Gender And Immigration

Gender roles, relations, and ideologies are major aspects of migration. This timely book argues that understanding gender relations is vital to a full and more nuanced explanation of both the causes and the consequences of migration, in the past and at present. Through an exploration of gendered labor markets, laws and policies, and the transnational model of migration, Caroline Brettell tackles a variety of issues such as how gender shapes the roles that men and women play in the construction of immigrant family and community life, debates concerning transnational motherhood, and how gender structures the immigrant experience for men and women more broadly. This book will appeal to students and scholars of immigration, race and ethnicity, and gender studies and offers a definitive guide to the key conceptual issues surrounding gender and migration.

The impact of gender on migration processes Considering the dynamic and reciprocal relationship between gender relations and migration, the contributions in this book approach migration dynamics from a gender-sensitive perspective. Bringing together insights from various fields of study, it is demonstrated how processes of social change occur differently in distinct life domains, over time, and across countries and/or regions, influencing the relationship between gender and migration. Detailed analysis by regions, countries, and types of migration reveals a strong variation regarding levels and features of female and male migration. This approach enables us to grasp the distinct ways in which gender roles, perceptions, and relations, each embedded in a particular cultural, geographical, and socioeconomic context, affect migration dynamics. Hence, this volume demonstrates that gender matters at each stage of the migration process. In its entirety, Gender and Migrationgives evidence of the unequivocal impact of gender and gendered structures, both at a micro and macro level, upon migrant’s lives and of migration on gender dynamics.

Bringing together diverse approaches and case studies of international health worker migration, Global Migration, Gender, and Health Professional Credentials critically reimagines how we conceptualize the transfer of value embodied in internationally educated health professionals (IEHPs). This volume provides key insights into the economistic and feminist concepts of global value transmission, the complexity of health worker migration, and the gendered and intersectional intricacies involved in the workplace integration of immigrant health care workers. The contributions to this edited collection uncover the multitude of actors who play a role in creating, transmitting, transforming, and utilizing the value embedded in international health migrants.

In 2006, the United Nations reported on the “feminization” of migration, noting that the number of female migrants had doubled over the last five decades. Likewise, global awareness of issues like human trafficking and the exploitation of immigrant domestic workers has increased attention to the gender makeup of migrants. But are women really more likely to migrate today than they were in earlier times? In Gender and International Migration, sociologist and demographer Katharine Donato and historian Donna Gabaccia evaluate the historical evidence to show that women have been a significant part of migration flows for centuries. The first scholarly analysis of gender and migration over the centuries, Gender and International Migration demonstrates that variation in the gender composition of migration reflect not only the movements of women relative to men, but larger shifts in immigration policies and gender relations in the changing global economy. While most research has focused on women migrants after 1960, Donato and Gabaccia begin their analysis with the fifteenth century, when European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade led to large-scale forced migration, including the transport of prisoners and indentured servants to the Americas and Australia from Africa and Europe. Contrary to the popular conception that most of these migrants were male, the authors show that a significant portion were women. The gender composition of migrants was driven by regional labor markets and local beliefs of the sending countries. For example, while coastal ports of western Africa traded mostly male slaves to Europeans, most slaves exiting east Africa for the Middle East were women due to this region’s demand for female reproductive labor. Donato and Gabaccia show how the changing immigration policies of receiving countries affect the gender composition of global migration. Nineteenth-century immigration restrictions based on race, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, limited male labor migration. But as these policies were replaced by regulated migration based on categories such as employment and marriage, the balance of men and women became more equal – both in large immigrant-receiving nations such as the United States, Canada, and Israel, and in nations with small immigrant populations such as South Africa, the Philippines, and Argentina. The gender composition of today’s migrants reflects a much stronger demand for female labor than in the past. The authors conclude that gender imbalance in migration is most likely to occur when coercive systems of labor recruitment exist, whether in the slave trade of the early modern era or in recent guest-worker programs. Using methods and insights from history, gender studies, demography, and other social sciences, Gender and International Migration shows that feminization is better characterized as a gradual and ongoing shift toward gender balance in migrant populations worldwide. This groundbreaking demographic and historical analysis provides an important foundation for future migration research.

This book is the product of a collaborative effort involving partners from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America who were funded by the International Development Research Centre Programme on Women and Migration (2006-2011). The International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam spearheaded a project intended to distill and refine the research findings, connecting them to broader literatures and interdisciplinary themes. The book examines commonalities and differences in the operation of various structures of power (gender, class, race/ethnicity, generation) and their interactions within the institutional domains of intra-national and especially inter-national migration that produce context-specific forms of social injustice. Additional contributions have been included so as to cover issues of legal liminality and how the social construction of not only femininity but also masculinity affects all migrants and all women. The resulting set of 19 detailed, interconnected case studies makes a valuable contribution to reorienting our perceptions and values in the discussions and decision-making concerning migration, and to raising awareness of key issues in migrants’ rights. All chapters were anonymously peer-reviewed. This book resulted from a series of projects funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.

Includes statistics.

"Edited by a leading pioneer of immigration studies, this volume offers some of the latest and most brilliant thinking about what migrant men and women bring to the United States, leave behind and create anew. This is a must read for those interested in immigration, gender, and the many meanings of life."—Arlie Russell Hochschild, co-editor with Barbara Ehrenreich of Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy "Moving between individual decisions and broad political and economic forces, and focusing on family and community in Mexico and the U.S., Hondagneu-Sotelo's pathbreaking book casts new light on the centrality of gender for patterns of migration. A superb intersection of ethnography, history and theory."—Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley "A path-breaking book combining the study of gender with immigration to show how Mexican women and men continually reinvent themselves and their family lives in the U.S. Gendered Transitions offers rich insights into the complexities of women's settlement experiences and marks a new era in immigration studies."—Maxine Baca Zinn, Michigan State University

Resurgent immigration is one of the most powerful forces disrupting and realigning everyday life in the United States and elsewhere, and gender is one of the fundamental social categories anchoring and shaping immigration patterns. Yet the intersection of gender and immigration has received little attention in contemporary social science literature and immigration research. This book brings together some of the best work in this area, including essays by pioneers who have logged nearly two decades in the field of gender and immigration, and new empirical work by both young scholars and well-established social scientists bringing their substantial talents to this topic for the first time.