Introduction

The increase in life expectancy is leading to growing numbers of frail older people worldwide, while the potential availability of family and informal care resources – especially from older people's children – is dramatically declining in Europe, due to lower fertility rates, rising labour market participation by women and higher shares of lone-elderly households (OECD, 2005a). Providing appropriate longterm care to large numbers of disabled, very old people therefore represents an increasing challenge to all welfare states, particularly in the light of the preference granted by official policies, in Europe as elsewhere, to arrangements promoting ‘ageing in place’, by enhancing tailor-made home and community care services, and moving away from institutional care (European Commission, 2008). A solution that is increasingly being adopted to tackle this challenge is based on the employment of migrant care workers, a discreet and to a large extent invisible trend that is giving rise to a sort of ‘ethnic segmentation’ of the elder care sector across Europe (Lamura, 2013). Italy is one of the countries where this phenomenon has become most widespread. Due to the overlapping of increased female employment, generous cash-for-care schemes and a still ‘familistic’ approach to elder care, in the last decade an increasing number of Italian families have indeed opted to privately employ a migrant care worker, often on a live-in basis, in order to provide support to their frail older family members. In this chapter, after a short introduction on the global and European situation, a more in-depth overview of the main trends currently affecting the demand and supply of elder care in Italy is provided, including an outline of the motivations driving Italian families to employ migrant care workers as well as of the difficulties experienced by migrant workers themselves. The conclusion analyses the opportunities and challenges for receiving as well as sending countries, in an attempt to set an, albeit provisional, agenda for future research, policy and practice in this still largely neglected area.

Migrant care work in ageing societies: the phenomenon in a global and Mediterranean perspective

One of the major concerns resulting from population ageing is that expenditure to provide ‘formal’ long-term care services (services that are delivered by public, profit or non-profit organisations to dependent, mainly older, people requiring continuous assistance) are expected to increase worldwide (Oliveira Martins and de la Maisonneuve, 2006)