Disentangling interlocking regimes in the biographies of migrant mothers with tertiary education Open Access

Migrant mothers with tertiary education face significant challenges to accessing working positions commensurate with their studies. Although it is well known that motherhood influences women’s career and job outcomes, its impact on the professional trajectories of migrant women with tertiary education remains understudied. The paper proposes to fill this gap and argues that the intersection between regimes – particularly those of migration, care, and gender – conditions employment opportunities and shapes the trajectories of migrant mothers with tertiary education. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in Veneto, Italy, and Alsace, France, that included fifty interviews, out of which four portraits of migrant mothers with tertiary education were selected to analyse the intersection between regimes and its impact on professional trajectories.

In Western European countries, migrant women tend to be confined to the bottom of the employment structure (Ballarino & Panichella, 2018; Freedman, 2018) and are over-represented in feminised jobs with low social recognition, especially in the domestic and care work sectors (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015; Parreñas, 2015). Receiving tertiary education¹ is expected to facilitate access to rewarding positions, as their holders tend to occupy jobs with better salaries and higher social recognition, compared to candidates with lower levels of education (Crawford, Gregg, Macmillan, Vignoles, & Wyness, 2016; OECD, 2019). However, returns to education for migrant women seem to be reduced. With the same level of education, they tend to perform jobs with lower social recognition compared to local women and men (Grigoleit-Richter, 2017; Kofman, 2012).

Although research on so-called ‘skilled’ migration initially mainly focused on men (Boucher, 2009), since the 2000s, scholars have explored the question of why migrant women with tertiary education are confined to the bottom of the employment structure (Ackers, 2004; Grigoleit-Richter, 2017; Kofman, 2012; Raghuram, 2008). Theorists of the ‘international division of reproductive labour’ (Parreñas, 2015) emphasise that there is high demand for a low-paid feminised workforce in the Global North that confines migrant women, including those with tertiary education, to the domestic and care work sectors. In parallel, scholars have analysed how migration policies (Kofman, 2012; Liversage, 2009), via their poor recognition of human capital, signified through titles and skills gained abroad (Kofman, 2012), and co-national networks (Killian & Manohar, 2015) limit the employment opportunities of migrant women with tertiary education.

Recent publications have highlighted that, although it is well known that motherhood influences women’s careers and job outcomes (Collins, 2019), its impact on the professional trajectories of migrant women with tertiary education remains understudied (Schaer, Dahinden, & Toader, 2017; Shinozaki, 2014 Wong, 2014). To fill this gap in the literature, this paper analyses how motherhood influences employment strategies, trajectories and outcomes, as well as the subjective perception of social mobility (Attias-Donfut & Wolff, 2001). In contrast to a representation that sees migrant women as vulnerable victims (Giorgi, 2012), the contribution of this paper highlights their agency and their capacity to negotiate their roles as mothers, partners, workers, and members of the political community of the immigration country.

I argue that the professional experience and trajectories of migrant mothers with tertiary education illustrates how different regimes – particularly those of migration, care and gender – intersect and condition the structure of opportunities in the labour market. In order to analyse the employment positioning of these women, it is necessary to disentangle these interlocking regimes and understand how the interaction between them produces inequalities based on gender, migratory status, class, race, and mothering status, leading to an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities (Anthias, 2001). Through this analysis, the article seeks to respond to Amelina and Horvath’s (2020, p. 495) call for adopting an intersectional regime approach when conducting empirical research on migration.

The trajectories of migrant mothers with tertiary education are of specific interest for analysing the interaction between regimes, as these women experience intersecting and cumulative disadvantages (Purkayastha, 2005) connected both to their gender and their migratory status, while they are also subject to different forms of racialisation (Killian & Manohar, 2015). Moreover, migrant mothers often have specific care needs connected to their mothering status (Shinozaki, 2014). Furthermore, from a class perspective, these women tend to experience a loss in their social status and contradictory social mobility when crossing borders (Parreñas, 2015), as they might simultaneously experience an increase in income and a decline in their professional and social status. The experience of these women is also particularly relevant as, through their migration, they have navigated different migratory, gender and care regimes that need to be analysed from a transnational perspective (Kilkey & Merla, 2014).

