International migrant eldercare workers in Italy, Germany, and Sweden: A feminist critique of eldercare policy in the United States

Hiring international migrant eldercare workers to work hard for little pay simply because this traveling workforce needs wages higher than those they would receive back home seems somehow “wrong.” The standard justification for hiring migrants seems more like an excuse than a justification. My purpose in this article, however, is not to condemn people who hire international migrant eldercare workers, but to suggest that these employers as well as their employees are caught in the same moral bind. Depending on how uncaring a state is about meeting its people’s fundamental needs including adequate long-term care, it will create a hostile environment for the development of caring people (Eckenwiler 2011, 9). But a society without a sufficient number of caring people risks unraveling. People who avoid care work and who shun the practice of care are, in my estimation, “marginal” to society in that they are not contributing to the foundation that makes society possible.