Piscitelli - Brazilian Women As International Migrants

Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Gendered Migrations
A Silent but Mighty River: The Costs of Womens Economic Migration

Adele Jones
is occurring at a faster rate today than at any other point in history, and currently there are an estimated 175 million people living outside their country of birth, approximately 49 percent of whom are women (IOM 2005). Womens involvement across all forms of migration is growing, both in terms of the number of female migrants and in the role women play in utilizing migration strategies to improve the economic well-being of the family. For instance, the majority of persons trafcked are women, and women account for about 70 percent of the estimated 25 million persons internally displaced by conict (Alicea and Toro-Morn 2004; IOM 2005). Increasingly, women are also exercising career and economic choices that involve movement from rural to urban areas and also to other countries. Emergent labor shortages in richer countrieswhich are linked to improved options for women in those countries, with more women opting out of jobs with low status and undesirable hourshave resulted in the specic targeting of women workers from poorer countries. In some countries women make up the greatest percentage of migrant workers; for example, the majority of workers migrating from the Philippines to the Middle East are women (IOM 2005). Set against realignments in world politics, facilitated by globalization, and fueled by social and personal factors, the migration of women workers also reects new directions for womens agency. For example, as an increasing number of women take on the lead-migrant role
nterregional and international migration A silent but mighty river, a phrase inspired by the 2006 State of World Population Report (UNPF 2006), describes the global impact of a growing female migrant workforce, otherwise termed the feminization of migration.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2008, vol. 33, no. 4] 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2008/3304-0007$10.00
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within their families, they are reconguring gender relations and challenging the structures that have traditionally positioned them not as independent subjects in immigration proceedings but as legal appendages of husbands (Mohanty 1991).
The language of migration
Typologies of migrationeconomic, forced, displacement, exile, asylum, undocumented, and trafckinglike the phenomena they seek to describe, are subject to dominant political forces and hegemonic discourses. Although these typologies are generally presented as gender- or valueneutral terms about which there is universal understanding, categorizing the experiences and motives of migrants is contested territory. It is always necessary to examine whose interests such denitions serve and to understand that the conceptual landscape these terms construct is embedded within specic historical, political, and geographical terrains. Migration categories expedite policy formulation. However, they also have the effect of reducing complex phenomenathe hybrid identities and the multilayered transition and social transformation processes created by the movement of people across geographic, national, and cultural boundariesto an inert set of descriptors. Different patterns of migration produce different diasporic communities and give rise to different migrant identities. Rather than reecting situated subjectivities, migrant categories ascribe an externally dened meaning to these experiences, based on perspectives loaded with political intent. So, for example, the child born in the United Kingdom to a nurse who is a migrant worker from Guyana is likely to be delineated from other British children by the descriptor second-generation immigrant, a term that captures nothing of the childs subjective transitional experience yet forever xes the child in the position of outsider. That the ofcial language of migration is inextricably wedded to popular discourses that frame migrants in pathologizing ways is well documented. This, the parallel market in which the currency of migration terms circulates, reveals implicit racialized and gendered codes (and, increasingly, those based on religion) that serve to separate out a nations outsiders (Davies 1996; Jones 2001). This discursive construction of the alien other is a prevailing theme in migration. Avtar Brah (1996), writing from her perspective as an Indian woman migrant, describes the ways in which this other is also inferiorized. In developing this theme further, it must be understood, however, that inequality is itself unequal and, indeed, that inferiorization is not an essential characteristic of being
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an outsider but rather is inscribed by gender, class, ethnicity, race, and postcolonial positioning. For example, the British engineer working for a multinational oil company in Trinidad is a British expatriate and the French man in his Dominican tax haven a tax exile; these constructs signify outsider but not inferiorized other. However, the female factory worker from Aruba who migrates to Holland to work is constructed as other and is inferiorized.
Migration policy: Institutionalizing patriarchy
The coterminous discourses of nationalisms and migration that underpin migration policy are clearly not benign. They are rooted in patriarchal ideologies that are constituted or reconstituted depending on the historical, political, and social context (Charles and Hughes-Freeland 1996; Davies 1996; Alicea and Toro-Morn 2004). Hannah Arendts analysis of the origins of totalitarianism provides a convincing argument to show how ideologies of race, gender, and class have come to be institutionalized within the political and social structures of society (1968). Migration policy, as an organizational determinant of social and economic relations, is widely acknowledged as a key element of the structures Arendt refers to. It is perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that perspectives on migration, discursively congured in relation to patriarchal values, are translated into institutional practices that perpetuate gender inequality. In her analysis of British immigration law, Chandra Talpade Mohanty identies the ways in which women are dened only in relation to men and how immigration laws are used to sustain heteronormative patriarchal familial arrangements (1991). This is an example of what Dorothy Smith calls the operation of the relations between the discursive paradigm and discursive practice (1990, 177). No discussion of womens migration is complete without acknowledgment of women migrants struggles for rights recognition; however, this essay is concerned largely with structures of inequality within the sphere of migration, and the focus is thus primarily on the interconnection and institutionalization of these structures, or relations of ruling (Smith 1990). It is important, however, to point out that oppositional migration politics is a eld of dynamic and progressive social action about which feminist scholars have written extensively. I turn now to examining some of the ways in which methodologies for analyzing migration contribute to the minimization of womens experience and the roles that women play.
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Analyzing migration analysis: The case for a gendered approach
Macroeconomic analysis (a dominant approach in many studies of global labor migration) treats female migration simply as a by-product of the overall increase in service work as a share of the global market (Thomas, Hosein, and Yan 2005). Economists argue that worker mobility from poorer to richer countries maximizes the value of labor resources, thus promoting global production. Other studies have focused on the economic benets of migrant labor, not only for host countries but also for originating countries, especially in relation to remittances and the skills and investments of returnees (UNPF 2006). In many poor countries, not only do remittances outstrip international development funds, but they can also be more effective in reducing poverty because they directly target families, meet needs identied by the recipients themselves, and produce trickle-out benets to communities. Such is the persuasiveness of these arguments that managed migration strategies are increasingly centered on poverty reduction policy (although there is little evidence that migration reduces poverty overall; DFID 2007). What these studies have in common is that they represent a hegemonic stranglehold on methodologies that privilege economic factors over social and political ones. As economists act together with policy makers and international organizations, the dominance of these approaches is afrmed, and the experiences of female migrant workers are reduced to cost/benet analyses, with inadequate attention being paid to gender issues. This is despite the fact that, as Brah points out, the emergent new international division of labor depends quite crucially upon women workers (1996, 49). It must be pointed out, however, that some writers have addressed the gender dimensions of migrant labor. For example, Judith van Doorn points out that although women migrants generally earn less than men and are more likely to occupy lower paid jobs, women overall remit a greater proportion of their earnings. She also argues that as womens earnings are more likely to be spent on health care, daily living needs, and education, women make a greater contribution to development than men, who typically spend their money on consumer items and investments (van Doorn 2002). In foregrounding the role of women in development, van Doorn makes an important contribution to knowledge in this area; however, even this analysis is based on an economic model. The signicance of gender relations in the study of migrant labor, however, is not simply that women and men circulate differently in the global economy (Kofman et al. 2000), that more women have economic freedom, or that there are gender-specic economic outcomes, but that it is through the intersection of gender, poverty, and global capitalism that the feminization
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of migration is occurring. The need to focus on the role of gender is thus made more pressing not only because of the growing number of female migrant workers but also because their experience is likely to differ from that of men (Taran and Geronimi 2003). In light of the importance of gender to a complete understanding of the migrant experience, the nal section of this essay uses a gender-centered approach to explore some of these issues in relation to a specic group of migrant workers: Caribbean nurses.
Nurse migration: Some macrolevel and microlevel implications
Although there are some exceptions, economic migration generally benets receiving countries more than sending countries, since immigration policy is largely set up to facilitate the movement of educated and skilled persons. The migration of Caribbean nurses poses some specic challenges to the development of the region, since it constitutes not only a loss of social and professional contributions but also a loss of government investment in their education and training. In 2005 the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reported that nurse migration had led to losses in government investments in nurse education, estimated at between US$15 and $20 million per annum, and that health worker emigration was undermining the health care systems in the region (2005, 28). The Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) review also highlights concerns about the declining quality and reductions in health care services in the region and attributes this to a 35 percent nurse vacancy rate across the public sector as a direct consequence of migration. This review showed that the impact of this nurse vacancy is wide ranging, particularly since the provision of health care in the Caribbean is heavily dependent on nurses. In Guyana, for instance, a country with a high percentage of its population living in rural areas, most health care is provided by nurses (Anderson and Isaacs 2007, 394); however, the PAHO review concludes that across the region there are now insufcient nurses to deliver even essential health services. In addition, many hospitals have had to merge patient care units; there are increasing cancellations in elective surgery and a general decline in the availability of specialist services (PAHO 2001). The loss of specialist nurses creates particular problems, both because of the costs involved in lengthy specialist training and because any reduction of specialist nurses (e.g., intensive care nurses) can undermine a countrys health care provision, especially for very small countries. These losses are taking place within a context in which major demographic and epide-
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miological changes in the region call for increased, not reduced, health services. For example, there is a growing population of elderly people with chronic health care needs, and there are escalating health challenges related to HIV/AIDS as the Caribbean grapples with an advanced HIV epidemic that is second in prevalence only to that in sub-Saharan Africa (UNAIDS 2006). The current migration rate of health workers has set back health sector reform in many Caribbean countries, and thus questions must be raised about the ability of these countries to meet Millennium Development Goals (ECLAC 2003). While nurses who migrate to richer countries often receive additional professional training in the host country, and there are clearly potential benets for Caribbean countries when they return, it is also the case that fewer nurses return than migrate, and of those who do, very few return to work in the public health care system (Byron 1998). There are also implications for women themselves that need to be considered. Studies of the migration of nurses from the Caribbean tend to regard the subject as if it were a nongendered phenomenon even though, as in most parts of the world, nursing in the Caribbean is overwhelmingly a female-dominated profession. There is need, therefore, to examine the broader gender issues and the social costs of nurse migration for the nurses themselves. For many Caribbean nurses, migration is economically and socially benecial for them and their families. However, set against these benets are costs that are often concealed. In the Caribbean, women carry the major responsibility for family care, and it is estimated that 40 percent of households are headed by women (Barrow 1998, 76). In line with the ndings of a recent study of migrant nurses in the United Kingdom, Caribbean nurses who migrate are more likely to be older, married, and/ or heads of family households than, for instance, nurses from Australia and New Zealand, and they are also more likely to be the main breadwinners in their families (Buchan et al. 2005). Changes in immigration regulations in host countries and the short-term nature of contracts make family relocation very difcult, and migration thus often results in longterm family separation, with children and older dependent relatives remaining in the home country. In these situations, female responsibility for family life does not cease but rather is changed (Bach 2003). Yet little is known about the emotional and psychological effects on women who manage transnational families or the strategies used in sustaining longdistance parenting. The working environment in the host country may also contain hidden costs that can affect health and well-being, and Caribbean nurses who migrate to more economically advanced countries may nd themselves subject to a process of inferiorization. James Buchan and
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coworkers study of international nurses in the United Kingdom indicates that migrant nurses experienced discrimination within their work environment (2005, 16), and an article on institutional racism (Allan et al. 2004) suggests that nurses from overseas are made to feel different because of their color, culture, and language. This process of inferiorization is institutionalized through negative stereotyping and a career structure that disadvantages nurses not trained in the United Kingdom (Allan et al. 2004). Another area in which the gender implications of nurse migration are underacknowledged is in the surrogate care of children, elderly people, and the sick. When a nurse migrates and leaves her family behind, it is usually another woman (a female friend, a grandmother, or another female relative) who provides care for her family in her absence, and when Caribbean nurses are nursing sick people elsewhere, it is other women, by and large, who step in to meet needs neglected because of underresourced health care services. The link between women who migrate to work as caregivers and nurses and those who have increased caregiving responsibilities in the home country as a consequence has been conceptualized as a global care chain (Yeates 2004, 79). Highlighting this link is important because it increases the visibility and contribution of womens labor more widely and sheds some light on the pressures women face at both ends of the migration experience. These global familial networks, underscored by versions of patriarchy that are inscribed by Caribbean histories and cultures, create a pivotal point around which women negotiate and manage their changed responsibilities. It is around this pivotal point that the strain is being felt by many Caribbean women.
Conclusion
Gender matters. Gender matters in migration at the level of ideology, discourse, policy, and in the lived realities created by the migratory experience. How gender matters is different for men and for women; this essay has focused specically on how gender matters for women migrant workers. While it is important to uphold the right of women to travel and work freely across the world, and it is clear that migration can result in increased economic freedom for women, the failure to address gender inequality as a central issue in migration processes both reects and contributes to the marginalization of migrant womens voices, masks hidden social costs for women, and undermines the potential gains to be made. Centre for Applied Childhood Studies University of Hudderseld
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References
Alicea, Marixsa, and Maura I. Toro-Morn, eds. 2004. Migration and Immigration: A Global View. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Allan, Helen T., John A. Larsen, Karen Bryan, and Pam A. Smith. 2004. The Social Reproduction of Institutional Racism: Internationally Recruited Nurses Experiences of the British Health Services. Diversity in Health and Social Care 1(2):11726. Anderson, Barbara A., and Alexander A. Isaacs. 2007. Simply Not There: The Impact of International Migration of Nurses and MidwivesPerspectives from Guyana. Journal of Midwifery and Womens Health 52(4):39297. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Andre Deutsch. Bach, Stephen. 2003. International Migration of Health Workers: Labour and Social Issues. Working paper no. 209, International Labour Ofce, Geneva. Barrow, Christine. 1998. Family in the Caribbean: Themes and Perspectives. Kingston: Ian Randle. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. New York: Routledge. Buchan, James, Renu Jobanputra, Pippa Gough, and Ruth Hutt. 2005. Internationally Recruited Nurses in London: Prole and Implications for Policy. London: Kings Fund. Byron, Margaret. 1998. Migration, Work and Gender: The Case of Post-war Labour Migration from the Caribbean to Britain. In Caribbean Migration: Globalised Identities, ed. Mary Chamberlain, 21731. London: Routledge. Charles, Nickie, and Felicia Hughes-Freeland, eds. 1996. Practising Feminism: Identity, Difference, Power. London: Routledge. Davies, Charlotte Aull. 1996. Nationalism: Discourse and Practice. In Charles and Hughes-Freeland 1996, 15679. DFID (Department for International Development). 2007. Moving Out of PovertyMaking Migration Work Better for Poor People. Report, DFID, London. ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean). 2003. Emigration of Nurses from the Caribbean: Causes and Consequences for the Socio-economic Welfare of the Country; Trinidad and Tobagoa Case Study. ECLAC, Port of Spain. . 2005. Migration in the CaribbeanWhat Do We Know? An Overview of Data, Policies and Programmes at the International and Regional Levels to Address Critical Issues. Caribbean Expert Group Meeting on Human Rights and Development in the Caribbean, Port of Spain. http://www.eclac.cl/ publicaciones/xml/9/23209/L.54.pdf. IOM (International Organization for Migration). 2005. World Migration 2005: Costs and Benets of International Migration. Report, IOM, Geneva. http:// www.iom.int/jahia/Jahia/cache/offonce/pid/1674?entryIdp932. Jones, Adele. 2001. Child Asylum Seekers and Refugees: Rights and Responsibilities. Journal of Social Work 1(3):25371.
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Kofman, Eleonore, Annie Phizacklea, Parvati Raghuram, and Rosemary Sales. 2000. Gender and International Migration in Europe: Employment, Welfare, and Politics. New York: Routledge. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 1991. Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, 1 47. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. PAHO (Pan-American Health Organization). 2001. Report on Technical Meeting on Managed Migration of Skilled Nursing Personnel. PAHO Caribbean Ofce, Bridgetown. Smith, Dorothy E. 1990. Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge. Taran, Patrick A., and Eduardo Geronimi. 2003. Globalization, Labour, and Migration: Protection is Paramount. Report, Perspectives on Labour Migration 3E, International Labour Ofce, Geneva. http://www.eclac.org/celade/ noticias/paginas/2/11302/PTaran.pdf. Thomas, Clive, Roger Hosein, and Jean Yan. 2005. Assessing the Export of Nursing Services as a Diversication Option for CARICOM Economies. Report prepared for the Caribbean Commission on Health and Development, CARICOM and Pan-American Health Organization, Washington, DC. UNAIDS (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS). 2006. Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic 2006. United Nations, New York. http:// www.unaids.org/en/HIV_data/2006GlobalReport/default.asp. UNPF (United Nations Population Fund). 2006. A Passage to Hope: Women and International Migration. State of World Population Report, United Nations, New York. van Doorn, Judith. 2002. Migration, Remittances and Development. Labour Education 4(129):4853. http://www.ilo.org/public/english/dialogue/actrav/ publ/129/8.pdf. Yeates, Nicola. 2004. A Dialogue with Global Care Chain Analysis: Nurse Migration in the Irish Context. Feminist Review 77(1):7995.
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Beautiful Victims and Sacricing Heroines: Exploring the Role of Gender Knowledge in Migration Policies
Helen Schwenken
ecently several international agencies and commissions have met to discuss the role of migration and particularly to depict the nexus between migration and development. The UN High-Level Dialogue on Migration and Development was held in September 2006 in New York. In July 2007 a follow-up event, the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration and Development, took place in Brussels, and in autumn 2008 the process will be continued by a Global Forum in Manila. In these meetings and in their publications, international agencies and commissions emphasize the positive effects of remittances sent by migrants to their countries of origin in general and the increasing number of female migrants and their overall positive role in this process in particular (e.g., GCIM 2005; World Bank 2005; UNFPA 2006). In this moment of heightened attention to female migrants, a new topos has entered center stage: the sacricing heroine, who is characterized through her transmission of both monetary and social remittances. The recently mushrooming number of publications on the gender dimension of remittances all move in the same direction: authors argue that it is time to acknowledge female migrants as agents because, percentage wise, women send home more money from their salaries than men, they send it for a longer period of time, and they channel the money into longterm investments such as education and health care (not spending it for negatively connoted consumption and to raise their status, as men tend to do).1 Social remittances, which stand for immaterial transfers, such as changed attitudes and knowledge transfers, are signicant as well. Women return migrants, for example, are less likely to accept patriarchal gender orders and claim their own property and income (Dannecker 2005). This may trigger changes in gender relations and in intimate and family relationships, however, not welcomed by everybody in the societies of origin. Even though the effects may be contested locally and some sending countries still ban the out-migration of women (e.g., Bangladesh), the inter-
Compare UNFPA 2006, chap. 2; UN-INSTRAW 2006; Morrison, Schiff, and Sjo blom 2007. An often-quoted gure is that female migrants in the Middle East remit, on average, 72 percent of their earnings (UNFPA 2006, 29).
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national development communityamong them international organizations, donor agencies, and nongovernmental organizationsregard the temporary migration of women as economically benecial for the sending countries and as a factor contributing to the modernization of these societies. Parallel to this new topos, a rather old topos, that of the trafcked migrant woman, continues to remain important. This topos dates back to debates in the early twentieth century about white slavery (see Rupp 1997, 150ff.) and led to the rst antitrafcking (and at the same time antiprostitution) regulations in the United States, the White-Slave Trafc Act (also known as the Mann Act) in 1910. A considerable number of todays political measures targeting female migrants are specically aimed at ghting the trafcking of women. Even policy entrepreneurs such as the World Bank that deal mainly with economic issues are all of a sudden proposing antitrafcking measures in their gender-related policy recommendations (e.g., Bourguignon 2006, 12). The controversies revolving around (anti)trafcking policies have been discussed and written about extensively, particularly by feminists. Some voices have argued that there is a continuum, not a dichotomy, of voluntary and forced migrations and have criticized the role some womens advocacy organizations tookoften unintentionallyin buying into repressive immigration policies when combating trafcking. Despite more nuanced research that nds complex relations between the parties involved, namely, women in the countries of origin and the smuggling and trafcking industry, antitrafcking campaigns often build upon a simplistic dichotomoy of the innocent female victim and the male criminal (Andrijasevic 2007a).2 The antitrafcking campaigns work with visual techniques such as using the image of woman as human marionette or by displaying pictures in which the suffering of the women is aestheticized and eroticized. The campaigns imply that it is safest for women to stay home (Andrijasevic 2007a, 31). Yet, paradoxically, antitrafcking policies have the effect of actually pushing women into (other) dangerous ways of migrating. The images both of the beautiful victim, on one hand, and of the sacricing heroine, on the other, are powerful in dening current perceptions of female migrants. They reect and are linked to certain approaches in the governance of migration. Those who understand female migrants as victimsconsidered to be deprived of agencysupport ac-
2 Rutvica Andrijasevic (2007a), for example, analyzed the antitrafcking campaigns of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Middle and Eastern Europe. The IOM collaborates with local womens organizations and is a major donor in that eld.
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tions such as antitrafcking measures. For others, who imagine migrants as sacricing heroines, appropriate reforms include lowering how much it costs to transfer money back home, as the women are considered neoliberal entrepreneurs. Policy and media engagement with female migrants, therefore, currently move between two obsessions: articulating outrage about the plight of trafcked women and at the same time praising the unselshness of women sending home large amounts of their incomes earned overseas. At rst glance these images do not seem to be congruent. However, if we analyze the underlying gender knowledge in the constitution of public perception and policy processes, striking similarities between both images are revealed.
The concept of gender knowledge
The analytical tool to examine assumptions about gender in policies and organizational behavior is drawn from the German social scientists Irene Do lling and Su nne Andresen, who introduced the concept of gender knowledge (Geschlechter-Wissen; Andresen and Do lling 2005; Do lling 2005). Gender knowledge does not mean that someone knows about gender in a factual way. Knowledge here is not understood as being something objective. Rather, it refers to the social construction of meaning and to explicit and implicit negotiations about those meanings and about gender relations in society. Thus Do lling and Andresens concept of gender knowledge can be embedded in a broader poststructuralist perspective in which the generation of knowledge and the relations between knowledge, power, policies, and gender are central. A key assumption in the concept of gender knowledge is that every form of knowledge, be it academic knowledge or everyday knowledge about causal relations, is based upon a specic knowledge about gender (Do lling 2005, 50). Two dimensions of gender knowledge can be identied: First, at the macro level it refers to collective knowledge on the binarity of and difference between the two sexes, the reasoning about the self-evidence of those differences, and normative concepts about correct gender relations and natural divisions of labor between men and women (Andresen and Do lling 2005, 175). Second, at the level of the individual the term encompasses biographical forms of knowledge that are rooted in collective knowledge but have been appropriated individually and thus in different ways (175). Both of these dimensions can be found in three forms of knowledge: tacit and unreected everyday knowledge and knowledge of experience; knowledge and meanings generated by institutions such as religion, academia, or law; and popularized knowledge that is
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dispersed through media, guidebooks, and social movements, among other forces, and that often links everyday and expert knowledge (Do lling 2005, 5052). Approaching the oppositions in the portrayal of female migrants from the analytical perspective of gender knowledge allows rst an explanation of the background of such contradictions, which are often deeply rooted in hegemonic knowledge systems about gender and gender relations. Second, rethinking the modes of the production of gender knowledge is an important component of agency and is necessary for changing existing gender orders.
Gender knowledge: Beautiful victim and sacricing heroine
In both portrayals of female migrantsas a beautiful victim or sacricing heroineclear distinctions between the sexes are assumed even though the distinctions may be counterfactual. For instance, in representations of the beautiful victim, it is assumed that women are the ones being trafcked and men are the criminal trafckers. However, why is it that the forced labor of male migrants (in construction work or slaughterhouses) is not scandalous? Moreover, why is it that women working in the trafcking business are not examined? In the case of the sacricing heroine, it is assumed that women and men have different attitudes toward money. Womens remittance sending is represented as a natural extension of motherhood, while men invest in business or want to display their social status. Yet, attention to individuals particular backgrounds would be more telling in explaining motivations for remittance sending. Interestingly, no relation is made between the two images, even though the line between trafcked and not trafcked but just-the-regular-kindof-exploitation (Anderson 2007) is thin. Both types of migration are part of the same capitalist logic: expropriation of labor. Also, the normative knowledge about correct gender relations that underlies both representations reveals a similar traditional image: staying home is safe (what about domestic violence?), and if a woman migrates, she is still the pennypinching housewife, not enjoying her life. Nevertheless, besides the partial closeness of both images, there is a tension between these images and womens changing roles and aspirations about staying or leaving. Even if the experiential knowledge of the trafcked women is included in discourses around womens migration, it is only in very specic ways. Their stories are transformed into standardized narratives. Unclear stories may be either not used (they dont work on a poster) or streamlined. Meanwhile, the experiences of labor migrants are less frequently cited in
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studies about remittances, which tend to analyze quantitative data on nancial ows and thereby to disembody migrants. Beyond international agencies and commissions, institutions also contribute to the production of gender knowledge. In the eld of trafcking, law and research have been inuential. The estimation that 120,000 women from Eastern Europe have been trafcked annually to Western Europe and between 2 and 4 million worldwide is highly questionable (cf. European Commission 2000; GAO 2006), but it became truth through constant repetition from ostensibly authoritative sources.3 On the nature of gures, UNESCO Bangkok states: When it comes to statistics, trafcking of girls and women is one of several highly emotive issues which seem to overwhelm critical faculties. Numbers take on a life of their own, gaining acceptance through repetition, often with little inquiry into their derivations. Journalists, bowing to the pressures of editors, demand numbers, any number. Organizations feel compelled to supply them, lending false precisions and spurious authority to many reports (UNESCO Bangkok n.d.). Also, the third form of gender knowledge in Do llings and Andresens concept, popularized knowledge, is in the trafcking discourse very inuential and produced via documentaries, campaign posters, and so on. A visible expression in Europe is the widespread Natasha-discourse, labeling female migrants from the former Soviet Union as (trafcked) sex workers (Andrijasevic 2007b, 838). The domination of the antitrafcking approach in policies and in the public is thus stabilized through institutions and popularized knowledges, subsuming all kinds of migrations under trafcking and referring to problematic statistics. In the case of the remitting wife and mother the discursive effects are less clear because it is a more recently popularized image. The independent female labor migrant was, until recently, an alternative representation of womens migration that tied womens migration to mens. Many women migrants organizations, especially those run by Filipinas, used it in order to build up a different image of female migrants. It will be interesting to observe if and how far the female migrant becomes a neoliberal subject, a tendency very well described in the studies of governmentality (e.g., Dean 1995). An analysis of gender knowledge indicates that present-day images of female migrants are rooted in similar but also partly contested narratives of gender difference and normative gender relations. Gender relations are embedded in struggles about voice, modernization, retraditionalization,
3 The UNESCO Trafcking Project collected and compared the trafcking estimates of different international organizations (UNESCO Bangkok 2003).
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and neoliberal concepts of the self. From a feminist perspective it would be too optimistic to equate the interest in female migrants with a step toward the realization of the agendas of feminists and migrant advocates in the international eld, not to speak of the interests of local and transnational immigrant womens communities. As gender knowledge in its traditional forms is quite persistent, it is important to trace its history and its present-day incarnations in order to create spaces to change it. Department of Social Sciences University of Kassel
References
Anderson, Bridget. 2007. Motherhood, Apple Pie and Slavery: Reections on Trafcking Debates. Working Paper 48, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford. http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/publications/ Working%20papers/Bridget%20Anderson%20WP0748.pdf. Andresen, Su nne, and Irene Do lling. 2005. Umbau des Geschlechter-Wissens von ReformakteurInnen durch Gender Mainstreaming? [Is gender mainstreaming reconguring the gender knowledge of reform actors?]. In Was bewirkt Gender Mainstreaming? Ansa tze der Evaluierung durch Policy-Analysen [What impact does gender mainstreaming have? Approaches for the evaluation through policy analysis], ed. Ute Behning and Birgit Sauer, 17187. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Andrijasevic, Rutvica. 2007a. Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration and Representation in Anti-trafcking Campaigns. Feminist Review 86:2444. . 2007b. Ost-, ostmittel- und su dosteuropa ische Prostituierte in West-, Mittel-, Nord- und Su deuropa seit den 1980er Jahren [East-, east central- and southeast-European sex workers in Western, Central, Northern and Southern Europe since the 1980s]. In Enzyklopa die Migration in Europa vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart [Encylopedia of migration in Europe from the seventeenth century to today], ed. Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen, and Jochen Oltmer, 83538. Paderborn and Munich: Ferdinand-Scho ninghVerlag/Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Bourguignon, Francois J. 2006. Women on the Move: Magnitudes, Trends and Impacts of the International Migration of Women. Paper presented at the United Nations High-Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, New York, September 1415. Dannecker, Petra. 2005. Transnational Migration and the Transformation of Gender Relations: The Case of Bangladeshi Labour Migrants. Current Sociology 53(4):65574. Dean, Mitchell. 1995. Governing the Unemployed Self in an Active Society. Economy and Society 24(4):55983.
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Do lling, Irene. 2005. Geschlechter-Wissenein nu tzlicher Begriff fu r die verstehende Analyse von Vergeschlechtlichungsprozessen? [Gender knowledgea useful concept for the interpretative analysis of engendering processes?]. Zeitschrift fu r Frauenforschung und Geschlechterstudien [Journal of women and gender studies] 23(1+2):4462. European Commission. 2000. Trafcking in Women: The Misery behind the Fantasy; From Poverty to Sex Slavery: A Comprehensive European Strategy. Brussels: European Commission. http://ec.europa.eu/justice_home/news/ 8mars_en.htm. GAO (United States Government Accountability Ofce). 2006. Human Trafcking: Better Data, Strategy, and Reporting Needed to Enhance U.S. Antitrafcking Efforts Abroad. Report. Washington, DC: GAO. http://www.gao .gov/new.items/d06825.pdf. GCIM (Global Commission on International Migration). 2005. Migration in an Interconnected World: New Directions for Action. Geneva: GCIM. http:// www.gcim.org/attachements/gcim-complete-report-2005.pdf. Morrison, Andrew R., Maurice Schiff, and Mirja Sjo blom, eds. 2007. The International Migration of Women. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Rupp, Leila J. 1997. Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Womens Movement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. UNESCO Bangkok. 2003. Data Comparison Sheet #1: Worldwide Trafcking Estimates by Organizations. UNESCO Bangkok. http://www.unescobkk.org/ leadmin/user_upload/culture/Trafcking/project/Graph_Worldwide_Sept_ 2004.pdf. . n.d. Trafcking Statistics Project. UNESCO Bangkok. http:// www.unescobkk.org/index.php?idp1022. UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund). 2006. State of World Population 2006: A Passage to Hope; Women and International Migration. Report. New York: UNFPA. http://www.unfpa.org/swp/2006/pdf/en_sowp06.pdf. UN-INSTRAW (United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women). 2006. Gender, Migration, Remittances and Development. Paper presented at the Fifth Coordination Meeting on International Migration, New York, November 2021. http://www.un.org/esa/ population/meetings/fthcoord2006/P02_INSTRAW.pdf. World Bank. 2005. Global Economic Prospects 2006: Economic Implications of Remittances and Migration. Report. Washington, DC: World Bank. http://econ .worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/EXTDEC/EXTDECPROSPECTS/ GEPEXT/EXTGEP2006/0,,contentMDK:20709766menuPK:1026823page PK:64167689piPK:64167673theSitePK:1026804,00.html.
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Diversifying Feminism: Migrant Womens Activism in Australia

Christina Ho
of receiving new arrivals, from the eighteenth-century British colonization of the country to the more recent postwar mass migration from Europe and, currently, an extremely diverse migration program that processes people from all regions of the world. Migrant women have made enormous contributions to modern Australia, particularly through their active involvement in employment and in sustaining their families and local communities. However, they have traditionally been viewed as a disadvantaged group in Australian society, confronting racism, sexism, and poverty. The challenges they have faced in their daily lives have underpinned their political organizing, although this activism has not always been recognized by the mainstream Australian womens movement. This article documents the rise of migrant womens activism since the 1970s and examines why there has been a decline in political activity in the last two decades.
ustralia has a long history
Beginnings: Migrant womens activism in the 1970s and 1980s
While migrant women have been involved in political activity since the early postwar period, including within unions and ethnic community organizations, it was in the 1970s that they began to make their voices more independent, with activism focusing on racism, employment, community child care and support, and related issues. Although migrant women in the postwar period were often stereotyped as homebound and under patriarchal control, many were economically active and had higher rates of employment than Australian-born women. For example, in 1973, 48 percent of married women from non-English-speaking backgrounds were in the workforce, compared to 36 percent for Australian-born married women. For some migrant groups, including Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Yugoslav women, the gure was more than 60 percent (Alcorso 1993, 49). Migrant women during this period, being from primarily working-class backgrounds, were concentrated in low-paid, low-skilled work, particularly in manufacturing (Storer 1982; Collins 1991). Working conditions, pay,
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and equity issues therefore featured highly in their political activism. One example was the Migrant Women Workers Project (197475), which was, arguably, the rst occasion when feminist concerns combined with ethnic rights multiculturalism to highlight the precarious position of migrant women in the workforce (NFAW 2007). The project produced signicant reports such as the 1976 But I wouldnt want my wife to work here report (Storer 1976) documenting the appalling pay and working conditions of migrant women in Melbourne factories. At the same time, the newly established Working Womens Centre in Melbourne also provided support for migrant women on employment issues (Kaplan 1996, 124). These efforts were largely separate from the activities of the trade union movement. Despite the substantial presence of migrant workers in highly unionized industries, the Australian union movement was generally not very receptive to the issues confronting migrants, particularly those confronting women. This was not for lack of involvement on the part of migrants themselves, who historically had high levels of union membership (Alcorso 1993, 55); some groups, including women from the Indian subcontinent, South America, Italy, the Philippines, and Hong Kong, were relatively vocal in unions and other political organizations (Ganguly 1995, 42; Kaplan 1996, 132; Bulbeck 1998, 194). Nor were migrant womens issues well recognized by the Anglo-dominated, largely middle-class Australian feminist movement. In her history of the womens movement in Australia, Gisela Kaplan notes that migrant women of different linguistic backgrounds were by and large not welcomed in the womens movement (1996, 127; see also Kalantzis 1990; Martin 1991). Even when Australian feminists began to address issues of difference in the 1980s, critics like Ien Ang argue that nonwhite women were recognized only to a certain extent: feminism functioned as a nation, she argues, one that invited other women to join as long as they did not disrupt the ultimate integrity of that nation (1995, 72). It is not surprising then that in the 1980s, migrant women began to organize their own independent associations, breaking away from both the womens movement and male-dominated ethnic associations. Two of these organizations were the New South Wales Immigrant Womens Speakout Association, established in 1986, and the Association of NonEnglish Speaking Background Women of Australia (ANESBWA) in 1987. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s both were active in putting migrant womens issues on the national political agenda, particularly those relating to employment, health, domestic violence, and community services. The 1980s marked the high point of migrant womens activism in
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Australia, during which time they were most successful in sustaining strong and independent organizations and in gaining governmental and public recognition of the challenges migrant women faced in Australian society. In part, this reected a national political culture under a federal Labor government that was particularly receptive to womens issues, as evidenced in the rise of the femocrats, feminist bureaucrats who had secured considerable inuence in federal and state government departments (see Eisenstein 1996). Nevertheless, Kaplan argues that, overall, change for migrant women and their descendants lagged about fteen years behind that for women in general (1996, 125).
Issues for migrant women today: Work, family, and gender identity
Compared to their counterparts in the early postwar period, todays migrant women are more likely to be educated and middle class, reecting the shift in Australias migration policies in the 1980s toward skill-based admissions. Issues of employment and domestic support are still paramount for the current cohort of migrant women; however, they are more commonly concerned with the downward mobility often experienced by professional women. As many researchers have documented, problems with the recognition of overseas qualications, language barriers, and discrimination often result in highly skilled migrants working in lower-status jobs or withdrawing from the workforce altogether.1 There is much evidence that migrant women face particular difculties transferring their skills across borders. Even among recent, highly skilled migrants, womens employment rates fall dramatically after migration to Australia and are signicantly lower than those of their male counterparts. For example, among primary applicant migrants arriving in Australia in the early 1990s, womens employment rates fell from 63 percent prior to migration to just 39 percent after three and a half years in the country.2 In terms of occupational attainment, women are less likely to be in professional jobs after migration, and, moreover, the gender gap between men and womens occupations appears to widen after migration (Ho and Alcorso 2004).
1 Evans and Kelley 1986; Chapman and Iredale 1993; Hawthorne 1994; Iredale 1997; Friedberg 2000. 2 A primary applicant migrant is the person in whose name an application for migration is based and who is often the head of a household. The data about womens employment rates come from the rst Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia, a governmentcommissioned study of more than ve thousand migrants arriving between 1993 and 1995 (DIAC 2006).
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It is no surprise that issues around access to work remain signicant for migrant women. Historically, as mentioned earlier, womens labor force participation has been lower in Australia than in many of the countries from which migrants have come. A continuing theme in research on migrant women is their surprise at the more traditional female roles undertaken by Australian-born women. Contrary to their expectations of an advanced Western country, migrant women have found that the predominance of the nuclear family model and traditional breadwinner-housewife arrangements in Australia restrict womens opportunities for employment because of, for example, the lack of child care facilities (Alcorso 1993, 50; Bulbeck 1998, 194). As one migrant woman expressed it, Australian girls work only till they are about 25, then they get married, have babies, stop working, get fat, and watch TV all day. . . . Theres no child care facilities because theres no need for them: women dont want to work (quoted in Ganguly 1995, 40). As a result of downward occupational mobility and reduced domestic support, many migrant women experience a feminization in identity, reorienting them away from the world of work and careers and toward the family sphere (Ho 2006). While a newfound domestic orientation can bring many rewards, it also reects life choices that are based on limited opportunities and is an ironic outcome of a migration policy that aims to maximize all migrants contributions to the national workforce.
Where is migrant womens activism today?
While these experiences point to an urgent need to improve migrant womens access to employment, particularly at the level of the professions, as well as to the need to increase the availability of child care and other family-friendly work arrangements, there is comparatively little activism or advocacy on the part of migrant women in Australia today. There have been no signicant new initiatives such as those documented above, and migrant womens issues rarely feature in media or scholarly debates.3 Partly, this is a result of the changing demographics of migrants to Australia. Not surprisingly, middle-class migrants have had less of a history of organizing around employment issues and may feel even more distant from trade unions than earlier migrants (there are some important exA notable exception is the moral panic around so-called oppressed Muslim women, with regular debates concerning the relative merits of the headscarf and other facets of Muslim womens lives. An extended discussion is beyond the scope of this article, but see Christina Ho (2007) for more details.
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ceptions, e.g., among migrant nurses). Middle-class women are also in a position to negotiate more individualized solutions to problems, which can function as an alternative to collective action. For example, carving out a new and rewarding life as a full-time mother is possible for those whose partners are able to nancially support the household through their sole income. More signicantly, the decline in migrant womens activism reects the decline of the womens movement more generally in Australia. As many feminist scholars have noted, Australia, like many Western nations, is currently in the grip of a ercely conservative political culture, one that is challenging many of the victories of the feminist and other progressive movements. The prime minister, John Howard, stated in 2002 that Australia was in the post-feminist stage of the debate because for young women, the battle has been won (quoted in Hewett 2002, 45). Thus, feminist commentator Anne Summers (2003) wonders whether we are seeing the end of equality, arguing that the goal of gender equality has been pushed off the list of public priorities for improving Australian society. In practical terms, nongovernment organizations are confronting a political onslaught from a government intent on silencing dissent (Hamilton and Maddison 2007), whether through actual or threatened withdrawal of public funds or by funding only direct service delivery, at the expense of projects involving political advocacy or lobbying. The Immigrant Womens Speakout Association is one example of an organization that has been largely reduced to providing services to migrant women, for example, those facing domestic violence. Although these services are obviously vital, what has been lost is the lobbying and political organizing capacity that characterized the associations earlier years. Meanwhile, outspoken organizations such as the Womens Electoral Lobby and ANESBWA have lost their government funding altogether, and groups that do receive public funds do so on the condition that they will not issue press releases without rst notifying the government (Summers 2005). In this climate, migrant womens voices are rarely heard in political debates, even when issues of multiculturalism and cultural diversity are so consistently in the national spotlight. The collapse of this political organizing arguably reects Australian womens organizations traditional overdependence on the state. Under the two Labor governments of the 1970s and 1980s90s, womens organizations, like many community associations, were often beneciaries of relatively generous state funding and to some extent were incorporated into the mechanisms of policy making. With so much effort directed at maintaining relationships with government bureaucracies, womens organizations were not well equipped to deal with the shift, in the mid-
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1990s, to a conservative government profoundly suspicious of progressive movements, whether in the form of the womens movement, trade unionism, civil liberties groups, or others.
Conclusion
Although this is a relatively bleak portrait of the current state of affairs among migrant womens organizations, there is emerging evidence that although womens organizing activity has fragmented, the locus of much activity may have shifted toward other spheres. In particular, as mentioned above, Arab and Muslim women are under unprecedented scrutiny in national debates and policy making, and this has generated an upsurge in womens organizing to address racism and Islamophobia. The Sydneybased United Muslim Women Association is one example of a group that, despite having suffered substantial funding cutbacks, has largely replaced publicly funded service delivery programs with volunteer-driven advocacy and public education campaigns around issues such as the headscarf and the role of women in Islam. Such efforts are testimony to the continued resilience of migrant women in Australia and to their active contribution to a society that continues to display an uneasy relationship with cultural diversity. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences University of Technology, Sydney
References
Alcorso, Caroline. 1993. Economic Stocktake: Trends and Issues for NonEnglish Speaking Background Women since 1982. Australian Feminist Studies 18 (Summer): 4966. Ang, Ien. 1995. Im a Feminist but . . . : Other Women and Postnational Feminism. In Transitions: New Australian Feminisms, ed. Barbara Caine and Rosemary Pringle, 5773. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Bulbeck, Chilla. 1998. Re-orienting Western Feminisms: Womens Diversity in a Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, Bruce, and Robyn R. Iredale. 1993. Immigrant Qualications: Recognition and Relative Wage Outcomes. International Migration Review 27(2): 35987. Collins, Jock. 1991. Migrant Hands in a Distant Land: Australias Post-war Immigration. Sydney: Pluto. DIAC (Department of Immigration and Citizenship). 2006. The Longitudinal
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Survey of Immigrants to Australia. http://www.immi.gov.au/media/research/ lsia/index.htm. Eisenstein, Hester. 1996. Inside Agitators: Australian Femocrats and the State. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Evans, Mariah D. R., and Jonathan Kelley. 1986. Immigrants Work: Equality and Discrimination in the Australian Labour Market. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 22(2):187207. Friedberg, Rachel M. 2000. You Cant Take It with You? Immigrant Assimilation and the Portability of Human Capital. Journal of Labor Economics 18(2):22151. Ganguly, Indrani. 1995. Exploring the Differences: Feminist Theory in a Multicultural Society. Hecate 21(1):3752. Hamilton, Clive, and Sarah Maddison, eds. 2007. Silencing Dissent: How the Australian Government Is Controlling Public Opinion and Stiing Debate. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hawthorne, Lesleyanne. 1994. Labour Market Barriers for Immigrant Engineers in Australia. Canberra: Australian Government Publication Service. Hewett, Jennifer. 2002. The Mothers Club. Sydney Morning Herald, September 7. Ho, Christina. 2006. Migration as Feminisation? Chinese Womens Experiences of Work and Family in Australia. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32(3):497514. . 2007. Muslim Womens New Defenders: Womens Rights, Nationalism, and Islamophobia in Contemporary Australia. Womens Studies International Forum 30(4):29098. Ho, Christina, and Caroline Alcorso. 2004. Migrants and Employment: Challenging the Success Story. Journal of Sociology 40(3):23759. Iredale, Robyn R. 1997. Skills Transfer: International Migration and Accreditation Issues; A Comparative Study of Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. Wollongong: University of Wollongong Press. Kalantzis, Mary. 1990. Ethnicity Meets Class Meets Gender in Australia. In Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions, ed. Sophie Watson, 3960. London: Verso. Kaplan, Gisela. 1996. The Meagre Harvest: The Australian Womens Movement, 1950s1990s. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Martin, Jeannie. 1991. Multiculturalism and Feminism. In Intersexions: Gender/ Class/Culture/Ethnicity, ed. Gill Bottomley, Marie de Lepervanche, and Jeannie Martin, 11031. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. NFAW (National Foundation for Australian Women). 2007. Migrant Women Workers Project, 19741975. Australian Womens Archives Project, Melbourne. http://www.womenaustralia.info/biogs/AWE2125b.htm. Storer, Des, ed. 1976. But I wouldnt want my wife to work here: A Study of Migrant Women in Melbourne Industry. Research report for International Womens Year, Centre for Urban Research and Action, Melbourne.
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. 1982. Migrant Workers and Structural Change. Migration Action 6(2): 2025. Summers, Anne. 2003. The End of Equality: Work, Babies, and Womens Choices in 21st Century Australia. Sydney: Random House. . 2005. Where Have All the Women Gone? The End of Equality. Sydney: Evatt Foundation. http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/118.html.
Looking for New Worlds: Brazilian Women as International Migrants

Adriana Piscitelli
he connection between transnational notions of Brazilianness and womens migratory experiences rst caught my attention at the beginning of 2000, when I was doing eldwork in Fortaleza, in the northeast of Brazil. This sunny city, recently integrated into international tourism circuits, is well known for its beautiful beaches and is considered one of Brazils so-called sex tourism destinations. Trying to understand the impact of tourism on the local populations sexual and affective choices, I observed that middle- and lower-middle-class local women frequently traveled abroad accompanying or invited by foreign tourists. Some women left the city in order to work in the sex industry in Europe. A number of women spent brief periods of time in another country, living as spouses with men they met in Fortaleza, returning disappointed with their experiences. Many others, however, remained overseas, frequently marrying foreigners they met in Brazil (Piscitelli 2004, 2007c). In recalling these perceptions I do not intend to suggest that Brazilian womens international migration is mainly associated with the sex industry or with the blurred space in which sex and marriage markets are superposed. However, the racialized and sexualized notions about Brazilian styles of femininity that attract sex tourists to the country also mark female international migrants. The vast majority of these out-migrants do not participate in the sex industry. Nonetheless, the idea that they are bearers I would like to thank Albertina de Oliveira Costa, Mariza Corre a, and Roseli Golfetti for their comments and support.
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of an intense natural disposition for sex and a propensity to prostitution, combined with ambiguous notions of Brazilian women as feminine, submissive, and joyfully committed to domesticity and maternity, affects them all (Pontes 2004; Padilla 2006; Piscitelli 2007c). These conceptualizations vary in migratory contexts that have different historical relationships with Brazil and also according to the womens social class and color. With the ux of Brazilian women toward rich countries in North America and Europe, the cultural translation of the subaltern place that Brazil occupies in transnational relationships has a major effect on Brazilian womens gendered experiences.
Brazilian women on the move
Like other countries marked by acute regional inequalities, Brazil has witnessed an enormous internal migration from the poorest to the richest states and from rural areas into cities. This process has changed to a certain degree in recent times, when part of this migration has been redirected abroad (Azevedo 2004; Rios-Neto 2005; Costa, forthcoming). In terms of international migration, Brazil was considered a major receiving country in the very recent past.1 In the 1980s, in the context of a serious economic crisis, for the rst time the country showed a large emigration. Since then, reduced labor opportunities and prospects for social mobility, particularly for sectors of the middle class, have fed the emigration ux. Governmental reports estimate that around 3 million Brazilians (1.7 percent of the total population) were living outside the country in 2006 (Magno 2006).2 A large number live as irregulars (i.e., undocumented
1 According to migration studies, between the 1890s and World War I Brazil was third among receiving countries in the Americas, following the United States and Argentina, sheltering immigrants mostly from Italy, Portugal, and Spain (Menezes 2001, 126). Between 1908 and 1940 they were joined by Japanese immigrants and by citizens of other European countries (Seyferth 20002001). At the present time, Brazil receives mostly immigrants from other Latin American countries. 2 According to Joa o Magnos 2006 report, the major receiving countries were the United States (1,800,000), Paraguay (450,000), Japan (250,000), Portugal (100,000), and the United Kingdom (100,000). In the past four years, Brazilian migration has signicantly expanded in certain parts of the world, particularly in Southern Europe. Since 2005 Mexico has required a visa from Brazilian citizens, making it harder to arrive at the U.S. border. The effects of this shift include an increase in transnational links among smugglers and an increase in the risks and economic costs migrants face trying to clandestinely cross more than one border. As a result, the migration ux directed toward European countries appears to have increased (Secretaria Nacional de Justic a 2007). Consulate agents in Spain and Italy state
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immigrants) abroad, which affects the possibility of obtaining accurate statistics. The scant attention paid to gender in data gathering poses further difculties in estimating the numbers of female Brazilian migrants. However, these womens international displacements appear to be signicant. According to the Brazilian Federal Police, in 2005 women represented around 30 percent of the persons sent back from foreign countries. This includes deportees, but the vast majority are those women whose entry was refused in countries that do not require visas from Brazilian tourists, mostly at European airports. In these places, young darker Brazilian women who look poor in the eyes of the migration police are detained for one or more days, humiliated, frequently labeled prostitutes, and sometimes sexually harassed, with no reason other than police disbelief with regard to their tourist status (Secretaria Nacional de Justic a 2006, 2007). Recent governmental reports about deported women suggest that they are mostly from the lower-middle class (Secretaria Nacional de Justic a 2006, 2007). The majority are single or divorced, in their twenties and thirties; almost half of them have children and, in a country that values whiteness, they mostly consider themselves brown (morenas, the most frequently used native term, or pardas, the expression used in the National Census for mixed-race persons).3 Economic motivations are the main reason for their migration, which they may undertake either individually or in cooperation with their families. These proles, however, cannot be generalized. Scholarly studies about Brazilian gendered international migration point to diversity in terms of migrant womens educational and class backgrounds and skin colors. These aspects interfere with the class positions women hope to obtain in their migratory trajectories. In different receiving contexts, Brazilian women work in commerce; in administrative, educational, and health services; and as small entrepreneurs (Cavalcanti 2006). But, like women from other third-world countries, they are mostly occupied in domestic services, cleaning, and taking care of children or the elderly (Messias 2001; Oliveira 2006). Particularly in Southern Europe, they also work in the sex industry (Mayorga 2006; Piscitelli 2007a). Although only a fraction of Brazilian women are occupied in this sector, the relevance of this activity is amplied by press
that they are offering services to a much larger number of Brazilian residents than was the case four years ago (Piscitelli 2005, 2007b). 3 In the Brazilian census, as well as in academic research, color is dened according to the subjects self-classication.
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coverage that frequently merges international displacement for the purpose of working in the sex industry with trafcking of persons. Research reports allow us to perceive that, according to the Palermo Protocol, there are cases of women who are trafcked in the context of international migration, mostly being exploited as domestic or sexual servants.4 This happens in travels toward rich countries in Europe and North America. It also happens in the Brazilian borders with Suriname and in the triple frontier: in the borders with Argentina and Paraguay (Figueiredo and Hazeau 2006; Magno 2006). However, these studies also show that there are women who, far from being forced or deceived and/or used as bound or forced labor, decide to work in this sector in rich countries. With this objective, like other migrants, they mobilize social and familial support networks in order to travel abroad (Ministe rio da Justic a 2004; Secretaria Nacional de Justic a 2006; Piscitelli 2007a). For nontrafcked sex workers as well as for Brazilian women engaged in other economic activities, their main concerns are related to the possibility of obtaining papers in order to legalize their status abroad and to labor conditions that can be highly exploitative for undocumented migrants (Juncks 2004). Womens presence is particularly striking in the Brazilian communities of Southern Europe. They constitute more than 60 percent of the Brazilians living in Spain and approximately half of the Brazilian population in Portugal (Servic o de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras 2005). In these countries, as well as in Italy, they are considered to be signicant in the sex industry, and they also constitute one of the main groups of foreign women married to national men.5 And in these countries, the strikingly few transnational marriages involving Brazilian men suggest that Brazilian women acquire a particular value in the marriage market, driven in part by notions about Brazilian femininity that mark it with sensuality but also with the valorization of domesticity and an interest in motherhood. Having (or not having) residence and work permits and job opportunities,
4 The Palermo Protocol is the short name for the most important contemporary international legal disposition regarding trafcking of persons, the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafcking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, issued by the United Nations in 2000. For the text of the protocol, see http://untreaty.un.org/English/ TreatyEvent2003/Texts/treaty2E.pdf. 5 In 2006 Brazilian female spouses were the second-largest group of foreign women marrying Spanish men. See the INEbase database at the Instituto Nacional de Estad stica, Spain, for the years 2005 and 2006 (http://www.ine.es). In Italy, according to an analysis of the 2001 census, Brazil was the main non-European country furnishing foreign spouses, mostly women, to Italians (Istituto Nazionale de Statistica 2005).
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marrying men who are citizens of the receiving countries, and giving birth to children in the migratory contexts are major differences that distinguish one Brazilian womans experiences from those of another.
Images of Brazilianness
Stating that women from diverse backgrounds are affected by the images connected to Brazilian styles of femininity means considering that, although women from the global South get conned to specic occupations, they do not constitute a homogeneous category. In the frame of the unequal relationships between North and South, the differences among women from the global South are frequently translated into attributes that evoke ethnosexual frontiers (Nagel 2003). According to the context, these borders affect women from distinct ethnicities, regions, and countries in different ways. It could be thought that, in the United States, tropicalizations (Aparicio and Cha vez-Silverman 1997) might impinge on any Latin American person. In the system of ideological ctions with which the dominant (Anglo and European) cultures trope Latin American and U.S. Latino/a identities and cultures, subjectivities connected to these regions are frequently coded as tropical, exotic, and hypereroticized sexually. However, research points to the fact that, both in the United States and in Southern Europe, racialized and sexualized notions of femininity mainly affect women from certain countries. Brazil, Cuba, and Colombia, associated with racial blends that bring to mind African traces, are among them. While Latin American women from different nationalities are occupied as domestic workers and more broadly in service work, Brazilian, Colombian, and Cuban women are also considered signicant in both the sex and the marriage markets in some Southern European countries. The effects of these notions are more attenuated among the Brazilian women who attain better class positions in the receiving countries. Nevertheless, women (no matter their background) locate themselves among positions of overt resistance and apparent complicity at various times, rejecting but also using postcolonial images to negotiate their positions in unequal migratory contexts. In an interplay that reinforces certain stereotypes while weakening others, both in the labor and marriage markets (Pontes 2004; Piscitelli 2005; Beserra 2007), the connections of female Brazilianness with friendliness, joyful domesticity, cleanliness, and natural propensity for care and even sensuality are turned into part of the arsenal these women implement in their struggle for a better place in those harsh new worlds. These negotiations are depicted in studies that show how Brazilian
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women deploy some of these attributes in order to obtain access to privileged levels of paid domestic work in Boston, where Brazilian womens openness, joyfulness, and special care are set out in order to attract clients for their own housecleaning agencies. These ethnic attributes are activated with the aim of opening small enterprises in which Brazilian immigrant women sometimes function as bosses of males who are their kin or part of their social networks, enterprises that offer what women consider to be a well-paid and autonomous activity (Assis 2004). The connection between Brazilianness and sensuality annoys women, who are frequently harassed in several milieus. In order to avoid it, some migrants even lie about their national origin (Beserra 2007). However, it also seems to be strategically performed. The ethnic sex appeal is conceived as an asset for undocumented women working in the sex industry, who feel it helps them attract clients. But it is also perceived as offering benets for diversely positioned Brazilians, whether documented middle-class women in the academy in Los Angeles (Beserra 2007) or public service workers in Lisbon (Pontes 2004). Nonetheless, the major benets that women who do not work in the sex industry obtain by embodying sensuality appear to be related not to the labor but to the marriage market. In these cases, women combine sensuality with other attributes, performing the image of sweet, submissive, caring, domestic, and sensuous wives eager to be mothers. American and Southern European husbands seem to perceive relationships with these women as an opportunity to recreate traditional patterns of masculinity with the additional spice of enjoying a particular style of sexuality (Assis 2004; Piscitelli 2005; Beserra 2007). For Brazilian women, performing this combination of notions opens the way for desired marriages. Mixed marriages expose women to risks, particularly for those with fewer resources, who are subjected to more intense degrees of inequality and racism. However, these weddings are most desired since they offer women the main way to obtain residence permits in the context of highly restrictive migration policies. And these marriages are also valued as symbolic resources that contribute to achieving cultural citizenship abroad.
International migration and feminist activism
Brazilian women living in foreign countries organize themselves in groups that suggest feminist concerns but work with different objectives. Some try to disconnect the representation of Brazil from the sexualized image of its women created through music and carnival (Beserra 2007), while
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others intend to empower migrant women by helping them to learn the new language and obtain jobs and intend to protect them from the domestic violence that particularly affects married women and to support them in divorce processes, especially in terms of legal rights over their children, which are threatened when they divorce in some countries (Zingaropoli 2003). Feminist activism in Brazil is particularly vigorous in diverse issues connected with womens rights in internal migration. It also engages with some of the matters that affect migrant women abroad, mainly by discussing and rejecting the traveling notions of a sexualized Brazilianness. Working with other human rights groups, the feminist movement has successfully interfered in the ofcial sexualized marketing of Brazil in the international tourism sector. However, in terms of international emigration, the main feminist concerns are related to the trafcking of persons and to the connections between sex tourism, migration, and trafcking.6 At this moment, the latter is one of the major working themes of important Brazilian womens coalitions.7 While trafcking is indeed one of the most serious violations of womens rights, the scholarly production and governmental reports about gendered emigration point to an array of acute problems faced by women. The limitation of their right to free movement under the accusation of being prostitutes is only one of them. But these issues, acknowledged abroad, are not yet included in the main activist concerns in Brazil. The almost exclusive focus on trafcking of persons in terms of emigration has the effect of effacing other signicant difculties while at the same time posing the risk of reinforcing a one-dimensional and stigmatized vision of Brazilian women as international migrants. Center for Gender Studies University of Campinas
References
Aparicio, Frances R., and Susana Cha vez-Silverman, eds. 1997. Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
6 The program of the tenth Feminist Latin American and Caribbean Meeting that took place in Sa o Paulo in 2005 included three panels, two of them prepared by Brazilian activists, related to these issues and also a panel connected to prostitution but none related to female migration at large. 7 See Confere ncia Nacional de Mulheres Brasileiras 2002 and Sempreviva Organizac ao Feminista at http://www.sof.org.br/.
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Assis, Gla ucia de Oliveira. 2004. De Criciu ma para o mundo: Rearranjos familiares e de ge nero nas vive ncias dos novos migrantes brasileiros (From Criciu ma to the world: Family and gender rearrangements in the life experiences of new Brazilian migrants). PhD dissertation, University of Campinas. Azevedo, De bora B. 2004. Brasileiros no exterior (Brazilians abroad). Nota Te c rea XVIII, Congresso Nacional, Bras nica, Consultoria Legislativa da A lia (Technical report, Legislative Area XVIII Consultancy, National Congress, Brasilia). http://www2.camara.gov.br/internet/publicacoes/estnottec/tema3/pdf/ 2004_3518.pdf. Beserra, Bernadete. 2007. Sob a sombra de Carmen Miranda e do carnaval: Brasileiras em Los Angeles (Under the shadow of Carmen Miranda and carnival: Brazilian women in Los Angeles). Cadernos pagu 38 (JanuaryJune): 31344. Cavalcanti, Leonardo. 2006. O protagonismo empresarial imigrante a partir de uma perspectiva de ge nero: O caso das brasileiras nas cidades de Madrid e Barcelona (Migrants entrepreneurial protagonism from the perspective of gender: The case of Brazilian women in the cities of Madrid and Barcelona). Paper delivered at the Semina rio Internacional Fazendo Ge nero 7, Santa Catarina, August 2830. Confere ncia Nacional de Mulheres Brasileiras (National conference of Brazilian women). 2002. Plataforma pol tica feminista (Feminist political platform). http://www.articulacaodemulheres.org.br/. Costa, Maria Tereza Paulino da. Forthcoming. Algumas considerac o es sobre imigrantes brasileiros na jurisdic ao do Consulado Brasileiro de Nova York (Some considerations about Brazilian migrants in the Brazilian Consular District of New York). In Brasileiros no exterior: Caminhos da cidadania (Brazilians abroad: Paths to citizenship), ed. Bela Feldman-Bianco and Carlos Vianna. Campinas: Papirus. Figueiredo, Danielle Lima de, and Marcel Hazeau. 2006. Migrac ao e tra co de seres humanos para Suriname e Holanda (Migration and trafcking of human beings to Suriname and Holland). Fo rum da Amazo nia Oriental. http:// www.faor.org.br/CD/download/4_traco_seres_humanos.pdf. Istituto Nazionale de Statistica (Italy). 2005. Gli stranieri in Italia: Analisi dei dati censuari (Foreigners in Italy: Analyses of census data). Istituto Nazionale di Statistica. http://www.istat.it/istat/eventi/stranieri/volume_stranieri.pdf. Juncks, Ka tia Regina. 2004. La fomacio n histo rica de la clase obrera en la Barcelona del siglo XXI: Un pequen o dia logo con E. P. Thompson (The historical formation of the working class in twenty-rst-century Barcelona: A brief dialogue with E. P. Thompson). MA dissertation, Universidad Auto noma de Barcelona. Magno, Joa o. 2006. Relato rio nal da Comissa o Parlamentar de Inque rito (Final report of the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry). Brasilia: Comissa o Parlamentar Mista de Inque rito de Emigrac ao, Congresso Nacional, Repu b-
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lica Federativa do Brasil. http://www.senado.gov.br/web/comissoes/CPI/ Emigracao/RelFinalCPMIEmigracao.pdf. Mayorga, Claudia. 2006. Identidade, migrac ao e ge nero: O caso de mulheres brasileiras prostitutas em Madrid (Identity, migration, and gender: The case of Brazilian prostitutes in Madrid). Paper delivered at the Semina rio Internacional Fazendo Ge nero 7, Santa Catarina, August 2830. Menezes, Lena Medeiros de. 2001. Movimentos e pol ticas migrato rias em perspectiva histo rica: Um balanc o do se culo XX (Migratory movements and policies from a historical perspective: A summary of the twentieth century). In Migrac oes internacionais contribuic o es para pol ticas (International migrations: Policy contributions), ed. Mary Garcia Castro, 12337. Bras lia: Comissa o Nacional de Populac ao e Desenvolvimento/CNPD. Messias, DeAnne K. Hilnger. 2001. Transnational Perspectives on Womens Domestic Work: Experiences of Brazilian Immigrants in the United States. Women and Health 33(12):120. Ministe rio da Justic a/Nac o es Unidas/Escrito rio Contra Drogas e Crime. 2004. Tra co de seres humanos no Brasil (Trafcking of human beings in Brazil). Bras lia: Ministe rio da Justc a. Nagel, Joane. 2003. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press. Oliveira, Adriana Capuano de. 2006. Mulheres imigrantes no sul da Florida: Um estudo de caso revelando diferenc as (Immigrant women in southern Florida: A case study revealing differences). Paper delivered at the Semina rio Internacional Fazendo Ge nero 7, Santa Catarina, August 2830. Padilla, Beatriz. 2006. Integrac ao dos imigrantes brasileiros rece m-chegados na sociedade portuguesa: Problemas e possibilidades (Integration of recently arrived Brazilian immigrants in Portuguese society: Problems and possibilities). In Um mar de identidades: A imigrac a o brasileira em Portugal (A sea of identities: Brazilian immigration in Portugal), ed. Igor Jose de Reno Machado, 1942. Sa o Carlos: Edufscar. Piscitelli, Adriana. 2004. On Gringos and Natives: Gender and Sexuality in the Context of International Sex Tourism in Fortaleza, Brazil. Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 1(1/2):87114. http://www.vibrant.org.br/portugues/ artigos2004.htm. . 2005. Inte re t et sentiment: Migration de bre siliennes en Italie dans le contexte du tourisme sexuel international (Interest and emotions: Migration of Brazilian women in Italy in the context of international sex tourism). Migrations Socie te : La revue du CIEMI (Centre dinformation et de tudes sur les migrations internationales) 17(102):10525. . 2007a. Brasileiras na indu stria transnacional do sexo (Brazilian women in the transnational sex industry). Nuevo MundoMundos Nuevos 7. http:// nuevomundo.revues.org/document3744.html. . 2007b. Corporalidades em confronto: Brasileiras na indu stria do sexo na
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Espanha (Confronting corporealities: Brazilian women in the transnational sex industry in Spain). Revista Brasileira de Ciencias Sociais 22(64):1733. . 2007c. Shifting Boundaries: Sex and Money in the North-East of Brazil. Sexualities 10(4):489500. Pontes, Luciana. 2004. Mulheres brasileiras na m dia portuguesa (Brazilian women in the Portuguese media). Cadernos Pagu 23 (JulyDecember): 22957. Rios-Neto, Eduardo. 2005. Managing Migration: The Brazilian Case. Belo Horizonte: UFMG/Cedeplar. Secretaria Nacional de Justic a (National Secretary of Justice). 2006. Pesquisas em tra co de pessoas. Parte 2: Relato rio ind cios de tra co de pessoas no universo de deportadas e na o admitidas que regressam ao Brasil via o aeroporto de Guarulhos (Research on people trafcking. Part 2: Report on the signs of people trafcking among deportees and those refused entry who return to Brazil through the Guarulhos airport). Bras lia: Ministe rio da Justic a. . 2007. Relato rio: Tra co internacional de pessoas e tra co de migrantes entre deportados(as) e na o admitidos(as) que regressam ao Brasil via o aeroporto internacional de Sa o Paulo. (Report: International people trafcking and the trafcking of migrants among deportees and those refused entry who return to Brazil through the Sa o Paolo international airport). Bras lia: Ministe rio da Justic a. Servic o de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (Border Control and Immigration Service). 2005. Estat sticas: Populac ao estrangeira residente em Portugal, por nacionalidade segundo o sexo, dados de 2005 (Statistics: Resident foreign population in Portugal, according to nationality and sex, data from 2005). Lisbon: Servic o de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras. Seyferth, Giralda. 20002001. Imigrac ao no Brasil: Os preceitos de exclusa o (Immigration in Brazil: Prescriptions of exclusion). Com cie ncia, revista eletro nica de jornalismo cient co 16 (DecemberJanuary). http://www .comciencia.br/reportagens/migracoes/migr03.htm. Zingaropoli, Silvia. 2003. Tutela per le brasiliane in Italia (Tutoring Brazilian women in Italy). Interview with Rosa Mendes. Musibrasil 3(9). http:// www.musibrasil.net/articolo.php?idp370.
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The Labor Brokerage State and the Globalization of Filipina Care Workers
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez
ilipina migrant workers in care-related occupationsdomestic workers, nannies, nursesare ubiquitous in core and newly industrialized countries throughout the world today. The liberal individualist premises of market discourses suggest that the overseas migration of these women workers is a result of individual decisions and actions facilitated by globalizations encouragement of labor mobility. There are other factors at play, however, in Filipinas migration to countries as widely varying as the United States, Qatar, Canada, Malaysia, Italy, Singapore, and Taiwan. The Philippine stateacting as a labor brokerplays a critical role in producing, distributing, and regulating Filipinas as care workers across the globe. From a macrostructural perspective, feminist scholars of globalization have argued that the rise of neoliberalism and the concomitant reduction and dismantling of social services by erstwhile welfare states, along with the entrance of more and more women into the labor force, have resulted in new kinds of demands for a wide range of care work around the world. These demands often arise in relatively more privileged countries in the world system, while the labor to ll these demands is located in poorer economies. Moreover, gendered understandings that dene women as most suitable for performing care work continue to exist across the globe. What has emerged, according to Rhacel Salazar Parren as is an international transfer of caretaking (2001, 62; see also Parren as 2000). Consequently third-world women, including Filipinas, are increasingly nding themselves doing the care workwhether as domestic workers, child-care providers, or nursesaround the globe. Other scholars have focused less on these broader macrostructural analyses and more on the peculiarities of gendered and racialized labor demand in specic national labor markets to understand the globalization of Filipinas. For instance, Rochelle Balls (2004) comparative study of the demand for nursing labor in the United States and Saudi Arabia nds that in the United States, demand for nurses has to do in part with American
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womens reluctance to go into the eld of nursing, which they see as being very difcult (due to factors such as the reorganization of health care necessitated by neoliberalism as well as to Americans lack of health insurance). American women also see the nursing profession as limited in terms of opportunities for upward mobility. This lack of interest in the eld creates the nursing shortages that Filipinas then ll. In Saudi Arabia, however, gendered ideologies that restrict local women from particular kinds of education and employment limit their participation in the labor market generally. Saudi Arabia has, hence, depended on the labor of foreigners, including Filipinas, to ll nursing jobs. A number of studies have been especially focused on Filipina domestic workers and caregivers in different national contexts (see, e.g., Wong 1996; Constable 1997; Chin 1998). While set in very different countries, these studies of domestic workers, like Balls, generally examine the labor markets of labor-receiving states as well as employers constructions of domestic labor in order to explain preferences for Filipinas. Although all of the research on Filipina migrants offers important interventions in understanding transformations in the global order and although these transformations affect specic national contexts to explain the worldwide deployment of Filipina migrants, it still cannot adequately explain why it is that Filipinas migrate and why they generally do so as care workers. The Philippines is certainly not alone in its positioning as a peripheral economy. Many other economies occupy similar or worse locations in the global order, yet they do not supply the worlds reproductive labor in the way that the Philippines does. Macrostructural analyses of the international transfer of care, therefore, cannot explain exactly why Filipinas are doing a good deal of care work around the world. Although localized studies of Filipinas in different national contexts reveal that they are typically dened in socially marginalized ways that conne them to lower salaries and the status of racialized noncitizens, they cannot explain the racialization and gendering of Filipina migrants in remarkably similar ways around the world. I suggest that to answer these questions requires a close analysis of the Philippine state in structuring the globalization of Filipina migrants. Indeed, it is precisely this sort of perspective that is missing in all of these accounts. While most scholars of Filipina migration agree that the Philippine government, since the institutionalization of labor export became a developmental policy in the 1970s, is important in facilitating the outmigration of workers, few studies have examined the practices of the Philippine state and therefore have not theorized its role in structuring Filipinas globalization. My work aims to address this gap in the scholarship
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through a focus on the labor-sending state. Indeed, my work complements existing research by examining how the Philippine state, positioned as it is in the global order, negotiates labor demands as they are constituted in specic national contexts and by broader global processes. The Philippine state has increasingly come to rely on the export of labor to contain the social, economic, and political dislocations that have resulted from its adherence to neoliberalism. The state takes advantage of labor demands engendered by contemporary processes of globalization to place its citizens in overseas jobs through a highly developed transnational migration apparatus. This apparatus comprises numerous government agencies based in the Philippines (including the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, or POEA), as well as in the Philippine embassies and consular ofces around the world (e.g., International Labor Affairs Service, or ILAS). The task of agencies like POEA and ILAS is not only to address but also to create worldwide demand for Philippine labor. As one POEA ofcial describes it, the migration bureaucracy is an LMI [labor market information] institution, generating various statistical and qualitative data which deal with the temporary migration or contract employment of Filipino human resources around the globe.1 Through this transnational state apparatus, research is conducted to determine broad, global demands for Philippine labor, while more focused research in particular countries examines which specic industries are experiencing shortages of labor and/or whether those particular countries offer visa categories that would allow Philippine migrants to enter for employment. Even as state agencies attempt to locate demand for Philippine labor broadly, they do, in fact, have ofcials specically tasked to identify demand for different kinds of care workers. Indeed, I learned through interviews with an ofcial in the POEAs marketing branch that the POEA has skills desks for special job categories including domestic helpers, shipping, construction, entertainers, and medical workers. These desks . . . are tasked with promoting the specic skills of Filipino workers.2 On the one hand, the Philippines has a long history (since the American colonial period) of nurses out-migration and hence has long-established training and education programs that prime women to work as nurses and other kinds of care workers (see, e.g., Choy 2003). At the same time, the out-migration of better-paid, skilled workers guarantees the Philippine
1 Ricardo Casco, Welfare and Employment Division ofcial, POEA, interview by the author, June 2000, Mandaluyong City, Philippines. 2 Stella Banawis, interview by the author, June 2000, Mandaluyong City, Philippines.
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government higher remittance returns. Moreover, by training women workers, the state ensures that Filipinas possess some level of skill before departure, which placates Philippine civil society actors fears that lack of skills as well as their employment in gender-typed jobs expose Filipinas to sexual abuse and exploitation. On the other hand, my research on training and education programs for nurses and care workers reveals that these programs are also the channel through which the state attempts to discipline prospective women migrants to conform to acceptable norms around gender and sexuality. One POEA ofcial commented that despite the fact that the United Kingdom was increasingly securing Chinese nurses while the United States was securing Indian nurses, she believed that the Philippines is still top. Filipinas have a warmth and care that people like.3 Training and education programs ensure that Filipinas will exhibit these putatively natural traits. Because labor is less mobile than other kinds of commodities, in the sense that workers are subject to particular kinds of regulations (i.e., visa requirements), the Philippine state necessarily has to engage in diplomatic relations, both informal and formal, if it aims to continue to export labor to existing and new markets. The Philippines has a stake in initiatives taken by labor-importing states to introduce new visa categories that allow the legal inux of migrant labor into their countries. Moreover, it attempts to negotiate bilateral labor agreements with labor-importing states to help ease the migration of Filipinas. Hence, to promote or market Filipina labor, embassy and consular staff from the department of foreign affairs become important. Formal bilateral relations such as labor agreements or memorandums of understanding have been a key mechanism by which the Philippine government facilitates ows of Philippine labor overseas. Labor diplomacy, as Philippine migration ofcials describe it, comprises the more formalized state-to-state relations the Philippine state engages in to develop markets for Philippine labor. By formalizing the transfers of Filipina workers through labor diplomacy, the Philippine state ultimately assents to host states gendered and sexualized forms of regulating Filipinas that require, for instance, womens proof of marriage and mandatory pregnancy testing. The Philippine governments role in marketing Filipina workers and engaging in diplomatic relations with foreign governments is for the purpose of promoting the deployment of migrants both through Philippinebased private recruitment agencies and through its own government
3 Lorna Fajardo, Contract Employment Branch, POEA, interview by the author, November 2000, Mandaluyong City, Philippines.
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recruitment facility, the Government Placement Branch (GPB). In a marketing mission in 1998 to the United Kingdom, for instance, the Philippines explored the possibilities of deploying Filipina nurses to meet the demand for what is estimated to be fteen thousand vacancies for nurses. The GPB is the agency that foreign states deal with to secure migrant labor for government-to-government hiring. Rather than allowing private recruitment agencies access to potentially huge foreign government clients, the Philippine state positions itself as the provider of labor for these government labor contracts. According to Fely Romero, when there are foreign diplomatic dealings and foreign labor ofcials request labor of the President, the GPB steps in. We cant recommend private recruiters.4 The state sees itself as being a more ideal provider of migrant labor to foreign governments than private recruitment agencies because the transfer of labor between governments is a diplomatic matter. Furthermore, the state ensures that workers are properly trained and certied and offers convenience for foreign governments, which are spared the effort of trying to locate appropriate recruitment agencies. The GPB had twenty foreign government clients in 20002001. The biggest demand from these clients, Romero indicates, is for medical personnel in government hospitals.5 The GPB also has some private-sector clients. In addition to the ones mentioned by Romero, the GPB provides physical therapists to the United States and information technology workers to Singapore. Today, the GPB has twenty-eight government clients (POEA 2003, 16). The fact that the GPB has so many government clients suggests that there is a dimension of state privatization that is seldom noted in the scholarship on labor migration. States, like business corporations, are increasingly outsourcing labor, eliminating employment for their own citizens and nationals while securing workers from other countries. Neoliberalism is creating demands for labor that states like the Philippines increasingly ll by facilitating the migration of its nationals to other countries. Filipinas positioning as care workers around the world is ultimately a consequence of the ways in which the Philippine state has historically drawn on the labor of Filipina women for developmental aims. As Jan Jindy Pettman argues, the commodication of womens bodies for multinational space and work on the global assembly line is not removed from the transnational circuits that deliver womens bodies across state borders
4 5
Fely Romero, interview by the author, July 2000, Mandaluyong City, Philippines. Ibid.
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for domestic and sex work. In both cases, it is not only gender which marks womens bodies for particular kinds of work, but also processes nationalising and racialising gendered bodies, especially the body of the Asian woman (1998). Labor brokering as a developmental strategy, similar to other strategies of development engaged in by the Philippine state, such as export-oriented production or tourism, relies on particular representations of womens labor. Filipinas construction as caring, docile, meticulous migrant care workers abroad is congruent with their construction as caring, docile, meticulous factory workers or workers in the tourism industry in the Philippines. These constructions of Filipinas can, furthermore, be tracked to earlier colonial histories that mobilized Filipinas labor as nurses for the U.S. colonial administrations own aims. Their labor during the American colonial period required their travel abroad. Womens international migration to work as care workers or even entertainers in the contemporary moment is an extension of their employment in the Philippine labor market. Export-oriented production and tourism within the Philippines prove to be unable to absorb the unemployment and underemployment that are exacerbated by the states aggressive pursuit of neoliberal economic policies. Overseas employment serves as the only means of survival for many women. At the same time the Philippine state draws on womens gendered and sexualized labor to bear the economic and political burdens of neoliberalism. By brokering workers, the state is ensured of a steady inux of remittances and is able to contain social upheaval, at least temporarily, as more and more people, women and men, ght for more just alternatives to globalization. Department of Sociology Rutgers University
References
Ball, Rochelle E. 2004. Divergent Development, Racialised Rights: Globalised Labour Markets and the Trade of Nursesthe Case of the Philippines. Womens Studies International Forum 27(2):11933. Chin, Christine B. N. 1998. In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project. New York: Columbia University Press. Choy, Catherine Ceniza. 2003. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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Constable, Nicole. 1997. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Parren as, Rhacel Salazar. 2000. Migrant Filipina Domestic Workers and the International Division of Reproductive Labor. Gender and Society 14(4):56080. . 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pettman, Jan Jindy. 1998. Women on the Move: Globalisation and Labour Migration from South and Southeast Asian States. Global Society: Journal of Interdisciplinary International Relations 12(3):389405. POEA (Philippine Overseas Employment Administration). 2003. Annual Report. POEA, Mandaluyong City. http://www.poea.gov.ph/AR2004/AnnualReports/ AR2003.pdf. Wong, Diana. 1996. Foreign Domestic Workers in Singapore. In Asian Women in Migration, ed. Graziano Battistella and Anthony Paganoni, 87108. Quezon City: Scalabrini Migration Center.
The Invisible Woman: Gender Blindness and South African Immigration Policies and Legislation
Sally Peberdy
a migrant in South Africa, and, as in many parts of the world, they would probably describe a man. Reecting the long history of male circular migration to work in South Africa from the rest of southern Africa, he would usually be imagined as traveling alone. But, in this imaginary (especially if imagined as white) he might be accompanied by a wife and even by children as part of his luggage. More often, though, his partner is imagined waiting at home for him to return from his workplace in another country. However, gendered imaginaries of migrants are more than pictures of the mind, and in South Africa the place of male and female cross-border migrants in the national imaginary, both past and present, is complicated by South Africas racially exclusionary past. For the majority of South Africas history, only white people were allowed to immigrate to the country. However, notwithstanding these restrictions, from the late 1800s South Africa used the wider southern
sk people to describe
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African region as its labor market to develop the mines and commercial agricultural sectors. Thus, from the rst immigration act of 1913 following the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910 (which in one form or another remained in force until 1990), black (male) contract mine workers and black farm workers (both male and female) could enter legally as temporary sojourners and under specic conditions.1 In addition, secret side deals between the governments of South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) as well as South Africa and Portuguese East Africa (now Mozambique) allowed for clandestine (or irregular) migration between the signatory countries (Peberdy 1999). As Linzi Manicom argues, men and women are dened and constructed within the particular discourses and practices of ruling, specifically, in commission reports, parliamentary debates, . . . laws, and administrative procedures and practices (1992, 456). Thus, the meaning of the categories woman and man are not static but are historically situated. As she contends, the very fundamental categories of state and politicslike citizen, worker, the modern state itselfare shot through with gender; they were in fact historically constructed and reproduced as masculine categories (Manicom 1992, 444; see also Anthias and YuvalDavis 1993, 12526).2 To this could be added the categories of immigrant and migrant. Despite South Africas long history of white immigration, white women are conspicuously absent in ofcial debates around migration (Dodson 1998; Peberdy 1999). To the state, immigrants were generally seen as white men and white women as their silent spouses.3 White women appear regularly in ofcial letters and memoranda on immigration only immediately following the introduction of the 1913 act and in the 1960s and 1970s (Peberdy 1999). The 1913 act gave married and dependent women privileges that were not given to men, since women could enter the country even if they were illiterate or not economically active.4 White women reappeared in debates around immigration in the early 1960s, when the state was trying to encourage immigration. The state imagined white women immigrants as wives and mothers, as stabilizing forces, whose
Act No. 22, Immigrants Regulation Act, 1913. Acts promulgated before May 1961 were passed by the Union of South Africa and after May 1961 by the Republic of South Africa. 2 For South African critiques of constructions of women and gender, see Bozzoli (1983), Gaitskell and Unterhalter (1989), and Walker (1990). 3 The secondary literature on immigration to South Africa is similarly silent about the migration of white women, with the exception of Swaisland (1993). 4 Section 5(d), Act No. 22, Immigrants Regulation Act, 1913.
