Instituto de Ciências Sociais

Universidade de Lisboa www.ics.ul.pt

Working Papers

Immigrant Families: Managing Work and Care for Young Children

Karin Wall and José São José Instituto de Ciências Sociais, University of Lisbon

WP 2-04 March 2004

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Introduction One of the most significant changes in European societies over the past two decades is the increase in and diversification of immigration. Contrary to expectations in the seventies, when the intense labour migration movement of the sixties began to slow down and the recruitment of new immigrants became more restrictive, migrant inflows increased again during the eighties and nineties, bringing into Western European countries not only unskilled workers to satisfy specific labour market needs but also an increasing number of asylum seekers, family reunion migrants, highly qualified workers and illegal migrants (King, 1993; Castles et al, 1998). Reflecting this increase in immigration, the stock of foreign population in Europe rose strongly and by the end of the nineties roughly 5% of the European population was composed of foreigners (Salt, 2000). The highest percentages are to be found in Switzerland (20%), Luxembourg (37%), Austria (9%), Germany (9%) or Belgium 8%) but even countries with low percentages, such as Italy (2.2%), Finland (1.8%) or Portugal (1.9%), have recorded sharp increases in the foreign population over the past decade1. Understanding the impact of immigration has therefore been one of the major tasks of migration studies. The social processes related to this impact have generally been conceptualised in terms of assimilation, integration and ethnicity (Dewitte, 1999; Boucher, 2000; Haug, 2000). The concept of assimilation (literally the process of becoming alike) points to the loss of individual and collective characteristics - immigrants are absorbed or assimilated by the host country - whereas the concept of integration underlines the idea of mutual acculturation, a long-term process in the course of which migrant communities are important due to their protective function as transition spaces (Fernández de la Hoz, 2002, Nauck, 1989). The concept of ethnicity focuses on the contrasts and similarities between the migrant populations and the majority population group (Machado, 1999; Kozakai, 2000). It proposes an assessment of features such as language, religion, values and position in the labour market in order to determine the type or degree of ethnicity of the migrant population. Ethnicity can be seen to be stronger when migrants belong to a population group which is strongly contrasted – socially, culturally and racially – with the majority of the population. In such a situation ethnic identity is stronger than other elements of identity and plays a leading role in structuring social practices and perceptions (Machado, 1999:55) Our main concern in this article is with the work and family lives of immigrant families. By focusing on a very specific but crucial problem in family life - how to manage work and caring responsibilities for young children - our aim is to identify the strategies adopted by immigrant families in order to organize work and family life. From a broader perspective, however, we can say that analysis of the work/life strategies of families will give us a privileged insight into the integration process of immigrant families in the receiving societies. If, as we know, immigrants face strong pressures arising from work (long working hours, atypical timetables), from economic difficulties, from racial and social discrimination and from contrasting cultural and religious values, then the reconciliation of work and family life is likely to be a sensitive point revealing the 1 Stock of foreign population as a percentage of total population in each country, for 2001 or latest data available (Salt, 2000 and Council of Europe, 2001).

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specific tensions and vulnerabilities of the position of immigrant families in the receiving societies. How do immigrant families deal with these patterns of “vulnerability” and to what extent does the latter hinder accessibility to the social care models of the host society? On the other hand, what are the main factors which influence coping strategies? Is the reconciliation of care and paid work strongly shaped by the family’s social position and its migration pattern? Or is it also influenced by the family’s gender role preferences which may depend on ethnic identities and values? And what about the care support systems at a national level, do they seem to make a difference? To explore these issues, our analytical framework looked at the processes of social care and work/life balance as well as those related to migration. With regard to the first, our primary focus is on social care practices, broadly defined as the assistance and surveillance provided by paid or unpaid, professional or non-professional carers (within the public or the private sphere) in order to help children or adults in their daily lives and activities (Daly and Lewis, 1998; Kroger, 2001). These practices are embedded in work/life patterns whereby families develop specific strategies to manage work and caring responsibilities (Drew et al. 1998, Hattery, 2001, Garey, 1999, Crompton, 1999; Dulk et al., 1999). The latter may include cutting back on working hours, adapting parents’ work schedules or delegating care to professional and informal carers. “Reconciliation” and “balancing” are the concepts currently used to analyse this process. They seem to imply that some form of conciliation or equilibrium between the two spheres is always achieved, and this represents an analytical drawback. In fact, one of the important issues in this paper may be to question the idea that receiving societies always develop accessibility to a “reconciliation” model in which the State, the family and the private and voluntary sectors come together to provide adequate care. Reconciliation of work and caring may not always be possible and this may lead to alternative arrangements such as taking children to work or leaving them to fend for themselves. Therefore, although we shall also sometimes use these concepts in our work, in general we prefer the rougher and more neutral concept of “managing” work and family life (Hantrais, 1990). Work/family strategies in the receiving society must also be seen in the context of migration. Reasons for migration, social integration in the receiving society and ethnic characteristics may vary considerably and this will have an impact on work and family life. Analysis of families’ migration trajectories and the nature and duration of their migration project allowed us to identify different migration patterns2 in our study of immigrant families. The main ones are labour or worker migration (unskilled, long-term), student migration, highly qualified professional migration, asylum seeker migration, returnee migration and “mixed marriage” migration (where an immigrant woman migrates in order to marry a national from the host society). One of the key aims of our analysis will be to see if these different types of migration patterns are linked to certain types of work/care strategies. In this article we will draw upon the results of a qualitative research project which sought to understand the work/family balance of immigrant families in five countries (Finland, France; Italy, Portugal and the UK). One segment of the sample consisted of 97

2 Migration patterns may be described and identified on the basis of some of the following dimensions: meanings of/reasons for migration, migration trajectory, migration project, duration of stay or generation in the receiving country (first/second), position in the social structure of the host society.

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immigrant families with young children (aged 10 or less) and working parents (part-time or full-time3); it included couples with children as well as some lone parents. From the point of view of migration, however, the national samples within this larger sample of working parents with young children (all legal residents in the host country) represent many different types of migration patterns as well as sending countries. This makes it difficult to build in a strictly comparative perspective across the five national samples. But it allows us, nevertheless, to carry out an exploratory qualitative analysis4 which examines the specific constraints faced by immigrant families as well as the main linkages between some contextual variables, such as migration patterns, ethnicity, or social networks, and the work/care strategies of immigrant families. In order to deal with the diversity of the national samples we will begin by analysing the work/care strategies within each country. In the process we will seek to identify and explain, on the basis of a detailed description of some typical “cases”, what relationships arise between certain types of immigrant families, patterns of vulnerability and specific strategies for managing work and care. Against this background of case-types, we will then try to understand and discuss some of the main factors involved in shaping work/care strategies. In all countries the families to be interviewed were collected through a variety of sources: immigrant associations, social care services, personal networks, social workers, organizations employing immigrant workers. In-depth interviews were carried out on the basis of a semi-structured interview guide which included the following main themes: family life course (family life in the sending country, family and marital trajectories); the story of migration (reasons to emigrate, migration trajectory, problems on arrival, integration in the host society); work and life in the host country; caring for children in the host country (caring obligations, typical weekday of the child, family division of work and care, support networks, main problems, gaps and tensions); the effects of caring (on professional work, on the personal health of family members). Immigrant families in France The French sample of 19 families (16 couples with children and 3 lone parents) was collected in Rennes and comprises some diversity with regard to countries of origin, migration patterns and social position of immigrant families. All the immigrants are of African origin, but some come from the Mahgreb and others from West or Central Africa. Six couples are mixed Franco-African couples and the African partners come from Tunisia, Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal. The other families come from three regions of Africa, the Mahgreb, West Africa (Mauritania, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Mali) and Central Africa (The Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo). Differentiation is strongest, however, from the point of view of the migratory pattern: some came seeking political asylum, many arrived as students, others came to marry a French husband, only one came as an unskilled labour migrant. Although all of them may be considered first-generation migrants, the social position of these couples differs quite

3 The sample also includes a few families where the mother is in training or studying for a PhD. 4 Analysis was carried out on the basis of 63 fully-transcribed interviews (including some Finnish interviews translated into English), synopses of all interviews and five national reports (Zechner, 2002; Trifiletti et al, 2002; Martin at al., 2002; Hadlow et al., 2002; Wall et al., 2002). For references on immigration, specific migrant communities and social care in each country, see these national reports.

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strongly: some men, mostly French nationals in mixed couple families, are qualified professionals or managers, others are clerical workers and some are employees in the service or industrial sectors. Finally, in relation to the family division of paid work, we have a mixed profile: the dual earner model (both working full-time) appears alongside many cases of the “attenuated” male breadwinner model (the father working full-time, the mother part-time). Table 1 sets out the main work/care strategies of these families. The most common one is what we called the “mother-centered” strategy, where mothers cut back on their working hours and organize their work around the children’s nursery/school timetables. Many women in these families did not work at all when the children were below age three and now they have part-time jobs or training courses which enable them to be “available” for children after school and on Wednesdays. Liliane, for example, works as a nursing auxiliary from 5 to 8 a.m. so that she can care for her one-year old at home and be available for her other school children during the day (her husband is a plumber, and they are asylum seekers from Zaire). Many of these mothers are clearly what we might call “voluntary” stay-at-home mothers or part-time workers. They portray mother- centeredness as an option which addresses their identities as women and the caring needs of children. “It’s the woman who raises her children, I think this is good for the child, the child needs a mummy more than a daddy (…) You, you are with your child…and it’s better if you yourself look after your children” (Amok, Mali, no professional qualifications, low income family) In some cases, however, the emphasis is on constraint rather than choice. The involuntary component is expressed through nostalgic recollections of rural African women who take their children to work, the desire to train in order to find well-paid full-time employment and many statements referring to the fact that they are looking for new jobs. Women who already had some qualifications or held down a reasonably good job in the sending country are more likely to have “constrained” mother-centered strategies. “And now, since October, I’ve started on a course. I’m training to be a nursing helper (…) Because my basic training is as a short-hand typist. But with that, it’s impossible to find work here. So first I improved my schooling level. Then in 1999 I was pregnant…And then in 2001 I decided to become a nursing helper. And now, at the end of March, I will start looking for a job (Dielika, from Mali, worked irregularly as a waitress before pregnancy, child two years old and in a crèche since D. started her training, anxious about how she will manage her work schedule with the crèche timetable and in the holidays when she starts working). Table 1. Work/care strategies in immigrant families (France) Managing work and care through mother-centeredness

• Mother-centered care(10 cases) Managing work and care through extensive delegation

• Extensive formal care (4 cases) Managing work and care through negotiation within the family

• Shared parental care (2 cases) • Shared familial care (1 case)

Managing work and care through child negligence • Standard formal care and self care (1 case) • Extensive formal care and self-care (1 case)

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Reconciling work and care through negotiation within the family or extensive delegation are two other possible strategies. In the former strategy, work/care balance is achieved through the negotiated, mutual adjustment of couples’ (or of family members’) working hours and caring responsibilities. It may take shape in different types of care arrangements. “Shared parental care” is an arrangement which relies on the sequencing of care provided by both members of the couple whereas “shared familial care” involves several members of the family. Ursule and her husband (from the Congo, both former students in France) are a good example of this strategy. They have three children of their own (aged 8, 3 and 9 months) and a step-daughter aged 15. Ursule works as a night nurse and her husband, a teacher, has a daytime schedule and is at home in the evening and at night; the stepdaughter is essential to care for the children in the early morning after father has left home and before mother arrives at 7.30 a.m. This reliance on an older child is considered by the interviewees as a common strategy in African families. Some of them looked after young children when they themselves were adolescents and frequent references are made to help provided by other women living in the same household. The second strategy (extensive delegation) implies handing over care responsibilities for children to carers who look after them for long periods of time. Delegation based on informal carers (grand-mother, childminder or a living-in family member) is usually low-cost and offers flexible and regular support, while delegation based on formal care services has to rely on services with very long opening hours (afternoon and homework clubs, school day care, holiday centres and so forth, usually requiring some payment) This is how Lydie and her husband, both working full-time (8-5 pm) balance work and care for three children aged 6, 3 and 14 months. The children are in formal care institutions from 7.30 am to 5.30/6pm every day of the week, including Wednesdays. The couple live in a low-rent apartment, are not very well off and often send money to their families in the Congo. Lydie arrived in 1994, to join her husband who came as a post-graduate student but was only able to apply for training and a job in 1997 after getting her residence permit; she stayed at home for six months when her last son was born and then put him in a day care centre. The last strategy - managing work and care through child negligence – relates to situations where children are left alone at home (self-care) or are looked after by other young children (aged ten or less)5. In the French immigrant families, this strategy occurs in two lone parent families with low incomes, long working hours and no family support. Julia is a lone parent who arrived in France as an asylum seeker and has a child of 6. She is in training during the day and works an evening shift in cleaning services from 6 to 8.30 pm. Her little girl is in formal care until 5.30, than comes home on her own (she has a key) and waits for her mother. Julia mentions neighbours who sometimes keep an eye on her daughter but she also says that the child usually stays on her own. Said, on the other hand, is an unskilled labour migrant and now works in a warehouse handling stores. He is divorced, his partner lives far away and his income (3700F) is limited notwithstanding a heavy work timetable starting at 7 am. This makes it impossible for him to be there for his 9 year old son in the morning before he goes to school, in the afternoon at 4.30 or on Wednesdays (the activity centre is considered to be too 5 Self-care in this article thus refers to situations where young children aged ten or below age ten are left on their own for certain periods of time.

