Preface to the 2007 Edition

      THE DOMESTIC GOES GLOBAL

      Can we conceive of globalization without migrant domestic workers? In the preface to the first edition of this book, I argued that the work of Mexican and Central American domestic workers was critical to keeping afloat the culture and the economy of Los Angeles, and more generally, the United States. I still think this is true. But as I look back now, I am struck by the pervasiveness of this pattern around the globe. Women from countries as varied as Peru, the Philippines, Moldavia, Eritrea, and Indonesia are leaving their families, communities, and countries to migrate thousands of miles away to work in the new worldwide growth industry: paid domestic work.

      Paid domestic workers in the United States have historically been disregarded and treated as though they were invisible in the homes where they work. So it is too with migrant domestic workers on the global scene. Both the celebrants and critics of globalization have rarely paused to consider the importance of migrant paid domestic workers. Not only were the modernization theorists wrong in prematurely predicting the demise of paid domestic work in modern societies, but neither they nor the globalization theorists who followed them predicted or acknowledged the role of migrant domestic workers in the era of globalization and postindustrial societies. I think the reason they have not paid attention is relatively simple: the cleaning and caring that takes place in private homes is seen as women's work. For many observers, shipping containers, overseas factories, and international banking are the stuff of globalization. But a group of policy makers and academics, most of them working from a feminist perspective, has been paying ample attention to the recent expansion and dispersal of transnational migrant domestic workers. A plethora of recent research—a selected list of which appears at the end of this preface—illuminates the presence of foreign domestic workers in Europe, the Gulf States of the Middle East, Israel, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, and in Canada and the United States. Meanwhile, particular nations around the globe have emerged as the places producing migrant domestic workers. The domestics' countries of origin are diverse, as are the circumstances situating their migration and domestic employment, but they share a status as the new cleaners and caregivers of the twenty-first century

      We live in the age of migration. Around the world, at least 185 million people, and perhaps as many as 200 million, reside in countries other than those where they were born. Why are so many people leaving their countries of origin? The legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, civil wars, imperial wars, uneven development, and the contemporary shock effects of neoliberalism and political shifts have laid the structure for today's global migration. Meanwhile, innovations in technology, particularly in transportation