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As early as 1995, Arlie Hochschild, a pioneer in my field of research on care migration (1), drew attention to a growing global care crisis. Nancy Fraser, in her famous 2016 article "Contradictions of Capital and Care", also points out that social capacities are coming under increasing pressure: It is about those who are responsible for raising children, caring for senior family members, maintaining households, or even sustaining entire communities ... whether paid or unpaid, they are at the limit of their capacities.

This 'Crisis of Care', long known and largely ignored, is one of Europe's most pressing problems today. One dimension of this care crisis is a growing care deficit, particularly in the area of senior care in the economically strong countries of Western Europe. This care gap is increasingly being compensated by women migrating from Central and South-Eastern Europe.

The Covid19 pandemic has not only enormously illustrated the scale of the crisis, but also shown how heavily Western European countries depend on migrant care workers and how unsustainable these care systems are. This lack of sustainability is true in many respects and applies to both sides of the so-called 'care chain', the receiving side and the supply side.

Social sustainability can be described as "the impact of formal and informal systems, structures, processes and relationships on the current and future liveability and health of communities." (2) Care is a "social practice, involving a social interaction between people" as Christensen & Pilling put it in the 2018 Routledge handbook to social care work around the world (p.2). Thus, social sustainability is about relationships, whether between individuals, within families or a community as a whole. And when women migrate, they are missed in their families, households, larger social networks, communities, and societies.

In the following, I will briefly outline some aspects of this unsustainability, focusing on the social aspects. The examples are related to care migration from Serbia, which is the subject of my research project. The project examines the social consequences of care migration between Serbia and Western European countries on local communities in Serbia are:

Brain drain in the Serbian health and senior care sector
In the formal labour market of supply countries such as Serbia, a care deficit is emerging in the paid care sector, which is discussed under the term 'brain drain'. This describes the outflow of trained health workers, which has serious consequences for health care provision in the sending countries. A prominent example that illustrates this connection is the so-called 'Triple win' programme. This is a recruitment programme for trained nurses launched by the German Federal Employment Agency (3). On the supply side, the recruitment was organised by Serbian national employment agencies and supported by the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ). After a wave of criticism, especially negative media coverage pointing out the consequences of the brain drain, the Serbian government decided to terminate the project prematurely in 2020. (4) The project is still running in Bosnia and Herzegovina, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Tunisia.

It is understandable that a country like Germany with an enormous shortage of care workers has to look for solutions. One of these is the import of skilled workers to fill the gaps in their health care system. Unfortunately, this solution means that an economically advantaged country drains the care resources of an economically less advantaged country and contributes to a further deterioration of the living situation in the supply countries, here in the area of health care. Germany must ask itself how it can morally justify this. It is the duty of a nation-state to provide decent health care for its citizens, but does this responsibility stop at the national border?

The transnational irregular care labour market
Apart from the developments in the Serbian formal care work sector, an irregular care work market has been expanding in Germany, especially in recent years, causing an increasing demand for care workers and attracting an "army of women willing to put themselves on the move" (5). This 'care mobility industry' is a highly "unregulated, ethicized, gendered, yet legally allowed market of commodified care" (6), which accounts for by far the largest share of the care migration movement. Nevertheless, the activities of this 'shadow economy' remain mostly unnoticed and invisible. Especially for untrained women, caring for older people in German private households is the largest field of activity. This care arrangement is often characterised by the precarious working and living situations of the caregivers. Informal caring is a highly unstable occupation and women report encounters with completely different situations and tasks than previously stated, denial of rest periods, sick leave or holidays, overtime work, missing salaries, emotionally and physically highly stressful tasks, not to mention the psychological burden of isolation and distance from home and family, and we also hear of cases of mistreatment, and (sexual) harassment. (7) These circumstances are not only unacceptable for the workers concerned, but also harmful to those in need of care. Care work is a physically and emotionally highly demanding job, and in the cases described it is not uncommon for women to quit after a short time. Thus, it is also not rightful to the older care-dependant people. There is no professional support and no quality control in these private care arrangements. How is it even possible to provide and secure decent care under these circumstances?

Care drain in the private sphere of the family in Serbia
When female care workers migrate abroad, they leave gaps not only in the paid care sector in their countries of origin but also in the private sphere of their own families, households and communities, as they are the traditional caregivers in most societies. In the region of the former Yugoslavia this phenomenon, often called the 鈥榗are drain鈥�, can be observed especially among older parents. In the case of Serbia, 85% of older people in need of support are cared for by their relatives (8). But, while their daughters care for German senior citizens abroad, they themselves often live alone, isolated, with hardly any support. This is especially the case in rural areas where, due to high migration rates of all genders and for decades, entire communities are dying out.

All these examples show that we have a crisis of care in various ways. Whether it is the brain drain in the Serbian care market, the conditions in the transnational irregular care labour market or the unpaid care work in the private sphere of the family, all phenomena show that the formal and informal care systems across Europe are becoming fragile, less reliable and are highly unsustainable. It will require major policy efforts to improve the "future liveability and health of communities" in a socially sustainable way. I hope that with my research I can contribute to a change.

1) care migration = transnational labour mobility/migration of women to work in the care sector abroad
2) Barron, L. and E. Gauntlet (2002). WACOSS housing and sustainable communities indicators project. Sustaining our Communities International Local Agenda 21 Conference, Adelaide.
3) Bundesagentur fuer Arbeit (2023). Triple Win. Programminformation. Link: https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/vor-ort/zav/triple-win/triple-win-pflegekraefte [11/1/23]
4) RTV (2020). Radio-Televizija Vojvodine. Obustavljen projekat "Triple Win" preko koga su dr啪avljani Srbije masovno odlazili u Nema膷ku. 5.2.2020. Link: https://rtv.rs/sr_lat/drustvo/obustavljen-projekat-triple-win-preko-koga-su-drzavljani-srbije-masovno-odlazili-u-nemacku_1090874.html [31.10.2022]
5) Vi拧ic, T. (2022). Peripheral labour mobilities: Elder care work between the Former Yugoslavia and Germany. Campus, p.92
6) Ibid., p. 264
7) Ibid.
8) Sauer, M., & Peri拧i膰, N. (2014). Local Networks in the Provision of Long-term Care Services in Serbia 鈥� a View from the South-East of Europe. Sozialer Fortschritt, 63(8), p. 211