Feminists have long understood domestic labour as crucial to the functioning of any economy (Comack 51). With women citizens entering the paid workforce in increasing numbers, in Canada, much of this labour is now performed by migrant caregivers. In the essay “Love and Gold,” Arlie Hochschild provides a compelling analysis of the flow of care from the Global South to the Global North, positioning it as a new form of imperialism (26-27). However, though she thoroughly describes the characteristics of care-imperialism, she places less emphasis on exploring the mechanisms that bring it about. In this article, I show how domestic labour policy functions as a tool to assign a symbolic femininity to the Global South, with the result of devaluing migrant caregivers’ labour in a characteristically imperial dynamic.

I begin this discussion by elaborating on the definition of imperialism that I use, before justifying my treatment of caring labour as a commodity, and then bringing these two themes together into a theory of ‘care-imperialism.’ Next, I describe the historical role of feminization in other forms of imperialism. After providing a brief history of caregiver immigration policy in Canada, I go on to show how it has served to feminize the Global South. Finally, I illustrate how such feminization is instrumental in establishing exploitative labour dynamics. As temporary migration and the surrounding legal frameworks become increasingly prevalent worldwide, advancing labour justice will require a deep understanding of how exploitative dynamics come into existence. To this end, a postcolonial analysis of Canadian domestic labour policy is absolutely vital, inasmuch as it can shed light upon the origins of care-imperialism.

Theoretical Background

Care-Imperialism

Although imperialism is typically understood as an effort to accumulate wealth by establishing footholds in foreign parts of the world, “formal” appropriation of land has not always been an integral component in the process. For instance, in the rough period between 1820 and 1880, countries like Britain and France became interested in minimizing foreign administrative duties — and the associated expenses — wherever possible. Hence, imperialism began to take on an “informal” quality, with empires seeking to expand their wealth by establishing exploitative trade dynamics, more than formal footholds (Streets-Salter and Getz 234). Imperial powers established and maintained these uneven trade dynamics through various forceful strategies, including the use of military aggression against nations with protectionist trade policies, and using free trade as a condition for military aid (Streets-Salter and Getz 245-249). Thus, some historians have argued for an understanding of imperialism that relies less on an assumption of formal occupation, and that instead privileges the core tenet of violent wealth extraction (Streets-Salter and Getz 235).

Aside from expanding the definition of imperialism, it is also worth reconsidering what is included in the category of ‘wealth,’ or what is considered a commodity. Drawing on insight from Karl Marx, socialist feminists have closely evaluated the theory of labour-power — “the capacity of a worker to work” — in order to illustrate the value of domestic labour (Vogel 20). In particular, they draw attention to the fact that labour-power is something which must be continually produced and reproduced: the workforce itself must be renewed through such means as childbearing and childrearing, and workers must have their nutritional, emotional, and everyday health needs seen to in order to be able to work. Thus, socialist feminists argue that the labour which fulfills these requirements — that is, domestic or caring labour — “forms an essential condition for capitalism” (Vogel 158-163).

Before delving into an analysis of the flow of domestic labour from the Global South to the Global North, it is worth justifying the treatment of this labour as a commodity. There is some debate among socialist feminists as to whether it can be said that domestic labour is commodified under capitalism, with those opposing this description arguing that domestic labour does not produce tangible products whose sale generates revenue for the ruling class (Vogel 144). However, one major motivation for such debate is to achieve consistency of definitions among Marxist scholars, and particularly to remain faithful to Marx’s definitions (see Vogel 143-144). While these concerns are certainly valuable, an analysis which uses the term commodity in a different way than Marx does must not necessarily sacrifice legitimacy. Adopting a slightly different interpretation of the term from Marx’s, I argue that caring labour is a commodity because it can be transferred between households, can be bought and sold, and, as we will see below, can even be supplied from one country to another. Hence, analysis of caring labour as a commodity is more than valid; in fact, such an analysis is essential for fully appreciating its political implications.

Combining an investigation of caring-labour-as-commodity with an appreciation for histories of informal imperialism, Hochschild has produced a compelling evaluation of imperial dynamics in North American care work immigration. In the essay “Love and Gold,” she describes dramatic increases in female emigration from the Global South. As she explains, these trends in the Global South result from the combination of changing gender expectations; globalized culture and employment networks; and poor prospects in local labour markets. Hochschild’s analysis places a particular focus on the hosts of Global South women that have immigrated to the United States to work as caregivers. She discusses how these women must often leave behind their own families in what she terms a “care drain” — mirroring the widely-studied “brain drain.” Stressing the coercive nature and foreign origin of the economic pressures that promote migration; the importance of care work for the functioning of the US economy; and the exploitative conditions that migrants face, Hochschild positions the care drain as a new form of imperialism (17-27). Drawing on her work, in this article I use the term “care-imperialism” to refer to the forceful, exploitative extraction of a crucial resource for the Canadian economy — caring labour — from the Global South.

