Article

Between hearts and pockets: Locating the outcomes of transnational homemaking practices among Mexican women in Canada's temporary migration programmes

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Abstract

Temporary migration programmes (TMPs) contain features such as reduced costs and the social legitimation of regularized entry that allow women, including the very poor, to access transnational livelihoods. For mothers, taking up opportunities for employment abroad inevitably involves ‘transnational homemaking’, the set practices involved in caring for family relationships and maintaining household economies across borders. In this article, we examine the transnational homemaking practices undertaken by rural Mexican migrant women employed in highly masculinized TMPs in Canada, tracing how they construct and maintain household economies across borders through a delicate (re)negotiation of reproductive roles and responsibilities with non-migrating kin in Mexico. We find that migration yields material and subjective benefits that enable the expansion of their citizenship across multiple dimensions ranging from the economic to the sexual. At the same time, as racialized, gendered, migrants from the global South, their labour and status in Canada are highly precarious. The advantages derived from transnational migration are thus tenuous, limited, and contradictory.

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... Recent literature from Canada examines how the family context of immigrants is often neglected in policies that promote permanent settlement and inclusion (Bauder, 2019). This neglect is intensified in the policies that govern Canada's temporary labour migration regime (Cohen, 2000;Preibisch and Santamaria-Hermoso, 2006;Bernhard, Landolt, and Goldring, 2009;Pratt, 2012;Preibisch and Encalada-Grez, 2013;Bryan, 2014;Martin, 2019). This observation is particularly germane considering how, for much of the past 15 years, Canadian immigration policy has been reoriented toward addressing the needs of employers by increasing its reliance on a temporary and precarious foreign workforce. ...
... The disregard of family relationships in this context is most noticeable in the requirement that migrant workers in low-wage jobs travel to Canada alone, without their families. It has been shown that the requirement that workers leave their families behind is an important mechanism of labour control in Canadian workplaces, as it restricts workers' access to a social life outside work (Basok, 2002;Preibisch, 2010;Schwiter, Strauss, and England, 2018). The ability of employers to control workers' social lives illustrates how access to the TFWP provides Canadian businesses with employment practices that would not be available if they were limited to hiring a domestic labour force (Preibisch, 2010). ...
... It has been shown that the requirement that workers leave their families behind is an important mechanism of labour control in Canadian workplaces, as it restricts workers' access to a social life outside work (Basok, 2002;Preibisch, 2010;Schwiter, Strauss, and England, 2018). The ability of employers to control workers' social lives illustrates how access to the TFWP provides Canadian businesses with employment practices that would not be available if they were limited to hiring a domestic labour force (Preibisch, 2010). Writing about migrant farm workers for example, Basok (2002: 123) describes how family separation contributes to a compliant workforce thus: "They have no birthday parties, funerals, or weddings to attend. ...
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... Habitus provides a useful entry point to organise existing research, and a theoretical framework through which to understand their transnational experiences. The goal of this article is to extend the concept of transnationalism to circular migrants by centering on their agency, as enacted through acts of citizenship (Isin, 2002) and by inserting themselves into local social fabrics as a form of resistance (e.g., Preibisch and Grez, 2013;J4MW, 2018). This article moves in three parts. ...
... Literature that operationalises the transnationality frame vis-à-vis temporary workers is limited but includes analyses of its gendered and familial effects (Hennebry, 2014;Preibisch and Grez, 2013), with respect to remittances and communications (Hennebry, 2008) and the impact of isolation (Kearney, 1995). Still, the bulk of transnationalism research speaks more strongly to long-term migrants instead of circular migrants (Parreñas, 2010), or more broadly, to the experiences of migrants with relative ability to forge selective and voluntary attachments to new and old spaces, and the freedom recreate experiences in places of long-term (re)settlement (e.g., Bauböck, 2003;Beaverstock, 2005;Morawska, 2014;Tollefsen and Lindgren, 2006;Vertovec, 2001;Scott, 2006). ...
