Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction

E. Kofman, P. Raghuram

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230537088
• eBook ISBN: 9781137510143
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

1

Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction: An Introduction

1.1 Gender and global migrations

Feminist interventions into globalisation theory and policy have highlighted the ways in which global transformations are also gendered transformations. In particular, gender is an important factor influencing global migration today and this recognition has spurred a range of empirical studies, theorisations and policy measures.

The notion of global migration carries with it many things. Firstly, it signals the widespread spatial extent of migration, the fact that even if only a small proportion moves overall, migration still affects many people in a large number of places, leading Castles and Miller (1993) to call this ‘the age of migration’. Secondly, it signals the factors influencing migration – many of which are being reconfigured through processes of economic, political, social and cultural globalisation. The movement of capital, commodities, ideas and ways of living all contribute to and structure who moves. Thirdly, the global agenda of a range of organisations has also influenced migration so that analysing migration through the traditional binaries between sending and receiving countries is no longer adequate. Here global refers to new alliances and spatial formations that are reconstituting the imperatives that influence migration and the directions in which people move. The emergence of regional blocs and the significance of multilateral organisations in shaping migration (Guild and Mantu 2011; Sisson Runyan et al. 2013) also suggest that there are many players influencing the shape of migratory trends between and within an increasingly heterogeneous Global North and South (Bakewell 2009; IOM 2013; Kofman and Raghuram 2010). Fourthly, the increasing privileging of the skilled and exclusion of the less skilled are producing new forms of inequality and stratification that have implications beyond those of the nation-state and contribute to the transnationalisation of inequality (Weiss 2005). Immigration restrictions and the reduction in countries of net immigration are reinforcing an asymmetric globalisation (Czaika and de Hass 2014). Many of the vectors of differentiation – and the intersection between them – which are used to understand migration, such as class, race and nation, are being reconstituted transnationally and globally through migration (Anthias 2012; Bose 2012; Herrera 2013; Purkayastha 2012).

Gender is a significant aspect influencing these processes and the increasing number of women who move has attracted the attention of researchers and policy makers (Piper 2005). Although the proportion of women migrating has not hugely increased in the past half century from 1960 to 2010 (Donato et al. 2011; UNDESA 2013; Zlotnik 2003), it is the feminisation of labour migration¹ that initially altered the nature of many of the debates in migration research (Castles and Miller 1993). For instance, it has long been recognised that male migration impacts on women in a range of ways (Gulati 1993) but as the number of women who move for work increases, debates on women’s contribution to development and social reproduction in countries of origin are being rewritten. Social reproduction has been defined as ‘the array of activities and relationships in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally’ (Glenn 1992). These involve a range of activities such as the purchase of household goods, socialisation of children, provision of care and support for adults, and the maintenance of kin and community ties; they cover both nurturance and non-nurturant reproductive occupations and include in their ambit those who have direct contact with users as well as those who manage the providers of such nurturance (Duffy 2005). Feminist Marxist conceptions of reproduction go beyond this. For instance, Truong (1996: 32) identifies three interrelated meanings of reproduction which include: human biological reproduction; maintaining and sustaining human beings throughout their life cycle; and systemic reproduction which enables a given social system to be recreated and sustained.

The recent literature on the contributions of migrants to reproduction has been theorised through various lenses. Perhaps, the most powerful optic has been that of care chains. Migrant women may be seen as providers (albeit differentially) of several types of care: moral care, or the provision of discipline and socialisation; emotional care; and material care that ensures the provision of the physical needs of dependents (Parreñas 2001: 117). Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) emphasise the role of migrant women in the production of care in its material and emotional dimensions, enabling economic expansion in the First World to take place under neo-liberal conditions of welfare restrictions and flexible labour. Globalisation has led to the marketisation and the privatisation of various services, including care, which is now brought into global care chains (Yeates 2004). This international transfer of reproductive work, especially to Europe and North America, is one of the most influential theoretical lenses in the analysis of care (Hochschild 2000; Parreñas 2001; Widding Isaksen 2010).