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expensive). Said rings to see if everything is all right. In summary, Said’s problems in managing work and care seem to be closely linked not only to his situation as a labour migrant but also to his position as a lone parent. Difficulties are related, on the one hand, to the type of job (manual, low paid, with long and atypical working hours) and, on the other hand, to isolation as a lone parent who receives no support from his ex-partner or other relatives. Going beyond this description of work/care strategies implies looking at variables such as immigration history or family trajectories which might shape and explain certain types of work/care strategies. In the case of the immigrant families in Rennes, we were able to identify three distinctive patterns of migration which are strongly linked to specific ways of managing work and care for young children. In the mixed marriage migration pattern a foreign wife comes to live and build a family in France, her husband’s country of origin. Usually the couple meets in Africa, either marries there and returns together or then gets married in the latter after some to-ing and fro-ing between the two countries. In this migration pattern, immigration and marriage weave into each other and may be regarded as the two interlocking features which shape family life and social care. The African women who immigrated to marry a French national are more family-orientated (this was the reason for migration), give high priority to caring for young children and adopt a work/care strategy which stresses the role of the mother as the main carer. This strategy is influenced not only by family values but also by the immigrant mother’s marginal position inside marriage and in relation to the labour market of the receiving country: the husband has his job, is the main breadwinner and is socially integrated whereas the wife’s integration derives from the husband’s status, creating an initial sense of belonging to the host society but also of personal loneliness and social isolation (“having no outside” as one immigrant woman put it). Motherhood intervenes fairly early on and typically leads to a mother-centered strategy due to the wife’s weak or non-existent breadwinner role. These women are more protected from economic difficulties, from the total absence of kin networks (which exist on the husband’s side) and the downward mobility of many refugee couples but they are constrained to a certain gender role inside the family which reinforces a traditional gender socialization. However, as the children get older, many of them seek to alter their position and adopt new ways of combining employment and mothering. From this point of view, they are eager to take up the opportunities (for training, employment, care provision) which the receiving society, France in this case, offers them. Migration patterns in which one or both members of the couples immigrated as students shape different work/care strategies. In couples where both have studied in France, the members of the couple are not only fairly well integrated culturally and socially but also have more similar positions/qualifications with regard to the labour market and the breadwinner role. The meanings and forms of work/care management thus shift toward strategies that are much closer to the “reconciliation” social care model of the receiving society: taking turns to be more available for caring (negotiation), both working full-time and devolving care to many types of formal institutions (extensive delegation), buying in childminders to fill in the gaps. In some situations these are combined with a solution used by working women in the sending societies - a family member, such as a sister or a cousin – who lives in the household and lends a hand in caring and household tasks. Patricia and Norbert are quite a typical example of this student migration pattern. They

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are both Congolese and arrived in France as students. He arrived to continue his law studies (master’s degree), she arrived to do a master’s degree. They met in France, started living together and had their first child when Patricia was still finishing her degree (so the child went to a day care centre as a baby and stayed there when Patricia started working full-time a year later) At present they are both working full-time. Patricia in a telemarketing company and her husband in a security service in a large company. Their son is nearly four and goes to pre-school as well as the school day care centre. As Norbert works in shifts, he sometimes goes to fetch the child from school if he is on an evening shift. He also participates in household tasks. Patricia and Norbert do not have any close relatives living nearby and think of themselves as rather “child-centered”. Asylum seeker families, as unskilled labour migrants, seem to have more problems in organizing work and care. It is important to underline two main features related to this pattern of migration. First, migration in these families “happens” nearly always at a later stage in the family life course. Unlike the students who are usually single or in the first years of married life, these couples are forced to emigrate when they already have several children and are not so young. Family life as well as professional life may be brutally interrupted or sacrificed: as a result, part of the family, namely some of the children, are often left behind and stable jobs and careers are suddenly abandoned. Moreover, work/care strategies which often relied on extensive kin support as well as domestic help must be restructured. Secondly, during the first years after immigration, there are strong economic constraints due to long periods of waiting for legalization, followed by entry into low paid, unqualified jobs. Those who had previous qualifications may have to struggle to train and work at the same time, a problem that puts extra strain on the amount of time available for caring. If they are lone parents (see Julia, above) they may have to juggle training, work and caring at the same time. Legalisation, housing, work and training to get a better job - in other words the elementary steps toward establishing a “normal” life in a new society – will be family priorities. In such a situation, care arrangements have to adapt to these priorities rather than the other way round and children may have to contribute to this effort by looking after their younger brothers and sisters, remaining in the sending country or staying alone with no one to care for them. Claudine and her husband went through some of the above-mentioned difficulties: They left Zaire four year ago. Claudine was pregnant at the time and they had to leave their three children, aged 12, 8, and 6, with her mother. Claudine has a degree in economics and was working at the Treasury department when they emigrated (her mother took care of the children while she worked); her husband was an English teacher. They entered France as asylum seekers and finally got their residence permits in order after three years. At present, Claudine’s husband is an industrial worker in a car factory and either works a morning (5.20 am -12.20 pm) or an afternoon shift (12.20 to 8.00 pm). Claudine is on a training course and the two children born in France (now aged 3 and a half and two) are both going to full-time day care. Claudine hopes to be able to get a job with normal hours. The other children are still in Zaire and the couple sends money regularly to help Claudine’s mother. Their income is therefore quite limited at the moment and they live in a low rent apartment. Although there is an expressed wish for the children in Zaire to join them in France in the near future, it is not very clear whether they will do so. The first years after emigration are obviously the most difficult for refugee families. Families who have been in France for more than ten years may still complain of the

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difference in living conditions before and after migration. But they have gradually become integrated in the labour market and have a more stable economic and work/care situation. Immigrant families in Finland The Finnish sample of immigrant families with young children was collected in the regions of Tampere and Helsinki and it includes two main countries of origin: China (10 families) and Estonia (8 families). All immigrants are first-generation migrants and most of the families are couples with children (only 3 lone parents). As in the French sample, there is some diversity in terms of migration patterns. The majority of Estonian immigrants are considered as “returnees” (immigrants with Finnish origins, mostly “Ingrian Finns” who are descendants of Finnish peasants who moved to Ingria, near St. Petersburg, in the 17th century; Ingrian Finns were persecuted and many ended up in Estonia). The Finnish authorities gave immigrants with Finnish roots privileged access to Finland, at least until the mid-nineties. In response to this immigration policy, families with very diverse social profiles decided to immigrate to Finland: some have fairly high qualifications, others have low or medium qualifications, were sometimes unemployed and emigrated essentially to look for better living and employment conditions. In contrast, the Chinese immigrant families have a “skilled worker” profile. Most of them migrated in order to train (PhD) and/or in response to employment/career opportunities in the skilled sectors of the labour market (highly qualified professional migration) and only a few came as unskilled immigrant workers. Chinese immigrant families The work/care strategies of Chinese families are strongly centered on the dual-earner model, with both partners working full-time and extensive delegation of child care based on formal services which care for children all day long (see Table 2). Curiously, the one and only case of mother-centered care is related, as in many of the immigrant families in Rennes, to mixed marriage migration. The other work/care strategies are linked to two main types of migration: short-term professional migration and unskilled economic migration. Short-term professional migration involves families with high educational qualifications (both members of the couple, often engineers or physicists, strongly committed to their careers) who came to Finland to work or to work and study for a few years. These families do not usually have many problems with residence permits, income and housing but their social and cultural integration in Finnish society is limited and not considered as a priority. English is the language they need for post-graduate studies and for work, Finnish is hardly spoken and most of their friends are Chinese and live nearby, especially if the family lives in the student-housing area by the University. In this context, care is organized around the resources which are most at hand and guarantee the children’s “international” integration: English language day care centre and school (which have fairly long opening hours, from 8 to 17.30, and may cost up to 290 euros per month), fetching and taking by the father or the mother and some occasional support from other Chinese families if work finishes later than usual. Knowledge of other caring arrangements and local services is limited and interviewees emphasize that they have little information at their disposal (for example, on babysitters and on childminders, a

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solution which some of them would prefer for children below age 3). However, when families have been in Finland for a slightly longer period, this profile may undergo a few changes. L. (a software engineer) and C. (research fellow) have been in Finland since 1991 when they came to do their PhDs. They live in a rented apartment in a block of flats, speak a little Finnish and have decided to send their son, now aged 7, to a Finnish school. They hesitated about this decision for two reasons. First, although they feel they have settled in Finland, they are still thinking about going back to China, where English would be more useful; secondly, they are worried because of the Finnish school timetable (ending at 1 pm) as they feel their son is too young to stay alone in the afternoon; they have applied for an afternoon club (136 euros per month) and are waiting for an answer. Table 2 Work/care strategies in immigrant families (Finland) Chinese families Managing work and care through mother-centeredness

• Mother-centered care (1 case)

Estonian families Managing work and care through mother-centeredness

• Mother-centered care (1 case) • Mother-centered with some

negotiation (2 cases) Managing work and care through extensive delegation

• Extensive formal care (7 cases) • Childminder (1 case)

Managing work and care through extensive delegation

• Extensive formal care (2 cases) • Extensive varied (school/no

extras + older child care (2 cases)

Managing work and care through child negligence

• Formal (school, no extras) + self care (1 case)

Managing work and care through child negligence

• Formal care (school/no extras) + childminder + self care (1 case)

A second profile seems to be more closely associated with unskilled labour migration. Only three worker migrant families were interviewed in Finland and the trajectories of the immigrant women are rather different. Two interviewees emigrated as single persons and the other came to join her husband who had found work as a cook in Finland (they set up a restaurant of their own some time later). Nevertheless, the families seem to portray some common vulnerabilities that contrast sharply with the highly qualified families already described. Chinese worker migrants with work permits seem to have immigrated quite easily in the late eighties and early nineties when there were labour shortages in Finland. As in other Chinese communities all over the world, many came to work in Chinese restaurants or families and then moved on to other jobs or tried to set up on their own. Having a restaurant, a café or a shop of your own implies long and atypical working hours. On the other hand, being a Chinese unqualified employed worker is not easy either as it usually means working in catering or cleaning services and earning low salaries. These, then, are the main constraints faced by these families: long working hours in unqualified jobs or in self-employment, low income and fear of losing the job when working for others (one interviewee talked at length about how, in a previous job, she felt that she couldn’t miss

