Caretaking work is handed down across borders. Women in poorer countries leave their own families to look after families in richer ones, and their own children are then left in someone else's care. The result is an international division of the work of raising and tending people, shaped by inequality between nations.
Families split across countries are a new kind of household, held together by money sent home and contact from far away. Yet they are still judged by older ideas of who should nurture whom, especially the idea that mothers belong at home. That gap creates strain between parents and children and between women and men.
Migrant domestic work can raise a worker's class position and lower it at the same time. She may earn more abroad as a servant than she could at home in a more respected job, and support her family's rise. Yet the work itself pushes her down in status, so she gains money while losing standing.
Migrant workers are often excluded in the country where they work, and that exclusion keeps pulling their hopes back toward home. They may also be looked down on within their own migrant communities. The result is a sense of not fully belonging anywhere.
Migration that begins as a short-term plan to work abroad tends to settle in over the years. Children eventually come to join their parents, and the workers grow old in jobs with little security. Aging care workers then have no clear way to be cared for themselves. When men take up domestic work, which is seen as women's work, they can feel their sense of manhood is in crisis.