“You better stay healthy and postpone any illness until I can be with you”: the multidirectional ‘care ecologies’ of migrant women during the COVID-19 pandemic

Drawing upon the concept of ‘care ecology’, in this paper we explore migrant women’s unpaid caring activities and emotional labour within the spatial orderings of the COVID-19 pandemic in and beyond Aotearoa New Zealand. In dialogue with 12 middle-class migrant women, this paper sketches a complex picture of the ways informal and unpaid caring activities are conducted across multiple scales of body, home, countries of origin and Aotearoa. The findings revealed migrant women’s caring activities were disturbed, intensified, and informed by spatial structures of the pandemic, including border closures, lockdowns and (in)accessibility to care services in Aotearoa and their homelands. These results highlight further that unpaid care, both at transnational and local levels, is not simply due to an individual’s capacity and feelings of responsibility, but is also a collective spatial construction that is shaped by a range of social, cultural, and political factors. Our research emphasises that addressing mental health challenges of migrant women during the pandemic requires targeted policies that acknowledge their invisible emotional labour and cater to their specific needs.