... Workers also validate new cultural capital through institutions of greater Canadian society, such as by declaring their cultural identity valuable to discourses around the Canadian cultural mosaic (Gabriel and McDonald, 2011). Similarly, on the individual level, workers will engage in acts that complicate their segregation by forming social and economic ties, including by learning English and participating in recreational activities (Dance, 2014;Municipality of Leamington, 2017;Mojtehedzadeh et al., 2017), learning of and asserting one's labour rights (Smith, 2005), forming meaningful relationships with persons inside and outside their workplace (Enlace Canada, 2012;UFCW, 2018;Preibisch and Grez, 2013), as well as speaking to the media (Rankin, 2017) and participating in research activities. Preibisch and Grez (2013) found women working in temporary migrant programs 'expand their citizenship' by renegotiating their gender and economic roles at home and abroad, and by engaging in romantic or sexual relationships only available to them in transnational spaces (p.789). ...
... Habitus provides a useful entry point to organise existing research, and a theoretical framework through which to understand their transnational experiences. The goal of this article is to extend the concept of transnationalism to circular migrants by centering on their agency, as enacted through acts of citizenship (Isin, 2002) and by inserting themselves into local social fabrics as a form of resistance (e.g., Preibisch and Grez, 2013;J4MW, 2018). This article moves in three parts. ...
... Literature that operationalises the transnationality frame vis-à-vis temporary workers is limited but includes analyses of its gendered and familial effects (Hennebry, 2014;Preibisch and Grez, 2013), with respect to remittances and communications (Hennebry, 2008) and the impact of isolation (Kearney, 1995). Still, the bulk of transnationalism research speaks more strongly to long-term migrants instead of circular migrants (Parreñas, 2010), or more broadly, to the experiences of migrants with relative ability to forge selective and voluntary attachments to new and old spaces, and the freedom recreate experiences in places of long-term (re)settlement (e.g., Bauböck, 2003;Beaverstock, 2005;Morawska, 2014;Tollefsen and Lindgren, 2006;Vertovec, 2001;Scott, 2006). ...
... Workers also validate new cultural capital through institutions of greater Canadian society, such as by declaring their cultural identity valuable to discourses around the Canadian cultural mosaic (Gabriel and McDonald, 2011). Similarly, on the individual level, workers will engage in acts that complicate their segregation by forming social and economic ties, including by learning English and participating in recreational activities (Dance, 2014;Municipality of Leamington, 2017;Mojtehedzadeh et al., 2017), learning of and asserting one's labour rights (Smith, 2005), forming meaningful relationships with persons inside and outside their workplace (Enlace Canada, 2012;UFCW, 2018;Preibisch and Grez, 2013), as well as speaking to the media (Rankin, 2017) and participating in research activities. Preibisch and Grez (2013) found women working in temporary migrant programs 'expand their citizenship' by renegotiating their gender and economic roles at home and abroad, and by engaging in romantic or sexual relationships only available to them in transnational spaces (p.789). ...
... In effect, they subsidize the receiving economies of wealthier nations (Griffith 2018;Hennebry 2010). Guest worker programs designed to place the burden of social reproductive costs on home communities are the outcome of the uneven development of capitalism, shaped by colonial histories (Binford 2013) and connected to processes of racialization (Binford and Preibisch 2013;Preibisch and Encalada Grez 2013) and racial capitalism (Hjalmarson 2022;Walia 2021). In Canada farm work is "among the most gendered and racialized occupations, highly segregated by sex, race, age, and citizenship" (Preibisch and Encalada Grez 2011, 101). ...
... Bastia and Busse 2011;McLaughlin et al. 2017;Preibisch and Encalada Grez 2013;Schmalzbauer 2015;. Migration research on gender and parenting (focusing here on Latin America and Jamaica), emphasizes the toll on parents, both abroad and back home, as well as the reconfiguration of gender relations (for example,Bastia and Busse 2011;D'Aubeterre Buznego et al. 2020;Dreby 2010;Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997;Fernández Kelly 2005). ...
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... As daughters, wives, and mothers, women typically have to take up domestic work and mothering to create a 'home-like' environment in interior spaces. Hence, women tend to care about family relationships in domestic spaces (Preibisch and Grez, 2013;Alam et al., 2020). Alongside this, women build up social networks outside their dwellings and carry out their gender practices in public spaces. ...
... In addition to social relations, sensory experiences (including visual, auditory, tactile, smell, and taste) in daily life can arouse women's 'at-home' emotions, significantly affecting their construction of home (Longhurst et al., 2009;Tolia-Kelly, 2004;Law, 2001). It is especially so for migrant women since they usually encounter gendered barriers in an unfamiliar environment, thereby requiring them to create various forms of intimacies in their everyday lives (Preibisch and Grez, 2013). ...
