Melisa Villarreal on "Introduction" to Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy

Barabara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild write about the care deficit emerging in the First World where wealthier people are employing women from the Third World to fulfill services that are considered a wife's duty such as household chores, child care, and having sex. I want to go futher into this idea and why a care deficit surfaced in First World countries.

Women in wealthier countries are taking positions of higher power in their careers but Ehrenreich and Hochschild point out that while these women are moving ahead there is no one to clean the house and "mother" the next generations, a duty that men already do not help women with. Women from Third World countries are employed because they will complete all these jobs for little pay, but the migrant workers are usually forced to leave their own families behind. The migrant workers accept these jobs anyway because many times they are the breadwinners of their family and need to work fulfilling the "wife's duties" instead of doing that with their own families. They write, "women who migrate bring not only their muscle power but an attentiveness to detail and to the human relationships in the household that might otherwise have been invested in their own families," (Ehrenreich 4). This is where the care deficit becomes a problem because the children of the migrant workers are left to be raised by other people as their mother has to mother the children of a wealthy employer. One group of women becomes more oppressed as another group of women move ahead.

Ehrenreich and Hochschild also write about the "feminization of migration" occurring due to this surge of employment. The governments that home these Third World women that are struggling to meet their children's needs are encouraging women to find jobs in wealthy countries. The reading says, "migrant women are more likely than their male counterparts to send their hard-earned wages to their families rather than spending the money on themselves." For this reason, the governments want the women to accept jobs where they would need to migrate to the First World so it ensures that the money they earn will be brought into the Third World countries. While it is true that the women migrant workers are bringing in money to their country and families, the absence of these women do take a toll on the families. Many children, like Josephine's children, are victims of the care deficit and suffer from social and mental issues.

There are many immigration issues are being discussed today about why Mexican immigrants decided to come to the United States without having proper documentation, but most of the time it is because they are not able to make ends meet in Mexico so they come here in hopes of finding any job they can to send money back to their families. Just like how many women workers from the Philippines come to the United States to work for wealthy families as domestic workers, many Mexican undocumented women work as domestic workers for wealthy families because it is a private service.

How can we ensure the security and proper treatment of these migrant women working to feed the families they left back home?