Creating a home

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Searching for and creating “home” is a recurring theme throughout many of the testimonies. Leaving behind a place that once seemed the natural focal point of belonging requires a rethinking of what home means and how it can be actively shaped.

Many accounts describe the process of gradually making a home in places that were not initially intended as permanent destinations. This involves active reflections of what to identify with and what not. Through work, community involvement, friendships, and participation in local social and cultural life, migrant women actively contribute to shaping the places in which they settled. At the same time, “home” often includes connections to places and communities left behind. Food, language, music, festivities, traditions, and regular contact with family and friends help maintain a sense of continuity across borders, often supported by migrant communities and periodic returns.

Many interlocutors reflect on how they found a way to feel home without being dependent on a specific location. Rather, their sense of home became more closely connected to the individual social and emotional environments they cultivated, to provide comfort and safety. In this way, home could be found, recreated, and sustained across different places and stages of life.

Seeking opportunities

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Migration decisions are not only shaped by external forces like economic pressures, or political conditions. For many people sharing their stories here, it is a means of pursuing greater independence, education, professional development, and the curiosity to explore the world beyond familiar surroundings. Transnational mobility opened up new possibilities, empowering women to shape their own life paths.

For some, migration offered a way to move beyond the limitations of social expectations, prescribed roles, or restricted opportunities in their places of origin. It provided access to education, employment, and economic security that might otherwise have remained out of reach. For others, migration was not simply a path towards a better life, but the only viable way to study, sustain themselves, or support their families.

The testimonies also include the experiences of highly skilled migrants, highlighting how privilege, access to opportunities, and the ability to continue careers across borders affect migration. Across different life stages, they reflect an ongoing search for new opportunities: gaining independence, entering or re-entering the workforce, changing careers, expanding skills, and contributing to social, cultural, and political life. Together, these stories show how mobility can be both a response to constraints and a powerful source of agency and empowerment.

Working double

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The testimonies also shed light on the often invisible double burden carried by many migrant women: Alongside paid work that provides financial security or opportunities for professional development, they frequently take on a disproportionate share of unpaid reproductive labour – care, household, and community responsibilities. These demands are often intensified by the challenges of migration itself, including learning a new language, navigating unfamiliar systems and supporting family members abroad.

Many of the accounts reflect how women managed this “double shift” through resilience and mutual support. At the same time, they reveal efforts to make this often overlooked labour visible and to challenge unequal expectations. In private and public spheres alike, women advocated for greater recognition and a fairer division of care work, and fought for women’s rights and workers’ rights, contributing to broader social and political change.

Caring for family across borders

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Family and care take many forms in the context of migration and are a recurring theme in many of the testimonies presented here. They reveal how the responsibility for sustaining family life and providing care often falls to women, shaping both their migration experiences and life choices.

For some, migration means leaving children, partners, or other family members behind in order to provide financial security and create better opportunities for those at home. Care is practised across borders: through remittances, regular contact, emotional support, and the ongoing effort to maintain family ties despite physical distance. These forms of transnational care are often accompanied by high expectations, feelings of responsibility, and the pressure to support loved ones from afar.

The testimonies also highlight the role of outsourced care. Women who migrate to take up paid care work often rely on others to care for their own children, parents, or households in their absence. In this way, care responsibilities are transferred across families, communities, and countries, revealing the unequal distribution of reproductive labour and the wider social consequences of global care migration.

At the same time, the accounts speak of building new families abroad, drawing on family and community networks, and reuniting with loved ones after periods of separation. Migration can create new possibilities for family life, while also reshaping relationships, roles, and responsibilities.

Many testimonies further reflect the ongoing negotiation between motherhood, professional aspirations, mobility, and familial expectations. They tell of women balancing paid work and care responsibilities, pursuing careers alongside family life, and challenging traditional assumptions about gender roles. Together, these experiences show how migration not only transforms patterns of care but also opens spaces to redefine family, work, and personal identity.

Resisting in invisibility

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Dominant migration narratives have often focused on the figure of the male migrant, leaving women’s experiences and contributions comparatively overlooked.

Much of migrant women’s labour remains invisible because it takes place behind closed doors or in areas of public life where work is noticed only when it is absent. This applies both to paid, frequently informal work, such as domestic labour in private households, as well as unpaid care work that sustains families and communities. This invisibility often implies a lack of access to rights and opportunities to shape their own life conditions.

Yet invisibility should not be mistaken for passivity. The stories collected here reveal countless ways in which women exercised agency in their everyday lives, often expressed through small but meaningful acts: rejecting expectations (such as preparing meals or buying food), preserving personal routines, creating moments of joy, or carving out spaces of autonomy within restrictive circumstances. Acts of mutual support, care, celebration, and solidarity also became ways of maintaining dignity and joy in a daily life shaped by hard work.

Through the different testimonial formats presented here, we have explored how invisibility, and the forms of resistance that take shape within it, can be made more visible.

Standing up for human and workers’ rights

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The stories featured on this platform reveal a myriad of ways in which women have stood up for their rights, for human rights, women’s rights, migrants’ rights, and fair working conditions. Their efforts range from everyday acts of resistance to collective political action, reflecting a wide variety of experiences, opportunities, and constraints.

Some interlocutors describe challenging unfair treatment directly: confronting employers, negotiating with authorities, pushing back against discrimination in their social environments, or finding creative ways to resist exclusion in everyday life. Their subversive acts were often small in scale, yet significant in impact, reaffirming dignity and agency in situations marked by unequal power relations.

Others became involved in organised forms of activism. They joined strikes and demonstrations, built community support structures, established advocacy organisations, and campaigned for political and social change. Many formed alliances across communities, languages, and backgrounds, recognising that shared challenges often required collective responses.

