There are several unserious and common arguments made by nativists that are delivered in the style of a ham-fisted mic drop. My responses to the ham-fisted mic drops aren’t as important as my answers to concerns about terrorism, crime, cultural assimilation, economic effects, or the political effects, but they’re worth writing about nonetheless. The most common I hear now is, “If you like immigrants so much, why don’t you let them live in your home?” My response is that we do, and the experience is so positive that I recommend you try it – especially if you have young children.
Does that mean we can liberalize immigration, legalize illegal immigrants, and shrink the immigration-enforcement industrial complex down to a pathetic rump with less respectability than the TSA? No, I didn’t think so.
Helga (name changed for privacy purposes) is only the seventh migrant we’ve let live in our home. She arrived on the J-1 au pair program from a Northern European country known for its beer, manufacturing acumen, and some poor geopolitical decisions in the 20th century. Under that visa, she lives with us rent-free and can eat us out of house and home if she desires. We pay for her transportation and some education, and she essentially becomes part of our family while watching our three young children while my wife and I work. You didn’t think we let her live with us out of a sense of charity, did you?
Inviting an au pair to live in our home and care for our children while we work is the second-best child-related decision my wife and I have made. The best is having them. It’s also a financial no-brainer. All you need is a spare furnished bedroom, enough income to support a young woman, some extra gas money, the cost of a few college courses, and a wage (or stipend, if you prefer legal accuracy). Au pairs aren’t for the rich despite the clever French marketing. It means, “On equal terms,” in French. Not, “Super fancy nanny for aristocrats.”
You can’t afford not to have an au pair if you have young children. Daycare costs for my three children would be over $40,000 a year at their current ages, where we live, which is about $10,000 more than the all-inclusive price of an au pair. The (opportunity) cost is higher if you were renting out that spare room she occupies, but you probably weren’t. As a side benefit, hiring an au pair means you also have a handy excuse to make your in-laws stay at a hotel when they visit.
Just to be clear, I am not paid by the au pair industry, Big Au Pair, the au pair trust, or billionaires who made their money “exploiting” the work of au pairs. I’m just an enthusiastic user of the visa who wants to share the benefits of immigration with the rest of you.
The US government regulates J-1 au pair visas closely, but also outsources some of the monitoring to authorized sponsoring agencies like Cultural Care or AuPairCare (we’ve hired both and had good experiences). Thus, American families can’t just hire an au pair directly but must instead go through a sponsoring agency. Even if you could do all the paperwork and check all the regulatory boxes yourself, you’d probably want to go through an agency anyway.
The family begins their journey toward amazing au pair-supplied childcare at a good price, topped with cultural enrichment, by selecting an agency and completing an online application that describes their household, location, schedule, and expectations. The agency screens the family for basic eligibility, including lawful residence, English fluency, and the availability of a private bedroom for the au pair. The family also pays a program fee, typically ranging from $9,000 to $11,000 per year. Once approved, the US family browses profiles of pre-vetted applicants from abroad who have opted into the program and talks with those who are interested.
Many au pairs create videos about themselves, share their social media profiles, and are happy to answer any questions you may have. There are also “rematches,” which refers to au pairs already in the United States who are changing homes for various reasons. Families can talk to previous sponsors of rematches to see why they are moving. Families and au pairs interview each other via video calls or other means until both sides agree to a match.
Then the agency arranges the knotty visa details, provides some training, and then the family steps in to coordinate travel. The agencies recommend that families write house rules for the au pair and set reasonable curfews, limitations on car usage, and whether the au pair can invite significant others over to your house, among others. It’s like practice for having a teenager. The au pairs can stay up to two years (in two twelve month groups) and switch families during their time here. The families can also fire the au pairs and then return to the agency to hire another, assuming there were no exceptionally bad circumstances. There are rules for all these details, and they are annoying, but not as onerous as you might think. The agencies really want to help and make a match. They’re businesses contracted to supply a visa after all, not government agencies.
