Labor Migration and the Missing Work of Home-making: Three Forms of Settling for Chinese-Canadian Migrants

• In Event: 506 - Section on International Migration Paper Session. Immigrant Workers and Professionals in Precarious Jobs

Abstract

Much of migration theory has come to revolve around the category of the “labor migrant,” without taking into account labor, like home-making, that remains unrecognized by the market. Drawing from qualitative interviews with thirty one Chinese migrants in different stages of making a move from Beijing to Vancouver, we attempt to bring better visibility to how the labor involved in home-making intersects with migration. Defining home-making as work in the pragmatic-existentialist context of the stabilization of everyday routines, we uncover three themes to home-making work: settling in, settling down, and settling for. Discussion of these themes reveals two important issues for migration theory: settlement relies upon the work of home-making and the work of home-making in many cases motivates migration. For these reasons, the work of home-making should be more carefully studied within the migration literature.

Authors

• Nathanael T. Lauster, University of British Columbia

• Jing Zhao, University of British Columbia