The article studies this phenomena through a detailed analysis of biographies of migrant mothers with tertiary education. This method makes it possible to demonstrate how regimes intersect to shape trajectories and how individuals adopt strategies to cope, resist, and eventually challenge the aforementioned regimes (Apitzsch & Siouti, 2015). Moreover, this paper adopts an international comparative perspective between France and Italy, in order to contextualise further the social phenomena and enhance the complex ways in which regimes implemented at the local level influence migrants’ experiences (Bloemraad, 2013).

The first part of the article reviews and discusses the literature on regimes and their intersection. The second part focuses on the contexts in which the fieldwork was conducted. The third part analyses the biographies of four migrant mothers who have received tertiary education, highlighting the multiple ways in which the intersection between regimes shapes trajectories.

Research on migration has increasingly made reference to the concept of regimes, although there is no shared definition of the notion (Horvath, Amelina, & Peters, 2017). The initial understanding of migration regimes, which focused on a network of rules, norms, and procedures (Krasner, 1982) has progressively been widened to include practices of control and mobility, that encompass migrants’ strategies to cope, resist, and circumvent them (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2012). In addition, researchers have stressed that migration regimes are also based on discourses and ideologies, marked by the history of migration, colonial past, and prevailing forms of racialisation (Grosfoguel, Oso, & Christou, 2015). Migration regimes create, perpetuate, and transform borders and boundaries within societies, including social hierarchies and stratifications (Amelina & Horvath, 2020). In addition, scholars have highlighted that migration regimes are constructed upon and recreate intersectional inequalities. For instance, skilled migration schemes, such as the EU Blue Card, often become de facto mechanisms of exclusion – on the basis of gender, race, and class – because rather than selecting the most intelligent, these schemes tend to favour the highest earners (Kofman, 2012).

Scholars have called for triangulation between migration regimes with care and gender regimes to better understand their functioning (Lutz, 2017). Care regimes were initially associated with welfare regimes that focused on policy-related factors (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The concept has progressively been broadened to incorporate elements connected to the gender regime, namely practices, discourses, and ideologies on what constitutes appropriate care and expectations concerning gender roles.

When it comes to analysing the intersection between gender, care, and migration regimes, scholars have mainly focused on inequalities in social reproduction, with women from the Global South leaving their children behind to care for the children of women (and men) of the Global North (Parreñas, 2015). However, this is not the only way in which regimes intersect to shape migrant women’s trajectories. By focusing not only on ‘transnational mothering’ (Fresnoza-Flot, 2009) but also on the impact of care practices of co-resident migrant mothers, namely those living with their children, this article studies the multiple ways in which mothering status intersects with class, migratory status, and racialisation to influence employment strategies and outcomes.

In so doing, this article seeks to fill a significant gap in the literature. Few publications have sought to analyse the strategies adopted by co-resident migrant mothers to combine paid work with unpaid care work (Bonizzoni, 2014; Gilmartin & Migge, 2016). Moreover, the literature on ‘skilled’ migrant women has progressively emphasised how gender roles negotiated within families impact employment paths (Riaño, 2012; Schaer et al., 2017; Shinozaki, 2014). However, these publications rarely focus on these women’s caring practices or on the influence of motherhood in their professional trajectories (Wong, 2014).

Theorists have emphasised that migration, care, and gender regimes are context dependents (Horvath et al., 2017; Jenkins, 2018). As a result, it seems particularly relevant to analyse them through an international comparative perspective as this approach makes it possible to further contextualise social phenomena (Bloemraad, 2013).

