What's the Border Got To Do With It? How Immigration Regimes Affect Familial Care Provision – A Comparative Analysis
Will be published at American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy and the Law (Forthcoming, 2011)
Abstract
The article offers an analytical framework to analyze the role of immigration law in shaping familial care provision and markets of in-home care. The framework builds on distributive models of the welfare state, and goes beyond the family-state dyad to include the market as a sphere in which the family is meaningfully regulated. The framework is then applied to the three very different immigration regimes that prevail in the U.S., Australia, and Israel, and specifically as they relate to migration of unskilled workers. The analysis exposes the distributive effects of migration regimes among different groups of migrant workers, and among migrant workers and the men and women in the households that employ them. It further shows the effects immigration regimes have on the bargaining positions, the familial expectations, and the division of labor within families in the three jurisdictions. The comparative distributive analysis suggests that the details of the legal regime of migration are crucial to understanding the overall effects of the phenomenon of migrant care work on markets of care and familial care. Accordingly, general claims about the significant harms and risks that characterize the migration of care workers or the immense benefits and redistributive qualities of remittances, makes very little sense absent a specific legal context.