Searching for Well-being in Care Work Migration: Constructions, Practices and Displacements among Immigrant Women in Italy

This article revisits the migration–care nexus through the lens of subjective well-being, building on a case study of immigrant women employed as live-in care workers in Italy. Based on their constructions, practices and displacements of well-being, care work migration is appreciated as an inherent source of paradoxes and dilemmas. While a search for “better days” does underpin migrant women's life trajectories, its accomplishments are typically limited and embedded in thick networks of family-based expectations and obligations. Ironically, migrants' search for well-being may result in its indefinite displacement or postponement, or at most in its “externalization” in favor of left-behind kin. Subjective well-being should then be reconceptualized as a relational state of being which conflates distinct, even opposite needs, interests and stances, ego- and other-oriented. It can be shifted over time and space, as much as (or even more than) being experienced at present in migrants' everyday lives.