IMISCOE Research Series

Anastasia Christou
Eleonore Kofman

Gender and
Migration
IMISCOE Short Reader
IMISCOE Research Series
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Anastasia Christou • Eleonore Kofman

Gender and Migration

IMISCOE Short Reader
Anastasia Christou Eleonore Kofman
School of Law Middlesex University
Middlesex University London, UK
London, UK

ISSN 2364-4087 ISSN 2364-4095 (electronic)

IMISCOE Research Series
ISBN 978-3-030-91970-2 ISBN 978-3-030-91971-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9

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Contents

1 Gender and Migration: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Scope and Aims of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
1.3 Organisation of the Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
2 Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches:
Theorising and Researching Mobilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.1 Shifting Analytical Parameters: From Women to Gender
in Contemporary Migration Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.2 Intersectionalities and Conceptual Approaches
in Researching Gendered Social Transformations . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
2.3 Key Conceptual Turns in Migration Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
2.4 Tackling Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Issues
in Research on Gendered Mobilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3 Gendered Labour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.1 Early Studies of Female Labour Migrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
3.2 Care and Social Reproduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.3 Understudied Sectors and Gendered Migrant Division of Labour . . . 39
3.4 Skilled Sectors and Gendered Migrant Division of Labour . . . . . . . 43
3.5 Deskilling and Devaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
3.6 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
4 Transnational Families, Intimate Relations, Generations . . . . . . . . . 57
4.1 Developing Family Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
4.2 Transnational Families: Concepts, Generations, Relations . . . . . . . 60
4.3 Transnational Parenting and Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

v
vi Contents

4.4 Transnational Intimacies and Sexualities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

4.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
5 Gendering Asylum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
5.1 Emergence of Gendered Perspectives on Forced Migration . . . . . . 78
5.2 Displacement to Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
5.3 Vulnerability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
5.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
6.1 Immigration and Integration: Insights and Debates . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
6.2 Integration Policies, Gendered Interventions and Outcomes . . . . . . 101
6.3 Beyond ‘Integration’? Activism and Inclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
6.4 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
7 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
Chapter 1
Gender and Migration: An Introduction

1.1 Introduction

Why has it been important to incorporate gender relations into our understanding of
migration processes and to engender migration research? The need to do so does not
only stem from the fact that women globally make up just under half of international
migrants. Gender is one of the key forms of differentiation within societies which
interacts with other social divisions such as age, class, ethnicity, nationality, race,
disability and sexual orientation. The drivers of migration impact on women and
men differently. Women and men circulate distinctively, whether it be between rural
and urban areas, intra-regionally or globally. Labour markets are often highly
segregated and the possibility of women and men crossing borders may also be
restricted or opened up through gendered discourses, practices, and regulations
governing the right to move and under what conditions. Migration may in turn
change gender relations within households and in the community and impact on
gendered and sexual identities.
Gendered understandings of international migration emerged slowly in the 1970s
and 1980s (Morokvasic, 1975, 1984; Phizacklea, 1983; Simon & Brettell, 1986).
The special issue of International Migration Review in 1984 was titled ‘Women and
Migration’ and highlighted historical and contemporary dimensions of a neglected
issue, namely that of rural-urban and international migration and the incorporation of
women into wage labour through labour migrations. Until then, women had been
largely ignored in writings on international migration; they had been largely rele-
gated to the home and seen as relatively insignificant economically and politically.
As migrants, they were depicted as following men rather than as initiators of
migration or moving as independent beings. However the gender blindness of
migration studies began to be challenged through the writings of feminist scholars
in the 1980s and then some mainstream authors in the 1990s (e.g. Castles & Miller,
1993; Cohen, 1995).

