Feminist Ethics 2024-2
Anca Gheaus (2013) Care drain: who should provide for the children left behind?, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 16:1, 1-23
Introduction
The massive migration of people from a country or a region to another country or region can trigger various problems for those who stay behind, especially when migration happens at short notice and in the absence of an institutional context that can mitigate its consequences.
The significant migration of people with higher education has become a subject of sustained research and has been labelled ‘brain drain’ to indicate the impoverishing in terms of human capital of the labour markets of the countries or regions of origin [두뇌유출(brain drain) 이민의 증가는 해당 국가의 빈곤화를 나타내는 지표가 됨].
Another form of impoverishment in terms of human capital is the migration of people who, while living in their country of origin, do most of the hands-on care of those who cannot care for themselves such as infants and children, ill or disabled people or the frail elderly. Whether giving care is what these people do as paid jobs– in caring institutions such as hospitals or elderly homes– or at home to their own families, the effect of their migration is a sudden imbalance in their communities of origin between the demand for, and supply of, care. Hence, this phenomenon is referred to as ‘care drain’.[돌봄 노동자 이민의 증가는 수요-공급 불균형과 함께 돌봄이 필요한 취약계층에 대한 여러 문제를 불러일으킴]
I argue that care drain resulting from the temporary, years-long migration of people who have children and who, for economic or legal reasons do not take their children with them involves moral harm. (1) The children left behind often receive insufficient care, which results in the frustration of their developmental and emotional needs. (2) Moreover, the moral problems entailed by care drain are also problems of social justice and therefore call for rectification by the state involved.
I use a normative approach which assumes there is a social duty to protect the vulnerable members of the society (Goodin 1985). Following Joan Tronto (Tronto 1993), by care I understand the activity of meeting needs, including developmental, emotional and relational needs. Care-giving derives its value from the moral requirements that universal human neediness puts on everybody (Kittay 1999, Engster 2008). Because of its emphasis on need, a feminist ethics of care is a well suited normative model for understanding the harms of care drain: the frustration of essential emotional, developmental and social needs of migrants and their children. Moreover, care drain often damages the wider social relationships of care by putting too much strain on them. Studies of migrant parents from Romania, as well as from other parts of the world, yield very similar results in this respect.
| Two duties | (1) A social duty to protect the vulnerable members of the soicety. (2) A moral duty that human neediness puts on everybody |
| Care | Care: the activity of meeting needs, including developmental, emotional and relational need. |
Care drain is a worldwide phenomenon; I illustrate the problems it raises by looking at the case of Romania but, since the aim of my analysis is normative, I refer frequently to similarities to care drain from other geographical areas. The main policy I suggest in the last section is more easily applicable between countries that already belong to a common political structure– hence the attraction of choosing a case study from within the European Union. For the sake of focus and due to limitations of available empirical data, the analysis is restricted to the impact of care drain on the migrants’ children, although care shortage affects negatively all dependants
To date, there are few quantitative studies about care drain within the European Union, and even fewer to address care drain from Romania to other (wealthier) European Union states. Equally, there is little qualitative research to provide insights into questions such as:
What is the impact of the separation on both children and migrant parents?
(How) do parents continue to relate to their children?
How are the needs of children– including emotional and developmental needs– being met in the absence of their primary care-givers?
Are they well cared for, and by whom?
So far, information about care drain from Romania comes from a handful of studies. But qualitative research on care drain from and to other parts of the world is helpful for understanding the predicament of migrant parents’ who have to choose between caring for their dependants and pursuing their right to work and seek economic well-being for themselves and their families.
This research shows why care drain worldwide rises issues of justice and care that are currently unsatisfactorily addressed at the level of social institutions and policies.
The analysis of care drain worldwide reveals
① that the emotional needs of migrant parents and children are hurt by separation,
② that primary care relationships and various care networks are damaged by extended periods of separation, and
③ that the problematic of care drain emerges in the context of deeply gendered expectations about caregivers and of a gendered division of labour.
Although these studies discuss care drain in other parts of the world, their conclusions about the frustration of emotional and developmental needs of children left behind has universal relevance inasmuch we assume that care and primary caring relationships have universal value.
Why does care drain raise problems of social justice? Migrant parents are usually not the worst off people from their society. Generally, those who have the financial means to emigrate, and sufficient education to find and sustain even unskilled jobs in a foreign country, are not the poorest, nor the most uneducated part of the population. Most Romanian migrants are, nevertheless, seriously disadvantaged. The migrant parents discussed in this paper are either unemployed or employed for wages insufficient to make a living. Moreover, they lack economic security: if employed, they have poor job security and, given the continuous erosion of the Romanian welfare state, uncertain perspectives for social security. According to recent analysis of disadvantage, security itself is an essential component of advantage (Wolff and DeShalit 2007).
I argue that the precarious [불안정한, 위태로운] situation of most migrant parents is often the result of the sending states’–in this case, Romania– failure to ensure just economic redistribution. Under these circumstances, migration is not an entirely voluntary choice and migrants should not be expected to shoulder all its burdens alone. Specifically, they should not be required to carry the full responsibility of the choice they face, between living separated from their children and forfeiting [몰수당하다] the chance to economic decency [체면] for themselves and their children. Migrants’ children often benefit from the material advantages resulted from migration, but also suffer from a significant frustration of their non-material needs. Here I assume that an adequate metric of justice should be pluralist, and thus not allow material gains to compensate for the frustration of non-material needs. While migrants and their children might not be the most disadvantaged members of their society, an egalitarian theory centred on needs and vulnerability will acknowledge duties of justice towards them.
