Migration as self-sacrifice – For (whose) greater good? On the (dis)placement of well-being in the narratives of immigrant care workers in Italy

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on migrants’ life quality and wellbeing, by revisiting the narratives of thirty migrant women employed in co-resident care work in a North Italy town. As female immigration for care exemplarily shows, a search for wellbeing marks all the steps of a migration process, and yet it is likely to prove elusive – for migrants at least – for the most of it.

A massive employment of live-in immigrant labour, in a country with weak and familist welfare arrangements, has proved critical to the everyday domestic care (hence to relatively better life quality) of the elderly. At the same time, it is an expectation to achieve greater well-being – first of all for those left behind – that has typically driven female migration flows from Eastern Europe and post-Soviet countries. How immigrant women construct their wellbeing – and often the lack of it – is however a less obvious point, which my paper will address. Is their family-oriented affective and moral commitment, and possibly the emotional support they receive from “home”, enough for them to enjoy some wellbeing of their own, against a background of harsh or even exploitative work conditions? How does a tacit “externalization of wellbeing” – towards the homeland (i.e. in favour of their children left behind), and towards the future (as it is procrastinated to a supposedly “imminent” return there) affect their life quality, along with their perceptions and personal feelings of wellbeing? Would a “stratified understanding” of their wellbeing – possibly in perceptual, material and relational terms – provide a better account of it? Migrants’ emic understandings of their well-being, along with some external indicators of it (such their access to social and health care, or the properties of their informal networks), will be explored in this respect.