405
Global Care Crisis
A Problem of Capital,
Care Chain, or Commons?
Lise Widding Isaksen
University of Bergen, Norway
Sambasivan Uma Devi
The United Nations and the International Labor Organization,
Geneva, Switzerland
Arlie Russell Hochschild
University of California, Berkeley, USA
More and more of the world’s migrants are mothers who leave their families in the
villages of the South to take up jobs caring for families in the North. Most current
research on this trend focuses on the conditions of work that such migrant mothers face
in the North or on the children she leaves in the South, understood as a rearrangement
of roles in the family. Here, the authors call for a macro-analytic theory of the effect of
such migration and consider two alternate views. According to one, the care of children
in the South involves a transfer of “social capital” from South to North. According to
the other, it involves a more fundamental erosion of the “commons” of the South by the
markets of the North. The latter, the authors propose, best captures the full nature of
this important hidden injury of global capitalism.
Keywords: global care; social capital; commons; migration; women; children
An increasing proportion of the earth’s population—180 million people—move
each year from one country to another. An increasing proportion of these
migrants are women (Castles & Miller, 1998; United Nations, 2002). Of such women,
an increasing number migrate not to reunite families but to seek jobs far from them
(Zlotnik, 2003). For many, these jobs are to care for the young, elderly, sick, and disabled
of the First World. Thus, many maids, nannies, eldercare workers, nurse’s aides,
nurses, and doctors leave their families and communities in the weak economies of the
South to provide care to families and communities within the strong economies of the
North. In such countries as the Philippines and Sri Lanka, female migrants outnumber
American Behavioral Scientist
Volume 52 Number 3
November 2008 405-425
© 2008 Sage Publications
10.1177/0002764208323513
http://abs.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Authors’ Note: This article is based on research sponsored by a project entitled, “Gender and
Globalization: Care Across Borders,” headed by Professor Lise Widding Isaksen, and is based at the Rokkan
Research Centre at the University of Bergen, Norway, and funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Many thanks to Bonnie Kwan for her excellent typing and editing assistance, to Adam Hochschild for his
helpful critique of an early draft, and to Winnie Poster for her helpful critique of a later draft.
male migrants, and many are young mothers. Once in the North, female migrants also
tend to stay longer than male migrants do. Just as poor countries suffer a brain drain,
as trained personnel move from South to North, so too they suffer, we argue, a care
drain (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2003; Hochschild, 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2001;
Momsen, 1999; Parreñas, 2001). Both sexes contribute to the brain drain, but due to
the power of custom in both sending and receiving cultures, it is overwhelmingly
women who take care with them wherever they go.
Women are moving in five main migratory streams—from Eastern Europe to
Western Europe; from Mexico, Central America, and South America to the United
States; from North Africa to Southern Europe; from South Asia to the oil-rich
Persian Gulf; and from the Philippines to much of the world—Hong Kong, the
United States, Europe, and Israel (Castles & Miller, 1998; Zlotnik, 2003). In the villages
of western Ukraine, for example, the Christian Science Monitor recently
reported (Farnam, 2003),
Most of the adults in the mountain villages have made the crossing in order to work
illegally in Central and Western Europe. But the price is high; a generation of
children left behind with grandparents, and a region increasingly drained of its working
population. (p. 4)
Many factors cause people to have to—and to have to want to—migrate: stagnation
or collapse of Second and Third World economies, political unrest, and enormous
gaps between life as it is lived in rich and poor nations. Migration also has
many effects, both positive and negative.
Until recently, labor migration scholars focused on men who took agricultural or
industrial jobs in the North, remitting wages to wives and parents who cared for their
children in the South. Migrant man was economic man (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994).
Scholars of female migration focus either on wives who joined their husbands in the
North to reunify the family (Djamba, 2001) or on female solo migrants who moved
for work. As Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (1994, 2003) notes, women increasingly fit
the “male model” of migration (Anderson, 2000; Khruemanee, 2002). Those who
study women who migrate in order to work—that is, who follow this male model—
often focus on the poor pay, long hours, and sexual exploitation that the female
worker faces in the North (Anderson, 2000). Missing has been any inquiry into her
relationship with her children or other family and friends left behind.
Here, we focus on the missing piece—the family life of global working mothers.
Among Filipino migrants, for example, more than half are women (Erista, Tia,
Sevilla, & Orteza, 2003). Their median age is 29 and they have, on average, 2.74
children who stay in the Philippines (Morales, 2001; Parreñas, 2001, 2003).
Migrant woman was, thus, family woman or economic woman, but not family and
economic woman. Valuable as this research is, it leaves a large hole—the story of the
global fathers and the story of working mother (Anderson, 2000; Momsen, 1999).
406 American Behavioral Scientist
Migration and Work–Family Balance
In her pioneering work, Parreñas focuses on both the Filipina migrating mother
and the children she leaves behind. Building on Parreñas’s work, Hochschild proposes
the concept of “global care chains”—the series of personal links between
people across the globe based on paid or unpaid care. A Sri Lankan nanny may leave
her children in the care of her sister and a nanny in Colombo, for example, and take
up the paid care of twin sons of an upper-middle-class couple in Los Angeles, the
wife of whom gives, as a personnel officer, her “care” to a multinational company.
Meanwhile, the second nanny (who may come from a rural village outside
Colombo) may leave her youngest children in the care of her 15-year-old daughter
and leave a sickly mother in the care of a neighbor.
Meanwhile, another set of scholars focuses on the two-person balancing act in the
North, omitting from the picture the child-care worker and her children living in the
South (Hood, 1983; Huber & Spitze, 1983). The concern for work–family balance
so freely applied to families in the North is often somehow missing from more economically
focused research on migrant women of the South.1
Global care chains have long existed within given regions and countries and were
common in the United States amongAfricanAmerican women from the 1860s through
the mid-20th century. But, they have also long crossed national boundaries as well.