Although Hochschild refers to poor economic prospects in the Global South, her essay consists more of an ethnographic study of the families impacted by the care drain than an investigation into the mechanisms by which the Global North is able to establish such an extractive dynamic. Nevertheless, understanding how care-imperialism has come about is essential for creating positive change. Hence, in this article I turn my attention to the mechanisms behind imperialist extraction of care, evaluating Canadian domestic labour policy as a key instrument in generating care-imperialism.

Feminization

Throughout imperial history, one important mechanism for establishing exploitative dynamics has been feminization, which occurs when an imperial power symbolically associates foreign parts of the world with femininity. For example, the cultural theorist Anne McClintock describes various historical instances in which the imperial imagination rendered ‘the New World’ as feminine in order to naturalize “penetration” and conquest (25-26). In order to fully understand how imperial powers utilize such ‘imaginary’ association to achieve practical domination, it is useful to refer to Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism.

Said describes Orientalism as a system of thought used in Western writings and teachings about the East, influenced by fraught histories of East-West relations — and, importantly, by a lingering colonial impulse (“Introduction” 11). He emphasizes that Orientalism is not merely a field of study or an inert component of Western culture; rather, Orientalism is “an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also a whole series of ‘interests’ which […] it not only creates but also maintains” (“Introduction” 12, emphasis in original). In other words, Orientalism establishes the West and the East as inherently distinct, and uses this distinction to maintain a particular geopolitical relationship between the two entities.

At times, the distinct image of the colonized Other can become so potent in Western minds that imperialism is reframed as a necessary response to a tangible threat, or as a reflection of the natural way of the world. For instance, McClintock analyzes an allegorical painting portraying the colonization of North America, in which a naked Indigenous woman stretches in an “inviting” pose before a fully armored, White man (McClintock 25-26). The man holds an astrolabe, flag, and sword, and the woman extends a beseeching hand out toward him, not only accepting, but appealing for Europe’s “scientific mastery and imperial might” (McClintock 26). In this way, not only are European powers able to imagine Indigenous people as naturally submissive, but they can also rationalize colonization as a way of ‘rescuing the New World from its own ignorance.’ In other words, feminization has served to justify the colonization of the Americas. Bearing this context in mind, the focus of the present article is to expose how Canadian domestic labour policy also uses feminization to naturalize imperialism.

Caregiver Immigration in Canada

Caregiver immigration is a longstanding feature of the Canadian labour market. While early programs were designed mainly to encourage immigration of young, single, British women, beginning in 1955, single women from Jamaica and Barbados were able to receive landed immigrant status — the equivalent of permanent residency — after working for one year as live-in domestic workers. However, in response to the quantity of women that would conceal their dependents and then apply for re-unification after receiving status, in 1973, Canada introduced the Non-Immigrant Employment Authorization Program, which marked the beginning of temporary foreign worker policy in Canada. Through this scheme, foreign caregivers were admitted to Canada on single-year visas that gave no provisions for receiving landed immigrant status (Brickner and Straehle 310-311).

In 1991, the Canadian government introduced the Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP), which enabled caregivers to apply for permanent residency after having worked with their employers for two years. The program further stipulated that migrant caregivers could not take on any household responsibilities outside of child care, and that their employers had to provide them room and board. The work visas granted under this program were tied to migrants’ employers, meaning that if the employment relationship ended, caregivers would lose their status (Brickner and Straehle 311). In 2014, following decades of criticism, the LCP was replaced with the Caring for Children and Caring for People with High Medical Needs pilot programs, which removed the live-in requirement but preserved most other features of the LCP. After consultations in 2018, the government launched the Home Child Care Provider and Home Support Worker pilots, which grant occupation-specific work visas (as opposed to employer-specific), and provide more options for family reunification and achieving permanent residency (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada).

Although the evolution of caregiver immigration policies is a rich topic in itself, in order to understand their role in generating exploitative labour dynamics, it is more valuable to analyze these policies in general terms. While the latest policies may provide a better reflection of the current relationship between Canada and the Global South, my argument in this article is that care-imperialism is the product of decades of policymaking. Hence, I abstract away from the current state of caregiver migration policy in order to study the policies that have had the greatest influence on care-imperialism.

