Navigating the COVID-19 crisis: exploring care arrangements and gendered inequalities for migrant women in transnational families in Berlin

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has precipitated a notable shift in care responsibilities, transferring them from institutions to families, with a pronounced impact on migrant women in transnational families who navigate both local and transnational care arrangements. This study explored how the pandemic affected women's care arrangements and exacerbated existing inequalities at the intersection of labour, migration, and welfare regimes. Following a qualitative methodology based on grounded theory and ethnography, this study analysed interviews with migrant women, their family members, and experts to understand their experiences with caregiving and transnational family dynamics during the pandemic, the costs and coping strategies related to gendered aspects of care, and the changing landscape of migration and care policies during the pandemic. This study scrutinised the intricate web of local and transnational caregiving structures, emphasising women's agency in negotiating care needs amid pandemic restrictions and constraints on access to formal social protection.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant women
• care arrangements
• transnational families
• gender
• COVID-19 pandemic
• social protection

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic and its associated response measures disrupted interpersonal relationships and care provision, exacerbating gender inequalities in care within families and societies. Studies have suggested that the pandemic has resulted in mothers providing most unpaid care due to the closure of formal care facilities (Hank and Steinbach 2020; Hipp and Bünning 2020; Kreyenfeld and Zinn 2020; Zoch, Bächmann, and Vicari 2021). Although research has shown the gendered inequalities of care provision during the pandemic, its differential impact on people according to class and ethnicity, family diversity and migration background have been less studied (Kabeer, Razavi, and van der Meulen Rodgers 2021; Maestripieri 2021). Different social positions play an important role in how pandemics and emergency policies affect care arrangements, livelihoods, and family well-being.

As part of the Special Issue “Transformations of transnational care in times of the pandemic” edited by Anna Amelina, Karolina Barglowski, and Başak Bilecen (2024), the study aimed to analyse care experiences of migrant mothers in transnational family constellations whose care arrangements were particularly affected by border closures, quarantine regulations, and lockdowns. With the closure of essential institutions, these women had to manage childcare and educational needs while coping with mobility restrictions and caring for their wider transnational families. They shoulder increased care responsibilities while struggling with income loss and a lack of social protection owing to their often-precarious inclusion in formal labour. This study specifically examined migrant mothers’ experiences with younger children who arrived in Germany before the pandemic to elucidate how the pandemic and related policies affected local and transnational care arrangements; as women with young children were particularly affected by the closure of childcare institutions (Bujard et al. 2020, 53; Li et al. 2021; Kohlrausch and Zucco 2020).

Migrant women face challenges in accessing social rights due to structural and political inequalities arising from the interplay between migration and welfare regimes (Kilkey 2017; Simola and Wrede 2021) and employment structures (Lee 2022) as well as discrimination in access to formal social protection by gatekeepers of the welfare system (Lafleur and Mescoli 2018; Ratzmann 2021). Additionally, migrant women engage in cross-border care exchange with their wider family network, including co-territorial and transnational care arrangements (Merla, Kilkey, and Baldassar 2020), which are particularly affected by mobility restrictions such as border closures, flight suspensions, and institutional delays in visa and residency issuance. Transnational families, defined as families that provide and share care in different countries (Baldassar 2007; Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Merla, Kilkey, and Baldassar 2020), are highly diverse in their composition and the ways in which they exchange care and maintain familyhood across borders (Bryceson 2019). Transnational families are often “mixed-status families’ (Bonjour and de Hart 2021) in terms of citizenship and residency status, and their members often have different rights to cross-border mobility, welfare and social protection, a fact that gained importance with the negative pandemic effects on families’ livelihood.

The pandemic disrupted care practices at the society’s macro-, meso-, and micro-levels. Therefore, care is a crucial concept for analysing the pandemic’s impact on migrant mothers care arrangements at the local level and across national borders. The study adopts the broader definition of care proposed in the literature on transnational families and migration, which understands care as multidimensional and inclusive of care for children and the elderly, as well as the provision of different forms of remittances, information exchange, and housing and emotional support (Kilkey and Merla 2014). Care-giving depends on the giver’s capacity and resources to care (Kilkey and Baldassar 2024; Kilkey and Merla 2014). Thus, examining policy-based access to (formal) social protection and care provision by welfare states is important for understanding the impact of the pandemic on migrant women. Specifically focusing on migrant mothers’ experiences in the pandemic context and the impact of pandemic response measures on their access to formal and informal care is important for understanding the different experiences and specificities in their family constellations.

