Global Care Crisis

More and more of the world's migrants are mothers who leave their families in the villages of the South to take up jobs caring for families in the North. Most current research on this trend focuses on the conditions of work that such migrant mothers face in the North or on the children she leaves in the South, understood as a rearrangement of roles in the family. Here, the authors call for a macro-analytic theory of the effect of such migration and consider two alternate views. According to one, the care of children in the South involves a transfer of “social capital” from South to North. According to the other, it involves a more fundamental erosion of the “commons” of the South by the markets of the North. The latter, the authors propose, best captures the full nature of this important hidden injury of global capitalism.