When it comes to the scale of analysis, scholars have highlighted that regimes have a multi-scalar character and that they are transnational, ‘reaching beyond national and regional state borders and at the same time operating within them’ (Lutz, 2017, p. 361). In this regard, researchers have called for a reconceptualization of labour markets at the local level (Peck, 1989) and argue that gender orders are local (Jenkins, 2018) while stressing the importance of locality when analysing the experience of migrants (Bloemraad, 2013). Taking this criticism into account, this paper analyses regimes at the local level, focusing on the biographies of migrant mothers with tertiary education that live in two European local areas, namely Veneto in Italy and Alsace in France.

On the one hand, the areas selected for conducting research share a series of features. Compared to other regions in Italy and France, Veneto and Alsace have lower levels of unemployment, a relatively high proportion of migrants in the overall population, and a majority of women amongst migrants (Insee, 2018; Istat, 2018). Moreover, in both regions, there is differentiated access to employment according to gender and country of birth, as graduated migrant women are more affected by unemployment and have less access to graduate jobs as compared to non-migrants (Insee, 2017; Romens, 2019).

On the other hand, Veneto and Alsace are embedded in national contexts with different policies, histories, and discourses on migration. France tends to be associated with a Republican Model, in which diversity is seen with suspicion (Fassin & Fassin, 2006), and migrant women are strongly encouraged to erase any sign of cultural differences at work (Scrinzi, 2013). Italy instead has progressively switched from emergency trial-and-error policies to a mandatory, sanction-based integration model (Barbulescu, 2019). Furthermore, in Veneto and Alsace, political parties with anti-migration discourses have gained electoral support and media attention. However, while in Veneto, Lega Nord has held power in the region and several cities since 2010, Rassemblement National in Alsace has not obtained seats as mayors in the main cities. This difference might translate into different practices of internally creating borders and boundaries that impact migrant mothers’ experiences.

Both national contexts are also associated with different models of care. France is associated with a continental model and higher levels of provision of childcare facilities, consisting of public and private crèches, as well as registered childminders. Italy instead follows a familist model (Lyon, 2006), in which the responsibility for providing childcare continues to rest primarily on the shoulders of mothers and their families (Craig & Mullan, 2010; Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). In France, over half of the children under the age of 3 are enrolled in formal childcare, while in Italy, only a quarter of them are registered. Nonetheless, in both countries, access to care services for children under three years of age continues to be scattered and does not cover the entirety of the population’s needs (OECD, 2017).

This paper is based on 50 narrative interviews conducted in both Alsace and Veneto. Thirty-three of these participants were migrant women with tertiary education born in countries outside of the European Union. Interactions with these women consisted of biographical narrative interviews (Collet & Veith, 2013). Participants were asked to recount their lives from childhood onwards, then to narrate specific events and finally to share their opinion on migrant women’s access to employment. Their accounts were put into dialogue with the views of seventeen stakeholders. In addition to biographical narrative interviews, I also conducted semi-structured interviews with twelve human resources managers and five professionals working for institutions and NGOs that aim at facilitating access to employment. All names cited are fictitious, and interviewees are listed in Table 1.

Biographies of migrant mothers with tertiary education were constructed out of the interviews and analysed, paying specific attention to the pieces of narration which implicitly or explicitly referred to regimes and their different manifestations. Using biographies to analyse regimes makes it possible to understand better how their intersection shapes trajectories and how individuals adopt strategies to cope, resist, and eventually challenge such regimes (Apitzsch & Siouti, 2015).

Four significant portraits were selected to analyse this phenomenon. They correspond to a variety of trajectories and cover all of the main issues identified in fieldwork that relate to the ways in which intersections between regimes shape migrant mothers’ trajectories. The criteria for selecting the case studies relates to their country of birth and of residence, where tertiary education was obtained, motherhood temporalities – namely whether interviewees became mothers before or after migrating – and the country of birth of their partners.

