Remittances and transnational families in Italy and The Philippines: breaking the global care chain

Abstract

This article describes the situation over the last 30 years of women migrants from the Philippines in Italy, who have been caught in what many have called the ‘global care chain’. The pressure to send remittances back home is locking these women even further into the global care chain, with not only economic, but social and cultural consequences. Based on interviews and official data available on Filipina migrants, and learning from the activities of the Filipino Women's Council (FWC), the article relates the story of migrant women's difficulties caring for families across continents. It is important to re-think gender and development by taking into account migration and care work as a transnational reality, which breaks down neat conceptual divides between ‘development’ and ‘migration’.