International Migration Policies And The Status Of Female Migrants

FROST (Copy 2): From the John Holmes Library Collection.

Gender and International Migration in Europe is a unique work which introduces a gender dimension into theories of contemporary migrations. As the European Union seeks to extend equal opportunities, increasingly restrictionist immigration policies and the persistence of racism, deny autonomy and choice to migrant women. This work demonstrates how processes of globalisation and change in state policies on employment and welfare have maintained a demand for diverse forms of gendered immigration. The authors examine state and European Union policies of immigration control, family reunion, refugees and the management of immigrant and ethnic minority communities. Most importantly this work considers the opportunities created for political activity by migrant women and the extent to which they are able to influence and participate in mainstream policy-making. This volume will be essential reading for anyone involved in or interested in modern European immigration policy.

Women and men migrate across international boundaries at roughly the same rate. Yet most scholarship assumes that international migration results primarily from the labor migration of male workers. When international female migration is acknowledged, the focus is almost exclusively on women in the low-wage labor sector of the global economy. Gender and Immigration challenges this outlook by examining the diverse and complex ways in which women in a variety of occupational and social categories experience international relocation. Written by experts and policymakers in the field, the timely essays collected here explore whether international migration provides women with opportunities for liberation from the subordinate gender roles of their countries of origin. Or, do migrant women face both traditional and new forms of subordination and discrimination in their host societies? Exploring the experiences of a broad range of women, from "unskilled" workers on the U.S.-Mexican border and Filipino mail-order brides to Indian-American motel owners, Asian businesswomen, and Russian immigrants to Israel, Gender and Immigration offers a much-needed corrective to the long-standing invisibility of women in international migration research.

The current share of women in the world's international migrant population is close to one half. Despite the great number of female migrants and their importance for the development agenda in countries of origin, there has until recently been a striking lack of gender analysis in the economic literature on international migration and development. This volume makes a valuable contribution in this context by providing eight new studies focusing on the nexus between gender, international migration, and economic development.

Eleonore Kofman and Parvati Raghuram argue for the benefits of social reproduction as a lens through which to understand gendered transformations in global migration. They highlight the range of sites, sectors, and skills in which migrants are employed and how migration is both a cause and an outcome of depletion in social reproduction.

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.

"Family-related migration is moving to the centre of political debates on migration, integration and multiculturalism in Europe. It is also more and more leading to lively academic interest in the family dimensions of international migration. At the same time, strands of research on family migrations and migrant families remain separate from--and sometimes ignorant of--each other. This volume seeks to bridge the disciplinary divides. Fifteen chapters come up with a number of common themes. Collectively, the authors address the need to better understand the diversity of family-related migration and its resulting family forms and practices, to question, if not counter, simplistic assumptions about migrant families in public discourses, to study family migration from a mix of disciplinary perspectives at various levels and via different methodological approaches and to acknowledge the state's role in shaping family-related migration, practices and lives"--Rear cover.