Two of the selected participants lived in Veneto, while two lived in Alsace. In each area, one of the women was born in a European country (outside of the EU), namely Ukraine and Albania, and one in an African country, namely Cameroon and Niger, as according to the literature, migrant women born in these macro-areas are subject to different forms of racialisation (Grosfoguel et al., 2015). In addition, scholars stress that little research has been conducted on the experience of skilled African women (Wong, 2014). To emphasise the challenge of having human capital, obtained abroad, recognised in the country of immigration (Kofman, 2012), both in Alsace and Veneto, one of the women obtained a tertiary degree abroad, while the other completed her studies after migrating.

When it comes to family life, all of the women had children. Two of them were already mothers before migrating, while two others became mothers after migrating. Last but not least, two women were in a relationship with men born in the country of immigration, while two were in a relationship or had been in a relationship with men from other countries, which allows the paper to analyse the impact of having a local partner in care arrangements.

The following section analyses four portraits of migrant mothers with tertiary education and highlights how the intersection of regimes has shaped their trajectories.

Winika was born at the end of the 1960s in Ukraine, where she obtained a university degree in music education. She first worked as a music teacher. Subsequently, Winika and her husband, who was also a teacher, started a fruit and vegetable business. However, after a year of working in this sector and as the Soviet Union collapsed, she and her husband considered migrating to Western Europe. The first to leave for Italy was her husband, but as he struggled to find a job and co-nationals advised him that Ukrainian women more easily found employment, Winika joined him a year later. The couple agreed that their son, who was then of school age, would stay in Ukraine until they could earn a sufficient income to qualify for family reunification.

This decision was influenced by the interconnection between migration, care, and gender regimes, which is reflected in labour market stratifications. From the perspective of Winika’s husband, migrant women in northern Italy had a greater chance than migrant men of getting a job in the care sector, so he convinced his wife to migrate. However, she had to move without her son because of Italy’s restrictive migration regime and limited resources, which illustrates that migration policies are also selective from a class perspective, as the possibility of moving with one’s family depends on economic capital. As a result, Winika practised ‘transnational mothering’ (Fresnoza-Flot, 2009), which demands negotiating absence in order to give meaning to migration, as it contradicts the ideology that sees mothers as the primary caretakers of their children. In Winika’s case, sending remittances and financially supporting her son, who was staying with her relatives in Ukraine, gave meaning to her initial decision to migrate.

In Italy, Winika first worked as a live-in domestic worker and then looked for what she calls a ‘real job’, meaning a position that would enable her to rent an apartment and earn the income necessary for family reunification. During this first period in Italy, Winika put her career aside, and her main goal was to earn as much as possible to reunite with her son.

Winika found a part-time job in a restaurant, which she complimented with a part-time position in a patisserie. While working at the restaurant, she felt that anyone could do her job and take her position. Therefore, to access more secure employment, she started learning how to make pizza. Winika’s strategy was that of using labour market stratifications, based on gender and migration background, to her advantage by working in a sector where migrant women are represented in Veneto, namely that of hospitality, and then gaining a specific skill through informal training³, to obtain a more stable position compared to her entry-level jobs.

After a couple of years, the restaurant in which Winika was working went bankrupt, and she had to look for a new job. Thanks to the practical knowledge she had gained in her previous work, Winika quickly managed to be hired as a pizza maker in another company. This new position enabled her to earn the income needed for reuniting with her son, who was by then a teenager and starting high school in Italy.

Meanwhile, Winika’s husband became depressed and decided to move back to Ukraine. From Winika’s point of view, her partner was not coping with his downward trajectory, going from being a teacher in the former Soviet Union to a blue-collar migrant worker in shipyards with no employment contract. Winika wanted to stay in Italy to secure what she calls a ‘European situation’ for her son, meaning a rewarding social and professional position in Western Europe. In the end, she divorced her husband and stayed in Italy with her child.

Following the divorce, Winika indicates that she set aside her career and affective life (for instance, with her husband) to prioritise her child’s trajectory. Her example illustrates how migrant mothers invest in their children’s education to ensure intergenerational upward social mobility (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). Although Winika presents her path as a ‘sacrifice’, her experience highlights that providing upward mobility to one’s child might help to cope with working in posts that do not reflect one’s background. Winika accepted her social and professional downgrading as a price to pay so that her son would have a better position. Her vision is influenced by her understanding of motherhood and gender ideologies prevailing in Ukraine and Italy that see mothers as children’s primary carers and as being responsible for their future (Vianello, 2009).