Feminization of the Global South in Canadian Policy

Hochschild describes how, despite women’s increasing labour force participation, most careers are still built around a male model, in which advancement requires workers to minimize their family responsibilities by finding “someone else” to fulfill them (20). While this someone-else role has traditionally been filled by the worker’s wife, shifting gender roles and economic necessity have led more and more women[1] to enter the labour force; consequently, many North American households have had to turn to extended families or to paid solutions for child care (Michel and Peng, 407-409). In their analysis of care regimes in North America, Michel and Peng describe how the Canadian government preferentially finances child care through transfers to parents rather than to providers, and relies on market solutions over public provision. With government supports falling far short of guaranteeing accessible child care, families are pushed to seek caring labour at the lowest price possible. Hence, those with the means to hire a nanny often seek out migrant workers who are willing to work for minimum wage — or even less (Michel and Peng 410-411). Thus, the increasing reliance on migrants to fill the female-coded “someone-else” role described above is driven by (gaps in) government policy.

Furthermore, Macklin shows how increasing systematization of care work migration in Canada was a direct, explicit policy response to women’s entry into the labour force (691). In other words, Canadian policy approaches migrant workers as direct replacements for Canadian women who previously provided unpaid domestic labour full-time. Importantly, while the LCP and its descendants do not exclusively admit Global South women, the vast majority of its users belong to this group, with the result that policy changes are often conceived with them in mind (Macklin 690-693). Hence, we can interpret the rapid development of frameworks to admit temporary migrant care workers into Canada as a means by which migration policy incorporates Global South workers into the female-coded “someone-else” role. Both through active policy-making, and through a failure to provide adequate child care supports, caregiver immigration programs cast the Global South in a feminine role with respect to the Global North.

However, feminization of the Global South in Canadian policy goes beyond assigning Global South workers a feminine role; migration schemes also regulate the symbolic femininity of the Global South. As described, caregiver migration policy required care workers to live in their employers’ homes from 1955 until 2014. Judging based on the predominant motivations that guide migration policy (Benjamin et. al 313-315), the aim of this stipulation was likely to reduce migrants’ potential reliance on social supports, and to ease the financial strain of moving to a new country. However, the same goal could have been achieved in other ways — for instance, by giving the option for employers to provide care workers with a room-and-board budget.[2] By requiring caregivers to live in the houses where they work, caregiver migration policy opens migrants’ non-working lives up to scrutiny from their employers, and reduces their opportunity to disconnect from the home that employs them (Brickner and Straehle 314, 318). Hence, the live-in requirement functioned to prevent traditionally unfeminine behaviour, and to confine care workers to the domestic realm — which is traditionally understood as the realm of the feminine (Comack 51). Thus, this feature of caregiver migration policy has had an active role in preserving Global South workers’ feminized status.

Feminization and Care-Imperialism

Thus far, I have shown how Canadian policy feminizes the Global South, a practice that has traditionally been used to naturalize and justify imperialism. However, what remains unclear is whether this process has a practical role in furthering care-imperialism today. To assess this possibility, it is useful to explore the implications of gendering care work as feminine. As Brickner and Straehle have described, women’s domestic labour has been persistently undervalued in the Global North, both because women are assumed to be naturally suited to it and because fields of work dominated by women are viewed as necessarily lower-skilled (317). Below, I will argue that this logic extends to the symbolic femininity of the Global South, by analyzing Pratt’s study of the migrant care work industry in Vancouver through the lens of care-imperialism.

In 1994, Pratt conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with agents from the nine major “nanny agencies” operating in Vancouver. Her main aim was to analyze systematic stereotyping in the care work industry, as well as the psychic investments that Canadian parents have in preserving these stereotypes (Pratt 159-161). Because half of the migrant caregivers working in Vancouver in 1992 relied on an agent to secure their positions (Pratt 161), Pratt’s conversations with care work agents serve to represent not only the climates in the specific agencies she studied, but the dynamics of the care work industry as a whole. Although the cultural and legal context of the study is slightly outdated, Pratt’s investigation provides a crucial discussion of the roots of several caring labour dynamics that persist today, including underpayment and hyper-scrutiny.

In evaluating Pratt’s findings, one important point to keep in mind is that Canadian migration policy has a different impact on Global South and Global North migrants. The below quote from a care work agent is a particularly stark reflection of this fact:

See the Europeans that are coming in here, after 2 years, if they stay and they apply for landed immigrant — they don’t do nanny work. It’s just a jumping board that they use because they have their own plan, their own career, their own training back there [in Europe]. They are not going to stay nannies. Filipinos will. That’s the only thing that they know to do. […] Some of them will really have a little bit more plans for their life than being that way, but the majority: nannies (Pratt 172).

In this quote, Filipinos and Europeans are positioned as essentially different in character; but, moreover, the nature of their interaction with the LCP is framed as fundamentally distinct as well. While Filipinos are defined completely by their participation in the LCP, Europeans’ participation is seen as practically incidental, “just a jumping board.” The cultural association between Global South workers and caregiver migration programs is much stronger than it is for workers from the Global North. Hence, I argue that the cultural implications of domestic labour policy — including feminization — are much more relevant for Global South workers, while they are nearly negligible for Global North migrants.

