Care migration: The connectivity between care chains,care circulation and transnational social inequality

Migrant care labour in the care economy

Worldwide, over the last 20 years, care giving in private households has developed into the largest employment sector for migrant women – and men, to much less of an extent. The global demand for caregivers has boosted the market of transnational ‘care migration’ that accounts for the increasing feminization of migration worldwide. During the first decade of the 21st century, the demand for care workers grew exponentially in the industrialized states of the Western world, and in the middle- and upper-class households of Asia (India, Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.), the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, etc.) and Central and Latin America. The International Labour Organization estimates that a total of 67.1 million people worldwide are employed in private households, of which 73.4% are women (ILO, 2015a). Although in many countries a majority of workers are internal migrants (e.g. China), the number of international migrant workers is also growing and comprises 8.5 million women and 3 million men (ILO, 2015a). An earlier report mentioned that given the inadequacy of sources it could also be twice as much: data collection in this sector is weak and reliable figures are difficult to raise (ILO, 2013: 32). One example in question is the calculation of migrant caregivers in European households. While the ILO calculation for Northern, Southern and Western Europe accounts for 1.8 million (ILO, 2015a: 5, 6, 17), sources from Italy alone suggest that there are 1.5 million migrants working in Italian households: according to Ambrosini (2013) one Italian household out of 10 employs a migrant domestic/care worker for care of children or the elderly.

Reasons for the continuing growth of this sector are diverse. They include the increasing state withdrawal from the institutional provision of care, in particular care for the elderly; the introduction of ‘cash for care’ policies into private households in classic European welfare states; and the continuing absence of state involvement in institutional care giving in countries where welfare state supply has been traditionally low (USA, many Middle Eastern, Asian and African states). Rapid demographic ageing, and a growing number of female citizens entering the labour market, are also cited as factors that stimulate growth. Some regions and states treat the recruitment of female migrant care workers as a core element of their national labour market policy, designed to enable female citizens to engage in waged work, for example in Singapore (Teo, 2014), or less explicitly in the USA and Canada (Michel and Peng, 2012). This trend has received growing attention from economists: for example, the 2015 World Employment and Social Outlook predicts that until the year 2020 the bulk of new jobs will be ‘in private sector services, which will employ more than a third of the global workforce’ (ILO, 2015b: 23) and that a significant proportion of these jobs will be related to care.

The new ‘Care Economy’ is now considered to be one of the main trends in future global development. The think tank ‘New America’ forecasts that care work will be the largest occupation in the US by 2020: ‘with care-sector jobs growing five times faster than other large job sectors’ (Slaughter, 2016). Here, care jobs already outnumber those of the auto and steel industries combined, as Folbre (2006) has shown. Some economists hail these developments (e.g. de Heneau et al., 2016), while others are more cautious and critical. The commodification of migrant care work in private households is criticized for a number of reasons. Williams (2010) underlines that care provision, as part of a privatized employment sector, is rarely subjected to any state control or regulation. Fraser (2013) criticizes the neoliberal embrace of female empowerment and entrepreneurship for its wilful ignorance of undervalued or invisible work – like the precarious working conditions of mainly migrant caregivers. She identifies care in contemporary capitalism as a ‘fictitious commodity’ (Fraser, 2012; Lutz, 2017a). Parrenas (2001) describes the global trend of care commodification as a ‘new international division of reproductive labour’, while Hondagneu-Sotelo (2001) speaks of a ‘new world domestic order’. Taken together, these analyses show that in many countries and continents, particularly in global cities, middle-class women and men have entered what Andall (2000) calls the ‘post-feminist paradigm’, reconciling family and work by outsourcing their care work in large part to migrant women. The presence of migrants helps employers to cushion their gendered responsibilities. At the same time, the outsourcing of care responsibilities to another woman working in the private home simply perpetuates the traditional gendered division of care work in families. There are additional and structural components to this phenomenon: neoliberal welfare states need, and use, both legal and undocumented migrants to do the ‘repair and maintenance’ of their care regimes, mending the frictions and care gaps that otherwise would cause public remonstration (Ambrosini, 2016; Lutz, 2017a).

