Epilogue: The Meaning of Rights to Family Life

Abstract

This book addresses the right to family life for migrant domestic and care workers from different perspectives and levels of analysis, in different countries and contexts. It shows how the specific work conditions of live-in domestic and care work, the legal frameworks, and global economic inequality determine the absence of a right to family life for migrant domestic and care workers; how migrant women experience work and life in different parts of the world, ranging from situations of a complete lack of rights, and illegality of work and residence status in many cases, to situations of prospects for promised residency leading to citizenship rights ; and the strategies they develop for coping with the situation and for creating compensatory social fields of quasi-familial relations to satisfy basic needs that remain unfulfilled because of the separation from their families and social relations. The effort entailed in this book is to raise awareness for this right, a right that has not yet been discussed in the broad scientific and policy debates so far.