When I met Winika, her son was finishing his studies in Switzerland, and the woman felt she could finally focus on her career. In parallel to her work as a pizza maker, she was enrolled at university and was considering migrating again.

Rose was born in the 1980s in Cameroon, where she obtained a trilingual bachelor’s degree in French, Italian and English. Upon her parents’ suggestion, Rose applied for a study visa in Italy and started studying Political Science in Veneto. During the first year, she relied on financial support from her parents. However, after the first year she needed to find her own income. Through a Cameroonian friend, she found a job as a cleaner in a supermarket and worked there until she completed her master’s degree in Human Rights. As is often the case amongst migrant women (Killian & Manohar, 2015), the network of co-nationals enabled Rose to access jobs, but these jobs were always at the bottom of the employment market and did not correspond to her academic background.

While studying, Rose met her partner, who, like her, was born in Cameroon and had come to Italy for his university studies. They had their first child six years after living in Veneto when Rose was finishing her master’s degree. Rose was hesitant about what to do next. However, during a workshop on maternity, she met a social worker who offered to forward her resume to an NGO providing support to refugees. Rose did a six-month internship at the organisation, and then started occasionally working there as a cultural mediator. Meanwhile, the NGO offered Rose a part-time position as a social support assistant.

Rose’s experience stresses that activities connected to maternity can enable migrant women to build social capital that facilitates accessing the job market. In addition, it also shows that migrant women tend to access specific jobs in stratified local labour markets. Although being a social support assistant is more in line with Rose’s academic background, her new job also tends to be ‘ethnicised’ and mainly performed by migrants, due to the stereotyping that assumes an ‘ethnic-cultural closeness’ between migrants and the population targeted by social policies (De Rudder & Vourc’h, 2006, p. 182). Thus, Rose’s educational background might have played a secondary role in helping her to obtain this position, behind her migrant status.

When I met Rose, she was still working part-time at the NGO and had given birth to her second child. Her partner had recently started vocational training out-of-town in his field, namely that of Computer Science. He left home early in the morning and came back in the evening. As a result, Rose cared for her two children almost alone and struggled to combine her part-time job with care work.

Rose could not rely on family or a network to support her in caring for her children. The lack of support from her parents connects to her family geography. This notion relates to whether there are family members in the country of immigration that can help in taking care of children and dependents. It also refers to the ease with which caregivers (especially grandmothers) in the country of emigration and children in the country of immigration can move from one country to the other (Bonizzoni, 2014).

Rose’s case stresses that migrant women, and especially those coupled with a foreign-born partner and whose family is distant, are exposed to loneliness in care work. As a result, they are in particular need of accessing childcare services to compliment paid and unpaid care work. However, Rose had to face additional challenges connected to the local rules related to accessing a public crèche, as they discriminated against migrants compared to locals. A regional law adopted in Veneto in 2017 gave priority to ‘children of parents residing in Veneto, including in a non-continuous way, for at least fifteen years’ (Veneto Region, 2017) when accessing public crèches. Similar norms were adopted at the council level where Rose lived. The Italian government referred this regional law to the Constitutional Court, who declared it unconstitutional in May 2018 (Italian Constitutional Court 107/2018), for being in contradiction with the principle of equality and the European legislation on freedom of movement. However, in the meantime, several migrant families, such as Rose’s family, were excluded from accessing public crèches. This example stresses the need to consider temporalities (Griffiths, Rogers, & Anderson, 2013) when analysing interlocking regimes and migrant mothers’ agency. Although the courts removed discriminatory criteria, migrant families who had wanted to access services when the rules were unfair continued being excluded afterwards.

