This book explores how around the world, women’s increased presence in the labor force has reorganized the division of labor in households, affecting different regions depending on their cultures, economies, and politics; as well as the nature and size of their welfare states and the gendering of employment opportunities. As one result, the authors find, women are increasingly migrating from the global south to become care workers in the global north. This volume focuses on changing patterns of family and gender relations, migration, and care work in the countries surrounding the Pacific Rim—a global epicenter of transnational care migration. Using a multi-scalar approach that addresses micro, meso, and macro levels, chapters examine three domains: care provisioning, the supply of and demand for care work, and the shaping and framing of care. The analysis reveals that multiple forms of global inequalities are now playing out in the most intimate of spaces.

This volume makes the case for the fair treatment of female migrant workers from the global South who are employed in wealthy liberal democracies as care workers, domestic workers, home health workers, and farm workers. An international panel of contributors provide analyses of the ethical, political, and legal harms suffered by female migrant workers, based on empirical data and case studies, along with original and sophisticated analyses of the complex of systemic, structural factors responsible for the harms experienced by women migrant workers. The book also proposes realistic and original solutions to the problem of the unjust treatment of women migrant workers, such as social security systems that are transnational and tailored to meet the particular needs of different groups of international migrant workers.

This volume is focused on Asian women who migrate either globally or across the Asian continent or within their respective countries in order to seek work. The contributors cover a broad terrain of issues including the changing gender composition of migration streams; the motivations of individual migrants; the different outcomes of male and female migration; and discernible patterns in the migration of women.

Based on insights from Filipina experiences of domestic work in Paris and Hong Kong, this volume breaks through the polarized thinking and migration-centric policy action on the protection of migrant women domestic workers from abuse to link migrants' rights and victimization with livelihood, migration and development. The book contextualizes agency and rights in the workers' capability to secure a livelihood in the global political economy and is instrumental in making the problem of migrant women workers' empowerment both a migration and development agenda. The volume is essential reading for social scientists, bureaucrats and non-governmental political activists interested in the protection of the rights and livelihoods of migrants. It will also appeal to migration and feminist scholars who have yet to adopt the contribution of critical development studies in the analysis of low-skilled female labour migration.

Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship develops essential insights concerning the notion of transnational citizenship by means of the life stories of skilled and educated migrant women from Turkey in Germany and Britain. It interweaves and develops theories of citizenship, identity and culture with the lived experiences of an immigrant group that has so far received insufficient attention. By focusing on the British and German contexts, it introduces a much needed European and comparative perspective, whilst exploring the ways in which diverging concepts and policies of citizenship allow for a differentiated examination of ethnicity, gender, multiculturalism and citizenship in Europe. Presenting a significant and welcome contribution to our understanding of the complexities of multiculturalism it challenges Orientalist images of women as backward and oppressed. Through engagement with the changing realities of education, work, intimacy, family and social activism, this volume provides a situated account of how the concepts of citizenship, transnationality and culture play out in actual social relations. With its rich empirical material the book explores how migrant women create new practices and meanings of belonging across boundaries. Critiquing dominant multiculturalist and anti-multiculturalist accounts, this book suggests how citizenship debates can be reframed to be inclusive of migrant women as actors. As such it will appeal to those working across a range of social sciences, including sociology and the sociology of work, race and ethnicity; citizenship, cultural and gender studies, as well as anthropology and social and public policy.

In this pathbreaking and timely work, Hamal Gurung gives voice to the growing number of Nepali women who migrate to the United States to work in the informal economy. Highlighting the experiences of thirty-five women, mostly college educated and middle class, who take on domestic service and unskilled labor jobs, Hamal Gurung challenges conventional portraits of Third World women as victims forced into low-wage employment. Instead, she sheds light on Nepali women’s strategic decisions to accept downwardly mobile positions in order to earn more income, thereby achieving greater agency in their home countries as well as in their diasporic communities in the United States. These women are not only investing in themselves and their families—they are building transnational communities through formal participation in NGOs and informal networks of migrant workers. In great detail, Hamal Gurung documents Nepali migrant women’s lives, making visible the profound and far-reaching effects of their civic, economic, and political engagement.

Between 1945 and the new century millions of women, including mothers and migrants, joined the labour force. These changes are brought to life through the stories of migrant women, working in factories and hospitals, banks, care homes, shops and universities over a period of 60 years. Migrant Women's Voices is an autobiography of the post-war period as Britain became a multi-cultural society and waged work the norm for most women. McDowell illustrates the shift in migration patterns as post-imperial migrants to the UK replaced the immediate post-war pattern of migrants from war-torn Europe and who were then themselves joined by migrants from an increasingly diverse range of countries as the 20th century drew to a close.