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"Even though it's paid well, you are sinking in the amount of your work It [is] abo very depressing. The only thing you can do is give all your love to [the two-yearold American child]. In my absence from my children, the most I could do with my situation is give all my love to that Child."
-Vicky Diaz, domestic care worker in Beverly Hills, who had to leave her children in her home country1
"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 My mother misses me, too. My mother will retire at some point, but how old will I be then?"
-Priya, Keralian (India) college student, whose mother works as a foreign domestic worker2
Migration, Care, Care Drain, and Care Chains
The history of migration is as old as the history of humanity. Since the very beginnings humans have migrated to build a new, more hopeful existence somewhere else. Today migrants often break away from their home countries as a consequence of warfare, political repression, or severe poverty. Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller write that "migration has become a private solution to a public problem."3 As political, economic, and structural keys to a narrowing of the global North-South gap are still missing, individuals "close the gap privately, by moving from South to North at great emotional cost."4 Migrant labor is also of course associated with a myriad of other problems to which such workers are subjected.
Employers, recruiting agencies-as well as both sending and receiving states-profit from migrants' hard work and contributions. For the sending countries, migration is a successful development and growth policy. It not only decreases unemployment rates, but also brings in remittances. Some states market the image of female migrants by praising them as "'economic heroes' who not only sacrifice themselves for their families but also for the nation."5 Receiving countries, too, gain from the hard, but low-priced, work of migrants. These states are able to reduce labor shortages in sectors such as information technology or health and domestic care and provide upper-middle-class families the possibility of private child or elderly care as a kind of...