Extended Summary

In order to understand migration movements within and between countries, it is necessary to look at the dynamics of capitalist development. In the process of establishing the global dominance of capitalism as a regime of production and accumulation in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is a common practice for capitalist countries in the center to meet their labour needs in various sectors and professions through migrant labour from peripheral countries. The demand for labour is the result of the expansionist nature of the capitalist accumulation process and the desire of employers to keep labour costs low. The gender dimension of labour demand has long been a neglected topic in migration research.

This article examines women’s labour migration to Western and Southern European countries since the 1950s in three historical periods based on an extensive literature review. Although these periods are not strictly separated from each other, discussing and defining a period with its prominent features makes it easier to grasp the uninterrupted labour migration process.

The first period is the period following the Second World War and lasting until the mid-1970s. In this period, especially due to the expansion of capitalist production, cheap labour was needed for unskilled jobs in the manufacturing industry, mining, services and agriculture. There were many women among the workers brought from neighboring countries, and women worked in the manufacturing industry in branches such as food, textile-garment, electrotechnics, in the services sector, especially in hotel-restaurants, and in households in jobs that the local labour force did not want to work. In mainstream social science research, the subject of labour migration is mainly men, and women are assumed to participate in migration movements as family members who follow men’s decisions and follow them from behind. The literature that ignores migrant women workers in this period and focuses only on women who came within the scope of family reunification is based on stereotypes that present migrant women as unproductive, illiterate, isolated, wives and mothers with many children dependent on their husbands or families. In the following years, the questionable findings of some studies, which were generalized, were partially weakened by a critical perspective, largely through the research of feminist social scientists who experienced migration themselves.

The second period that began after the 1973 economic crisis is the period of neoliberal restructuring of capitalism. In this period, when labour recruitment was stopped and legal immigration channels were closed due to the economic crisis, the need for labour in factories decreased, while the need for migrant women labour in the service sector, especially in care services, began to increase. Especially with the expansion of the services sector and the creation of new employment opportunities for the native female labour force, the increasing participation of women in employment has made it more difficult to meet care work within the household. Another development was the increasing share of the elderly in the total population as a result of the sociodemographic transformation in Western countries with the increase in life expectancy and the slowdown in the rate of population growth due to declining fertility rates of women. The solution to the reproduction crisis, in other words, the solution to the care deficit, is the employment of migrant women in domestic and care work. As a result, the demand for migrant women workers increased and the trend defined as the “feminization of migration” emerged.

The third period is after 2000 and extends to the present day. Since the 2000s, cognitive capitalism has become a widely used concept to describe the neoliberal global economy. While technical knowledge and engineering activities have always been important in the capitalist production process, after the 1980s, the use of computers and the dissemination of information through network connections facilitated global collaborations and increased the emphasis on the importance of information. In this period, migration of highly skilled labour came to the fore in line with the needs of cognitive capitalism. Feminist social scientists discussing the impact of the knowledge economy in terms of gender inequalities point out that women in higher education generally study in the social and administrative sciences and health, and are less likely to be among the highly skilled in the fields of the sciences and engineering. On the other hand, as a result of sociodemographic factors such as the shrinking working age population in European countries and the aging of the population, the demand for health professionals, especially nurses and doctors, is increasing not only in household care services but also in the health sector. In the process of meeting the serious labour shortage that arises, it is observed that there is a high proportion of women among those who migrate from neighbouring or other developing countries.

In the coming period, developed countries will encourage the migration of highly skilled labour, especially in the science, engineering, information and communication sectors, in line with the economic growth and profit-making goals of cognitive capitalism. Immigration gates will be kept open for the highly skilled, and the migration of groups such as doctors, nurses, etc. will also be encouraged. However, if the need for migrant women working in long-term care services, which is an important component of health services, is not included in migration policies because they are considered “unskilled” labour, domestic and care workers will continue to be employed in unprotected and precarious forms.