The notion of extracting resources from the Third World harks back to imperialism in its most literal form: the nineteenth-century North’s extraction of gold, ivory, and rubber from the South. That openly coercive, male-centered imperialism—which persists today—was always paralleled by a quieter imperialism in which women were more central. Today, as love and care become the ‘new gold’, the female part of the story has grown in prominence. In both cases, whether through the death or displacement of their parents, Third World children pay the price.
In the classic nineteenth-century form of imperialism, the North plundered the natural resources of the South. Its main protagonists were virtually all men: explorers, kings, missionaries, soldiers, and the local men who were forced at gunpoint to do things such as harvest wild rubber, latex and the like. European states lent their legitimacy to these endeavours, and an ideology emerged to support them: ‘the white man’s burden’ in Britain and la mission civilisatrice in France. Both, of course, stressed the great benefits of colonization for the colonized, and enlisted some of the colonized to actively cooperate with, and even administer colonial rule.
Nineteenth-century imperialism was more physically brutal than the imperialism of today, but it was also far more obvious. Today the North does not extract love from the South by force: there are no colonial officers in tan helmets, no invading armies, no ships bearing arms sailing off to the colonies. Instead, we see a benign scene of Third World women pushing baby carriages, elder care workers patiently walking, arms linked, with elderly clients on streets or sitting beside them in First World parks.
Today, coercion operates differently. While the sex trade and some domestic service is brutally enforced, the new emotional imperialism does not, for the most part, issue from the barrel of a gun. Women choose to migrate for domestic work. But they choose it because economic pressures all but coerce them to. The yawning gap between rich and poor countries is itself a form of coercion, pushing Third World mothers to seek work in the First for lack of options closer to home. But given the prevailing free market ideology, migration is viewed as a ‘personal choice’. The problems it causes we see as ‘personal’ problems. But a global social logic lies behind them, and they are, in this sense, not simply ‘personal’.
Through this social logic, migration creates not a white man’s burden, but a dark child’s burden. We need much more careful research on the children left behind if we are to find out how such children are really doing. We need to know further, how these children grow up and what happens to them when they too become adults and have children. For anecdotal evidence suggests that the young daughters of women who leave children behind to migrate for work—when they themselves are grown and have children—also leave their children behind to migrate for work.
How then are we to respond to all this? I can think of three possible approaches. First, we might say that all women everywhere should stay home and take care of their own families. The problem with Vicky is not that she migrates, but that she neglects her traditional role as mother. A second approach might be to deny that a problem exists: the care drain is an inevitable outcome of globalization, which is itself good for the world. The supply of labour has met a demand for it. The market is working and the market is always right. If the first approach condemns global migration, the second celebrates it.
According to a third approach—the one I take—loving, paid childcare with reasonable hours is a very good thing. And globalization brings with it new opportunities, such as a nanny’s access to good pay. But it also introduces painful new emotional realities for Third World children. We need to embrace the needs of Third World societies, including their children. We need to develop a global sense of ethics to match emerging global economic realities. If we go out to buy a pair of Nike shoes, we want to know how low the wage and how long the hours were for the Third World worker who made them. Likewise, if Vicky is taking care of a two-year-old six thousand miles from her home, we should want to know what is happening to her own children.
If we take this third approach, what should we or others in the First World do? One obvious course would be to develop the Philippine and other Third World economies to such a degree that their citizens can earn as much money inside their countries as outside them. We would then change the social logic that underlies the care drain. Then the Vickys of the world could support their children in jobs they’d find at home. While such an obvious solution would seem ideal—if not easily achieved—Douglas Massey, a specialist in migration, points to some unexpected problems, at least in the short run (Massey, 1988). In Massey’s view, it is not underdevelopment that sends migrants like Vicky off to the First World but development itself. The higher the percentage of women working in local manufacturing, he finds, the greater the chance that any one woman will leave on a first, undocumented trip abroad. Perhaps these women’s horizons broaden. Perhaps they meet others who have gone abroad. Perhaps they come to want better jobs and more goods. Whatever the original motive, the more people in one’s community migrate, the more likely one is to migrate too.
If development creates migration, and if we favour some form of development, we need to find more humane responses to the migration such development is likely to cause. For those women who migrate in order to flee abusive husbands, one part of the answer would be to create solutions to that problem closer to home—domestic-violence shelters in these women’s home countries, for instance. Another might be to find ways to make it easier for migrating nannies to bring their children with them. Or as a last resort, employers could be required to finance a nanny’s regular visits home.
