bringing in remittances and contributing to development and growth. Their husbands and families celebrate them, as they now can afford to live better than ever before (good and healthy food, private schools, toys, better houses, etc.). Their employers in the rich North sometimes esteem them, as they acknowledge the increased need for care work. On the other hand, the same women migrants are being criticized and condemned. Many times, their children express disapproval and negative feelings towards their mothers. They keep asking themselves—even years after the migration process has ended and the family is reunited again—whether their mothers really had to “go,” why their mothers left them, whether there were alternatives to leaving children behind. Neighbors criticize migrant women, especially the more wealth the migrating women’s families acquire, for how “materialistic” those departing women are. After all, they sometimes surreptitiously say, those women were able to leave children and husbands behind just to make money. And very often these are exactly the same thoughts and beliefs that migrating women themselves have. Thus, women migrants have and face constant self-reflection and self-criticism.26

Another problem, often disregarded, is the contradictions in class positions of the female migrants. Most of these have received high educations and have academic qualifications. Many have worked in middle-class, albeit underpaid, jobs. Migration exchanges all these for a job in an economically rich country, that will bring in a much higher income for the migrants and families back home, but is ascribed lower status and considered low-skilled and easy. The move thus involves a social decline as care work is undervalued, but is simultaneously an ascent, as the new job involves higher payment and thus social rise.27

Millions of children of migrants are also affected. A generation of children has grown up without their mothers at their sides. The consequences of long separation periods, especially in very young ages, can be devastating. Another negative aspect is the fact that now that mother-child/children relations cannot be based upon direct care, they alter into “care through money.” This can be called “commodification of motherhood.”28 Although mothers make huge sacrifices for their children, trust in mother-child relations erodes and children frequently have doubts about why their mothers had gone.

Studies reveal that migrants’ children are ill more often than other children; they experience resentment, bewilderment, and indifference more than their friends, who live with their mothers. Here we notice “injustice at work, linking the emotional deprivation of these children with the surfeit of affection their First World counterparts enjoy”—at least ostensibly.29 Time, energy, heartiness, and vigor—but also care, affection, fondness, and yes, love—are all being redirected from the children of the migrating women towards the children of their employers, who now apparently possess everything: nice toys and big rooms, fancy cloths and good schools, caring nannies and adoring parents. These children get all the freely given love and affection that their parents and families are willing and able to provide, plus all the bought love and affection of their nannies. Of course, much of this is an illusion since the children of the rich also suffer from a kind of emotional deprivation, given that meaningful caring cannot simply be bought and paid for. Still, what is so hard to come by among the poor disproportionately located in one part of the globe, is available in much greater abundance among the rich disproportionately located in another part of the globe.

Care Seen Through Feminist Eyes

From the point of view of middle-class women in developed states, “liberation” from non-paid domestic work is an attractive and understandable aspiration. Although technology has made most household chores less burdensome, the total hours of housework has not decreased for women or been shared equitably with men. Thus, women still are not emancipated from domestic work, which makes some kind of domestic help attractive, especially if they work in highly demanding, administrative, time-consuming jobs.30 The labor of low-wage foreign domestic workers changes all this.

Upper-middle-class, professional women of the rich countries, who can afford to do so, “use their class privilege to buy themselves out of their gender subordination”—in their case by hiring foreign housekeepers.31 In doing so, they emancipate themselves from housework and care work. However, the increasing North-South gap and rising poverty in the global South means female migrants who take over care work have few other choices if they are to promote the economic welfare and guarantee the survival o f their families. And so emancipated women seem to consent to this gendered, unequal, hierarchical job division (public/male—private/female dichotomy) and bind it with a globally racist division of labor between women.32