Between 1850 and 1970, for example, thousands of women from rural Slovenia
migrated to Egypt to take up positions as domestic servants and wet nurses, leaving
their own children behind. As one Catholic nun in Saint Francis Asylum in Cairo,
Egypt, observed (Barbic & Miklavcic-Brezigar, 1999, cited in Momsen, 1999),
We witnessed the sufferings of these young mothers on those Sunday afternoons, as
they were giving their own body and milk to the child that was not their own, for the
sake of their family. In spite of their suffering, they returned to Egypt as wet nurses
after each baby, for they were well paid, and the family property was enlarged—but
their suffering was too high. Let not this situation happen again, never more. (p. 169)
So, how can we best understand such transfers of care? In “Global Care Chains:
Critical Reflections and Lines of Inquiry,” Nicola Yeates (2004) systematizes the
idea of care chains, broadens the scope of its applicability, and adds to it a clearer
picture of global labor networks. Here, we extend Yeates by offering a conceptual
picture of what it is that anchors care chains: the socio-emotional commons. Care
chains are not free-standing strips of relationships; they are anchored in a commons—
a community of give and take of which any individual is one small part.
The term commons originally referred to land on which 15th-century English villagers
could freely graze their sheep and cattle, collect firewood, and hunt game. It
was shared land. Through the Enclosure Acts, the British Parliament privatized this
land, preventing commoners from using it (Bollier, 2003; Rowe, 2002). But, the term
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 407
commons can refer to other physical resources held in common (Internet access to
data, the ocean, nature preserves). It can also refer to social resources held in common—a
community. By socio-emotional commons, we refer to a group of people
whose actions express a principle of “generalized reciprocity.” Each individual in a
commons is poised to give to others in the community because that individual—and
those close to her or him—have received something from the community in the
realm of random small favors in normal times and big favors in times of emergency.
Just as public spaces can be placed off-limits to commoners, so too can communities
and the help they promise to provide.
In showing how care chains are anchored in such commons, we hope to open up
a conversation about social policies that inadvertently distort or erode them, for
migration has, we argue, become a private means of coping with the global wage
gap, and the costs of migration are mainly counted as private costs. But, when
enough people—adults and children alike—become part of a private problem, it
becomes a public issue to which we need thoughtful public answers.
Obstacles to Open Discussion About
Migrant Mothers’ Children
The first task in researching lives of migrants’ children is to analyze why participants
sometimes find the topic so hard to talk about and researchers find it difficult
to research. Indeed, the very issue of ease of conversation about migrants’ children
should become, itself, an object of study. One reason for some anxiety about the
topic is surely the fact that the Third World state, the First World employer, and often
the migrant herself clearly want this global arrangement to work. Given the huge
financial incentives, workers badly want the jobs. Domestic workers migrating to the
United States and Italy—interviewed by Rhacel Parreñas in the 1990s—had, back in
the Philippines, averaged $176 a month as teachers, nurses, and administrative and
clerical workers. But, by doing less skilled though no less difficult work as nannies,
maids, and care-service workers, they earned $200 a month in Singapore, $410 a
month in Hong Kong, $700 a month in Italy, and $1,400 a month in Los Angeles.
The Sri Lankan Muslim maids studied by Michele Gamburd (2000) and Grete
Brochmann (1993) migrated to pay for basic food and shelter. Most lower-middle-class
and middle-class Filipina migrants studied by Parreñas (2001) and the medical
workers studied by Uma Devi migrated to pay for school fees and better housing and
to start new businesses.
For their part, the migrant’s children, spouse, parents, and such people as the
mason who builds her new house and the priest at the village temple who receives a
new donation want migration to work, too, because they benefit from it. Third World
governments—that of Sri Lanka and the Philippines, for example—also gain enormously
from the inflow of taxable hard-currency remittances. According to the
408 American Behavioral Scientist
International Monetary Fund, officially recorded remittances in 2005 exceeded $232
billion, two thirds of which went to residents in poor countries. Unofficially recorded
transfers are estimated to be an additional $116 billion (Ratha, 2005; see Erista et al.,
2003). Remittances make up 24% of the gross domestic product of Haiti, 22% of
Jordan, and 16% of Nicaragua.
In the North, employers also welcome the badly needed care workers, to fill the
needs of aging societies with high female employment, and do not ask many questions
about the family lives of such workers. In sum, many parties—the workers; the
workers’kin; the workers’employers; the businesses that arise to train, transport, and
house migrants; and the governments—come to have a vested interest in female
migration and are less interested in hearing about the costs.2
But, as Uma Devi’s (2003) research shows, there is a cost. Many migrant mothers
who were proud to work overseas also felt bad about leaving their children
behind. Relatives, teachers, and child advocates also expressed concern about such
children. As a 2003 report of the National Statistics Office of the Philippine government
concludes (Erista et al., 2003),
The country faces huge social costs to migrant families as a result of prolonged separation,
the breakdown of families and the deterioration and underdevelopment of the
psycho-social growth of their children. (p. 10)
Apart from the alignment of interests in migration, talk about this “huge social cost”
is difficult for another reason: shame. Many mothers face accusations of being a
“bad mother” or a “materialistic person” and themselves feel anguished about long
separations from their children. Indeed, Uma Devi’s first discovery, in her interviews
with the kin of Kerala female migrant mothers, was the taboo among the kin against
talking about “how the children were doing.” Mothers felt their departures as a sensitive,
private issue, not as a private expression of a larger public issue.3
One final obstacle faces those who write about the children left behind—fear of
the “misuse” of their findings. Feminist scholars who place, as we do, a personal
value on the ability of mothers to work outside the home may fear that their findings
will build the “maternalist” case for returning women to the home. Scholars who
champion, as we do, the rights of migrants may also fear that scholarship illuminating
the family problems of migrant workers could be used against them by nativists
of the North. Such fears are understandable and well founded. Even more important,
however, is the more basic task of opening up a full conversation about the hidden
costs of female migration, both to advance various branches of theory—feminist,
migration, and work–family—and to influence global social policy.
