During the summer of 2014 a crisis exploded in the US media. Large numbers of women and children were detained at the US border in Texas. They were Central Americans for the most part, fleeing criminal and political violence in their own countries and on their way to join relatives already living in the US. Many were unaccompanied children.
To handle the crisis, two detention centers were opened in Texas. A year later, in midsummer 2015, a judge (Dolly M. Gee) for the Federal District Court for the Central District of California found that these two centers failed to meet the minimum legal requirements for settling and housing children. These requirements called for placing children in facilities that are licensed to care for children and not secured like prisons. Those in Texas were being run by private prison contractors. One human rights activist commented: “I think this spells the beginning of the end for the Obama administration’s immigrant family detention policy . . . A policy that just targets mothers with children is not rational and it’s inhumane” (quoted in Preston 2015: A14). In addition to the Texas detention centers, there was one in Berks County, PA, and together they were holding 2,600 women and children. A New York Times story (Preston 2015) reported that in the beginning Homeland Security detained the families to send a message to others in Central America that they were not welcome in the US without legal papers for entry. But a federal court in Washington, DC, ruled that this approach was unconstitutional and officials ceased invoking deterrence as a basis for evaluating cases for asylum within this group. Despite this ruling, “many women and children remained stalled behind bleak walls and fences month after month with no end in sight. Mothers became severely depressed or anxious, and their distress echoed in their children, who became worried and sickly” (Preston 2015: A14).
The experiences of these Central America women is quite different from that of a young Indian woman, whom I call Anjuli, whom I met very soon after she arrived in the US in the summer of 2002. Anjuli had been recently married. Her husband had been working in the US on an H1B skilled worker visa and had returned to India to marry her. After waiting in India for a few months, Anjuli was able to join him in the US, entering the country on an H4 dependent visa. Although Anjuli was welleducated and had been working in a multinational bank for several years in India, according to the stipulations of the H4 visa, she was prohibited from seeking employment in the US. After acclimatizing herself to her new life, including finding an Indian grocery store in the city of Dallas and the Hindu and Jain temples, Anjuli began taking some courses at the local community college. Her husband, whom I call Sudeep, began the process, with his employer, of applying for a green card. After a year, Anjuli and Sudeep bought a house in one of the suburbs of Dallas but a year or so later Sudeep accepted a job in Seattle. His new company took over the green-card process and eventually both Sudeep and Anjuli became legal permanent residents. Anjuli was able to work for a short time but then she became pregnant with her first child and cut back on her hours. Anjuli and Sudeep have relocated several times over the years I have known them and two more children have arrived. All their children are US citizens, and they are thinking about naturalization for themselves. Sudeep is certain about it; Anjuli less so.
Migration policies and laws of citizenship, while proclaiming to be gender-neutral, are, as the cases described above suggest, in fact imbued with gender (as well as class and racial) inequalities that influence migration patterns and experiences. These laws and policies can determine the differential access that men and women have to a country of immigration, as well as their legal status, right to citizenship, and political subjectivity. Sociologists Cecilia Menjívar and Olivia Salcido (2013: 2) argue that in general immigration policies “assume dependencies that privilege male applicants over females and that often make women an afterthought in the implementation of immigration laws.” Laws and policies are built on ingrained gender-specific ideologies that position men as breadwinners and women as family dependants.
Similarly, contemporary refugee and asylum law is also rife with gender biases (Calavita 2006). Certainly these laws have developed and changed over time from their initial formulation as part of the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. In the period following World War II, the typical asylum seeker was a male claiming persecution for his political beliefs or actions. “Women, on the other hand, [were] not considered to engage in ‘real’ politics that would make them the object of persecution” (Calavita 2006: 111). It was only after 1980 that private sphere persecutions began to be considered and in 1996 a political asylum appeal based on gender (the potential for genital mutilation, were the female asylum seeker to return to her home country in Africa) resulted in the granting of asylum. And yet, Calavita argues, there remains a contradiction between a gendered perspective and a human rights perspective. The human rights perspective that undergirds asylum and refugee law “has all too often been a subterfuge for, or has led to, stereotyping in which domestic violence, genital cutting and other such gendered behaviors are ascribed to ‘barbaric’ Islamic cultures” (Calavita 2006: 112).
Such philosophical conflicts are equally present in the differences between immigration laws that define women as dependent on their husbands for both legal status and economic support on the one hand and domestic violence laws (such as the 1994 Violence Against Women Act in the United States (VAWA) that was reauthorized in 2000, 2005, and 2015) that make it possible for immigrant women to take action against their abusers (Das Gupta 2006: 91). VAWA sets aside green cards for undocumented immigrant women who have been physically abused by a citizen or lawful permanent resident spouse. It permits them to petition for permanent residency without the knowledge or support of a spouse. But to secure legalization under this Act, it is necessary to produce documentation of joint residency. Very often a woman’s name is not included in this documentation – that is, on household bills, bank accounts, tax returns, insurance policies etc. This contradiction in legislation, as sociologists Menjívar and Salcido (2013: 7–8) argue, offers further evidence of the subtle gender biases in immigration and other social legislation.
The gender-bias in immigration laws is also present in debates about citizenship which, as feminist scholars have observed, pay little attention to the distinct and different ways in which citizenship is experienced by men and women, let alone how it is accorded (Yuval-Davis 1997; Lister 1997a, b; 2001; Friedman 2005; Tastsaglou and Dobrowolsky 2006). As philosopher Alison Jaggar (2005: 92) has argued, citizenship in Western societies has been “gendered masculine . . . the activities regarded as characteristics of citizens – fighting, governing, buying and selling property, and eventually working for wages – have all been viewed as masculine, as have been the social locations where these activities are undertaken.” Criticism of the gendered and exclusionary language of citizenship has been part of feminist discourse since the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) in the later eighteenth century. The citizen in a liberal democracy generally referred to a white male property-holding individual who had access to certain rights and assumed certain responsibilities. This construction endured through much of the nineteenth century and only began to change once women were accorded the right to vote, something that occurred in the US with the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution that was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920. By the end of the twentieth century, sociologist Nira Yuval-Davis (1997: 22) was advocating for an approach to citizenship that dismantles “the identification of the family with the private domain and the political with the public domain” and instead constructs “citizenship as a multi-tier concept” that severs it “from an exclusive relation to the state.” This conception of citizenship would encompass the state, civil society, and the family, thus bringing gender fully into the discussion.
This chapter explores the gendered dimensions and gender biases in US immigration policy and citizenship laws from the late nineteenth century through until the present. Where relevant, comparisons will be made within a global context. Among the questions addressed are: When and how were women defined solely as dependants – that is, classified in relation to men? How do such policies place women in a family role rather than a market or economic role? How have men’s and women’s citizenship rights been defined and changed? And how do gendered policies in relation to migrants differ, if they do, from those related to refugees and other legal statuses? This chapter also considers the gendered implications of legal status, exploring, for example, the case of mixed status families where often the husband and some of the children are legal while a wife and older children are undocumented. It also explores the contested dimensions of immigrant women’s reproduction, as related in particular to debates regarding birthright citizenship and so-called “anchor babies” as a path to citizenship. Finally, it turns do a discussion of the gendered dimensions of political activity for those who are able to secure citizenship. Theoretically, therefore, the chapter draws on an intersectional understanding of the gender/race/class system as a set power relations that produces inequalities in the way in which migrants are socially constructed by the state and hence differences in how they experience processes of mobility, settlement, politics, and belonging.
From their inception immigration laws in the US have been shaped by gender ideologies and have in turn generated gendered patterns of mobility.1 In accordance with the middle-class social ideals and morals of the Victorian period, women have been constructed as powerless, deferential, and dependent on men who were correspondingly constructed as the heads of household and breadwinners. Single women with no relationship to a male head of household to assume responsibility for them were often barred from entry for fear that as independent and unattached persons they might fall into prostitution.
In the US, the first restrictive federal immigration law, the Page Act of 1875, fully revealed both gender bias and these moral concerns. This law, which particularly impacted the immigration of Chinese women, was designed to ensure that they were entering the US of their own free will rather than as indentured prostitutes (Hirata 1979). The law contained five sections. The second section stipulated a fine and jail time for anyone who tried to transport any individual from an Asian country into the US against her/his will – a clear response to the anathema that slavery had itself become. The third section stated that bringing any woman into the country for the purpose of prostitution (“for lewd and immoral purposes”) was against the law and subject to fine and jail time. The fourth section forbade the illegal supply of coolie labor and the first section stated that a foreign person convicted of a crime and any woman transported to work as a prostitute in the US would be denied entry. Historians have observed that this law shaped Chinese migration patterns by preventing the entry of most Chinese women. Chinese immigrants, mostly men who outnumbered women by twenty to one during the 1880s, were thus constructed as sojourners and became a “bachelor society.” Men’s efforts to bring their wives to the US were generally met with hostility. Historians have also noted that this law served to “protect” white men – to prevent them for contracting the diseases spread through prostitution and to control their immoral behavior in an American west where prostitution was by no means rare. The law ultimately sustained the institution of monogamous marriage itself (Abrams 2005), controlled Chinese reproduction in the US, and upheld “white values, lives and futures” (Luibheid 2002: 37).