This study examined the problems faced by five women and their families during the pandemic and how they coped with care deficits. The participants had different origins and social backgrounds and resided in Berlin during the pandemic (2020–22). By analysing migrant mothers’ care arrangements and practices during the pandemic, this study aimed to capture the complex “assemblages’ of local and transnational care provisions (Amelina and Bause 2020) among migrant women and their families, as well as women’s agency in negotiating care needs. The study included ethnographic fieldwork and observations to contextualise the complexity of migrant mothers’ care arrangements at the local and transnational levels. It drew on an inductive, qualitative methodological approach based on grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin 1996) and ethnography as well as on data collected through problem-centred interviews (Witzel 2000) with migrant women and family members (partners), key informants, and experts. The results highlighted the complex effects of care shortfalls and difficulties faced by migrant women in balancing care, work, and (im)mobility. These findings underscore the importance of migrant women’s pre-pandemic positions to understand the effects of the pandemic on them in terms of care and gender inequality.

The pandemic’s impact on migrant women in transnational families: literature review and analytical framework

The analyses of the COVID-19 pandemic are many and still continuing. Anti-COVID-19 measures in Germany particularly affected families with care responsibilities for children and the elderly, as care services closed down to prevent viral spread. Aspects of gendered inequalities in care provisions during the pandemic were relevant to analysing difficulties with childcare (Gromada, Richardson, and Rees 2020) and parenting (Buschmeyer, Ahrens, and Zerle-Elsäßer 2021; Fadda et al. 2023; Hank and Steinbach 2020), the gendered division of care work and labour in households (Buschmeyer, Ahrens, and Zerle-Elsäßer 2021; Bujard et al. 2020; Cohen, Oppermann, and Anders 2020; Del Boca et al. 2020; Hipp and Bünning 2020; Kohlrausch and Zucco 2020), and the inequalities faced by migrants regarding the pandemic’s health impacts (Yong and Germain 2022). Studies have shown that women are disproportionately affected by the crisis due to decreased income and increased care workload (Kohlrausch and Zucco 2020; Li et al. 2021). However, much of this work has not considered the variety of intersecting hierarchies that impact migrant women’s access to rights and their social status regarding inequality (Maestripieri 2021), in terms of family diversity (Sampaio and Carvalho 2022) and life course (Kabeer, Razavi, and van der Meulen Rodgers 2021). Research on the care arrangements of transnational families during the pandemic has emphasised the diversity of experiences and the important role of mobility for family members in providing care (Brandhorst, Baldassar, and Wilding 2020; Kilkey and Baldassar 2024; Sampaio and Carvalho 2022; Simola et al. 2022). However, migrant women’s diverse care arrangements and differential positions concerning care responsibilities, labour market inclusion, and entitlement to welfare provisions have not been sufficiently studied. By analysing the experiences of migrant mothers in transnational families in local and transnational contexts, this study aimed to address some of these gaps.

Migrant women’s differential position when confronting the pandemic

To analyse the gendered impact of the pandemic on migrant mothers in transnational care arrangements, this study drew on two scholarship bodies. The first centres on migration, social protection, and inequality, and the second focuses on transnational families and care. The first strand of research revealed the complexities involved in accessing social protection after migration and migrants’ strategies to mitigate social risks “in the realms of childcare, elderly care, health problems, and unemployment” (Barglowski, Bilecen, and Amelina 2015, 216). This line of research conceptualises transnational social protection as an assemblage of formal and informal elements (Bilecen and Barglowski 2015). While formal aspects include “opportunity structures codified in nation-state rules and regulations’, informal social protection refers to “resources encountered in personal networks, including hands-on care” (Bilecen et al. 2019, 2; Bilecen and Barglowski 2015). Research on welfare regimes has shown that nation-states and their institutions shape access to institutional childcare, parental leave, and elderly care, and strengthen the gendered division of care in households and families (Daly and Lewis 2000; Pfau-Effinger 2005). Access to social protection shapes the chances of living and inequality structures for migrants, including inclusion and exclusion structures (Anthias 2009). Furthermore, care exchanges in family networks are gendered as they rely on women’s unpaid care work as part of their social reproduction (Kofman 2014). This line of research highlights access to affordable childcare, which is crucial for migrant mothers to enter the labour market, while a lack of childcare options hinders labour market integration and limits the life chances of mothers and their children (Barglowski and Pustulka 2018). Thus, opportunities for the conversion of former credentials and access to formal labour shape migrant women’s social positions and their access to resources (Barglowski and Pustulka 2018; Landolt and Goldring 2015).

