Cristensen and Guldvik’s Migrant Care Workers provides insight to the historical context for public care work and shows how migration policies, general welfare and long-term care policies as well as cultural differences in values in the UK and Norway set the context for how migrant care workers can realise their individual life projects. The authors discuss what might be called ‘a new type of migrant’ one who is neither a victim of the divide between the global north and the global south, nor someone leaving family behind, but individuals using care work as a part of their own life project of potential self-improvement.