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... Although this is much greater than income opportunities in guest workers' countries of origin, their wages are automatically deducted for benefits to which they often lack access (Ramsaroop 2016). The significant economic gains guest workers derive from remittances are unstable and often come with significant costs to workers such as prolonged, painful familial separation (Preibisch and Grez 2013). ...
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... Without their families in Canada, most migrants felt it was impossible to belong to a Canadian rural community. Forced to leave their families behind, migrants nurture their emotional attachments to their loved ones from a distance Preibisch & Encalada Grez, 2013). For Javier, a 36-year-old male Mexican worker, home provides a feeling of comfort because, as he said, 'you know someone is waiting for you or that one feels at ease because you are coming back'. ...
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The Canadian temporary migration regime has been widely criticised for its failure to provide protections and address migrant needs. This article contributes to these critiques by analysing how temporariness impacts the sense of belonging and perceptions of social inclusion among farmworkers in Canada. The sense of inclusion and belonging is vital for individuals’ sense of well‐being, and therefore, a critique of temporariness is incomplete without it. Based on ethnographic research conducted in 2018–2019 in a rural community in Southwestern Ontario, Canada, it documents that, despite certain initiatives to make temporary migrant workers feel welcomed, migrants have not grown attached to this place. We situate farmworkers’ limited sense of belonging in the exclusionary architecture of this labour migration regime. We argue that two structural elements in particular make it impossible for most migrant farmworkers to feel connected to Canada—the forced separation from their families, and the lack of mobility within the labour force.
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... WMWs also have mental health needs as a result of leaving children behind in home countries (McLaughlin, 2010;Preibisch and Encalada Grez, 2010;Grez, 2013;Rodriguez, 2010;Hondagneu-Soltelo, 2010). Social isolation is also a factor among some groups of women migrant workers, such as among those working as domestic workers in private homes, where the workplace is not shared by other workers, and housing is potentially in remote or isolated geographic areasboth of which are overlaid by cultural isolation when the migrant worker is from a different country of origin, practices a different religion than their employer's family, and when there are language barriers, etc. (McLaughlin, 2009). ...
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... However, the women do not believe that their husbands or children will find secure work in New Brunswick. Transnational family situations and transnational mothering have an emotional and social cost for these women, as highlighted in other research (Preibisch and Grez, 2013). Their time in New Brunswick is a period of social limbo. ...
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This article explores gender issues in West Indian migration by taking a comparative -cross-national -perspective. The focus is on the three major West Indian migration movements of the mid- and late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -to the United States Britain and Canada. A comparative approach has a number of benefits for the study of West Indian migration. It not only points to similarities and contrasts in gender-related patterns among West Indian migrants in the United States Britain and Canada but also forces us to try to account for them. It brings out in an especially dramatic way the role of the context of reception and the receiving countrys immigration policies in shaping male-female differences in West Indian migration flows as well as immigrant adaptation. The comparative analysis of the three migrations in this article explores the reasons for and patterns of West Indian migration as they relate to gender including the practice of leaving children behind in the Caribbean as well as aspects of the labour market incorporation of West Indian men and women when they have arrived and settled in the migrant destination. More specifically the comparisons raise some intriguing questions. Why for example did West Indian women comprise a greater proportion of the migrations to the United States and Canada than to Britain? Why were West Indian women more likely to work in caregiving jobs in private homes in the United States and Canada than in Britain? And have the dynamics of transnational motherhood differed in the North American and British contexts?
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The two volumes Gender and Migration: crossing borders and shifting boundaries offer an interdisciplinary perspective on women and men on the move today, exploring the diversification of migratory patterns and its implication in different parts of the world. It reflects the vibrant scholarly debates as well as unique learning and teaching experiences of the Project Area Migration, the International Women's University. While pointing to historical continuities, it is shown how contemporary ways of bridging time and space are shaped by the new opportunities - or lack of them - related to the process of globalization. This shaping is gendered. Gendering migration paves the way for further intersectional analysis. Vol. I critically examinesmobility, globalization and migration policy from a gender perspective. It includes case studies on internal and international migratory processes inand from Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. Furthermore it makes an important contribution to the issue of agency and empowerment emerging from migrant women's experience.