The second strand of research on transnational families and care addresses the mechanisms through which migrants sustain connections with their families across vast geographical distances following migration, aiming to foster a sense of “collective welfare and unity” (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002, 18). Researchers have highlighted disparities in the entitlements of family members within different welfare states (Bilecen and Barglowski 2015; Kilkey 2017) and how the welfare states and their intersections with migration regimes and family policies influence possibilities for members of transnational families to exchange care in a wider geographical space (Amelina and Bause 2020; Baldassar and Merla 2014; Kilkey 2017; Kilkey and Merla 2014). The literature on transnational families approaches care in a broader, multidimensional sense, including practical care, the provision of different forms of remittances, information exchange, housing, and emotional support (Kilkey and Merla 2014). Such a wider definition showed how care exchanges over distance shape transnational family lives (Merla, Kilkey, and Baldassar 2020). Care circulations are characterised by the “simultaneity” of care exchanges within national and transnational contexts (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) and by their “situatedness’ in particular institutional contexts (Kilkey and Merla 2014). According to this understanding, care depends on an individual's capacity to provide care and access to care resources. Thus, social policies and formal care provisions by welfare states, understood as formal social protection (Bilecen et al. 2019), are important for individual abilities to care for others (Kilkey and Merla 2014). Both strands of research contribute to understanding the impact of the pandemic on migrant mothers’ care arrangements on a local and transnational scale.

Analytical framework

The pandemic and related prevention measures have affected access to care for migrant mothers and transnational families at the macro-, micro-, and meso-levels, and on local, national, and transnational scales. This analysis identified these changes in migrant mothers’ experiences from the perspective of a multilevel, multi-scalar framework (Amelina and Bause 2020; Erel and Ryan 2019) that considers the impact of care and migration regimes (Kilkey and Merla 2014) and the opportunity structures provided by welfare regimes (Anthias 2009). Although the main analysis focused on the micro-perspectives of migrant women in transnational families during the pandemic (e.g. their care exchange practices and strategies for coping with care constraints), the study analysed these experiences as embedded in the meso – and macro-levels and in local and national contexts. At the macro level, it focused on changes in economic and political structures affecting welfare, migration, and care regimes such as changes in labour regulations, access to childcare, and mitigation policies and changes in mobility, which shape migrants’ social status and access to mobility. The meso-level analysis focused on institutions such as daycare, families, and networks, and how they mediated the macro-level changes and micro-level experiences of migrant mothers during the pandemic. Furthermore, a multi-scale approach allowed capturing the socio-spatial scales (local, national, transnational, and global) of migrant life worlds (Amelina and Bause 2020), which are “not entirely bounded by the local, nor entirely free and unfettered within transnational space” (Ryan 2011, 87). Therefore, the transnational dimension of care not only describes care exchanges in family networks but also acts as a continuum of changing intensity and quality that adapts to the family life course to varying degrees over time (Faist et al. 2015). Such an approach allowed examining the micro routines of “doing family” and analysing how structural factors related to class, gender, and other markers of inequality impact individuals’ abilities to provide care on the local and transnational scales (Amelina and Bause 2020). These findings are useful in understanding migrant mothers’ access to formal and informal care during the pandemic.

Methods: the pandemic’s effects on migrant mothers in transnational contexts in Berlin

This study analysed the impact of the pandemic on migrant women and their caregiving arrangements within the extended transnational family network. Additionally, it examined the pandemic’s effects on migrant women’s caregiving and division of labour within the nuclear family and its impact on partner relationships. Furthermore, it analysed migrant women’s coping with care challenges. To this end, the analysis drew on ethnography and participant observation, and conducted problem-centred interviews (Witzel 2000) with migrant women and with their partners. Five women and two men representing five transnational families were interviewed in person and online in three languages (Spanish, English, and German). Each interview lasted 1–3 h. The participants were contacted personally or through key informants, friends, or acquaintances. A theoretical sampling approach was used (Strauss and Corbin 1996, Wiedemann 1995), involving snowball sampling and seven additional expert interviews with key informants such as daycare workers, language teachers, and legal counsellors, in which challenges faced by migrant mothers and their families were observed. Interview narratives were coded and analysed using a grounded theory approach (Charmaz 2000; Strauss and Corbin 1996). The data were analysed and structured using open and axial coding to reveal relevant aspects and to understand the interrelations between them. After performing a theory-driven analysis, relevant codes were used to compare the findings (Strauss and Corbin 1996). All interviewees received extensive information about the study, data handling, and rights to data protection. Informed consent was obtained from each participant prior to the interviews. All names are pseudonyms, and the data were anonymised.

This study adopted an ethnographic approach in a feminist tradition that acknowledged subjectivity combined with reflection on the researchers’ own positions and experiences as key heuristic elements in approximating the field of research (Castañeda Salgado 2012; Mohanty (1992) 2002). The observation was nurtured by my personal experiences of the pandemic lockdown on childcare and border closures on transnational family constellation. I also drew insights from conversations with affected families regarding their experiences during the pandemic, particularly regarding the effects of anti-COVID-19 measures on family life.

