Care work migration

The book Ceniza en la boca (2022) by Mexican author Brenda Navarro narrates the story of a woman, the protagonist’s mother, who migrates to Spain looking for a better future for their children, who she leaves in Mexico with their grandparents. Because of her illegal status, she is forced to take badly paid and non regulated jobs cleaning houses and caring for elderly people in Madrid and being subject to exploitation. When the protagonist is finally reunited with her mother in Spain, she finds that she too has very limited job options and has to follow her mother’s steps. The novel reflects a widespread phenomenon in the migratory context: women who migrate to perform domestic and caring activities in high-income regions or countries.

Around 11.5 million migrants around the world work in domestic settings, according to the International Labour Office (2015). As domestic labor is a highly feminized sector, it is not surprising that 73.4% of those migrants are women, an approximate of 8.5 million, and that they are concentrated in high-income countries. This group is heterogeneous: some women migrate within a region (e.g. from Eastern to Western Europe) or within the so-called ‘Global South’ (e.g. from Asia to the Middle East), but most of the migration occurs from the so-called ‘Global South’ to the ‘Global North’ and can be linked to colonial ties. This is the case of a significant percentage of migration from Latin America to Europe, particularly the Iberian Peninsula —for example, more than 30% of immigrants in Spain come from this region (Hierro 2016)— as Navarro’s novel reflects, and the United States —around 19% of the total population is made up of Latinos, a third of which are foreign-born (Moslimani and Noe-Bustamante 2023). 

This particular population group has been studied for more than 25 years (e.g. Cheng 1996; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997 focused on the effects of migration on motherhood), and lately it has received more attention from both international organizations and a range of academic studies (e.g. Drotbohm and Alber 2015; Dengler and Lang 2022) due to its particular characteristics and vulnerabilities: the work these women do requires them to care for other people, demanding physical and emotional labor from them; many migrate alone and are likely to have an irregular legal status, which forces them to be separated from their families and work in informal settings; and many help sustain the health of others, while being unable to access healthcare themselves. Therefore, this particular group at the intersection of being women and being immigrants requires recognition from the countries importing and benefitting from them.

Working women

At least since the 90s, the term ‘care work’ has been used to talk about activities like child-rearing, caring for the elderly and disabled, and nursing, work historically done by women in their homes and without receiving payment (Fraser 2016). When women started working in capitalist economies, they were still expected to take on the “traditional” domestic role, even if they had similar shifts to their male counterparts. An important aspect of Feminist Economics has been to make care work and women’s second shift visible, as well as to highlight the fact that without these caring activities the economy could simply not function (Dengler and Lang 2017). While care work is indeed more visible now, the fact is that domestic labor is still undervalued, still invisible, and still performed by women, only now they are —usually poorer and racialized— migrant women instead. 

Industrialized countries demand migrant women for a variety of reasons: they have an aging population that requires constant care, their women are part of the workforce and have less time to do domestic labor traditionally done by the female population, and the states have not kept up with necessary child caring facilities (WHO 2017). Thus, they are essential for filling in gaps within these societies. However, caring and domestic work is very poorly regulated or unregulated in most countries, with a few exceptions like Germany, Sweden, Uruguay, and the Philippines, which makes these women particularly vulnerable in the receiving countries, especially when they have an irregular migratory status (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2013). As a result, women doing crucial labor are separated from their children and families, whom they usually have to leave behind. The experience has been studied under the name ‘transnational motherhood’ (see Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Asakura 2012). These women work in stressful conditions and may tolerate abuse from their employers for fear of being reported to the authorities. 

On the other hand, a UN report on the topic highlighted the fact that nurses and domestic workers, for example, are attracted to high-income countries because of better earning possibilities, pulling them away from the poorer regions where they are more needed (Amrith 2015). For these women the migratory process may bring a sense of agency and empowerment coming from their ability to provide for their families. These women also resist exploitation and find ways to maintain their autonomy, as Aceros et al. (2023) study on female migrant domestic workers in Spain shows. 

