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Assignment 10

In “Global Care Crisis: A Problem of Capital, Care Chains, or Commons?” Arlie Hochschild, Lise Widding Isaksen, and Sambasivan Uma Davi talk about the various concepts surrounding migration, including some of its hidden aspects. First, they mention that the number of female migrants is increasing compared to male migrants, most of them being young mothers of multiple children. This influences places where the female population is migrating out to the North to look for jobs, causing a decrease in the working population in the South. The women who choose to migrate must leave her family, which has several consequences. The mothers must leave behind their children in the care of her husband, grandparents, relatives, and sometimes neighbors. This impacts the child in such that they must grow up without the special love and connection that only mothers can provide. They may be more economically stable than their peers but will feel left out and envious of those who live with their mothers. Moreover, they can start doubting whether their parents really love them or not, and wonder whether the money and gifts they are receiving from their migrant mothers really represent love or just commitment. In such ways, children are very much affected by having to live apart from their migrant mothers. In the case of the mother herself, the act of leaving her place in a community deprives her family and the community of the caring and emotional relational exchanges that would have occurred had she not left. There is the challenge of weighing the benefit of the monetary stability and sustaining important relationships. “The Commons” represents a community that is bonded through the exchange of favors and the resulting growth in trust and dependence of one another. This is a healthy social development that is being disrupted through the increase in female migration, because it keeps the mothers away from being involved with the family and community, at least to the degree that would have occurred had she not left to earn money. Such are the hidden costs of being mothers who migrate to support and raise up her family.