Current regulations mandate a weekly minimum wage of $195.75 for a 45-hour work week in addition to room, board, transportation, and education. At the risk of delving into the details, the compensation calculation is the $7.25 hourly federal minimum wage multiplied by 45 hours, which equals $326.25. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, families are allowed to reduce the wage by 40 percent to compensate for providing room, board, food, and other amenities, which brings the weekly wage down by $130.25 to $195.75. But that’s the minimum wage, and every family I know (anecdote alert) pays more than that, sometimes substantially more. And there’s no mystery why some au pairs earn more than others. The au pair’s marginal productivity determines her place on the labor demand curve, and more productive au pairs, those with more childcare experience and greater maturity, command higher wages.
Helga didn’t cross the border into our home as a conqueror. She came as a helper, eager to learn about the United States while helping take care of our children. She’s settled in like a second cousin would – familiar, friendly, and a part of the family. She gets to live cheaply, hone her English, and travel around North America with a basecamp near the fifth or sixth best city on the East Coast (sorry, Baltimore). Our children love her, and my four-year-old daughter is especially smitten. My wife enjoys having an au pair because she can work at home without constant interruption, but she also gets to see the children frequently and can choose whether to run errands or pick up a sick child from school rather than having no options. My older boys love it because Helga is like an older sister who also drives them to their human capital building exercises. Lastly, I love having her as part of our family because it means I can spend longer hours at the office without feeling guilty that I’m leaving my wife at home alone. Or, perhaps, “as guilty” is more accurate.
It’s taboo to discuss ways to ease the burden of parenting because strangers judge your worth as a parent using the labor value theory, but that’s a silly conflation of laziness with efficiency. My wife and I value efficiency and are less concerned with socially signaling our good parenting than most others. Helga starts at 7:30am on school days by rousing the children. That allows us to sleep in just a little longer if we want. In the BAP time (before au pair), the latest I could rise on a workday was 6:45 a.m. to shower and change before waking up the children, feeding them, and kicking them out the door to catch the bus. Now, the latest I can get up is 7:15 a.m., and it makes a world of difference. We frequently wake up earlier for other reasons, but we have the option to sleep in just a little bit longer when we want to. And the best part is that when I get downstairs to wish them a good day, I didn’t just spend the last 30 minutes pushing, yelling, threatening, and begging them to get ready on time. We can all just go, being better rested with a smaller chance of being late. Having an au pair makes it easier to have a family and sleep just a bit longer.
There are several reasons why parents around the world are choosing to have fewer children, but a higher opportunity cost is one of them. Higher wages and better entertainment options make everything else better, which means it’s costlier to have children because you must give up more to be a parent. This is especially true for women like my wife, who have a career and who are smart, industrious, and hardworking outside the home. Without an au pair, we probably wouldn’t have three kids, let alone want more like we currently do. Or, if we did, we’d be much poorer because she wouldn’t be working.
You don’t get points as a parent for struggling or being more tired; it just makes you unhappier than you could be and may make you want to reconsider becoming a parent again. Instead, you should give in to temptation and invite an au pair to live with your family. Many mothers decide not to work while raising children, and more power to them, but they’re less likely to want an au pair. They are more for middle and upper-middle-class families where both parents work. Many such families think they can have it all – careers, children, and being well rested without an au pair. And maybe some of them can figure it out, but hiring an au pair certainly makes it easier to achieve all those goals.
Au pairs are fun additions to your family who teach your children working-class European slang, save you money, increase your fertility, and displace your in-laws. What is there not to like? Well, there are a few things. Half of our au pairs have been wonderful cooks, and so we all gained weight. Our entertainment expenditures also rose because the presence of a babysitter allowed my wife and me to go out on more dates. We also reduced social solidarity by having young law-abiding persons from South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, France, Switzerland, and Germany boost the diversity of our neighborhood. And don’t forget the RETVRN to tradition by having an unrelated person living in our house.
The only real potential downsides are just symptoms of other personal problems that would likely be exposed or exacerbated by hiring an au pair. The first is if you don’t like unrelated people living in your house, then you won’t enjoy living with an au pair. My wife and I thought we’d dislike that aspect of it and that we’d take a long time to adjust to having a stranger in the home. It took about 20 minutes to adapt to Neevoliah, our first au pair, even before she started working. You’d adapt quickly, too. If you’re a deeply private person, then there might be a learning curve, but you’d probably get over those feelings when you realize how much easier your life has become.