Between 1875 and 1882, as a result of the Page Act, several hundred women were returned to China. And in the year 1882, just prior to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act,2 only 136 of the close to 40,000 Chinese who were admitted to the US were women (Abrams 2005). Ironically, by creating such a gender imbalance in the Chinese immigrant community, the Page Act promulgated “the very vice it purported to be fighting: prostitution” (Abrams 2005: 701, 702). Only after World War II was gender balance restored. Indeed, in the six years following the end of this war close to 90 percent of all Chinese immigrants were women (Abrams 2005).
The gendered moral concerns reflected in the Page Act were equally present in the assessment of entrants at Ellis Island, which opened in 1892. Men and women travelling alone were treated differently upon their arrival. Married women who were travelling on pre-paid tickets were seen as dependants and hence were routinely detained until a husband or other close relative arrived to meet them (Gabaccia 1994: 37). Single women were also detained until a relative appeared to escort them. By contrast, a man on his own and without language skills was processed through to find his own way in the city. Unlike a woman travelling alone, he was not considered likely to become a public charge.
There was always concern about prostitution. If an unmarried woman was pregnant or someone reported that a single woman was sexually active on the ship crossing the ocean, Ellis Island inspectors became concerned. In 1909, 573 immigrants at Ellis Island were detained as prostitutes and 273 were returned to their homelands (Bayor 2014). These actions were reinforced by the 1907 Immigration Act which, while largely directed toward imposing limitations of entry upon those with disabilities or disease or likely to become a public charge for any other reason, had also given further ballast in section two to the exclusion of women and girls who entered the US for purposes of prostitution.3 Women continued to be viewed at this time as dependants of men and hence laws that limited the immigration of individuals who could not support themselves often resulted in greater restrictions on female immigrants, especially those who were single or unaccompanied.
The Immigration Act (or Expatriation Act) of 1907 had other gendered dimensions. In particular it took the principle of coverture, whereby a husband and wife shared a legal identity in marriage, in new directions. As historian Martha Gardner (2005: 14) has written, beginning in 1855 with the Naturalization Act, “any alien woman who wed an American citizen became a citizen by virtue of her marriage, and until the 1920s and 1930s a woman’s citizenship was derivative, through her father as a child and through her husband as a married woman.” In fact this law, which identified foreign wives as the first and sole group of adults to be accorded derivative citizenship, applied only to white women. Further, no reference was made to American women who had married alien men until the 1907 Act which specified that an American-born woman lost her citizenship if she married an alien man. In many ways this was a patriarchal law with a subtext of trying to control whom women married by penalizing them for marrying foreign men, and particularly foreign men (i.e. Asians) who were not eligible for American citizenship (Bredbenner 1998; Cott 1998). Race and gender were complexly intertwined in these citizenship laws. “By law, American women who married foreigners after the 1907 act assumed their husbands’ racial identity as well as his political identity. If he was not a citizen, neither was she. If he was ineligible for naturalization, so was she” (Nicolosi 2001: 2–3).
It was as a result of the 1907 act that the notion of “derivative citizenship” for women was fully codified. Derivative citizenship,
deprived American women of their political birthright: membership in the American polity . . . Derivative citizenship also provided the state with a means to manipulate women’s citizenship in order to obtain the objectives of foreign and domestic policy and of prevailing racial attitudes . . . It reveals an anxiety concerned with guarding both the white American female and the concept of American citizenship. Legally, the American female citizen was any female born in or naturalized by the United States, but ideologically, she was a woman of Anglo descent who embodied the racial and cultural ideals of American identity
(Nicolosi 2001: 1–2)
Derivative citizenship was certainly not unique to the US and as such it suggests the extent to which citizenship itself was gendered as a male attribute.4 Historian Ann Nicolosi goes so far as to argue that this was another form of trafficking in women – that is, trafficking in women’s civic rights! And she observes that there was no consideration of the fact that women might become stateless if they married a man whose own country did not extend citizenship to the foreign wives of its male citizens.
The Expatriation Act remained in place until 1922 when the Cable Act (or Married Women’s Independent Nationality Act) was passed and began to poke holes in some of its elements. The Cable Act, which terminated the loss of citizenship for women (white or black) upon marriage to a foreigner, clearly followed on the heels of extending the right to vote to American women in 1920. It separated marriage and citizenship. While positive for many women, for immigrant women it made the process by which they could enter the US, as the wives of immigrants or as foreign-born wives of the native-born, more challenging. “Immigration and naturalization laws now required that women have independent status as admissible aliens or as permissible citizens” (Gardner 2005: 125). Further, the racial dimensions of limiting rights to citizenship contained in the 1907 act remained in place for several more years. Thus, some immigrant women were excluded based on their race, as were women who were married to men who could not naturalize because of their race. Only in 1931 was this latter provision dropped.5
Japanese immigrants on the west coast were subject to a different set of immigration laws from those that impacted Chinese immigrants. Japanese immigration, primarily of men, began in the late 1880s. Women started to arrive in greater numbers only after 1900. Married men sent for their wives, while single men returned to Japan to find a bride or, quite commonly, arranged a marriage long distance. A tradition of “picture brides” (or marriage by proxy) was established. One such woman comments on the process: “I had but remote ties with him. Yet because of the talks between our close parents and my parents’ approval and encouragement, I decided upon our picture-bride marriage” (quoted in Seller 1981: 54). Another describes the efforts by Japanese husbands to look western and make them look western so as to distinguish themselves from the Chinese who remained in traditional Chinese clothing.
I was immediately outfitted with Western Clothing at Hara’s Clothing Store . . . Because I had to wear a tight corset around my chest, I could not bend forward. I had to have my husband tie my shoe laces. There were some women who fainted because it was too tight . . . In my case, I wore a large hat, a high-necked blouse, a long skirt, a buckled belt around my waist, high-laced shoes, and, of course, for the first time in my life, a brassiere and hip pads.
(quoted in Seller 1981: 56)
Eventually, the Japanese, like the Chinese, became subject to more restrictive immigration policy. The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 to 1908 banned further immigration of Japanese laborers but did permit men who were already in the US to continue to bring over their wives. The picture bride practice continued but remained disconcerting to anti-immigrant white activists concerned that these women would produce US citizen offspring (Sinke 2006b: 298). This concern, emerging from worries about racial purity, and compounded by new charges of the possible immorality of these women, ultimately resulted in further restrictions on immigration from Japan.6 By 1920, the Japanese Government ceased to issue passports to Japanese picture brides in accordance with the “Ladies’ Agreement” with the United States.
Other laws and policies of this period of increasing restrictionism also shaped gendered and racial immigration and citizenship patterns. The Mann Act (or White Slave Traffic Act) of 1910 prohibited the importation or interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes while the Immigration Act of 1910 revised a three-years-after-US-entry limit on the ability to deport any immigrant woman who was found to be practicing prostitution (written into the 1907 Act). In the 1910 Act there was no time limit on deportation if the woman had not become a citizen. Historian Martha Gardner (2005: 79) points out the extent to which moral dictates were given the force of law and caught women in a kind of Catch 22.
Without access to citizenship women, especially those women classed as racial outsiders, were left without legal recourse. Immigrant women accused or suspected of prostitution could not become citizens through marriage to a citizen. Nor in the years after women achieved independent citizenship could women charged with immoral behavior demonstrate the “good moral character” necessary for citizenship. The result was a class of permanent noncitizens.
Once World War I had begun, immigrant men, but not Asians, were offered a path to citizenship through military service. The Immigration Act of 1917 identified “homosexual” as an excluded category, virtually banned all future Asian immigration except for the Japanese and Filipinos, increased the tax paid by new immigrant arrivals, gave immigration officials more discretion in decisions on who might be excluded, and introduced a literacy test for immigrants that stipulated that all immigrants over the age of sixteen had to demonstrate a basic reading comprehension in any language. The literacy requirements impacted women more harshly than men because their literacy rates were often lower than those of men. However, women entering as wives, under coverture policies that defined a woman’s legal, political, and economic status in relation to her husband and that favored family reunification, were exempted from deportation. Thus, it was marriage that gave immigrant women access to the United States (Gardner 2005: 29).
In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act, otherwise known as the National Origins Quota Act, was passed. Influenced by the growing eugenics movement in the US and rising xenophobia, this act put in place a system of quotas based on national origins. It stipulated that only 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality who were resident in the country according to the 1890 census would be admitted. It also barred from admission all those individuals who were prohibited from becoming US citizens, specifically Asians. Finally the annual quota for all immigrants was lowered from 358,000 to 164,000. The National Origins Quota Act was formulated to preserve the racial and ethnic profile of the United States by placing limits on the immigration of individuals who were not of northern European origins and by totally excluding Asians.
During the 1940s and 1950s there were several additional pieces of US immigration legislation, some of which had gendered and racial dimensions that produced inequalities in treatment and access. The Nationality Act of 1940, which stipulated that natural-born American citizens would lose their citizenship if convicted of military desertion during time of war, clearly impacted men more than women and was struck down by the Supreme Court as a violation of the Eighth Amendment. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 but China’s quota was set at only 105 admissions annually. The War Brides Act of 1948 made it possible for US citizen male veterans to sponsor foreign-born fiancées, spouses, and children for entry, laying the foundation for family reunification principles that were to characterize much of post- World War II immigration policy. The 1948 Displaced Persons Act allowed for the admission of 205,000 refugees over two years as quota immigrants. This Act included some technical conditions that were exclusionary toward Catholics and Jews. By 1953 these provisions were dropped and 205,000 refugees were admissible as non-quota immigrants. The McCarren-Walter Act of 1952 lifted the total ban on Asian immigrants but replaced this with very small quotas – 185 for Japan, 105 for China, and 100 for other Asians. There were strict limits on those who could enter from former British colonies – something that helped to contain those who wanted to come to the US from the West Indies. This Act also specified that “subversives”, gays, and lesbians were excludable and deportable – thus retaining sexual orientation as an overt dimension of immigration policy. And finally, in this Act the husbands of American women could be admitted as non-quota immigrants. Thus, while some overt discriminatory measures related to gender, race, and even religion remained in immigration policy, others were removed.
