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Abstract
Although skilled migration now represents the only ‘acceptable’ form of migration into the UK there has so far been little analysis of the ways in which the shift in the skills of the primary migrant reconfigures family migration. In this paper I outline some reasons for this neglect, highlighting the ways in which two related sets of debates, that on gender and international migration into Europe and that on tied migration, have not yet adequately addressed the changing role of migrant women in contemporary labour markets. Both offer a critique of patriarchy within the household but neither have examined the ways in which immigration regulations intersect with labour market conditions in influencing family strategies around labour market participation of men and women in migrant households. Through the example of medical labour markets I argue that such an analysis is necessary for understanding family migration amongst the skilled.
Notes
Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Human Geography at Nottingham Trent University. Correspondence to: Department of International Studies, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS. E‐mail: [email protected]
In this paper I have made little distinction between the family as a kinship unit and households as residential or economic units, as this is a very large topic which needs to be separately addressed. In the context of this paper, the differences between family forms in countries of origin and countries of destination do have important implications for co‐residentiality, for who applies to enter through family migration, who decides who should move and who supports and is supported by those who move. However, hegemonic nuclear versions of the family dominate immigration regulations and are also influencing discourses of the family in other parts of the world. Also, in this paper, the focus on tied migration has meant that I have limited my analysis to the spouse.
See, for example, recent articles in The Guardian: ‘Migration myopia’, 27 February 2003; ‘Crossing the border’, 23 March 2003.
There is now a large literature on family migration, the most recent of which occurs within the context of debates on transnationalism. For instance, Mary Chamberlain’s research on Caribbean family migration (Citation1999) highlights the ways in which families assist their members through the process of migration but also ground the migrants in transnational fields (Vertovec Citation1999). However, in this paper I am only reviewing one small segment of this literature, i.e. that which focuses on family reunification amongst labour migrants.
Labour migration to Europe in the 1960s and 1970s carried with it implicit assumptions of race, class and gender. Here, I only outline the gender implications but race and class implications have also influenced the discourses on family migration. Labour migration, whether under the colonial regime (as in the UK), guestworker systems (as in Germany) or hybrid systems (as in France), usually involved migration from Third World countries. This power hierarchy worked alongside other forms of hierarchy (such as that of past colonial domination) to racialise migrants upon entry into destination countries. This racialisation was complemented and made more complex by class distinctions arising from the nature of unskilled migration.
Family formation migration has in many European countries been restricted to those with skills, and unskilled migrants were for long not allowed to bring their families with them. Interestingly, the UK’s new immigration proposals as stated in the White Paper Secure Border, Safe Haven (Home Office Citation2002) will ‘import’ some of these regulations into the UK. The paper’s proposals will result in a further casualisation of unskilled labour and will limit the ability of unskilled workers to bring their families with them.
Feminist academics have highlighted the labour market contributions of women migrants, depicting the experiences of women who entered as labour migrants in their own right, and of those who came in through family reunion but subsequently were economically active (Phizacklea Citation1983). However, there has been little research so far on the extent to which women labour migrants reconstituted their household in the country of destination and the nature of the families that reunited with them.
Stier and Tienda (Citation1992) have shown that factors such as nationality and individual resource endowments (education, experience, years of US residence and proficiency in English) do alter the labour market participation of Hispanic immigrant wives in the US. It is, however, not clear from their research whether these factors actually influence who becomes the lead migrant.
In the UK, the state has also proposed a new raft of regulations to ‘free’ the tying of skilled migrants to labour markets, through its Highly Skilled Migrant Programme, although the extent to which this will be taken up is not yet clear.
NHS statistics differentiate between doctors on the basis of their country of qualification (initial medical qualification). The three categories for which data are available are: UK qualified, EEA qualified and ‘other overseas’ qualified. This paper only focuses on the last category, henceforth termed as ‘overseas doctors’.
However this dependence on overseas doctors has not been without its critics. For instance, CitationBulstrode and Lourie criticise the tendency of the NHS to take in doctors from the Commonwealth ‘to swell the ranks of apprentices, then kicking them back before they can become masters’ (1997: 260).
A gender breakdown of the data presented above is not available within the National Health Service (NHS) census data because, although this data source provides accurate gender breakdowns, the country of qualification data is not accurate for individual countries (personal communication, NHS Census Office). The other major data source, the General Medical Council’s database of doctors who have registered to practice in the UK, on the other hand provides accurate data on the basis of country of qualification but does not contain a gender breakdown. Anwar and Ali, who conducted a seminal study of overseas doctors in the UK in 1987, also do not provide gender breakdowns. Immigration data sources such as the Work Permit data are inappropriate for an analysis of the migration of doctors as most doctors do not enter the UK on work permits but through the permit‐free training immigration category. Their entry would therefore not be registered in the Work Permit data. Finally, India does not require emigrants holding graduate degrees or higher to obtain emigration clearance when they leave, so there is little emigration data available on the exit of doctors. Existing data sources therefore do not provide a gender breakdown for doctors who qualified in India. However, National Insurance figures analysed in a study of the UK’s labour market trends suggest that the number of new Indian women workers doubled between 1996–97 and 2000–01 and it is likely that some part of this increase occurred in the health sector, including doctors (Robinson Citation2002).