Naiade Pereira Da Costa and one of the children she used to look after.
As we stood at the school gates on a well-to-do Brooklyn street, Shelly took a step back and looked at me quizzically. “OK. See, you look like a mom, but you’re a nanny?”
Laughing, I told her that, as far I knew, I was not a mom. I was a babysitter, working a couple of afternoons each week to supplement my writing income. I understood her surprise, because I’m white. Shelly is a black Guyanese woman some twenty years my senior, making her a typical nanny in that neighborhood.
Women, disproportionately women of color and immigrants, make up 94 percent of the nation’s child-care workers. As an immigrant myself, I find this statistic fascinating. We live under an administration that depicts immigrants as shiftless, drug-dealing job stealers, yet millions of American parents are happily handing their children—their most precious and gigantic responsibility—over to . . . immigrants?
I’m Irish and moved to New York City five years ago. Had I come to the United States 150 years ago, I would probably have been a full-time, live-in nanny, not someone who babysits on the side. Between 1820 and 1860, more than one-third of all immigrants to the United States were Irish, and more than 60 percent of Irish women immigrants went into domestic work.
Immigrants arriving today continue to find child care a reliable entry point into the American economy. But that’s where the past and present diverge. Second-generation Irish women, and those who came after them, turned away from servitude toward the relative autonomy and higher pay of jobs like teaching, bookkeeping, and nursing. That same mobility is not available to immigrant women today.
Case in point is Naiade Pereira Da Costa, a Brazilian immigrant I found by posting on a parents’ forum in Brooklyn. Da Costa first came to the United States in 2012 through the J-1 visa program. She was twenty-six, and like every J-1 applicant had to pass an English proficiency test, demonstrate “binding ties” outside of the United States, outline the specific skills she would learn on the program, and complete a personality profile. That’s more than you need to get a job as, say, the President of the United States.
Da Costa moved to North Carolina and lived with the family she worked for, earning $195.75 for working forty-five hours per week. Both parents were doctors who worked long hours, and they had a newborn. Still, she decided to continue her education. Six years later, after starting many a day at 4 a.m. to fit in work and study, she is now a full-time student taking prerequisite classes for nursing school.
Da Costa counts herself lucky. She remains close to the couple who hired her. But obtaining permanent resident status will not be easy.
“There is no pathway right now,” she says. “My options are to get married, but that is not optimal.” The longer she stays, and the further in school and debt she gets, the more she is risking. “You spend a ton of money studying and you might get a sponsorship for work. But if there’s a crackdown on H-1B visas, then I don’t see that happening.”
Da Costa wants to improve her financial situation, but her struggle is about more than that. “I feel like as a woman and as an immigrant, we’re always trying to prove ourselves. I feel that today there is pressure to do that, to conquer our own space.”
The sad truth is that working as an immigrant nanny rarely leads to better career opportunities. Maki Park, a senior policy analyst for early education and care at the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, puts it bluntly: “It’s not a field that promises advancement.”
The sad truth is that working as an immigrant nanny rarely leads to better career opportunities.
Even among immigrant women who work in formal child care programs, day-care centers, or preschools, more than one in five are living in poverty, Park says. Her prediction: “Folks who are relying on informal child care are going to continue to do so and immigrant workers will continue to make up this workforce. They will just be pushed further and further underground.”
In 1998, when I was seventeen, I came to the United States and worked, undocumented, as a nanny for a family with four children in Rye, New York. There were bursts of fun and job satisfaction, but it was monotonous, and sometimes grueling, work. Endless rounds of snacks and meals, then clean up; hours spent soothing a teething baby and keeping a challenging toddler happy.
Full-time nannies are required to be paid an hourly wage and are entitled to overtime pay, but the informal child-care industry is rife with gray areas and personal interpretation. A 2017 report entitled “Undervalued: A Brief History of Women’s Care Work and Child Care Policy in the United States” by the National Women’s Law Center made me exclaim “What?” so loudly I scared my dog—twice. The first time was when I read that “wages have scarcely risen for child-care workers in real terms in the past two decades.”
The nannies I spoke with often brought up the imbalance of power between themselves and their employers, particularly if they are undocumented. One said the people who entrusted her to look after their children would not trust her to have her own set of house keys. Another told me her employer confiscated her passport, just in case.
Compared to most other developed countries, the United States invests very little public money in child care, which is seen as a private responsibility. The United States is the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee paid maternity leave for working mothers. And working U.S. parents pay nearly twice as much of their income for child care (23 percent) than the world average (12 percent), according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The system in which nannies work also often exploits their bosses—the middle-class women whose children they are taking care of.
