Gender, migration and the inequalities of care

This chapter examines the contribution of research on migration and care labour to understanding the inequalities of care provision. It delves into how we are to understand those inequalities in relation to macro, meso and micro level relationships, policies and processes. At the same time, it considers the contestation of those inequalities, and in ways that make necessary connections between the claiming of rights in relation to migration, paid work and unpaid care. It is argued that an understanding of care inequalities and their contestation provides the basis for a ‘social transformation’ perspective on migration (Castles in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36: 1565–1586, 2010), situating migration in relation to wider social processes. Concurrently, in bringing a feminist approach to social transformation to the fore, the importance of understanding the local specificity of intersecting inequalities is also emphasised, to avoid reducing an understanding of global care inequalities to a simplified North/South binary.