Rising inequality and the lure of northern prosperity have contributed to what Stephen Castles and Mark Miller call a ‘globalization of migration’ (1998: 8; see also Zlotnik 1999). For men and women alike, migration has become a private solution to a public problem. Since 1945 and especially since the mid-1980s, a small but growing proportion of the world’s population is migrating. They come from and go to more different countries. While migration is by no means an inexorable process, Castles and Miller observe that, ‘migrations are growing in volume in all major regions at the present time’ (1998: 5). The International Organization for Migration estimates that 120 million people moved from one country to another, legally or illegally, in 1994 (Castles and Miller 1998). Of this group, about two per cent of the world’s population, 15 to 23 million are refugees and asylum seekers. Of the rest, some move to join family members who have previously migrated. But most move to find work.
In addition, half of all the world’s migrants today are women. In Sri Lanka, one out of every ten adults—a majority of them women—work abroad. (That figure excludes returnees.) As Castles and Miller explain:
Women play an increasing role in all regions and all types of migration. In the past, most labour migrations and many refugee movements were male dominated, and women were often dealt with under the category of family reunion. Since the 1960s, women have played a major role in labour migration. Today women workers form the majority in movements as diverse as those of Cape Verdians to Italy, Filipinos to the Middle East and Thais to Japan. (1998: 9)
Many such female workers migrate to fill domestic jobs. Demand for domestic servants has risen both in developed countries, where it had nearly vanished, and in fast-growing economies such as Hong Kong and Singapore, where, write Castles and Miller, ‘immigrant servants—from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea and Sri Lanka—allow women in the richer economies to take up new employment opportunities’ (1998: xi).
Vastly more middle-class women in the First World do paid work now than in the past. In the United States in 1950, for example, 15 per cent of mothers of children aged six and under did paid work while 65 per cent of such women do today. Seventy-two per cent of all American women now work. Most also work longer hours for more months a year and for more years, and hence badly need help caring for the family (Hochschild 1997). The grandmothers and sisters who 30 years ago might have stayed home to care for the children of working relatives are now out working themselves. Just as Third World grandmothers may be doing paid care work abroad, so too more grandmothers of the rich North are working&mash;another reason First World families are looking outside the family for good care.
Women who want to succeed in a professional or managerial job in the First World also face strong pressures at work. Most careers are still based on a well known, male pattern: doing professional work, competing with fellow professionals, getting credit for work, building a reputation, doing it while you are young, hoarding scarce time, and minimizing family work by finding someone else to do it. In the past, the professional was a man; the ‘someone else’ was his wife. The wife oversaw the family, itself a flexible, preindustrial institution concerned with human experiences which the workforce excluded: birth, child rearing, sickness, death. Today, a growing ‘care industry’ has stepped into the traditional wife’s role, creating a very real demand for migrant women.
But if First World middle-class women are building careers that are molded according to the old male model, by putting in long hours at demanding jobs, their nannies and other domestic workers suffer a greatly exaggerated version of the same thing. Two women working for pay is not a bad idea. But two working mothers giving their all to work is a good idea gone haywire. In the end, both First and Third World women are small players in a larger economic game whose rules they have not written.
The impact of these global rules extend to many who have no voice. For many, if not most, women migrants have children. The average age of women migrants into the United States is 29, and most come from countries, such as Mexico, where female identity centers on motherhood, and where the birth rate is high. Often migrants, especially the undocumented ones, cannot bring their children with them. So most mothers try to leave their children in the care of grandmothers, aunts, and fathers, in roughly that order. An orphanage is a last resort. A number of nannies working in rich countries hire nannies to care for their own children back home either as solo caretakers or as aides to the female relatives left in charge back home. Carmen Ronquillo, for example, migrated from the Philippines to Rome to work as a maid for an architect and single mother of two. She left behind her husband, two teenagers—and a maid (Parreñas 1999).
Whatever arrangements these mothers make for their children, most feel the separation acutely, expressing guilt and remorse to the researchers who interview them. Says one migrant mother who left her two-month-old baby in the care of a relative, ‘The first two years I felt like I was going crazy. You have to believe me when I say that it was like I was having intense psychological problems. I would catch myself gazing at nothing, thinking about my child’ (Parreñas 1999: 123). Recounted another migrant nanny through tears, ‘When I saw my children again, I thought, “Oh children do grow up even without their mother”. I left my youngest when she was only five years old. She was already nine when I saw her again, but she still wanted me to carry her’ (Parreñas 1999: 154).