Given these obstacles, the small but important line of research emerging to fill
this gap is especially welcome. Early studies focus on the effect of departing fathers
(Abella & Atal, 1986; Arnold & Shah, 1986; Go & Postrado, 1986), whereas recent
studies increasingly focus on the effect of absent fathers and mothers (Aranda, 2003;
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 409
Artico, 2003; Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002; Parreñas, 2005; Schmalzbauer, 2004).
Some research focuses on children’s education. Kandel and Kao (2001), for
example, find that the children of Mexican migrants earn better grades in high school
and can—given their parents’ remittances—better afford to go to college than
children of nonmigrants. But, poignantly, compared with nonmigrant children, the
children of migrants are less likely to want to go to college.
Other studies focus on children’s emotional well-being. For example, in their survey
of 709 Filipino elementary school children—average age of 11—Battistella and
Conoco (1998) compare children who live with both parents with “father absent,”
“mother absent,” and “both absent” children. Most children “show an understanding
of the main reason for parents being abroad, that is, to add to the family coffers, and
to improve their own education.” But, they write, “most also view their parents’
departure with ‘a sense of loneliness and sadness’” (p. 228). Children living with
both parents earned higher grades and a higher rank in class than children with
absent parents. Compared to children with absent fathers, children with absent mothers
were also more likely to say they felt sad, angry, confused, and apathetic.
In one of the few in-depth studies of what she calls “parenting from afar,” Leah
Schmalzbauer (2004) studied 154 Hondurans, among whom were 34 care workers
living in Chelsea, Massachusetts, and 12 of their family members back in Honduras
(and 6 more whose family ties had been severed). Both migrant fathers and mothers,
Schmalzbauer discovered, worried whether their children truly understood why they
left. In addition, she notes, “Dissension within transnational families is common.
The extreme occurs when migrants completely cut themselves off from their families
at home” (p. 28). In another study of children of migrant workers, Parreñas (2005)
compares the children of Filipino male migrants (usually raised by the child’s
mother) and female migrants (raised by their fathers, grandmothers, aunts, or
others). When husbands migrate, she discovered, wives usually assume the role of
father and mother. But when wives migrate, husbands tend to stand aside, leaving
child rearing to female relatives. In the end, Parreñas sensibly calls for Filipino husbands
of migrant worker wives to face up to the challenge of child rearing just as
their female counterparts have done.
The Study: Children in Kerala,
Working Mothers in the Persian Gulf
In 2003, Uma Devi and her assistant Ramji interviewed 120 people, 22 of whom
were working mothers from Kerala—a state in the southwest of India—delivering
health care in the United Arab Emirates. Among these were 6 doctors, 10 nurses, 5
laboratory technicians, and 1 hospital cleaner. For each such migrant, Uma Devi and
Ramji averaged interviews with five family members back in Kerala, including
children, spouses, parents-in-law, siblings, and other caregivers. They interviewed
410 American Behavioral Scientist
the working mothers in the six emirates of the United Arab Emirates (where 9 of the
22 lived alone) and interviewed their children and the kin who cared for them in
Kerala, India. Of the 13 children younger than age 5, 7 lived with both parents in the
United Arab Emirates, 1 lived with the father and paternal grandmother in Kerala, 2
lived with maternal grandparents and apart from both parents, 2 lived with paternal
grandparents and apart from both parents, and 1 lived with another relative in Kerala
and not with parents or grandparents. Of the 9 adolescent children, 4 attended boarding
school in Kerala and 5 lived with their fathers. In no case did migration sever
relations between spouses, despite years of living apart, with occasional meetings.
Migration in Kerala has become an accepted way of dealing with a discrepancy
between its strong system of schooling and its weak economy. As a state, Kerala has
established a strong educational system, but its troubled economy cannot absorb
many of the graduates it produces. One solution to this discrepancy has been to
export educated workers. One out of every 5 working adults in Kerala is or has been
a migrant worker (Kerala State Planning Board, 2002). One out of every 10 of these
migrants is a woman and many of these are mothers. In the Kerala study, the migrant
mothers averaged two children each and visited their children, on average, once each
year for a month.
Mothers who migrate from Kerala often experience a conflict, Uma Devi found,
between wanting to be an “ideal mother” and wanting to be a “community heroine.”
By migrating, these mothers are defying the prevailing local notion of an ideal
mother. To be sure, the idea of an ideal mother differs from one ethnic and religious
group to another within Kerala. Sixty percent of Keralans are Hindu, 20% are
Muslim, and 20% are Christian. Thus, Keralan culture draws on many different cultural
beliefs about motherhood. But, all of them share a vision of the ideal mother as
one who lives with her own children. The ideal mother may work outside the home
during the day but she returns to her children in the evening.4
Thus, the cultural
acceptance of shared care does not, in Kerala, automatically extend to an acceptance
of the prolonged absence of mothers.
Keralans also share an ideal of the joint household, in which elderly parents live
together with their sons and their families. The ideal mother within the “ideal joint
family household” is one who is physically present and the object of a child’s
primary emotional attachment while, at the same time, gladly sharing the emotional
limelight with loving grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and others. Both ideals—
that of the extended household and the physically present mother—persist in the
popular imagination, but less and less do they persist in reality. Mothers found themselves
in a cultural cross-current of criticism and praise, disapproval (as heartless
and materialistic), and approval (as heroically sacrificing and generously providing).
Although few mothers had been criticized to their face, all of them were well aware
of criticisms “going around.” At the same time, given the high unemployment in
Kerala, many well-trained and able-bodied Keralans from both the middle and working
classes—even some who expressed criticism—wished for a chance to migrate.
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 411
Migrant mothers and their kin also felt that the negative gossip came out of envy for
the larger homes, more lavish weddings, larger dowries, and educational opportunities
that migration afforded.
Despite her conflict (Shall I be an ideal mother or shall I be a financial success?),
the migrant mother did not feel alone. She was, she and her relatives agreed, following
a family plan. She was making a sacrifice for the family.
