The ‘Care Gap’ and Migrant Carers

The demographic transformation due to population ageing, changes in household structures and roles, together with more demanding patterns of care, such as dementia, and an inadequate provision of long-term care (LTC), have significantly influenced the steadily increasing demand of families for alternative care resources, namely for assistance and support within the household by third parties. This has resulted in the emergence and spread of a new phenomenon by which families establish care arrangements with private care workers, who are mainly female migrants from neighbouring East European countries (Bettio et al., 2006) or from Asia, Africa and South America (Cox, 2006; Lutz, 2008). Private care workers actually fill the gap between family care that is no longer able to sustain ‘traditional’ caring tasks for older parents, and the lack of public services: in fact the EUROFAMCARE study on family carers already found several years ago that, in 17 out of 23 countries in Europe, families reported relying on private migrant care workers at least from time to time (Mestheneos and Triantafillou, 2005).