© The Author(s) 2022 1

A. Christou, E. Kofman, Gender and Migration, IMISCOE Research Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9_1
2 1 Gender and Migration: An Introduction

Initial studies had focussed on women and migration but by the 1990s there had
been a paradigm shift to migration as a gendered process, where gender reflected the
practices and representations of femininity and masculinity and relationships
between women and men (see Chap. 2). Nonetheless, gender continued for many
writers to connote women’s experiences and lives. In a review of the field, the first
handbook on this topic (Willis & Yeoh, 2000) noted that a gender perspective has
drawn attention to the significance of the household and its reproductive activities
(Truong, 1996), in particular of domestic and sex work. Labour migration, as the
focus of much gender and migration, demanded an explanation and highlighted the
complexities of migratory movements, their temporalities and circularities.
Poised at the cusp of new developments, the review identified emerging trends
such as the diversity among women and men in which gender cut across class,
ethnicity, sexuality, age and other social variables, an approach would become more
evident with the development of the concept of intersectionality, the buzzword of
feminist scholarship (Nash, 2008 and Chap. 2). Absence of men and masculinity
would not be rectified until males were studied as gendered subjects (Charsley &
Wray, 2015; Gallo & Scrinzi, 2016; Pasura & Christou, 2018) (Chap. 2).
Though transnationalism questioned the focus on the bounded nation-state in the
1990s, it remained masculinist until a decade later (Mahler & Pessar, 2001; Pessar &
Mahler, 2003). The gender and migration literature also increasingly engaged with
theoretical analyses of global inequalities and the counter geographies of globalisa-
tion that create new circuits linking the Global South and the Global North, and in
which women significantly contribute to household survival in economies
destabilised by economic restructuring and withdrawal of public welfare (Sassen,
2000). Concepts such as the global chains of care (Hochschild, 2000) reflected the
growing global demand for reproductive labour (domestic, care and sex work).
Though family migration had received relatively little attention (Kofman, 2004),
with increasing labour migration more families were forced to live apart and
stretched across space, as the study of transnational families in Europe (Bryceson
& Vuorela, 2002), Asia (Yeoh et al., 2005) and North America (Hondagneu-Sotelo
& Avila, 1997) revealed.
Three socio-economic and political changes have also oriented the development
of gender and migration. They are firstly the enlargement of the EU and the growth
of mobilities and migrations from Eastern to Western and Southern Europe where
research has focused on domestic and care labour exemplifying the global chains of
care (Lutz, 2011; Marchetti, 2013) as well as family networks (Ryan et al., 2008).
The second is the financial crisis, especially severe in Southern European countries
which had less impact on migrant women’s employment, though it often put
additional pressure on them as breadwinners. The loss of employment brought
about new mobilities between sending and receiving countries (Herrera, 2012). It
also led to emigration from Southern to Northern European countries, but here we
know less about its gendered outcomes (Bartolini et al., 2017; Lafleur & Stanek,
2017). Thirdly conflicts in the Middle East and Africa generated large flows of
asylum seekers and a renewed interest in gendered aspects of refugee flows and
1.1 Introduction 3

settlement in Europe in academic and policy studies (Freedman et al., 2017;

Williams et al., 2020).
Throughout this period in the growth of studies of gender and migration, it has
become common to speak of the feminization of migration, noted as one of the four
key trends in the age of migration (Castles & Miller, 1993). Yet in the last few years,
the notion of the recent feminization of migration has been challenged (Donato &
Gabaccia, 2015; Schrover, 2013). Donato and Gabaccia (2015) note that globally the
percentage of female migrants has only increased by a small amount from 46.7% in
1960 to 49.6% in 2005. They argued that migrations had already begun to feminise
in the early twentieth century in settler societies and Europe. In the United States the
share of women in immigrant flows increased sharply between the 1830s and 1860s,
and again in the first half of the twentieth century, to attain 50% in 1930. In many
European countries it was gender balanced before World War II, leading Schrover
(2013: 123) to comment that ‘if there was ever a period of feminization, it was in this
interwar period’.
During the twentieth century, the composition of flows tended to change
according to immigration policies, recruitment practices and the nature of the labour
market. In the 1920s, a number of countries restricted male migration but allowed
female migration. Many German women migrated as domestic workers to the
Netherlands and Scandinavian countries (Schrover, 2013: 112). After the war labour
shortages emerged by the end of the 1940s. States with colonies, such as France and
the UK, had largely free movement within the colonial system, often recruiting
women for low level service and welfare work as with Caribbean women in France
and Britain (Byron & Condon, 2008). Other sources of labour in the UK came from
displaced persons camps and the Baltic (McDowell, 2016). The liberalization of
labour flows in Western Europe following the establishment of the European Coal
and Steel Community initially favoured men but from the mid-1960s, the growth of
the electronics industry and the search for so-called nimble fingers led to the
recruitment of female labour in Germany beyond Southern Europe to countries
such as Turkey (Erdem & Mattes, 2003). Sectors such as domestic work and
concierges were largely filled by Southern European women, as Laura Oso (2005)
highlighted for France. It is estimated that until the economic crisis of 1973 that the
‘guest worker’ recruitment comprised about 70% men.
However, the global average masks substantial differences between regions due
in large part to types of migration (Fig. 1.1).
Regions such as Europe and North America, Australia and New Zealand, and
Latin America and the Caribbean have a gender balance with a very slight increase
since 1990. These regions offer permanent settlement as well as the right to family
reunification and the possibility for family members to accompany labour migrants.
This tends to push up the gender balance due to the feminised nature of family
migration. In contrast, in other regions, male predominance has risen slightly since
1990. In Western Asia, which includes the Gulf States, demand for less skilled and
skilled male labour has been strong even though female domestic workers are also in
demand (Malhotra et al., 2016). Thus, the number of female migrants may have
increased in absolute terms while relatively declining, a distinction which should be
4 1 Gender and Migration: An Introduction

