Westood17 points out how many works on ageing and care do not consider diversity, when aging, care and diversity conform the key triangle of contemporary changes in sociological aging challenges. She also adds how this ‘uncritical reliance’ has often led to homogenising narratives. which has often not included questions of diversity in its parameters, has not included representative populations and has not incorporated issues of diversity and/or inequality in its analysis.

Lamas-Abraira1 provides with a contextual vision of the importance of the debates on care, migration and the elderly in diverse areas of the world. The background context revolves around how to resolve definitional ambiguities on the research of gender and migration and to provide and integrated, synthesized overview of the current state of knowledge. The concept of care has been a main axis of research in migration and gender studies. Fisher and Tronto10 explain how care encompasses orientation and practices: it permeates people´s lives and seeks to give continuity, wellbeing and or recovery.

Even if the triangle of care has mostly been analysed in Anglo-Saxon countries, we can consider diversity of care of human beings, which involves our everyday life, but it is also inserted in genderised intersectional power systems. Those care systems are of course conditioned by the historical and cultural contexts which lay behind those systems, in this case referred to the Barcelona case. Of course, such pandemic events were internationally spread. In early 2020, when dominant news reports suggested that COVID-19 was a virus that would target the elderly and vulnerable, many perceived that the brewing pandemic would likely not affect them. For example, the community perception that Black populations in Britain were mostly younger and healthier was compounded by reports- reflective of initial Chinese media channels- that amplified the belief that some people were less susceptible, and would only face flu-like symptoms should they catch the virus. See the exhibition of Open Wounds exhibition | The King's Fund (kingsfund.org.uk)(accessed 12.02.2023).

For this article, we focus on the elderly and how they are cared as a center of reflection. Care work is defined broadly as consisting of activities and relations involved in meeting the physical, psychological and emotional needs of adults and children, old and young, frail and able-bodied. It is understood inside “human capabilities”, they mean “health, skills, or proclivities that are useful to oneself or others”, which include“physical and mental health, physical skills, cognitive skills and emotional skills”. Similarly, Standing defines care work as “the work of looking after the physical, psychological, emotional and development needs of one or more other people”.

Two broad kinds of care activities have been defined: first, those that consist of direct, face-to-face, person-care activities, which typically include the work of “nannies”, childcare workers, nurses, doctors, teachers, caregivers in nursing homes for older persons and older person caregivers in private households; and, second, those that do not entail face to-face person-care, such as cleaning, cooking, laundry and other household maintenance tasks.

Firstly, we locate care. The meaning of care for the elderly in the context of welfare regimes and migration in Southern Europe opens new debates on the location of the so-called care crisis and its reading from a gender perspective. Certainly, the social organization of care appears as a matter of crucial importance in the world and the European context during the last decades. In this sense, we are not talking about a new phenomenon, the need for care, but we refer to how the problem regains increasingly greater magnitude and intensity. Especially regarding ways of thinking care of dependents and elderly women, in the chainging realities associated to new demographic, political-social and economic changes, which entail a strong increase in demand; at the same time, we are also witnessing a cut and decrease in social benefits. Furthermore, from the elaborations on social care, the place of care in welfare regimes, and the role of the States to regulate and assume it, associating it with labour markets and immigration regulations that unprotect caregivers, have also gained presence.

Care work for the elderly can be paid (in this case with migrant carers) or unpaid (in this article with family carers). As everywhere in the world, the largest amount of unpaid care work in nearly all societies takes place within households, most often carried out by women and girls of the families concerned. But individuals also perform unpaid care for people outside their families, webbed in social networks, such as friends, neighbours, and community members, and within a variety of institutions (public, market, non-profit, community, and even NGOs) on an unpaid or voluntary basis. Paid care work is caring work performed in exchange for payment or remuneration within a range of institutional settings, such as private households (as in the case of domestic workers, who are mainly migrants), and public or private hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and other care establishments. Marketed care for the elderly is very wide, and it’s in constant transformation. As paid care workers may be in an employment relationship, where the employer may be a private individual or household, public agency, a private for-profit enterprise, or a private non-profit organization; or they may be working on their own account (self-employment), and they are often inside personal arrangements in the informal labour market and with an irregular migrant´s condition.

An easy and graphical way to understand care is through the “care diamond”, which proposes a way of conceptualizing the institutional architecture through which care is provided – the four institutions, which are the family/ household, the state, the market, and the non-profit sector, which includes voluntary and community organizations; and the division (and redistribution) of care labour, cost, and responsibility among them. The demand for care services that are “non-familial” (not involving family members) has been on the rise and employed care workers comprise a growing segment of the paid labour force. Care providers in the private sector comprise several kinds. These costs are unequally borne by those who carry the disproportionate burden of unpaid care, i.e. mostly female members of the family and community. In the context of high-income inequality and high poverty levels, families living in poverty provide a steady source of cheap care labour. They can organize and provide care services by care workers employed by the enterprises themselves; or that act as intermediaries, subcontracting care workers or establishments for and on behalf of care recipients; or that simply recruit care workers for private households, individuals, or establishments. The terms of the triangular relationships that involve care recipients, care workers, and these various types of establishments are changing very fast and it is evolving in many different ways.

