ABSTRACT
Italy was historically a sending country with substantial emigration and little immigration until recently. This chapter explains the organization of the domestic work sector, tracing its workforce from Italian men, to unmarried Italian women from Southern Italy, to today's migrant labor force of caregivers. It presents a link of migrant domestic workers to Italy's "care crisis" for its aging population and the limitations of its welfare state. The chapter presents how Italy's immigration laws trap migrants in Italy, bolstering the "gulag" metaphor. It focuses on the institutions that organize collective life for Ukrainian migrants in Rome, especially post-Soviet churches and an organized meeting space called the "Garbatella". Like the post-Soviet churches, the Garbatella was also a site of collective meaning-making for Ukrainian migrants in Rome. Ukraine is caught somewhere between "Europe" and "Africa". Ukrainians in Italy fought against this characterization, because it was their greatest fear that Ukraine might indeed go the way of "Africa".
