Who Cares? Migrant Domestic Workers and the Cost of Care

In this episode of Mobility, Work, and Rights, Ilse van Liempt and Nando Sigona bring together three of the world’s leading scholars of domestic work - Rhacel Parreñas (Princeton University), Bridget Anderson (University of Bristol) and Sabrina Marchetti (Ca' Foscari University of Venice) - to unpack how migration and labour regimes shape the everyday lives of the workers who keep households running across Europe and beyond. They explore why ordinary families become employers, how global care chains redistribute inequality, and what new research from the I-CLAIM project reveals about the irregularisation of migrant domestic work today. Our podcast picksBooks- Anderson, B (2000) Doing the dirty work? Bloomsbury- Marchetti, S (2022) Migration and domestic work, Springer (open access)- Parreñas, R (2025) The trafficker next door, Norton & Co.PodcastNot Just Your Cleaning Lady, The Invisible Community PodcastI-CLAIM reports- Hajer, M., & van Liempt, I. (2025). Irregular migrants in the Dutch Domestic Work Sector. I-CLAIM. DOI: ⁠https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15775196⁠- Marchetti, S., and Lashchuk, I. (2025) Irregularised migrant domestic workers in Naples, Italy. I-CLAIM. DOI: https://zenodo.org/records/15775615- Merikoski, P., and Näre, L. (2025) Precarious migrants in domestic cleaning work. Findings from Finland. I-CLAIM. DOI: https://zenodo.org/records/15775520- Sigona, N., Piemontese, S., Mendes, S.S., Achi, A. (2025) Irregularised migrants doing domestic work in the United Kingdom. I-CLAIM. DOI: https://zenodo.org/records/15775346How to citevan Liempt, I, Sigona, N, Parreñas, R, Anderson, B, Marchetti, S (2025) "Who Cares? Migrant Domestic Workers and the Cost of Care", Mobility, work and rights: the I-CLAIM podcast, S1 E8, 28 November 2025.Call to action ⁠⁠Follow the podcast⁠⁠ on all major podcasting platforms or through our ⁠⁠RSS Feed⁠⁠.  Get all the latest updates from ⁠⁠I-CLAIM ⁠⁠ on⁠ ⁠ ⁠⁠BlueSky⁠⁠,  and ⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