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A massive shift has taken place in Canadian immigration policy since the 1970s: the majority of migrants no longer enter as permanent residents but as temporary migrant workers. In Home Economics, Nandita Sharma shows how Canadian policies on citizenship and immigration contribute to the entrenchment of a system of apartheid where those categorized as ‘migrant workers’ live, work, pay taxes and sometimes die in Canada but are subordinated to a legal regime that renders them as perennial outsiders to nationalized Canadian society. In calling for a ʼno borders’ policy in Canada, Sharma argues that it is the acceptance of nationalist formulations of ‘home’ informed by racialized and gendered relations that contribute to the neo-liberal restructuring of the labour market in Canada. She exposes the ideological character of Canadian border control policies which, rather than preventing people from getting in, actually work to restrict their rights once within Canada. Home Economics is an urgent and much-needed reminder that in today’s world of growing displacement and unprecedented levels of international migration, society must pay careful attention to how nationalist ideologies construct ‘homelands’ that essentially leave the vast majority of the world’s migrant peoples homeless.
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Liberal and marxist theories of civil society contain a conceptual paradox of 'civil society without citizenship'. This article shows how the paradox about civil society comes about through an under-theorization of the multivalent character of citizenship and rights, which in turn reflects a rather impoverished understanding of culture, discourse and symbolization. The discussion starts with two related questions about civil society: (1) where is the locus of citizenship in classical liberal and marxist theories of civil society; and (2) what implication does the conventional state-civil society distinction have for the notion of citizenship as a category of status and agency? It further distinguishes among three different theses of state-civil society relations in the two different theoretical traditions. The article will conclude by outlining an alternative theoretical strategy whereby to go beyond the conceptual impasse and to meet the challenge of globalization.
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Global restructuring is dramatically reshaping how women and men around the world relate to agriculture. While gender analysis has been central to research on labor‐intensive, corporate agriculture in the global South, it is rarely invoked in the literature exploring these trends in the North. Moreover, research on gender in agriculture in high‐income countries has tended to focus on women in family farms, despite extensive restructuring of the sector that has increased demands for waged laborers. This article speaks to these limitations by tracing the incorporation of Mexican women into the Canadian agricultural sector as temporary migrant workers. In exploring the lived realities of these women, it reveals workplaces characterized by highly gendered, racialized employment relations and illustrates how temporary migrant worker programs further entrench existing structures of labor segmentation in agriculture. While temporary migrant worker programs have brought greater flexibility into the Canadian agricultural labor market by enabling a particular set of employment practices that rest on gendered, racialized subjectivities, these processes are by no means uncontested by the actors they seek to command.
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Since 2000, approximately 440,000 Mexicans have migrated to the United States every year. Tens of thousands have left children behind in Mexico to do so. For these parents, migration is a sacrifice. What do parents expect to accomplish by dividing their families across borders? How do families manage when they are living apart? More importantly, do parents' relocations yield the intended results? Probing the experiences of migrant parents, children in Mexico, and their caregivers, Joanna Dreby offers an up-close and personal account of the lives of families divided by borders. What she finds is that the difficulties endured by transnational families make it nearly impossible for parents' sacrifices to result in the benefits they expect. Yet, paradoxically, these hardships reinforce family members' commitments to each other. A story both of adversity and the intensity of family ties, Divided by Borders is an engaging and insightful investigation of the ways Mexican families struggle and ultimately persevere in a global economy.
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Recent transnational migration literature does not sufficiently explore women's role in the development of transnational communities. By analyzing 30 interviews with Puerto Rican migrant and return migrant women, the author shows that women, through subsistence production, play a significant role in the social construction of transnational communities. By using a transnational perspective and placing migrant women's subsistence work and its contradictory nature at the center of her analysis, the author challenges studies that assume that maintaining ties to homelands leads to freedom for all family members, moves away from home/host binary frame works of immigrant women's experiences that locate greater gender oppression in home countries and more freedom in host societies, and explores women's complex perceptions of home.
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Latina immigrant women who work as nannies or housekeepers and reside in Los Angeles while their children remain in their countries of origin constitute one variation in the organizational arrangements of motherhood. The authors call this arrangement “transnational motherhood.” On the basis of a survey, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic materials gathered in Los Angeles, they examine how Latina immigrant domestic workers transform the meanings of motherhood to accommodate these spatial and temporal separations. The article examines the emergent meanings of motherhood and alternative child-rearing arrangements. It also discusses how the women view motherhood in relation to their employment, as well as their strategies for selectively developing emotional ties with their employers' children and for creating new rhetorics of mothering standards on the basis of what they view in their employers' homes.