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work even if the children were ill for fear of being fired). The work ethic is thus very strong and family life must adapt to work life rather than the opposite. As a result, the work/care strategies in these families are strongly connected to the caring norm of “managing on your own”. This means that caring responsibilities must be managed as far as possible inside the nuclear family even if this implies getting young children to stay at home on their own or to look after other children, or taking children to work if necessary. Hua is a typical example. She arrived in Finland in 1989 with a permit to work as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant. During that first year Hua lived in lodgings provided by her employer and worked 60 hours a week; she had no idea it was illegal to work so many hours. Hua married a Finn, has two children aged 10 and 4 and now works in the kitchen of a local elementary school. Her husband has a shop for gardening tools which is not doing well; he also has a drinking problem and Hua has already considered a separation. Family income is low (1796 euros). In terms of care, one child is at school and the other in day care (79 euros per month). The elder child, a girl, goes to school until 1 or 2 pm, then stays alone at home in the afternoon; very often she also goes to fetch her brother from day care and gives him tea (formal care + self-care, see Table 2). At present, Hua is pleased with her job. As she works for the local authorities, she knows she has her rights and feels secure. Although she feels it is difficult to miss work as there are only three people in the school kitchen, she has no fear of being fired and is happy to be allowed to take the children to work when there is no school or if they are recovering from an illness: “I have often taken the children along with me to work. They are bigger now, but they are often ill. Around a year ago I think it was about twice a month, sometimes a week, that I took a child along with me to work”. Contrary to the qualified Chinese immigrant families, these worker families are permanently settled in the host country and seek integration: they manage quite well in Finnish, they have more contact with Finnish people in their daily lives and the children go to Finnish day care and schools. However, long working hours, low salaries and strong pressure not to lose jobs seem to shape work/care strategies where children, rather than the parents and their jobs, are the adaptive element in work/life patterns. This sometimes leads to self-care but not necessarily. Hua does not have reliable help from her husband as he is an alcoholic and has financial problems with his small shop. But Wan, another Chinese mother who runs her own coffee shop, where she bakes bread at dawn and cooks both Finnish and Chinese food, relies on her husband (who has normal working hours) to take and fetch their young child from full-time day care (169 euros). Care gaps are more likely to arise when children begin school and have awkward timetables. Lack of informal kinship networks to fill in these gaps, more difficult access to afternoon clubs (compared to day care for children below age 7) and some social acceptance, in the host country, of leaving primary school aged children alone in the afternoon, are the factors which appear to contribute most to the emergence of self-care. Estonian immigrant families Most of the Estonian immigrant families came to Finland as “returnees”. However, when we take a closer look at their migration patterns, we find some diversity in terms of the nature of the migration project. Some of the “returnees” emigrated to get away from an unstable economic and political situation, others to find stable, well-paid employment and better living conditions in which to bring up a family. Living and working conditions

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in Estonia, prior to emigration, were bad. Run-down, over-crowded houses, lack of basic amenities such as running water, families living in “rooming houses” provided by the factory, low-paid jobs and unemployment, these are the images that make up the family and work background of many interviews. The late 1980s and early 1990s introduced new push factors – such as political instability – but also new opportunities such as labour shortages in Finland and an immigration policy that gave immigrants with Finnish roots easier access to Finland. This policy encouraged emigration in general and for different reasons. If some families emigrated for economic reasons, others (middle class, with jobs) did so mainly to get away from an unstable, uncertain political situation and others, mostly lone parents, to “get a fresh start” (hopefully a partner) in a new place or to benefit from Finnish social policy (one lone parent with a disabled child). Although they label themselves as “returning migrants”, none of them had ever lived in Finland before immigration. Thus, in practice, they are first-generation migrants and usually have few or no other family members living in Finland. Estonians now form quite a large community in the receiving country and the Estonian immigrant association is mentioned by several of the interviewees as an important meeting point. Migration patterns, integration and work/care strategies in the Estonian immigrant families differ quite strongly from the Chinese families which we have just examined. There are some important contrasts which must be taken into account. First, the work ethic, which was seen to be very strong in both the highly qualified and the worker Chinese immigrants, appears to be weaker in the Estonian families, especially in those who migrated to get a fresh start in life and remarried in the receiving country. Secondly, although many have felt discriminated in the labour market and despised by the local population, integration has been facilitated by the closeness of the Estonian language to Finnish and an immigration policy which gave “returnees” considerable social support in the form of housing, training and initial integration into the labour market (subsidized employment). The small number of Estonian families with young children and their internal diversity make it difficult to identify predominant strategies. However, a number of different types of situations emerge. Once again, the “mixed marriage” migration pattern stands out quite distinctly in the case of two families and is associated with the “mother-centered” care arrangement (which sometimes develops into a different work/care strategy as the children get older). In one family, the mother (a construction engineer who worked in the woodwork sector in Tallinn) met her husband in Estonia and was already pregnant when she arrived in Finland. She decided to stay at home for four years until both children, born with a year’s difference, went to kindergarten (this was partly because she wanted to, partly because she was unemployed, partly because she was anxious about working in Finland). She now works full-time as a furniture saleswoman (normal hours) and both children are in formal day care all day (extensive delegation); the family has some occasional support for caring from the husband’s mother and an Estonian friend. On the other hand, Anni, the second “mixed marriage” migrant, still has a typical mother-centered strategy, working part-time in order to be more available for child care. She met her husband in Tallinn in the mid-eighties. She was finishing her secretarial studies and he was working in a shipyard (professional plumber). They moved to Finland in 1991 when Anni was 8 months pregnant (by then she had been working for 5 years and didn’t want to leave her job before the end of the pregnancy). Anni was at home caring for her

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daughter for 5 years. Then she tried to find a job but only found temporary secretarial work for a year (her daughter was cared for by a childminder). She did extra training courses but was not successful in finding a job. She complains that employers prefer Finnish workers and feels that her “option of coming to Finland through marriage” makes things more difficult as she is not entitled to the State support that returnees and refugees receive. At the moment she does translations at home (free-lance). Her 9 year old daughter is at school until 1 or 2 pm and it is always Anni who fetches her and is available. Anni feels she has to accept this situation: “his income is larger, it is his income we are living on, so that he’s the one who goes off to work, and it’s me who has to stay home, at least at the moment, because my income is so very small in comparison”. Anni says she has decided to make an effort not to complain. In contrast to Anni, the “remarried lone mothers” who came looking for a fresh start in life (and married shortly after arrival) are satisfied with a work/life balance based on a main male breadwinner and part-time work for themselves. Godula, a music teacher and a divorced lone mother with two sons, arrived in Finland with her eldest son in 1991. She remarried shortly after, brought her youngest son and had two more children, now aged 9 and 8, with her new (Finnish) partner (postman, working from 6 am to 2 pm). She has always worked part-time, teaching music some days a week for a few hours either in the afternoon or in the evening when her husband or one of the older sons are at home (mother-centered strategy, combined with some negotiation inside the family, see Table 2). Adapting her part-time work in this way has meant that the family has never needed to use services such as day care or afternoon activities for school children and, although she feels that family income is low, Godula is pleased to have been available for her children in this way. In summary, in these cases of remarriage, the difficulties of immigration are less pressing as the family’s economic survival and well-being can rely on a new breadwinner. Moreover, a second marriage usually implies the birth of more children and this usually means staying at home for some years (rather than the nine months which the Chinese working women take after the birth of a child). In short, mother-centeredness is searched for and carefully woven into the work/family pattern. In what we could label as “middle-class returnees”, mother-centeredness as a strategy to combine work and family life with young children is not emphasized. Qualifications are higher in these couples and the women had quite stable, qualified jobs in Estonia before emigrating. Although the jobs in the receiving society are not always easy to find and do not necessarily correspond to their qualifications, the mothers in these families are working full-time in medium-qualified jobs and delegating the care of their children. In the case of Meeri, a journalist in Estonia now working as an immigration coordinator (her husband, an engineer, found work as a CAD technician), the three-year-old child is in day care (extensive delegation); while in the case of Ilona, a piano teacher/accompanist with good career prospects, and Olga, a manager of a small cooperative, the school-aged children have the surveillance of an older, adolescent, child after school finishes (extensive varied, Table 2). Both are lone parents who divorced some time after the family’s arrival in Finland and both have been able to rely on an older child in order to fill in the caring gaps in the afternoons. The last profile is very different from the previous situations and is linked to unskilled worker migration. Elina was a single young woman with no qualifications when she tried to immigrate in the late eighties. She was refused legal immigration (not being a returnee)

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but she had a married sister in the receiving country and started staying in Finland for long periods and working as a kitchen hand. In 1991 she married a Finn. Two children were born and Elina stayed at home for as long as she could on maternity and parental leave. She now works as a packer in a two-shift job (7am to 3pm; 3pm to11pm) and her husband is a blue-collar worker with a three-shift job. She feels “she would sort of like to stay at home” but points out that her income is important. The parents combine several care solutions: they rely on the sequencing of care provided by both members of the couple when they are off-shift and on a childminder with very flexible hours for about 12 days a month for the younger child (now 4 years old). The eight-year old son goes to school and comes home by himself at one or two. On some days he has a parent at home, on other days he stays alone at home for a few hours (“self-care”). There are no comments on this situation but Elina and her husband emphasize that their work/family life is difficult as they have very little time for the children and for themselves. Atypical working hours are thus a strong constraint and this family has to struggle hard in order to coordinate all the different timetables. From this point of view, Elina and her husband remind us of immigrant families from other countries, mostly economic migrants or asylum seekers with long working hours in the industrial or unqualified service sectors, who find it difficult to avoid some child negligence with young school-aged children. In this family, however, self care is not presented as a problem, probably because it is irregular and for short periods of time and also because the child is eight and expected, in Finnish society, to start being more independent. Curiously then, it is in a blue collar “mixed” couple, where both are working in shifts, that we found more difficulties in organizing care as well as work/family strategies which include self care. Child negligence is not seen as the main problem, but the strain of managing shift work, household chores and caring for young children is felt strongly not only by the mother, who sometimes thinks about staying at home again, but also by the father, who mentions that the only way to have time to be with the children is to scale back household chores (buying ready-made food, for example). Immigrant families in the UK The UK sample was collected in South-East England and includes 17 families working and caring for young children (mostly couples with children, only two lone parents). The majority of families live in East Kent and some live in more urban settings further north and nearer to London. The sample reflects the multi-cultural mix of immigrants who came to South-East England in the eighties and nineties as labour migrants, students or qualified professionals (mainly at Kent University). Most of the families are Asian (from Malaya, India, Mauritius, Hong Kong) or Asian with partners from other countries (Mexico, Columbia). In one of the couples both the wife and the husband are Dutch and there is also an Irish lone parent as well as a few cases of “mixed” couples where British nationals are married to immigrants from other countries (Spain, Italy, Korea, Hungary). The latter immigrated as single persons and qualified professionals to work in a multinational company or to train in the UK and then got married some years later (to qualified professionals or managers); at present they belong to dual-career couples and there are therefore no cases of “mixed marriage” migration. As in France or in Finland, this diversity makes it difficult to consider these immigrant families as belonging to a specific immigrant community, but it allows us to carry out an

