Management Versus Rights: Women's Migration and Global Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

The global governance of labor migration reflects two major trends: one supports neoliberal migration management priorities and another addresses human rights, with the latter subordinated to the former. This subordination of human rights to other, market-related, priorities parallels global governance priorities in general. While some international organizations address the need for protection of migrant rights, their specific on-the-ground programs do not match the rhetoric. This study demonstrates this disconnection on the basis of an analysis of interviews with representatives of global governance institutions and international nongovernmental organizations conducted between 2007 and 2010 in the Latin American and Caribbean region and at the headquarters of relevant international organizations in Geneva. Furthermore, the study argues that because the discourse on migrant women's rights and their labor exploitation is framed predominantly in the context of trafficking, little headway is made in advancing migrant women's labor and social rights.

Keywords:

• Global governance
• gendered migration
• migrant worker rights
• international organizations
• Latin America and the Caribbean

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the International Development Research Council of Canada (IDRC) for their generous support for our project on migrant rights activism in Latin America and the Caribbean. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the Australian Research Council, the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation for their financial support for Nicola Piper's projects on global migration governance and transnational migrant rights networks. We are grateful to Carolina Stefoni, Myriam Serulnicoff, Sandra Buccafusca, Martha Rojas, and Bridget Wooding for identifying IOs and national state departments involved in migration work and setting up interviews for us in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, respectively. In addition, we thank Mauricio Lopez for his research assistance throughout the project, particularly for conducting interviews in Costa Rica. We express gratitude to Victoria Simmons for her invaluable assistance with data collection, analysis, and preparation of this manuscript. This contribution benefited from insightful comments by Suzan Ilcan, the editors of this special issue, and two anonymous reviewers, all of whom we thank profoundly. The authors, listed alphabetically, have contributed equally.

Notes

 ¹ We limit our discussion throughout this study to labor migration to the exclusion of other types of international migration, especially forced migration (that is, refugees). Although these two types often overlap in the lived experience of migrants, the global regulatory framework strictly separates the two. Throughout this study, therefore, the word “migration” refers strictly to labor migration. Furthermore, we use the terms “work” and “labor” to refer to paid work, even as we acknowledge that unpaid work is also work.

 ² At the time when the research was conducted, the new agency called UN Women (United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women), set up in 2010, did not yet exist; even at the time of writing, the budgeting and programming implications of this merger of various women-related UN institutions, including UNIFEM, were not known.

 ³ This project involves five teams of researchers in each of the five countries, in addition to the two principal investigators. In attempting to build a team for this comparative project in the LAC region, the two principal investigators relied on personal networks and knowledge of current research in the area of migration – particularly migration of women. In order to keep the project manageable and within budgetary constraints, we did not include other countries, such as Ecuador and Venezuela, which receive considerable numbers of migrants.

 ⁴ See Thomas Faist (2008) for a historical overview of the three main phases that characterize the shifting concerns and foci in this debate.

 ⁵ The GFMD was initiated at the High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development in 2006 in response to the globalization of the migration debate (Romeo Matsas 2008). It takes the form of an annual event, to which only official state representatives are invited, to informally discuss how to enhance migration's benefits for development.

 ⁶ This is not to say that trafficking is not a problem that deserves attention; rather, the point is that trafficking is not the most critical issue in international migration in all places around the world, as Johan Lindquist and Nicola Piper (2007) found in Southeast Asia.

 ⁷ For more details, see the UNHCR website (UNHCR Global Migration Group).

 ⁸ This interest in East and Southeast Asia may be attributed to the personal dedication and knowledge of the former chief of UNIFEM, Noeleen Heyzer, who succeeded in securing funding for migrant women rights projects and programs in this region.

 ⁹ We acknowledge that some activists see the term “domestic work” as disrespectful (conjuring up the notion of being “domesticated”), and they suggest the use of the phrase “household work” instead. Nevertheless, we stick here to “domestic work” and “domestic worker” simply because it is the more widely used phrase and also deployed by the ILO.

¹⁰ It has to be pointed out that IOM covers all types of migration, not only labor migration. In fact, it was originally set up in the 1950s to take care of refugees and displaced people; but since then, it has expanded its remit and claims (rightly or wrongly) expertise on all migration-related subjects.

¹¹ See UN (2005) and Gabriela Diaz and Gretchen Kuhner (2008) for Guatemalans in Mexico; James Ferguson (2003) and Laurel Fletcher and Timothy Miller (2004) for Haitians in the Dominican Republic; and Ana Isabel García, Manuel Barahona, Carlos Castro, and Enrique Gomáriz (2002), Abelardo Morales and Carlos Castro (2002), and Catherine M. Marquette (2006) for Nicaraguans in Costa Rica.

¹² For Chile, please see IOM Chile: Facts and Figures. For Argentina, please see IOM Argentina: Facts and Figures. For Costa Rica, please see IOM Costa Rica: Facts and Figures. For Mexico, please see IOM Mexico: Facts and Figures. And for the Dominican Republic, please see IOM Dominican Republic: Facts and Figures.

¹³ See IOM Chile: Facts and Figures.