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This paper offers a first attempt at discussing the linkages between migration and development in reference to the feminisation of intra-regional migratory flows in Asia. It begins with a summary of the current debate on the ‘migration and development nexus’ with two objectives in mind: 1) to assess this debate's relevance to intra-regional migration in Asia; and 2) to redirect attention to the social dimension of feminised migrations and its relationship to development. In doing so, the focus is on the individual and family level to discuss the impact of migration on personal development as well as on interpersonal relations. What follows thereafter is a brief summary of the character and context of feminised migration in Asia, by approaching this issue from an intra-regional (that is migratory moves of Asians within Asia) perspective. The final section links the previous discussion to the issue of rights. The article concludes that the conceptual and normative linkages between women's social and economic rights as they relate to migration need further exploration, eg by way of specific case studies or ethnographic research. This is needed for relevant policy reform and implementation.
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Birds of Passage presents an unorthodox analysis of migration ion to urban industrial societies from underdeveloped rual areas. It argues that such migrations are a continuing feature of industrial societies and that they are generated by forces inherent in the nature of industrial economies. It explains why conventional economic theory finds such migrations so difficult to comprehend, and challenges a set of older assumptions that supported the view that these migrations were beneficial to both sending and receiving societies. Professor Piore seriously questions whether migration actually relieves population pressure and rural unemployment, and whether it develops skills necessary for the emergence of an industrial labour force in the home country. Furthermore, he criticizes the notion that in the long run migrant labour complements native labour. On the basis of this critique, he develops an alternative theory of the nature of the migration process.
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The migration literature agrees on several key factors that motivate individual decisions to move: human capital investments, socioeconomic status, familial considerations, social networks, and local opportunities in places of origin relative to opportunities abroad. Yet further analysis of the social forces underlying these relationships reveals interwoven gender relations and expectations that fundamentally differentiate migration patterns, in particular who migrates and why Data analysis of 14,000 individuals in 43 Mexican villages reveals several mechanisms through which the effects of gender play out in the migration process. Results suggest that migrant networks provide support to new men and women migrants alike, whereas high female employment rates reduce the likelihood that men, but not women, begin migrating. Education effects also emphasize the importance of examining gender differences. In keeping with the literature on Mexican migration, I find that men are negatively selected to migrate, but, conversely, that higher education increases migration among women. My findings also question the narrow portrayal of women as associational migrants that follow spouses, disclosing much greater chances of family separation than reunification among migrants' wives and significantly higher migration risks for single and previously married women than married women.
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This article explores the consumption dilemmas encountered by migrant men from the Ecuadorian Andes living and working in New York City. Specifically, it looks at how the priorities of budgeting and saving money that are necessary for generating remittances conflict with migrants’ practices of consumption. New consumption practices take shape as young men experience the city as an engagement of perceived modernity. I argue that the changes involved in this process require men to confront long-standing relationships between ideas of what constitutes proper masculinity and the uses of money in the Andes. They also require men to find new ways to balance consumption and their gender identities. In this space, new models for fatherhood emerge as migrants shape their role as breadwinners through the specific practices of providing for families back home.
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Although as such not new, the revival or continuation as well as expansion of temporary contract schemes as the main method by which to regulate economic migration legally is part and parcel of a new discourse on migration policy making: ‘management of migration’. Furthermore, this discourse and concomitant policy descriptions are related to the current phase of the debate on the relationship between migration and development. The focus on managing migration in its link to development revolves around the idea that orderly, legal migration schemes can benefit sending and receiving countries’ developmental and labour market needs as well as individual migrants themselves. The welfare and rights of migrant workers, however, remain the neglected dimension in this equation. As preference is given to temporary or circular migration policies, while little attention is paid to migrants’ rights beyond the rhetorical level, the question which arises pertains to migrants’ actual capability to contribute to development. In the attempt to address this question, the normative starting point of this paper is a rights-based approach to migration and development. The argument advanced revolves around the need to re-politicize this discourse and policy prescriptions. Empirically, my discussion is based on the ‘political activist work’ carried out by the regional migrant rights network in Asia, the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA).