① The next section is an empirical discussion of care drain from Romania followed by an analysis of its gendered nature and of the unfair choice it presses on migrant parents.
② The third section criticizes the position according to which care drain is morally unproblematic because it leads to preference satisfaction.
③ The fourth section employs an ethics of care to assess the moral consequences of care drain for the well-being of migrant parents, their children and the extended families with a special emphasis on the frustration of important emotional and developmental needs.
④ In the fifth section I rely on Daniel Engster’s recent analysis of care-friendly economic justice to show that parents’ migration takes place in the context of unjust economic and political conditions.
⑤ In the last section I sketch possible solu tions to avoid or mitigate some of the harms of care drain on the children left behind. I argue that both receiving and sending states must take responsibility for the well-being of migrants’ children and I suggest a mid-term, ‘real utopia’ policy, to discharge this responsibility.
Case study: migration from Romania to the European Union
Migration from Romania has been a large-scale phenomenon in the past 20 years when, for the first time after five decades of a repressive political regime, Romanians could travel and work abroad. Leaving a country stricken by relative poverty and threatened by unemployment or underem ployment, millions of Romanians have settled, on a permanent or tempo rary basis, in various countries of the ‘global north’. The structure of migration from Romania has since undergone continuous change, and it amounted to a serious problem of brain and skill drain. In the past few years migration from Romania became highly feminized: female migration from Romania has doubled between 2001 and 2004 (Piperno 2007c) with some regions of the country being especially affected (Soros Foundation Romania (SFR) 2007). Many of the migrant women work as seasonal labourers in agriculture, while others are employed as care workers. Most of them migrate to Italy and Spain. Often, migrants leave for a fixed period of time– for example, one year– and then decide to extend contracts or to get new jobs abroad. They respond to the changing conditions of the labour market and extend their migratory period as they go along, with little or no long-term planning.
Migration results in both gains and losses for the families left behind. On the one hand, the remittances [송금] sent home by immigrants make a considerable contribution to the material well-being of these families and to the economic development of the regions from which most migrants originate. On the other hand, recent migration from Romania has led to a shortage of physical and emotional care for migrants’ dependants. The feminization of migration is relevant for care drain because in Romania many of the recent migrants used to be the main care-givers in their families.
For the past several years, the headlines of Romanian newspapers have been telling stories of children missing their parents– usually mothers who work abroad. Occasionally, one reads about children committing desperate acts as a consequence of what they perceived to be abandonment, or out of mere longing– as suicide notes explain. Beyond the exceptional tragedies, widely speculated by the mass-media, the inadequate care for migrants’ children is a large-scale, significant social problem.
There is no consensus on the exact number of children whose parents work abroad. The official data in 2007 was 82.464 (Autoritatea Nationala Pentru Protectia Drepturilor Copilului (ANPDC) 2007). According to a 2008 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) study, approximately 126,000 children from Romania have both parents working abroad, while 400,000 have at some point been in the situation of having at least one parent working abroad. Half of these children are below ten years old, 25% are between two and six years and 4%, below one year of age. A total of 16% spent more than one year without both parents, whereas 3% spent more than four years. Between 16% and 18% of all middle school children of Romania have at least a parent working abroad (SFR 2007).
The same sources indicate that, when both parents migrate, 74% of children remain in the care of grandparents and 5% with other members of the extended family (UNICEF and Asociatia Alternative Sociale (AAS) 2008). Sometimes children are cared for by neighbours, friends or siblings. According to some studies 3500 children are in this situation (UNICEF and AAS 2008). Sometimes they grow up without any care-giver.
Because migrants’ working arrangements are temporary, most dependants stay behind. According to Maria Carmen Pantea, ‘there does not seem to be a pattern of entire family migration or reunification abroad, among Romanians’, due to the high costs of raising children abroad and to the migrants’ often precarious living conditions and lack of time for parenting. Thus, reunification is ‘isolated and follows a process of successive migration of family members’ (Pantea 2011, p. 3).
According to the few studies (AAS 2006, SFR 2007) as well as popular perception, many of these children suffer from neglect and even abandonment. The migrants and their families organize alternative forms of care, but often the strategies are improvised and insufficient. Under the conditions of an impoverished and continuously shrinking [움츠리는] welfare state, Romanian public institutions fail to make up for the loss of care entailed by migration (Piperno 2007b).
Care drain from Romania is a highly gendered issue. When only fathers migrates, in 94% of the cases children continue to live with their mother; but when only mothers migrate, just in 58% of the cases do children continue to live with their father (SFR 2007, p. 8).
This confirms the more general observation that ‘when husbands migrate ... wives usually assume the role of father and mother. But when wives migrate, husbands tend to stand aside from child rearing [양육] leaving childrearing to female relatives’ (Isaksen et al. 2008, p. 410). [5]
In accordance with persisting cultural norms and expectations, migrant mothers tend to identify themselves as care-givers; as mothers in a patriarchal society, everybody, including themselves, feel they should not leave the hands-on care of their children to others, and probably most of them suffer for having to do so. To the suffering resulting from the severed relationships they have to their children is added the guilt of feeling they have failed their children and the shame of being perceived as less than good mothers in a still very much gender conservative society.
