The Intersection of Childcare Regimes and Migration Regimes: A Three-Country Study

Abstract

This chapter argues that migrant Filipino domestic workers in Italy are perpetual foreigners. It includes the story of Valentina Diamante, a woman who has worked in Italy for nearly two decades, to illustrate the experience of being an intimate foreigner. The chapter explains the cultural and structural factors that propel the integration of Valentina Diamante in Italy as an intimate foreigner. It discusses the social realities reflected in the legal status of foreign domestic workers in Italy as perpetual foreigners. The chapter emphasizes how the formation and maintenance of a transnational family underscores the position of Filipino domestic workers as intimate foreigners. Filipino transnational households are in fact similar to those of African American families who migrated from the southern to the northern United States. Most Filipinos in Rome are long term legal residents of Italy. Racism plays a central factor in the occupational segregation of migrant Filipinos, as well as their exclusion from dominant spaces of Italian society.