A recent New Yorker cover, “A Mother’s Work: A Glimpse into the Lives of New York’s Caretakers,” sparked heated discussion on social media for its striking portrayal of migrant women’s realities. The image depicts two women of color caring for white children on a playground. One woman, cradling a baby, shows her colleague a photo of a young graduate on her phone, likely her own child, celebrating a milestone she could not witness. This poignant illustration lays bare the invisible labor at the heart of the global care economy. In these care chains, women from low-income countries leave their families behind to provide care and comfort to wealthier households, while their own children are often raised by relatives or hired caregivers back home. Behind every remittance sent across borders lies the sacrifices these women make, which keep families both near and far afloat.

While gendered labor has been structured around care of the upper-class family structure since chattel slavery and colonialism, in the postindustrial era and subsequent capitalist boom of society, the decline in publicly funded social services and the privatization of care have reshaped household responsibilities, shifting caregiving from a public good to a market-driven service. While second-wave feminism in the 1960s fought for women’s rights in the workplace, such as the right to equal pay, mainstream feminism often centered the struggles of middle-class white women—those discouraged from working outside the home—while overlooking the realities of women of color and migrant women. Black women, in particular, never left the workforce of maternal care in the afterlife of slavery, continuing to work multiple jobs, including domestic labor, to support themselves and their families, without paid leave and affordable childcare.

In response to these exclusions, socialist feminist economists examined the link between the gendered division of labor and neoliberalism, birthing critical concepts such as commodification and care, social reproduction (which studies the trading of care as a marketable good), and gender-segregated labor markets within and across countries as a result of these analyses. In many countries, throughout the Global North and recently the Middle East, the difficulties of middle-class women combining work and caring responsibilities have not resulted in men’s increased care responsibilities. Instead, this crisis of caring has led to a growing demand for low-cost domestic and care workers, many of whom are migrant women from poorer countries, and oftentimes contributes to a distinctly racialized social hierarchy. This system of interconnected caregiving across borders has been dubbed by feminist economists as “the global care chain” as a framework to analyze this extractive system of the gendered division of labor.

Under a global capitalist system, care work—ranging from jobs in private homes to social care institutions such as care homes and hospitals—is often viewed as an extension of femininity rather than a skilled profession. This devaluation is reinforced by the historical exclusion of domestic workers from labor rights movements. For instance, in the United States, the 1935 National Labor Relations Act guaranteed workers the right to unionize but explicitly excluded domestic and agricultural workers, sectors dominated by Black women, leaving them without collective bargaining rights.

This exploitative structure continues to shape the realities of migrant women who are preferred to their non-migrant counterparts as they work for longer hours for significantly lower wages, subsequently experiencing double discrimination as both migrants and women. Domestic workers lack the same legal protections as other workers, including minimum wage guarantees. Their residency is tied to their employers, granting bosses unchecked power. Many migrant women in the Middle East report verbal and physical abuse, sexual violence, starvation, and in extreme cases, murder. Though supposedly reformed in 2021, recent events in Lebanon have shown that little has changed.

Among the exodus of migrant workers stranded in Lebanon during Israel’s bombing, one thing stood out: The majority were not only women but also overwhelmingly workers from Kenya, Ethiopia, and the Philippines, neglected under the government-endorsed kafala migration system, widely condemned as modern-day slavery. Numerous videos on social media show these women pleading for help, trapped in a conflict zone, abandoned by their employers, and excluded from shelters due to racism. Their plight is not anecdotal; it is a reality that African labor migration has increasingly taken on a female face, while migration remains highly dangerous.

Statistics show that women make up nearly half of African migration figures, reaching 49 percent, and in some regions, such as East Africa, surpassing male migration. Women make up the majority of the returnees from the Middle East, as 78 percent of women from the 30,000 nationals repatriated to Africa in the last nine years. These trends raise urgent questions about the structural forces driving the feminization of labor migration from Africa and the unique and specific vulnerabilities that women migrants face, such as abuse and maltreatment.