On the one hand, migrants are being celebrated for their courage and achievements, and for their important contribution to the material well-being of their (extended) families who remain in Romania. On the other hand, migrant mothers in particular are socially blamed for the deficit of care created by their departure. Thus, care drain is a context that brings the traditional problem of parents, and especially mothers’, choice between work and family to a new level. [6]
Arguably, working for adequate reward is an essential component of well-being, and according to a foundational conception of the modern state citizens are entitled to work and to its material, psychological and symbolical benefits. At the same time, the ability to enjoy family life and see one’s children growing up is the main source of well-being for many, if not most, people. In the case of migrant parents, this choice is shaper than in the case of sedentary individuals who find it difficult to pursue inflexible and over-demanding careers and raise families. The former have to choose between unemployment or underemployment in materially precarious conditions, and seeing their families as rarely as once a year for Christmas.
The unfairness of the migrant parents’ situation is made clear by a normative model of the just society, discussed in the fifth section, in which sates ensure that citizens are able to combine work and care. This model is sympathetic to a conception of citizenship as defended by several feminists (Lister 1997/2003; Pfau-Effinger 2005), under which parents who live under strained [불편한] conditions can be good citizens whether they fulfil traditional roles of carers or whether they decide to migrate and delegate [위임하다] the care for their dependants to others.
Within this normative framework, the double-bind in which migrant parents find themselves reflects a failure of states to eliminate economic need sufficiently to enable all its citizens to care for themselves and their families, rather than any particular failure of parents themselves to fulfil roles that are structurally incompatible. In the absence of a wide public consciousness of people’s entitlement to be able to both work and care, migrating parents perceive their departures as a ‘private issue, not as a private expression of a larger public issue’ (Isaksen et al. 2008, p. 419).
Is care drain harmful?
The separation between parents and children in the context of the parents’ migration is, according to some scholars, morally unproblematic. A wholehearted defender of a neoliberal approach to globalization, Jagdish Bhagwati argues that mothers who migrate as care workers, dependants for whom they used to care at home and whom they left behind, as well as pretty much everybody else involved, are net winners from the process of migration:
The migrant female worker is better off in the new world of attachments and autonomy; the migrants’ children are happy being looked after by their grandmothers, who are also happy to be looking after the children; and the employer mothers, when they find good nannies, are also happy that they can work without the emotionally wrenching sense that they are neglecting their children. (Bhagwati 2004, pp. 77–78)
At first glance, migration seems to provide solutions to all the problems implied in Bhagwati’s analysis (migrant mothers and their dependants’ economic need, and the need of mothers from the ‘Global North’ to buy care in order to be able to combine family and career).
Premise: Undoubtedly, migration brings various benefits, including increased autonomy for women and more economic well-being for the migrants’ children.
① A view like Bhagwati’s is nevertheless highly romantic: it neglects the emotional costs of both migrants and their children, the developmental costs paid by children, as well as the deterioration of migrant family relations resulted from the stress of care shortage.
② Moreover, Bhagwati’s evaluation of care drain suffers from myopia [근시안]: it fails to raise the question whether migrant women themselves have any chance to combine work and family life and does not note the absence of fathers from the provision of care.
③ Finally, this approach to care drain is entirely unhelpful for understanding why the problems to which women’s migration offers solutions are themselves forms and signs of injustice. Bhagwati’s approach misses issues of justice, both global or local, both inter- and intra-generational, bracketing questions such as: why do these parents need to migrate in the first place? Why do they not have the option to bring their dependants with them? Why do employer mothers need to rely on finding a ‘good nanny’ in order to be able to pursue their careers? How fair is it to expect the extended family to fully carry the burden of looking after the children and other dependants left behind by women migrants– for as long as, at times, several years? What are the consequences of disturbed and often unstable family and care arrangements on the migrants’ children? And, most importantly perhaps, why is the entire issue of care still seen as ‘women’s work’ and women’s responsibility– whether the women in question are migrants or employer women? A satisfactory normative account of care drain, and the solutions to the problems it raises, have to integrate issues of care and of justice for all those affected: parents, their children and sometimes other members of the migrants’ families.
This highlights the insufficiency of a preference-satisfaction approach to the analysis of care drain, particularly if it is not informed by an understanding of parents’ limited negotiation powers on the global market and by the reality of adaptive preferences. And even if a preference-satisfaction analysis of care drain could be adequate for parents, who can make their choices (to migrate, to live separated from their families and so on) and then be held responsible for them, it would remain inadequate for children, who do not have any real choice in this process.
The harms of care drain
By contrast to an approach exclusively based on preference satisfaction, I use a normative approach centred on the importance of meeting needs, with a special focus on emotional and developmental needs.
Migrating parents suffer from the anticipated separation even while contemplating migration and as a result some leave unexpectedly, without warning their children (Piperno 2007a). Literature on migrating mothers from all over the world shows that the difficulties of living away from their children are aggravated by women’s realization that they are missing out on the childhood or adolescence [청소년기] of their children (Hochschild 2005, Isaksen et al. 2008).
