Between State Bio-Power and Social Bio-Politics Documented and Undocumented Migrant Care-Workers in Israel

The paper deals with tensions emerging between high demand for migrant care-workers in affluent economies and their simultaneous construction as a demographic threat to the nation’s political body. Drawing on the empirical analysis of the Israeli case, an ethnically defined nation state and a major ‘insourcer’ of labor migration, the article examines how these tensions are put in display in the topical realm of migrants’ family formation and unity within host countries. It argues that while contradictions between the reproductive labor of migrant care-workers and their reproducing bodies are closely connected to gendered state policies managing labor migration, they manifest differently along the legal/illegal continuum of migration status. Thus whereas documented care-workers are subjected to the regulation of their employment conditions and protected by labor laws, they are also directly exposed to state and employers’ control on family formation. Paradoxically, undocumented domestic migrants who are forsaken to unfettered dynamics of informality and risk of deportation, gain space for greater maneuver over the creation and maintenance of family life in host countries. Moreover, difference in the management of the reproductive-reproducing dyad around care workers according to their legal status, shape the repertoires of contention available to civil society organizations and networks as they try to assert migrants’ rights to family life in the context of global feminization of migration and stringent control policies.