Women’s gendered roles are seen to be significantly influenced by familial ideologies and centre around households. Here the dominant imperative is largely analysed through the lenses of stability and stasis, which are disrupted by migration and mobility.² Mobility, and hence the transgression of gendered norms of caring for one’s own family, is made necessary by the need for survival in the context of deepening global inequalities. This is one script around which female labour mobility is written.

However, in making the journey, female migrant workers often seem to be replicating this gendered labour in a range of reproductive sectors of the economy. While economic globalisation is primarily seen to be corporate globalisation, examining the role of female global migrants forces us to recognise the extent to which it is the restructuring of reproduction that is driving female migration, therefore validating reproduction as a key part of global economics and producing a countergeography (Sassen 2000). Feminist research in this field has highlighted that it is not only the circuits of production that are being globalised but that accompanying this is a new international division of reproductive labour which is offering many women opportunities for work and therefore to migrate (Truong 1996). Taking full account of the place of women in the new global political economy also requires us to take a long look at the sphere of reproduction, its relationship to production (Katz 2001; Mitchell et al. 2003) and the role of female migrants in these global processes. For instance, Truong (1996: 47) suggested that ‘[n]o production system operates without a reproduction system and it should not be surprising that the globalisation of production is accompanied by its intimate “Other” i.e. reproduction’. Reproduction involves, as we shall see, the global transfer of different kinds of reproductive labour from one class, ethnic group, nation or region to another.

In the mid-1990s, Truong was one of very few writers acknowledging the importance of the globalisation of reproduction; much of the analysis still centred on the globalisation of production. In the subsequent decade, the ‘potent spatiality’ accompanying the reorganisation of reproduction (Mitchell et al. 2003) caught the academic imagination, so that the analytical framework for understanding reproductive work has itself been globalised (Hochschild 2000; Mills 2003; Peterson 2003; Sassen 2000). Much of this attention has focused on migrants who enter the lesser skilled sectors of the labour market to perform various forms of reproductive labour: domestic and care work, and sex work (Agustin 2005; Anderson 2000; Lutz 2011; Parreñas 2001).

But wives who accompany male corporate migrants, and migrant women who work in state-provided reproductive sectors such as nursing (Kingma 2006; Yeates 2009), teaching and social work are also caught up in this redistribution of reproductive labour (Kofman and Raghuram 2005, 2006). Thus, taking account of female migration alters the frame of globalising processes, expands the notion of reproduction to include the multiple ways in which women form a cornerstone of state-provided services in welfare societies and forces us to recognise the intimate ways in which production and reproduction are interconnected.

These intersections become even clearer if we look at the experiences of family migrants. Marriage migrants contribute to biological and labour reproduction (Constable 2005; Toyota 2008; Williams 2010). Older family members also migrate to provide care (Escriva and Skinner 2006). Moreover, women who migrate as partners of work-permit holders are, in many countries, allowed to work in the formal sector, and this labour often goes uncounted. Women may also move as independent migrants, often as care-workers or sex-workers, and then change to a dependant status through marriage so that the relationship between the different forms of work they perform is connected and dynamic (Kofman 2012; Lan 2008). They may shift from providing paid sex to clients in source countries to providing the same service as wives after marriage and migration (Groes-Green 2014).

The multiple forms of globalisation also point to the multiple sites in which globalisation is played out and disrupts the spatial parameters that are frequently used to understand migration. Female migration offers a different set of issues in the governance of migration. For instance, the concern over separated families (Zentgraf and Chinchilla 2012), especially children left behind (Cortes 2008; Parreñas 2005; Toyota 2007), and the ensuing disruption of the family – a key element of the social fabric of society – raise particular questions for states where female emigration is significantly altering the demographics of society. The policing of female bodies by receiving states is also based upon the embodiment of migrants as women. Thus, the pregnancy checks that female domestic workers are required to undergo in Singapore (Huang and Yeoh 2003) and the targeting of language classes and integration measures for female migrants in a number of Western European countries (Kofman et al. 2013; Kortweg and Triadafilopoulos 2013) presuppose particular imaginations around what or who the female migrant is. Spatially and temporally specific notions of femininity therefore significantly influence how we view female migration.

