 Another haunting reminder of chattel slavery is the neoliberal welfare state’s intrusion in the family, charging parents with poor work ethic and neglect of their children. In the US, poor children of color, especially Black, Latine, and American Indians living on reservations, are at higher risk of being taken away from their kin and carers and turned over to the family regulation system (Goldberg 2015). The world over, parents who are socially displaced such as Romanian immigrants in Norway, are under greater scrutiny by state actors, e.g., child protective services. In the U.S., social workers’ own white middle class (protestant) work ideology is enforced paradoxically on working-class mothers: these stigmatized women are summoned to comply with social programming, a penal version of the cult of domesticity and are thus effectively forced out of a paid job, made dependent on the good will of the social worker and family court judge, who may grant access to child-supervised visits. Parents charged with child abuse and/or neglect are thus unable to pursue education or a job, often creating an intergenerational cycle of the violence of poverty (Nagel 2018). In ideological terms, this is coded as welfare dependency and racialized as a controlling image, thus stereotyping young Black mothers (Fraser and Gordon 1994; Hill Collins 2000). In response, the National Welfare Rights Organization was created to destigmatize welfare by postulating it as a human right (Toney 2000) and by also demanding a basic income, as alternative to punitive welfare (Weeks 2011, 138). The proposal for universal basic income has gained traction in recent years (Chatzidakis et al. 2020). Migrant workers, worker-mothers who serve as domestic workers are also at risk (of deportation and/or imprisonment) for facing frivolous neglect charges or simply for lacking proper visa status. Gendered moral economies operate across national, racial and geographic borders in enforcing a domestic and domesticating patriarchal ideology and determining who is a good victim and deserves to be rescued (Keogh 2015; Nagel 2013; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2010; Grewal and Kaplan 1992; Kaplan et al. 1999).