Female migrants as percentage of all internaonal

migrants, by year and region
Parity

Sub-Saharan Africa

Oceania (excluding Australia and New Zealand)

Northern Africa and Western Asia 2017

2015
Lan America and the Caribbean
2010
Europe and Northern America 2005

Eastern and South-Eastern Asia 2000

1995
Central and Southern Asia
1990
Australia and New Zealand

38 40 42 44 46 48 50 52
Percentage
Source: UNDESA (2017)

Fig. 1.1 Proportion of female migrants of all international migrants 1990–2017

taken into account in the discussion on the feminization of migration (Vause &
Toma, 2015). The evidence does not substantiate the view that feminization has been
linear nor always a new development, but rather that it is dynamic and complex. We
need to distinguish between the feminization of migration and the feminization of
the ‘migratory discourse’ in which women are conceptualised as actors of migration
(Schrover, 2013; Vause & Toma, 2015).
Lastly, a different critique of the view that migration has become feminised draws
upon the increasingly higher levels of education of migrant women to contend that
what we have been witnessing in the past few years is the feminization of skilled
migration (Dumitru, 2017). Highly educated women in particular are migrating to a
much greater extent than men with a similar educational level with the number of
tertiary educated migrants increasing by 79% between 2000/01 and 2010/11, 17%
greater than for male migrants to OECD countries (OECD, 2016). In the countries of
the South, among women aged over 25 years, highly educated women are the most
mobile groups, especially from poorer countries, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where
almost 20% of the highly educated in 2010 had emigrated compared to 0.4% of the
least educated (Dumitru & Marfouk, 2015). Women have thus formed an increasing
percentage of skilled migrants (defined by their level of education rather than the
occupation they take up after they have migrated). As we shall see in Chap. 3, there
1.1 Introduction 5

has been relatively little research on highly educated women or those undertaking
highly skilled jobs post-migration.
It should also be noted that the discussion about feminization focuses on labour
migration, yet in 2015 the largest source of permanent migration in OECD countries
was family migration, ahead of labour and humanitarian migration, with 38% of
migrants entering through this route. Over 50% of this type of flow are women, with
60% in European OECD countries, 57% of sponsored family in Canada and
two-thirds in Australia. In some countries with a large number of family permits,
such as Canada, the UK and the US, the proportion of accompanying family of other
admissions streams, such as the economic, pushes up the proportion of family-
related reasons for migration. Most family migrants are spouses, followed by
children and parents (OECD, 2017: 125). In some countries where family
reunification is not permitted for less skilled migrants, one of the most significant
forms of family migration is marriage migration as in Asia (Chung et al., 2016;
Constable, 2005). In general, the number of family migrants may fluctuate according
to the general level of migration, as in Southern Europe, or due to shifts in
immigration policy where governments seek to control this form of migration,
often in favour of skilled labour migration, as in Australia in the 1990s (Boucher,
2016).
The focus on labour migration framed the migration of women within a general
push-pull model, even if a social dimension was added. Only more recently has a
more comprehensive reflection on how female migration to a much greater extent
than male might be driven by a desire to escape socially discriminatory institutions
and social control. Evidence from the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI),
which measures discrimination against women in social institutions, indicates that
gender inequalities serve as both a motivating factor and barrier for women’s
migration (Ferrant & Tuccio, 2015; Ruyssen & Salomone, 2018). On the one
hand, women who face discrimination in their country of origin may want to migrate
abroad, and may chose destinations where levels of gender discrimination in social
institutions are lower than at home. On the other hand, gender discrimination in
countries of origin can also prevent women from being able to migrate, when they
have onerous family responsibilities, limited access to resources and social net-
works, little bargaining power or the right to initiate migration themselves. Qualita-
tive research further supports the finding that discrimination is a driver of women’s
migration. Studies show, for example, that women migrate internally to larger cities,
or across country borders, to avoid child, early and forced marriage and other forms
of violence against women in the family (Parish, 2017).
And lastly, we should take into account that migration has become complex in its
directions and orientations. It is varied in its duration with migrants not necessarily
starting out with fixed intentions or what Engbersen et al. (2013) have called ‘liquid
mobility’. In Europe the opening up of free movement in 2004 in the context of
increasingly liberalized and deregulated labour markets has generated large-scale
movements from East to West with such migrants often replacing racialized migrants
beyond Europe (Favell, 2008). Subsequently the severity of the economic crisis in
Southern Europe, loss of employment, especially among youth and the austerity
6 1 Gender and Migration: An Introduction

