Global Care Chains and Migration in East Asia: The Pain and Gain of Temporariness

Asian welfare regimes have historically taken the form of liberal familialist welfare regimes characterized by a heavy reliance on migrant care workers. While this arrangement is often interpreted as a mere extension of familialism, it is more accurately understood as a process through which Confucian values—particularly norms emphasizing family responsibility and filial piety—have been politicized and mobilized to legitimize liberal familialism. In this sense, familialism has not functioned simply as a cultural residue but rather as an ideological resource that justifies limited state intervention and the marketization of care.

This welfare configuration has been underpinned by what is commonly described as the temporariness of the migration regime, which is marked by the provision of only limited citizenship to migrant care workers. Such regimes selectively incorporate migrant workers as labor while excluding them from full social and political membership. As a result, a range of structural problems has emerged, including the precarization of migrant care labor, insufficient rights protection, and concerns regarding the sustainability and quality of care provision.

In recent years, however, countries such as Japan and Taiwan have increasingly oriented themselves toward welfare state expansion, driven by rapid population aging and the growing limits of family-based care. This shift signals a reconfiguration of previously dominant liberal familialist arrangements and a renegotiation of the respective roles of family, market, and state in care provision. Consequently, familialism in Asia can no longer be understood as a singular or static model but should instead be conceptualized as increasingly diversified, both institutionally and normatively.

Short bio

Wako Asato is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Letters, Kyoto University, specializing in sociology and migration studies. His research focuses on international migration, care work, welfare regimes, and social integration, with particular attention to East and Southeast Asia. He has published extensively on the political economy of migration and the intersection between welfare state development and transnational labor mobility. In 2014, he received the Philippine Presidential Award in recognition of his contributions to research on international migration and migrant welfare.