Because Rose’s position in the wait-list was so low down, she opted for a private, more expensive crèche. However, women lacking economic capital or financial support from their network might have difficulties implementing the same strategy as Rose. If they cannot access public or private child care facilities, these women might leave the labour market and confine themselves to more traditional gender roles as mothers and wives (Ho, 2006). Moreover, this process can increase child poverty as the family misses out on the mother’s income.

During the interview, Rose also expressed worries about seeing her children being discriminated against because of the colour of their skin. As a result, she wondered whether she should move with her family to another context perceived as less acializing than northern Italy. In this regard, the literature emphasises that migrant women might leave the country they live in as a response to stigmatisation. However, this option is perceived by scholars as being less attractive for migrants who are mothers, as they might not want to ‘uproot their children’ (Eijberts & Roggeband, 2016, p. 142). My fieldwork goes in the opposite direction, as it stresses that being mothers can also further motivate migrant mothers to move abroad to avoid discrimination.

Callaia was born in Niger in the 1960s. After undertaking a vocational training in midwifery, she worked in her field for over ten years. She married and had two children, but after divorcing, she was separated from her children and only managed to reunite with them years later, when she was already living in France. While working as a midwife in Niger, she met her second husband, a French doctor.

By the beginning of the 1990s, Callaia moved to Alsace, following her partner. As she wanted to continue working in her field, she began the process of having her education and experience recognised. At the end of the procedure, she was informed that her Nigerien diploma would only enable her to work as a nursing assistant. Callaia’s experience stresses that education and experience obtained abroad tend to be disregarded in Western Europe, especially when they were obtained in post-colonial countries (Grosfoguel et al., 2015).

To access the job she wanted, Callaia was planning to enrol in training once again and went to a midwifery school to learn about the procedure. When arriving, the institution’s director said that she wanted Callaia to take dictation, as she doubted Callaia could adequately speak and write French, even though French is Niger’s official language. Callaia was shocked and decided not to enrol in the school. Although colonisation has left behind a common educational system and language, it has simultaneously built up a racial-social system that continues to influence current social representations (Killian & Manohar, 2015).

Callaia started working as a nurse assistant. After nearly nine years of working in this position, she decided to take an exam to enter a nursing school. Succeeding at the competitive exam was a personal victory for Callaia, that enabled her to regain confidence in her skills and silence those who doubted her capability. Moreover, through her degree, Callaia’s cultural capital was institutionally recognised in the French context (Bourdieu, 1986).⁴

Meanwhile, Callaia had two children with her French partner and reunited with the children from her first marriage. When I met her, Callaia had been working as a nurse for the past eleven years. She worked part-time, in order to combine paid work with unpaid care work. Like Rose, Callaia stressed how difficult it was for her to combine caring with working, as her partner was working full-time and she could not count on external family support. However, compared to Rose, Callaia managed to enrol her children in public day-care and schools, and could rely on a network of neighbouring mothers who had their children in the same institutions. When one of the women could not pick up her child, other mothers would do it. Callaia’s experience illustrates that mothering can contribute to building networks that support migrant women in their care-work.

Like Rose, Callaia was also concerned by racial discrimination and gave several examples of episodes in which she and her children faced racialisation. Callaia’s strategy to cope with racism differed from that of Rose. In contrast to Rose, Callaia did not consider migrating again but instead encouraged her children to talk about their experiences and challenge essentialism through verbal confrontation.

By encouraging her children to take action, Callaia contributes to deconstructing racialized approaches to citizenship. Her practice of resistance illustrates how migrant mothers can take part in the construction and renewal of citizenship (Erel & Reynolds, 2018).

Amapola was born in Albania in the 1970s. At university, she studied French literature and philology. After graduating, Amapola started working as a project assistant and then participated in a selection process to work at the Albanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She succeeded and was appointed to a position as a diplomat in Alsace. One year after her arrival, she met her French partner and, while still working as a diplomat, gave birth to her first son.