If pre-World War II US immigration laws and policies were hardly gender neutral, the same can be said for those formulated during the latter half of the twentieth century. However, what is different is that while the gender (and racial) biases in immigration and citizenship laws developed between 1850 and 1924 were explicit and overt, the gender biases and inequalities of more recent laws are more subtle. These inequalities impact both legal and undocumented immigrants as well as those seeking political asylum. For example, sociologists Olivia Salcido and Cecilia Menjívar (2012) argue that employment visas (H1B specialized skill visas, H2A temporary agricultural worker visas, or L1 corporate transfer visas) are the most skewed in relation to gender because they are most commonly extended to men. By contrast with employment visas, entry based on family reunification is the most important avenue by which immigrant women legally enter the US. This section treats each of these categories of immigration in turn, occasionally drawing comparisons with policies in other parts of the developed world that manifest similar gender biases.
The US Immigration Act of 1965 (Hart-Cellar Act) replaced the 1924 National Origins Quota Act. The 1965 Act constructed an immigration policy based on principles of family reunification and workplace skills.7 Seven categories of preference for relatives of US citizens and permanent resident aliens were established. Two categories of immigrants not subject to numerical restrictions were identified: immediate relatives (spouses, children, parents) of US citizens; and special immigrants such as certain former employees of the US government abroad and certain individuals who had lost citizenship (by marriage or by serving in a foreign armed service). The Act retained numerical restrictions, limiting Eastern hemisphere entrants to 170,000 and capping Western hemisphere entrants to 120,000. But neither preference categories nor the 20,000/country limit applied to the Western hemisphere figure.
Sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (2011: 224) has astutely observed that while we generally consider the 1965 Immigration Act to be a liberal piece of immigration legislation because it definitively ended Asian racial exclusion and placed legal family immigration at the center, it can also be considered exclusionary “because it reifies a narrow heterosexual definition of family”. It also continued to construct women primarily as dependants upon male breadwinner migrants. They enter as wives of the primary migrant. Some scholars have observed that this law, formulated with an American understanding of marriage, discriminates against women who come from countries where common law unions are widespread (Menjívar and Salcido 2013). Women in such unions find it hard to offer proof of the longevity of their relationships. Further, family reunification policies often require extended waiting periods; rather than wait in the country of origin, some women (and children) have entered the US without papers, and thus become even more dependent on a sponsoring husband. In addition, even women who have joined their husbands legally must often refrain from working until a work permit is issued. This also increases dependence, can cause family hardship, or opens the possibility for exploitation on the part of employers who know that a woman does not have papers and hence has little recourse to complain about low wages or poor working conditions.
An example at the other end of the class spectrum that explicitly demonstrates the vulnerability of women who enter the US in a dependent status associated with family reunification policies is offered by legal scholar Jacqueline Bhabha (2009: 187–188). She discusses the case of a British widow of a trader killed on September 11, 2001. This woman left her country to follow a husband who had taken a job in the United States. Her visa was dependent on that of her British husband. After his death, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service took steps to deport her despite the fact that she had two children who were born in the United States. She had no rights of her own as caretaker to these two young American citizens. Her right to be in the US was dependent on that of her husband who was now dead. Only after the personal interventions of prominent individuals, including Tony Blair and Hillary Clinton, was she granted a green card in accordance with a special provision of the USA Patriot Act that permitted foreign-born spouses of 9/11 victims to apply for residency. As Bhabha writes (2009: 188), “high-profile leverage, British heritage, and the sympathy surrounding the events of September 11 resulted in these two American children being spared the trauma of being uprooted from their country or being separated from their mother.” Such privileges might not be extended to persons of color or lower social class, indicating the racial and classist dimensions of these special exceptions. However, more broadly the case illustrates powerfully the problems with dependent visas and with regulations that often prohibit women from securing jobs and their own independent visa status.
These same subtle gendered biases are present in the policies of other major western receiving nations. For example, geographer Margaret Walton-Roberts (2004) writes about the Canadian system and its discriminatory effect on immigrant women who are sponsored by their husbands. This system “exacerbates their unequal status within the marriage, diminishes their dignity and degree of independence, aggravates existing socio-economic disadvantages and violates their most basic human rights” (p. 270). Walton-Roberts describes a reformulation of these policies that occurred in the first decade of the twenty-first century to address the gendered inequities in the law, particularly as they related to marriage. In essence, the Canadian government has implemented a gender-based analysis to evaluate the differential impact of policies on men and women and to identify any inequities in their formulation and implementation. However, it is often the case that gender discrepancies are only amended when there is public pressure to do so and when the changes are acceptable economically (p. 274). This pressure has often come from immigrant women “actively exercising their citizenship rights and benefiting from state-based political rights” (Walton-Roberts 2004: 279).
A second dimension of Canadian immigration policy that appears to have a differential gendered impact is the point system.8 Several authors have noted that this system often results in a deskilling process that impacts immigrant women in particular because they often enter the country as dependants on their husbands who are the primary immigration applicants. Sociologist Guida Man (2004; see also Iredale 2005) illustrates this impact among highly educated Chinese women who have migrated to Canada since the late 1980s. As a result of employer requirements for “Canadian experience”, as well as professional accreditation systems, and other gendered and racialized state policies and practices, these Chinese women find themselves channeled into menial or part-time employment or remain unemployed. This situation is then exacerbated by other factors – the absence of a support network to help with childcare and other domestic responsibilities; a diminished earning power which makes it more difficult to pay for daycare; and the lack of English-language skills, which diminishes the professional qualifications they have. Man argues that state policies need to be changed to halt this brain-drain/deskilling process.
In the European Union marriage and family reunification are now the primary basis for legal entry for women, although prior to 1973 countries such as Germany and France were recruiting women to work in particular industries – the electronics industry, for example (Lutz 1997: 103). The policies for reunification are however quite stringent in many European countries, requiring, for example, proof of uninterrupted residence for five to eight years, having a minimum income level, and a minimum contract for future employment of a year or more. In addition, couples sometimes have to prove the quality of their relationship, and demonstrate that they have access to adequate housing for the family. If a spouse dies, a wife being sponsored is often left in a precarious position. Sociologist Helen Lutz (1997: 104) points out that family unification regulations in host societies often use a nuclear family definition of the family.
For some immigrant groups this has led to the isolation of women from their family networks. Social parenthood (custody and care for children by the extended family, including nephews and nieces) or the active involvement of grandmothers in childcare, which are features of many immigrant groups’ cultures, are not accepted by the current regulations.
In general, then, these European policies of immigration, like their American counterparts, are built on an assumption of a male breadwinner and place women in vulnerable positions as non-working dependants responsible for the domestic sphere and child-rearing.
The emphasis on family reunification in post-1965 immigration has made marriage a focus of controversy. Are individuals using marriage as a way to secure permanent residence status (a green card); that is, paying someone to participate in a marriage of convenience and act as the sponsor for the individual interested in immigration? The marriage then terminates after a successful entry with legal papers in place. This “fraudulent marriage” scenario was the theme of the popular 1990s film “Green Card” starring Andie McDowell and Gerard Depardieu, the former playing the role of the US citizen wife, the latter that of the would-be immigrant. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has estimated that between one-fifth and one-third of marriages between US citizens and immigrants are fraudulent, although there is often no way of knowing for sure and no way of knowing how many involve American citizen wives versus American citizen husbands. It is important to emphasize that there are barriers in place to make such marriages as a path to legal immigration difficult. In 1986 the United States passed the marriage fraud amendments to the Immigration Act. Penalties for those who were involved in “sham marriages” were increased and a two-year provisional green card was created for immigrant spouses of citizens and permanent residents.9
This questioning of the legitimacy of marriages is also prevalent in other national contexts. For example, in the early 1990s Asian men were refused entrance into Britain at a high rate (86 percent in 1991 and 84 percent in 1992) because they were suspected of arranging marriages of convenience in order to enter the country (Lutz 1997: 103). Eventually, the interrogation system that yielded this result was abolished on the grounds of gender discrimination. Other countries placed minimum lengths of time on marriages before an application for family reunification could be filed. Thus, as in the US, suspicion of fraudulent marriages often guides evaluations of family reunification petitions, particularly when men are applying to join a wife already in the country of immigration. There is an inherent gendered bias in which marriages are more subject to suspicion of fraud and hence more scrutiny, again rooted in an idea that men should be the primary immigrants.
Some scholars have examined the effects of the legalization process on immigrant families as well as the gendered dimensions of mixed-status families. Both of these are important aspects of late twentieth-century immigration to the US where the number of undocumented immigrants has risen to approximately eleven million.
Within Mexican families it is often wives who push for family reunification, frequently leaving home villages of their own accord (with or without their children and generally without documents) to join husbands living in the US. However, once they arrive they find themselves dependent on husbands who may already have legal residence or citizenship and who are therefore the ones who must file all the paper work to legalize a wife’s status (Hagan 1994). This was a common scenario after the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) – an act that extended amnesty and a path to legalization for all immigrants in the US who could prove they had been living and working in the country for five years prior to the implementation of this law.