measures drove many highly educated young people to seek employment and
opportunities in Northern Europe (Lafleur & Stanek, 2017).
And whilst, as we shall see in Chap. 3, many young Europeans experienced
dequalification and deskilling, especially in the initial period of movement, those
with recognized cultural capital, and often from a solidly middle class background,
are able to enter more smoothly into skilled occupations, for example, as with
Spanish migrants in France (Oso, 2020). In this way gender, racialization, class
and age have stratified the outcomes of their migratory projects. The ability for
European citizens to move with relatively few barriers has also initiated onward
migration of new EU citizens of migrant and refugee background (Ahrens et al.,
2016; King & Karamoschou, 2019) which breaks down a straightforward relation-
ship between origin and destination country. Gender plays a part in whether the
family moves and in the severity of the often precarious experiences of such onward
migrants (McIlwaine, 2020).

1.2 Scope and Aims of the Book

There are a number of ways in which one may structure the field of gender and
migration which has in the past two decades begun to crystallise into an epistemic
community (Kofman, 2020; Levy et al., 2020) as a production of knowledge
amongst a network of scholars around certain topics and approaches. Some scholars
have focussed on threading an analysis around key perspectives such as
intersectionality and transnationalism (Amelina & Lutz, 2019) or integration
(Anthias et al., 2013). In this book we trace the emergence of knowledge production
of the field in general followed by the key drivers or motives for migration – labour
family and asylum/refugees. These are the building blocks of contemporary migra-
tion governance, and as categories implemented by states and international organi-
sations, they shape and control the modes of entry open to migrant women and men
and also structure the nature of academic outputs. This is not to say that these
categories determine migrant lives or that the categories themselves are fixed; they
are in fact entangled, articulated and dynamic.
In the past few years, reflections on the construction of categories in migration
research and policy have come to the fore (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018; Dahinden
et al., 2021; de Haas et al., 2019; Schrover & Moloney, 2013). Throughout the book
we acknowledge the fact that the categories we are dealing with have been deter-
mined by states and international organisations, and often disseminated by the
media. Classifications and categories emerge in a particular social and political
context and period; they may evolve in certain instances, whilst in others they
remain largely unchanged in a reality that has changed. Within the broader catego-
ries, there are numerous issues which demand critical attention. Especially pertinent
are definitions of skills and their gendered implications, the notion of the family,
usually nuclear and heterosexist for the purpose of entry, and of the refugee more
likely to have been displaced through mass movements arising from conflicts rather
1.3 Organisation of the Book 7