To expose how feminization of the Global South furthers care-imperialism, the first useful finding from Pratt’s research is that agents view caregivers from the Philippines as naturally more caring than their British counterparts. For instance, one agent states that their agency generally has trouble with Filipino caregivers’ style of discipline, because Filipinos are “kind and caring and loving and that sort of thing” (Pratt 164). Pratt describes this as a common perspective among care work agents: “[l]oving, patient and gentle with babies, several agents felt that Filipinas were ill equipped to instil values in older children” (164). In other words, Filipinos’ naturally caring dispositions are so central to their characters that they cannot always be strict when it might be necessary. This attitude is an excellent illustration of the impact of the feminization of the Global South: when Filipinos are associated with and confined to femininity through domestic labour policy, they are cast as naturally caring. Consequently, their affective labour — the ‘love, patience, and gentleness’ required for work as a caregiver — can be framed as a natural expression of their essential selves rather than a product of carefully honed skills. Thus, the market value of their labour is driven down to unjust rates. In other words, feminizing the Global South through domestic labour policy functions to create an exploitative trading dynamic in the exchange of caring labour between this region and Canada, in a pattern consistent with care-imperialism.

Pratt also shows how Filipino workers with comparable qualifications to their European or Canadian counterparts are consistently seen as lower-skilled. Beyond the fact that the LCP featured much higher training requirements for Filipinos compared to Europeans (Pratt 172), Filipino education was seen as inherently less valuable within the care work industry itself: “[Filipinas] have to have 2 years’ college to be equivalent to our high school,” said one care work agent (Pratt 172). According to this agent, a high-school-educated Filipino should be treated as lower-skilled than a high-school-educated Canadian solely because they are from the Philippines. Understanding this attitude through the theory of a North/South, male/female divide, we can see clear echoes of the attitudes that surround female-dominated industries. Just as work that is commonly performed by women is cast as inherently low-skilled, when the Global South is feminized, workers from this region can be treated as inherently lower-skilled — and thus lower-value. Hence, feminization of the Global South through domestic labour policy allows the Canadian economy to extract care work from this region at the lowest cost possible. Interpreting the vital importance of low-cost caring labour for the Canadian economy within the context of imperial history, it becomes possible to understand caregiver migration policy as establishing and preserving care-imperialism.

Conclusion

As Hochschild has identified, current care regimes mirror imperialism in several ways, from the coercive nature and foreign origin of the economic pressures that promote migration, to the exploitative conditions that migrant care workers face. To expose the mechanisms that bring care-imperialism about, it is valuable to understand feminization as an imperial tool. We can see how caring labour policy operates to cast the Global South as feminine in the failure of the Canadian government to provide adequate child care support; in its structural reliance on migrant labour to perform domestic labour in the wake of Canadian women’s entry into the paid workforce; and in the way that past caregiver migration policies confined care workers to the domestic realm. Just as early imperial efforts feminized the ‘New World’ in order to naturalize conquest, so too does this feminization enable the exploitative extraction of key resources. This feminized exploitation is evident in the way that Filipino care workers are viewed as inherently more loving and lower-skilled than their European counterparts, such that the labour market severely undervalues their caring labour.

Canada’s economy relies on care provided by Global South women — and relies on this care being supplied under exploitative conditions. In fact, given the state’s preoccupation with “the child” as a “site for anxieties about cultural purity and cultural transmission,” (Butler 238), future research should be devoted to evaluating the state’s response to the increasing involvement of Global South women in parenting, with a critical eye toward any evidence of white nationalism. However, what remains clear is that the state extracts care from the Global South under an exploitative dynamic it secures by employing domestic labour policy as a tool of feminization.

Notes

[1] For a crucial challenge to the narrative of “women entering the labour force in the late 20th-century,” see Beal (168), who calls attention to the fact that systemic racism forced Black women to work to support their families long before the rise of second-wave feminism. Still, as I show, the entry into the paid workforce of white women and more privileged women of colour had profound policy impacts, making it an important phenomenon to analyze in a study of the social consequences of migration law.

[2] This option is available under the Home Child Care Provider and Home Support Worker pilots introduced in 2019. However, it is important to note that some migrant activists have spoken out against room-and-board deductions (Migrant Workers Alliance for Change). Further, there is reason to doubt the degree of liberty that room-and-board budgets controlled by employers could afford. Nevertheless, for the purposes of studying the role of feminization in care-imperialism, exploring the issue of room-and-board deductions is not as valuable as analyzing why migrants were required to live with their employers in the first place.