For over a decade, women from Moldova have been laboring in Istanbul homes as undocumented migrant domestics. The supply and the demand for this unusual labor migration are predicated upon neoliberal transformations in the global political economy and the feminization of migration worldwide (Sassen 1998, 2000; see also Eder 2007). But the development of this transnational labor market is also prompted, this paper argues, by shifts in local moral notions regarding women, work and what constitutes a “modern” household in Turkey. Such gendered moral economies, drive this migration and the experiences of it on the ground. In order to fully understand this transnational migration and the social transformations occurring in Turkey then, this paper attends to these subjective accounts, to the agency of migrants, and to multiple perspectives on this labor at both its supply and demand. Drawing upon 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and Moldova, this paper explores these dynamics from the perspective of workers and their employers in Istanbul. It also deploys critical discourse analysis of representations of Moldovans. The image of the Moldovan in Turkey – marked by notions of gender, but also citizenship, class, race, ethnicity, and religiosity – works with political economic conditions to construct the gendered moral economy of demand for women from formerly socialist states as domestics in Istanbul. These processes are fraught with contradiction and precarity for all parties involved, but the undocumented migrant faces the harshest consequences. Contrasting employer and employee discourses and practices regarding “desirable domestics” reveals some changes and some continuities in ideas about women, workers, and households in Turkey. Thus, this paper builds upon rich research about such transformations in households and the middle classes in Turkey (Oncu 1997; Keyder 1999, Ozbay 1999, Ozyegin 2001, among others). In this case, shifting gendered moral economies in the postsocialist/neoliberal context embed domestics and their employers in new economic practices that may offer new freedoms, but also pose new limitations. Individuals resist such limitations in some ways, but also are complicit in demarcating them. Such gendered discursive practices do not just negotiate political-economic contradictions however (Parennas 2001, 2005, 2008); they authorize the neoliberal capitalist economy (Gal 1994, Gal & Kligman 2000a; see also examples in Ong 1987, Mills 2003, Brennan 2004).