The people whose stories are collected here speak of taking a stand without deepening divisions. Rather than accepting the instrumentalisation of migrants for political purposes, many worked to strengthen dialogue, solidarity, and social cohesion. At the heart of their efforts was and is a commitment to greater justice, equal participation, and the conviction that every person deserves to be treated with dignity and respect.

Negotiating belonging and identity

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For many migrant women, migration is not only a geographical journey but also an ongoing negotiation of belonging and identity. Their stories describe the challenge of positioning themselves in relation to the expectations, norms, and labels imposed both by the societies they leave behind and by those they enter. At the same time, they reflect on the process of defining for themselves who they are, where they belong, and what matters most to them.

Questions of belonging become part of a lifelong process. Many women speak of feeling caught between different worlds, of alienation from their home, or of gradually coming to see a new country as home whilst keeping earlier attachments intact. They describe deciding which values, relationships, languages, and traditions they want to carry forward, and which new influences they embrace along the way.

These reflections are closely linked to broader questions of recognition and self-worth. Beginning again in a new environment can mean having to constantly prove oneself, professionally, socially, or personally. Previous achievements and qualifications are often overlooked, requiring women to earn that selfsame recognition all over again. This often involves building confidence in one’s own place in the world.

At the same time, many women describe migration as an opportunity to redefine what a fulfilling and joyful life means to them, beyond the expectations of others.

Looking back, many do so with a remarkable sense of dignity. Their stories are not only about adaptation and belonging, but also about the lives they have shaped, the relationships they have built, and the care, support, and opportunities they have given others.

Dealing with challenges in a new environment

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Starting a life in a new place often comes with challenges that extend far beyond the moment of arrival: learning a new language, finding suitable work and housing, navigating unfamiliar institutions and bureaucracies, and building social connections from scratch. For many, these experiences are accompanied by periods of uncertainty, isolation, homesickness, and the need to adapt to unfamiliar social norms and expectations.

At the same time, many women carry responsibilities not only for themselves, but also for children, relatives, and wider family networks. These responsibilities can add considerable pressure to an already demanding settlement process. At the same time, many also find themselves navigating new forms of dependency on employers, landlords, partners, or state institutions, particularly during the first years after arrival.

Yet nearly all of the women whose stories are shared on this platform also reflect on the ways they navigated these challenges. Despite limited resources and little external support, they found practical solutions, developed new skills, built networks, and created opportunities for themselves and others. Their accounts speak of determination and resourcefulness, yet also of the emotional costs that often accompany the process of building a new life.

Facing discrimination and marginalization

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Migrant women encounter discrimination and exclusion in many forms. Their experiences are often shaped by multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination related to socially ascribed characteristics and social positions, including gender, migration status, ethnicity, religion, health, class, and sexual orientation.

Discrimination can take institutional shape in the form of unequal access to education, healthcare, fair employment, housing, public services and precarious residencies in strict migration regimes. A striking continuity across different historical periods and migration contexts is the high proportion of migrant women in informal, low-paid, or otherwise precarious forms of work. Whether employed in domestic labour, caregiving, agriculture, hospitality, or other sectors, women have often carried out essential work while having limited access to labour protections, making them particularly vulnerable to exploitation and even violence by employers and agencies.

Even when not working in precarious jobs, many migrant women face barriers in accessing jobs that match their skills or receiving equal pay for their work.

Discrimination is also felt in everyday interactions: in dismissive remarks, paternalistic treatment, stereotyping, exclusion, and forms of dehumanisation that can become part of daily life.

Yet the women whose stories are shared here are not defined by vulnerability alone. They describe a wide range of strategies for navigating and challenging unequal conditions: moving forward and finding ways to reduce their own vulnerability, speaking out against unfair treatment, and resisting exclusion through small acts of everyday defiance. Some became involved in collective initiatives and political movements advocating for equal rights, fair working conditions, and greater social recognition. Their experiences reveal not simply the realities of discrimination, but the many ways women confront it and exercise agency.

Building communities and supporting each other

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Arriving in a new country often means navigating a host of everyday challenges. Finding housing, learning a new language, dealing with unfamiliar bureaucracies, accessing healthcare, making ends meet, or coping with demanding working conditions can shape the realities of daily life for years after the act of migration.

Where institutional support falls short, communities often become vital sources of solidarity. They provide practical help, emotional support, and spaces in which people can share experiences, knowledge, and resources. For many women, these networks offer not only assistance in everyday life but also the confidence and collective strength needed to claim rights, challenge exclusion, and make their voices heard.

The testimonies on this platform show a wide range of forms that solidarity can take. They recount joining demonstrations, establishing educational initiatives, founding organisations, supporting one another through care work, and creating shelters, counselling centres, and advocacy networks for people affected by exploitation and violence. For many migrant women, such alliances are particularly important because they often face multiple forms of discrimination at once. Whether advocating for women’s rights, equal participation as migrants, or fair working conditions, collective action has frequently been a crucial way to address exclusion and create opportunities for change.

They also speak about the quieter ways in which community is sustained: through shared meals, conversations, celebrations, music, and small gestures of support. In these moments, people create spaces of familiarity and connection in new surroundings.

Yet communities are never simple or homogeneous. Like all social worlds, they are shaped by both inclusion and exclusion, by alliances and disagreements, by shared experiences as well as differences. The stories collected here remind us that networks of belonging rarely follow clear boundaries of nationality, language, religion, or gender. Instead, they are constantly negotiated, reshaped, and reimagined through everyday encounters and acts of mutual support.