As the number of female migrants increased and their forms of circulation became more distinctive compared to men, how we understand global migration and what we do about it also change. One analytical response to the new and varied forms of migration has been to recognise the ways in which migrants, particularly female migrants, move between – and invest politically, economically and emotionally in – the sending and receiving countries. The framework of ‘transnationalism’ offers us a way of understanding how the links between these two places are maintained and of emphasising the agency of migrants who maintain these relations across space (Erel and Lutz 2012; Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004; Pessar and Mahler 2003). It has spurred a whole host of research on transnational processes (migrations and circulations, practices, communications, remittances) that migrants engage in. The use of intermediate staging posts in the broader migration strategy also alters the spatial dynamics of migration. Thus, while Hong Kong may be the final destination for some female migrants, for others, it merely provides a space within which to accrue the forms of capital that are required to move to a more desirable destination, such as Canada (Liebelt 2008; McKay 2002).

The policy responses to migration have involved a range of sites, processes and institutions for governance of migration. In addition to state regulations, bilateral, multilateral and regional agreements, such as the EU and NAFTA, have reconfigured the remit and content of immigration regulations (Gabriel and Pellerin 2008; Guild and Mantu 2011; Sisson Runyan et al. 2013). This has resulted in migrants from different countries having stratified rights to entry, mobility, work and access to welfare (Kofman 2002; Morris 2002), creating new forms of stratification which demand novel conceptual lenses of analysis. At the same time the growth in the number of NGOs and the importance of civil activism in claiming rights for migrants have led to challenges and re-workings of these regulations (Basok and Piper 2013; Piper 2004). These processes are altering the nature of public space and of the political sphere. For instance, when a Filipina domestic worker living in Hong Kong stands for elections in her home country on a platform of migrant rights, we are forced to recognise that migration is a key political issue of the future, to interrogate the notion that residence is a criteria for electoral politics and thus to challenge the boundaries of the nation-state. On the other hand, the figure of the migrant is also increasingly being deployed in electoral politics in receiving countries often occupying the (embattled) ground for media attention, policy making and for a range of activists (Ogaya 2004).

While the above analysis has focused primarily on women, men are also involved in and implicated in gendered social reproduction. Overall, male migrants are far less involved in paid reproductive labour than women who dominate sectors such as domestic work, sex work and care work. However, there are variations to these patterns based both on countries of origin/destination and on the skills of workers. For instance, there is a range of tasks such as household maintenance, driving and gardening which are dominated by men but are often not included in domestic work and are a part of social reproduction (Kilkey et al. 2013; Ramirez and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2009). Moreover, in some countries such as Saudi Arabia the figure for male domestic workers is higher because of restrictions on female mobility. Moreover, even within each sector there are differences in how male and female migrants are incorporated into the labour market as we will go on to see (Chapter 5). Some male-dominated sectors of social reproduction provide greater opportunities for entrepreneurship and social mobility than female-dominated sectors (Ramirez and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2009). Finally, skills also influence the extent to which sectors are gender-segregated. Some sectors, such as nursing, are female dominated, but are increasingly employing male migrants, while men have always dominated other sectors such as medicine as in many countries there are more male doctors than female ones. Sectors such as sex work also involve both men and women (Mai 2011). Moreover, men are moving as partners of female lead migrants and are providing some of the social reproductive work that women have historically provided (Adhikari 2013). However, there is much less recognition of these forms of male-provided socially reproductive labour.

Men have dominated migration theories and agendas through their role in productive labour. Thus, both production and men are the implicit centre of much migration analysis. The focus on female migrants and on care in recent years has acted as a corrective to this. In fact, for Oso and Catarino (2013: 626) the ‘process of perpetual rediscovery regarding the presence of migrant women has added to the discourse surrounding the “feminisation of migration” and constitutes a situation of gendered asymmetry, as the object of study – migrant man – does not appear to require any form of legitimisation’. However, this focus on the productivity of men has also meant that they are analysed primarily as economic subjects; there is only a small (but growing) body of work on their social roles and on their masculinity (Batnitzky et al. 2008).