1
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contentment was essential to the male migrants decision to stay. So, in a 1960s attempt to encourage migration, a special brochure titled The Immigrant Housewife in the RSA [Republic of South Africa] was produced.5 In the early 1970s, the thenminister for home affairs articulated this position, saying of the woman immigrant, she is the key to the whole success of it, for if the immigrant wife in South Africa, the mother, is settled in and feels at home and happy, the family is settled in.6 Black women migrants and immigrants were almost completely silenced by the apartheid state and its predecessors.7 Even more than their male counterparts, their entry and exit went unrecorded. However, in contrast to white women immigrants, black, nonSouth African women migrants, when they did appear in debates around migration and urbanization, were largely portrayed as contaminators and disrupters of the social order, as undesirable women (Bonner 1990; see also Stichter 1985; Cockerton 1997). More rarely black women were seen as nurturers, but usually as domestic workers caring for white people (Bozzoli 1983). Black male migrants did not gure in ofcial migration debates, except as temporary sojourners, mine workers, and farm workers, and as part of the larger apartheid project of racially segregated spaces (Robinson 1996; Peberdy 1999). South Africas construction of the relationship among women, men, and citizenship was embedded in the states citizenship legislation.8 Until 1949, a woman who married a man with a different nationality lost her
Debates, Hansard, June 4, 1963, vol. 7, col. 7238 (Pretoria: Government Printer). Debates, Hansard, April 28, 1971, vol. 33, col. 5459 (Pretoria: Government Printer). 7 Some exceptions in the secondary literature include Stichter (1985), Bonner (1990), Miles (1991, 1996), and Cockerton (1996, 1997). 8 See Act No. 4, Naturalization of Aliens Act, 1910, replaced by Act No. 18, British Nationality in the Union and Naturalisation and Status of Aliens Act, 1926, and Act No. 40, Union Nationality and Flags Act, 1927. Act No. 44, South African Citizenship Act, 1949, repealed and replaced the 1926 Act. The 1949 act was amended by Act No. 64, South African Citizenship Amendment Act, 1961; Act No. 69, Commonwealth Relations Act, 1962; Act No. 23, Residence in the Republic Regulation Act, 1964; Act No. 41, South African Citizenship Amendment Act, 1973; Act No. 53, South African Citizenship Amendment Act, 1978; Act No. 30, South African Citizenship Amendment Act, 1980; Act No. 43, South African Citizenship Amendment Act, 1984; Act No. 53, Matters concerning Admission to and Residence in the Republic Amendment Act, 1986; Act No. 112, Application of Certain Laws to Namibia Abolition Act, 1990; Act No. 70, South African Citizenship Amendment Act, 1991; Act No. 132, General Fourth Act, 1993. The amended 1949 Act was repealed and replaced by Act No. 88, South African Citizenship Act, 1995.
6
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citizenship.9 Similarly, nonSouth African women who married South African citizens became South African citizens upon marriage. Until 1995, South African women could not confer citizenship on their children. Rather, citizenship was awarded to children through their fathers and grandfathers. Although single women immigrants could, and no doubt did, become citizens in their own right through naturalization, citizenship was essentially constructed as a privilege granted to women through men. The conation of women immigrants with the baggage of their male counterparts; their inclusion as wives, mothers, and bearers of future citizens in state discourses around migration; and the denition and determination of womens citizenship through men reects the way that South African national identity was, from the earliest years, constructed as male (and until the 1990s as white). The silencing of women immigrants and the construction of a gendered South African citizenship followed inevitably. In 1994, South Africas rst democratic government was elected; in 1996, the constitution was ratied. South Africas constitution is one of the most progressive in the world, protecting the human rights of all, regardless of race, sex, sexuality, nationality, or immigration status. In 2004, a woman, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, was appointed minister of home affairs, succeeding the male leader of the opposition Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) who had held the position for the previous decade as part of the government of national unity. Although current debates around migration remain largely gender blind, there has been increasing recognition, although not extensive, of migration as a gendered process, and more than in the past women are seen as migrants in their own right. However, these debates do not reect the increasing feminization of migration streams to and from South Africa, particularly the ows from the rest of southern Africa (Dodson 1998; Dodson and Crush 2006). Although there are indications that women constitute an increasing proportion of migrants, migration ows to South Africa from southern Africa are still dominated by men (Dodson and Crush 2006; Pendleton et al. 2006). Recent research suggests that about 80 percent of those who migrate for work are men, although 44 percent of migrants from Zimbabwe were found to be women (Pendleton et al. 2006, 2). However, the restructuring of the gold-mining industry has led to massive retrenchments among black male mine workers, particularly from Lesotho, where
See Act No. 44, South African Citizenship Act, 1949. Under the 1961 South African Citizenship Amendment Act, women who took their partners nationality had to actively renounce their South African citizenship (Act No. 64, sec. 11). This change may reect the role of women in the nation-building myths of Afrikaner nationalism (see Brink 1990).
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employment fell by over 50 percent in the 1990s (Peberdy, Williams, and Crush 2007). This has meant that women form an increasing proportion of both internal and cross-border migrants in and from Lesotho (Ulicki and Crush 2000). Small-scale, or informal sector, cross-border traders comprise a signicant amount of the over 8.5 million border crossings into South Africa each year. The majority are women who travel to South Africa for stays of between one to two days and three to four weeks. Those making short visits may travel more than once a week (Peberdy 2007). Women are most likely to appear in ofcial debates around migration as emigrants and as victims of human trafcking. Women emigrants make up an increasing component of the brain drain from South Africa, particularly as nurses and teachers, although exact numbers are hard to nd (Rogerson 2007).10 No existing research examines the impact of this migration on household formation and gender roles. South Africa has no legislation on trafcking as yet, but the Childrens Amendment Bill currently under discussion, when promulgated, will make it illegal. However, no measures are currently in place to deal with victims of trafcking. Although it now seems that they are more visible in post-1994 debates around migration, little mention is still made of women migrants. Research is largely gender blind, although some studies have disaggregated data by sex as well as attempted some gendered analysis (Dodson 1998, 2002; Dodson and Crush 2006). Research on migration for specic occupations has also uncovered some information about the experiences of women migrants.11 Post-1994 migration-related legislative changes came slowly. The rst ever Refugee Act was passed in 1998 (coming into force only in 2000). A new Immigration Act (Act No. 13) was passed in 2002 and was amended in 2004. Ostensibly gender blind, the 2004 Immigration Amendment Act (Act No. 19), while more friendly to female migrants, remains problematic with its associated regulations (Dodson and Crush 2006). The act largely prevents semiskilled and unskilled workers from entering South Africa but still allows for the entry of male mine workers and male and female seasonal farm workers. Men, who are more likely to qualify as skilled workers, therefore have easier access. Under the Immigration Act of 2004, with the exception of the extraordinary skills category, residence is granted only
In 2001, 23,407 health workers were practicing in ve Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries, of whom 6,844 were nurses/midwives (Rogerson 2007, 16). 11 Crush 2000; Ulicki and Crush 2000; Peberdy and Dinat 2005; Peberdy et al. 2006; Dinat and Peberdy 2007.
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to applicants and not automatically to their spouses or families. Thus, while the spouses of temporary residents, whether male or female, may no longer be seen as luggage, traveling with spouses may be difcult. People granted permanent residence under the partnership clause (marriage is not a requirement) have to remain in the relationship for ve years following the granting of residence. This makes it difcult for women (or men) in abusive relationships to leave them. Time restrictions on visitors permits restrict the movements of small-scale, cross-border traders who travel frequently and who are most likely to be women (Peberdy 2007, forthcoming). Published ofcial statistics are rarely broken down by sex. Notwithstanding these limitations, post-1994 national identity, as constructed by the state, is inclusive. Echoing the constitution, the Reverend Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, in the foreword to the report on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said South Africa was moving to a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex (Tutu 1998, 22). Post-1995 citizenship legislation accords men and women, and their children, equal access to citizenship, suggesting a shift by the postapartheid state toward an inclusive citizenship regardless of gender. However, gender-blind policies and legislation and debates around migration mean that policies fail to address the changing households of southern Africa as well as the implications of gender for migration and for migrants and their households. Graduate School of Public and Development Management University of the Witwatersrand
References
Anthias, Floya, and Nira Yuval-Davis. 1993. Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-racist Struggle. London: Routledge. Bonner, Philip. 1990. Desirable or Undesirable Basotho Women? Liquor, Prostitution and the Migration of Basotho Women to the Rand, 19201945. In Walker 1990, 22150. Bozzoli, Belinda. 1983. Marxism, Feminism and South African Studies. Journal of Southern African Studies 9(2):13971. Brink, Elsabe. 1990. Man-Made Women: Gender, Class and the Ideology of the Volksmoeder. In Walker 1990, 27392. Cockerton, Camilla M. 1996. Less a Barrier, More a Line: The Migration of Bechuanaland Women to South Africa, 18501930. Journal of Historical Geography 22(3):291307.
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. 1997. Documenting the Exodus: The Dimensions and Local Causes of Bechuanaland Womens Migration to South Africa, 19201966. South African Geographical Journal 79(1):4351. Crush, Jonathan, ed. 2000. Borderline Farming: Foreign Migrants in South African Commercial Agriculture. Southern African Migration Project Migration Policy Series no. 16, Southern African Migration Project, Cape Town. Dinat, Natalya, and Sally Peberdy. 2007. Restless Worlds of Work, Health and Migration: Domestic Workers in Johannesburg. Development Southern Africa 24(1):186203. Dodson, Belinda. 1998. Women on the Move: Gender and Cross Border Migration to South Africa. Southern African Migration Project Migration Policy Series no. 9, Southern African Migration Project, Cape Town. . 2002. Gender and the Brain Drain from South Africa. Southern African Migration Project Migration Policy Series no. 23, Southern African Migration Project, Cape Town. Dodson, Belinda, and Jonathan Crush. 2006. South African Immigration Law: A Gender Analysis. Southern African Migration Project Migration Policy Brief no. 16, Southern African Migration Project, Cape Town. Gaitskell, Deborah, and Elaine Unterhalter. 1989. Mothers of the Nation: A Comparative Analysis of Nation, Race and Motherhood in Afrikaner Nationalism and the African National Congress. In Woman-Nation-State, ed. Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, 5878. London: Macmillan. Manicom, Linzi. 1992. Ruling Relations: Rethinking State and Gender in South African History. Journal of African History 33(3):44165. Miles, Miranda. 1991. Missing Women: A Study of Swazi Female Migration to the Witwatersrand, 19201970. MA thesis, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. . 1996. Migration and Development in Post-colonial Swaziland: A Study of Womens Mobility and Livelihood Strategies. PhD dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Peberdy, Sally. 1999. Selecting Immigrants: Nationalism and National Identity in South Africas Immigration Policies, 1910 to 1998. PhD dissertation, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. . 2007. Monitoring Small-Scale Cross-Border Trade in Southern Africa. Unpublished paper for the Regional Trade Facilitation Programme, Pretoria. . Forthcoming. Shopping and Trading: Small Scale Cross Border Trade in Southern Africa. Trade Winds 1. Institute for Global Dialogue, South Africa. Peberdy, Sally, Benjemim Cau, Abel Chikanda, Ntombikayise Msibi, Alistair Munthali, Oleosi Ntshebi, Ines Raimundo, and Daniel Tevera. 2006. Female Cross-Border Traders and HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa. Unpublished report for the International Organization for Migration, Pretoria. Peberdy, Sally, and Natalya Dinat. 2005. Migration and Domestic Workers: Worlds of Work, Health and Mobility in Johannesburg. Southern African Mi-
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gration Project Migration Policy Series no. 40, Southern African Migration Project, Cape Town. Peberdy, Sally, Vincent Williams, and Jonathan Crush. 2007. Labour Migration and South Africa: Towards a Fairer Deal for Migrants. Unpublished paper for the South African Department of Labour, Pretoria. Pendleton, Wade, Jonathan Crush, Eugene Campbell, Thuso Green, Hamilton Simelane, Daniel Tevera, and Fion de Vletter. 2006. Migration, Remittances and Development in Southern Africa. Southern African Migration Project Migration Policy Series no. 44, Southern African Migration Project, Cape Town. Robinson, Jennifer. 1996. The Power of Apartheid: State, Power and Space in South African Cities. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. Rogerson, Chris. 2007. Medical Recruits: The Temptation of South African Health Care Professionals. Southern African Migration Project Migration Policy Series, no. 46, Southern African Migration Project, Cape Town. Stichter, Sharon. 1985. Migrant Laborers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Swaisland, Cecillie. 1993. Servants and Gentlewomen to the Golden Land: The Emigration of Single Women from Britain to Southern Africa, 18201939. Oxford: Berg. Tutu, Desmond. 1998. Forward by Chairperson. In Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report, 1:123. New York: Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Ulicki, Theresa, and Jonathan Crush. 2000. Gender, Farmwork, and Womens Migration from Lesotho to the New South Africa. Special issue, Canadian Journal of African Studies 34(1):6479. Walker, Cherryl, ed. 1990. Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945. Cape Town: David Phillip.

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Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Gendered Migrations

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