Article
Joanna Dreby's Divided by Borders makes an important contribution to immigration scholarship because of (1. its focus on the changing contexts and relationships in transnational families' lives over time and the families' adaptations to life circumstances, (2. an emphasis on the unique role and perspectives of the caretakers of children left behind in Mexico when parents move to the United States, (3. consideration of the worldviews of children who experience separation as a result of migration, and (4. the voices of the children expressing their feelings and opinions about how long separations due to parents' migration affects them. The first chapter explains the author's own experiences in a divided family and instantly establishes common bonds with families who have not experienced migrations but have experienced divided families through divorce or other separations. The emotional aspects of prolonged separation caused by migration are extremely difficult for all involved — the parents, the children and the caretakers — but the author makes the point that the emotional consequences of separation are concentrated among children who are the least powerful. At the same time, this book shows how children are a powerful influence on parents' decisions about migration and how both young children's and teenagers' behaviors can increase parents' feelings of insecurity about being away. Nonetheless, the interviews and case studies also show that the sacrifices involved in these long separations reinforce the bonds of commitment for parents and children. Many of the parents send money that provides their children with better educational opportunities. However, some of the most moving parts of the text are interviews with children that show they are unsure of their relationships with their parents when the parents return, and cases of children who refuse to leave their caretakers in Mexico to join their parents in the United States. The chapter on "Middlewomen" illustrates the important role caregivers in Mexico have in mediating relationships between migrant parents and their children. These women may be grandparents or other relatives. Many of them develop very close relationships with the children they are raising while the parents are in the United States, and they struggle with trying not to usurp parental rights. The author describes the ways remittances are handled by the different care givers and conflicts that arise over time. Only a few other studies of migration have addressed the implications of migration on family members left behind, and how their responsibilities and relationships change due to the migrations and money sent home. The studies that have addressed those remaining in the home country have primarily focused on spouses and not children or caregivers when mothers migrate. As women are increasingly part of the migratory workforce, this chapter is an insightful contribution to the literature. The research design is elaborated in an appendix explaining that "constant international movement of people has fostered new methods of social research" which the author refers to as "multisited methods" and "ethnographies that follow people."(231) The core of the book is based on interviews with a group of 12 families; this allowed the author to interview family members in their transnational family constellations and in both Mexico and the United States. The book is also based on an on-going ethnography over four years that documented families' experiences over time. Interviews with parents and children are accompanied by open-ended interviews with middlewomen, school personnel and social workers who interact with the children left behind. Additionally, the author incorporates surveys of children in Mexican primary schools, children's drawings of family constellations and details of migration histories. Another interesting appendix includes a chart of family descriptions of single mothers who migrate, fathers who migrate, couples who divorce after migration and details of the children's caregivers in Mexico, age of children at time of first interview, the migrants' backgrounds and notes about relationships in the migrants' families. These details provide much to debate about qualitative research approaches and how mixed media studies add or detract from analyses. Case studies of individual families are incorporated into several chapters which allow the author to bring into the text portions of transcribed interviews and life stories that clearly illustrate the complexity of relationships in migration processes. An...
Article
The paper argues that citizenship needs to be understood as a multi-layered construct, in which one's citizenship in collectivities in the different layers - local, ethnic, national, state, cross- or trans-state and supra-state - is affected and often at least partly constructed by the relationships and positionings of each layer in specific historical context. This is of particular imporance if we want to examine citizenship in a gendered non westocentric way. The paper explores some of the central issues which affect contemporary citizenships, in particular those relating to constructions of borders of boundaries, starting from the boundary between 'private' and 'public' and then looking at state borders and collectivities' boundaries. The effects on citizenship of the new modes of communication and transport, as well as the contradictory expansions and defensive closures of people's identities states are also explored.
Article
This paper argues for treating gender as a key category in the understanding of migratory processes. Starting with an illustration of the absence of women in mainstream migration research, it presents the debate on this phenomenon and its development from a focus on women to one on gender. Through discussion of the debate on current migration phenomena it is demonstrated how gender can be used in a conceptual framework which includes various levels (micro, meso and macro). The paper advocates the analysis of migratory processes within a broader framework of social change.
Article
Women's migration spurs the reconfiguration of the gender division of labour in transnational families, while the migration of men maintains it. Father-away migrant families usually mirror modern nuclear households. The only difference is the temporal and spatial rearrangement brought by the father's work: instead of the father routinely getting back home to his family during suppertime, he comes back home from work every ten months. My paper looks at the transnational families of migrant men as unexpected sites of gender conflicts in the maintenance of intimacy. Using interviews with adult children left behind in the Philippines and their guardians, I show that intimacy is more of a challenge for migrant men to achieve with family in the Philippines than it is for migrant women. Their families suffer from emotional distance, because: generations operate in ‘time pockets’ that are ‘outside the real time of the outside world’; migrant men do not accordingly adjust their performance of fathering to accommodate the needs created by distance; and fathers insist on maintaining gender-normative views of parenting.
