What’s the Border Got to Do with it? How Immigration Regimes Affect Familial Care Provision - A Comparative Analysis
American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law, Vol. 19, No. 2, p. 601, 2011
69 Pages Posted: 18 Aug 2010 Last revised: 1 Jun 2011
Date Written: August 16, 2010
Abstract
This article offers a framework to analyze the role of immigration law in shaping familial care provisions and markets of care. The framework builds on distributive models of the welfare state, and extends beyond the family-state dyad to include the market as a sphere in which the family is meaningfully regulated. The framework is then applied to the three very different immigration regimes that prevail in the U.S., Australia, and Israel: specifically, how they relate to the migration of care workers. The analysis exposes the distributive effects of migration regimes on different groups of migrant care workers, and on the men and women in the households that employ them. The analysis further shows the effects immigration regimes have on the bargaining positions, the familial expectations, and on the division of labor within families in the three jurisdictions. The comparative distributive analysis suggests that the details of the legal regime of migration are crucial to understanding the overall effects of the phenomenon of migrant care work on markets of care and families alike. Accordingly, general claims about the significant harms and risks that characterize the migration of care workers or the immense benefits and redistributive qualities of remittances, make very little sense absent a specific legal context.
Keywords: Immigration regimes, immigration law, Family law, Welfare regimes, Care Work, Child Care, remittances, migrant workers
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