Suchergebnisse

For some years, the German public has been debating the case of migrant workers receiving German benefits for children living abroad, which has been scandalised as a case of "benefit tourism". This points to a failure to recognise a striking imbalance between the output of the German welfare state to migrants and the input it receives from migrant domestic workers. In this article I discuss how this input is being rendered invisible or at least underappreciated by sexist, racist, and classist practices of othering. To illustrate the point, I will use examples from two empirical research projects that looked into how families in Germany outsource various forms of reproductive work to both female and male migrants from Eastern Europe. Drawing on the concept of othering developed in feminist and postcolonial literature and their ideas of how privileges and disadvantages are interconnected, I will put this example into the context of literature on racism, gender, and care work migration. I show how migrant workers fail to live up to the normative standards of work, family life, and gender relations and norms set by a sedentary society. A complex interaction of supposedly "natural" and "objective" differences between "us" and "them" are at work to justify everyday discrimination against migrants and their institutional exclusion. These processes are also reflected in current political and public debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of care.

Das Konzept »transnationaler Räume« hat der Migrationssoziologie neue Impulse gegeben. Wenig Beachtung hingegen fand bisher die Pendelmigration deutsch-polnischer Doppelstaatler aus Oberschlesien - einer Region, die aus der ehemaligen Peripherie Deutschlands wie Polens inzwischen mitten in ein vereintes Europa gerückt ist. Dabei macht die wechselvolle Geschichte dieser historischen Grenzregion sie geradezu zu einem Paradebeispiel für das Phänomen »Transnationalismus«. Die hier analysierten Lebensgeschichten ihrer Einwohner_innen werfen Schlaglichter auf europäische Diskurse über soziale und politische Partizipation sowie auf individuelle und kollektive Identitätsbildung.

In an age of migration and mobility many aspects of contemporary family life -- from biological reproduction to marriage, from child-rearing to care of the elderly - take place against a backdrop of intensified movement across a range of spatial scales from the global to the local. This insightful book analyzes the opportunities and challenges this poses for families and for academic, empirical and policy understandings of 'the family' on a global level, including case studies from Europe, India, the Philippines, South Korea, the United States and Australia. With chapters on international reproductive tourism, transnational parenting, 'mail-order brides' and 'sunset migration', it examines the implications of migration and mobility for families at different stages of the life course. Moreover, it brings together leading international scholars to connect a fragmented field of research, and in so doing enables an interdisciplinary exchange, generating new insights for theory, policy and empirical analysis.

PurposeIn the last decades, migration of domestic workers and, in particular, care workers has grown into a significant part of movement from the global South to the global North. This phenomenon is referred to as the "new international division in social reproductive work" – outsourcing domestic chores to (mostly) migrants enables families in the global North to escape from the tensions arising from balancing productive and social reproductive work. This paper seeks to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachConsidering two empirical examples of stereotypically male and female migrant domestic work – Polish handymen and elderly care workers – this paper puts the phenomenon in the context of the broader feminist debate on care work, global care chains and social policies.FindingsIt attempts to analyze how the employment of Polish handymen or elderly care workers in Germany results from and recreates social inequalities based on gender, class and ethnicity/citizenship.Originality/valueFor this purpose, it looks at both "ends" of this specific European "care chain" – the employing families in Germany as well as the migrant's families in Poland.

"In einem 2000 erschienenen Artikel prägte Arlie Hochschild den Begriff der 'care chains', um zu beschreiben, dass Migrantinnen, die im Ausland die Care-Arbeit für Kinder und alte Menschen übernehmen, daheim eine Versorgungslücke in ihrer eigenen Familie hinterlassen. Diese Lücke, so Hochschild, werde entweder durch Mitglieder des Familiennetzwerks gefüllt oder durch Migrantinnen aus einem wirtschaftlich ärmeren Land. In diesem Artikel werden Daten aus einem Forschungsprojekt vorgestellt, das untersucht, wie in Deutschland arbeitende polnische Migrantinnen und in Polen arbeitende ukrainische Migrantinnen diese Versorgungslücke bewältigen. Wie wird die Betreuung und Versorgung von Kindern und alten Eltern im Herkunftsland organisiert? Was bedeutet transnationale Mutterschaft für die Familien der Migrantinnen in praktischer und emotionaler Hinsicht? Wie geht die Öffentlichkeit in den betroffenen Ländern mit dem Thema Care-Arbeit und Migration um?" (Autorenreferat)

In this article, we deal with contradictions and paradoxes of the German policies on migration and domestic care work. Although the demand for care workers in private homes is increasing, the German government has turned a blind eye to the topic of migrant care workers. As a result of the mismatch between demand and restrictive policies, a large sector of undeclared care work has come into being. This veritable 'twilight zone' can be coined an 'open secret' as it is the topic of extensive discussions among the populace and in the media. We will address various discrepancies in the debate on migrant domestic work in Germany by providing a view from multiple actors' perspectives. Examining the intersections of gendered migration and care regimes, we assert that undeclared care migration is an integral part of German welfare state policies, which can be characterised as compliance and complicity.