Still, Uma Devi observed that, when speaking of their children in the interview,
most mothers teared up or openly wept. Even mothers who had long been reunited
with their children expressed anguish when they recalled the separation. A number
of nurses worked for hospitals in the Persian Gulf with stringent leave policies for
their pregnant workers. Most such hospitals allowed mothers 45 days postpartum
leave for the birth of their infants. Thus, mothers would fly from the Gulf back to
Kerala, give birth to their babies, stay for 40 days, and then return to their full-time
jobs in the Gulf. Many also continued working a year—and in a few cases, more—
before they were able to see their babies again. Infants left by mothers at the age of
1 month can develop a wide variety of alternate attachments, depending on the personality,
capacity to love, and consistency of care given by the surrogate caregivers.
This study does not begin to do justice to that enormous variety.
But, Uma Devi was struck by some of the open statements by older children of
migrant workers. For example, Priya, a Keralan college student and the daughter of
a nurse practicing in the United Arab Emirates, said,
I want you to write about the human cost for people like us, to be apart for year after
year. I’m living here in this hostel, and my classes are fine, but I can’t talk to my
mother. I can’t tell her things. I can’t see her face. I can’t hug her. I can’t help her. My
mother misses me too. My mother will retire at some point, but how old will I be then?
Leela, another daughter of a nurse working in the United Arab Emirates who lives
with her father and brother in Kerala, had this to say:
I cannot go home even for weekends because my father is alone at home and in a traditional
setting I would not go and live with him, when he is alone. . . .You know you cannot
discuss everything with your father. I wait for my mother’s call every Friday, but from
the hostel phone. Also, I cannot talk freely with her, because the matron (a nun) is always
hovering around. . . . My father is very strict, he has become more strict now and is very
conservative. . . . If I do anything non-conventional, he tends to blame my mother for
bringing me up the way she has, so I try to be very careful to see that my mother is not
blamed. This is a big burden, which I would not have if she was here.
Many children spoke of envying friends who enjoyed the luxury of living with
their mothers. When her mother left for a nursing job in the Gulf, Vijaya, now 20,
also told of taking her mother’s place in the household with her father and brother
and of envying the carefree childhoods of friends of nonmigrating mothers. But, as
she explained, she also envied them the sheer company of their mothers:
412 American Behavioral Scientist
When I see my classmates accompanying their mothers to church or shopping, I miss
my mother badly. . . . Actually, I need my mother now at this age. Anyway, later they
would marry me off and I would miss the opportunity of living with my mother. I miss her.
When Vijaya’s mother was interviewed in the United Arab Emirates, she asked,
How is my daughter? I know she misses me. They call me every day in the evening
from the STD booth (an outdoor phone store, with a private booth). She sometimes
cries. I do too.5
Even in their absence, migrant mothers became an emotional presence to their
children. Mina, the 2-year-old daughter of a nurse in the United Arab Emirates, for
example, daily looked at a blue dolphin toy hung in the center of the living room.
Her paternal grandparents encouraged Mina to play with it, reminding her, “Your
mommy sent the dolphin for your birthday.” When it was decided to take a photo of
Mina, her grandmother immediately dressed her in a frilly dress and brought her
beaming into the living room. “Tell them who sent you this frock,” the grandmother
coaxed Mina. Mina, shyly looking down and holding her grandmother by one hand
and putting her hand over her face, replied in a whisper, “Ammachi” (“my mother”
in Malayalam).
The memory of the missing parent was not suppressed, as can happen in the case
of a bitter family rupture, a divorce, or a suicide. Nor was the mother’s absence completely
normalized as in the case of the absent sea-farer or soldier. Nor, again, was
the role of mother fully absorbed by the grandmother or sister-in-law or father.
Rather, a place was reserved in the child’s heart for a mother who was not there.
At the same time, to varying degrees, children managed their private doubts about
the arrangement. Older children recall asking themselves, Why did my mother leave
me when the mothers of my school friends did not leave them? Did my mother have
to leave, or did she want to leave? Or did she leave me? Answers to these questions
seemed to differ depending on their cultural image of the parent’s role. But, the more
the child was exposed to friends whose mothers had not left, the more the question
arose. As one child of a migrant worker, now adult, put it, “I wondered why she
couldn’t have stayed back or I couldn’t have gone with her. I still wonder.” She was
managing doubt.
A few children, Uma Devi found, had moved from doubt to distrust. They felt
promised an emotional bond with their mother that had not, in fact, been sustained,
and they felt betrayed. This may correspond to what psychologists call “empathic
rupture,” the breaking of an empathic connection. The headmaster of a boarding
school for children of migrant workers in Kerala reported this:
Most of the children we have in this school have parents working in the Middle East.
The children we have here range in age from 5 to 16. Many of them have lost trust in
adults. They are very independent, but not always in a healthy way. They distrust adults.
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 413
Each relationship between child and migrant mother—like that between child and
father—is unique. Not all children of migrant workers are sent to boarding school.
Not all who attend boarding school end up losing trust in their parents or in all
adults. But the headmaster’s comment points to an issue we know far too little about,
a hidden price tag of global inequality.
Children find themselves in an emotional commons, one in which there is a busy
exchange of favors, large and small, by the adults in their lives. That is, they live in
a community of kin, friends, neighbors, and teachers, all of whom exchange favors
with one another. This commons is governed by a complex web of understandings.
For example, grandparents care for a 4-year-old child. The migrant mother pays a
builder to build a house for her brother. The brother and his wife, in turn, stand ready
to care for the grandparents as they grow older. The mother finds a job in the United
Arab Emirates for the brother’s wife, and so the favor exchange goes on. Children
face the task of figuring out their footing within this commons.
