Migration, Motherhood, and the Global Care Chain

In the Philippines, they call them **Bagong Bayani** — the new heroes. These are the millions of Filipino women who migrate abroad to work as domestic workers, nannies, and caregivers, sending remittances home that constitute nearly 10% of the national GDP. In India, they are the women who leave their villages for the Gulf states, or their small towns for Mumbai and Delhi, to work in households where they will raise someone else's children while video-calling their own for fifteen minutes before bedtime. They are the invisible backbone of the **global care chain** — and their story is one of the most urgent, most gendered, and most morally complex narratives of our time.

The Architecture of Care Migration

The concept of the **global care chain** was first articulated by sociologist **Arlie Hochschild** in 2000, describing a series of personal relationships across the globe where each caretaker — usually a woman — leaves her own dependents to perform care work for the family of another, usually wealthier, woman. The chain typically runs from poorer countries to wealthier ones: from the Philippines to the Gulf, from Indonesia to Singapore, from India to the UK, from Mexico to the United States.

The numbers are staggering. The **International Labour Organization** estimates that there are approximately 11.5 million domestic workers worldwide, of whom 83% are women. When you include the broader category of care work — nursing, elderly care, childcare — the numbers multiply exponentially. The **World Bank** reports that remittances sent by migrant workers to low- and middle-income countries reached $656 billion in 2024, with a significant portion coming from women in care sectors.

But behind these numbers lies a profound **feminist paradox**. On one hand, care migration provides women with economic independence, professional opportunity, and the means to support their families. On the other hand, it perpetuates a global system where women's care labor is undervalued, underpaid, and structurally dependent on the exploitation of other women's need for childcare.

"We are asked to love other people's children as our own while missing our own children's first steps, first words, first days of school."

The Emotional Economy of Separation

The emotional toll of care migration on mothers is well-documented but rarely centered in policy discussions. A **2023 qualitative study** published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies interviewed 200 Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong. The researchers found that 78% reported experiencing symptoms consistent with **complicated grief** — not for a person who has died, but for the ongoing loss of proximity to their children. Researchers have termed this **"ambiguous loss"** — the person is alive but absent, present in memory but absent in daily life.

Indian women who migrate for care work face compounded challenges. The cultural expectation that a mother is the **primary emotional anchor** of the family creates intense guilt when she leaves. A **2024 study** by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences found that 65% of Indian women domestic workers in the Gulf states reported feelings of "failure as mothers" — despite the fact that their migration was driven by economic necessity, often at the family's own urging.

The children left behind are not immune. Research by **Lan (2022)** on Filipino children of migrant mothers found elevated rates of anxiety, attachment difficulties, and behavioral issues, particularly when the migration occurred before age five. The children understand, on some level, that their mother has left to care for other children — a reality that creates what researchers call a **"care deficit"** at home even as a "care surplus" is exported abroad.

The Feminist Tension

Here lies the tension that feminism must confront honestly. Care migration is both a survival strategy and a system of exploitation. It allows women to exercise agency within profoundly constrained circumstances. But it also relies on the **global feminization of poverty** — the structural reality that women in the Global South have fewer economic options, fewer legal protections, and fewer pathways to financial independence that do not involve the sale of their caring labor.

**Ruphina,** a Kenyan domestic worker in London, captured this tension in a 2024 interview with The Guardian: "I am told I am empowered because I earn money. But my daughter calls the woman I work for 'Mama.' She does not call me that anymore. Is that empowerment?"

Feminist scholars are divided. Some, like **Eileen Boris** and **Sandra Sanchez**, argue that migration itself is a form of feminist agency — that women choosing to migrate, even under difficult conditions, represent a challenge to the patriarchal structures that confine them. Others, like **Gita Sen**, argue that celebrating individual agency obscures the **structural violence** of a global economy that forces women to choose between their own children and their children's survival.

The truth, as with most feminist analyses, resists easy resolution. Care migration is simultaneously an expression of women's resilience and a symptom of systemic failure. Both things are true at once.

Toward an Ethics of Care Without Exploitation

What would a feminist politics of care migration look like? Several principles emerge from the scholarship.

First, **legal protections** for migrant domestic workers must be strengthened. The **ILO's Convention 189**, which recognizes domestic workers' rights, has been ratified by only 40 countries as of 2025. Major destination countries — including the Gulf states, Singapore, and several EU nations — have not ratified it. Without legal protections, migrant women remain vulnerable to wage theft, confiscation of documents, and physical abuse.

Second, the **care infrastructure** of sending countries must be addressed. If women migrate because there are no jobs, no childcare, and no social safety nets at home, then the solution is not to restrict migration but to build the conditions that make it a choice rather than a necessity.

Third, and most fundamentally, society must reckon with the **moral weight of care itself**. When we pay domestic workers poverty wages to raise our children, clean our homes, and care for our elderly parents, we are making a statement about whose care work counts and whose does not. Feminism demands that we interrogate this hierarchy — not just in theory, but in the wages we pay, the labor laws we support, and the value we assign to the women who make our lives possible.

"The global care chain is not just an economic system. It is a mirror. It shows us exactly how much we value the women who hold the world together — and how little we are willing to pay for it.