Sample description

All interviewees were migrant women, but their pre-pandemic residency duration in Germany varied between 2 and 19 years. Three originated from Eastern Europe, one from Western Europe, and one from Latin America. All were mothers of one or two children under the age of seven at the onset of the pandemic, and all were in a relationship when interviewed. Two of the partners had German citizenship, while others had come from different countries (see Table 1). Three of the women were unemployed, and two had lost a job when the pandemic started. Only Sandra maintained formal full-time employment, allowing her access to social security benefits at the beginning of the pandemic. Maria rejoined the formal labour force during the pandemic. All women-maintained relationships with their wider transnational family networks during the pandemic and relied on family members to varying extents for help with childcare, which was contingent on caregivers’ mobility. Women also provided or received financial and social remittances as well as emotional support (Baldassar 2007). While some women had binational family arrangements, others were in multifocal family networks (Bryceson 2019).

Table 1. Sample sociodemographic data of the interviewed migrant women.

	Name^a	Age (years)	Origin	Highest degree	Job status in 2020	Residency duration in Germany	Number of children and their age (years)	Local household^b	Partner’s origin
1	Angelina	35	Eastern Europe 1	Bachelor’s degree	Unemployed	Since 2018	1 (4)	Two-parent family, married	Eastern Europe 1
2	Sandra	36	Eastern Europe 1	Technical/Professional diploma	Employed	Since 2009	2 (12, 5)	Two-parent family, separated, daughter lives with ex-partner	German
3	Karen	43	Latin America	Master’s degree	Self-employed	Since 2016	1 (5)	Two-parent family	Western Europe
4	Cecilia	47	Western Europe	Master’s degree	Unemployed	Since 2014	1 (5)	Two-parent family	German
5	Maria	39	Eastern Europe 2, German citizen	Master’s degree	Unemployed	Since 2001	1 (3)	Single/ Two-parent family	Caribbean

^a All names were changed.

^b All participating women had transnational family ties and engaged to different degrees in forms of transborder care exchanges with their family members

Contextualisation of the experiences of migrant women in Berlin during the pandemic

Measures to combat the COVID-19 crisis led to changes in care and working conditions at the local, state, national, and global scales, with different timings of temporary closures and lockdowns of public life and institutions. In the EU, most countries closed their borders from mid-March to mid-June 2020, and the German government reintroduced border controls (Peyrony, Rubio, and Viaggi 2021). Lockdowns and anti-pandemic measures changed labour market conditions and institutional care provisions for care-receivers. In Berlin, social distancing and lockdown happened from March 2020 to the end of April 2020. On 17 March 2020, retail outlets and childcare facilities, including nurseries and schools, closed and were gradually reopened. Lockdowns included the closure of playgrounds. Subsequent “lighter” lockdowns were implemented from late October and then tightened from December 2020 to March 2021, and an extension until early May, which amounted to five months for early childhood education and care (ECEC) facilities, while schools presented a slightly different picture, with a gradual reopening from mid/late February for face-to-face and alternating shift classes (Sonnenburg, Buddeberg, and Hornberg 2022). During the second and third lockdown, day care centres functioned in “emergency operation” or “limited regular operation” mode during which exceptions were made for parents employed designated in “systemically relevant” professions and later for single parents and vulnerable groups.

In Germany, access to formal social protection is mostly tied to formal labour market participation over a certain period (Schnabel 2020). During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrant women faced structural disadvantages due to their often-precarious inclusion in labour markets (temporary, low-wage or self-employed work). Research has shown that women, newcomers, and people in temporary low-wage sectors are particularly affected (Brücker et al. 2021; Falkenhain et al. 2021; Kempny 2022; Polloczek and Schwuchow 2021). While all legal residents in Germany have access to social welfare benefits to families, policies favour dual-earner families and, therefore, put migrant women and families with a lower employment share at a disadvantage (Samper and Kreyenfeld 2021). Families in Germany have a right to childcare (ECEC) for children from the age of one; however, the demand for childcare facilities had not been met (Lokhande 2023). Migrant families are more affected than non-immigrant families because of the informal and discretionary mechanisms of place allocation (Dohmen, Karrmann, and Bayreuther 2021). In Berlin, approximately 36 per cent of the population had a migration background by 2021 (Berliner Morgenpost 2020; Destatis 2022, 44). Pre-pandemic structural disadvantages for migrant families to access housing and work (Hillmann and Toğral Koca 2021) and access to basic social rights like social assistance (Ratzmann 2021), and early childhood education (Dohmen, Karrmann, and Bayreuther 2021) were well documented. Although childcare services are free in Berlin, the admission process requires individuals to prove their need for care through employment contracts. Parents employed full-time receive more hours of daycare than those without full-time employment.

