Trapped in the Care Cage: Transnational Caregiving among Indonesian Migrant Live-in Care Workers and Their Left/Stay-Behind Families

Expanding and engaging scholarship on care circulation, this article draws on interviews with twenty-five Indonesian migrant live-in care workers in Taiwan to examine how migrants care for their children, aging parents, and other kin from a distance. The findings challenge assumptions that caregiving requires physical proximity and flows unidirectionally, showing instead that migrant women, their parents, siblings, and extended kin collaboratively organize care through remittances, delegated hands-on labor, and emotional work. At the same time, the article resists romanticizing reciprocity in care circulation. It argues that the asymmetries and costs embedded in transnational caregiving are not merely familial dynamics but are intensified by Taiwan’s temporary migration regime, which extracts care labor while deferring migrants’ claims to family life and long-term security. The article uses the cage metaphor to illustrate transnational caregiving that both enables family reproduction and constrains migrant women’s life trajectories.