IRCA legalized close to three million undocumented immigrants, most of them from Mexico and Central America. Many husbands began to sponsor their wives and families once they had obtained a green card (legal permanent residency) for themselves. Others brought their families but failed to proceed with the paper work, leaving their wives and children in legal limbo and vulnerable. Prior to IRCA about one quarter of all migrants were undocumented women; during the period of transition when IRCA was being implemented that proportion increased to one third (Massey et al. 2002). Several scholars have documented cases of abuse among women who entered the country illegally and whose spouses then failed to pursue legal status for them. A husband may threaten his wife with deportation (i.e. informing “la migra” that she is in the country illegally) if she does anything contrary to his wishes, including reporting physical violence. Salcido and Menjívar (2012: 349) observe that women “whose presence is not formally recognized even when they contribute monetarily (including through paying taxes), who are not ‘attached’ to a family member who has LPR [legal permanent residence] or is a US citizen . . . , or who are ‘attached’ but the LPR or US citizen is unwilling to petition for them, have little if any chance of regularizing their status.”
IRCA was supposed to halt the entry and hiring of illegal immigrants to the US. But, during the 1990s, with the US economy booming and no further opportunities for amnesty, millions more Mexicans and Central Americans, many of them single and married men, entered the country without papers. After 2001, the border between Mexico and the US was tightened, breaking the pattern of easy back and forth movement that had been characteristic of the 1990s. Men, the primary migrants, stopped returning to Mexico to visit their wives and children and began instead to smuggle their families into the US. As a result, numerous families of mixed legal status were created.
Sociologists Michael Fix and Wendy Zimmerman (2001) found that one in ten US families were mixed-status families (that is, a family where at least one immigrant parent is unauthorized and at least one child is a US citizen) at the end of the 1990s10 and that 75 percent of children in immigrant families are citizens. By the end of the next decade, demographers Jeffrey Passel and Paul Taylor (2010) were reporting that 79 percent of the 5.1 million children of unauthorized immigrants who were younger than eighteen were born in the US and hence US citizens. Further, 37 percent of all adult unauthorized immigrants were parents of children who are US citizens. The number of US-born children in mixed-status families expanded from 2.7 million in 2003 to 4 million in 2008, while the number of children who are unauthorized themselves (1.5 million in 2008) hardly changed in five years.
These families face any number of challenges, many of them exacerbated by changing immigration policies. As Fix and Zimmerman observe (2001: 398), laws that have made it increasingly difficult to adjust from an illegal to legal status have fixed individuals in a particular status, thereby perpetuating these legally unstable families as well as the categorization of one or both parents as forever “outsiders” who do not belong. This creates serious inequities. Citizen children in mixed-status families may not have the same opportunities and access to resources that are accorded to those in families where everyone is a citizen. Mixed-status families comprised 40 percent of low-income families in California at the end of the 1990s and 20 percent of low-income families in New York. Twenty-one percent of all uninsured children nationwide in the late 1990s lived in mixed-status families (Fix and Zimmerman 2001: 402). Fix and Zimmerman suggest that welfare reforms and immigration laws have in effect created two classes of citizens – those eligible for benefits and those ineligible. Within one family some children may be eligible and others not, a situation that generates inequality and divisiveness (Pine and Drachman 2005; Glick 2010). Further, undocumented parents may simply be afraid to apply for benefits for their children, even those who are eligible, because they are afraid of being detected and deported.
Certainly, as the twenty-first century has unfolded, unauthorized parents have faced the increasing risk of deportation. Between 1990 and 1995, deportations averaged approximately 40,000 per year; from 1996 to 2005 the figure rose to an average of more than 180,000 per year (Hagan et al. 2008: 66). In 2005, more than 200,000 were deported, the majority of them citizens of Mexico but also including significant numbers of Central Americans. Recent reports have estimated that approximately 600,000 children have been separated from one or both parents as a result of deportation policies that have been implemented aggressively under the Obama administration.11 The majority of these children are US citizens. Deportation destabilizes families and impacts parents’ emotional well-being, their relationships with their children, and overall household finances (Thronson 2008; Brabeck and Xu 2010).
Legal scholar Jacqueline Bhabha (2009: 188) describes the case of a Guatemalan woman who was arrested and handcuffed in front of her US citizen husband and eight-year-old daughter. She was deported to Guatemala, having missed a hearing to regularize her status in immigration court because the notification that she received listed the date incorrectly. She was in Guatemala staying with a friend. The family had little recourse. Bhabha observes, in relation to this case, and that of the British widow discussed above, that “from the perspective of international human rights, both mothers and children experienced a radical rights deficit. In one case, government discretion was exercised in favor of family unity, in the other case it was not – a bonus for the privileged white family but a casualty for the working-class Hispanic one. In both cases, the parent’s legal and social credentials rather than the child’s nationality were the deciding factor” (Bhabha 2009: 188–189).
Sociologists Jacqueline Hagan, Karl Eschbach, and Nestor Rodrigues (2008) have explored the implications of deportations on Salvadoran families, some of whom were long-time settlers in the US. They found that the majority of deportees were young and male, demonstrating that deportations are gendered. Women are at less risk of removal because “migrants are generally apprehended at locations where males dominate in number and are more visible to the official eye, such as ports of entry, prisons, labor pools, public streets and job sites” (Hagan et al. 2008: 71). But they do observe that Mexican women are more likely to be apprehended and deported because they are more likely to enter the US without documentation. And in a follow-up study (Hagan et al. 2011: 1383) of Latinos in North Carolina a particularly poignant case of the impact of a female deportation is presented:
In summer 2008, a Latina business owner in Johnston County, Veronica, was approached by a sister of one of her customers with an unusual request.
The sister had a 9–year-old boy and a baby with her. The mother of the children, Veronica’s customer, had been arrested for driving without a license and deported. The deported woman was a single mother and her children were left with her sister who was unable to care for them, since she was unemployed and living with a friend. Veronica . . . decided to take in the 9–year-old boy but not the 6–month-old baby. As she explained, “I can’t keep an infant in the restaurant and there is no one at home to care for it. The boy still lives with me but he is sad, shy, and regularly cries for his mother and baby brother.” His mother has not been able to get back to the States.
Deportations have not only disrupted stable families in the US, they have also impacted families in the home country by rupturing the flow of remittances sent back to support those left behind, including elderly parents.12 In the research sample of 300 Salvadorans studied by Jacqueline Hagan and her colleagues (Hagan et al. 2008), 31 percent were living with a spouse and child in the US prior to being deported to El Salvador. Further, 73 percent of deportees with children in the research sample reported having a child under the age of eighteen living in the US (90 percent of these children were American-born). Thus, if it is the breadwinner who is deported, he leaves the family, which may include US citizen children, in a precarious situation and potentially more dependent on government services. On the other hand, if the individual deported left his family in El Salvador, he is reunited with them after deportation but this family too may face hardship if they were dependent on the remittances that the breadwinner father had been sending back from the US.
Those who have left families behind in the US express an intention to return as soon as they can, generally illegally. Hagan and her co-authors thus observe that the practice of deportation has in fact created a circular migration pattern. It does not stop illegal immigration, it just raises the costs for migrants and for their families; it “undermine[s] long-standing family reunification principles of US immigration policies” (p. 85) and disrupts communities. Deportation policies are hence full of irony and have gendered impacts.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 also introduced employer sanctions as a mechanism for supposedly halting future undocumented immigration. As a result of this Act, all employers are now required to ask for proof of the right to work (and by extension legal status in the US) from employees and are subject to fines if they knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. They are required to fill out an Employment Eligibility Verification Form. Few employers have been fined and there is always the possibility that they can claim they saw documents and that it was reasonable evidence. This aspect of IRCA has also had some gendered impacts. For example, sociologists Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum (2000) have demonstrated that male immigrant workers, after the implementation of employer sanctions, have gravitated to the garment industry. Prior to this legislation these undocumented and mostly male workers were able to find work in manufacturing jobs that paid better. But after sanctions the larger manufacturing plants as well as some non-immigrant industries tended to enforce the legal documents requirement and hence male immigrants were driven into the underground and informal economy.
The gendered dimensions of undocumented immigrants are present in other national contexts. The best example are the so-called “sans papiers” (without papers) of France. As feminist scholar Catherine Raissiguier (2010: 2) has argued, increasingly restrictive immigrant policies have transformed large numbers of immigrants into clandestins – illegal immigrants. As a result of the repressive Pasqua laws of 1993, several categories of immigrants (for example, asylum seekers who had had their files rejected, spouses or children of legal immigrants, parents of children born in France) could not regularize their status. Family reunification policies that had long been in place in France became more restrictive.
Immigrants who file a family reunification request on behalf of family members now need to document at least two years (instead of one) of legal sojourn in France and their ability to meet appropriate personal housing resource requirements. The 1993 immigration law demands that family reunification happen in one unique step. No longer can immigrants bring family members incrementally over time as their social standing improves and they are better able to meet the necessary housing and income requirements. The Pasqua laws of 1993 also prohibited the entry of polygamous families into France through the process of family reunification . . . It also prohibited the renewal of residency permits of foreigners in polygamous situations.
