Gender and Migration
Until mid 1980’s, global migration was a male phenomenon. Currently, women make up for nearly half of the global migrants. Migration is a gender-neutral activity because of its dealings with the process of a person’s movement. Migration is gender-related this is because migration has different impacts on both men and women and on how various groups of men and women prosper in their movement processes. It is a little surprising on how international migration and movement of women has been drawing significant attention in the past years. In recent times, global restructuring has increasingly forced quite a number of women in countries that are still developing to immigrate to already developed countries. However, the argument in this context is whether poverty is the only reason why many women are migrating to more developed countries.
In Oishi’s Women in Global Migration, she scrutinizes various cross national patterns, which concerns the female migration and movement in Asia. The book draws on a fieldwork of more than ten different countries, which are both migrant receivers and migrant senders. Oishi investigates individual autonomy, state policies, globalization impacts and different social factors. The study of gender and migration in this book offers an integrative approach to female migration. It also gives a comparative perspective on women migration flow in different countries .
In the book “Engendering Migration Studies” by Pessar, the literature review emphasizes the contribution, which is made by scholars who in one time have treated gender as an important principle in migration. Gender promotes an examination on the various ways of which migration concurrently challenges and reinforces patriarchy in its numerous forms. There are various questions, which will materialize when gender will be on the center stage of migration, how and why men and women experience immigration differently and finally, how such a contrast will affect settlement, transmigration and return. The United States of America has attracted unreasonably more female migrants compared to other labor importing nations. Comparatively, few females manage to convert high standards of education into key jobs due to economic reforms in the United States that show a broad range of women-intensive industries. Pessar challenges the claim that states that, the United States immigrant families are an acclimatized social form. The migration scholars also examine the effects of immigrant women’s normal wage work on the gendered relations. The author recommends that few studies will address on whether migration encourages or discourages feminist consciousness.
On her conclusion, Pessar states that people must develop analytical frameworks and theories, which will allow them to capture and evaluate the simultaneity of effects of gender, ethnicity, race, class, nationality, and legal status about the lives of immigrants. The progress that is noted is that there are cases studies accumulations, which document on how male and female experience migration in different ways. Also, noted is how men and women create and stumble upon patriarchal ideologies and how the institutions that are across the transnational migration circuits and the way patriarchy reiterate because of migration .
My opinion towards gender and migration is that, gender equality and relocation are directly associated to development hence, they are increasingly considered as one of its main indicators. Due to unavoidable circumstances, many people have to relocate to better areas with women playing prominent roles during forced migration. In some instances, many women face gender based violence and persecution making them have a limited access to proper health. Positive migration is crucial in the development of nations and this can be more encouraging in future.
Bibliographies
Hofstetter, Eleanore O. 2008. Women in global migration: 1945-2000: a comprehensive multidisciplinary bibliography. Westport, Conn. [u.a.]: Greenwood Press.
Pessar, P.R. 1999. “Engendering Migration Studies: The Case of New Immigrants in the United States.” American Behavioral Scientist 42: 577-600.
