Deferring the Care Crisis to Immigrant Workers: The Italian Response to an Aging Population.

This paper explores how the presence of immigrant workers, in particular immigrant women workers, allows the Italian state and Italian families to respond to one of the most important issue of the 21^st century: the growing need for long-term for the elders.  In the process, the paper argues that the presence of immigrant women make the Italian state more resilient. The presence of these women regulated through various migration policies, in fact, provide the Italian state and Italian families with a ready made market solution to a problem that would otherwise require a great deal of investment in terms of resources, services, and ideas. In addition, the presence and work of immigrant women allows the Italian state to fully become neoliberal therefore gaining legitimacy among most powerful nations.