(Raissiguier (2010: 62–63)
These laws increased the legal vulnerability of immigrant women in particular. Not only was legal reunification harder to attain, but papers could be rescinded in cases of divorce or estrangement. If an individual became illegal, they were deportable. Mothers of French children are protected from deportation but they are nevertheless undocumented and hence unable to work and unable to claim health and other social benefits. The undocumented population in France, as a result, became increasingly feminized. They comprised a large portion of the sans papiers. Many of the women in this situation were African women, some of whom had no economic resources of their own and others of whom worked illegally for low wages in difficult conditions in sweatshops, as domestic workers, in the informal small-business economy, or as sex workers.
Raissiguier’s research focuses largely on the political activism of the sans-papiers – men and women – to protest the repressive immigration laws, their undocumented status, and their potential deportation. Her discussion is framed within a broader analysis of the construction of the immigrant woman as a threat to the nation – a discussion that also includes reference to the “head-scarf debate” (l’affaire du foulard) that erupted in 1989 and that has continued. “The wearing of Islamic scarves in French schools, polygamy, arranged marriages, and female genital cutting are important threads within anti-immigrant discourse that present North and sub-Saharan Africans as undesirable immigrants who are unwilling or unable to assimilate into French culture” (Raissiguier 2010: 33).13 Thus, like scholars who have worked on the US context of immigration and citizenship laws, Raissiguier also sees the powerful gender (and also racial) biases contained in immigration laws (in this case of France) that are presumed to be gender neutral, biases that disproportionately impact women, frequently locking them into domestic roles within a traditional sphere, and enhancing their precarious economic and social status.14 Similar biases characterize refugee and political asylum laws.
The United Nations Convention of 1951 defines a refugee as any person who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence . . . is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it” [Geneva Convention 1951 (Refugee Status), Art 1A (2)].
The language of this convention is masculinist, written with a male asylee subject in mind. As sociologist Jane Freedman (2012: 48) has observed, the UN Convention was first formulated at a time when gender equality and women’s rights “were far from the center stage of politics, and particularly international politics. More seriously, the high commissioner’s observation that he could not envisage persecution on the grounds of sex seems to have endured in many interpretations of the Convention, and the male model of rights on which it was based has in many cases not been challenged in its implementation.” More recently, a number of scholars have begun to critique the UN Convention for not focusing sufficiently on gender-specific and gender-based forms of persecution and violence and for not considering women a particular social group (Inlender 2009; Freedman 2012).15
Many of the gendered claims for asylum are legally invisible, deemed the result of private sphere rather than public sphere persecution. Private sphere persecution is not considered relevant to refugee and asylum law (Freedman 2012: 50). Legal scholar Talia Inlender (2009) engages the pros and cons of this status quo position, arguing that gender-specific claims can be dealt with under the current five categories for granting asylum (race, nationality, religion, political opinion, membership of a particular social group), but that gender-based claims might call for an additional or sixth ground for political asylum. But the fact of the matter is that it is only recently that gender-specific asylum claims have been recognized, and, even so, this recognition is rare. Further, scholars have noted that while women and children outnumber adult males as refugees in developing countries that neighbor their country of origin, male asylum seekers outnumber females in developed countries. “Women historically have had less access than men have had to the formal and informal structures that facilitate migration . . . and this lack of access along with their dependent family status, personal history, and social positioning” (Kerber 2009: 88–89) is a barrier to individual flight and hence the possibility of asking for asylum in a western democracy.
These issues are very much the subject of current debate, and social scientists have only recently begun to focus their attention on the gendered dimensions of asylum-seeking as it is experienced by those who have fled their countries. Few Central Americans seeking asylum in the United States are successful with their applications but it appears that the law has been more on the side of men’s experiences with political persecution as a result of their direct involvement in conflict than with the often more indirect experiences with political violence to which women were subjected (Salcido and Menjívar 2012: 342). Not only was recognition of the level of persecution and fear that women have suffered an obstacle, so too were recognition of the precise forms of persecution specific to information and access to information about them, since women do not always appear on registration lists in their own right but rather as members of family groups. “As the United Nations admits and scholars of gender and refugee law indicate . . . the problem is not only that the lack of the use of the terms sex and gender in the UN Convention of 1951 (on which the 1980 US Refugee Act is based) creates the exclusion of gender-specific needs, but also once again that the perspective and interpretation of a framework based on male experiences reproduce gendered hierarchies and serve to maintain a heteropatriarchal state” (Salcido and Menjívar 2012: 363–364).
The gendered biases in political asylum law pertain as well to refugee laws. Nahla Valji and her colleagues (Valji et al. 2003: 61) observe that refugee women “have not been afforded anything like the protection offered refugee men in refugee-receiving countries throughout the globe, particularly in the developed world.” They emphasize that until recently refugees were considered male almost by default, while women and children were part of a “family package” with a derivative status which makes them vulnerable. These authors point to media reports in refugee-receiving countries of the North of a rise in domestic abuse on the part of husbands who are aware of the power they have over their wives as a result of the refugee determination process. Wives may lose this status if they leave their husbands or they may lose access to public funds. Only recently have agencies and other gatekeepers come to recognize that women may be at special risk and should be addressed in their own right.
The issues of asylum law that are addressed in the context of the United States are also of concern elsewhere around the world. Thus, writing about South Africa, Middleton (2010) observes that this is one of the few countries that brought gender into prominence as a seventh ground for asylum as a result of its 2008 Refugee Act. However, distinctions between the political and the personal often remain part of decisions about who is granted asylum – gendered claims, as mentioned above, are frequently deemed personal and generally dismissed. Further, gendered harm is often only viewed as persecution “when it occurs during the time of an officially recognized conflict, or where it can be associated with a foreign culture, or cultural backwardness” (p. 68). As a result, female genital mutilation is often viewed as persecution and a basis for asylum, while rape, forced marriage, and domestic violence are not. The United Kingdom has recently tightened some of the grounds for asylum claims despite the fact that the UN Convention has been opened up to more gender-based claims, allowing that sexual violence that is the result of civil war and conflict, even when perpetrated by nonstate actors, can be potential grounds for asylum, while ordinary domestic or sexual violence (i.e. “harmful cultural practices”) is not (Chantler 2010).
What has happened in the United Kingdom is also occurring in the European Union and has created particular challenges for women seeking asylum on the basis of gender-related persecution (Freedman 2012). Asylum seekers are very often constructed as a threat to the states of the global north that increasingly see themselves as being overrun by those seeking refuge whether for political or economic reasons. The securitization of borders has taken precedence over the security protection sought by those leaving their homelands because of war and conflict. While the European Parliament adopted a resolution in 1984 urging member states to consider women a particular social group and hence to consider gender-specific persecutions, in general European states have shown resistance. As a result, the voices of women asylum seekers in particular fall on deaf ears. Where they are heard, women have often been forced to “present themselves as idealized ‘victims’ of ‘barbaric’ other cultures in order to have any chance of receiving protection under refugee regimes” (Freedman 2012: 45). This, sociologist Jane Freedman argues, deprives them of any political agency and essentializes gender differences. “It fixes an opposition between ‘them’ and ‘us’, between ‘Western women’ and ‘Other women’, which might obscure the real structures of gender inequalities in different societies and the reasons for the persecutions that women suffer as a result” (Freedman 2012: 56).
In the European Union women comprise about one third of total asylum claimants. They face more difficulties leaving their countries because they have fewer financial resources and the primary responsibility for children. They are more susceptible to the violence of smugglers, including sexual violence. They may be persecuted for political activities, but they may also be persecuted, Freedman (2012: 50) argues, for less overt political activities “such as sheltering people, providing food or medical care” or for “not conforming to religious and social norms”. They may even fear persecution and violence for simply being the spouse of or related to a male who is considered a political dissident. These forms of persecution are rarely considered by countries of the European Union even though refusing female circumcision or forced sterilization can be constructed as highly political acts. Thus, “rape and violence are often effectively normalized, and considered as part of the universal relations between men and women. This normalization or relegation of rape to a private affair between individuals means that it might not be taken seriously when women make claims for asylum” (Freedman 2012: 51). In other words, sexual violence often goes unrecognized as a tool of war and political oppression. Few European states have responded to the range of gender guidelines formulated by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in recent years to accommodate gendered persecutions in their determinations for granting asylum and if they have been adopted their implementation is rarely consistent.
In summary, the feminist critiques of asylum and refugee policies are broadly rooted in concerns about both the masculinist and universalistic dimensions of the UN Convention. Female forms of persecution are evaluated according to masculine forms of dissidence and universalism fails to accommodate the cultural diversity in gender norms and ideologies. Further, a western model of rights is held up as the standard. The result is that many women are denied access to international protection.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US constitution, ratified on July 9, 1868, extended citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the US. This amendment firmly established what is referred to as “birthright citizenship” or jus soli citizenship. Other nations have had a principle of jus sanguinis citizenship – that is citizenship by blood relationship or ethnic heritage.16 In relationship to immigration, this principle of citizenship has occasionally caused controversy, particularly in relation to women’s fertility and so-called anchor babies. Specifically, the argument is that women, and particularly pregnant women, enter the US, often without documents, in order to have their child in the territory of the United States. These children are then automatically American citizens and can “anchor” the family. That is, when they reach adulthood, as natural-born citizens, they can help their parents to acquire legal citizenship. Conversely, if undocumented parents are deported, by extension one is also deporting American citizens – that is, children who have been born in and have grown-up in the United States and who have no necessary relationship to the country of their parents’ birth. There is a not insubstantial segment of the US population that, given the thorniness of these scenarios, wishes to deny the privilege of birthright citizenship to those born of individuals who enter the country illegally – women, and their bodies, are hence at the center of a critical debate regarding immigration and citizenship.17
Women migrants, from this perspective, are constructed not as workers but as reproducing mothers (Gutierrez 2008). As part of what anthropologist Leo Chavez (2008) dubs the “Latino Threat narrative” these women, most of them from Mexico, are identified as individuals who cross the border between Mexico and the US and bear large numbers of children. They, and their families, so the narrative goes, are a burden on our institutions and our welfare system, including the public hospitals where they give birth.