However, the presence of women and men in migration streams is always intimately related. Social reproduction involves both men and women as providers and recipients of this labour. Gender relations influence the nature of social reproduction, how it is divided and performed and who pays for it and where. These relations are contingent not only upon the social norms of sending and destination countries but also on the processes of transit and the immigration regulations that influence who is available to do what and the sectors of labour market demand. Moreover, these relations are dynamic and change not only individually but also in relation to each other. For instance, a growth in demand for certain kinds of male labour will also lead to a growth in female migration, where women are allowed to accompany men, albeit often after a time-lag. Thus, female reproductive migrant labour within the family accompanies male migrant productive labour and the reverse is also true. Increasingly, skilled female migrants such as nurses and doctors are accompanied by their spouses (Raghuram 2004a). Hence, comparisons between male and female migration also need to reflect on how these are deeply intertwined.

These articulations between genders, forms of labour and immigration regulations also intersect with other variables. The new imperatives driving global migrations are altering social hierarchies in complex ways. As a result, our analysis suggests that race and class differences as they intersect with gender require fresh thinking. For instance, since the late 1960s immigration policies in the major states of immigration have shifted from crude racialised policies, which excluded the vast majority of Third World migrants, to more selective incorporation of migrants, especially the skilled and educated. In European states, until the stoppage of mass labour migration in the mid-1970s, labour migrants were largely restricted to less-skilled employment with the exception of small numbers from former colonies (British, Dutch and French). In this case, the metropolis attracted tertiary students from the colonies where the educational system was modelled on that of the centre (Madge et al. 2009). Metropolitan and recognised colonial qualifications then allowed skilled colonials, both of metropolitan origin and racialised others, to work in the mother country (Raghuram 2009). Progressively by the 1990s, the dismantling of overtly racist policies, an emphasis on skilled and educated migrants, and geopolitical changes, for example in China and Hong Kong, led to a massive expansion in the number of migrants from Asia. In Australia, Canada and the USA, Asian migrants constitute the largest groups (Castles and Miller 2009) so that what it means to be a Chinese or Indian migrant in these countries is itself changing.

New migration regimes have enhanced the value of skills and education, with states drawing sharper distinctions between the skilled who are welcomed, at least temporarily, and the lesser skilled whose movement is often much more constrained (see Chapter 6). Economic recession has, in many countries, also reinforced this divide. Being skilled has opened up opportunities for mobility, so that mobility has come to increasingly signify the possession of certain social and cultural capital within the global economy. However, mobility, despite being coveted as a resource, does not in itself guarantee the valuation, recognition or transfer of cultural capital (Bourdieu 1997) and its legitimation as symbolic capital. For instance, the ‘protectionism’ of professional associations and state regulations, can play an important role in shaping labour force participation of migrants and their settlement experience. Thus, in Canada, for example, the migrant’s cultural capital, especially in its institutionalised or educational form, is devalued through the failure to translate foreign credentials and work experience, a barrier which benefits national labour by excluding migrants from the higher echelons of the labour force (Bauder 2003; Raghuram 2014).

The possibility of such transference is also influenced by gender. For instance, skilled migrant women are more likely to be employed in regulated professional occupations such as nursing, and are therefore more dependent on their educational qualifications and the transference of these credentials than male migrants who dominate newer and less-regulated occupations such as information technology and management. Some of this transference is influenced by new geopolitical alliances such as regional blocs (e.g. EU, NAFTA), but historical formations such as colonial alliances also significantly influence the ability to transfer capital (Raghuram 2009). Thus, the processes through which inclusion/exclusion are written are not racist in any simple way. Rather, the racism that marked the history of colonial and postcolonial mobility is being reformulated in these new landscapes of migration.

Class continues to be a key variable along which migration is being stratified, albeit in novel ways. Class has been claimed by some to be in retreat and displaced, partly eclipsed through the politics of identity on the o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• 1. Gendered Migrations and Global Social Reproduction: An Introduction
• 2. Gendered Migrations and Global Processes
• 3. Conceptualising Reproductive Labour Globally
• 4. Sites of Reproduction, Welfare Regimes and Migrants: Unpacking the Household
• 5. Skills and Social Reproductive Work
• 6. Immigration Regulations and Social Reproduction
• 7. Migration, Social Reproduction and Inequality
• 8. The Value of Social Reproduction
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index