This article explores migration to higher income countries in light of collective commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argues that domestic social protection and labour market policy will need to be modified to meet these commitments. We look primarily at women in care work, using a broad definition of care that includes home help, domestic work and health care. We argue that the failure to recognise and value unpaid care work has created a sustained labour demand for women migrant care workers in many of these labour-importing countries. Increasingly, immigrant women are being imported into host economies to care, often in informal settings, and frequently engaged by private households, without full access to social protection and labour rights. The consistent application of SDG goals 5 and 8 and their linking to existing labour rights norms and conventions could simultaneously address care deficits in home and host countries and protect the rights of care workers in labour-importing countries and ensure that migrant workers are able to claim these rights.
In the years since I started working on the research for this book I have lived in four different cities and have been fortunate to receive the support, guidance, and encouragement of many friends and colleagues.First of all, I want to thank the members and leaders of financial self-help groups in New York and in Argentina, who let me join them in their activities and learn from their lives.This book would not exist without their openness, generosity, good will, and eagerness to teach me.To preserve anonymity, I am not using their real names.But they know who they are, and I am grateful to them.This project started at Columbia University.I was fortunate to receive the extraordinary guidance of Gil Eyal, who continues to influence my sociologi-