Introduction: Transnational Care in Europe—Changing Formations of Citizenship, Family, and Generation

The issue of how care should be arranged within European states’ welfare policies in the context of Europe’s aging population has generated considerable interest. Increasing labor market participation of women, longer life expectancy, and greater care needs have contributed to a care deficit in Europe. Projections of population aging and concerns about the future ratio of workers to non-working people with care needs (e.g., the elderly, children) have elevated care into an important policy concern for many European states, and on the level of the European Union (EU). While a lot of the conceptual tools for research on transnational care have been developed in the North American context where state provision is lacking, the situation in Europe differs. Especially in recent years, in many European countries, care has been recognized as a public good (Lister et al. 2007) and European states shape care provision by restructuring state support for care.

While care is organized differently in each country, there is a trend toward commodification of care in Europe, exemplified through cash or tax credits for childcare (in the UK, Spain, Finland, and France), tax breaks for employers of domestic help (Sweden), or direct payments for elder and disability care (UK, Netherlands, Italy and Austria) (Williams 2011). These encourage the expansion of marketized, home-based care. Migrants, often with precarious access to residence permits and labor markets, make up a major source of this care labor. Contributions to this issue cover different European countries with a range of different care, gender, and migration regimes (Williams and Gavanas 2008). The articles provide theoretical and empirical perspectives on care, as it is constituted and conceptualized in different national contexts of welfare policies, migration experiences, and class, racialized and gender relations presenting cases of migration to Spain, Germany, Norway, the UK, Ireland, Slovenia, and Poland, with a range of sending countries. This geographical variety is significant as it shows the range of different care, gender, and migration regimes. This is empirically significant but can also further our theorizing by helping to identify the various factors influencing how gender, class, and racialization can intersect in transnational care.

While in northern European countries migrant workers are integrated into care regimes characterized by a shift from state to marketized provision, both in home-based and institutional environments, in southern Europe, migration quotas for care workers, as well as regular amnesties for undocumented migrants, have led to a restructuring of familialist care arrangements to a widespread “migrant-in-the family” arrangement (Bettio, Simonazzi, and Villa 2006; Williams 2010, 2011). The transition from communist to market-based societies in eastern Europe has meant profound changes in labor markets, as well as care provision. In this context, some countries such as Poland have become at once receiving and sending countries for migrant care workers (Lutz and Palenga-Möllenbeck this issue, Lutz 2008), instantiating the observation that alongside global inequalities, regional inequalities fuel the transnational migration of care workers (Williams 2010). Transnational care in Europe is characterized by the migration of care workers from eastern to western European countries, as well as from the global South (Lutz 2008; Williams 2011).

Most of the articles were originally presented at a workshop entitled “A Caring Europe? Care, Migration and Gender” held in November 2009 at the Open University.¹ The workshop brought together scholars from a range of disciplines and countries to explore the centrality of migrants’ care relationships. The papers and discussions explored paid and unpaid care, carers as care-receivers, carers as ethical subjects, and carers as citizens, bringing into dialogue diverse aspects of the gender–care–migration nexus that are often compartmentalized in contemporary debates.

The articles address the complexity of migrants’ positionality in care relationships. They cover migrant workers engaged in paid and unpaid care work in the formal and informal sectors and in jobs deemed skilled and unskilled. Yet, migrants are also engaged in unpaid care for their own family members. In some cases, these family members reside in the same country, but the situation of those who migrate to work in care...