GENDER AND IMMIGRATION

Transcription

1 GENDER AND IMMIGRATION

2 This page intentionally left blank

3 Gender and Immigration Edited by Gregory A. Kelson and Debra L. DeLaet

4 Selection and editorial matter Gregory A. Kelson and Debra L. DeLaet 1999 Text Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources

5 To Lori Andrews, J.D. and Nanette Elster, J.D., M.P.H. for the support and encouragement they have given to me as a policymaker Gregory A. Kelson To my parents, Jack and Sandy DeLaet, for their constant support and encouragement Debra L. DeLaet

6 This page intentionally left blank

7 Contents List of Tables List of Contributors Preface ix x xiv 1 Introduction: The Invisibility of Women in Scholarship on International Migration 1 Debra L. DeLaet Part I The Economic Status of International Female Migrants 2 Seeds for Self-Sufficiency? Policy Contradictions at the US Mexico Border 21 Kathleen Staudt 3 Labor Migration and International Sexual Division of Labor: A Feminist Perspective 38 Shu-Ju Ada Cheng 4 Asian Women in Business in Australia 59 David Ip and Constance Lever-Tracy 5 Immigration Policy, Cultural Norms, and Gender Relations Among Indian-American Motel Owners 82 Nandini Narain Assar 6 Third World Immigrant Women in American Higher Education 103 Cecilia G. Manrique and Gabriel G. Manrique Part II The Social Status of International Female Migrants 7 Mail Order Brides: The Legal Framework and Possibilities for Change 127 Lisa Simons 8 Sri Lankan Tamil Immigrants in Toronto: Gender, Marriage Patterns, and Sexuality 144 Lynn Morrison, Sepali Guruge, and Kymberly A. Snarr 9 Gender Implications of Immigration: the Case of Russian-Speaking Women in Israel 163 Larissa I. Remennick vii

8 viii Contents 10 Social Services for Immigrant Women in European Nations; Including Lessons from the Council of Europe s Project on Human Dignity and Social Exclusion 186 Brigitte H. Bechtold and Ludmila Dziewigcka-Bokun 11 Conclusion: Policy Considerations for the Twenty-First Century 207 Gregory A. Kelson Index 216

9 List of Tables 4.1 Qualifications and English of employed men and women of Chinese and Indian ancestry in Brisbane and Sydney Labor force status of non-employee men and women in Brisbane and Sydney Independents as proportion of the labor force, Brisbane and Sydney Business involvement by married women, Brisbane and Sydney Immigrant experiences with discrimination Immigrant experiences with prejudice Effect of race on professional advancement Comparison of job opportunities in the USA and immigrant s country of origin Comparisons of resources in the USA and immigrant s country of origin Comparisons of opportunities in the USA and immigrant s country of origin Views of campus diversity by gender Changes in Europe s population (selected countries, 1995) Female and male non-nationals in the European Union 189 ix

10 List of Contributors Nandini Narain Assar is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She holds a BA with honors in Sociology from Miranda House College of Delhi University (India) and an MA in Sociology from the State University of New York, Binghamton. Her research interests include race and gender, immigration, political economy and women in development. She has also taught courses on gender relations and third world women and development. Brigitte H. Bechtold is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Women Studies Program at Central Michigan University. She holds an MA in Economics from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation was entitled French Macroeconomic Policies in the 1960s: An Econometric Evaluation. She is the author of seven books and numerous articles dealing with economics. Shu-Ju Ada Cheng is a Ph.D. student in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. She holds a BA in Spanish from Fu-jen University (Taiwan), and an MA in International Studies and a graduate certificate in Women s Studies from the University of Oregon. Her research interests includes women s movements around the world, western and third world feminism, development theory, gender and development, and human rights. Debra L. DeLaet is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Drake University. She received her Ph.D. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests are in the areas of international migration, human rights, and international law and organizations. She is currently revising her manuscript, U.S. Immigration Policy in an Age of Rights, and is completing research on the most recent amendments to US immigration policy. Ludmila Dziewie4cka-Bokun is Associate Professor in Politics of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Wroc)aw (Poland). She holds an MA with special Honours in Law and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wroc)aw. Her research is on modern social conflicts and on rebuilding the state society relationship in post-communist European countries. Sepali Guruge is an M.Sc. candidate in Nursing at the University of Toronto. Born in Sri Lanka, she was first educated there, and later in the x

11 List of Contributors xi Soviet Union, and in Canada. Her research interests include immigrants and refugees health issues and their access to health services. She currently works as a registered nurse at the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto. David Ip is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Queensland (Australia), and a Director of the Master s programme in Social Planning and Development. He was born in Hong Kong and educated there and in the United States. His main research areas are in the sociology of development, social planning, and social impact assessment. In recent years his research has concentrated on Australia s ethnic entrepreneurship and Asian immigrant communities as well as on the socio-economic development of China. He is co-author of Asian Impressions of Multicultural Australia and is also actively involved in consultancy work for the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau, now renamed AusAid. Gregory A. Kelson is the founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Women and Children s Policy, an international policymaking thinktank. He is the author of three law review articles and has lectured extensively on international women and children s human rights. His current work involves monitoring government compliance to the Beijing Platform for Action, the rights of children in adoption cases, reparations for Asian comfort women, and gender-based persecution and political asylum. Constance Lever-Tracy is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Flinders University of South Australia, Adelaide. She has lived, studied and worked in England, Israel, France, Africa and Australia, and has always been interested in the transnational networks that migrating people weave. Her initial work focused on the transnational culture created by militant industrial workers from around the world in Australia s factories. She has also studied the impact of returning immigrants in Malta. She is the coauthor (with Michael Quinlan) of A Divided Working Class: Ethnic Segmentation and Industrial Conflict in Australia. Cecilia G. Manrique is Professor of Political Science/Public Administration at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where she also serves on the faculty of the Women s Studies Department. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame with areas of specialization in comparative politics and international relations. She has done extensive work in integrating computer applications including the Internet in a variety of courses. She has published widely in this field and has published the second edition of The Houghton Mifflin Guide to the Internet for Political