Is the care they receive from grandparents or aunts, for example, freely given as a
gesture of love, or is it a way of “doing mother a favor”? Is this care offered out of
commitment or out of desire, or in what measure of each? Migrant mothers often sent
caregivers personal gifts; in what sense, the children sometimes wonder, is this a “payment”
for their care, or in what measure is it simply a gift? Is the child, he or she wondered,
a welcome addition or a bit of a burden? Migration places large new demands
on the joint family to care for migrants’children. In taking on this care—especially the
care of very young children—kin often feel that they are offering the migrant an enormous
emotional gift, regardless of material returns. So, Uma Devi discovered, both the
migrant workers and their children often felt beholden to the caregivers. Some children
reported feeling “like a guest” in the house or like a “burden.” So, some of the
migrants’ children tried to behave like little adults vis-à-vis their grandparents or aunts
and uncles in the household, especially the older girls who tended to make themselves
useful as little mothers to younger siblings. Thus, for some children, the emotional
challenge was to manage an aversion to feeling like a “charity case.”6
The migrant mother was also forced to “materialize” love—to express through
money and material gifts that which she could not express through talk and hugs.
Thus, for the child, the arrival of a package of toys or electronic gadgets could mean,
“Mother is thinking of me,” or “Mother knows what I like.”7
On the school playground
in Kerala, a new toy often made a migrant’s child at once a prince and an
object of pity, for it meant both that one’s mother was absent but also that one’s
family was richer than nonmigrant families. The socially upheld meaning of a remittance
or gift was, “I am devoted to your welfare.” But, many also interpreted gifts as
guilt offerings, as ways of saying, “I’m sorry,” or “Here is this gift instead of me.”
Some children of absent parents continued to feel ambivalent about gifts they’d
received from parents even many years later. For example, Divya, now 26, had
grown up separated from both her parents who worked in the Gulf in order to accumulate
a large dowry for her in the form of a “Gulf house” (the name given to large,
414 American Behavioral Scientist
upscale houses built with remittances). With this dowry, Divya indeed married well
and now raises her newborn son in this house, still never having opened the small gifts
her parents had sent to her during their long absence. As she told Uma Devi during the
interview, “My parents sent me many glamorous pens and pencil boxes from the
Middle East. But I never used them, even now 20 years later. I’ve never used them.”
The children of Kerala migrant workers, thus, faced a number of emotional issues
related to the departure of their mothers: the management of sadness at the lost company
of one whose emotional centrality remained in absentia, envy of children with
resident mothers (and this despite an official acceptance of the trade-offs of migration),
doubt about why a mother had to leave, and an aversion to being a burden to surrogate
caregivers. They also developed a sensitivity to the meaning of material gifts, because
they were offered, as one mother explained, “because I couldn’t be there in person.”
The migration of these mothers also led to shifts in the family system and the
community beyond it. Although other research has uncovered stories of ruptured
relations between wives and husbands, and even between parents and children, Uma
Devi came across no such stories in her Kerala interviews (Schmalzbauer, 2004).
Migration did not divide the community between the migrating rich and the nonmigrating
poor, as in some countries, for most families at each occupational level had
one migrant contributor to the family coffers. At the same time, it created cross-currents
of envy (of the migrants’ money) and criticism (of the migrants’ maternity)
through communities of kin and family. It also unsettled the footing of children
throughout the migratory system, for if the mothers of some children could leave,
then other mothers might also leave as opportunities opened up. Most important,
migration stripped away the patterns of care that would have taken place—between
a woman and her child, her husband, her parents, her neighbor, her friend, and her
temple—had she not had to migrate.
Uma Devi’s fieldwork opens a door into a large world of unanswered questions.
At the very least, it suggests a strong basis from which to argue that there are vitally
important emotional—and not simply economic—realities unfolding with the feminization
of migration.8
Although children have in the past and still today miss their
migrant fathers, in most Third World cultures, the export of care work involves the
export of women. Given local tradition, at least in Kerala, the export of women
removes those who have been central in the care of children.
Transferring Care Capital or
Eroding a Third World Commons?
The nurse who leaves her children in the care of relatives in Trivandrum, Kerala,
India, while she cares for patients in Dubai on the Persian Gulf is part of a care chain.
But, how do we conceptualize this care chain? Should we understand it as the transfer
of “care capital,” like a transfer of social capital from one family and nation to
another family, workplace, and nation? Or, is it best understood as an erosion of a
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 415
“life world,” to quote Jurgen Habermas, a socio-emotional commons within which
capitalization takes place?
We can speak of migration as leading to a transfer of a migrant’s care capital—
caring skills—from South to North. But, this transfer calls, at the same time, for new
kinds of exchange—between migrants in the North and kin in the South—of social
capital. The already overstretched metaphor of capital, we argue, both illuminates
one small part of the picture and obstructs our vision of the bigger picture. So, a brief
word about social capital is in order. The concept of social capital draws on the work
of Pierre Bourdieu (1986; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), James Coleman (1988), and
Robert Putnam (1993, 2000), and it has been applied to migration by Alexandro
Portes (1998).9
Putnam (2000) defines social capital in a variety of ways: as the
number of a person’s social contacts, as the sum of one’s organizational memberships,
and as the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from these contacts
and memberships.10
More useful for our purpose is Alexandro Portes’s (1998) definition of social capital
as the accumulation of “social chits.” People with many chits are high in social
capital, and those with few are low. As Portes notes, “Social capital (is) primarily the
accumulation of obligations from others according to the norm of reciprocity” (p. 7).
The normal exchange of social chits in families or communities differs from pure
economic exchange, he argues, in two ways. In a pure economic exchange, we borrow
money and we repay money. The currency remains the same. In the exchange of
social chits, we give in one currency but repay in another. Again, in a pure economic
exchange, if we borrow money, we pay it at a specified time. In the exchange of
social chits, we leave open the time for repayment.
Between migrant mother and caring-giving kin, there is an exchange of social
chits. A favor is freely given (the relatives care for the child) but is also eventually
repaid (the mother pays various expenses and gives various gifts). For example, the
migrant health worker Sujatha asked her sister and the sister’s stepdaughter Prithi to
care for her 6-year-old daughter Anitha. Sujatha sends money for her daughter
Anitha’s upkeep and education. She also pays for her sister’s medical treatment and
for Prithi’s education. Sujatha also sends Prithi golden ornaments as gifts. Note that
Sujatha does not send simple checks but, rather, designates a purpose for money,
making the transfer more personal (this is often but not always done). Prithi is hoping
that one day Sujatha will be able to find her a job in the United Arab Emirates.
