All in the family? Migrants, nationhood, and care regimes in Asia and North America

Abstract

If a ‘migrant in the family’ is the prevalent pattern of care work in Mediterranean societies today, what are the emergent patterns in other familialistic societies, and what factors are driving or impeding them? We address these questions by examining the cases of Japan, Korea, Canada, and the US. Our analysis shows that while care work patterns in all these four countries resemble those of the Mediterranean countries in their increased use of migrant care workers, they also differ from the Mediterranean and among themselves, partly because of their varying conceptualizations of nationhood. We argue that concepts of nationhood are significant but not all-determining in efforts to reconcile care work and migration regimes.