Care Migration in Long-Term Care in Germany: Care Arrangements, the Commodification of Care Work and the Interaction of Policy Fields

With the introduction of Long-term Term Care Insurance (LTCI) in 1995/96, Germany made universal long-term care support available and simultaneously restructured professional care provision based on New-Public Management (NPM) orientated ideas. Embedded in social and demographic changes within this framework distinct patterns of formal and informal care arrangements developed, which built the starting-point for the expansion of both, the professional care infrastructure and paid care work up to 24-hours care services within the household context. The commodification of care work – both within the professional care infrastructure and within private households - was followed by an increasing employment of migrant care workers embedded in an interaction of long-term care-, employment- professionalization- and migration policies.

In the focus of the paper is the comparative analysis of the patterns of increasing employment of migrant care workers within and between both types of paid care work embedded in an interaction of policies – long-term care-, migration-., employment- and professionalizaton policies – on the national and EU-level. Conceptually, the paper combines neo-institutionalist approaches created within international comparative care research and multi-scalar intersectional approaches. Empirically, it draws on an analysis of the institutional design of the policy schemes, findings of an own representative inquiry with care workers, representative statistics and a literature review.