But, as Sujatha told Uma Devi, “I know Prithi expects me to bring her over to Dubai,
but if she comes [to Dubai], who would look after my daughter Anitha? So I don’t
want to help bring Prithi here now.” In this case, giving one chit prevents receiving
of another.
As for other migrant families, what was an informal exchange of chits, an expression
of the principle of reciprocity, comes one step closer to a market exchange. This
is not because money is, in every instance, depersonalizing. Rather, it is because
other forms of sociality—the simple keeping of company—have been subtracted
416 American Behavioral Scientist
from the overall human exchange. There is no sharing of dinners or birthday celebrations,
no daily conversation, no visual or physical contact. In this instance, children, as
well as their caregivers, can come to experience money as a substitute for shared experiences
and love. Paradoxically, as such, it can even loom larger as a symbol of love
even as it can, at the same time, also depersonalize and commodify love.
The accumulation of chits between Sujatha and Pritha implies a hidden inequity
between Sujatha and the other player in the game—the employer in the North.
Sujatha comes to her employer unencumbered by children: Pritha, half a world away,
is invisible to her employer in the North. But, her caregiving is utterly necessary to
liberate Sujatha for her 50- or 60-hour weeks of childcare in the North. Were Sujatha
to “hire” her sister’s stepdaughter, for example, it would be seen as necessary to add
the cost of that childcare to the wages Sujatha is paid in the North. That cost might
be passed on, in turn, leading to raised costs of medical services in the Middle East.
But, because the exchange of social chits is invisible, Sujatha cannot “cash in.” The
employer in the North does not see the need to pay. This is an argument of displaced
cost: The caretaker back in Kerala is absorbing a cost that the Northern employer
should rightly pay. The idea of social capital—like that of costs of reproduction, in
the Marxist framework—illuminates this inequity.
At the same time, the (care and social) capital framework inhibits us from appreciating,
and thus theorizing, the communal world in which children and their chitexchanging
mothers and relatives actually live. Therefore, it hides yet another, yet
more basic, inequity—access to an integral collectivity that gives a social chit meaning
in the first place. The idea of social capital leads us to imagine that social chits
are individually owned and therefore independent of life in a community. It is as if
one person could put capital in their suitcase, get on a plane, and go. We are led to
forget all the favors, the chits, that would have been exchanged and would have
enriched the community had the person stayed. Social chits—gifts, favors, and kindnesses—operate
in, derive from, and are sustained by family and community and are
nothing whatsoever outside them.
As the socio-linguist George Lakoff (1980) argues in his book, Metaphors We
Live By, every metaphor implies a cognitive frame, itself based on assumptions
about reality. Social capital is part of the same cognitive frame as material capital,
that is, money. It describes what a migrant mother or child has, not who she is, as
defined by participation in a social whole.
If family and community are absent from the picture as basic social units to begin
with, there is nothing there to be distorted, strained, or eroded by a Third World “care
drain.” To put it another way, we cannot see the effect of pollution on the ecology of
the lake if we only focus on each individual fish. Similarly, social chits operate in,
derive from, and are sustained by family and community.
If we apply a market metaphor to a communal reality, we blur Portes’s distinction
between the two and the meanings attached to that distinction. As the economic
anthropologist George Dalton (1971) notes,
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 417
To employ market terms to the non-market sectors of primitive and peasant economies
is as distorting as it would be to use the concepts of Christianity to analyze primitive
religion. (p. 185)
Only with concepts true to their collective context can we understand the feelings of
doubt, sadness, and envy that Keralan children report. We argue that migration can,
in Polanyi’s (1944/2001) and Giddens’s (1991) sense, “disembed” social chits and
turn them into social capital. But, this is not a process we see—or appreciate the cost
of—if we assume that they are, and only are, social capital to begin with.
Finally, the concept of capital (social or care) turns the camera’s eye away from
children and from the split-family context as children experience it. It leads us to
gloss over that of a child’s relational world, which is not exchangeable or unalienable,
and the feelings in response to that relational world, including feelings of
anguish, doubt, envy, and sadness.11
We propose, then, another concept that focuses the camera’s eye on the very way
migration disembeds relationships of family and community, shifting the terms on
which it is based away from chit and toward capital. South–North migration of
mothers over long periods of time, we argue, attenuates, distorts, and sometimes
ruptures the socio-emotional commons (Polanyi, 1944/2001; Rowe, 2002; Tronto,
1993).12
The concept of the commons focuses our attention on the very “for-itself-ness”
of family and community.13
We are looking, as Marx and others have, at inequity, at the gap between haves
and have-nots. But, what is there to have or not have is a commons. That is, what is
missing from the capital/market view is the opportunity to live as part of an integral
whole—a family and community. One thing that makes a whole into a whole is
being together, seeing each other, talking directly, physically touching—in a word,
co-presence. We can imagine a family gathered around a table or a community celebration
as expressions of a socio-emotional commons.14
It is clear that there are
many other bases for a commons, material and nonmaterial, existing in the past and
today, although this discussion falls beyond the scope of our article.15
But, the commons can become “fodder” for the market.16
Indeed, it is our thesis
that just as the market eroded the commons in 18th-century Europe, so the market
of the North is eroding the commons of the South today. Looking at the growth of
market capitalism in Europe, various observers noted that the market relied on—and
then, in a sense, used up—preexisting nonmarket social ties based on trust and
mutual commitment (Durkheim, 1984; Polanyi, 2001). As Durkheim noted, contracts
were first based on precontractual solidarity. To lend money, tools, or labor to
a neighbor, a man relied on a culture of trust and the watchful eyes of an embedded
community. From this original basis, contracts, courts, and jails were derived. But,
once established, these impersonal mechanisms tended to undercut the trust, which
had been based on primordial ties (Fevre, 2003). In The Great Transformation, Karl
Polanyi (2001) argues much the same thing. Speaking of the market in 19th-century
European society, Polanyi noted,
418 American Behavioral Scientist
A principle quite unfavorable to individual and general happiness was working havoc
with his social environment, his neighborhood, his standing in the community, his craft;
in a word, with those relationships to nature and man in which his economic existence
was formerly embedded. The Industrial Revolution was causing a social dislocation of
stupendous proportions, and the problem of poverty was merely the economic aspect
of this event. (p. 129)
For Durkheim and Polanyi, both society and the market existed in the same place,
Europe. But, the relationship between them changed from one time to another,
roughly from the 1800s to the 1900s.