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exploratory analysis based on some typical cases. In the case of the immigrant families in South-East England, we were able to identify five main patterns of migration which partially shape and explain the strategies for organizing work and care for young children. Short-term student/professional migration is related, as in other countries, to a temporary and goal-orientated stay in the receiving country. However, compared to the Chinese professional migration, the immigrant families in the UK speak English fluently and thus appear to be more integrated, not only in terms of the university community but also in local society. Parents in this migration pattern either organize care arrangements by using a mother-centered strategy (as school finishes early, the mother fetches the child but then does some work in the evening at home) or by bringing a young domestic help to care for small children while the family is abroad. The two Malayan middle class couples who use this latter strategy were used to having informal domestic help in the sending country. In the receiving country, this strategy has several advantages: it is low cost, which is important as one member of the couple is studying for a PhD and only one is working, it keeps the children in touch with their own language and culture and allows both members of the couple to concentrate on studying and employment. A slightly different profile emerges when couples are long-term highly qualified professional migrants or “mixed” dual-career couples (the immigrants in these couples are also qualified professionals and mostly from other European countries). In these cases the family is settled permanently in the UK and both members of the couple work full-time and have career opportunities in the receiving country. Another feature of these qualified “dual-career” couples is a work/family balance that emphasizes extensive delegation of caring based on extensive formal services rather than a mother-centered strategy or a solution imported from the receiving society. Thus high income and high socio-professional status tend to be associated with work/care strategies that rely mostly on private formal care services or a mixture of private informal and formal paid services. Peter and Anneke are a typical example (extensive varied, see Table 3). They are both Dutch and came to England in 1994 when Peter got a lectureship at the University. They had initially planned to stay for two years but have now settled more permanently in the UK, especially as Anneke also has a good job (head of staff of an educational unit) and feels that the UK offers her better career opportunities. Both speak English fluently and the couple has English as well as Dutch friends. Their 2 year old son goes to a private nursery (1400 pounds per term) that only closes at 5 pm; their 5 year old daughter goes to school from 9 to 3 but has paid informal after-school care (16 pounds a week). It is also important to underline that all the families who use extensive formal delegation in this sample have to resort to private profit-making services that are considered very expensive by all but the only way to avoid cutting back on work and career opportunities. Even Paula, a lone parent (born in India, in the UK since the age of four), emphasizes that the only way she can preserve her teaching career, even if half her salary goes to pay for this, is to use private services to care for her one year old daughter (540 pounds a month).Her relationship with her family is not easy as Paula is a lone parent and has challenged traditional Indian values and gender expectations; nevertheless, the parents do help out in emergencies (for example, when the child is ill). Another profile emerges when student migration from Asia turns into long-term family immigration. Income and social status is average rather than high, not only due to lower

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professional qualifications but also because the family is striving for an upward mobility that implies “saving up” for long-term economic investments. In these families the work/care strategies rely on negotiation within the family (shared parental, two cases, Table 3) rather than private formal care, considered to be far too expensive. Marie and Antoine, both from Mauritius, came to train as nurses in the UK and now have three school-age children. They have no relatives to call on for child care but they have some Asian friends who also work in the health service and occasionally participate in reciprocal care arrangements. Overall though, child care has had to be negotiated within the family, as private formal care is not a viable option. Before the children went to school, Marie only worked a couple of 12-hour night shifts per week in order to be available for the children during the day; she felt exhausted. Now that they are older, the parents work 8-hour shifts (morning, afternoon or evening) in a sequencing pattern that allows them to share fetching and caring for the children after school finishes at three. The couple is saving up to buy their own nursing home for old people and in the near future expects to be able to balance work and care with less need for negotiation of opposite shifts as the children will be older and they will be living on the premises of the home. The main problem in this family is tiredness and limited shared family time. Table 3. Work/care strategies in immigrant families (UK) Managing work and care through mother-centeredness

• Mother-centered care(4 cases) Managing work and care through extensive delegation

• Extensive formal care (5 cases) • Extensive varied (formal and informal) (1 case) • Living in domestic helper (2 cases) • Grandparental support (1 case)

Managing work and care through negotiation within the family • Shared parental care (2 cases)

Managing work and care through superposition of care upon work • Formal care (no extras) and workplace care (1 case) • Workplace family care (1 case)

Indian, Chinese and Mauritian immigrant families who arrived in the UK as worker migrants with low qualifications seem to represent yet another situation. The migration project is long-term and emphasizes access to a better life (stable jobs, average income, decent housing) as well as economic and educational opportunities for children. To accomplish this project, it is important to be a dual-earner or a self-employed couple and we have already seen that this often means structuring child care around work rather than working hours around care. In this type of immigrant family, the vulnerability of the care arrangements is often linked to work schedule problems: working hours are long or atypical and do not coincide with school timetables, level of income makes it difficult to buy in after school child care and close family networks (an ideal solution for these families, as it is flexible and low cost) only emerge occasionally in second-generation families.

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In labour migrant families in other countries, these constraints force families to use low-cost formal or informal services but they also sometimes lead to strategies of self care. In the UK, however, low-cost formal services are not available, there is a strong normative pressure not to leave children below age twelve alone and families are very much expected to manage childcare on their own, within the family, by taking up part-time work and alternate shifts. As a result, work/care strategies in the UK labour migrant families are more family centered than in the other countries. In spite of the negative impact on income, on living conditions and the migration project, some families have been constrained to cut back on the mother’s employment (mother-centered strategy) so that the children are not left alone after 3 pm when school finishes. Geeta and her husband are a typical case. They are from Mauritius, both practicing Muslims, and arrived in the UK in the eighties as young single adults looking for work and a better life. Geeta used to work full-time when she arrived in the UK but now works part-time as a low-qualified clerical worker so that she is available for their two children, aged 7 and 5, in the afternoon. The family lives in a council house with one bedroom and family income is low. Geeta would prefer to work full-time in order to improve the family’s living conditions and future prospects. However, as one of them must be more available for the children, it is her husband, an auxiliary nurse, who works long hours, as well as extra time paid at a better hourly rate, in order to boost family income. Geeta would like to see local, freely available or affordable child care for all children while parents are working. Economic constraints in this type of immigrant family make it impossible to buy in formal child care or after school care. In some families, however, alternative family care arrangements(grandparental support) may be available at present or in the past. Thus A., a second-generation Indian Asian mother with four children (married to S., also Indian, a bus-driver) was able to work full-time for many years because her mother, a labour migrant who arrived in the sixties, lived nearby and cared for the children. When the grandmother became ill two years ago, A. changed to part-time work as buying in child care would be too expensive (mother-centered strategy at the time of the interview). She too would like after school facilities to be provided at school or the school day to be extended. Adapting work to care responsibilities may take other forms. An alternative strategy is to superimpose caring on the work context (managing work and care through superimposition of work upon care, Table 3). T. and W., recent migrants from Hong Kong, are a typical example. As many Asian families who are keen to set up their own family business, they have established a take-away food outlet. Their flat is above the take-away shop and family life revolves around the shop and its business: the baby (15 months) wakes with the parents at 11 am, stays in his high chair while they cook and is put to bed at 1 am after the family has closed the shop at 11pm and had its evening meal. As in most low-income immigrant families, child care has to adapt to work life as the family’s livelihood depends on the success of the business and the family cannot afford to pay for child care. Once a week T. takes the baby to a play group for two hours. It has been set up for socially excluded mothers and their children and T.’s family is included as they live in an area designated as socially deprived. To establish a contrast with these Asian labour migrant families, it might be useful to describe the migration pattern and the work/care strategy of one last family: Nora, a lone

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parent from Ireland, arrived in the UK as a single young woman in the eighties (with medium qualifications). Her migration project seems similar in some ways to the Estonian lone women who wanted a fresh start in life. Nora came looking for opportunities in general, a job, a new life (an uncle, who became an actor, and a brother had already moved to the UK before her). At the time of the interview she had two children, aged 8 years old and 8 months, and worked part-time as a class assistant 16 hours weekly (mother-centered strategy). However, contrary to the Asian labour migrant women, she prefers to work part-time and would even prefer to be a stay-at-home mother if she did not need the extra income to cover her mortgage payments. In summary, reconciling work and care through a mother-centered strategy is, in this case, an approved and voluntary work/life pattern. Economic pressures to work and to be professionally successful are less strong than in labour migrant or highly qualified families and, on the other hand, family/work values in the sending country do not contrast strongly with those in the receiving country (weak ethnicity). In this context, more priority is given to family life in the receiving society. As a general conclusion, it is also important to note that the UK sample of immigrant families, with the exception maybe of Nora, is sharply divided into two main contrasting groups. In the UK, career-oriented, high income, qualified professionals are the only families that seem to be able to combine full-time work with the regular and extensive use of formal care services. The other work-oriented immigrant families – labour migrants, student migrants who have settled to work and live in the UK – have to find alternative strategies which rely on the family. This is a situation which contrasts sharply with France and Finland, where low and average-income families usually have access to low-cost formal care provision with fairly long opening hours. In the UK pressure seems to be strong not only for families to manage care on their own but also to avoid self care. In practice this means that work has to be adapted, either by cutting back on the mother’s employment, or through negotiation of opposite shifts, or even through strategies that bring children into the work context. In fact, this last strategy, although it does not leave children alone, may also contain some situations of child negligence: children in these situations are often loosely supervised or restrained in various ways while their carers are trying to work. On the other hand, family income suffers a strong reduction. For immigrant families who are struggling to improve their living conditions, this makes for a difficult economic situation. Immigrant families in Portugal Portugal, along with Spain, Italy, Ireland and Finland, falls into a group of countries that has registered a strong increase in immigration since the eighties. Unskilled worker migration from the African colonies, mainly from the Cape Verde islands, began in the sixties to compensate for labour shortages caused by emigration (mainly to France and Germany) and the colonial war. However, it was in the late seventies and in the eighties and nineties, after the Revolution (1974) and decolonisation, that immigration from the former African colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé) intensified (Pires, 1999). Today African immigrants account for almost half the foreign population in Portugal and the majority are from the Cape Verde islands. The Portuguese sample of families was collected in the city of Lisbon, where most African immigrants are concentrated, and includes 21 Cape Verdean families (14 couples

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with young children and 7 lone parents). Most of the interviews were carried out in socially deprived areas - in new suburbs of social rehousing as well as an older “slum” area where brick houses have replaced former wooden shacks6 -, but a few took place in other suburbs of the city where some families have rented or are buying flats. The sample is therefore homogeneous in terms of the sending country but also comprises some internal diversity from the point of view of family forms, duration of stay and integration in the receiving society. If we begin by looking at the general characteristics of these immigrant families and their life histories, three striking features may be emphasized. First, the intensity of the migration phenomenon in the sending country. Cape Verde is made up of a group of extremely arid islands off the West African coast. For many centuries its development was based on its use as a commercial entrepôt, with ships stopping by to stock up, and it was gradually populated and farmed by the Portuguese with slaves brought from Africa. Drought is severe and can last for several years, leading to endemic famine and persistent emigration in search of alternative or complementary means of survival. Thus the life histories of the immigrant interviewees all tell us about the continuous circulation of men, women, young people and children: of men who inevitably went to sea or emigrated, of single young men and women who followed a father or a brother into emigration, of mothers and children who stayed behind for many years, of young lone mothers who emigrated on their own, leaving small children with a grandmother or an aunt. In the second half of the last century, destinations became more varied: the Cape Verdeans emigrated not only to Portugal and to other Portuguese African colonies but also to the United States, to Holland, Italy and Spain. A second feature is related to the organization of family life, which contrasts sharply with what we might call the “European” family. Cape Verdean immigrants are also strongly contrasted with the local population groups from a racial point of view but they are less so in terms of religion or language - they are Catholic and although Creole is the language families speak at home, Portuguese is well known as it continues to be Cape Verde’s official language as well as the language in which children learn to read and write at school. Family forms and dynamics are, however, somewhat different. Shaped by the historical and social contexts of slavery, African roots, migration and the struggle for survival, family life is more centered on the mother-child unit, on cohabitation and lone parenthood rather than marriage, and on considerable independence and sexual freedom of both women and men. Fertility, motherhood and fatherhood (rather than parenthood), and intergenerational support are basic family values but they are channelled through bonds and types of households which slip away from the nuclear family of couples with or without children. As a result, family transitions follow specific and diverse patterns which revolve around lone parenthood: a young woman will have a first birth outside marriage and then cohabit with her partner and have more children, or she may never cohabit and have several children with the same partner, or she may have children from different partners and never cohabit with any of them, or she may get married after cohabiting for some years and the birth of one or two children. Having children and independent motherhood are strongly valued, even by second-generation young women who are now less in favour of having many children. As one single mother put it: “It’s like this, we are not like the Portuguese. We, the mothers have their children, right? By 6 “Bairro 6 de Maio”