A common element in all care work migration is an initial situation in which wo/men from countries that are relatively poor, and lacking in social infrastructure (social protection, free access to health care and education), move as part of a global labour market of commodified domestic and care work into the households of more prosperous countries. This movement can be temporary or permanent, legal or illegal. As a rule, many of these wo/men are well educated, but not exactly trained for the job they are doing; their wages are lower than those of autochthonous care workers. Thanks to asymmetrical socioeconomic conditions, these migrants prefer care work abroad to unemployment – or at best low-paid work – in the country of origin.

In the majority of studies these trends are termed ‘Global South to Global North movements’; this description, however, falls short when it comes to care migration between Asian countries (Michel and Peng, 2012) and from Asia to the Middle East (Gamburd, 2000; Samarasinghe, 1998). It also fails to describe the situation in Europe: here, the vast majority of ‘old’ Europe’s care migrants come from Eastern Europe. This results not only in East-to-West but also involves East-to-East migration where Moldavian, Georgian, and especially Ukrainian and Belarusian, women work in wealthy upper- and middle-class homes in the booming cities of Poland and the Czech Republic, while Slovakian, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Latvian women from rural areas are employed in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, the UK and Austria (see Bauer and Österle, 2016; Cox, 2015; Krzyżowski, 2013; Leon, 2014; Lutz, 2010, 2011; Österle and Bauer, 2016; Urbańska, 2015). Summing this all up, the geopolitical framing of ‘Global South to Global North’ needs to be amended by analysing the wide-ranging and multiple scaling of care migrations, understood as complex relations, where in each case the respective gendered, ethnic and class dimensions of the phenomenon are taken into account (Lutz, 2017a; Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2014). Care migrations are multifaceted, so they pose a challenge to theory building. It is obvious that the multitude of differences listed above cannot be included in a single causal analysis. My question is how far the commonalities and difference of care migrations can be explained by three familiar concepts. By themselves, each exhibits a gap in explanatory scope; taken together, I argue, they can compensate each other for their respective lacunae. My summary then discusses the pros and cons of each approach.

The Global Care Chain Concept (GCCC)

Macro-economists from powerful institutions like the World Bank often describe migrants’ remittances to their countries of origin as a ‘driver’ of development (see Dayton-Johnson et al., 2007). Their assessments derive from the fact that hard currency transfers by migrants are the most important source of income in many of the sending countries’ national budgets. Often described as a ‘triple win’, this view assumes that migration fosters the upward economic mobility of migrants and their families, reduces the care deficit in the target countries and improves the economies of the sending countries (for a critique, see Van Haer and Sørensen, 2003; Yeates and Pillinger, 2013). The GCCC, in contrast, emphasizes the social cost for migrants and their non-migrating family members. The objects of its analysis are care-providing chains, characterized on the one hand by a care drain – wo/men migrate away from their families, leaving gaps in the care provision of those children and elderly family members left behind – and on the other hand by a care gain – in the recipient countries families gain an extremely flexible and low-cost group of employees, and profit from the ‘emotional added value’ of people-related work (Hochschild, 2003). This concept of care chains encompasses the commodification of care work, migrants’ precarious working conditions, and transnational social asymmetry: families in sending countries are characterized as winners, while family members left behind in the migrants’ countries of origin are losers who pay the price for their parents’ – in particular their mothers’ – absence (Hochschild, 2000; Parreňas, 2001).

A crucial aspect in the GCCC discussion is the debate about transnational families – where one or both parents are temporarily or permanently absent – manifested in ‘distant mother-fatherhood’ and ‘transnational parenthood’. In particular, the appeals to motherhood and references to the situation of children left behind (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012), and the widely differing assessments of that situation, continue to lead to considerable differences in research on care migration. In many receiving households, the unification of mothers and children is either legally or practically impossible, because live-in caregivers in particular are obliged to cohabitate with their employer, and cannot run a separate household with their families. Many studies are concerned with the situation of children left behind; however, they disagree in the effects of the mother’s absence. There are three main groups:

According to Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila (1997), and to some extent Parreñas (2005), serious evaluations must consider a range of factors like: the organization of child care arrangements on the spot; the effects of these regulations; and the gender relations in care replacement concerning the (re)distribution of primary care responsibilities inside and outside of the family. A study on stay-behind children’s care arrangements in post-socialist countries (Poland and Ukraine) detected task-sharing between grandmothers and fathers as a dominant pattern of motherly care replacement; predominantly, grandmothers take on the role of substitute mothers while in addition they look after the fathers, their son (or son-in-law). In some cases, fathers withdraw completely from caring for and about the children, especially after divorce or separation (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2012; Palenga-Möllenbeck and Lutz, 2016). There are, nevertheless, exceptional settings where a father as a single parent performs ‘motherly’ tasks, for which the grant of social recognition is often refused (Lutz, 2018). This pattern was also found in Solari’s (2017) research about Ukrainian care migrants to Italy, although she emphasizes the high number of migrating grandmothers who left their country driven by the desire to provide financial support for their stay-behind children and/or grandchildren. A recent study by Bauer and Österle (2016) on circular female care migrants from Slovakia and Romania to Austria, found that a significant proportion of fathers take over care and domestic work from their wives during their absence, an interesting development which needs further investigation. To date, most studies (see Carling et al., 2012: 193-198) confirm that the majority of fathers leave child care to their female relatives – contrary to the erstwhile assumption of migration researchers that absent breadwinning mothers would automatically be replaced by their stay-behind male partners. In many sending countries, stay-behind fathers do not give up their employment when their wives emigrate, whereas wives of migrating husbands tend to become housewives (Urbańska, 2015). Historically, in the case of male-gendered occupations like seafarers, truck drivers, soldiers or salesmen, absent fathers have been neither shamed nor blamed. In contrast, the feminization of migration triggered public debates about the presence of mothers being seen as indispensable to their children’s well-being and which blamed them for their children’s discomfort (Lutz, 2017b). Moreover, until recently, any discussion about ‘fathering and fatherhood’ has been hugely neglected in the study of migration consequences. Taken together, these studies indicate that in many sending countries as a reaction to female migration, gender orders are under pressure, and that much more research is needed to account for differences in gender regimes. So far, culturally coded gender norms, and the gendered division of labour, are the key elements in understanding transnational motherhood and fatherhood performances, and hence, migrants’ childcare arrangements.

The Care Circulation Concept (CCC)

Criticism of the GCCC rejects the reduction of migration to a static two-way traffic relationship, where migrants move in one direction (from the South to the North), to earn money that then travels the opposite direction back to their families. This view is criticized for portraying in particular migrant mothers as givers, their stay-behind families as receivers, and for ignoring care exchange between the various participants (Kofman, 2012). Critics call this a deficit model, which ignores virtual communication and co-presence through telecommunication tools that enable the exchange of emotions both ways, and replace corporal by virtual proximity (Madianou and Miller, 2012). Baldassar and Merla (2014: 29) argue that, from a family perspective, the chain metaphor is unsuitable because it reduces mobility ‘to back and forth movements between two nodes of a chain, where migrant and non-migrant exchange various types of support, thus reinforcing the distinction between the two sets of actors’. In their view, the chain metaphor creates the wrong impression that care is incorporated solely in the female migrant and ‘cannot travel without the migrant’, an approach which – according to the authors – is only applicable in a labour market perspective that foregrounds materiality and corporality of care:

If we move from a labour market focus to a focus on the moral economies of the family, we can see that not only do embodied and commodified forms of care travel along the chain, but also other ‘virtual’ forms of care travel in both directions. (Baldassar and Merla, 2014: 29)

This view is persuasive as it emphasizes the complexity of family networks which cannot be reduced to a unilateral relationship. Indeed, the CCC opens up new ways to assess the mobility of care giving and receiving among members of families dispersed over the globe. Unlike the GCCC it is able to demonstrate the power of connectivity, emotional and moral support as a condition for the acceptance of long-term absence and adverse employment conditions. However, Baldassar and Merla’s concept is based on the ubiquitous accessibility of the new technology that facilitates ‘co-presence’. Moreover, technology has its limits: although it may facilitate the exchange of emotions, it is not a replacement for ‘hands-on care’. While I agree with their view that social relations in transnational families cannot be limited to a labour market perspective, I disagree with its total suspension. Although it is important to uncover the transformative potential of migration by highlighting moral responsibilities of family members, it is also dangerous to glorify and prioritize the mutuality of kinship relations in care circulation as a given. Moreover, neither the asymmetrical relationship between the givers and recipients of care nor the precarious labour market conditions for migrant care givers, exploitation and the resultant tremendous discrepancies in social positions can be ignored, because reciprocal relationships are impeded by them.