While having to deal with the pain of separation, migrating parents make efforts to live up to their desire to carry on guiding and maintaining control over their children, under conditions in which they cannot hope to do so properly. They call and write regularly, make use of the new possibilities of communicating on-line in real time and try to visit (AAS 2006). Their struggle to be acknowledged as parents is tarred [타르를 칠한] by feelings of remorse [회환] and guilt at falling short of this ideal (Hochschild 2005, Piperno 2007a).
The situation of those who migrate in order to take care of their employers’ children– the vast majority of them mothers– is particularly painful. Since parenting is a caring relationship involving both parents’ and children’s needs for love, and given that prolonged absence leads to a deep frustration of parents’ needs to love and be loved by their children, some times their love is being ‘transplanted’ into the country of immigration. When migrating mothers work as nannies, in relative social isolation, they may end up forging strong connections with the children of whom they take care; these connections overwrite the emotional relationship with their own children. There are testimonies of migrants who acknowledge that they came to love their employers’ children more than their own:
For María Gutierrez, who cares for the eight-month-old baby of two hard working professionals ... loneliness and long work hours feed a love for her employers’ child. ‘I love Ana more than my own two children. Yes, more! It’s strange, I know. But I have time to be with her. I’m paid. I am lonely here. I work ten hours a day, with one day off. I don’t know any neighbours on the block. And so this child gives me what I need. (Hochschild 2005, p. 40)
Need for their parents’ love and affection
1. the commitment [헌신] expressed by physical presense and by doing hands-on care
2. Continuity in care/a primary care-giver
3. Secure love (migrants’ children can feel they are unwanted by the relatives who take care of them, or worry that the care they receive is conditioned by the gifts and economic favours their new care-givers receive from their parents.)
4. moral and social stigmatizing
Many of the children whose parents migrate are also suffering. An essential need frustrated by migration is children’s need for their parents’ love and affection. According to AAS (2006), Romanian migrants’ children perceive the loss of parental love as the most important one they experience in the context of their parents’ migration. While sentiment usually endures, another component of love, the commitment expressed by physical presence and by doing hands-on care slowly evaporates from the relationship. Children whose parents– but in particular mothers– migrated abroad are more likely to feel depressed and say that they feel unloved and emotionally neglected (SFR 2007).
Another need frustrated by parents’ migration is that of continuity in care. As already mentioned, only a minority of the children whose mothers emigrate and whose fathers remain at home continue to be cared for by their fathers. Children whose both parents migrate, or who do not continue to live with their fathers after the mother’s migration, are left in the care of grandparents or other relatives. Research on Romanian children suggests that, although parents’/mothers’ migration is temporary, the effects it has on children is often similar to the effects of parents’ divorce or to the death of (one of the) parents (SFR 2007). Lack of continuity of care for migrant’s children, and the absence of a primary care-giver are enduring problems in spite of arrangements to have members of the extended family care for the migrants’ children. Extended family often fail to provide continuous care, and children find themselves shuffled between different relatives or guardians (Piperno 2007a).
This situation leads to the frustration of children’s need for adult guidance when unstable care arrangements fail to give rise to a close relationship, leaving an emotional and communicative void. In almost all cases, when children were asked who supported and guided them in times of difficulty, they were not able to point to any adult who they could turn to apart from their mothers who are abroad. (Piperno 2007a, p. 64)
The absence of continuity in care-giving results in children’s confusion and general disorientation. Some of the children, especially the very young, do not understand why their parents left and feel betrayed (Isaksen et al. 2008, p. 413). As a result of their confusion and sense of abandonment, Romanian children whose parents work abroad are considered to be at a higher risk for deviant behaviours and school failure (AAS 2006, SFR 2007). Absenteeism [잦은 결석], dropping out of school and social marginalization are often highly correlated to parental migration (AAS 2006).
Additionally, migrants’ children can feel they are unwanted by the relatives who take care of them, or worry that the care they receive is conditioned by the gifts and economic favours their new care-givers receive from their parents (Isaksen et al. 2008, p. 414). In other words, these children suffer from what they perceive as a lack of secure love.
Finally, having one’s parents abroad sometimes invites moral and social stigmatizing. The economic benefits and higher living standards enjoyed by some of migrants’ children can turn against them: the possession of mate rial goods raise the doubt of whether these goods are meant to replace parental love and repay a sense of parental guilt. Moreover, such doubts are transparent within the children’s communities (and hence, potential stig matization). Both points are illustrated by Isaksen’s et al. (2008, p. 414) discussion of children in India and confirmed by AAS (2006) and Piperno (2007a).
One of the moral harms of prolonged periods of parental absence is the erosion of the moral relationship between migrant parents and children. ① Some children develop a ‘sense of guilt for the sacrifice made by their mothers’ (Piperno 2007a) and ② mothers themselves feel guilt towards children and shame for not living up to the social expectations of motherhood. ③ Most importantly, prolonged periods of absence erode the every day basis of the relationship. Often, both the child’s relationship with the migrating parent and with the custodial [양육권이 있는] parent deteriorates (SFR 2007).
The relationships between children and extended families who take care of them also deteriorate when children feel they are an unwanted burden and, in worst cases, a ‘charity case’. In turn, relatives who take care of the children may feel exploited, especially when care arrangements are made ad hoc and there are no clear standards and expectations of who is supposed to do what in the relationship. Add to this the migrant parents’ sense of the impossibility of ever repaying the debt to the relatives who care for their children and it is easy to see how connections within the extended family may collapse under the burden of doubts, guilt and economic conditioning– all set against a background of long distance relationships and difficult communication.
