And, finally, transnational migrants often experience marginalization based on the interconnections of gender, class (usually their social class in the new country and not their class status at home), and nationality (especially highlighting presumed racial-ethnic characteristics). One consequence of globalized carework is that the inequalities among women are intensifying and global stratification systems are strengthened, rather than undermined. Middle- and upper-class women in the United States and other developed countries benefit from these migration chains, obtaining low-cost help with the domestic and care work that is still defined as their responsibility.
My recent edited book with Minjeong Kim shows that migration for domestic work is an important focus for feminist and gender researchers in some regions, especially Asia and Latin American, as well as in the United States.1 And, most recently, Professor Kim and I are beginning to examine migration for marriage and how it is related to the demand for reproductive and domestic labor. In contrast to paid carework, unpaid carework gains little legal attention and is regulated primarily through marriage (and citizenship) laws rather than by labor laws. Some women migrate from former communist countries (such as Poland or Russia) or from troubled economies in Asia (such as Thailand, Vietnam, or the Philippines) as mail-order/email order brides, or perhaps arranged through match-making agencies, to marry men from developed countries or newly industrializing nations. Frequently, such women are motivated by economic need; meanwhile, men are seeking traditional marriages in which wives focus their activities on unpaid domestic work and carework. Some of these future husbands adhere to the stereotype that “exotic” Asian women will be home-oriented. In addition to seeking wives who perform unpaid domestic and carework, others seek wives who are ethnically similar to themselves, such as the South Korean farmers, studied by Minjeong Kim, who seek brides from the Philippines, Vietnam, or Japan because they live in rural areas from which local women have left in order to find paid work in cities (and to avoid becoming farm wives). Unfortunately, most studies of migration and carework labor do not include marriage migrants in their analyses, perhaps because they seem to be unaffected by labor regulations. Our new project comparatively examines at least six countries (primarily, but not solely, in Asia) that keep national aggregate data on the national origin of the “foreign born” spouses of native born residents. We will contrast the international origin of the spouses that men choose with those that women choose, as well comparing those choices to the typical race-ethnicity of domestic workers in each country.
As you can see, the relationship between paid and unpaid domestic work is structured on a global level, as well as at the national level. As more and more women in industrialized countries become unwilling to bear the sole burden of domestic and care work, it may be taken on by poor women of color or by women migrating from developing countries. But as women in developing countries become less willing to marry into traditional roles in their native countries, or other demographic imbalances are in play (such as in China where there are more men than women, due to their one child policy), more men will seek this type of free labor abroad by connecting with marriage migrants. Of course, if more men were willing to equally share in domestic and care labor, the demand for either form of “feminized migration” would be reduced.
- Christine E. Bose and Minjeong Kim, eds., Global Gender Research: Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge Press, 2009). [↩]