The CCC as a counter heuristic to care drain neglects the damage and asymmetry caused by migration, such as the creation or increase of what Nicola Yeates (2009) calls ‘emotional inequality’. It is, therefore, important to add a concept dealing with the calibration of transnational social inequality.

Transnational Social Inequality (TSI)

Many definitions of inequality use the nation-state as the ‘natural’ frame for equality measurement. This traditional ‘sendentarist view’ (Büscher and Urry, 2011), which sees immobility and the life-long inhabitancy of one nation state as a ‘normal’ human condition, is obsolete where migrants are concerned: it fails to deal with the trans-border dynamics of concurrent and unequal life chances ¹ (Beck, 2007). Various scholars have tried to overcome methodological nationalism and theorize transnational social inequalities as ‘multilocal hierarchies’ (Anthias, 2012), or ‘contradictory social mobility’ (Parreñas, 2001). This covers those migrants who, given their educational attainment and professional skills, belong to the educated middle class in the country of origin; by means of income generation and the return of remittances they leave unemployment and poverty behind and maintain their – often middle – class status. In contrast, doing ‘unskilled’ care work in the destination countries often implies low social status, and extensive marginalization in the receiving society, as in most cases diplomas or professional attainments are not recognized. This ‘status paradox in migration’ (Nieswand, 2011) is reflected in the simultaneity of downward and upward mobility, where migrants position themselves in the stratification order of the sending and the receiving society (Amelina, 2017: 33). Relationality is a key component of this status paradox. Migrants develop a relational, transnational habitus where trans-border mobility functions as a capital that allows them to translate and convert other forms of capital into each other (Kelly and Lusis, 2006: 836). Studies of transnational inequality, therefore, examine ‘how a relational multilocal setting (which includes localities in the sending and receiving countries) co-produces these specific stratification orders’ (Amelina, 2017: 35).

I distinguish three aspects of TSI:

Conclusion

In this article I have argued that three concepts, the GCCC, the CCC and the TSI, are all equally important for the analysis of specific cases of care migration. The Global Care Chain Concept paved the ground for understanding the asymmetrical global dimensions of care commercialization and the emergence of the care economy; it emphasized that the current market logic is embraced by powerful actors of the global economy, pushing the conversion of care from a prerequisite for a successful life into a fictitious commodity. However, the concept omits the analysis of transnational migration as a space of possibility expansion for (middle-class) migrants from countries where economic conditions and the enabling of equal life chances have been deteriorating for decades. In contrast, the Care Circulation Concept correctly insists that care chains cannot be reduced to a unilateral relationship with a migrant caregiver and stay-behind-kin care receivers, but that care is mobile and circulated within family networks, dispersed over the globe. This concept highlights the transnational dimension of (material and emotional) care, but it forgets that working conditions in the care economy are often precarious and produce asymmetrical status positions for (educated) migrants. Finally, the Transnational Social Inequality Concept, in its three dimensions – emotional and care inequality; the absence of adequate social protection; and the racialization and gendered naturalization of care work – illuminates the emergence and co-production of social inequalities in and through transnational space. The status paradox of trans-border mobility engenders the production of specific bi- or multinational stratification orders. The new features of social inequality in transnational space are not only found in putting (female) workers into a gendered employment sector, but the gendered nature of the relational care-giving-and-receiving nexus characterizes care as a very peculiar activity from the point of view of standards of human need and moral obligation. Still, the TSI concept so far has not adequately taken into account the centrality of ‘care’ and care commitments in transnational relations, where care obligations in the sending and receiving countries are part of the same nexus (Amelina, 2017: 149–150). Again, insights from GCCC and CCC are important to compensate for these gaps. I omitted to mention the role of the ‘ethic of care debate’ in the remit of my article, because it is currently hard to imagine that a new ethics of care, focusing on a new language and a new moral discourse (Weicht, 2015: 214), is on the horizon, however desirable that may be. Nevertheless, it seems important to emphasize in every case study, where and how migrant care work is shaped by moral norms and power structures (religion, politics, economics, culture, etc.) in discourses, practices and institutions – and to highlight the scandal of social discrimination and exploitation and its continued reproduction.