Given the documented mass exploitation, a close read of push-pull theories of migration is critical in understanding the structural factors influencing why African women are increasingly migrating abroad. While the care economy in destination countries pulls women in, the lack of economic opportunities at home—such as unemployment, poor governance, and security-related issues—push them out. In Ethiopia, for example, women face limited formal employment opportunities, high unemployment rates, and gendered labor markets; these system barriers reflect why women’s domestic labor force participation (57 percent) is significantly lower than men’s (81 percent). Pull factors such as better wages, health care, and education opportunities for their children make migration an attractive, albeit risky, option. This is why some choice-constrained domestic workers in Lebanon opt to stay even if provided with the means to leave—the better quality of life, including access to free health care and education, that the state offers their children in comparison to their home countries ultimately outweighs the significant human rights abuses inherent in remaining.

Despite the increasing feminization of migration, there remains a critical lack of nuanced and gender-sensitive knowledge, research, and policies related to women migrants. This has resulted in women migrants being characterized in harmful binaries. On the one hand, these women are “heroes,” reliable remittance senders, empowering themselves through financial independence, lifting their families out of poverty, and fueling domestic economies. For instance, Ethiopian domestic workers generate billions in remittances annually, making labor migration a key source of foreign revenue. Governments, eager to capitalize on migrant remittances, aggressively pursue bilateral agreements with European and Middle Eastern states, often without proper protections for workers. One Ethiopian domestic worker put it bluntly: “We are like oil to our government.” This myopic framing, enabled by state forces, masks the daily precarity these women endure under exploitative migration governance systems.

On the other hand, migrant women are reduced to powerless “victims,” seen as passive subjects in need of state intervention to protect them from trafficking and exploitation. While it is true that women migrants face high risks, this narrative erases their agency. Migration choices are highly gendered—African women are more likely to move to the Middle East, while men predominantly migrate within Africa. Instead of recognizing migrant women as individuals with rights, states impose restrictive policies under the guise of protection, forcing them toward irregular and more dangerous migration routes, increasing their vulnerability to trafficking and abuse.

In April 2023, Ethiopia signed a bilateral agreement with Lebanon to regulate employment and prevent trafficking, lifting a decade-long ban on labor migration. Similarly, trade union federations from Kenya and Lebanon signed a memorandum of understanding to strengthen recruitment agency regulations. But what good are these agreements when migrant workers remain excluded from domestic labor laws and treated as second-class citizens?

Understanding these dynamics is crucial to recognizing why policies and interventions meant to protect or empower women migrants consistently fail. The recent stranding of migrant workers in Lebanon, abandoned by both their host and home countries, exposes the limitations of legal frameworks, human rights mechanisms, and international agreements in ensuring migrant women’s safety. Ultimately, it wasn’t the international community or institutions like the International Labor Organization (ILO), backed by millions in funding, that rescued these women when their governments failed. It was grassroots organizers, supported by public donations, who brought them home safely.

While short-term solutions like disaggregating migration data by sex and improving monitoring and enforcement may help, there needs to be a radical shift in investment in domestic opportunities. If governments focus on investing in poverty alleviation, public education, and basic income, many women would not be forced to seek work abroad. Instead, countries like Ethiopia and Kenya treat labor migration as a bandage for unemployment, directly marketing it to women, as the case of an Ethiopian woman who was told by the government that migrating was a “quicker path to success in life than school.” Hence, the structures driving unemployment in the first place, including poor governance and poverty, remain in place.

This is why there is a clear need for a gendered analysis of migration. Not just to highlight the unique vulnerabilities migrant women face but to expose the hidden sacrifices behind their labor, which sustains families across continents while their own families endure their absence. As long as states treat labor migration as an easy fix for unemployment, women will continue to fill gaps in the global economy while suffering its worst abuses. The question is not just how to make migration safer for women but how to create a world where they no longer feel forced to leave at all.