The second potential problem is related to the stereotype of au pairs, which you can probably imagine: a young foreign woman coming to America in search of a green card. It’s an inspiration for Hallmark movies and Law and Order episodes, but that’s about it. Suffice it to say that it almost never happens, we’ve never heard of it in our extensive social network of other parents with au pairs, au pair agencies supposedly kick families out of the program when that happens, and the au pair is probably the proximate rather than the ultimate cause of such discord.
There might be highly individualized reasons for some people to personally dislike au pairs, but why would anybody dislike the au pair program in toto? There are a few bad ideological reasons that I didn’t satirize above. The first is that there are a handful of busybodies who want to tell Americans how to raise their own children. They think American mothers should stay home, and that’s it. There’s nothing wrong with mothers making that choice for themselves and their families. My own mother did, and it was great. However, other mothers and families make different choices. Of course, the real alternative for most of the 20,000 or so families a year who welcome new au pairs into their homes is day care, not a stay-at-home mother.
We tried daycare for a few years before hiring an au pair. The contrast uncovered that an unexpected benefit of au pairs is avoiding the worst of the flu and cold seasons. Day cares are the grossest viral and bacterial petri dishes in the United States, and during the worst seasons, one of our kids would come home with a new illness every three weeks or so and often spread it to us. We don’t miss that.
The second silly reason people oppose the au pair program is classic and fallacious labor market protectionism. Opposing au pairs to give jobs to American-born childcare workers is just an intensely personal and more destructive-than-usual example of how devastating protectionism can be for American families. It came from a few former au pairs who earned green cards and their labor union buddies who conspired to reduce the number of au pairs to cut labor market competition and make life harder for families. Those groups coalesced to convince the Biden administration to propose a regulation that would kill the au pair program by copying a wage increase in Massachusetts that reduced the number of new hires by over 60 percent, as well as other regulations that would make the program unworkable for most families. Thousands of comments submitted by the public, and one especially excellent one written by me, stopped that regulation cold and sent it back to the drawing board. The Trump administration has not revisited it yet.
The au pair program isn’t perfect. It should be deregulated. Au pairs should be able to switch families more easily, work for more than two years if they want to, the visa should be dual intent, au pairs should be able to work in elder care or perform other domestic work, they should be able to get part time work outside of the home, the education requirement should be dropped, and older au pairs should be able to work on the visa too. However, even in the current regulatory environment, it remains a mystery why only around 20,000 American families invite a new au pair into their home each year. The advantages are as vast as the program is underused.
More Americans than that have a spare bedroom, the budget to hire an au pair, and the demand for childcare, so why don’t more use the program? Perhaps they think au pairs are for Americans who are especially wealthy, weird, welcoming, whacky, or worldly. As somebody who checks maybe one of those boxes at most (you guess which one), I can assure you that none are prerequisites and that fear of a deficit in one or all shouldn’t hold you back from giving it a try. The only other explanation is ignorance, most people just don’t know about it. This article should solve that problem.
When nativists ask me how many migrants I let live in my home, I answer, “Seven, over the years. From South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, France, Switzerland, and Germany.” When they invariably pause, I ask them, “How many Border Patrol agents do you let live in your home?” I’ve never heard an answer to that question. One silly ham-fisted mic drop question deserves another, but a 2,800-word explanation is more my style.
Nativists never ask what my family gets in return from hiring a migrant to live in our home who helps take care of our children, but the benefits are vast: childcare, lifelong friends who are as close as family, and the privilege of sharing a little piece of America. If any of those sound remotely appealing to you, then you should hire an au pair too.
I hope you realize that this reads like a parody of an out of touch beltway person extolling the personal benefits they receive from immigration, mainly that it's cheaper than paying American child care workers.
What a lovely piece and, boy, do you get the worst comments. I think you're right that people don't know about this program - I didn't.