There is enough evidence to suggest that differentiating care regimes is based on the relative roles of the state in the formal provision of care services and support and of the family in the informal provision of care 18. Two ideal types have been identified: at one end, the Southern European “familialist care model”, with high levels of unpaid care provided by the family (particularly women) and minimal public provision of care services; and, at the other end, the “public services model” of Nordic countries, with egalitarian care and gender regime and high levels of provision of public care services.

In this article the context is therefore put into two important evolving preprocesses is on the “marketisation of care” and the other is on “re-familiarisation of care”. As regarding the first process, the role of markets in delivering care to individuals and families has expanded especially by (i) direct purchase of service (e.g.families and individuals in a private nursing home, or directly buying such services, (ii) purchase through government care in subcontracting mode or employ care workers (ii) purchase of government to private services to give public services (privatization of care), (iii) partial private financing of public care services, including through user fees and other extra monetary support from care recipients.

As regarding the family setting. Some market-based instruments entail “unburdening the family” or “de-familiarization” of care responsibilities, other measures involve a “re-familialization” of care (bringing care delivery back within the family setting), such as cash-for-care allowances that enable or encourage families to hire caregivers who provide care at home. The types of care in light of the above-mentioned process are very different and give out a different impact on society in distending the social content of the care given, and the relationship between the care recipient and the care provider as well as understanding the economic character of the relationship and the labour involved (e.g. paid or unpaid, employment relationship or another arrangement).

Evidently enough, social relations of care are intertwined with existing structures of power and inequalities of gender, race, and class, Historically and across developed and developing countries, now called North and Global South, women from poorer and disadvantaged racial and ethnic communities have tended to provide the labour (for little or no pay) to meet the care needs (household maintenance, personal care) of more powerful social groups while their own needs have been neglected. Furthermore, workers generally experienced a wage decline when entering a care occupation and an increase when leaving care jobs, the fact that they were often not unionized, the low cognitive or physical demands of the jobs, or low levels of education and experience among care workers affect their labour trajectories.

In such a triangular setting, we would include the influence of three regimes, the care regime, the migration regime, and the employment regime. As care regimes, influences in support and its conditionality (e.g., direct payments, care allowances, cash benefits, tax credits), characteristics of the care workforce, “care cultures” (i.e., dominant national and local cultural discourses on gender and care, on what constitutes appropriate care, such as familial or institutional care for older people) and mobilizations concerning care. In addition to the distribution of care responsibilities – who pays, who cares, who decides –a regulatory framework that governs these care responsibilities, a care regime has an underlying “care culture” (and sub-cultures) that define what type of care is most appropriate and desirable, including who should provide care. The care regime is intimately intertwined with gender relations 1213.

Secondly, we locate migration. As a migration regime, we identify the main elements as immigration policies, settlement and naturalization rights, citizen rights, internal norms and practices in relationships between majority and minority groups, labour market divisions, exclusions and hierarchies, processes of deregulation, deskilling, precarious and flexible labour; forms of social protection ( production-related discourses (male breadwinner or dual worker, welfare-to-work schemes, labour market activation), and forms of mobilization.

As employment regimes, they shape the employment situation and working conditions of migrant care workers. At the macro level; institutions and organizations at the meso level; and formal and informal employment arrangements, relations, and practices at the micro-level.

Therefore, because of these arguments, we will use a triangular vision for the analysis of this article based on the different types of caregivers with whom we have discussed. Normally, the care triangle refers to a model adapted for the care of people with dementia - known as the Care Triangle or the Care Triangle - to create a link between the three parties: the person with dementia, the staff member, and the individual carer. This Triangle of Care describes a therapeutic relationship between the person with dementia (patient), staff member, and caregiver that promotes safety supports communication, and sustains well-being. The Triangle of Care seeks a better connection between service users and their caregivers, and organizations. It was developed by caregivers and staff to enhance caregiver participation in acute home and hospital treatment services. It was initially developed to improve acute mental health services in the UK by adopting specific principles: assessing the role of caregivers and their contact with services, contacting caregivers to interact with caregivers more effectively., and see to ensure that policies and protocols guarantee confidentiality and improve the information (https://www.cwp.nhs.uk/about-us/our-campaigns/person-centred-framework/triangle-of-care/).Accessed on 11.11.23.

Thus, because of these arguments, in this general context of the migrant women's work sector, we will also see how the economic crisis of 2008 and the pandemic take on a special role. If the outsourcing of care in society supposes a growing role in society, they are not linked to improvements in conditions in the sector. The role of the elderly in the face of the pandemic is closely linked to the impact experienced by the caregivers during the first lockout. If since 2008 the crisis has been making a dent in society and especially in the migrant community, the pressures have also become much harder during the pandemic: greater risks, greater uncertainty in mobility, and high social costs of immobility

Finally, in our empirical case, in this triangle of care for the interpretation of the debates and discussion groups carried out, we identify here three main social actors. The elderly person (as we have seen in the interviews), the caregivers - in their wide variety, from family members to hired workers, especially immigrant women- and thirdly, as the third aspect of the triangle and showing other social actors, and which remains in this article more blurred, the municipal and health public services. In other words, we focus on the nexus of all the care understanding from a triangular point of view. As we will see in the last part of the article, this triangle is also very affected by the adverse effects of the pandemic. Therefore, in this triangular setting, the pandemic highlights the existing systemic equalities, particularly affecting migrants and ethnic minorities, people who work in the care sector, and health personnel.