Anthropologist Phyllis Chock (1995) quotes Congressional Testimony of the mid 1980s – leading up to the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 – on precisely these issues, thereby illustrating the extent to which anti-immigrant sentiments at this time were rooted in concerns about the reproductive capacities of Mexican immigrant and Mexican-origin women:
The district I represent . . . is but a few hours away from the porous United States–Mexico border . . . Approximately 70 percent . . . of the babies born in country [sic] hospitals are to undocumented alien women. These babies are automatically American citizens, and are therefore eligible for all the welfare benefits available to any US citizen.
(William E. Dannemeyer, R, CA, Congressional Record, 1986: p. H9729; quoted in Chock 1995: 173)
I am told 80 percent of all children born in Los Angeles County public hospitals are born to illegal alien mothers – 80 percent!
(Harry Reid, D, NV [added remarks], Congressional Record, 1986: p. H9775; quoted in Chock 1995:173)
As Chock emphasizes, these testimonies clearly indicate the idea that the fertility of women is considered by many of these Congressmen as a threat to the nation. “Women and children figured here as signs of social disorder. In the talk about fertility, women (women of color, in particular Caribbean, Mexican, Central American) were also silent tokens for speakers’ fears – to be confirmed or allayed – about population growth and its effects on quality of life and national unity” (p. 174). Chock rather astutely observes that the preference for many of these speakers would be to keep this uncontrollable reproduction of labor power (“female, natural instinctual”) outside the United States, while maintaining an immigration policy that was rational, administrative, and market-driven (masculine?) and that brought adult, and primarily male laborers to the United States to work (p. 174).
These fears of massive births and overpopulation were not allayed even by demographers called in to testify who tried to assure the members of Congress that the fertility of immigrants soon comes to resemble that of the general American population. While IRCA was passed, the Latino Threat Narrative did not disappear, making it necessary for anthropologist Leo Chavez to take it on again two decades later and to demonstrate once more that apocalyptic assumptions about out-of-control Latina reproduction has no basis in fact (Chavez 2007; Chavez 2008). He notes that fertility rates in Mexico have been declining, “from 7 to 8 children before 1970, to 4.4 by 1980 . . . to 3.4 in 1990 . . . to 2.4 children per Mexican woman in 2000” (Chavez 2007: 71). Similarly, the average number of children born to Mexican-origin women living in the United States also declined such that by the final years of the twentieth century they were averaging 1.81 children per woman between eighteen and forty-four years of age. Within the Hispanic population, however, the foreign-born do tend to have higher rates of fertility than the native-born (3.1 versus 2.3 in 2008) (Passel and Taylor 2010).
In his own research, on Latinos in Orange County, California, Chavez shows that (1) Latina immigrants were more likely to report having had two or fewer sexual partners compared with Anglo women who reported having five or more; (2) Anglos were more likely than Latinas to have their first child after age twenty-five but for Latinas the mean age for having a first child was 21.6; and (3) Both Latinas and Anglo women in prime childbearing years (eighteen to forty-four) had fewer than 2.0 children per woman and those who are of Mexican origin who migrated as adults have slightly more children on average than do those who migrated as children (Chavez 2007: 81–85). Clearly, he concludes, the evidence does not support rampant and out-of-control reproduction. “The politics of Latina fertility have obscured a rather dramatic story of reproduction over the last thirty years. Latinas and Anglos both have fewer children today than they did three decades ago” (p. 88). Chavez ends by calling for an alternative discussion about the relationship between immigration and fertility – one that focuses on the value of children to reproduce the population of a nation. Many immigration scholars have suggested that the United States does not share a critical problem faced by other western democracies, the aging of their populations, precisely because of immigration.
In general, the fears about anchor babies and out-of-control Latina reproduction are unfounded. As legal scholar Jacqueline Bhabha (2009: 197) asserts, it is hard to prove that having an anchor baby is the sole motive for immigration. Further, she argues, the birthright citizenship repeal argument “seems to ignore the economic roles that migrant women play, casting them essentially as breeders” when they are anything but. And yet this argument endures, in the US and elsewhere. Perhaps the most vocal recent debate outside the US has occurred in Ireland, resulting in a shift away from birthright citizenship with the passage of the Irish Nationality Law of 2004 (Smith 2008). Much of the debate in Ireland emerged from discussion of the motives of childbearing female asylum seekers, most of them from Africa. Eithne Luibheid (2004) argues that the discourses and practices that targeted these women provided the opportunity for the Irish government to set itself up as the legitimate defender of “the sovereign Irish nation while at the same time reconfiguring racial and ethnic hierarchies” (p. 335).
Ireland has always been a country of emigration, but the economic boom that it began to experience in the 1990s began to attract immigrants and after that those seeking political asylum. The number of asylum seekers in the country rose above 1000 in 1996 and just eight years later it reached over 11,000. Nigerians were the largest group seeking asylum, followed by Romanians. Policies about how to handle them eventually resulted in a Direct Provision Program which is characterized by a strict set of rules and regulations. Individuals are provided with a bed, three meals/day, and health care. They cannot look for alternative accommodation, they cannot work, and adults cannot attend full-time education or training. They receive a weekly allowance calculated at a different rate for adults and children. They cannot travel outside Ireland without permission. Asylum seekers are, in essence, “largely excluded from meaningful participation in Irish life” (Luibheid 2004: 337). Faced with these restrictions, childbearing became a more reliable path to legalization. Irish law, until it was changed in 2004, made it possible to apply for residency based on the birth of a child who was automatically an Irish citizen and had a “right to the company, care, and nurture of her or his parents” (p. 338). One could move into different accommodations and have access to certain benefits once pregnant.
The debates surrounding this right began to emerge in the 1990s. Childbearing on the part of asylum seekers was portrayed as being out of control and with the potential to erode Irish sovereignty. The maternity residency clause associated with birthright citizenship was portrayed as a “mechanism for invasion and colonization” (p. 338), with women gaining entry so that they could have a child and enjoy the benefits of the Irish state. This discourse, Luibheid (2004: 340) argues, conveyed “beliefs and concerns about crime, welfare abuse, cynical exploitation, cultural dilution, economic difficulties, and a crisis of national sovereignty. What was so striking was that all these themes become linked through non-national asylum seeker women’s bodies, which were reduced to their sex organs and reproductive capacities.” Many viewed government action against them as a legitimate defense. The result, in this case, was the revoking of birthright citizenship with the enactment of the Irish Nationality Law of 2004.18 What is important here is how similar the debates are in the US and Ireland and that they perpetuate ideas that have long been present – to use immigration and citizenship laws as a way to control women’s bodies, and by extension to control, overtly or more indirectly, the racial boundaries and hierarchies of the nation.
A second issue revolving around women’s bodies that raises a question of how much attitudes have really changed in the US since the formulation of immigration laws at the beginning of the twentieth century relates to anti-trafficking legislation. In 2000, during the waning months of the Clinton presidency, the US Congress passed HR 3244 – the Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act. As sociologist Wendy Chapkis (2003) points out, this law was a welcome relief from the series of anti-immigrant legislation that had been passed prior to it, including the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), and the USA Patriot Act of 2001.19 However, close examination reveals that the Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act was not as charitable as a first glance might suggest. This Act, while exempting a small number of severely abused and exploited immigrants who had been trafficked from the punitive immigration and welfare reform measures of the late 1990s (by providing visas, work permits, welfare support ,and other special protections, and even the possibility of a green card for qualified victims and their families), it in fact mobilized
anxieties surrounding sexuality and gender in the service of immigration control . . . Language within and surrounding the [Trafficking Victims’ Protection Act] works to neatly divide “violated innocents” from “illegal immigrants” along the lines of sex and gender. Trafficking victims, described as vulnerable women and children forced from the safety of their home/homelands into gross sexual exploitation are distinguished from economic migrants who are understood to be men who have willfully violated national borders for individual gain. The law justifies offering protection to the former and punishment to the latter.
(Chapkis 2003: 924)
It does this by stirring up “a moral panic about ‘sexual slavery’ created through slippery statistics and sliding definitions”, by differentiating between “innocent” and “guilty” prostitutes, and by requiring that victims would receive aid only if they helped in the prosecution of traffickers (p. 924–925). It is intriguing to reflect on this legislation in relation to the legislation of the early twentieth-century US which was also focused on the question of women’s bodies and women’s agency in relation to prostitution.
It is impossible to leave this discussion of gender and racial biases in immigration and citizenship laws without a comment on the highly gendered policy (the National Security-Entry-Exit Registration System) that emerged in the United States after 9/11. It was announced and implemented in June of 2002. This policy required Arab and Muslim men aged 16 and older to register their presence in the country with the authorities. Those who failed to comply faced criminal and immigration penalties – they could be deemed to have violated their visas making them subject to removal, barring them from receiving future visas and prohibiting them from adjusting their status to permanent residency. Further, failure to notify the Department of Justice of a change in address was classified as a misdemeanor offense (Chishti and Bergeron 2011).
