Women on the move

Abstract

The rapid aging of the world's population warrants a response from developed and developing countries as to who should care for elderly people and for how much compensation, if any. A growing trend that requires scrutiny is that of relatively poor immigrant women who leave behind their families and countries to provide elderly people in wealthier countries with care services. As a result of meeting the eldercare needs of rich people, relatively poor immigrant women may create a "deficit of care" among the dependents they leave behind. In this chapter, I argue that ordinarily care deficits should not be viewed as mainly the fault of individual women, but primarily as the fault of uncaring marketplaces, governments, or individual men who do not do their fair share of carework.