Migrant Workers Vs. Brides: The Care Crisis in Southern Europe and East Asia

Existing studies on the link between migration and care regimes have focused on Europe and emphasized the centrality of the care regime in shaping different types of migration flows (e.g. Williams 2012). Recent attempts to go beyond Europe have focused on familialist welfare states in North America and South East Asia (Michel and Peng 2012), highlighting the importance of different notions of citizenship (civic vs. ethnic). Our paper seeks to explain very different patterns of female migration into five countries – Italy, Spain, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. They are all familialist welfare states, which traditionally relied heavily on the family for welfare provision. Today, these countries all face similar challenges: increases in women’s educational investment and labor force participation combined with demographic aging have led to acute care shortages. Italy and Spain embraced the ‘immigrant-in-the-family’ model by relying on female migrant care workers (Bettio, Simonazzi & Villa 2006), while Japan and Korea relied more on international marriages involving foreign wives from poorer Asian countries (Piper and Roces 2003). Taiwan is an intermediate case as it relies both on female migrant care workers and foreign brides from poorer countries. We explain these cross-national variations in terms of different ‘migration regimes.’ We define “migration regime” in terms of three sets of rules: (i) availability of employment visas for low skill work and the rights attached to such visas; (ii) the rights of undocumented migrants; and (iii) availability visas for family members and spouses and the rights granted to family members and spouses.