Four years after arriving in Alsace, Amapola’s appointment came to an end. To continue her career she needed to move back to Tirana. Deciding to stay or move is the result of multiple factors and involves negotiation within the couple. In Amapola’s case, the couple decided to stay in Alsace, therefore privileging the place where the male partner had better working opportunities. As a result, Amapola left her career and started facing the limits imposed on her by a restrictive migration regime. Amapola went from one work agency to another but did not receive any job offers. By that time, Amapola had a residence permit for ‘private and family life’ that authorised her to work but which needed to be renewed yearly.

Feminist researchers have pointed out that restrictions on the permits issued for family reasons are particularly penalising for women. Compared to men, women are more often covered under this type of permits, which might provide only limited access to employment (Kofman, 2012; Liversage, 2009). In France, the permit for ‘private and family life’ can be requested by the spouses of both French nationals and migrants who have resided in the country for at least 18 months. Women represent the majority of those who obtain the ‘private and family life’ permit as their first permit. In contrast with other countries (Killian & Manohar, 2015), the French permit gives access to the labour market. However, our fieldwork highlights that authorisation to work does not guarantee equal access to employment. As the permit is only valid for a year, recruiters might be reluctant to hire its holders, as in Amapola’s case. As a result, migrant women, who have been married to a French citizen for four years or have lived continuously in the country for five years, might start the complex procedure of acquiring French citizenship⁵ in order to have better access to jobs.

After more than a year of job hunting, Amapola applied for a position as a bilingual administrative assistant for an international organisation. She got the job and had several fixed-term contracts before getting a permanent contract from this employer in 2010. Amapola gave birth to her second son when she had a fixed-term contract.

Amapola decided with her partner that he would take a year off to care for her second child while she would go back to work after ten weeks of maternity leave. This decision limited the family’s income, as her husband’s salary fell out for some time, but it enabled Amapola to continue working and eventually progress in her career after years of unemployment.

Amapola’s experience is one of the only cases in my fieldwork where fathers assumed the main care work of their new-born child. Her experience appears as an exception to the predominant transnational gender ideologies that see mothers as primary caregivers. However, it is worth noting that Amapola and other participants whose partner was the primary nurturer when their children were new-borns, felt obliged to go back to work and guilty for not being at home with their child. Guilt can be interpreted as the result of the contrast between their practice of care and their representation of gender roles, which still identifies mothers as maintaining the primary burden for social reproduction (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015).

Unlike Rose, Amapola did not emphasise obstacles to accessing childcare facilities. In this field, Amapola’s worries rather concerned the limited extent of childcare services. As far as school schedules and holidays were concerned, a significant challenge for Amapola consisted in the two-month summer holiday in France, as neither she nor her partner could take time off to cover the whole period. The regular school week schedule was also challenging, as there were no classes on Wednesdays in the city where she lived.⁶ Finally, Amapola mentioned difficulties when her children got sick. She indicated that she used to feel guilty bringing her children to school when they were a bit sick, but she had no choice because she felt obliged to go to work. In contrast to the rest of France, local legislation in Alsace enables workers to continue receiving their salaries when taking leave for a sick child, including if it lasts more than three days. However, as Amapola’s case illustrates, the extent of child sickness leave is insufficient to cover the needs of some families.

Amapola and her partner developed different strategies to cope with these challenges. First, they combined and readjusted their schedules to care for their children outside of school hours. For instance, Amapola’s partner adapted his work schedule to be available on Wednesdays, and Amapola cared for them on Saturdays while her partner caught up with work. In parallel, their economic capital enabled them to fund extra-curricular activities during holidays. Finally, and unlike Winika, Rose, and Callaia, Amapola could also count on her in-laws’ support to look after the children, especially during school holidays. According to fieldwork, in-laws are particularly supportive when the partner is originally from the area and has his parents nearby, as was the case for Amapola, whose in-laws lived in Alsace.

Our interview took place ten years after Amapola had started working for this international organisation. Although from her perspective, her position as a bilingual administrative assistant did not fit her professional background, she appreciated working in an international environment and considered her work to be largely enjoyable.

