8. Migration: Global Care Chains

 Welcome to our Module entitled Migration: Global Care Chains. 

So far, we have examined how care creates kinship, circulates through gifts and reciprocity, and contributes to social reproduction. This week, we expand our perspective beyond individual households and communities. We ask what happens when care crosses national borders—and when one family’s solution to its care needs creates a care gap elsewhere.

🎯 Learning Goals

By the end of this module, you should be able to: 

• define "migration" and "global care chain"; 
• trace how paid and unpaid care are connected across households and countries;
•  explain how migration can be an act of care while also producing separation and loss; 
• apply the concepts of "remittances", "reciprocity", "social reproduction" and care as a "commodity" to migrant care work; 
•  identify how "gender", "race", "class" and "global inequality" affect who provides care and who receives it.

🚦 Introduction: Migration & Global Care Chains

Previously, we have examined care within families, communities and societies. We saw how care can be analysed in terms of culture, kinship, reciprocity, gender, and social reproduction. But care also operates on larger scales, beyond individual families, communities and societies.

Take nannies for example. 

1. A working mother in LA needs someone to care for her baby. She hires a Filipina nanny to do this. 
2. The Filipina nanny also needs someone to care for her baby. Her children might be cared for by a grandmother, older daughter or relative. But if not she hires a poorer woman from the countryside, which creates a third link in the chain
3. The poorer woman from the countryside also needs someone to care for her baby. 

We can analyse this as a "care chain"--a series of people connected through paid and unpaid caregiving. It becomes "global" when the chain crosses national borders. To better understand this, couple more concepts prove really useful. First and obviously, migration is people moving temporarily or permanently from one place to another. Anthropologists find that over the past few decades this migration can be analysed as transnationalism. This concept describes relationships, activities and responsibilities that connect people across national borders, including migrant workers’ continuing ties with families at home.

Finally we'll see that classical sociological categories such as wealth, race, and gender can be usefully deployed here.

📚 Recommended Materials

Read Hochschild, A. R. (2000). "Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value." In A. Giddens & W. Hutton (Eds.), On the edge: Living with global capitalism (pp. 130–146). London: Jonathan Cape.

Notes: It's not just nannies. migrants working in other forms of care (e.g. aged care) also create care chains. Analysing these care chains reveals structures of gender and globalisation. 

📘 Essential Materials

Read Hochschild, A. (2000). The Nanny Chain. The American Prospect, 11, 1-4. 

"Are first world countries such as the United States importing maternal love as they have imported copper, zinc, gold, and other ores from third world countries in the past?"

Notes: In rich countries, many mothers undertake paid work while remaining responsible for much of the care at home. This can lead to  They use nannies from poorer countries to pick up the slack (i.e. meet the rich household’s unmet care needs). These nannies leave their own children in the care of others. This creates a global care chain, linking families across countries through paid and unpaid care. Money flows back towards poorer households, while hands-on care flows towards wealthier ones. Globalisation moves care work across national borders. But it does not make care more equal between genders. Instead, care work passes from one group of women to another, usually from poorer women to richer families.

🗣️ Interactive tasks

Look at this BBC Photo Journal from 1996:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/04/asia_pac_filipino_nanny/html/11.stm

What has changed? What is the same?

The care chain involves 'things' being sent back and forth. It's not perfect, but can you match a concept with each of the six arrows:

1. remittance
2. migration
3. paid care
4. unpaid care
5. reciprocal obligation
   
6. Wages

LA Household--Mother & Child

a. ↓             b. ↑

Migrant Nanny

c. ↓           d. ↑

Migrant Nanny's mother

e.  ↓         f.  ↑

Migrant Nanny's child

🏁 Conclusion

Summary

We can analyse paid and unpaid migrant care work along lines of class, race, and inequality. Further, the concept of "global care chain" makes visible the links between households across borders

Significance

This analysis reveals that care not only personal or family responsibility, but also as a form of labour embedded in global capitalism. 

What’s Next

Next, we continue the shift in focus from family to larger arenas, focusing on how states and markets shape care.

🔎 Further Research

Hochschild's article is partly an introduction to research undertaken by Parrenas. So why not check out her book: Parreñas, R. S. (2001). Servants of globalization: women, migration & domestic work. Stanford University Press.