This program was an overt example of racial, religious, and gender profiling, targeting male non-citizens of a particular age and from predesignated countries. While the Department of Homeland Security scaled back the program in 2003 (for example, no longer requiring “check-ins” with immigration officials and filing information about changes of address), it was not fully terminated until the spring of 2011. During that time it came under criticism from any number of civil and human rights group, politicians, law enforcement experts, and the media. Between 2002 and 2003, of the approximately 85,000 individuals who were interviewed and registered, only 11 were found to have ties to terrorism and just under 14,000 were placed in removal proceedings. A number of lawsuits were filed challenging the constitutionality of the policy but in general federal district courts across the US ruled in its favor, as did the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008 (Chishti and Bergeron 2011).
Although this registration policy has been discontinued, while it was in place it made the lives of many Arab and Muslim men difficult and for some the legacy of the policy remains. Several years ago The New York Times (Dolnick 2011) reported the case of Mohammed G. Azam, a 26–year-old Bangladeshi who came to the US when he was 9 years old. When he registered in Manhattan in 2003 officials began deportation proceedings because he was in the country illegally. His father had applied for permanent resident status in 2001 (Azam was 16) through a program that permitted immigrants to pay a fine of $1000 and clear their records of any visa-related violations. Because of the backlog, his father’s approval did not come through until 2007 and by this time Mr. Azam was an adult. His father was able to sponsor his wife and daughter but not his son because he was now too old.
As of 2011, Mr. Azam was still caught in this net after numerous hearings. A small business owner with a college degree, Azam reported “big plans” which he was fearful of executing because the prospect of deportation still hung over his head. Judges have ruled in his favor but the immigration agency stands firm. In 2011, Mr. Azam commented to the New York Times reporter: “One-third of my life has gone to this immigration process. I grew up here. This is my country.”
In response to a broader literature on gendered differences in political engagement, scholars of immigration have begun to examine this issue for the most recent migrants to the United States. The broader literature tends to find that women are less politically engaged than are men. Is this also the case among immigrant populations? Jamal (2005: 53) notes that there are any number of obstacles that confront immigrants, both men and women, but particularly women, in their access to mainstream society. It is challenging to learn about the politics of the new environment and to surmount the language barriers. It is also challenging to reconcile their attachments with their homelands with their developing American identities. Living a daily life largely among co-ethnics may have a different impact than living detached from members of their own groups.
Political scientist Carol Hardy-Fanta (1993) discovered in her field research that Latino men and Latina women understand and talk about politics differently. This difference is encapsulated in two statements: one from a Latina woman named Silvia who “adores” politics which for her means “reaching out to other women and improving their living conditions”; the other a Cuban–American activist named Jesús for whom politics is about “creating political organizations and increasing Latino electoral representation” (p. 1). Her work challenges the idea that Latina women are passive in the political sphere by documenting their activities of running for office, promoting voter registration, providing political education, and forging links between city officials and the Boston area Latino community where she conducted her research. At many political events that she attended during the course of her research, Hardy-Fanta discovered that women were in the majority as participants and activists. Their vision of politics is more participatory than that of men, for whom politics is about elections and access to government positions (p. 3); that is, about power. For Latina women politics is about making connections, “connections between people, connections between private troubles and public issues, and connections that lead to political awareness and political action” (p. 3). It is about “taking a stand”. It is about achieving change by linking people together. This understanding of politics “is more effective in part because it is more in tune with cultural expectations and it overcomes many of the structural constraints of Latino political participation in [the United States]” (Hardy Fanta 1993: 2).
Building on the work of Carol Hardy-Fanta (1993), political scientist Michael Jones Correa (1998) quickly called for a gendered understanding of immigrant politics and immigrant political socialization. Based on his own research among Latino immigrant activists in Queens, he argues that men, who often experience downward mobility, are politically mobilized through their own ethnic organizations where they regain, as mentioned above, some social status in their respective immigrant communities. These organizations are dominated by men; for example, the Hermanos Unidos club in Corona, to which Dominicans belong, had 350 male dues-paying members at the time of Jones-Correa’s research and 15 female dues-paying members (p. 341). The organizations of various South American immigrants were more balanced in terms of the sex ratio of members but men monopolized the leadership positions. Male dominant organizations tend to appeal to the political life of home countries. Women, by contrast, through their work and childcare responsibilities, come into more contact with the public institutions of the host society and are mobilized in different ways as a result. Within their organizations they tend to focus more on issues of political life in the new environment. They become activists in the interface between immigrants and American laws and institutions. They serve as intermediaries. The differences between male and female political engagement for these Latinos in Queens, New York, is perhaps best summed up by an Ecuadoran woman who commented as follows to Michael Jones-Correa:
It was natural that people who came over in large numbers would want to get together, so they formed civic organizations. And men were always the leaders, because in Latin America men were always the leaders. Women in politics were seen as strange. When I was growing up as a girl in Ecuador, it was not the thing for women to do. Men here are more interested in politics there. They do good things, raise money, but they are not interested in what goes on here. They have status in the community; they are caciques [leaders]. But they aren’t interested in starting over – to begin with, to have to learn English. If they got involved in politics here they wouldn’t be caciques anymore. They would only play a small part. So women and Puerto Ricans tend to dominate local politics in Queens – Puerto Ricans because of their experience in politics, women because they are willing to work with others.
(Jones-Correa 1998: 343)
Jones-Correa leaves open the question of whether men will move more rapidly into electoral politics than will women, deeming it more appropriate for them given culturally based ideas about leadership. On the other hand, he documents the cases of several Puerto Rican women from the Queens area who won elections to various positions. At the time that he was writing these issues were relatively new but from the perspective of the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century and across various immigrant populations it appears that both men and women have moved in this direction, although more commonly among the second-generation than the immigrant generation. Other recent research (Pantoja and Gershon 2006) shows that Latina immigrants have higher rates of naturalization than do Latinos, that there is variation from one national origin group to another (Cubans have the highest rates of naturalization, Salvadorans the lowest, and Mexicans are in between), and that men and women are motivated differently in their pursuit of naturalization. These authors explain the higher rate of Latina naturalization to women’s stronger desire to settle permanently in the US. Their decisions to naturalize are more strongly related to family issues than are those of men. Further, while being interested in politics is positively related to naturalization for men, political interests “has no effect on women’s decision to naturalize.” For Latinas, a “positive orientation toward voting is tied to naturalization, [while] among men the presence or absence of this orientation is unrelated to naturalization”. Finally, it is not a difference in the attitude toward voting – more positive or more negative – that matters but that for men and women “this orientation leads to different outcomes” (Pantoja and Gershon 2006: 1182).
What is quite apparent as a lesson derived from this research on Latino politics is how important it is to view processes of immigrant political incorporation through the lenses of gender and culture (Piper 2006) and to broaden our understanding of political incorporation beyond documenting voting patterns to include forms of civic engagement and participatory citizenship (Brettell and Reed-Danahay 2012). These differences also need to be framed, as Carol Hardy-Fanta (1993: 30–31) argued more than twenty years ago, in relation to gendered concepts of power. Male concepts derive, she suggested, from the ability to use one’s own influence, authority or force to control and impact the behavior of others – “to exercise dominion or dominate”. Female concepts have more to do with processes of empowerment – the ability to collaborate with others to do together what one cannot do alone to effect change.
The issue of empowerment through the development of political consciousness in the public sphere is taken up by anthropologist Patricia Pessar (2001) in her study of Guatemalan refugee women who developed a feminist consciousness and became transnational subjects claiming citizenship in multiple contexts and as members of global communities. Reflecting on how these refugee women reacted to the acts of terror and violence to which they had been subjected, Pessar writes: “The process of feminist conscientization, initiated in exile, helped to convert [their experiences], and the accompanying emotions of helplessness and shame, into powerful structures of meaning and action” (p. 471). In the camps they became involved in rights-based initiatives promoted by the UNHCR. They were exposed to “alternative ways of leading gendered lives” (p. 477) and opportunities to expand their social relations. While some men in the camps resisted this empowerment of women, others recognized that the women were drawing attention to the common goals that they had to end the conflict in Guatemala and hence worked alongside the women. However, when they were resettled and after they returned to their local communities, these refugee women were essentially abandoned by the international organizations that had previously encouraged and facilitated their empowerment. Promises about co-ownership of land were broken, even by the men who had supported the idea in the camp. “In a few of the original return communities, women who pressed for their rights to land were threatened by male cooperative leaders with rape, and expulsion from their communities” (p. 481).
Pessar’s study was an effort to situate women’s political consciousness and practices of citizenship more centrally in the study of gender and migration. There have been some, although by no means enough, additional efforts to explore dimensions of gendered citizenship and political engagement among immigrant populations. For example, in a study of Arab-Americans in Detroit, Amaney Jamal (2005) found that political engagement is mediated by civic engagement. By contrast with several other immigrant populations, Arab women in the US are more likely than their spouses to be involved in the life of the Mosque and other ethnic organizations. This contrasts with patterns of behavior in sending societies. While 37 percent of Arab Muslim women in the Detroit level reported attending a mosque at least once a week, the comparable figures for Jordan and Morocco were 10 percent and 20 percent respectively (p. 56). As a result of this involvement, Jamal argues that Arab-American women have developed a greater sense of group consciousness than have men. “Women see their location in the US as one linked to the broader communal Arab and Muslim interests while men tend to situate themselves vis-à-vis their personal economic success” (p. 54). This makes them more likely to use their political voice when they see the community targeted than do men. They do this in particular to counter discrimination and stereotyping in the media and elsewhere, making the mosque a center of advocacy for the community in addition to a place of worship. Thus, the mosque and other ethnic institutions not only serve as vehicles for the preservation of cultural identity but also as vehicles for increased political participation. Women in particular develop discourses of individual rights and responsibilities as they serve as communal guardians (p. 74).