Through the analysis of these biographical portraits, the paper has sought to highlight the multiple ways in which regimes intersect to shape the trajectories of migrant mothers with tertiary education. It also illustrated how these women cope, resist, and eventually challenge obstacles that prevent them and their children from following their aspirations.

The analysis of these biographies illustrates how the intersection between migration, care, and gender regimes limits the access that migrant women have to employment, in particular when they have received tertiary education. Both in the Italian and French contexts, interviewees tended to work in feminised and ‘ethnicised’ positions (De Rudder & Vourc’h, 2006). For instance, at different levels in the care sector (from care assistant to nurse) or in specific jobs for which having a multicultural and multilingual background is valued by employers (from cultural mediator to bilingual assistant). In this regard, this paper seeks to stress how women cope with these stratifications by gaining additional training or passing competitive exams to access jobs that give more income stability or are more in line with their educational backgrounds.

Fieldwork also further illustrated how migratory regimes are gendered (Kofman, 2012), as short-term residence permits limit migrant women’s opportunities in the labour market. Furthermore, family reunification policies are also class selective, as reuniting with one’s family depends on economic capital. Thus, the intersection between restrictive migratory regimes and gender regimes, that see mothers as preferably caring for their children in situ, pushes migrant women to accept any job, even though it may not correspond to their educational background, as long as it provides an income sufficient to fulfil the requirements of family reunification policy.

This contribution seeks to emphasise that in asymmetrical gender regimes, in which mothers are expected to be the primary caretakers, migration reinforces the challenges women face to combine motherhood and paid work, as well as exacerbating a downward trajectory. In the rare cases in which fathers are children’s main carers, migrant women tend to feel guilty, as their care practices contrast with their representation of gender roles, which still identify mothers as the primary nurturer.

The ability to combine unpaid care work with paid work is influenced by the support which mothers receive from their families, state provisions, market, and community. When it comes to the first type of support, the analysis of interviewees’ family geographies stressed that migrant mothers tend to lack family support and are particularly exposed to loneliness in providing care. The ability of migrant mothers to count on family depends on travel costs and migration regimes. For instance, compared to a Ukrainian grandmother, a Cameroonian grandmother who wants to migrate to care for her grandchildren might face higher costs and additional administrative obstacles, including visa restrictions. Therefore, migratory regimes intersect with class and global inequalities to facilitate or impede the movement of caregivers that can support migrant mothers and enable them to work. This obstacle is expected to have a more significant impact in contexts in which care is mainly provided by the family, such as in the Italian familist welfare model (Lyon, 2006).

Due to the lack of family support, migrant mothers particularly need to access public care services. In this regard, the comparative perspective highlighted differences between the two geographical areas. It appeared that in the Italian context, exclusion criteria prevent migrant families from accessing services, which might restrain migrant women from accessing work or force them to limit their participation in the labour market. In France, migrant mothers did not refer to explicit discriminatory criteria. However, they highlighted the limits in the availability of services. To cope with this limited availability in public services, migrant mothers eventually came to rely on market services, access to which is ultimately dictated by class and economic capital.

Therefore, migrant mothers face additional challenges to combine care work and paid work, which might force them to leave the labour market, limit their career opportunities, adjust their working schedule, or look for part-time jobs to care for their children. However, motherhood also presents opportunities as it might enable them to build social capital that facilitates access to employment and provides support in care work. Motherhood can also enable migrant women to cope with downgrading by ensuring intergenerational social mobility (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). Last but not least, by teaching their children to take action against racism, migrant mothers are also contributing to the transformation of society and a renewal of the concept of citizenship.

I am grateful to the participants for accepting to contribute to my research. Thank you for sharing your experience, feelings and thoughts. I would also like to thank very much the guest editors of the special issue, particularly dr. Elise Pape and dr. Kenneth Horvath for their support. Special thanks also go to all the scholars and friends that contributed to the drafting of the article through discussions, feedbacks, and proof-reading. This work would not have been possible without the financial support of the University of Padua.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).