When the migrant caregiver needs care: hybrid transnational strategies of pregnant migrant caregivers in Taiwan

This article advances Transnational Social Protection (TSP) theory by uncovering how pregnant migrant caregivers in Taiwan – who are systematically excluded from core labour protections – mobilise hybrid, transnational resource environments to sustain both employment and motherhood. Focusing on pregnant migrant caregivers excluded from the Labour Standards Act yet nominally covered under the Gender Equality in Employment Act, this study draws on in-depth interviews with 18 Indonesian migrant caregivers to examine how they navigate intersecting regimes of care, employment, and reproduction. By tracing their strategies across pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare, this article shows how migrant mothers assemble hybrid ‘resource environments’ that combine state, market, civil society, and transnational family networks to sustain employment and reproductive agency under entrenched labour precarity. These strategies range from leveraging digital platforms for legal information, negotiating workplace accommodations, and activating shelter-based protections, to orchestrating transnational childcare arrangements. This study contributes to a more gender-sensitive, regionally diverse, and process-oriented understanding of TSP, extending its empirical scope to the Asia-Pacific – the world’s largest care migration corridor but an underrepresented context in existing scholarship. Findings illuminate how structural exclusion and gender hierarchies shape both the risks migrant caregivers face and the strategies they deploy to mitigate them.