All over the globe, women and men with middle and high incomes hire migrant workers in the private sphere of care. Women from Mexico and Central America leave to work for double-income families in the US; Indonesian women leave for economically more prosperous regions in Asia and the Arab countries; women from Sri Lanka migrate to Greece and Southern Europe, where quota systems have been introduced, especially for care workers. Women from Eastern Europe migrate to Germany, France, Italy, the US and Canada. The Philippines systematically developed the export of care and domestic workers. Here a substantial part of the country's migration industry focuses on often well-educated women leaving for care and domestic work abroad. The country, some call it a migrant nursery, ‘supplies’ about 160 countries all over the world with domestic workers (see Aguilar Jr, 2002). In Asia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka are also considered to be ‘supply’ countries. High and middle-income states in Asia, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, China and Malaysia, as well as the Gulf states, employ thousands of women migrants as domestic workers (Parrenas, 2003). In Europe, too, care work is increasingly migrant work.

There are differences in government policies toward women going abroad to work as domestic workers, ranging from liberal or encouraging systems (Philippines) to systems banning the outmigration of female workers (Bangladesh and Pakistan). Within Europe a variety of regulations concerning migrant work exists among the various countries. This chapter asks why care work is rapidly becoming migrant work in Europe, too – irrespective of different national labour market regulations and care arrangements in the individual countries. It is argued that global migrations follow existing regional hierarchies. Migrations further depend on regulations at extremely different geographic scales. Two intertwined trends add to the increase of migrant workers in the field of care and domestic work. First is the growing feminisation of migration on the global scale. The first part of this chapter presents the salient features in this respect by giving a rough overview of numbers and by presenting in a nutshell the existing theoretical lines of thinking on the impact of gender in the migration debate.