In the global migration of women today, we argue, a different form of the same
process is taking place. Only now, the places are different and the period of time is
the same. Now, the market of the North is indirectly eroding the social solidarities
of the South.
Mothers are still mothers. But, children forget what they look like. Mothers make
great sacrifices for their children but the trust concerning that great sacrifice has been
undermined. Absent mothers leave for their children’s sake, but children manage private,
often profound doubts about why, in fact, their mothers left. Just as a person’s
relationships to others and nature were disembedded in Polanyi’s quite general
terms, so, we suggest, the relationship between parent and child is disembedded by
migration. This happens “in” the family, but family theory, per se, is missing a picture
of both the context—the backstage of globalization—and the process by which
that context disembeds relations between parent and child. It is when we introduce
the idea of a commons that we see how the distorted and eroded family ties of the
South support the market of the North.
In addition, if the early European commons were sustained mainly by men, the
commons we describe here are sustained mainly by women. In a sense, global economic
circumstances have “thrown off” migrants from their Third World commons,
even as they continue to contribute materially to it. The vast majority of migrant
mothers of Kerala, Thailand, and Latvia would far rather work at adequate jobs near
their families than at jobs far from them. To be sure, migrants are “choosing” to
migrate, but only in the limited sense that 18th-century European peasants “chose”
to seek jobs in the margins of the expanding cities of the day. Similarly, most
migrants see themselves as using their remittances (the market) to better their
families (the commons). But, over their heads, so to speak, a more powerful process
is simultaneously at work—the distortion and erosion of the Third World commons.
Indeed, as whole villages in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Kerala, Latvia, and the
Ukraine are emptied of mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and daughters, it may not be
too much to speak of a desertification of Third World caregivers and the emotional
commons they would have sustained had they been able to stay.
In the end, the global care crisis raises issues for both social theory and social
policy. For social theory, it raises the vital issue of what market-derived concepts
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 419
prevent us from grasping. For social policy, it raises the issue of what we can do to
reduce the hidden injuries of global capital. At the very least, we can call for arrangements
by which children and perhaps other caregivers can follow mothers to their
new place of work. More basically, we can call for measures to be taken by the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the North American Free Trade
Agreement aimed at reducing the economic gap that motivates much migration to
begin with. That is, we can call on the nations of the North to provide more benign
ways of redistributing the resources of the North to the South. But, it takes seeing a
problem to solve it, and it takes the right concepts to see it.
Notes
1.Yet, another group of researchers studies Third World women who do not migrate at all but, instead,
face the hardships imposed by underdevelopment and “structural adjustments” imposed by World Bank
lenders (Kabeer, 1996). Thus, as an issue for research, the relation of migrant mothers to their children
has remained curiously hidden from view.
2. Some economists dispute the economic benefits of remittances for the country’s economy.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund and Duke University argue, for example, that remittances
are “wasted on big-screen TVs and faux-adobe mansions” instead of being invested in new businesses at
home (Frank, 2001, p. 2; Wheatley, 2003).
3. Many social problems have a “shame wrap around.” Homeless people are ashamed of being homeless.
Poor people are ashamed of being poor. The imprisoned are ashamed of being in prison. In each
instance, to different degrees, the victim is led to violate some norm for which they experience shame.
But, erased from the picture is the larger pattern that led to that violation, that shame in the first place.
4. The prevailing ideal in marriage also calls for co-residence and monogamy. Migration prevents the
first and strains the second. Although this was not a focus of the Kerala research, Parreñas (2005) found
many husbands of long-absent Filipina migrant mothers setting up house with other women in villages
apart from their own children.
5. In Tahitians, social anthropologist Robert Levy (1973) speaks of whole realms of human feeling
for which given cultures have few or no words. For emotions in the upper range—joy, happiness, euphoria—he
observed, the Tahitians had many words. But, for the lower range—sadness, regret, longing,
depression—they had only one word, sick. Where there are few words, Levy reasoned, there is a cultural
under-acknowledgement of feeling, an under-articulation of experience. In Malayalam, too, there is no
special word for a feeling many children in Kerala experience, “mother-envy.” For in the context of a
highly educated population and stagnant economy in which the desirability of migration goes largely
unquestioned, such feelings clearly exist, but with a cover over them, so to speak.
6. Parreñas, for example, found that relatives who cared for migrants’ children often came to resent
negligent fathers who either disengaged from their children’s daily lives or drank, gambled, and carried
on extramarital affairs (Constable, 2003; Parreñas, 2005). Such male avoidance of care may express not
simply a traditional reluctance to do “women’s work,” then, but a backlash at lost privilege. Kin must
then add to their caretaking responsibilities the task of dealing with a husband-father who feels he has
lost his place.
7. In this sense, migrant parents and children are subject to the same materialization doubts as absent
or divorced fathers. An 18-year-old daughter of a divorced father interviewed for a previous study told
Uma Devi, “Every time I talk to my dad on the phone, the conversation begins, ‘Do you need money?’
It’s as if he thinks that’s all he could give me.”
420 American Behavioral Scientist
8. We need highly sophisticated research comparing children of migrant mothers with those of nonmigrant
mothers and of migrant fathers. We also need work comparing children who experience various
kinds of nonparental care.