The pandemic’s gendered effects on migrant mothers in transnational families

This section illustrates the impact of the pandemic on migrant women's local and transnational care arrangements and family life in three main areas: (a) the effects of mobility restrictions on transnational care constellations, (b) efforts to balance childcare and work under the restrictions, and (c) the imbalances on their broader family life and well-being, including family – work conflicts. It shows how women strategically utilised their transnational resources to access formal and informal care and provide their family members abroad with informal care, such as remittances and emotional support. The analysis also incorporated expert perspectives from day care and social workers who observed the challenges faced by migrant mothers.

Effects of border closures and lockdowns on transnational care arrangements

For migrant women in transnational families, mobility facilitates the exchange of care based on reciprocity and family obligations as a means of maintaining familial ties across distances (Bryceson 2019; Serra Mingot 2020). Therefore, border closures during the pandemic affected migrant women who relied on mobility for childcare, family formation, and reunification. This impact extended not only to the provision of care by other family members such as “flying grandmothers” (Baldassar 2007) but also to family reunification efforts that were halted by border closures and delays in bureaucratic services related to the issuance of visas and travel permits. This was the case with Maria, a naturalised German citizen originally from Eastern Europe. A few years before the pandemic, she had met her child’s father, who was from the Caribbean. During the pre-pandemic period, she decided to join him in the Caribbean hoping to open a hotel. However, the pandemic began, and she returned to Germany with her 1.5-year-old child to ensure their livelihood and access to formal social care, which were not available in the Caribbean. They returned to Berlin during the initial lockdown without the child’s father, who had no residency permit. When the pandemic began, Maria swiftly secured housing, childcare, and employment. She hoped that spouse would join her shortly thereafter, but the border closures barred that.

(…) and then at some point, they started with lockdowns, and so on. I have found no more flights. The airlines have cancelled everything and the only flights … he needs [a] visa and to get the visa it takes up to two to three months to even get an appointment at the embassy (…), okay, after a few months it is maybe over, no!' One year, second year, and then last year 2021 in June, he has come (…) (Maria 2022)

For Maria, border closures and the slowdown of institutional service provisions resulted in family separation for over a year. Although normal travel resumed for most citizens in July 2020, flights from the Caribbean were restored only through the United States, which imposed special visa requirements and further delayed her reunion with her partner. Consequently, Maria functioned as a single parent balancing work and childcare in Berlin. She navigated the complexities of family reunification through German institutions, which added to her caregiving responsibilities. Her experience underscored how pandemic measures impeded family reunification efforts, with local and international measures and migration regimes compounding these challenges. Other migrant families were similarly affected. A day-care provider with a child in day-care shared the following case:

There was this family [during the lockdown] the grandmother was in Cuba with the child. She (the grandmother) always had to be in Cuba for two weeks every three months, and then she could stay in Germany again for three months, which is why she took the child with her [to Cuba], and suddenly everything was closed and then they did not come back. (Rita 2022)

Even before the pandemic, a grandmother assisting her daughter, a working single mother in Germany, with childcare responsibilities could not stay in Berlin for more than three months. As her daughter worked shifts and could not provide the necessary childcare through formal services, the grandmother took her granddaughter to Cuba. When the borders closed, they could not return to Germany, leading to several months of separation between mother and child. Both examples highlighted how unexpected border closures and travel restrictions separated transnational families, and directly affected their care arrangements and ties. Transnational care arrangements often served as alternatives to formal care and were more suitable, especially for women working long hours that formal childcare institutions did not cover (Kilkey and Baldassar 2024; Bilecen and Barglowski 2015; Serra Mingot 2020, 550). Such cases of family separation due to pandemic-induced travel restrictions underscored how structural constraints on care provision for transnational families had been exacerbated, adding to the pre-pandemic difficulties faced by migrant mothers and their families. Additionally, these forced separations caused emotional hardships and anxiety in migrant mothers, particularly due to time extensions and nerve-racking uncertainty.

Care provision for migrant women’s family members residing in their home countries constituted another important aspect of the interviews. Providing care for aging and sometimes sick parents has been highlighted as an important issue. For example, Cecilia’s father died during the pandemic.

(…) my father was in the hospital, and early in the morning, my sister called (…) and [said]: “Maybe it's time for you to come” (…), but there were no planes. (…) I left Berlin at 8 o’clock and I passed all night until two o’clock the day after on the train. (...) It was a time in XXX [her country of origin] when it was possible to see people in the hospital, because before you could not! Therefore, most people die in hospitals alone … fortunate that when we arrived, they let us see him every day until he died. (Cecilia 2022)