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norm it’s the mother who has the child and who takes care of the child. Of course, this means that I am alone in responsibility, anything that happens...” (Daniela, 24, born in Portugal, secondary education incomplete, two children aged 4 and 2 from the same partner, cohabited for one year between the two births, brought up by her godparents as her parents were very poor). The small sample of immigrant families collected in Lisbon thus contains family forms and trajectories which are quite varied and also experienced as ethnically different: many are lone parents (seven) and among the families of couples with children, there are more cohabiting (eight) than married couples and several are blended families with children from different fathers or partnerships. Integration in the labour market is the last aspect which must be highlighted. Cape Verdean immigrants have traditionally worked in two main sectors: the building and public works sector (the men) and the cleaning and catering services sector (the women). Both have long working hours, with the building sector starting very early in the morning, often working overtime and at weekends, and on sites outside Lisbon which imply staying away from home for weeks or months. The cleaning sector, on the other hand, also has long or atypical working hours and, compared to the male wage in the building sector, very low salaries (rarely going beyond the national minimum wage). It also important to underline the fact that African women are often confined to a certain sector of the labour market - firms that clean offices and public buildings at dawn and in the evenings – and have greater difficulty in obtaining the better-paid jobs in private homes or jobs as waitresses or shop attendants (taken up by Portuguese women or white, Brazilian or Eastern European immigrants). In the Portuguese sample, all the women except one are working full-time, nearly all in cleaning or catering services; one mother, eight months pregnant and with another child of two, has temporarily reduced her working schedule to part-time work (cleaning services in the morning, child in the care of a childminder). These are some general features of Cape Verdean immigrant families which had to be mentioned. If we look closer at the sample, however, it is also important to emphasize some internal differentiation from the point of view of the migration trajectory. Some interviewees are first-generation migrants and others are what we may call “second-generation” migrants: they came as young children with one or both parents and a few were born in the host country. This does not always mean that the social integration of second-generation families is very different; but it sometimes implies a slightly higher educational level, a stronger family support network and having no plans to return to Cape Verde; in a few cases it also means acquiring some professional training and getting jobs with normal hours, outside the building/cleaning sectors. Secondly, although the majority of families are worker migrant families, the sample has two cases of student migration and one case of we might call “employee” migration (migration to Portugal, before decolonisation, of an administrative employee, now a civil servant in a bank). Taking into account these differences, we were able to identify three main patterns of migration which influence families’ strategies for managing work and care for young children. First generation unskilled worker migration is related to a long-term migration project which emphasizes access to paid employment, to food and better living conditions and, savings permitting, the building of a new house in Cape Verde to which to return after retirement. Some immigrants arrived in the late sixties, at the time of a “great famine” in

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Cape Verde, others in the eighties or nineties. Networks usually helped to find work and/or temporary accommodation inside the slum. Usually the man came first and the wife and children later; but some years usually went by before enough money was saved to pay for the travel expenses of those left in the sending country. José and Domingas (aged 50 and 44, cohabiting couple, both illiterate) are a typical example of immigration in the late seventies. In Cape Verde, Domingas worked seasonally as a farm labourer, picking coconuts and cocoa, and later as a maid looking after small children. She started working when she was eight and never learnt to read and write. She went to live with José and his family when she was fifteen and had her first child (one of five) aged seventeen in Cape Verde. José emigrated soon after, was lodged by a relative in the slum, and started working in the building sector. A few years later, after “nailing together” a shack, he sent for his wife and child and, later, for his mother and brother. The wooden shack was gradually transformed by José into a brick house, but the family is still waiting for social rehousing. First generation immigration in the nineties, rather than in the seventies, is not very different. António, a bricklayer (earning 650 euros) had already been working in Portugal for a few years when he met Dulce in Cape Verde during his holidays. Like Domingas, Dulce (now aged 37, one year of schooling, cohabiting) also stayed in the sending country for a few years, had her first two children there and then joined her husband. She arrived in 1994 but left the two children with her mother in Cape Verde, so that she could work harder. António had left the slum area by then and rented a small council flat nearby, with one bedroom (and some dampness). This is where they still live today, with four children, the two elder children who came in 1998 and the other two born in Lisbon (the 4 children, now aged 13, 7, 3, 2, share the bedroom). Dulce first got a job through Cape Verdean friends in a factory (cleaning). As it was very hard work she moved to a cleaning services firm where she now works in two shifts (7am-1pm and from 6 to 9 pm, earning 350 euros). It is difficult to manage work and care but Dulce has always relied on her older son to look after the other children in the morning; he takes them to school and day care at 8 am (private non-profit, 69 euros for two children). During the day, this son is quite independent: for example, for several years now, he has been going home at lunch time to cook his lunch. Dulce fetches the other children in the afternoon but then leaves them alone for a few hours as she leaves for work at 5pm and her older son has school until 6.30pm (Formal + older child care + child negligence, see Table 4). Dulce and António would like to go back to Cape Verde one day and they have already started building a house there. The work/care strategies in this family highlight the main problems faced by first-generation migrants with young children. Incomes are low, housing conditions are bad, working hours are long and atypical, and formal care services, even though they are fairly cheap, do not cover the varied and long caring needs of children. Low-cost extensive delegation, older child care and child negligence are therefore the main strategies used. If there is a grandmother who joined the family (an exceptional situation for first-generation migrants, only one case), then informal extensive delegation is a solution. However, in the absence of this solution, the gaps in caring (early in the morning, when primary school ends, late afternoon, working overtime at weekends) will be managed with the means at hand: primary school children look after babies and learn how to cook, young adolescents look after several children, children stay on their own. In some families, such

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as Dulce’s family, the parents manage to cover almost all the caring needs with the help of an older child. When the children are all younger, then it is also the older child who, early on, will begin to stay alone and take on caring responsibilities. For example, Anita, Maria’s 7 year old daughter, has school and after-school club during the day, but in the morning, between 6.30 and 8.30, she takes care of her 3 year old sister, gives her breakfast and dresses her (formal extensive + child negligence, Table 4). Maria works a cleaning shift from 5.30 to 8 am and her husband works in the building sector and leaves for work at 6.30 (Maria also cleans a shop in the morning and is a daily in a private house in the afternoon and on Saturday). Before Anita started going to school, the family used to pay a babysitter to be there in the morning and then take the two children to day care (75 euros per month, when day care already cost 55 euros per child). As this was very expensive, they decided to “try” leaving Anita on her own with her sister in the early morning and on Saturday mornings when the parents work overtime. Anita does not like staying alone; she can’t sleep when the parents have left so she turns on the TV. Maria and her husband have brothers and sisters who emigrated and are living in Lisbon but they all work long hours, so time to help care for children is not available. As another interviewee put it, “No one is available here, everyone has to work…So the Cape Verdeans, we cannot reconcile the education of young children with two homelands. Not me personally, I have managed, but I am a drop of water in the ocean. But the Cape Verdean immigrant loses his child at age ten and many lose them many years before. They really lose them. The children are used to being alone, they run around, they finish school and get home hours later, they don’t do their homework…” (Guida, school helper with normal hours, 39, secondary educational level, arrived in Portugal aged 8 in 1971, 2 older children aged 19 and 20 from first marriage, now remarried and with 7 month old twins looked after by a paid childminder, former husband in Holland). Table 4 Work/care strategies in Cape Verdean families (Portugal) Managing work and care through informal extensive delegation

• Grandparental care (3 cases) • Paid childminder (2 cases) • Paid childminder with some negotiation within the family (2 cases)

Managing work and care through formal extensive delegation • Extensive formal care (6 cases) • Extensive varied (formal extensive with some older child care) (3

cases) Managing work and care through child negligence

• Formal(day care, school - no extras) + older child care + child negligence(3 cases)

• Formal extensive + child negligence (1 case) • Formal (school, no extras) + child negligence

When the first-generation migrant is a single mother, the pattern of social exclusion becomes more pronounced. Rosário, aged 26, is an example of this: Rosário was a three year old child when she was left with an aunt in Cape Verde. Her parents separated and both emigrated abroad and remarried; since then, she has only seen her mother once, when she was thirteen. In Cape Verde Rosário completed four years of

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primary schooling and then worked irregularly as a daily in restaurants and in private houses. She had her first child at the age of 20 but never lived with the father of her child. It was against this background that Rosário decided to emigrate in 1995, hoping to improve her life and earn more money. She came on her own, leaving her one year old daughter with her aunt, and with no relatives in Portugal who might help her. As she herself states, “When I arrived there was no one to receive me with open arms, for me to feel at home”. However, she had contacts to find work and went to be a maid in a private house in return for lodgings and food. After six months she went to work in another private home, but this time for a salary. Some time later she met a new partner, and had a second child. The couple lived with his parents first and then got a small rented flat of their own. However, after two years they separated and Rosário could not afford to go on paying for the flat. She was taken in for three months by a friend from work (also a lone parent) and then rented a room in another immigrant’s house in the slum area. Rosário is so ashamed of her room in the slum that she has not told her work colleagues where she lives. Currently she works in a cleaning services company from 8 am to 5 pm and earns 350 euros. With this salary and a small amount of family benefit, she has to pay her rent (100 euros), a local childminder for her daughter (100 euros), bus tickets, food and clothes, and try to send some money to her daughter in Cape Verde. Most of the time she cannot make ends meet and runs out of money for food. She does not receive any assistance from her former partner and she has not seen her older daughter, now seven, for six years. Another of her worries is the fact that the childminder is unreliable and sometimes leaves the small children alone with an eight year old daughter. Rosário feels that she has been living in hell since her separation. Second generation worker families and those who came as very young children were often brought up in the type of caring situations which we have just described. They lived in shacks, income was low, caring responsibilities and household tasks were distributed between the parents and the older children, and pressure to start working, in order to boost family income, was strong. Their individual and family/work trajectories, nevertheless, are not always the same. Some never finished compulsory schooling7, started working when they were twelve or thirteen and had children very early on. A few started working but managed to work and go to school at the same time, others went back to school and occupational training later on. Family support is another important factor in the work/life strategies of these second-generation families. Lone parents, and some couples with children, will often have support from close family members (parents or just a mother, brothers and sisters). Adolescent single mothers, if they do not leave home to cohabit with their partner, will stay on in an extended family household, where brothers and sisters and a grandmother will be available to help care for young children. This does not mean that child negligence does not occur (1 case, a primary school child who does not have an after school club at the school in the new suburb where the family lives). But work/care strategies in second-generation families are more systematically associated with grandparental support and with paid extensive delegation which covers the needs for child care, (mainly due to parents’ more “normal” working hours). If we look at the work/care strategies of some second-generation families, we find the following typical situations:

7 6 years of compulsory schooling until the late eighties; nine years since then.

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a) Grandparental care. Albina was born in Portugal (her father arrived in the late sixties, her mother some years later) and only has 4 years’ primary school education. She is 25 years old, lives with her partner who is 32, and has two daughters, one aged 5 and the other 11 (born when Albina was fourteen and still living at home). Like their parents before them, Albina works in the cleaning sector (she’s a daily, from 8 to 2 pm, Monday to Friday) and her husband works in the building sector (Monday to Saturday). Her mother cares for the youngest child during the day and gives support in other situations as she is retired and living in the same building. The older daughter goes to school on her own but has lunch with grandmother (who also “keeps an eye on her” after school).The family used to live in the slum area but was moved to two low-rent flats in a social rehousing quarter. b) Extensive formal care Dalila’s parents arrived in the sixties, at the time of the great famine. Dalila is 25 and works as a media library co-ordinator in an activity centre for young people (9 to 5, earning 600 euros). She started working in cleaning services when she was 13 to help her parents (5 children).However, as she was a good student, she decided to go to school in the evening and managed to complete secondary school. She had a first partnership which only lasted a few months but has lived for six years with her present partner (aged 40, metal worker, a first-generation migrant who has four other children in Cape Verde); the couple lives with the eldest step-daughter, aged 19, who arrived a short time ago to work in Portugal. Dalila’s two year old son is in day care (private non profit, open from 8.30-18.30, 52 euros per month) and it is Dalila who takes him and fetches him. Her parents live near her workplace and cared for the child until he was a year old; however, as her mother has health problems, Dalila decided to put the child in day care fairly early on. Dalila used to do some private cleaning on Saturdays to earn some extra money but she had to give this up as her parents could not always help out. c) Paid childminder (with some negotiation inside the family) Jamila (25) and Dajaré (23) are a cohabiting couple with a six-month old baby. They both arrived in Portugal as young children. Jamila was the eldest of 4 boys so he left school at thirteen and started working; a year later he went back to school at night and while working still managed to finish basic schooling (nine years). He was employed in the army for four years and then trained as an “activities co-ordinator”; at present he is under instruction on another training course on educational intervention (9 to 5) and will start working again in a few months. Dajaré (secondary school complete) has a more complicated timetable with two alternating shifts (10am-7pm for two days, 5pm–midnight next two days, week-ends included) in a McDonald’s food chain restaurant; she has quite a responsible position and earns 575 euros. Both Jamila and Dajaré have parents who could look after the baby but they live far away. Their son is cared for by a childminder during the week (120 euros) and by Jamila in the evening and at weekends when Dajaré is working. He had no sisters so as a child he learnt how to do household work and care for his younger brothers. d) Grandparental care (young lone parent living at home) Francisca (18 years old) is the daughter of a separated lone mother with four children and is herself a single lone mother with a baby of five months. She found school work difficult, failed repeatedly and only completed the 6th grade. She began cleaning as a young adolescent but has had a work contract in cleaning services for two years now,

