Care and migration

The demand for services such as childcare, elder care and care for people with long-term illness or disability is escalating in western welfare states. In the face of rising demand and growing fiscal pressures, governments in many high-income countries have stepped back from providing or funding the supply of care services, opting instead to provide cash subsidies and/or tax concessions and to promote markets in care, constituting care recipients as consumers in a marketplace rather than as citizens with entitlements to services. These trends in the demand for care and in the nature of its financing and provision intersect with the feminization of migration and the weakening of traditional labour market protections such as collective bargaining. The aim of this chapter is to show the connections between policies that govern care, employment and international migration, and to outline some the key debates that have emerged in this relatively new domain of policy and scholarship.