Polly Toynbee evaluates this critically: “Domestic servitude has only been escaped by passing it down to another cadre of oppressed women. Battalions of low-paid women…have taken up the domestic duties, along with the dirty washing, discarded by professional women who have fled the home. Liberation for high-fliers breaking through glass ceilings is only possible because of a flotilla of unseen, unheard women.”33 Parreñas calls this the “international division of reproductive labour…that is shaped simultaneously by global capitalism, gender inequality in the sending country, and gender inequality in the receiving country.”34

Because reproductive and care work remains in female hands—no longer in the hands of the intellectual, sometimes even quite liberated woman, but this time in the hands of an ethnically and socially “other” woman, who carries out life-sustaining reproduction and care work—the mounting participation of women in paid labor cannot transform gender roles connecting women with care work.35 So, “despite the increased feminization of labour, there has not been a decreased feminization of reproductive labour [i.e., the various forms of caregiving].”36

Arlie Hochschild draws attention to another aspect of the problem. Professional women in highly demanding administrative and executive employment in the developed world are obligated to work along capitalist lines: long working hours, excessive tasks, hard conditions, harsh competition; plus, of course the minimization of all obtrusions to work, including family work or family time, as your job comes first, always, at all times. This is aggressive capitalism. Thus, the need for the ever-increasing “care industry” stepping in to help out.37

It is not uncommon for women in the upper-middle- (or professional-technical) class in the global North to work long hours in stressful occupations, while their domestic care workers suffer from similar work overload—of course under still more oppressive conditions. According to Hochschild: “Two women working for pay is not a bad idea. But two working mothers giving their all to work is a good idea gone haywire. In the end, both First and Third World women are small players in a larger economic game whose rules they have not written.”38 Of course in all of this one should not forget that there are also women who belong to the capitalist class, and who do not need to work at all, and yet are even more likely to hire domestic laborers than their upper-middle-class counterparts—simply because their huge fortunes allow them to do so.

Care in the Neoliberal World

With neoliberalization continuing and the North-South gap increasing, it is not hard to forecast an increase of care drain. Seen from this perspective, it is hardly possible to consider care to be a “private” topic: care is undoubtedly a global political topic. Even more, Fiona Robinson says “decisions regarding the provision and distribution of care are of profound moral significance, insofar as they are central to the survival and security of people around the world.”39 Care relations globally are “constructed by relations of power determined primarily by gender, class, and race. These are, in turn, structured by the discourses and materiality of neoliberal globalization and historical and contemporary relations of colonialism and neocolonialism.”40 Therefore, the negative consequences of neoliberal capitalism must be included in discussions of foreign domestic work and workers.

Whereas in the past many European countries offered welfare support, over the last two decades most have curtailed the welfare state, imposing increasingly harsh austerity on domestic populations. They have done so in various ways: restricting rights to and quantity of social benefits, expanding costs for what used to be free services, and privatizing the state’s social-security responsibility.41 As the state withdraws subventions in care and health-care centers, families take responsibility for the increasing costs of care tasks. Thus, the privatization of formerly state-provided support leads to the erosion of care support in exchange for market dependence.42 The market increasingly sells care work to anyone—provided that the would-be buyers have sufficient money or means. Yet, the market does not carry out this privatization process through legalized labor alone. It is a well-known fact that “European economies have long profited from and, in actual practice, condoned illicit work by illegal migrants in the…restaurant trade, domestic cleaning, and private nursing care.”43 And: “The system is illegal, but it works. If it were not for the…[migrant] women, most of who are working illegally, domestic care would collapse completely. Therefore it is tolerated, more or less tacitly.”44

The realities of domestic workers reveal the feminization of migration and globalization of the international job market. Relations of exploitation and dependency shift from the national to international level; the domestics question widens from a class issue to an ethnic and international phenomenon.45 Reproductive work in the Western world is being shifted from local women to migrant women. Disparities between these women deepen, while global stratification systems are reinforced, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots within developed countries as well as between poor and rich states expand.46 Consequently we need to evaluate critically World Bank and IMF-imposed development models based on “growth” and the tightening of belts obliging teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other educated though unemployed or impoverished professionals to become domestics, maids, nurses, or nannies in developed countries.47