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earning 350 euros (16 is now the legal age for working). She works 9-5 during the week and 9-1 on Saturdays. Her mother (at home, with health problems) cares for the baby and another grandson (2 years old) - the son of Francisca’s sister (23) who is also a single mother living at home and working in the same firm as her sister. There are also two younger children, Francisca’s brothers, that are 13 and 9 and still go to school. Francisca wanted to go and live with her boyfriend but her mother did not allow it; at present they hardly see each other and she is disappointed that he never comes to see their baby. Francisca has a dream: she would like to emigrate to Luxembourg. A third and last profile is associated with student migration (as well as a case of “employee migration” where the immigrant family managed to send the second-generation to university). The work/family life of these migrants contrasts sharply with the patterns of vulnerability we have examined so far. Independent motherhood is still strongly emphasized but the difficulties of atypical working hours and very low salaries no longer influence the work/care strategies. Dores and Rosa are good examples. Dores came to Portugal with a scholarship to go to university. She got pregnant two years later, had her child as a single mother, started working part-time giving private lessons and managed to finish her degree. She had a second child from another partner 11 years later. At the time of the interview she was living with her two children and working full-time selling advertising space (earning 1000 euros; she also gets maintenance from the father of her eldest child, a medical student she met at university). The youngest child goes to a private not-for-profit primary school (9 to 7 pm, 95 euros); he is taken by his mother in the morning and usually fetched by his sister in the evening (Extensive varied, Table 4). Dores has no close family members to give her support and experiences some social isolation. As for Rosa, she arrived in Portugal as a young child. Her mother works as a secretary in the banking sector and her father, now retired, was a seaman. She studied law at Lisbon University and became a single lone mother when she was 32 (she never cohabited). At the time of the interview she was living in her own flat, quite near her parents’ house, and her five year old son was in a private profit-making nursery (225 euros), from 9.30 to 7 pm; occasionally, if she has to work late, someone from her family will baby-sit. She is strongly supported by her family and does not feel isolated. In summary, Cape Verdean immigrant families portray specific patterns of vulnerability which influence work/care strategies. Unskilled worker migration, associated in this case with strong ethnic contrasts (racial and familial) and social exclusion (segregation in terms of housing and the labour market), shapes work/life patterns in which parents work full-time with difficult schedules and low salaries. Extensive delegation, both formal (low-cost private non-profit) and informal, is the main caring solution but it does not always cover all the caring needs; in other cases, its cost is too high and leads to situations of extreme poverty. To deal with caring gaps, families rely on older child care when this is possible but they also ask young children below age ten to stay alone or to look after a younger child. These strategies reproduce work/life patterns from previous, rural or migratory, contexts or experiences and as such as they are recognized as “normal” solutions, which does not mean that families do not feel constrained and concerned. Families also complain about social isolation, especially first-generation ones. Family support for child care rarely exists in first-generation families and, while immigrant networks are important for finding work or lending an occasional helping hand

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(with house repairs, for example), time for regular caring is a rare resource in all families and social networks cannot deal with this need. Finally, family life, more centered in Cape Verdean families on lone motherhood, is another factor which intensifies the pattern of vulnerability. Women in unskilled jobs tend to earn less than men but they often have atypical working hours or shift work. Unskilled first-generation lone mother families thus emerge as the most vulnerable type of immigrant family: they are not entitled to any special benefit8, they rarely receive maintenance from the fathers9, family networks are absent and they work in low-paid jobs with long working hours. Immigrant families in Italy The sample of 22 Moroccan families with young children was collected in three different regions of Italy - Veneto, Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany. Like the Cape Verdean immigrants, they came to the host country looking for work and better living conditions (labour migration) and their jobs are generally low-skilled and low-paid in the industrial and service sectors. Nevertheless, there are some important differences. First, Moroccan immigration is more recent, with most interviewees arriving in the late eighties and during the nineties (first-generation10). Moroccan immigrants, both women and men, also have higher educational qualifications than the Cape Verdeans and more geographical mobility. Many migrated to other European countries before coming to Italy while others moved from one region of Italy to another in search of better work and living conditions. Although this does not alter the basic characteristics of integration in the host society (such as housing problems, illegal status during the first years of migration, jobs with long or atypical working hours), it makes for a more varied integration in the labour market: some self employment, factory work (sometimes skilled) as well as jobs in the catering and cleaning services, the latter both in private houses and institutions. It also leads to less residential segregation. Some families live in small urban “ghettoes” but others are dispersed and living in different urban or rural areas where they may receive quite a lot of support from local services and Italian families. Another important difference is related to the family dynamics of Moroccan migrants. In contrast to the Cape Verdean families, family life is organized around marriage and the married couple with children (20 families in the sample), and there are no cohabiting couples or single lone mothers11. Family and religious norms, on the other hand,

8 In Portugal, lone parents with young children have some extra tax reductions but no special allowances. This means that lone parents are expected to work and have a very high rate of employment (in 2001, 73% of lone mothers were in employment, the majority in full-time work). 9 By law in Portugal all parents have to provide maintenance for their children (this is independent of parental responsibility). However, the establishment of maintenance payments will only have to be decided in court if the parents were married and then divorced. In cases of cohabitation or lone parenthood, this only happens if one of them takes the matter to court (a step which, in the families interviewed, was only taken by a highly qualified lone mother, see “Dores” above). If the couple never cohabits, parental responsibility is presumed in favour of the mother. In cases of cohabitation, parental responsibility of both parents will be established if the couple declares it wants shared responsibility 10 There is only one second-generation family: the interviewee was 13 when she arrived with her mother in the eighties to join the father of the family. 11 The two lone parents in the sample are women who separated from their husbands in the receiving country and we may consider them as atypical in terms of their migration and life course patterns. One lone mother was a middle class secondary teacher in Morocco and she decided to immigrate in order to avoid a difficult relationship she had initiated and came looking for a fresh start in life. She married a Moroccan

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underline women’s domestic roles, their dependence on the male breadwinner, and the religious precept that a woman “should be at home”. Cultural pressure for stay-at-home mothers is therefore quite strong and this is reflected in different ways in the interviews: there are references to husbands who do not or did not allow their wives to work, there are words that underline the mother’s unique caring and educational roles, and there are male interviewees who refer to their wives as “housewives” even when they work part-time. However, counter-pressures are also strong: the wife’s participation in the labour market is regarded as essential for family income and the migration project, and the example of working women, not only in the host society but also in urban Morocco, is often referred to as a positive tendency. Overall, then, we can say that the attitudes to gender roles are undergoing important changes and often emphasize a more flexible interpretation of traditional norms. As one interviewee put it, “it’s difficult to follow the rules of religion, for example that I should never leave my house (...) Everybody has to work, we need a lot of money to live on” (Nadia, 38, secondary schooling, domestic employee working full-time, 5 years in receiving country, practicing Muslim, wears a veil, would like her daughters to marry “Muslim” men but considers the veil to be “their own choice”). In short, the Moroccan families with young children feature some significant cultural contrasts (religious, linguistic) in relation to the population of the host society but they seem to be slightly more integrated socially than the Cape Verdean immigrant families: segregation in the housing and labour markets is less pronounced, racial contrasts are less strong, higher educational qualifications do not give access to qualified jobs but they facilitate language acquisition, helping children with school work and dealing with institutions in the host society. Finally, family life centered on marriage and the couple makes it easier to avoid the severe forms of vulnerability associated with lone motherhood in the Cape Verdean families. If we now examine the work/life balance of the Moroccan worker migrant families and try to understand how it is shaped by this specific pattern of ethnicity, we find that families’ work/care strategies are both similar and different to those of the Cape Verdean worker migrant families. As nearly all the families are first-generation labour migrant families, we shall analyse the families as a whole and refer to the few families that do not fall into this migration pattern at the end (there is only one second-generation family and there are two cases of what we might label “lone women’s self-assertive” migration pattern: see footnote 5). Table 5 shows that Moroccan families manage work and care for young children through two main types of work/care strategies: mother-centeredness and extensive delegation. The women who rely on a mother-centered strategy work part-time in the catering, caring or cleaning services, nearly always in private homes where they can negotiate short or irregular working hours which fit in with their children’s nursery and primary school

travelling salesman, had two children and separated some years later. The other lone mother immigrated to meet up and live with her Moroccan fiancé, without her family knowing. Both these lone mothers were qualified professionals in the sending society and they seem to represent a different kind of migration pattern, more centered on the migration of qualified young women who want to assert their independence and own way of living. However, as we only have two cases, it is difficult to identify and propose a clear-cut migration pattern.

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timetables12 . Safir is a typical example. She is 25, married and has two children, one aged 3 and the other 7. As in most couples, her husband immigrated first, in 1989, and worked in Turin before settling in Tuscany. He is waiter in a pizzeria and has a complicated timetable with a morning and a night shift (11-3 pm, 6-12 pm, including week-ends). He married Safir (his first cousin, living in Morocco) in 1993 and she joined him a year later with the eldest daughter. Safir stayed at home for several years caring for the two children but now works in a private home caring for an elderly lady: from 8 to 12 am every morning and two afternoons a week when her eldest daughter has classes until four (state primary school, small fee for canteen service at lunchtime). The younger child stays in the crèche from 8 am to 4 pm (no fee, due to the family’s low income13). Safir is pleased to be working, not only because she earns some money and gets on well with the family she works for but also because she felt very lonely and had difficulties learning Italian during the years she stayed at home (she learnt by watching TV). The family’s main problem now is housing. They have moved several times but their house is small (two rooms) and damp; they have applied for a council house but have been told that this will be difficult to obtain. Safir has a compulsory school educational level and her husband completed secondary school; they have no other family members living in Italy and very few personal friends. Part-time work thus emerges as a solution which allows women to earn some money without delegating caring and household responsibilities in an extensive fashion. Some women see it as the only possible option for adjusting work and care responsibilities. “A woman should do these small jobs here, maybe because, how shall I put it, she’s forced to do it, what can you do when there are children – you can’t abandon your child from 7 in the morning until 7 at night, can you? So the mamma just does little part-time jobs”: (Chakiry, 30, 8 years in Italy, 2 children, working part-time). For those who stayed at home for several years when they arrived in Italy, it is also important to be able to break the social isolation they felt: “There was nobody to lend me a hand, nobody ringing at the door, nobody, nobody, it really hurt, hurt, I can’t tell you. And so now, with the children bigger and the nursery, I go to work” (Sumia, 32, secondary education, 6 years in Italy, 2 children aged 5 and 4, arrived one month after marriage and became pregnant soon after; working in cleaning services since last year; would like to work full-time in a factory) Table 5 Work/care strategies in Moroccan immigrant families (Italy) Managing work and care through mother-centeredness

• Mother-centered care (9 cases) Managing work and care through extensive delegation

• Grandparental care (3 cases) • Extensive formal care (2 cases) • Extensive varied (formal + informal low-cost, 4 cases)

Managing work and care through superposition of care upon work • Formal care (no extras) + workplace (2 cases)

12 Nurseries usually close at 4 pm and primary schools at lunchtime two days a week and at 4pm on the other days. However, there are also some variations. For example, in the Emilia-Romagna region, some women have access to nurseries that only close at 5.30 pm, 13 He earns 800 euros and she earns 250 euros. Safir’s salary is not declared so social services only take her husband’s wage into account.

