The traditional preoccupation with what money is (means of payment, measure of value, etc.) distracts attention from what money does to provoke, to shape and to respond to the political economy of international labor migration. The consequence of this preoccupation is the tendency for studies of international labor migration to foreground the details of people moving from ‘home’ to foreign lands and the implied consequences for social reproduction, including those affecting households of origin. Thus, it is commonplace to find detailed studies that foreground details of the scale and scope of labourers on the move whilst taking for granted the role of money —ex ante (as capital) and ex poste (as remittances) —and treating it as more or less neutral in its social reproduction effects. However, as Postone (2015; 2017) and Lange (2019; 2020) and other critical theorists have argued, what money does is at least as important as what it is. In particular, this approach emphasises money’s powers to create new forms of domination, both impersonal as well as personal. Indeed if we assume that the economic engine of immigration is capital accumulation and further assume that wherever geo-located is messy, disorderly and fundamentally anarchic, it implies what we often observe: social disorder in the often unpredictable ‘geographical penumbra’ of its origination, its cessation and so forth. From this perspective, it also follows that social reproduction itself is disorderly and often imposes unpredictable subsistence constraints on households shaping the need for money as a solution to the problem imposed. The aim of this paper is to encourage interdisciplinary interest in what money does and explore ways of documenting its effects on the forms of domination that have emerged in the most recent decades of international labor migration. It will draw on perspectives which emphasise Marx’s critique of labor’s central role in capitalism’s hegemony to illuminate the forms of domination emergent with increases in international labour migration in recent decades.

For the past 30 years, the demand for domestic and care workers has increased enormously in middle- and upper-class households in the growing economies of the Global South. In addition to the predominant focus on South-North flows, scholarship has concentrated more on certain nationalities, such as Filipina migrants, on specific corridors of migration, and the ‘classic’ kafala system of labour regulation, especially prevalent in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the Middle East. Greater attention has also tended to be paid to ‘power relations between workers and employers, the absence of protective legislation, neglect by states, and exploitation by recruitment agents and employers’ (Deshingkar and Zeitlyn 2015) while overlooking migrant domestic workers’ agency and strategizing, individually and through informal and community networks.

This article seeks to advance the understanding of the transformations and complexities of South-South domestic worker migration that stems from empirical research in a multi-country study involving women migrant domestic workers of different nationalities. Most women participants were Ethiopians, Filipinas, Ghanaians and from the former Soviet Union who were interviewed in Turkey, Lebanon, the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), and Pakistan. The systems of recruitment and regulation of labour in these four countries are different. Turkey does not have a kafala system and many domestic workers from neighbouring countries enter independently, often through tourist visas, while Lebanon has an entrenched kafala system that has proved difficult to change. The other two countries have so far received little attention in the literature, and can be positioned at mid points of this spectrum. In Pakistan, the kafala system is not present, however migrant domestic workers are recruited via agencies. Conversely, in KRI while kafala is not explicitly referred to, workers are recruited through regulated agencies.

This paper frames the comparative analysis of migrant domestic work and workers in different contexts in terms of a configuration based on the state and its regulatory institutions for the governance of labour; employers, especially families; the institutions facilitating the global circulation and placement of migrant labour (brokers and recruitment agencies); and women migrant domestic workers’ ‘patriarchal bargain’ (Kandiyoti 1988), that is their agency and strategizing to effect change in their lives and which entails continuous gendered, racialised, sexualised, and cultural negotiations with oppressive systems.