Care chains can involve the transfer of socio-emotional commons, with the receiving society as a whole benefitting from the siphoning of socio-emotional capital from the global South.48 Hence care chains reflect a colonial relationship: in the past precious raw materials were stolen from Africa and Asia by the imperial powers through coercion, force, and murder. Modern day colonialism takes over the social good (commons) of emotional work. This is what Arlie Hochschield calls “the new emotional imperialism.”49

Whereas the “old” colonialism was/is overtly brutal and a male-centered imperialism, modern-day colonialism is in this instance less atrocious, but by no means free of coercion. It is women-centered, as love and care, indispensable for the realization of reproductive work, have become the “new gold.”50 Yet, this new emotional imperialism should be condemned like all other forms of imperialism. Migrating women seemingly choose to leave. However, they are coerced by economic pressures and burdens, which force them into such difficult choices. The continuing global North-South gap itself is a kind of coercion, violence, oppression, and cruelty. Therefore it is not possible to consider the decision to migrate as a decision of “free will.”51

Fiona Robinson underlines that the dependency of the global North on the global South for the supply of care work—a reproductive work and life-nourishing task—is rapidly escalating. This indeed openly confronts conservative ideas about the global South’s “dependency” on the North.52 Moreover, migrant domestic workers sustain a significant component of the local, national, and even international infrastructure. Even though neither domestic work nor domestic workers are typically included in analyses of the global economy, they indeed are a significant component of it. Thus, the power of migrant domestic workers is much higher than most of them know: if domestic workers in a gentrified metropolitan area, say lower Manhattan, went on strike for a day or more, it would disrupt all parts of the city and the “urban economy would be paralyzed.”53

Therefore, notwithstanding the many predicaments and vulnerabilities migrant domestic workers face, their strength, courage, and determination to overcome all difficulties, to employ their talents as caregivers, and work hard to assure and enable the survival and social enhancement of their families and societies back home, is worth underlining and respecting. Domestic care workers are not only victims within this tough global economy, but also active agents chasing a better future for their families and themselves. Their experience represents a vigorous struggle against economic and social deprivations and hindrances.54 UN Women Executive Director Michelle Bachelet praises “the resilience and determination of these women to find ways to survive, and even thrive.”55

What remains to be done is to evaluate critically the global capitalist system that forces mothers to leave their own families and care for other families in order to provide for them within a commodity economy, instead of staying at home and working in their own communities. IMF and World Bank-imposed growth-models forced upon developing countries contribute to the further deterioration of the situation. In the global North it is also necessary to criticize an imperialist system where a substantial minority of relatively well-to-do, upper-middle-class (and upper-class) individuals are able to take advantage of a foreign-migrant-labor system to draw on the low-paid labor of others—who are brought into their domestic sphere to fill a care gap which is the natural counterpart of affluent professional and upper-class life styles. What makes this especially complicated, as Hochschild points out, is that many professional women (and men) may be in a job situation where they too feel they have no choice although their conditions are hardly to be equated in this respect with the foreign domestic workers that they employ.

One of the most problematic deficiencies migrant care workers face is the right to care—that is, the right to receive care themselves along with the right to care for their own families. Migrants should have a right to family life and to be reunited with their children. If families are reunited, transnational care chains will diminish or even disappear. This would require sociopolitical changes and reforms in care work. Larger-level changes would include grants of public money for households, the professionalization of care work, a raise in its social status, and the legalization of migrant workers—all these are steps in the right direction.56 Ultimately, the current, exploitative system of patriarchy, race inequality, capitalism, and imperialism has to be supplanted. But for an immediate and minimal first step, it is necessary to struggle to guarantee the right of children in all situations to be with their mothers (not to exclude their fathers as well) so that they can share family life again even while the mothers are working.57

Notes