Labor Migration and the Missing Work of Homemaking: Three Forms of Settling for Chinese-Canadian Migrants

Much of migration theory has come to revolve around the category of the “labor migrant,” without taking into account labor, like homemaking, that remains unrecognized by the market. Drawing from qualitative interviews with thirty-one Chinese migrants in different stages of making a move from Beijing to Vancouver, we attempt to bring better visibility to how the labor involved in homemaking intersects with migration. Defining homemaking as work in the pragmatic-existentialist context of the stabilization of everyday routines, we uncover three themes to homemaking work: settling in, settling down, and settling for. Discussion of these themes reveals two important issues for migration theory: settlement relies upon the work of homemaking and the work of homemaking in many cases motivates migration. For these reasons, the work of homemaking should be more carefully studied within the migration literature.