than the individual (male) figure envisaged by the 1951 Refugee Convention. Our
three prevailing categories are those used to classify modes of entry but the bearers
of these classifications assume a range of identities in societies post entry. The labour
migrant may form a family, the family migrant is increasingly likely to work, and the
asylum seeker/refugee seeks to work and reunite with their family or to form a new
one. Thus the gendered division of labour draws upon migrants entering through the
entire range of categories i.e. those entering through family channels or asylum also
participate in the labour market. So too are the categories and the ways they are
applied challenged by activists and researchers. Examples are the heterosexist nature
of the family in immigration policy which has, in a large number of European
countries, recognised same sex and cohabiting couples as constituting families;
equally there has been an attempt to inject gender and sexuality-related persecution
grounds into the Refugee Convention (see Chap. 5). In terms of participation in a
society, the concept of integration too has been subjected to considerable critique
(Anthias & Pajnik, 2014) at a time when many states are imposing greater demands
on migrants (see Chap. 6).
Thus this book seeks to cover the general development of the field of gender and
migration in the past 30 or so years, both in relation to different forms of immigration
and post entry insertion into societies. In doing so, we seek to raise debates and
explore different and emerging approaches. Intersectionality has become a major
concept in gender and migration studies though it struggles to encompass the full
range of the interplay of different social divisions (see Chap. 2). Moving on from
women to gender, there remains nonetheless a tendency to focus on women,
although the need to recognise men and masculinity is being addressed in general
and across a range of topics. So too is the relevance of sexuality in migration patterns
and outcomes. Most of the literature referred to in the Reader is in English but we
acknowledge the large bodies of academic and policy writing in other languages, and
in particular French, German and Spanish. Whilst both authors subscribe to looking
beyond the global North as the source of theoretical insights as part of the
decolonisation of gender and migration and the uneven circulation of knowledge
(Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020; Grosfoguel et al., 2015; Kofman, 2020), the restrictions
of a short reader have meant the book is largely limited to a European focus unlike in
a longer volume (Mora & Piper, 2021). Nonetheless, wherever possible, we have
incorporated wider theoretical insights. The limitations imposed by length have also
meant we have been unable, except to some extent through the discussion of
transnational families, to connect up origin and destination, though here too we do
not assume migration is in any way a linear or permanent journey.

1.3 Organisation of the Book

In this Chap. 1 we have briefly traced the development of gender and development
from the 1980s and then in the 1990s the adoption of the idea of feminization of
migration propounded by mainstream scholars as well. However others have
8 1 Gender and Migration: An Introduction

questioned the simplicity of the analysis and suggested gendered patterns as more
complex geographically and over time.
In Chap. 2, we turn to the major theoretical perspectives and the shifting analyt-
ical parameters from women to gender and the introduction of intersectionalities,
said by some scholars to be the key contribution of feminist scholarship. We then
examine some of the recent conceptual developments and methodological shifts and
their implications for gendered understandings of migration. We end Chap. 2 with a
discussion of research and ethics in undertaking migration studies.
In Chap. 3, we turn to one of the major empirical areas of study in gender and
migration, that of gendered labour. This title reflects the fact that labour may be
derived from a number of sources, ranging from labour migration, family migration,
asylum seekers and refugees as well as students, and that it may have regular or
irregular status. We argue that the labour market for migrants is heavily gendered
both among the lesser and more highly skilled sectors. There has been a tendency to
focus on what we have called the emblematic figure of the female migrant, that of
domestic and care work especially supporting the social reproduction of the house-
hold, but as we indicate there are other sectors both in the lesser skilled sectors, such
as hospitality, and in the skilled, such as health professionals as well as academia
which deserve more attention. There are also a few studies of women in predomi-
nantly male sectors such as IT and engineering. We also recognise that migrants are
distributed across the labour market but there are few studies to draw upon. Indeed
focussing on the sectoral division may mean one loses sight of the trajectories of
individual migrants both in relation to deskilling as well as social mobility.
Chapter 4 explores family migration, for a long time understudied and treated as a
secondary form of migration in which women followed men. As from the beginning
of this century it captured more attention and is the main reason for permanent
migration. Furthermore familial reasons generate more moves than labour in
intra-European mobility. The interest in the family and familyhood has spawned a
growing literature on diverse aspects of transnational families and how migrants
have engaged with borders and split lives and separated families. Thus transnational
parenting and children have become significant topics as have considerations of
cross-border intimacies and sexualities.
In Chap. 5 we discuss another form of mobility and displacement in which
women traditionally did not manage to get to European shores to the same degree
as men who had greater resources to make often difficult and dangerous journeys.
We show how gendered representations played a part in maintaining the binary
between the ‘there’ beyond Europe and ‘here’ in Europe. