Care Without Citizenship: How Migrant Women Subsidize Public Systems Without Rights

This paper examines how migration policy and underinvestment in public care systems combine to produce a workforce of migrant women who effectively subsidize national economies while remaining excluded from basic labor and social protections.

Across the world, migrant women perform the labor that makes everyday life possible. They care for children, older people, people with disabilities, and those who are ill. They clean homes, prepare food, and provide emotional and physical support that sustains labor markets, households, and public systems alike.

Yet despite the essential nature of this work, migrant women are routinely denied the rights, protections, and recognition afforded to citizens. Their labor is indispensable, but their lives remain precarious.

This is not a gap in compassion or a failure of individual employers. It is a structural outcome of how economies organize care, migration, and public spending.

Care work is not peripheral to the economy. It is its foundation. And today, that foundation is increasingly built on the labor of migrant women who subsidize public systems without citizenship, security, or rights.

Care is economic infrastructure

Care work is often treated as a private responsibility. It's something managed within families, households, or informal arrangements. But feminist economists have long argued that care is economic infrastructure: without it, no economy can function.

When children are cared for, adults can work. When elders are supported, households remain stable. When illness is managed, labor markets continue to function.

Public care systems, including childcare, elder care, disability support, and health services, shape who can participate in paid work and under what conditions. Yet across countries, states have systematically underinvested in these systems.

Aging populations, increased female labor force participation, and longer life expectancy have intensified care needs just as austerity, privatization, and fiscal restraint have reduced public provision. The care deficit has not disappeared. It has been displaced.

The gap is filled by migrant women.

Migration as a care strategy

Migration regimes increasingly function as care strategies, not explicitly, but in effect.

Migrant women are recruited through temporary visas, family reunification pathways, or informal and irregular channels to perform care work that states no longer adequately provide. Once destination countries, they often work in private homes, beyond the reach of labor inspections and excluded from standard protections.

In many countries, domestic and care workers are explicitly excluded from labor laws governing minimum wages, working hours, occupational safety, or collective bargaining--a gap the International Labor Organization (ILO) has repeatedly documented. Even when protections formally exist, enforcement is weak, particularly for workers whose immigration status is insecure.

This produces a workforce that is flexible, low-cost, and politically invisible.

Migrant women absorb the risks that public systems refuse to bear.

Care without rights

Despite performing work that is socially necessary, migrant care workers often lack access to:

• secure residency or pathways to citizenship

• healthcare and social protection

• labor protections and collective organizing rights

• effective remedies for abuse or exploitation

• family reunification and long-term stability

Their exclusion is not incidental. It is what keeps care affordable in systems unwilling to fund it publicly.When care is treated as a private commodity rather than a public good, its costs are shifted onto those with the least bargaining power. Migrant women are expected to provide continuity and compassion without security in return.

This is care without citizenship: full responsibility, minimal rights.

Gender, migration, and fiscal choices

The feminization of migration is inseparable from fiscal and economic policy.

Governments routinely prioritize low taxation, constrained public spending, and market-based delivery of services. Under these conditions, care is increasingly privatized. It is delivered through households rather than institutions, and paid for individually rather than collectively.

The privatization relies on gendered norms: the assumption that women will provide care, whether unpaid within families or underpaid in labor markets. Migrant women sit at the intersection of these dynamics. They are recruited precisely because care is feminized and because migration status limits their ability to demand more.

In effect, migration policy becomes. atool for managing the fiscal consequences of underinvestment in care.

Labor organizations have long argued that these policy choices are not neutral. They reflect decisions about whose labor is valued, whose rights are protected, and whose insecurity is considered acceptable in the name of "efficiency."

The costs are externalized

The economic value of migrant women's care work is rarely captured in public accounts. Yet its absence would be catastrophic.

Without migrant care work:

• households would struggle to balance paid work and caregiving

• women's labor force participation would decline

• health and social systems would face additional strain

• unpaid care burdens would intensify, primarily for women

By absorbing these pressures, migrant women subsidize economies.

But the costs do not disappear. They are borne privately: through burnout, injury, trauma, family separation, and legal precarity. Care workers' own needs for rest, healthcare, security, and dignity, are deferred.

Rights exist, but access does not

International human rights law affirms the right to just and favorable conditions of work, social security, health, and dignity. These rights apply to everyone, regardless of migration status, as recognized in instruments such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Yet for migrant care workers, rights are often theoretical. Access requires documentation and language support. It requires time and institutional trust. For workers whose status is temporary or insecure, these become scarce in more ways than one. Reporting abuse may jeopardize employment or residency. Organizing collectively may be legally restricted or practially impossible.

As with many economic and social rights, the problem is not absence of law, but the absence of access.

Rights that cannot be exercised are rights in name only.

Care as a human rights issue

A rights-based approach to care would recognize that:

• care work is essential labor, not informal assistance

• migrant workers are rights holders, not temporary solutions

• states have obligations to fund care systems, not outsource them

• economic participation depends on care infrastructure

UN Women, the ILO, and feminist economists have repeatedly emphasized that underinvestment in care entrenches gender inequality. Especially for migrant women, it depresses wages and reproduces precarity. A rights-based economy cannot rest on the systematic insecurity of those who sustain it.

Policy Implications

Addressing care without citizenship requires more than incremental reforms. It requires confronting the political economy that treats migrant women's labor as infinitely elastic.

Key Policy Interventions:

• sustained public investment in universal care systems

• labor protections for care workers regardless of migration status

• pathways to residency for long-term care workers

• access to healthcare and social protection

• enforcement mechanisms that protect workers who report abuse

These are not charitable measures. They are obligations rooted in human rights and economic justice.

Conclusion: Care makes the economy possible

Care is not a marginal issue. It is the engine of economic life.

Migrant women perform this work under conditions shaped by policy choices: taxation, public spending, migration, and labor discussed in conference rooms. Their exclusion from rights is not a failure of compassion so much as it is a reflection of priorities.

If economies depend on care, then care must be governed by justice.

Care without citizenship is unsustainable, ethically, economically, and socially. A rights-based economy must recognize care workers as full economic and political subjects, entitled to security, dignity, and voice.

Until then, the systems they sustain will remain unjust by design.

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References:

• LO, Decent Work for Domestic Workers (Convention 189)

• UN Women, Care Economy and Gender Equality

• ICESCR, Articles 6–9, 11, 12

• OECD, Who Cares? Attracting and Retaining Care Workers