9. Following Putnam, Dutch labor economist Irene van Staveren (2000) makes a well-meaning, but
we feel misguided, attempt to apply the idea of social capital to the realm of domestic care. As she puts
it, “Through mutual gift-giving in the care economy, mainly shouldered by women, . . . social capital
accumulates” (p. 12). Citing the classic study by Richard Titmuss (1971) on blood donation, she observes
that gifts freely given often get the job done more “efficiently” and with lower “transaction costs” than
services paid for (van Staveren, 2000). As van Staveren notes,
The more human capital (say a particular skill) is used, the faster it accumulates: practice increases
returns to skills. . . . Similarly for social capital: the more social capital (say the bonds in a neighborhood)
is used the faster it accumulates . . . so, the value of social capital is generated in the care
economy through the complementary caring characteristics of the goods and services produced. This
leads to increasing marginal returns, in analogy to the increasing returns of human capital. (p. 12)
Van Staveren focuses on (a) the efficiency of care, (b) care as a possession given or received, apart from
the context, and (c) care as therefore barren of personal meanings.
In this framework, no loss to the character of family solidarity is visible. If the nanny of an aunt takes
the Keralan child to school through the school years, it adds up to the same amount of “care” social capital
as if the child’s mother did it. Personal meanings are erased.
10. Actually, Putnam (2000) is confusing on just this point. He sometimes refers to social capital in
the way the metaphor suggests—as the property of an individual. Other times, he seems to be referring to
social capital strictly as the attribute of a collectivity. Scholars applying the concept to the Third World
tend to see social capital as the attribute of an individual (Harriss, 2001). As many social critics have
noted, the concept of social capital is overly broad. One World Bank economist, Woolcock (cited in
Harriss, 2001), says this:
Several critics, not without justification, have voiced their concern that collapsing an entire discipline
into a single variable (especially one with such economic overtones) is a travesty. But others are
pleased that mainstream sociological ideas are finally being given their due at the highest levels. (p. 81)
In “Social Capital: The World Bank’s Fungible Friend,” economist Ben Fine (2003) notes that the concept,
initially applied to economic growth and school performance and job placement, is not being related to
infant mortality and solid waste management and communal violence. The concept has also been
critiqued for its wooliness, lack of empirical specificity, decontextualization (our concern), and depoliticizing
implications. The more social capital, Harriss (2001) reasons, the more the World Bank feels it can
press for reduced government aid in Third World countries and for liberalization of trade. “Is it a coincidence,”
Fine (2003) speculates,
that social capital has come to the fore just as the World Bank is proposing to reallocate billions of
dollars for infrastructural funding from IDA (International Development Assistance) which makes
concessional loans to governments to IFC (International Financial Corporation) which lends exclusively
to the private sector? (p. 600)
11. The concept of social capital, let us hasten to add, was not originally designed to obscure the
human cost of global migration. On the contrary, those who first added social capital to the conversation
about Third World development and care did so with the idea of adding a human touch to the economic
discussion of money, bridges and factories, and the like. Paradoxically, though, “the human side” was
introduced in such a way as to obscure it. The market metaphor has nonetheless been making its way
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 421
through social science through what we might call the “capital series.” The series begins with material
capital and extends to human capital (Coleman, 1988), social capital (Putnam, 1995, 2000), emotional
capital (Nowotny, 1996), and pugilistic capital (Wacquant, 2004).
12. Theorists of the commons, for their part, offer us two pictures. One is a positive picture—a commonly
shared set of resources or relationships—for example, the simple facts of trust and co-presence of mother
and child. Here, the emphasis is on sharing a sense of in-commonness. The second is negative—a commonly
shared set of resources that people, each thinking of their private good, ultimately abuse (Harden,
1995). Here, we extend the first picture.
13. To be sure, individuals on both sides may betray a shared trust. A parent may fail to share his or
her earnings. An aunt may neglect her nephews. But, these acts are tacitly understood as betrayals of a
trust that was strongly valued, reinforced, collectively shared, nonfungible, and deeply rooted in time and
place. This was the taken-for-granted social fabric within which migration took place and to which—as
the interviews so poignantly show—it did harm.
14. Some commons are temporary and emergency based (as in response to natural disaster); others
establish expectations of long-term reciprocity.
15. Most commons of which we speak are based in reality, but many are based in fantasy. Many
migrants forced off the land into the city, or out of their country into another, look back with longing and
nostalgia at the community of their dreams back home. Indeed, many migrants wax lyrical about the folkways
of the communities they left behind in Estonia, Tunisia, and Uruguay. As whole villages have been
emptied out by migrations, the idea of an imaginary commons emerges to absorb the yearning for community.
But, the discontent of the displaced, and its resulting—often retrograde—nostalgia, is out of
public view. Indeed, it may be that it is when a desire for community is suppressed, an imaginary commons
tends to arise as the object of yearning. This yearning then becomes a tool in the hands of conservative
forces. This is because, in the brave new world of the market and capitalized self, these yearnings
have nowhere else to go. The point here is that this entire scenario is hard to grasp if we only see the world
through “market eyes.”
16. To World Bank economists, indicators of social capital are also seen as a sign of “good prospects”
for foreign investment in the Third World. But, little analysis is devoted to how immigration erodes the
very community and family life—the social capital—they see as the “missing link” in economic development
(Fine, 2003; Harriss, 2001; Woolcock, 2001).
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424 American Behavioral Scientist
Lise Widding Isaksen, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen,
Norway. For the time being, her research program is a comparative study of global care chains and cultures
of care in Nordic welfare states.
Sambasivan Uma Devi, PhD, Department of Economics, University of Trivandrum, Kerala, India, is now
a consultant with the United Nations and the International Labor Organization.
Arlie Russell Hochschild, PhD, is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She
has, with Barbara Ehrenreich, edited Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New
Economy and is the author of the best seller, The Time Bind.
Isaksen et al. / Global Care Crisis 425