Some steps forward

With all this as a backdrop, there is a real and urgent need to better working and living conditions of female migrant workers, which is why the WHO (2017) has proposed three steps to ensure their rights can be exercised in their report Women on the Move:

1. The first step is to generate evidence, i.e., to have more data, on the population group, importantly, it should be collected with a diverse and intersectional approach.
2. The second step is to improve the women migrants’ access to health care and well-being, taking into account their voices and concerns, as well as the families left behind.
3. The third and final step is to value caring activities and to develop policies that address care as a public good, strengthening the position of female migrant domestic workers and caregivers.

Book recommendations

If you want to read more about care work and care work migration here are some recommendations:

• Anthropological perspectives on care: Work, kinship, and the life-course. (2015). Erdmute Alber and Heike Drotbohm. Published by Springer.
• Salir adelante: experiencias emocionales por la maternidad a distancia. (2012). Hiroko Asakura. Published by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
  
• Care beyond repair (2022) Heike Drotbohm. In Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Anthropology. 
• Global woman: nannies, maids, and sex workers in the new economy. (2004). Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. Published by Macmillan
• Who Cares: The Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It. (2023). Emily Kenway. Published by Seal Press
• The new maids: transnational women and the care economy. (2011). Helma Lutz. Published by Zed Books
• Irregular Migrant Domestic Workers in Europe: Who Cares? (2013). Anna Triandafyllidou. Published by Routledge

 

References

Aceros, J.C., Duque, T., & Paloma, V. (2023). Activism among female migrant domestic workers: A qualitative study in Southern Spain. Estudios Fronterizos 24(e116), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.21670/ref.2305116 

Amrith, M. (2015). The invisible labour of female migrants in the care sector. Policy report 03/06. United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility (UNU-GCM). https://gcm.unu.edu/publications/policy-reports/the-invisible-labour-of-female-migrants-in-the-care-sector.html 

Asakura, H. (2012). Maternidad transnacional: Efectos de la maternidad a distancia en la subjetividad de las mujeres migrantes centroamericanas en México. In Y. Castro Neira (Coord.), La migración y sus efectos en la cultura. pp. 61-82. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Cheng, S.-J.A. (1996). Migrant women domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan: A comparative analysis. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 5(1), 139-152. https://doi.org/10.1177/011719689600500107 

Dengler, C. and Lang, M. (2022). Commoning care: Feminist degrowth visions for a socio-ecological transformation. Feminist Economics, 28(1), 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/13545701.2021.1942511 

Drotbohm, H. and Alber, E. (Eds.) (2015). Anthropological perspectives on care: Work, kinship, and the life-course. (2015). Springer.

Fraser, N. (2016). Contradictions of capital and care. New Left Review, 100, 99-117.   https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care 

Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, E. (2013). Trabajo doméstico-trabajo afectivo: sobre heteronormatividad y la colonialidad del trabajo en el contexto de las políticas migratorias de la UE. Revista de Estudios Sociales, 45, 123-134. https://doi.org/10.7440/res45.2013.10 

Hierro, M. (2016). Latin American migration to Spain: main reasons and future perspectives. International Migration, 54, 64-83. https://doi.org/10.1111/imig.12056 

Hondagneu-Sotelo, P., and Avila, E. (1997). “I’m here, but I’m there”: The meanings of latina transnational motherhood. Gender and Society, 11(5), 548–571. http://www.jstor.org/stable/190339 

International Labour Office. (2015). ILO Global estimates of migrant workers and migrant domestic workers: results and methodology. International Labour Office. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/documents/publication/wcms_436343.pdf 

Moslimani, M. and Noe-Bustamante, L. (2023, August 16). Facts on latinos in the U.S. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/fact-sheet/latinos-in-the-us-fact-sheet/ 

Navarro, B. (2022). Ceniza en la boca. Editorial Sexto Piso.

World Health Organization. (2017). Women on the move. Migration, care work, and health. World Health Organization. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/259463 

 

***

Mariel Elizondo, M.A., is a student in the HCIAS’ Master’s program Communication and Society in Ibero-America

---

---