Migrant Women’s Transnationalism: Family Patterns and Policies
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00613.x |
| Date | 01 October 2012 |
| Published date | 01 October 2012 |
| Author | Mojca Pajnik,Veronika Bajt |
Migrant Women’s Transnationalism:
Family Patterns and Policies
Mojca Pajnik* and Veronika Bajt**
ABSTRACT
Whereas current policies on migration and integration are beginning to recognise family
reunion as one of the most legitimate reasons for acceptance by a host society, they in
most cases still do not account for the growing trend of feminisation of migration, and
even rarely do they address specific migrants’ needs. As currently constituted, the inte-
gration bills envision a one-way process that places migrants into a position where they
cannot question, but only accept and fulfil the predetermined requirements of integration
plans. But who are the women that migrate, what influence do their transnational experi-
ences have on their families, and how do migration policies envision the reality of
increasing transnationalism? This paper focuses on biographical interviews with migrant
women in Slovenia as a valuable method to question current integration measurements,
applied here to explore female migrants’ experiences in transnational family life and
social networks. A gender sensitive approach is applied that critically evaluates the speci-
ficities of family reunification policies, which define women migrants as dependent family
members. We discuss life trajectories of women migrants, focusing the debate on their
own experiences in and with family life. This new empirical material is used to theorise
gaps in contemporary migration research. Women migrants’ own reflections of transna-
tional family ties show a great variety of experiences and their narratives are a unique
window into motivational, political, as well as legal dimensions of migration.
INTRODUCTION
Contemporary studies of global migration patterns note the ‘‘feminisation’’ of migratory
flows (Castels and Miller, 1993; Phizacklea, 1998) and despite the difficulty of establishing
the exact accurate figures, it is estimated that women represent at least half of the world’s
migrant population (Phizacklea, 1998: 22). It is becoming common practice in Western Euro-
pean countries with unfavourable demographic situation to hire migrant female workers,
while population aging further influences the organisation of everyday family life.
1
The actual
demand for female migrant domestic workers, as well as their engagement in the service
industry, agriculture and tourism, coupled with the traditional migrant labour demand in the
‘‘dirty, dangerous and difficult’’ sectors of the labour market is nonetheless poorly reflected
* Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, and The Faculty of Social Sci-
ences, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
** Peace Institute, Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies, Slovenia.
2010 The Authors
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., International Migration 2010 IOM
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, International Migration Vol. 50 (5) 2012
and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. ISSN 0020-7985
doi:10.1111/j.1468-2435.2010.00613.x
in the European states’ migration regimes. Moreover, current migration policies remain
engrossed in finding ways to ‘‘manage’’ migrations, while integration bills – despite their
declaratory statements – demand adaptation of migrants and hardly leave room for delibera-
tion over integration measures (Pajnik, 2007).
Based on the empirical study – biographical interviews with migrant women in Slove-
nia
2
– we argue that policies in the field of migration and integration lack a more active
approach that would allow going beyond purely formal, jural analyses, but rather take
into account differing positions of individuals, as well as discrepancies in these positions
that arise from categorical definitions by gender, nationality, ethnicity and class. More-
over, the paper provides a gender sensitive analysis by critically evaluating the specificities
of family reunification policies, pointing out the problems that migrant women encounter
in practice when their status defines them as dependent family members.
The contemporary challenges of multiple identities, migrants’ transnational experiences,
and diasporic realities point to the fact that there is no simple trajectory along which a sim-
ple, logical model of a consistent migration policy can be projected, since migrants’ practices
emerge as a reality of multiple existences. In the last decade, several attempts have been made
to thematise post-national (Soysal, 1994; Habermas, 2001), or, more recently, transnational
notions of citizenship (Balibar, 2004; Vertovec, 2004), which consider post- or transnational
changes in structural conditions, and also take into account individual biographies of migrat-
ing populations. Migratory patterns indeed show that we are faced with a new kind of de-ter-
ritorialised politics that has the potential to generate new modalities of political membership,
which evolves beyond the ideals of privileged membership in a nation-state, since it addresses
shifting identities, and legitimises transnational modalities of living. Argued from a feminist
standpoint, contemporary migratory patterns require the process of ‘‘engendering’’ migration
policies, that is, their evolvement as ‘‘a politics of difference’’ (Young, 1990) or as a ‘‘trans-
versal politics’’ (Yuval-Davis, 1997) that accommodates diversity and difference, and does
not ignore these in the name of some supreme universal and formal claims.
Our research suggests that women migrate for a myriad of reasons. Migration being a
result of a set of different causes and motives, accessing the labour market, though a promi-
nent factor, is only one among the reasons, as is so-called ‘‘marriage migration’’. Reflecting
multifaceted goals of the migration project, the women in our sample speak of their migra-
tion being connected to intimate relationships, as well as economic incentives to earn more
money; they may speak of having only short-term migration plans, or a purposeful action to
settle. Nevertheless, due to imposed quotas on work permits and entry visas, which limit
particularly migration possibilities of ‘‘third country nationals’’, many find themselves relying
on family reunification policies as the only legal means of entry. As the rare research in this
field (Phizacklea, 1998; Westwood and Phizacklea, 2000) has shown, these policies tie a
migrant woman’s residence status to a male relative who is considered the primary applicant.
As a consequence, women on family reunification entry visas are often prevented from work-
ing legally, and are confined largely to privatised spheres of work (i.e., domestic service, sex
industry), which are bounded by a racialised sexual division of labour. For women who
enter under family reunion regulations, migration laws largely act to reproduce ‘‘a very tra-
ditional notion of woman’s dependency within a male-regulated private sphere’’ (Phizacklea,
1998: 29). The patterns of entry thus generally define many migrant women as family depen-
dants without an independent legal status of their own. Women are usually cast as the fol-
lowers, since they tend to be understood as family-formers (Raghuram, 2004), narrowly
relegated to nurturing and reproductive roles, even though they have always been active in
the labour market as well. In contrast, our empirical research points to the fact that it is
wrong to see women’s migration simply as a secondary migration in relation to male labour
migration, proving the fact that migrating women do not ‘‘simply follow men’’. Biographical
154 Pajnik and Bajt
2010 The Authors. International Migration 2010 IOM
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