Cecilia felt fortunate to spend time with her father and make the necessary arrangements after his death and after the borders reopened. Additionally, the perceived (im)possibility of visits during the pandemic gave rise to tension and conflict within families. Karen, an interviewee from a Latin America, explained how the pandemic caused conflicts with her sisters regarding the risks of visiting her parents. While worried about their health, she was unable to visit, especially after the pandemic entered the second year. Discussions on the potential risks of visiting elderly relatives during the pandemic were common. In transnational families, time and distance exacerbated these concerns because visits could not be arranged quickly. Additionally, missing connections, bureaucratic delays and increasing costs made travelling difficult. These effects of separation were poignant, especially in the event of illness and death, when physical presence was important. This is consistent with the findings of Simola et al. (2022), who emphasised the affective dimension of care and the urgent need for physical co-presence reported by distant family members during the pandemic. Thus, the pandemic significantly disrupted the ability to provide and exchange hands-on care, presenting a unique challenge for families accustomed to travelling to provide this form of support. Given that the pandemic affected family members without formal social protection in the migrants’ countries of origin, the need for transnational care through remittances increased, as experienced by Angelina.

We send money to my mother, not much, but … now my mother works only part-time, (…) in the laundry, so when the restaurants and hotels were closed, she did not have work. (Angelina 2021)

Although Angelina and her family were ineligible for social assistance in Germany due to time restrictions on access to formal social security for migrants within the EU (Lafleur and Mescoli 2018; Simola and Wrede 2021), they provided informal social protection for their relatives in their home country. This demonstrated the importance of “emergency remittances’ (Galstyan and Galstyan 2021) within transnational families during the pandemic to fill gaps in family members’ formal social protection.

The pandemic-related border closures and travel restrictions disrupted the lives of separate families. Particularly, when family members had different legal statuses and travel credentials, global travel restrictions and slow immigration bureaucracies led to prolonged separation.

Although at the beginning of the crisis some migrant women used their transnational capital to improve their access to social protection or circumvent perceived confinement by joining their transnational families, the negative impacts on families increased as the pandemic progressed. This intensification highlighted an even greater need for other forms of care, such as remittances and emotional support, but also brought about additional problems, such as conflicts over frequency, potential risks, and the possibility of visits. Although these aspects were part of everyday life of families during the pandemic, for transnational families such challenges often resulted in longer periods of absence and uncertainty.

Challenges during lockdowns: balancing care and work in local care arrangements

Migrant mothers and their families faced “care gaps’ due to the closure of local facilities. The interviewed women’s efforts to enter the labour market through the revalidation of their credentials or by acquiring language skills were interrupted because they no longer had access to formal childcare. This particularly affected women newly arrived in Germany, namely Karens, Cecilia, and Angelina.

Fortunately, my partner was already employed when Corona came and could continue working because it was difficult to find a job. So, I was at home and had no chance of finding a job, so [we were] still only with his salary. (…), I already wanted to do something (…) but I could not at all because there was no language course, no work, nothing. (Angelina 2022)

Angelina had arrived in Germany two years earlier, and she and her family found housing and secured a spot in a daycare centre. With her child in daycare, Angelina enrolled in a German course to find a job but had to postpone it. Another interviewee, Karen, arrived in Germany four years before the pandemic and dedicated herself to raising her daughter.

For 2.5 years, I was with my daughter round the clock; … and as a migrant, I continued with things from my home country, I started to study German. … I started to look for my students. They arrived, and I started to work, and that was when the coronavirus arrived. (Karen 2022)

Karen had just started working as a sports trainer to gain financial independence but was self-employed and only worked part-time. She relied on social networks to promote her services and teach her classes, and her efforts were interrupted by the pandemic’s non-contact restrictions. Cecilia described a similar experience: she had been living in Germany for six years before the pandemic. She was a full-time mother, while her self-employed partner ran his company. Her pre-pandemic plans to start working with him were scuppered by the post-pandemic necessity of combining work with care for her daughter. All three interviewees had university degrees and work experience, but they could not use their qualifications in Germany and experienced “de-skilling” and difficulties of integrating into the formal labour force (Bilecen et al. 2019). As mothers with young children, they had care responsibilities, took on part-time work, and were largely reliant on their partner’s income. At the beginning of the pandemic, with the closure of day care centres, they switched to “traditional” care distribution in which mothers are responsible for care work. Although their male partners retained employment and worked from home, the interviewed mothers had to arrange for childcare, schooling, and housework. This, in turn, led to conflicts in their relationships, as the interviewees felt that their family care work was not valued and their efforts to achieve economic independence through paid work were thwarted.