12 xii List of Contributors Science. She and her husband, Gabriel, have undertaken research together on the subject of immigration and immigrant faculty in the US. Gabriel G. Manrique is Professor of Economics and chair of the Department of Economics and Finance at Winona State University, where he also serves on the faculty of interdisciplinary programs including the women s studies, international studies, and honors programs. He received his Ph.D. in Economics with a specialization in third world economic development and international economics from the University of Notre Dame. He has also served as a fellow at the Overseas Development Council and in the US Congress where he worked with the House Select Committee on Hunger. He is a native of the Philippines and his current research is on immigration and immigrant faculty in the US. Lynn Morrison is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. The focus of her dissertation is on sexual networking and the impact of HIV/AIDS in northern Thailand. Research on pediatric AIDS was also undertaken in Romania in Lynn has developed and implemented a peer education programme at Ryerson Polytechnic University, and also served as a committee member for From All Walks of Life, Toronto s walk for AIDS. Larissa I. Remennick is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Program in Medical Sociology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar- Ilan University, Israel. Born in Russia, she holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography of Health from the Institute of Sociology, USSR Academy of Sciences, Moscow. Her research interests include women s health, social demography of fertility and birth control, and the sociology of health, illness and health care. Larissa has conducted a number of studies on acculturation, gender and health issues among Russian immigrants in Israel. Lisa Simons is a Ph.D. student in international politics at the Graduate School of International Studies at Denver University. She holds a BA in political philosophy from Syracuse University and an M.Sc. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. She has taught classes in international relations, gender studies, political science, film studies, English composition and literature. Kymberly Anne Snarr is currently pursuing her Masters of Science at the University of Toronto in the Department of Anthropology. Her current areas of interest include: multiculturalism, empowerment, and women s issues and HIV/AIDS in immigrant populations and the Caribbean.

13 List of Contributors xiii Kathleen Staudt is Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas at El Paso. She holds an MA and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She wrote Free Trade? Informal Economies at the United States Mexico Border, has done consultation work for Partners for the Americas on Mexican family planners training at the US Mexico Border, and provided years of service for the Mexican Federation of Private Associations (FEMAP).

14 Preface This volume is an outgrowth of a panel on gender and international migration on which both of the editors participated during the 1996 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association in San Diego, California and a similar panel organized and chaired by Mr Kelson, with Dr DeLaet as the discussant. The primary objective of this edited volume is to apply a gender-sensitive lens to the study of international migration. In particular, the chapters in this volume explore the varied and complex ways in which women experience international migration. While the volume includes chapters on diverse groups of migrant women, several general questions frame this work. Does international migration provide women with an opportunity for liberating themselves from subordinate gender roles in their countries of origin, or are traditional gender roles perpetuated in the host societies? Do migrant women face new forms of subordination and discrimination in their host societies? To what extent is international migration driven by actors and institutions which exploit the social, economic, and political vulnerability of women across the globe? One of the unique contributions of this work is that it includes chapters on women in a variety of occupational categories. Previous studies of migrant women have focused almost exclusively on migrant women working in the unskilled sector of the global economy. To be sure, the volume includes several chapters which focus on the economic vulnerability of migrant women in low-wage occupations, including Kathleen Staudt s chapter on women who work in the informal economy along the US Mexico border and Shu-Ju Ada Cheng s chapter on domestic workers in East Asia. However, this volume complicates the ideological assumptions and theoretical implications of migration scholarship which only looks at these women. In an effort to provide a comprehensive overview of international female migration, this volume includes chapters on women in a variety of occupational categories. The chapter by Ip and Lever-Tracy looks at migrant women from Asia who work in business in Australia, and Nandini Assar s chapter explores the role of Indian women in familyowned hotel businesses in the US. Cecilia G. Manrique and Gabriel G. Manrique look at the case of Third World migrant women in higher education in the US. Moreover, this volume challenges the economically reductive approaches of earlier works by examining groups of migrant women who cannot rigidly be grouped into economic categories. Lisa Simons chapter on mail order brides and Larissa Remennick s chapter on xiv

15 Preface xv the experience of Jewish women from the former Soviet Union who have settled in Israel are illustrative of the social and political dimensions of female migration that are highlighted in this volume. Although women migrate across international boundaries at roughly the same rate as men, most international migration scholarship assumes that international migration results primarily from the labor migration of male workers. Thus, while mainstream perspectives acknowledge that women migrate, they tend to assume that women do not migrate autonomously but, rather, that they merely follow men as their dependents. As a result, scholars feel that in order to understand the underlying forces which drive international migration, it is most important to understand male migration. The few studies which have explored international female migration have focused almost exclusively on the migration of women to work in the low-wage labor sector of the global economy. This volume challenges the simplicity of both of these analyses. By exploring the status of migrant women in a variety of categories, several of the chapters in this volume address the question of the motivations which lead women to migrate and, in this way, highlight the reality that female migration is neither driven by exactly the same determinants as male migration nor merely an economic phenomenon. In this way, the chapters in this volume will provide a more thorough understanding of both the process of international migration and how it is experienced by women, and hopefully will enrich the work of migration scholars and policymakers alike.