PhD student at the University of Salamanca, e-mail address: mariasole.vettore@usal.es.

ABSTRACT

FROM ITALY TO ROMANIA: THE INVISIBLE RETURN OF ROMANIAN CARE WORKERS

This research examines the return migration of Romanian women who spent over a decade working as live-in care workers in Italy1 . Drawing on ten narrative interviews conducted in the Moldova region of Romania, the study shifts the focus from migration as a failure of an individual’s migratory project to a strategic life course stage, deliberately pursued by these women to ensure intergenerational social mobility. The findings reveal that while these women successfully return and reclaim domestic routines, relying on kinship support from their children and siblings, they face persistent socioeconomic marginalization. A critical pension gap emerges, the result of years of informal or grey labour in the Italian care sector leaving many with minimal financial security on the long term and in their older years. Furthermore, the research reframes the psychological distress of returnees not as a clinical pathology, but as a direct corporal cost of unregulated, high-intensity labour. Ultimately, the study highlights a triple absence, where returnees remain socially invisible and isolated, having fulfilled their familial mission at the expense of their own long-term structural well-being.

Keywords: return migration, care work, Italy Syndrome, transnational families ageing.

DOI: 10.59277/RJSoc.2026.3-4.02

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