However, Sandra and Maria did not rely on their partners. Sandra switched to working from home, which allowed her to maintain her family, given that her partner lost his job at the beginning of the pandemic. However, she initially lacked access to a day care centre due to the lockdown, which forced her to balance childcare and work in the limited family space of a two-room apartment:

I had a lot of stress, especially [during] the first few months when the little one (age 5 years) was at home [because] the daycare centre was closed. (…) I also had problems with the youth welfare office [because] my neighbours thought we were mistreating our son and [that] he was not getting enough to eat, and so on. (…) which has been a real shock to us (…). My husband and I stood shortly before separation. This was already a bit too much with the whole coronavirus crisis and the lockdown, and always squatting in the apartment (…). (Sandra 2022)

The first lockdown, which lasted seven weeks, was perceived as particularly difficult because, depending on the locality, playgrounds were closed. This placed a significant burden on women like Sandra, who were living in small apartments with young children and partners, which was common given their limited access to affordable housing. The lack of space caused conflicts within the family and aggravated conflicts with neighbours. Although she had to quit her job at first, she later started working again, which made her work classified as “system relevant” occupation, gave her the right to day care, and eased her family’s situation.

The partial closure of childcare facilities during the pandemic led to inequalities in social rights to access formal care. As the pandemic advanced, access to childcare was dependent on parents being employed in systemically relevant jobs and was later extended to single parents and “vulnerable” groups; a maximum capacity clause was applied. During times of limited and emergency operations, formal childcare had to be negotiated with daycare centres. Because the criteria and practices for granting access kept changing, access often depended on daily capacity and face-to-face negotiations with supervisors. These circumstances disadvantaged the migrant women because of the discretionary handling of their previously guaranteed rights. However, the exclusion of some children for several months affected their education and language acquisition (DJI and RKI 2022). Migrant women’s local experiences showed how the pandemic and related policy measures affected their care arrangements regarding two sensitive points: access to (formal) labour and childcare. Moreover, the suspension of services, qualifications, and hiring processes has delayed migrant women’s access to formal labour and social security.

Balancing care on multiple scales: revising the pandemic’s impact on migrant women’s family life and well-being

The closure of care institutions, such as day care and schools, and the resulting difficulties in engaging in paid labour affected women’s experiences of the pandemic. Although most reported work – family conflicts and care imbalances, those who were employed before the pandemic or had been living in Germany longer, such as Maria and Sandra, seemingly had less difficulty coping. Both managed to use their previously accumulated social and cultural capital to reestablish their lives but faced discrimination from street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1968 (1980)) or hostile neighbours. These negative aspects, which may have been present before the pandemic, gained poignancy in the context of the pressure women experienced during the crisis.

The other women who were interviewed experienced the pandemic negatively. Combining childcare and home schooling during the lockdown was particularly frustrating because, as described by Karen and Cecilia, mothers felt that their work was not valued and that their prospects for career and economic independence had been dashed.

After about a month or two (…), the schools closed again, and they started home schooling. So, that was the moment when it affected me directly, because (…) I was my daughter's teacher every day, and it was not my language. It was not my vocation; it was not my profession well, (…) I learned German with my daughter. (Karen 2022)

I still have no energy to work. I am still not recovering all the energy I had previously, for several reasons. First, I lost my father this time and (…). And then when I started to say, okay, now I feel better … I can organise my life and think of a new project. And then the war in Ukraine started, (…) I think in the last 1.5 years, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I feel like [there is] a cut in our life, something … strong changes (…). (Cecilia 2022)

Cecilia, Karen, and Sandra openly spoke about the emotional toll of the pandemic on them and their family. This has affected their financial situation and hopes for the future.

While some of the interviewees, except Sandra and Maria, seemed to be relatively well provided for by an income-earning partner, their experiences demonstrated how the lack of formal childcare during the pandemic affected their efforts to “revalidate” their former credentials (e.g. through language acquisition and professional capacitation) and connect to professional networks to gain economic independence, thus limiting their resources to share care. However, they did not receive any resources from the state to mitigate the negative economic impact because they did not have access to social security benefits or transfer payments. Income differences and gender-specific caring responsibilities strained these relationships. While their needs for formal childcare during the pandemic were not met, they still preserved their commitment to their families in their home countries through remittances, emotional support, and hands-on care, whenever possible. This indicated that migrant women’s pre-pandemic positioning is crucial for understanding the difficulties they encounter when forced to cope with crises. Specifically, their precarious pre-pandemic labour market inclusion severely affected their access to relief and financial resources.

Discussion and conclusion: the gendered trade-offs of anti-COVID-19 measures with migrant mothers’ care arrangements

The pandemic affected migrant mothers and their transnational care arrangements in at least three ways: how they balanced their family care arrangements in local and transnational contexts, how they accessed formal child-care and managed the reconciliation of care and labour, and their own and family well-being.

