Care Citizenship: Migrant Care Worker Policies in Taiwan and South Korea

• In Event: Governing Migration in Asia

Abstract

Industrialized countries around the world are facing rapid demographic changes—including declining fertility rates, greater longevity, and an aging population—that create unprecedented challenges in care provision. Many East Asian countries have used migrant care workers to solve the challenges of labour shortages in the social welfare sector. This paper investigates why East Asian countries have adopted different policy approaches to recruit migrant care workers. Specifically, why Taiwan’s policies are designed to recruit “household care workers with temporary contract” while South Korea are for the “institutional care worker with access to long-term settlement”?

This paper explores this question by probing the politics of eldercare and care migration, and tracing the development of migrant care worker policies. Through a framework of the intersections of care, employment and migration regimes, I highlight the institutional contexts that shape how a country designs its migrant care worker policies. I argue that migrant care worker policies manifest how care work, citizenship, and gender equality are defined and contested by the receiving society. This paper also demonstrates how the development of the migrant care worker policies reflects the legacies of earlier policy decisions, by illuminating the political actors with access to the policymaking process. Based on archival research and fifty-three personal interviews with government bureaucrats, policymakers and migrant worker activists, this paper maps out the political mechanisms that determine the levels of rights, labour mobility, and access to membership rights for migrant care workers in Taiwan and South Korea.

Author

• Yi-Chun Chien, National Chengchi University