Welfare Paradoxes and Interpersonal Pacts: Transnational Social Protection of Latin American Migrants in Spain

Laura Oso,Raquel Martínez‐Buján

doi:10.17645/si.v9i4.4639

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between migration, care work, and welfare provision, highlighting the role of Latin American migrants in Spain as providers of formal and informal social protection on a transnational scale. It contributes to the debate on transnational social protection and transnational social inequalities from the perspective of welfare paradoxes and interpersonal pacts. Migrant women in Spain have become a resource for the provision of formal social protection through their employment as domestic care workers. Nevertheless, given that access to social rights in Spain depends on job stability and residency status, they have difficulties in accessing formal social protection themselves. This process constitutes a “welfare paradox,” based on the commodification and exclusion paradoxes, explained by structural factors such as the characteristics of the welfare regime (familiaristic model, with a tendency to hire domestic workers as caregivers into households), the migration regime (feminised and with a clear leaning towards Latin American women), and the economic landscape resulting from two systemic crises: the great recession of 2008 and the Covid‐19 pandemic. Interpersonal pacts, rooted in marriage/couple and intergenerational agreements, and their infringements, are analysed to explain the transnational and informal social protection strategies in the context of the “exclusion paradox” and the breach of the “welfare pact.” Our research draws on the exploitation of secondary data and multi‐sited, longitudinal fieldwork based on biographical interviews conducted with various members of transnational families in Spain and Ecuador (41 interviews).

Highlights

Scholarship studying the link between migration, care work, and welfare provision has traditionally focused on the drivers of global care chains (Hochschild, 2000), social care analysis (Daly & Lewis, 2000), and the circula‐ tion of care (Baldassar & Merla, 2014)
We use the term “welfare paradox” to consider the impact of Spanish long‐term care policies, based on cash transfers, on the demand for domestic migrant and care workers, as well as the conditioning labour factors that block these workers’ access to basic social rights. We argue that this “welfare paradox” is fur‐ ther supported by two paradoxes conceptualised and dis‐ cussed here, namely the “commodification paradox” and the “exclusion paradox.”
The first contribution of this article to the debate on transnational social protection is the application of the “welfare paradox” concept to show how formal social protection of long‐term care in Spain has resulted in the emergence of a labour market for domestic ser‐ vice which centres the activity of migrant women, in particular of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) origin (“commodification paradox”)

Summary

Introduction

Scholarship studying the link between migration, care work, and welfare provision has traditionally focused on the drivers of global care chains (Hochschild, 2000), social care analysis (Daly & Lewis, 2000), and the circula‐ tion of care (Baldassar & Merla, 2014). Transnational social protection studies have reviewed reflections on these analyses and contributed new approaches to them. The “social care theory” has proved extremely useful in analysing the social models of care and their evolution, even though they are rooted in the notion of social rights associated with nation‐states, thereby com‐ plicating the identification of transnational protection needs (Parella & Speroni, 2018). The “circulation of care” concept creates broader areas of care than the previous concepts, it is unable to link the demand for care with “the precarious labour market con‐ ditions for migrant care givers” (Lutz, 2018, p. 582) and fails to articulate the exchange of welfare with the structure of global inequality that is the natural habi‐ tat of these workers

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