Another body of research on gendered immigrant political activism is offered by Hinda Seif (2008), who focused on gendered circuits of political power among Mexican undocumented women farm workers. These women are linked to Latino/a politicians through their participation in United Farm Worker electoral mobilization events. Seif (2008: 79) observes that power flows from politicians to the undocumented women and vice versa. She acknowledges that this involvement, if only indirect, of the undocumented in the electoral politics of the US might be considered controversial. But, she argues, it is also “essential for the democracy and well-being of the agricultural communities in which they constitute a significant proportion of the adult population.” Her research revealed that innovative approaches to mobilization that blur the boundaries between political and maternal roles, that include activities that are sex segregated and involve children, and that provide food, are particularly successful, despite the limitations of language barriers, transportation difficulties, undocumented status, and the vagaries of farm labor (p. 94). And “while undocumented women participate in visits to the offices of elected officials and group demonstrations mediated by documented organizers, they may be excluded from or fearful of engaging in door-to-door organizing in non-immigrant neighborhoods” (p. 95). The women she studied felt most comfortable when they were wearing union T-shirts because it linked them to other groups and drew attention “away from their legal status and toward their economic contributions, their linkages with Chicano and other US citizen activists and voters, and a national labor movement that, though weakened, still wields substantial legislative and electoral power” (p. 95).
The political activism on the part of immigrant women in particular that is described by Seif has also been documented by anthropologist Lynn Stephen (2003) in her research on female Mexican migrant farm workers in Oregon. These wives of campesinos created their own political forum, Mujeres Luchadores Progresistas, as an offshoot of labor union in the region. Through this forum they developed the leadership and public speaking skills that helped them to operate in the male-dominated public square. Stephen invokes the concept of cultural citizenship to describe a form of activism and claims-making on the part of immigrants who are not legal citizens.20 This organization illustrates one form of cultural citizenship, providing women who rarely attended public meetings or expressed opinions outside the extended family in Mexico with opportunities “to foster a sense of satisfaction, pride, [and] mutual support” (Stephen 2003: 34).
Yet another example of research that also draws on the process and practice-oriented approach encompassed by the concept of cultural citizenship is provided by anthropologist Kathleen Coll’s (2010) research on a grassroots social justice organization among immigrant women in San Francisco. Coll argues that the women with whom she worked “challenged their political marginalization as low-income, non-English-speaking women and the dehumanization of terms such as illegal and alien. In doing so, they embodied claims against the legitimacy of cultural, administrative, and legal obstacles that prevent full social and political participation of immigrants in US life” (p. 8). The women involved in Mujeres Unidas y Activas based their political actions on a principle of convivencia (spending time together). They developed autoestima but linked it, not to an American sense of self-esteem, but to their collaborative work with their peers and the process of learning how to speak up and articulate their claims and rights in relation to the various public institutions and entities (schools, public assistance, health care, subsidized housing) with which they had to interact on behalf of their families. Their narratives, told to Coll the ethnographer, described a process of personal and political transformation. The book she writes about them, she claims, is a story of “how a group of immigrant women worked together in a contentious time to write themselves into American history as neither victims nor heroes, but rather as mothers, workers, Latina, and human beings bearing rights regardless of their gender, class, nationality or location” (Coll 2010: 154).21
At the other end of the human capital spectrum represented by these studies of Latinos and Latinas in the US, one has the case of professional and educated Chinese immigrant women in Canada (Man 2004), who are channeled into menial work or unemployment as a result of gendered and racialized policies and practices, as well as employer requirements for “Canadian experience” and professional accreditation systems that do not recognize their foreign training. Some of these women are voicing their criticism of the Canadian system and have refused to take on jobs for which they are underpaid. They have formed their own professional organizations such as the Chinese Professional Women of Canada, the Chinese Professional Association of Canada and Immigrant Women in Science (Man 2004: 146). They have collaborated with other groups to lobby the Canadian government regarding issues of accreditation, retraining, and job-related language courses.
Despite this important work on practices of the civic engagement and grass-roots organizing dimensions of political incorporation described above, much research remains focused on gendered differences in voting patterns among immigrant populations, thereby continuing to frame politics almost exclusively as electoral politics. Thus, in a fairly recent comprehensive study of Asian American politics, political scientists Pei-te Lien, M. Margaret Conway, and Janelle Wong (2004) begin with the broader generalization that women are less interested in politics, have less of a sense of political efficacy, and are generally discouraged from running for office. They are socialized to think about politics as men’s business. Among Asian Americans, they find that both men and women are members of ethnic organizations which can provide the basis for political engagement. They found that more Asian American men are interested in politics than are women but that the more educated women are, and the more family income they have, the greater the interest in politics. They also found that citizenship mattered in the level of political activity for both men and women, but citizen men were more active than citizen women. They found that men were more likely to perceive local public officials as responsive to their complaints than were women and generally Asian American men have a higher level of political knowledge than do their female counterparts.
Asian American women are more likely to vote democratic and they hold more compassionate positions on issues by comparison with men but this varies with ethnic origin, nativity, degree of cultural and social adaptation, perhaps more so than with gender (p. 205). In the end these authors conclude that while there is gender variation, gender itself is a relatively insignificant predictor of Asian American political attitudes and behavior with the exception of explaining patterns of ethnic self-identification and the chance of being contacted by individuals for political mobilizations. Such a conclusion lacks the more nuanced approach to gendered understandings of politics put forward by Carol Hardy-Fanta and Michael Jones-Correa.
However, there is recent research on Asian immigrants in the United States that does emphasize the more participatory approach framed to include patterns of broad civic engagement. For example, in her book Unruly Immigrants, Monisha Das Gupta (2006) describes the “emancipatory politics” (place-taking and place-making) of feminist, queer, and labor organizations that have emerged within South Asian communities in the United States. She emphasizes that immigrants in these organizations claim rights as immigrants not as citizens. “They mobilize survivors of domestic violence, lesbians and gays, domestic workers, and taxi drivers who live and work in spaces where they do not enjoy the protections of citizenship because of their gender, sexuality, economic standing, race, and nationality” (p. 5). She traces the lines of division as well as the arenas of collaboration between first and second-generation, between working-class women and middle-class women, between lesbians and straight women and gay men, and between workers from different national origins who operate in the same employment sector. These organizations, in their range of activities, provide spaces where South Asian immigrants, male and female, working class and middle class, can “become politicized, act on their politics, and envision a full life for themselves and their families, communities, and political comrades” (Das Gupta 2006: 153).
The critical theoretical question in this chapter has been to explore the intersectional dimensions of migrant engagement with the state and how these have changed over time.22 The chapter has addressed the multiple inequalities that have and continue to characterize not only the formulation of immigration and citizenship laws in receiving countries but also how they are put into practice. These laws and policies are the foundations for determining who can and who cannot cross borders, who comes first and who follows, and who is considered deserving or undeserving of being granted a right to stay, and a path toward citizenship. This chapter has also explored outcomes in relation to gendered and ethnic differences in participation in the civic sphere through voting and other forms of political activism.
Immigration and citizenship laws are shaped by ideas about gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, and nation; sometimes they are also influenced by gendered conceptions of the nations whence people have come. On occasion, these laws respond to constructions of women as breeders and men as terrorist threats. More commonly, they position men as breadwinners and women as dependants, thus perpetuating gendered inequities and often depriving women in particular of their own agency. There are a number of scholars who call for immigration reform that would not only resolve the problem of the undocumented but also of gender inequalities. Immigration laws, in their view, should make access to legal entry for women “less dependent on a principal visa holder who petitions on her behalf as well as [provide for] more expedited access to work permits in order to shorten their dependency status” (Menjívar and Salcido 2013: 3).
It is worth mentioning that, while the focus here has been on immigration and citizenship laws in host societies, those of sending societies may be equally gendered and directly impact who leaves and why they leave. Writing about Mexican state policies that impact perceptions and experiences of migration, social scientists Michael Peter Smith and Matt Bakker (2008: 201) observe the structural biases against women “such as the taken-for-granted assumption of migration as an exclusively male phenomenon, [that] became ideologized in state policy documents and discourses that made heroes out of male migrants, while ignoring female migration altogether as a social phenomenon.” They note that the term “el migrante” is used exclusively in documents and the male-headed household is the unit with which state policies interact. “Nowhere in these state-policy formulations is any space created for female migrants as potential agents in the reproduction or transformation of their home communities. Female agency is absent from official discourse, except in the form of the wives and mothers left behind who are represented, both in the language of state policy and in statues that glorify the male migrant, as simple appendages of adventurous transnational male breadwinners” (p. 201).
As should be apparent in the discussion here, immigration laws and policies are not only shaped by broader ideas about gender, race, nation, and citizenship, but also by labor market needs and structures. Thus it is to the gendered dimensions of the immigrant labor force that we now turn.