Gender and International Migration: Globalization, Development, and Governance

Abstract

This contribution examines the connections between gender and international migration around three themes: globalization, national economic development, and governance. First, it discusses the connections between globalization and the multiplicity of processes that have contributed to international migration and its feminization, arguing that gender awareness is crucial to understanding these processes. Gender analysis makes visible the increasing commodification of care work on a global scale and highlights how the organization of families is changing. Second, it analyzes the various avenues through which migration may contribute to or hinder economic development, highlighting why remittances, in particular by women, have featured very positively in the migration and development policy discourse. Third, it discusses how issues of citizenship affect the migrant population, showing how gender analysis highlights many challenges with regard to nation-based notions of citizenship, particularly in the receiving countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• international migration
• globalization
• development
• governance

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This special issue was made possible by the generous support of a SIDA grant to Feminist Economics and the Juan Urrutia Foundation of Madrid who funded a workshop in March 2011 in Bilbao, Spain, attended by the authors included in this volume and a number of other experts on international migration. We benefited greatly from these discussions. We are also grateful for the careful comments and criticism that we received on this introduction from the FE editors, Diana Strassmann and Günseli Berik, and for their support and that of the FE staff, at all moments, from the conception to finalization of this special issue.

Notes

Among the countries that around 2000 had the largest share of migrants from developing countries as a proportion of their total population were the medium- to high-Human Development Index (HDI) countries of Costa Rica (7 percent), Argentina (3 percent), and Thailand (3 percent; UNDP 2009).

In Latin America, intraregional migration has been facilitated by the liberalization policies and economic integration policies of the 1990s, which have fostered freer transit in people as well as commodities (Jorge Durand and Douglas S. Massey 2010). Since 2008, for example, citizens of the countries of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) may travel to other member countries without visas. In Central America, there is free movement of labor among four of the five member countries of this region. The exception is Costa Rica, which has a higher standard of living than its neighbors and requires visas of Nicaraguans and Panamanians, but not of other Latin Americans.

In 2009, there were 126 women enrolled in higher education for every 100 men in Latin America and the Caribbean; in Sub-Saharan Africa, there were only sixty-three women per 100 men (United Nations 2011).

See the documentary Letters from the Other Side (2006) for a poignant portrayal of the difficulties faced by the wives of Mexican migrants to the US. Besides full responsibility for the maintenance and upbringing of children, they face the very real possibility of widowhood should the migration experience end in death, as well as the possibility of being abandoned by their spouse if the migration is drawn out and the husband forms a new family in the US.

A study of Mexican households concludes that the inverse U-curve peaks at around US$15,000 annually (UNDP 2009).