Article
Abstract Many analyses of the uses of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) focus on factors such as gender, class and communication infrastructures in explaining how and whether people communicate across distance. In this article, I argue that such analyses fail to capture the full complexity of ICT use. I use the results of a large qualitative study of transnational families, conducted in Australia, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Iran, Singapore and New Zealand, to examine how and whether kin maintain contact across time and space. The research demonstrates that ICTs are more available for some people than for others. However, also and possibly more important in the decisions people make about using particular communication technologies are the social and cultural contexts of family life, which render some ICTs more desirable than others at specific points in time. Acknowledging this provides an important corrective to economic analyses of transnationalism, and contributes to theorizing and documenting the role of ICTs in the maintenance of transnational social networks.
Article
This essay examines the confluence of local and global dynamics, exploring how transnational migration affects and is affected by gender roles, kinship relations, intergenerational obligations, and ideologies of parenthood. Journeying to the Middle East repeated on two-year labor contracts, many of Sri Lanka's migrant housemaids leave behind their husbands and children. Women's long-term absences reorganize and disrupt widely accepted gendered attributions of parenting roles, with fathers and female relatives taking over household tasks. Migrants say that economic difficulties prompt migration, and assess commitment to kin in financial terms. The government also benefits from remittances. Nevertheless, stakeholders (villagers, politicians, and the national media) worry about the social costs born by children. Drawing on interviews with the adult children of migrant mothers in four extended families in the Sri Lankan coastal village of Naeaegama, I examine the long-term effects of transnational labor migration on local households. The case studies do not support media claims that children suffer abuse and neglect in their mothers’ absence, but do in part support survey information on reduced education, shifting marriage patterns, and paternal alcohol consumption.
Article
This essay examines the historical and theoretical development of sexuality in migration research. Noting gaps and omissions in the literature, the essay proposes a dual notion of sexuality including one that is produced by the intersection of other social identities such as class and race, and a queer studies-derived idea of the sexual that goes against the normalizing of heterosexual institutions and practices. Utilizing a case study of Filipina migrant workers, the essay demonstrates the pivotal role of sexuality in the future of gender and migration research through a critique of the implicit normative assumptions around family, heterosexual reproduction, and marriage that abound in this body of literature, and how a critical notion of sexuality enables a more inclusive and accurate portrait of global gendered migration.
Article
Abstract For many middle-income Asian families from the region's less developed countries, the education of children in a more developed country has become a major ‘project’ requiring the transnational relocation of one or more members of the family. As an aspiring global education hub, Singapore has been a recipient of many international students. In our article we examine the case of ‘study mothers’ from the People's Republic of China who accompany their children to Singapore during the course of the latter's study, while leaving their spouses at home. In the analysis we demonstrate that the transnational ‘project of education’ for these young Asian children hinges crucially on the notion and realization of the ‘sacrificial mother’. Unlike the women in elite Chinese transnational families who enter western countries as potential citizens and are able to regain their relatively privileged lifestyles after a period of transition, the study mothers are admitted to, and remain in, Singapore as transient sojourners whose lives are characterized by continuing challenges and fluidity.
Article
Complex factors associated with migration and immigration policies contribute to the dispersion of families across space. We draw on interviews with 40 Latin American women in Toronto who experienced separation from children as a result of migration and argue that Canadian immigration policy and elements of the women’s context of departure lead to the systemic production of transnational family arrangements. Once in Canada, the women dealt with unexpected lengths of separation, the spatial dispersal of social reproduction, and post-reunification problems. The absence of a normative framework that could help the mothers make sense of family dispersal meant that their experiences of migration, family separation, reunification and settlement were marked by tension, guilt, isolation and shame.
Article
Abstract Temporary visa workers are increasingly taking on a heightened profile in Canada, entering the workforce each year in greater numbers than immigrant workers with labor mobility rights (Sharma 2006). This paper examines the incorporation of foreign workers in Canadian horticulture under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). I argue that foreign labor supplied under the SAWP secures a flexible workforce for employers and thus improves Canada's trade competitiveness in the global agrifood market. Using multiple research strategies, I track the evolution of Canadian horticulture in the global market and the transformation of labor in this industry. I outline the steady growth in the employment of temporary visa workers in the horticultural industry and show how they have become the preferred and, in some cases, core workforce for horticulture operations. The benefits of SAWP workers to employers include the provision of a workforce with limited rights relative to domestic workers and considerable administrative support in selecting, dispatching, and disciplining workers provided at no cost by labor supply countries. I conclude that the SAWP is a noteworthy example of the role of immigration policy in regulating the labor markets of high-income economies and thus ensuring the position of labor-receiving states within the global political economy.
