Entangled intermediation in familialistic care regimes: Migrant domestic work, crises, and migration infrastructures in Turkey

This article examines how migrant domestic and care work in Turkey is organized through entangled systems of intermediation linking households, intermediaries, digital platforms, and migrant social networks within a familialistic welfare regime. While existing research analyzes either the migration industry or migrants’ job-finding practices in isolation, this study integrates both perspectives to conceptualize intermediation as a multi-layered migration infrastructure shaped by welfare regimes, crises, and digitalization. Drawing on qualitative research based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with eighty-eight migrant women and nine intermediaries, the article traces how access to domestic and care work is mediated through overlapping social, commercial, and digital pathways. The findings show that Turkey’s familialistic care regime generates persistent demand for migrant care labor while delegating recruitment and governance to intermediaries. Under conditions of economic crisis and post-pandemic restructuring, intermediaries adapt through portfolio diversification, informal brokerage, and intensified digital recruitment, including the incorporation of new migrant groups identified through intermediary networks. Migrant women navigate these shifting infrastructures strategically, combining personal networks, digital platforms, and selective engagement with agencies in nationality- and status-differentiated ways. The article advances an infrastructural understanding of intermediation as a form of delegated migration governance and positions Turkey as a critical Euro-Mediterranean case of informalized, brokered, and migrant-dependent care markets. Theoretically, it demonstrates that intermediation in familialistic regimes is neither merely market-based nor purely informal, but operates as an entangled system of governance through which care deficits and migrant labor are continuously reorganized under conditions of structural uncertainty.