In 1972, when she was fourteen, Marina Lester moved from Trinidad and Tobago to live with her grandmother in Brooklyn. She arrived on a visitor’s visa and, when that expired, stayed on without papers. Lester began babysitting for others in her building and moved into nannying through an agency. She worked during the day and studied for her GED at night.
Left: Nanny Namrata Pradhan with children Maya and Ari. Right: Nanny Marina Lester and baby Margot.
At one household, Lester recalls, she was literally followed around by the children’s mother, who ran an inspecting hand over the surfaces Lester had just dusted. Another family she worked for moved away, without paying her what she was owed. Today, with her U.S. citizenship intact and a thirty-year career in banking behind her, Lester can smile ruefully about her old bosses. But she knows there are many others who are in similar situations now.
According to a study by the National Domestic Workers Alliance, economic hardship for these women is rife, with 37 percent of Latina domestic workers in the Texas-Mexico border region reporting that someone in their household went hungry during the past year. Working conditions are difficult: With just 13 percent of nannies working with a contract, many reported irregular pay, wage theft, and pressure to do more than their scheduled hours.
Other researchers have found that nannies who are undocumented are paid less. From 2011 to 2012, they had a median hourly wage of $9.86, compared to $12.56 for U.S.-born nannies. Undocumented Latinas made even less at $8.31 per hour.
Yet undocumented nannies rarely complain. “First, they know that conditions are unlikely to improve,” the Alliance study notes. “But the broader context for their silence is that they work and live in fear . . . An astonishing 26 percent of workers with irregular immigration status feared that their complaints would be met with violence while half were afraid of being reported to immigration officials.”
That fear is heightened as the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from Washington grows louder and turns into action. Family reunification rights, DACA, temporary protected status, and the protection offered by sanctuary cities are all being stripped away or threatened. In April, the Trump Administration ended temporary protected status for roughly 9,000 Nepali immigrants that had been in place since that country’s devastating 2015 earthquake.
Namrata Pradhan, a Nepali nanny living in Queens, is worried for herself and other domestic workers she has met through her advocacy work with Adhikaar, a social justice nonprofit run by and for the Nepali-speaking community. Because of her activism in Nepal as a young person, she received “withholding of removal” status here.
Similar to asylum, this is awarded to someone who demonstrates that they will likely be persecuted in their home country. Unlike with asylum, there is no path to citizenship, and the recipient cannot travel outside of the United States. Nepali nannies here who have just lost their temporary protected status are in flux. Some are hoping to be sponsored by the families they work for, a complex and costly prospect. Some will risk working in the United States illegally and others will leave, returning to a country still on its knees.
Pradhan has a sharp legal mind, having studied law back in Nepal and later trained as a worker leader with the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She also clearly feels the needs of others deeply. She was moved to tears when I asked about the family she works for today, explaining that she began looking after their little girl at the same age as her nephew had been when she helped rear him back in Nepal many years ago. That nephew is now grown; she misses him every day but cannot visit.
Nannies are not mechanics or engineers, with quantifiable skills and clear roles. Instead, they develop “soft skills,” like compassion and patience, that are difficult to put a dollar value on.
Many employers, too, want a certain selflessness from people who take care of their children—a woman who puts others before herself. “These are qualities that come almost from a history of oppression,” Park says. “These are qualities that come from women who are doing what they have to do simply to make ends meet.”
The National Women’s Law Center report also shook me with its reference to the “Black Mammy Memorial Institute,” established in the early twentieth century by the principal of the Athens Colored High School to “train young blacks in domestic skill and moral attitudes that were generally associated with the ‘old black mammy’ in the South.”
Women of color, employed or enslaved, have done domestic work including looking after other families’ children for most of this country’s history. Lester returned to nannying part-time after retiring from the bank, and I asked her feelings on being a black woman looking after white children. She’s thought about it, particularly after a recent encounter she had in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
Lester was pushing a stroller with her little white charge inside, when another black woman walked by and said, “I give you credit. I would never work for these people, or take care of their children.” Lester feels differently, and is proud to be a nanny: “I want to be happy in my job, and feel no shame about it, whatever job I’m doing. And you have to think of this innocent child, black or white, looking to you to protect them.”
The relationship between nannies and parents can be incredibly intimate, freighted with potential misunderstandings and uneven power dynamics. All of the women I spoke to for this article expressed difficulties navigating their work lives.
Da Costa, stressing the importance of empathy between employers and their nannies, put it like this: “There is a very thin line between being part of this family and not being part of the family.”
When I asked Pradhan what advice she could offer employers, she said simply, “Treat us like human beings. Oh, and let us know in advance when you are going on vacation.”