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Managing work and care through negotiation within the family • Shared parental care (1 case)

Managing work and care through child negligence • Formal care (school, no extras) and self care (1 case)

Combining part-time work and care for young children is not always an easy solution to build up. Many women only manage to find work in the mornings, some have to wait a long time before finding such a job, and one mother, with higher qualifications (secondary school and a diploma in cultural mediation, given by a local training agency), would like to work every morning as her 4 year old daughter goes to nursery school but has only found a few hours of work per week (in a health unit helping a gynaecologist with North African women). Lastly, in some cases, the part-time work that is available only coincides partially with the normal opening hours of formal care services. In these cases, if the mother wants to work, a mother-centered strategy is no longer possible. This is Rashida’s problem (30 years old, 5 years in Italy). She does two mornings of cleaning in a private house and she cleans in the evening, from 5.30 pm to 8.30 pm, for a cooperative of cleaning services to which she belongs (earning 160 euros per month). Her 3 year old daughter is in a nursery from 8 to 4 so in the evenings Rashida has to take the child to her workplace (superposition of work on care, Table 5); occasionally, when her husband (a factory furnace worker, working 3 different shifts which change every week) is on a morning shift (5am to 1pm), she will leave the child at home. Rashida would like to have a different job but, in spite of her vocational computer diploma, this is what she has been able to find: “I would like to find a stable job as a domestic help. But the Italians do not trust foreigners so it is not easy to find… luckily I can take my daughter to work”. She would be ashamed to do this type of work in Morocco but working is important to her - she worked in Morocco as a single woman before migrating and in Italy only stayed at home when she was unable to place her daughter in a public crèche. Saida (aged 26, 6 years in Italy, one daughter aged 2) has a similar problem to Rashida. She also has a part-time job with atypical hours working in a restaurant, in the evening from 7.30 to 10.30 pm and in the morning during the week-end. However, as her husband has a day-time job (7.30 to 6 pm, in a furniture factory), Saida has been able to negotiate a shared parental arrangement (see Table 5), with the father taking care of the child while she is at work. Saida would prefer to find a job in the morning, when her daughter is at the crèche (to be with other children), but this is the only work she has found and she insists that “she does not want to be at home all the time”. Saida has vocational training as a secretary and took an Italian language course for immigrants when she arrived; she does all the housework at home and even bakes bread. Extensive delegation, on the contrary, is a strategy which is linked to full-time work for mothers. Some of the women have fairly standard full-time jobs. For example, cleaning in private homes seven hours per day. But most have long or atypical working schedules in the catering or industrial sectors. In either case, however, due to the rigid and relatively early closing hours of public nurseries and schools in Italy, families usually have to rely on informal low-cost care after nursery or school hours. Only two mothers (see Nadia, above) have access to low-cost nurseries that are open from 8 until 5.30 pm, thus enabling them to work full-time and fetch their children after work (extensive formal care, Table 5). The others have to rely on extra informal care to supplement formal care

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services. “Grandparental care” is a strategy used by first-generation families who managed to bring over a close relative to help with household tasks or the birth of a baby. Grandmothers (sometimes grandfathers as well) will stay on in an extended family household and take on caring responsibilities and well as many domestic tasks. Amina’s family is a typical example. Amina (aged 37) was a low-paid factory worker in Casablanca when she decided to immigrate in the late eighties. She met her husband in 1988 in southern Italy and they later moved to the Veneto region. Her mother (aged 60) carries out most of the household tasks and cares for the 1 year old baby at home as well as her other grandchildren, aged 7 and 8, after school finishes. Amina has a tailoring job in a clothes factory. She works 40 hours a week (8-12 am and 2-6 pm) and earns 980 euros. Her mother has been living with them since 1989; in the summer she goes back to Morocco for 3 months and takes the grandchildren with her. If grandparental care is not available, it is difficult to obtain other informal unpaid support. Like the Cape Verdean immigrants, Moroccan interviewees say that social networks in the Moroccan community are important but that they do not compensate for the lack of close kin networks which provide help with child care in the sending country. Although some families get occasional support from Moroccan women who do not work, on a day-to-day basis families feel they have to manage on their own and “everybody avoids asking for help to take care of children except in exceptional situations and for short periods of time” (Koudar, 34, primary school education, 9 years in Italy, part-time work from 9 to 2 caring for an elderly person, 2 children aged 7 and 4, husband working as a kitchen hand in restaurant, 5 pm to 2 am). Dual-earner couples where both work full-time thus have to make do with other informal resources at hand (extensive varied, Table 5): for example, in one family there is a paid childminder to look after a four-year old between 4 and 8 pm (the couple have a butcher’s shop); in another there is an older child (15 year old) who fetches his 9 year old sister from school (both parents work in a shoe factory). Young children also get sent back to Morocco, for the holidays or for longer periods when they are not yet in primary school. Considering the difficulties that these dual-earner families have in order to organize work and care for young children, it is not surprising to find some problems of child negligence14. In the Moroccan families it emerges sporadically in a couple with a 6 year old child where both have somewhat atypical working hours. Hadou (32, 9 years in Italy, secondary education) does cleaning in a hotel from 8.30 am to 3.30 pm during the week and either on Saturday or Sunday mornings, while Said (37, 11 years in Italy, diploma in literature) works alternate shifts in a zinc factory during the week and on Saturday mornings. Their son sometimes stays alone for a few hours after school and on Saturdays and he also stays alone in the holidays when there is no school. This is the situation which worries Hadou most as they have no relatives, friends or neighbours to help provide care during the holidays; she thinks there should be more free after school and holiday clubs to help working couples with young children.

14 In the Italian interviews, the interviewers were not always able to check all the gaps in the care arrangements. For example, we do not always know exactly what happens when primary school children have their 2 free afternoons or in situations where both members of the couple work on Saturday morning. We therefore think it is likely that the problem of after school care for young children arises more frequently than would appear from the work/care strategies described in Table 5.

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Lastly, it is important to mention that the only second-generation family relies, quite typically, on grandparental support to help provide care for a 4 year old child before and after nursery opening hours. Mounia (26, vocational training) is a leather worker (8 am to 5 pm, 775 euros) and her husband works in a bakery (12 pm to 8 am, 1550 euros). Mounia’s parents and sisters live nearby so her mother fetches the child in the morning and takes her to nursery school at 9, a sister fetches her back again at 4 pm and leaves her with grandmother until Mounia arrives from work. Mounia would prefer not to work but states that she works to boost family income and to be independent: her husband left her once for eight months, so it is important for her to know that she can cope on her own. Although Mounia does not wear a veil, she is a practicing Muslim and regrets the fact that Muslim workers are not allowed to pray during the stated hours. As for the lone parent families in this sample, they do not reveal the pattern of extreme vulnerability we described in some other countries for lone parent labour migrants, mainly due to the fact that they are not typical worker migrants (even if integration and legalization were not always easy) and have more resources: some professional qualifications, reasonable income and a few good contacts in the host society (with social services or Italian friends). Sara came to Italy because she wanted to live with her Moroccan boyfriend and Malica, a secondary school teacher, to get away from a complicated relationship with a married man. Sara was a bookkeeper in an accountant’s office in Morocco and worked illegally in restaurants when she arrived in Italy. When she eventually got her stay permit 3 years later she worked for a year in a varnishing factory with awkward working hours. However, after her child’s birth, she managed to get a job in a printing workshop through an Italian friend (8 am to 5.30 pm, 730 euros). The couple separated a few months after the birth of the child. Sara was able to find a place for the child in a crèche which is open until 5.30 and all year round (90 euros per month); she can also rely occasionally on a sister who is a housewife and lives 30 km away as well as a friend who lives nearby. In summary, work/care strategies in the Moroccan immigrant families are affected by several factors. Like the worker migrant families in other countries, they have to deal with the absence of close kin, with the long and often atypical working hours of unskilled jobs in the industrial and service sector, as well as the rather rigid and awkward opening and closing hours of crèches, nurseries and primary schools. Unlike the Asian or the Cape Verdean families, they also have to take into account the Islamic norms which underline a male breadwinner model. In an effort to adapt to this context and to compromise with the economic demands of migration as well as the norms regarding gender roles, some women look for part-time work and develop mother-centered work/care strategies. Subjectively and objectively this accommodates different demands and constraints and allows women to “leave the house” without seeming to leave it for very long. In other families, however, the family’s wish to improve its living conditions, women’s previous work experiences and the fact that they are “living in Italy” (i.e. in a migratory context, where both members of the couple contribute to the success of the migration project, and far from the sending society where the traditional norms were learnt) seem to encourage work/care strategies in which both parents work full-time and delegate the caring of young children to formal and informal carers. Work/care strategies based on extensive delegation are difficult to organize and can often only be set up if formal services, which close early in Italy, are complemented by extra informal solutions such as older child

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care, a childminder or grandparental support. When these are not available, families may take children to work, send them back to the sending country temporarily or leave them alone at home. In overall terms, however, especially when compared to the Cape Verdean families, Moroccan worker families seem to be more vulnerable to problems related to women’s isolation and lack of autonomy but less exposed to situations of child negligence. This may be partially explained by the nuclear structure of the Moroccan immigrant family, which usually ensures a male breadwinner, and women’s part-time work. But it must also be seen in the context of Cape Verdeans’ strong social and educational deprivation. For example, Moroccan women have some access to reasonably paid part-time work in private homes as well as more skilled work in factories, whereas Cape Verdean women are more concentrated in full-time cleaning services with atypical hours and very low salaries. Extreme poverty during childhood in the sending or in the host country is also more pronounced in the Cape Verdean families. School drop-out and early entry into the labour market make it difficult to avoid negative repercussions for the next generation. Compulsory schooling is accomplished with difficulty and educational mobility, based on secondary school or higher professional or educational qualifications, is hardly considered. This reflects on caring and educational strategies, with Moroccan women being openly more conscious of the importance of trying to follow up children’s school work (even if they have difficulties with Italian) as well as ensuring the children’s participation in different multi-cultural activities. In summary, when we compare first-generation Cape Verdean and Moroccan immigrant families, we find some common traits and patterns of vulnerability. But we also find many specific characteristics, linked to family, educational, and cultural differences, that make for some specificity within this general pattern of labour migration. Conclusion Immigrant families adopt a diversity of work/care strategies in order to reconcile work and care for young children. Apart from two predominant strategies - managing work and care through mother-centeredness and through extensive delegation - families also take children to work, share the caring responsibilities by alternating the working hours of the two parents, rely on the regular help of an older child, keep children in the receiving country or leave children below age 10 alone at home. Almost all the immigrant families analysed in this explorative research suffer from the low availability of close kin support networks, from a strong pressure from/to work and from one or various integration problems during the first years after arrival: these may be related to problems of social isolation, lack of information, difficulties with the language, problems of housing or with legalization which hinder access to services as well as to the labour market of the receiving society. However, patterns of vulnerability and work/care strategies vary greatly according to the migration pattern of the immigrant families. Highly qualified professional migrant families are subject to pressure in terms of long working hours and careers but they seem to be the least vulnerable in terms of child care. They are usually dual career families that rely on extensive paid delegation which may take the form of care services of the receiving country or facilities provided for foreign children near their workplace (usually private and high cost), sometimes supplemented by paid informal care. Living somewhat

