This proposal examines the relationship between migration and care in the Colombian context, characterized by a significant presence of people from Venezuela (2.5 million as of February 2022) who intend to stay in the country. In response, Colombian authorities have emphasized transitioning from a humanitarian emergency response to focusing on the "socioeconomic integration" of the Venezuelan population. In line with this approach, the Temporary Protection Statute for Venezuelan Migrants (ETPV), in effect since 2021, provides valuable insights into migrants' profiles, service access, and the realization of their rights. This proposal specifically focuses on the employment status of migrant women, their challenges in accessing the formal labor market, particularly in the formal sector, and their involvement in both paid and unpaid care work. The relationship between migration and care work in Colombia exhibits distinct characteristics that set it apart from the prevailing perspective of "global care chains" (GCC) found in the relevant literature. According to the GCC theory, migrant women, sometimes lacking documentation and resources, often engage in paid care work, particularly within domestic settings, upon arrival in their host countries. While this narrative predominantly applies to south-north migration, it differs when considering the migration of Venezuelan women to Colombia – a south-south migration. This variance can be attributed to two primary factors: firstly, the presence of internal migrant women, who have assumed roles in domestic work due to displacement caused by armed conflict, and secondly, the context of south-south migration where arrival occurs in a nation marked by high inequality levels, impeding the local population from fully exercising their rights, including those related to employment and income generation. This study examines alternative relationships between migration and care, diverging from established literature narratives. Particularly, it delves into instances where Venezuelan migrant women find themselves in care-related sectors beyond domestic work, a domain that had previously been occupied by Colombian women who migrated within their own country's borders. Notwithstanding this distinction, a shared aspect among migrant women in Colombia – both Colombian citizens and Venezuelan arrivals – is the burden of unpaid care work, disproportionately affecting them. This burden creates obstacles to accessing the labor market, particularly impacting the most economically disadvantaged women.

This paper contrasts the intern(ation)al migration of domestic workers in China and Singapore, arguing that the literature on global care chains (GCCs) in transnational care migration is prone to methodological nationalism: theorizing from the standpoint of nation-states as the unit of analysis. The gendered and developmentalist ideology affecting migrant women in both cases stem from their respective historical legacies of industrial development, and go beyond nation-centric definitions of differences and borders, especially for China's household registration (hukou) regime. The central question we address is: How does the care service trade market reconfigure the division of domestic labor in China and Singapore, and by implication the life opportunities of domestic workers who migrate within and to these locations? Our research findings, from a scoping review of the literature, government policies, NGO reports, and news stories show that gender bias in service industries prevails, such that mobile women are seen as tradeable commodities and moral exceptions to the dominant society's ethical regime. Firstly, a similar logic of developmentalism conditions internal (China) and international (Singapore) migration. These revolve around ideologies of urban superiority, consumption, and modernization, expressed through a human quality (su zhi) and other Asias’ discourse respectively. Secondly, the care service trade intensifies the gendered contours of the woman-carer model amidst patriarchal relationships and economic dependency between core/urban and periphery/rural locations. Zoning in on privatized care work to contemplate our central question allows us to contrast feminized migration regimes that transcend the nation-state as a unit of analysis.

In urban or metropolitan centres of India, domestic workers are impoverished migrants from rural areas who have migrated with their families or alone as cities become spaces for their gainful employment. Their present-day figure stands large at 90 million within the unorganised and informal Indian labour markets. Migration has resulted in the creation of urban slums, squatter-settlements and camps surrounding middle- and upper-class residential areas where these migrants relocate for work. The often unknown or unexplored life histories of minority women has been given prominence in this study. Ethnographic data from Delhi which I shall present, attests to the creation of surplus labor, paving way for their exploitation, subordination and subservience to employers. Through this study&rsquo;s field site, of an urban slum/working-class neighbourhood ocated within an affluent colony in south Delhi, I identify the basis of shared struggles in context of how women, transitioning from rural to urban lifestyles, are seen constantly negotiating the spaces they move from and settle within. Data was collected over fourteen months, where I engaged with oral histories and visual ethnographies as qualitative research methods. Oral history as a methodological tool for has allowed this study to account for upheavals and changes experienced in social lives and interpret local histories of women workers. In-depth interviews, focused-group discussion and open-ended surveys with the women have facilitated in revealing subjectivities encountered in their lived realities. Domestic work is commonly understood as extensions of housework, nonetheless the worker is familiarized into doing tasks by her urban employers. This rhetorically question female domesticity, as she is re-trained into roles that society has historically believed to be hers. The paper will highlight class distinctions and social segregations as deliberate creations in a hierarchically stratified society. Further, the legal rights and dignity of domestic workers have largely been left out of the purview of existing national-level labour laws in India. I briefly trace the politico-legal trajectory in the development of various bills presented in the parliament on the recognition and protection of domestic workers. Ethnographic insights from the <em>basti </em>act as suggestive evidence, towards supplementing the goals and objectives that the many workers&rsquo; movements have been rallying around. The focus of the paper lies in highlighting the resilience affirmed by female domestic workers as a community, as they symbolise the interconnections of specific local cultures to that of urban or cosmopolitan cultures by attaching meanings to migration, occupation, and gendered labour.