The risks associated with parents’ migration put pressure on educational institutions to provide for the extra needs of children (Piperno 2007a). Romanian local welfare actors– mainly schools– who voluntarily take charge of some of the needs of migrants’ children are under disproportion ate pressure given the context of chronic shortage of resources. Many Romanian schools cannot afford psychologists or counsellors, whose services would be especially helpful for migrants’ children. Few schools collaborate with social assistants. Often, teachers themselves assume the role of counsellors and social assistants, without having the necessary sup plementary material and time resources, and many complain of not bein able to fulfil successfully all the roles at the same time (SFR 2007). More generally, local welfare actors such as schools and non-governmental orga nizations (NGOs) have a sense of failing to address the specific issues of children whose parents are working abroad and who grow up without adequate care (Piperno 2007b).
In Romania, when either mothers or both parents migrate, care-giving is reorganized through expanding the caring role of extended families– especially grandmothers, older sisters and aunts and, to a lesser extent, through purchasing care services on the market (Piperno 2007a, 2007b). Can care can be provided by extended families just as adequately as it was provided by the nuclear family disrupted by migration? This appears particularly plausible in the case of Romania, which has strong traditions of people living and caring for dependants within extended families. Even before the age of mass migration of the 1990s and 2000s, many generations used to live together in the same household, and children were regularly taken care of by several relatives. I do not dispute that good care can and should involve experiencing various types of caring relationships from early childhood. However, there are good reasons to doubt that the care drain which results from parents’ migration can sufficiently be made up for by the ad hoc involvement of extended families.
Delegating all childcare to grandparents– mostly grandmothers– is often conducive to [~에 도움이 되는] inadequate care and is likely to erode intergenerational relationships (Pantea 2011). Pantea’s study, based on interviews with children and grandmothers living in the same household as a result of parents’ or mothers’ migration, reveals the structural problems of these care arrangements. At short notice, grandmothers have to face responsibilities for which they are unprepared, such as helping with homework or mediating the relationship between children and their fathers. Both children and grandmothers experience a reduction of their privacy, which is especially difficult to accept given significant inter-generational differences in lifestyle– for example when children move from cities to the countryside. As Pantea shows, the cultural expectation that extended families care for children can, to some extent, render parents’ migration more acceptable, without in fact providing an adequate solution for the children left behind, especially when institutional resources to provide for the needs of either children or the elderly are insufficient.
Again, one may note similarities between Romania and other places where the cultural acceptance of shared care of children makes mothers’ absence morally tolerable but which, at the same time, display an ideology of a special mother–child bond. What happens when Indian mothers migrate from Kerala is that: ‘between migrant mother and caring-giving kin there is an exchange of social chits. A favour is freely given, (the relatives care for the child), but is also eventually repaid (the mother pays various expenses and gives various gifts)’ (Isaksen et al. 2008, p. 416).
This trade, ambiguously situated between a logic of contract and one of gift exchange, can easily result in discontents and hurt feelings– of children, who per ceive themselves as burdens on mothers and extended families alike, of parents who feel overly indebted, and of extended families who may feel exploited. In the worst cases, this leads to a progressive deterioration of trust within caring relationships. [11-12]
Within Europe, the domino-like chains of care drain from East to West (from Ukraine and Lithuania to Poland, from Poland to Germany, from Romania to Italy and Spain, etc.) result in dire [대단히 심각한] shortage [부족] of care in the poorer countries, impacting negatively on the extended care relationships which make the fabric of these countries’societies. It has been argued that, at a global level,
as whole villages in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Kerala, Latvia, and the Ukraine, are emptied of mothers, aunts, grandmothers and daughters, it may not be too much to speak of a desertification of Third World caregivers and the emotional commons they would have sustained had they been able to stay. (Isaksen et al. 2008, p. 419)
In Romania, too, care drain sometimes changes the nature and standards of care within extended families. The transformation of care provision in the context of migration is bad news both for the migrants’ children and for the maintenance of social relationships of care. In the context of a general shortage of care, care-giving from grandparents and other relatives– who might otherwise be an entirely welcome additional parent figure often results into relationships fraught with uncertainty and mutual resent ment. These relatives, frequently themselves in need of additional care, are suddenly, unexpectedly and not fully voluntarily becoming the main or only parent figure in children’s lives.
A just and caring economic system
Admitting that care drain involves moral harm, where does the main responsibility for it lie? Daniel Engster outlined the policies and institutions required by a just and caring society (Engster 2008). According to Engster an entitlement to receive basic care is justified by the universal need for care: to survive and thrive, all people needed, and benefited from, other people’s care. It would therefore be both hypocritical and incoherent to reject, in a principled manner, a social duty to ensure that all people receive the basic care they need.
The fundamental principle that societies should ensure basic care for their members leads to more specific expectations from a just economic system. Engster’s approach to economic justice relies on the assumption that people’s main reason for working is to be able to care for themselves and their dependants. An economic system that fails to meet this desideratum [원하는 것]– i.e. to make it possible for people to care– is therefore fundamentally wrong.
The universal duty to provide, and entitlement to receive, care together with the understanding that the main virtue of economic systems is to make adequate care possible, justify four principles of economic justice.
First, caring societies should promote sufficient prosperity [번영] for meeting everybody’s basic needs.
Second, the output of an economic system should be regulated by a distribution of resources, allowing all members of the society actually access the means necessary to meet their own and their dependants’ needs. Without the second principle many people would be excluded from care even in societies where enough resources were available.
Third, a just and caring economic system must promote individual responsibility towards the more vulnerable, such that all capable individuals contribute to the common economic effort, either through productive work or through the work of caring for others. The third principle is necessary in order to ensure the first principle is realized: everybody’s contribution may be needed in order to ensure adequate care to every body.
Finally, an economic system should ensure everybody’s access to direct care services, including ‘support and workplace accommodation for personal caring activities’. The aim of this principle is ‘to prevent economic processes and values unduly [지나치게] interfering with the ability of individuals to give and receive adequate care’ (Engster 2008, p. 140) and, ultimately, to prevent people from facing radical choices between work and family.
The Romanian state obviously fails to live up to the standards of the above account of economic justice. While it arguably meets the requirement of the first principle (i.e. the creation of enough supply to meet every body’s basic need for care) it clearly fails on the distributive principle. Romania is characterized by widespread corruption, rising levels of poverty and continuously widening income gaps. It also fails to meet the standards of the fourth principle: the welfare state has been constantly shrinking for the past 20 years, entailing shortages in direct care services such as adequate health care services and sufficient provision of daycare and kindergartens (and, for children in the more isolated rural areas, even of schooling). This made it increasingly difficult for people with dependants to find proper jobs while at the same time locked the unemployed, and the under-employed, in poverty.
Hence, the migrant parents’ decision to migrate is not a choice they make in a socially just context. The Romanian state fails to deliver its duties of care to its citizens, including the migrants’ children, their parents and those who, for better or worse, serve as primary care figures during parents’ absence. Therefore, individuals’ decisions to migrate in the quest of adequate economic well-being to care for themselves and their dependants are as such legitimate.
Parents should have the possibility to pursue employment as a means to economic sufficiency. If they cannot do this under reasonable conditions in their countries of origin, they have the right to migrate. Thus, a legal ban on parents’ migration cannot be a legitimate solution to care drain. [13-14]
To the extent to which states themselves cannot ensure that all its citizens enjoy a sufficient level of material well-being, migrating parents are actually going beyond their mere duties, by taking upon themselves a lar ger-than-should-be-expected share of responsibility for their own and their families’ well-being. Parents who choose to migrate out of economic need and who contribute to the material well-being of their families through remittances help create the conditions necessary for economic justice and hence should be entitled to institutional support for their dependants left behind.
I have argued that care drain entails an important frustration of the emotional and developmental needs of migrants’ children, but also to the needs of their parents and other relatives, and to the maintenance of a social web of caring relationships. Before looking at desirable policies to mitigate the harms of care drain we need to address the question of whose responsibility it is to ensure the well-being of migrants’ children. Where does the responsibility for the care of these children lie, and how should can such care be delivered while keeping an eye on the needs and fair treatment of the other individuals involved?
① Part of the answer follows from the above analysis. Since the Romanian state fails to deliver economic justice to its citizens, it is the Romanian state that must ensure that migrants and their children do not suffer unduly as a consequence of their parents’ legitimate decision to migrate.
② The answer also depends on who is gaining what from the care drain.
Some of the burden of alleviating the harms of care drain should be on those who gain most from it if such gains are made possible by unfair background distributions. At first glance, ②-1 the first gainers are the migrants themselves. However, inasmuch as most people who migrate do it out of a lack of decent [괜찮은] alternatives for fulfilling essential economic and care needs, to the fulfilment of which these people have an actual entitlement, they should not be expected to shoulder alone the difficulties of their new life arrangements. Especially when the (material) gains the parents obtain from migration do not surpass what they should be entitled to as citizens from their own states (but which the states are unable to provide) ②-2 these very states should take responsibility for the care of migrants’ dependants.
There are many other parties that benefit from care drain: ②-3 sending states benefit economically, directly or indirectly, from the important remittances [송금] coming from migrants; additionally, they are discharged from the duty to directly ensure the migrant’s right to economic sufficiency. ②- 4 Employers from receiving countries benefit too, because they can buy work at lower prices then those they would have to pay, should they employ their compatriots [동포]. Like other migrants worldwide, many Romanians work as care-givers of dependant members of the family who employs them. In these cases, employers can pursue their own careers knowing that their dependants are well cared for, while, ironically, migrants have to pay the price of abandoning their own families.
But often, employers’ gains are set in a context of unfair pressure on employers themselves to choose between work and family. Under a conception of social justice based on solidarity and on the acknowledgement that dependant individuals are entitled to welfare (Fraser 1994, Gornick and Meyers 2003) and support as care-givers (Kittay 1999, Engster 2008), receiving states should provide their citizens with direct access to adequate care services. When this is not the case and citizens of receiving states have to rely on migrants’ work for their families’ care needs it follows, from the above analysis, that the responsibility to repair the moral wrongs of migration fall on ②-5 receiving states rather than on migrants’ employers. Thus, receiving states too are gaining from care drain, because the relatively cheap work provided by migrants partially relieves these states from the duty to provide adequate public forms of care to their own citizens.
