Growing Up With Migration: Shifting Roles and Responsibilities of Transnational Families of Ukrainian Care Workers in Italy

Abstract

While migration to Italy constitutes only the second largest migration stream from Ukraine, it has surpassed in volume the migration flows to Russia, Czech Republic, and Poland in terms of its visibility. Media and political discourses, academics and civic organizations, as well as in the Ukrainian vernacular, often refer to it as “mothers’ migration.” Migration to Italy gained much publicity due to its particular gender and age composition; out of 195,000 officially registered Ukrainians in Italy, 83 percent are women, and the majority between 41 and 60 years of age.² This mostly female migratory flow became framed in rigid national discourses about purity, control over sexuality, and normative family standards in which a mother is the main provider of care for the whole family, while men provide the economic support. Such norms often stigmatize women who choose to migrate and provide care and financial support from a distance (Solari 2008; Vianello 2009; Tolstokorova 2010; Hrycak 2011; Tyldum (forthcoming)). Such better or worse intentioned discourses deny a great variety of lived practices of mothering at a distance and fail to address the complexity of the balancing roles of a mother who cares about her family by providing paid care work in other families’ homes.

Look at who has gone to work in Italy. Its mothers! It’s the maternal migration. What is a family without a mother?! What kind of childhood can a child have without a mother? Ukraine will have to face the consequences of this migration years from now, when all those children who are now separated from their mothers will grow up. [Interview with a Ukrainian labor migrant who returned from Italy, 2009]¹