The Making of Migrant Care Workers in East Asia

• In Event: Care Work Migration to Japan: Comparative Lessons and Domestic Realities

Abstract

The unprecedented level of population aging, shrinking size of families, increase in women’s wage labor and retrenchment of social expenditures bring challenges in how to cope with ‘care crisis’ in East Asia. Since the 1990s, this care deficit, accompanied by commodification of care work, has resulted in the introduction of migrants in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. While the historical continuum of reproductive labor to be ‘racialized’ and gendered persists, it has become complicated by what Parrenas (2001) calls ‘the international division of reproductive labor’ making care the front line of the uneven processes of globalization. However, the ways in which migrant caregivers have been introduced reveal a large difference depending on how the care regimes and migration regimes intersect with each other through the interplay of state, market and family. In Taiwan, migrants from Southeast Asia care for the elderly predominantly in private homes; in Japan, migrants from the same Southeast Asian countries entered under bilateral free trade agreements and work in care facilities; and in Korea, Chinese Koreans enter the care labor market as co-ethnics. The presentation aims to examine the configuration of migration regimes and care regimes in East Asia. The nexus of these regimes, where the migrant caregivers are situated, will define the entitlement of the migrants as well as the quality of care.
Parrenas, R, 2001, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work, Ateneo de Manila University Press: Manila.

Author

• Reiko Ogawa, Kyushu University