Therefore, the adoption of the policy solutions suggested below should be seen as primarily the responsibility of sending states, with some of the policies calling for the involvement of receiving states. In the case of Romania, the care shortage resulting from parents’ migration should be regulated by policies at the European Union level. Given the flux of migrants from the East to the West within Europe, these policies are relevant beyond the Romanian case.
Policy solutions
The present normative analysis extends beyond the Romanian case; I formulate suggestions for redistributive policies and institutions that can hopefully address care drain in various contexts. A coherent set of policies at the level of the European Union– which was joined by Romania in 2007– is required in order to address the needs of migrants and their dependants. First I sketch those policy solutions which, while legitimate, are less feasible– especially in the short-term.16 I then spend more time on what I take to be the most feasible short-term solution: giving adequate support to state institutions that can supply some of the needed care.
Eliminating poverty
The most obvious, and possibly the only complete solution to the problems triggered by care drain is to eliminate the economic need for migration. While it may look utopian at the global level (at least in the short-term), this solution is not too difficult to envisage [예상하다] at the European Union level. Although Romania is one of the poorest countries in the European Union, globally it is relatively better off. The most important move towards a just and caring economic system as outlined in the previous section would be a wider internal redistribution of wealth, together with universal provision of adequate care services. Ensuring decent minimum wages, unemployment benefits and the avoidance of big economic discrepancies between different regions and between cities and rural areas would reduce the economic need to migrate. Clearly, it is the responsibility of the Romanian state to strive towards these goals.
Bringing the fathers in
A second obvious way to increase migrants’ children’s chances to receive adequate care is to bring fathers into care– a solution which has been long advocated by feminists. This would make care more plentiful and distribute its burdens more justly between men and women, and would increase its symbolic value. In the context of care drain, the necessity to bring fathers into care is particularly urgent. Current studies suggest that even when Romanian fathers continue to fulfil their parental role after the mother’s migration, they tend to assume the bread-winning [생활] part of the parental role and delegate the hands-on care, and emotional involvement with children to others (AAS 2006). Given the proportion of female migration, and the fact that increasing numbers of children remain in countries of origin in the custody of their fathers, men’s presence and increased competence as care givers could prove a– perhaps partial– solution to the care shortage.
Because it requires the change of people’s behaviour, this solution is also likely to take time. Even in countries with sustained and well targeted strategies for bringing men into childcare the overcoming of gender roles has been a slow process. Moreover, for this solution to be really efficient, it should be accompanied by a change in general norms and expectations with respect to gender roles and the gendered division of labour– including migrant children’s own norms and expectations. Parrenas (2002) shows how children who expect mothers to be the main care-givers might con tinue to suffer from their mothers’ absence, and blame mothers for this suf fering, even when raised by particularly caring fathers. Parrenas argues that at least part of this suffering would be alleviated by a changed perception of who can– and should– provide care.
The Romanian state should take responsibility for advancing men’s participation into care through policies based on incentives rather than on coercion [강제]. Because coerced emotional care is an empirical, and possibly a conceptual, impossibility, coercive policies would be self-defeating.
Enabling migrants to bring their children with them?
A third solution is to make provisions for the care workers to take their children with them. Migrant parents should be given political and economic rights– funded by taxing employers and the state that benefits from remittances– to bring their dependant children with them.
Currently, migrants from Romania are reluctant to take their dependant children with them, for several reasons including economic inability, inflexible working schedules and the unavailability of child care arrangements in the destination country. Given the variety of types of jobs taken by migrants, and the variation in their living and working conditions abroad, it may be very difficult to create policies to overcome these obstacles. More over, in many cases this can only be a second best solution, since it involves moving children to a foreign country, often for undefined periods of time, at an age when disruption in schooling and living conditions may be unwelcome. The nature of short-term migration and of children’s developmental and educational needs makes this particular solution less promising.
Supporting institutional care in the sending states
The most promising solution in the short and mid-term is that sending and receiving states provide extra support to childcare institutions in the sending states, such that they can better address the emotional and developmental needs of the migrants’ children. Care drain provides a fresh sense of urgency to ensure adequate public institutions to provide care for children in sending states. This is particularly important as a matter of fairness to migrant parents and to their extended families, who should not be required to take over the entire work of care for the children left behind.
Most importantly, good public care would be part of an adequate response to the situation of the migrants’ children themselves, who usually need more guidance and emotional care in order for their lives to go as well as those of their peers, and who often end up feeling a burden on others. In addition, more socialization of migrants’ children care would make it easier to detect bad care and neglect, which are more likely to occur in the absence of a primary care-giver or when there is little continuity in care.
In particular, resources should be channelled towards the meeting of two essential needs: the need for continuity in care and for adult guidance. Unlike other needs frustrated by parents’ migration (like that for a particular parent’s affection), the needs for continuity in care and adult guidance can be adequately met through proper institutional policy.
This requires the creation and maintenance of daycare and after-school institutions, and the enabling of schools to hire counsellors and psychologists. It also requires the supporting of a network of social workers at local levels, who can check that all children have a designated, stable care-giver during their parents’ absence and that this care relationship is functional. All these measures have been long called for by school teachers, social workers and NGOs working in the domain of child welfare from Romania (AAS 2006). Provisions should be also made to assist children’s designated temporary caregivers.
