Right to Family Life and Reciprocity of Care: Prospects for Care of Aging Migrant Carers

Abstract

The care needs of migrant domestic workers, their obligations towards their own relatives, and the deprivation of the possibility of caring for their dependent family members have seldom been accorded full recognition in society. These issues surface mainly in the debate about care chains — the series of personal links between people across the globe who are involved in the paid or unpaid work of caring — and transnational motherhood (Hochshild 2001; Parreñas 2001, 2005; Williams 2009, 2012). Despite this growing awareness, the issue of care rights and obligations of migrant domestic workers remains under-investigated. While there is a vast literature about servicing care needs in the countries of the global North, there is little discussion about the care needs of the care workers themselves. Furthermore, there is a diametrically different approach to the care needs of the locals and those of migrant domestic workers. In current public and scholarly debates on children’s care, the emphasis is on the right of parents for care time and the right of children for care; in the context of migrant women’s domestic and care work, however, the emphasis is on the successful strategies towards the adaptation to the situation of transnational motherhood (Zentgraf and Chinchilla 2012), that is, the strategies applied to a situation where parents find themselves in host countries with no parental rights (Widding Isaksen, Uma Devi and Hochschild 2008).