Analysing care is central to understanding the effects of the pandemic on migrant mothers, given that immobility and pandemic restrictions had disrupted their previous care practices in unprecedented ways. By bridging the macro-, meso-, and micro-levels, this study aimed to reveal the interconnectedness of the pandemic-induced macro-level changes with the meso – and micro-level impacts of women’s care arrangements. By including different socio-spatial scales in local and transnational contexts at the intersections of care, migration, and welfare regimes, the study examined the pandemic’s repercussions on the care arrangements as “assemblages’ of formal and informal care (Amelina and Bause 2020; Bilecen and Barglowski 2015). Macro-level immobilisation measures and border closures disrupted the exchange of care within the wider family network and limited family reunions in mixed-status families at the micro level. The analysis of care arrangements revealed the pandemic’s diverse effects on family constellations and possibilities for organising and sharing care, with lockdowns and the closure of care institutions shifting responsibilities and affecting labour market incorporation.

On the transnational scale, care arrangements were affected by border closures and “forced immobility” (Bélanger and Silvey 2019). The pandemic adversely affected family reunification and the formation of a “family of choice” (Kilkey 2017), and often overlooked care provisions by family members, such as grandparents, to cover care gaps for migrant mothers (Kilkey and Baldassar 2024). Migrant mothers had to cover their care needs and gaps in social protection by providing care to their children and extended families. The timely and uncertain extension of border and institutional shutdowns, as well as the introduction of forced quarantines, delayed visa processing increased travelling costs, drained migrants’ resources, and curtailed family members’ possibilities of physical co-presence. These policy-induced delays were forms of “bureaucratically induced bordering” (Näre 2020) which separated transnational families, affecting especially children’s right to reunite with their families. These families experience increasing emotional hardship, especially in cases of illness or death, but also due to legal problems related to residency status, overstays, or the challenging logistics and costs of visa applications.

On the local scale, care constellations were affected by measures that reduced access to public services such as state-provided formal care. Although the Berlin case is special because residents normally had access to free childcare services, the ever-changing conditions during the pandemic limited access to childcare options. Anti-pandemic measures allowed the introduction of discretionary negotiations with daycare workers, who turned into gatekeepers. Before the pandemic, newcomers already had difficulty accessing childcare, and the anti-COVID-19 measures implemented during the pandemic introduced restrictions that forced women to negotiate to meet their needs. This contributed to the normalisation of unequal care burdens within families, particularly affecting migrant mothers striving to enter the German labour market. Mothers also experienced anti-COVID-19 measures as a source of delay and disruption in acquiring residency permits, employment authorisation, completing language studies, and professional capacitation, which are crucial for labour market incorporation. In turn, this regression often affected migrant women’s opportunities to re-engage with formal labour after child-rearing, which could have a long-term impact on women’s positioning in the labour market and increase the risk of old-age poverty because social security is determined by labour contributions. In particular, the pandemic intensified the gendered division of unpaid care work for women owing to their increased caregiving responsibilities, thereby forcing households to revert to the “male breadwinner model” (Pfau-Effinger 2005).

Although this study analysed a small number of cases, the findings provide insights into migrant mothers’ subjective experiences as well as the diversity of family constellations and multi-scale care practices during the pandemic. The richness of the findings derived from each case also provided important insights into various family constellations and strategies, with the potential to drive further enquiries into the impact of anti-COVID-19 policy measures and limitations in access to formal social protection for transnational families.

Strategies to provide and share care on different scales during the pandemic show the “complex geopolitical topographies’ navigated by migrant women to maintain transnational family ties (Kempny 2022, 12). Hence, although the study focused on the context of Berlin, it demonstrated the role and effects of transnational care relationships within extended families whose members provided care support across borders during the pandemic to fill care gaps in their (home) countries, despite the challenges posed by bureaucratic and financial constraints.

Bringing together the local and transnational contexts of care arrangements, the findings underscore the diverse impacts of the pandemic on migrant women, particularly with respect to care deficits for mothers and their relation to limited inclusion in formal full-time labour, as it affected access to formal social protection and resources to provide care. While this study focused on migrant women’s experiences, future research should delve into the exacerbation of intersecting inequalities and different but simultaneous scales during the pandemic. It is important to highlight the perspective of the children whose needs and rights to formal childcare and family care were affected by “forced” family separations. The pandemic underscored transnational families’ dependence on mobility and highlighted border closures not only as a barrier to family reunification and urgently needed care provisions, but also as further amplification of the bureaucratic hurdles faced by transnational and mixed-status families.

Ethics statement

Ethical approval was obtained from the Faculty of Social Science at Technical University of Dortmund. Before each interview, written informed consent was obtained from the participants involved in this research, including detailed information about the aim of the research, legal information regarding data collection, and data protection rights in accordance with German data protection regulations.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the participants who contributed to this research by sharing their experiences during the pandemic. A first version of this research-project was presented in the Workshop “Reconceptualising Social Care” in August 2021, and I appreciate the helpful comments by the participants. I also appreciate the thoughtful suggestions of the anonymous reviewers and editors of the Special Issue for their comments on the first draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

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