The economic responsibility for implementing policies of adequate care should be shared by those who benefit from care drain, i.e. both sending and receiving states. This means that European Union resources be directed into institutional structures to support children (and possibly other dependants) and extended families left behind when they assume the role of primary caregiver of migrants’ children. Some of the taxes collected by states of origin from remittances and, at least at the level of the European Union, taxes coming from states which benefit mostly from temporary migration, should go into providing adequate care for migrants’ children.
I argued that states should provide their citizens with the opportunities to care for their dependants and, when they fail to do so, citizens have a moral right [morally permissible?] to migrate even if this entails that they can no longer fulfil responsibilities of hands-on care for their dependants. In this cases, the states should undertake to fulfil the essential needs frustrated by migration. Sometimes states that are unable to ensure full economic justice can nevertheless find the means to fill the void of care created by migration. Indeed, the Romanian state– as well as, possibly, many of the states whose citizens’ migration results in care drain– is in the position to do this by directing some of the taxes it levers on remittances into childcare. The additional institutional childcare could easily be funded, by using some of the taxes on remittances which, at least in the case of Romania, add up to considerable amounts. Data from early 2000s suggest the volume of remittances has been constantly growing. According to one source, in 2002 the volume of remittances was estimated at US$1.5–2.0 billion, placing Romania at 23rd place of the top 30 developing countries with the highest volume of remittances. The National Bank of Romania reported that between 2002 and 2006 this volume has tripled, reaching e4.8–5.3 billion in 2006 (HIIE 2007, p. 7). According to UNICEF, remittances raised from US$4.733 mil lion in 2005 to US$6.718 million in 2006 to US$8.533 million in 2007, which represented 5.5% of Romania’s gross domestic product in 2006 and 5.1% of its gross domestic product in 2007 (UNICEF Florence 2009, p. 46). Given that migrants’ decision to work abroad is made in the context of an unjust economic set-up, it is fair that the Romanian state provides substantial institutional support for the care of the children left home.
A more politically daring suggestion is that an additional source for funding for these policies be a ‘care drain tax’, coming from the states which employ migrants with dependants in their country of origin plus a fixed share of the taxes that receiving states impose on remittances. The urgency of involving the states that benefit from the migration which drains care from the sending states is more obvious once we acknowledge that the welfare systems of countries which are affected by care drain are likely to be already weak. A principle of solidarity applicable at least within the European Union should recognize that weakening the welfare resources of another state is objectionable. In the case of Romania, for instance, it has been argued that care drain has a damaging impact on the welfare system although this is, so far, an under-studied phenomenon:
Precisely at a time when the European Union is promoting an economic, social and political integration policy perspective both internally and towards third countries, it is actually draining care resources from countries of origin, leaving local welfare systems to deal with the impact on their own. (Piperno 2007a, p. 66)
Indeed, the rise of neo-liberal policies in the European countries from the former communist bloc [연합] led to ever weaker welfare institutions. With national budges under strain, welfare institutions of various kinds have been prime candidates for downsizing. In Romania, the massive but hardly functional welfare state inherited from the communist past has already undergone several reformations, and each reform has shifted more responsi bilities of care from the state to private individuals. The lack of institutional capacity meant that, for a number of years, the situation of migrants’ chil dren living with improvised or no adult care went unrecognized.
Eventually, the Romanian state has been forced to respond to migration and the ensuing care drain. The situation of transnational families has been regulated in 2006. Ordinance 219/2006 required parents to inform authori ties of their prospective migration and register a guardian for the minors left home. Further regulation in 2009 requires parents to nominate guard ians who meet minimal criteria of income, age, abilities and number of other children in care. None of these laws, however, makes any provisions for assisting the temporary guardians, and their enforcement is very prob lematic.
In the meanwhile, social services are under the strain of increasing numbers children whose parents are abroad and who are in need of assis tance, and pressure is expected to increase. In 2005, the National Child Protection Authority (ANPC) estimated that about 17,000 minors– i.e. 14% of the minors whose parents worked abroad legally– were beneficia ries of some social services, with another 3% on the waiting list (Piperno 2007a).
Care drain also led to the appearance of new forms of commodified [상품화된] care in the shape of often unregulated markets involving either relatives or strangers who provide care for migrants’ children. Managing these markets and ensuring the required level of monitoring to avoid neglect and abuse are costly, but necessary actions. Most importantly, commodified care for migrants’ children can be at most a component of the overall strategy for addressing care drain, since it is likely to leave out of proper care the most disadvantaged of the migrants’ children.
Existing institutional care arrangements for migrants’ children are insuf f icient, lacking proper organization and funding. Currently, the task of ensuring care for migrants’ children is managed locally, by community level actors such as schools and NGOs. These are, without doubt, welcome developments. But it is fair to expect more: wide financial support for these institutions, and the creation of the additional services mentioned above, with the aim to ensure accountable safety nets for migrants’ children and more monitoring, and support, for their temporary care-givers. Here I argued that justice requires to involve, in the process of addressing the moral harms of care drain, both the states whose caregivers migrate and the states that benefit from this process.
Better provision of institutional childcare is, like most other solutions, a partial one. The creation of additional public care resources for migrants’ children does not do enough, on its own, to address the material needs which set migration in motion in the first place, nor the emotional needs of separated families. Thus, states stepping in to provide for essential emotional and emotional needs of migrants’ dependants is a matter of compensation for migrants and one of partial moral repair for their dependants.