“We were all working mothers,” writes American journalist Megan Stack in her recent New Yorker piece about raising two children in India. The women who helped shape her thinking and cleared the way for her writing were migrants who left their own children behind to lovingly care for hers. “We spun webs of compromise and sacrifice and cash, and it all revolved around me—my work, my money, my imagined utopias of one-on-one fair trade that were never quite achieved,” she writes. 

With rapidly aging populations and rising levels of female employment, the United States and other wealthy nations are facing unprecedented demands for non-familial care. These nations vary in their ability to address such demands. Those with more robust welfare states, including publicly supported, high-quality child care and elder care services and facilities, are generally able to meet growing needs for care, while those with weaker welfare states experience severe “care deficits,” leaving families with few alternatives. Increasingly, in the United States and elsewhere in the developed world, families are turning to migrants—usually women—to solve their care dilemmas.