Article
Abstract In this article I address transnational intergenerational relations between Filipino migrant mothers and their young adult children and examine how families achieve intimacy across great distances. I do this by identifying and examining the transnational communication methods Filipino migrant families use to develop intimacy, in other words familiarity, across borders. In my analysis, I address how political economy and gender shape the dynamics of transnational communication. By showing how economic conditions and gender shape transnational family communication, I provide a socially thick lens through which to understand the formation of transnational intimacy and emphasize how larger systems of inequality shape the lives of the children left behind by the global migration of women.
Article
In Britain, international migrants have very recently become the major workforce in labour-intensive horticulture. This paper explores the causes of the dramatic increase since the 1990s in the employment of migrant workers in this subsector. It locates this major change in a general pattern of intensification of horticultural production driven by an ongoing process of concentration in retailer power, and in the greater availability of migrant workers, shaped in part by state initiatives to manage immigration. The paper draws on concepts developed in the US literature on agrarian capitalism. It then uses case histories from British horticulture to illustrate how growers have directly linked innovations involving intensification through labour control to their relationships with retailers. Under pressure on ‘quality’, volume and price, growers are found to have ratcheted up the effort required from workers to achieve the minimum wage through reducing the rates paid for piecework, and in some cases to have changed the type of labour contractor they use to larger, more anonymous businesses. The paper calls for further, commodity-specific and spatially-aware research with a strong ethnographic component. Copyright
Article
Transnational social networks powerfully shape Mexican migration and enable families to stretch internationally. In an atmosphere of such high dependence on social networks, it would be rare for families not to be affected by the opinions of others. This article analyzes this often-overlooked aspect of social networks, gossip. I analyze gossip stories prevalent for one type of migrant family, those in which parents and children live apart. Drawing on over 150 ethnographic interviews and observation with members of Mexican transnational families and their neighbors in multiple sites, I describe both parents’ and children’s experiences with transnational gossip. I show that in a transnational context, gossip is a highly gendered activity with different consequences for men and women. Although targeting both women and men, transnational gossip reinforces the expectations that mothers be family caregivers and fathers be family providers even when physical separation makes these activities difficult to accomplish.
Article
Since the 2004 EU enlargement established one European common labour market, a large number of Eastern Europeans have taken up seasonal employment as hired farm workers in Norwegian agriculture. Much attention in the public has been given to the potential for ‘social dumping’ of these migrating workers, as they are considered prone to exploitation by farmers looking for cheap and docile labour, and subject to low-wages and poor labour conditions. In response to these threats, Norway implemented labour regulations (‘transitional rules’) that established minimum standards for wage levels and labour conditions, combined with registration and supervision of the incoming labour force. Nevertheless, reports from the field indicate that many of the westward migrating labour force experience work conditions that are far poorer than prescribed by the labour regulations, as these are not implemented at the farm level. In this paper, we discuss the social processes that result in this mismatch between state regulations (e.g. transition rules) and the actual experiences of migrant workers building on dual labour market theory. Analysing qualitative in-depth interviews with 54 farm migrants, we argue that there are two sets of factors underlying the poorer working conditions observed on the farms: Firstly, the structural disempowerment of migrant workers, which gives them weak negotiating positions vis-à-vis their employers (farmers); and secondly, the migrant workers' frame of reference for wage levels, in which poor payment levels by Norwegian standards are found acceptable or even good when judged by Eastern European wage levels. While a number of works have described the exploitation of farm migrant labour, we demonstrate in this paper how national immigration and agricultural histories, structures and present policies configure the labour–capital relations at farm level in the Norwegian case.
Book
Migrant Women Transforming Citizenship develops essential insights concerning the notion of transnational citizenship by means of the life stories of highly educated migrant women from Turkey in Germany and Great Britain. As such it will appeal to those working across a range of social sciences, including sociology and the sociology of work, race and ethnicity, citizenship, cultural and gender studies, as well as anthropology and social and public policy.