The Great Child Care Cost Shift

Special all-libertarian day here at quick and ed!--No, not really.

Kerry Howley makes the case in the recent issue of Reason that illegal immigration is particularly benefical to women because the supply of cheap, undocumented domestic labor makes child care more affordable, helping women balance work and family. It's an interesting argument, but I think overstated, considering that only 4% of children under 5 with working mothers are cared for by domestic workers in their homes, and fully 45% are cared for by relatives.

This ties into something I've been thinking about lately. The opening of employment opportunities to women and resulting shift of women from home to market labor over the past few decades has also shifted traditionally female labor into the market. Rather than being unaccounted for economically and therefore appearing "free" (despite the enormous cost it carried for women), that work is now visible, quantifiable, and has a clear cost attached to it--a seemingly new cost that families and society must bear. This is particularly the case for childcare. When we talk about childcare quality, cost, and "work-family" balance, what we're really talking about is who--society, families, women only, children themselves--should cover the costs that emerged when society could no longer assume that women, having few other options, would bear that entire cost themselves. As Howley shows, illegal immigration helps postpone reckoning on this question, because it imports another class of women who have few other options and will therefore provide childcare at an artificially low cost. But this stopgap clearly has its own limitations. The reckoning is still coming, and no one seems ready for it.