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in a world of their own, especially short-term migrants and those who do not work in the language of the host country, such as the Chinese high-tech workers in Finland, these families often lack information on the care services of the receiving society (regarding childminders, for example) and may experience some difficulties when they try to shift to the nurseries/schools of the receiving society. Nevertheless, we can say that a high level of resources compensates for the lack of integration in the caring services of the receiving society and allows for different options in relation to child care. Unskilled worker migrant families seem to be at the opposite end of the scale. Pressures to work (migration project, low income) and pressures from work - such as atypical or long hours and pressure not to miss work – are the main constraints on family/work life and caring strategies for children. Given the income from their jobs, these families must avail themselves of low-cost formal care arrangements with long hours of care, either public or third sector care facilities, or informal care. However, although most labour migrant communities have important social networks which provide support in some situations, interviews show that these informal networks fail to provide support for child care. This is because time is a rare resource in all labour migrant families, and very close kin, the main provider of child care in families (Coenen-Huther et al., 1994; Wall et al., 2001), is usually absent. As a result, work/care strategies in first-generation immigrant families fall systematically into three main categories: one solution is to cut back partially on the mother’s employment and to revolve working hours (mainly cleaning or caring services) around school/day care hours. The main tension in this case is that this strategy reduces the woman’s job options and earnings as well as family income. A second solution is extensive delegation to formal care services, providing it is affordable, available in that specific area, with a sufficient number of places, and with opening hours which cover workers’ long or atypical working hours. This is often not the case. Primary schools finish early, low-cost crèches and afternoon/holiday clubs do not always have enough places, and even when formal care services are available and are open for 8 to 10 hours a day, this may not cover the caring needs of families due to atypical working hours in the cleaning, health and catering services or shift work in the industrial sector. Work/care strategies therefore often have to rely on a mixture of individual solutions at hand, such as workplace care, formal care supplemented by older child care or low-cost childminders, and leaving children alone, usually before and after school hours or on Saturdays when parents are working. Across the five receiving countries and the different countries of origin, the work/care strategies reveal that these difficulties in managing work and care emerge in all the countries where labour migrant families were interviewed. The findings also show that national policies (related to availability of care/school facilities, women’s work, children’s autonomy, etc.) and the characteristics of the national immigrant groups may vary considerably and lead to a different emphasis being placed on mother-centered care, on formal extensive delegation, on negotiation inside the family or on leaving children alone. This complexity must be remembered and taken into account (see, for example, the contrasts between Moroccan and Cape Verdean families’ work/care strategies). Nevertheless, our main finding is that the overall general trend, in unskilled worker migrant families, is for the latter to be largely excluded from a “reconciliation” care model in which normal working hours, formal care services and the family (close kin) offer a balanced interweaving of formal and informal child care. In spite of the

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differences in the family and social care models of the five countries where this study was carried out15, we may say that in all the countries there seems to be an underlying work/care model in which women’s work is a predominant trend and there is a mix of informal care and formal care provision, either public or publicly–subsidized, which supports dual-earner parents in their work/family roles. Even Italy and Portugal, where traditionally care provision was expected to come from the family and women were expected to work less, have changed substantially over the last two decades and have witnessed a strong increase in women’s work as well as in low-cost care facilities for children under school age (in 2001, 97% of children aged 3 to 6 in Italy and 74% in Portugal were in pre-school). In spite of gaps and awkward hours, the interviews underline the importance, for working parents, of low-cost third sector facilities in Portugal and public pre-school nurseries in Italy. South-East England, however, stands out maybe as an exception: families with low or average income have almost no access to low-cost public or third sector facilities, and the work/care model here seems to be strongly influenced by a typical liberal non-interventionist welfare regime where child care is devolved to families and the market. At a national level, however, the UK has also been moving to catch up in terms of provision for young children. In summary, the strong contrasts in social care models which were underlined for the eighties (Antonnen et al., 1996) have become less pronounced. This does not mean that cross-national differences in family policies and in the nature of the Welfare State (Gauthier, 1996, Esping-Andresen, 1990) are not important. But it reminds us, as some authors have pointed out, that there has been a recent emphasis on the “reconciliation” of family and work in all countries and some convergence in terms of provision of non-parental childcare (Gauthier, 2000; Mahon, 2002). What the present research underlines, however, is that this development in the direction of more “reconciliation” is cross-cut by patterns of class and racial/ethnic status. Due to occupational segregation, lack of close kin and the characteristics of their jobs, labour migrant families have an unequal access to non-parental childcare. Possibly like other blue-collar workers that occupy similar jobs in the receiving societies (Presser, 1988), these families belong to working sectors that are insufficiently protected by the welfare state. Mixed marriage migration, student migration, asylum seeker migration and returnee migration present patterns of vulnerability that are less striking in comparison with the labour migrant families. Mixed marriage migration is related to a specific “gender contract” in which a foreign wife comes to live and build a family in her husband’s country of origin. Mother-centered care prevails and is often linked to problems of isolation as well as difficulties of integration in the labour market when the stay-at-home mother decides to work after raising young children at home for several years. Student migration of single persons, usually followed by inter-ethnic marriage and permanent settling in the receiving country, is, by contrast, more strongly associated with a family division of paid work based on the dual earner model (both full-time workers) and a work/life balance emphasizing formal extensive delegation of care (with the exception of the UK sample, where low-cost or even average extensive care facilities are not available, thus constraining the dual-earner couples into work/care strategies based on negotiation inside the family). Finally, it was observed that asylum seeker migration (in France) and 15 For an outline, see the national and synthesis reports of the SOCCARE Project. For example, Martin and Vion, 2002.

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returnee migration (in Finland) present patterns of vulnerability, especially during the first years after arrival, that are often similar to those of worker migrant families. However, both types of immigrant families receive considerable support in the receiving countries in terms of social housing, social benefits and training courses (sometimes followed by subsidized employment). These measures act as a buffer so that, in comparison with the worker migrant families, these families will more easily achieve a stable work/life pattern in the receiving society. Higher qualifications, where they exist, are also important, as they allow for more resources in establishing contacts and searching for alternatives. Two final comments are important to summarize some of the issues raised by this exploratory study on immigrant families’ work/care strategies. The first relates to the factors affecting immigrant families’ work/care strategies. The composition and size of the samples in each country make it impossible to carry out a country-based comparison but they allow us to pinpoint some of the main factors. We have already seen that work/care strategies are strongly influenced by the migration patterns of families. However, within the different types of immigration, some other factors have an impact and introduce some diversification. It is important to mention at least five. Family structure (couples versus lone parents) is an important variable but only in the more “vulnerable” types of immigration such as first-generation unskilled worker and asylum seeker migration: it is here that lone parents with young children are more exposed to social exclusion and to child negligence. Work and educational trajectories, before and after immigration, also have an impact. For example, many of the more recent worker migrants from Africa have higher educational qualifications (secondary schooling or vocational training) than the former generation of African labour migrants in Europe: this makes for some changes in attitudes to gender roles (and women’s work in particular), more flexibility and geographical mobility in the search for jobs and housing and therefore less residential segregation. From the point of view of work/care strategies, this seems to be encouraging work/family patterns more centered on women’s full-time work and extensive delegation. A third factor is related to the patterns of ethnicity. Strong racial and cultural contrasts, especially in the context of illegal and worker migration, seem to reinforce residential as well as occupational segregation. When this strong ethnicity is associated with specific family forms, as in the Cape Verdean immigrant families, difficulties in managing work and care for children increase. A fourth factor concerns the absence or presence of close kin networks. Findings show that when they exist, either in first-generation families who managed to bring the grandparents into the host country or in second-generation families, grandparental care and support is an important option to help families in their caring responsibilities. Last, the problem of gender. Not surprisingly, since it is at the core of the organization of work/life patterns in families, gender inequality emerged as an important factor in shaping work/care strategies. In one type of immigration, which we labelled “mixed marriage migration”, gender inequality is the most significant determining factor of work/care strategies: women who migrated through marriage are likely to adopt a male breadwinner pattern and to manage work and care through mother-centeredness. And in the Moroccan immigrant families, a community where culture and religion emphasize women’s domestic and caring roles, gender inequality in family roles also emerges as an important factor. It encourages some preference for mother-centeredness as a work/care strategy but

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it is not the only influence at work: previous work experiences, negative feelings of isolation at home due to lack of primary networks, as well as the family’s migration project to improve housing and living conditions, all these other variables appear to exert pressure in a different direction and to be encouraging work/family patterns based on women’s work outside the home. Finally, it is important to note that gender inequality in the labour market is also an important factor in work/care strategy formation. Labour migrant women working full-time are concentrated in low-paid jobs like the men, but they tend to receive lower salaries. For example, Cape Verdean women in cleaning services earn the national minimum wage whereas the unskilled male workers in the building sector earn well above the minimum wage. Apart from other effects, the main problem from the point of view of work/care strategies is that labour migrant lone mothers in low-paid jobs have extremely low resources, making it difficult to buy in even low-cost care services and often leading to work/care strategies based on self-care, work-place care or unreliable informal care. The second comment relates to some policy implications of these findings. First, it is important to underline the need to take into account the diversity of immigrant families. Within this broad category, there are many different worlds: different migration projects and trajectories, diverse family patterns and work/life strategies, variable resources to cope with the difficulties of managing work and care. However, if we focus on the most vulnerable immigrant families - unskilled worker migrant families as well as lone parents within this category - findings seem to point to the still weak regulatory function of the different welfare states in the protection of these families with low-paid, often atypical, jobs and caring responsibilities for young children. For example, in terms of child care, it is important to analyse the type of facilities provided by public or publicly-subsidized childcare and schools. These are often inflexible, have gaps in their opening hours or close early, even in countries such as France and Finland where formal childcare has been a dominant care arrangement for several decades. Labour migrant families usually need low-cost as well as responsive care services which take into account their income and family-unfriendly working hours. Another policy implication is related to the problem of close kin networks. Although the social networks of economic migrant communities cannot respond to families’ child care needs, a few families are able to bring close kin to help care for young children. Interviews show that this latter solution is not always easy to implement and it will therefore probably depend strongly in the future on family reunification policies that facilitate the entry of close relatives in ascending line. Finally, another major challenge in terms of social policy lies in gender inequalities in terms of caring pressure inside the family and in terms of the labour market. Gender inequality in migrant families with low-paid jobs is not easy to tackle. It involves looking at women’s training and educational opportunities, their access to the labour market (and to legalized work) when they arrive in the receiving society, the wages and working hours in the employment sectors in which they work as well as the support mechanisms with regard to child care. Policy development with regard to working lone mothers, in particular in Portugal and Italy where lone parents do not receive extra attention and support, is also an important issue. References

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Mahon, R. (2002), “Child care: Toward what kind of ‘Social Europe’?”, Social Politics, vol. 9, nº 3, pp. 343-379. Martin, C., Debroise, A., Le Bihan, B. (2002), Care arrangements in immigrant families. National Report, CRAP/CNRS and LAPSS/ENSP, Rennes. Martin, C., and Vion, A. (2002), Lone Parent Families, Work and Social Care. Synthesis Report, CRAP/CNRS and LAPSS/ENSP, Rennes. Nauck, B.(1989), “Assimilation process and group integration of migrant families”, International migration, vol. 27, nº 1, pp. 27-48. Pires, R. P. (1999), “Imigração”, in F. Bethencourt e K. Chaudhuri (dir.) História da Expansão Portuguesa, Vol. V, Lisbon, Círculo de Leitores., pp. 197-211. Salt, J. (2000), Current trends in International Migration in Europe, Strasbourg, Council of Europe. Presser, H. B. (1988), “Shift work and child care among dual-earner American parents”, Journal of Marriage and the Family, 50 (1), pp. 133-148. Trifiletti, R., Pratesi, A., Simoni, S., Care arrangements in immigrant families. National Report: Italy, University of Florence, Florence. Zechner, M., (2002), Care arrangements in immigrant families. National Report: Finland, University of Tampere, Tampere. Wall. K. Aboim, S., Cunha, V. and Vasconcelos, P. “Families and Support networks in Portugal; the reproduction of inequality”, in Journal of European Social Policy, 11 (3), pp. 213-233. Wall, K., São José, J. and Correia, S. (2002), Care arrangements in immigrant families. National Report: Portugal, ICS – University of Lisbon, Lisbon. Wall, K. and São José, J. (2003), Immigrant Families, Work and Social Care. Synthesis Report, ICS – University of Lisbon, Lisbon. Internet reference (for the National and Synthesis reports of the SOCCARE project): http://www.uta.fi/laitokset/sospol/soccare/ Contact: Karin Wall Instituto de Ciências Sociais Av. Prof. Aníbal Bettencourt, 9 1600-189 Lisboa email: karin.wall@ics.ul.pt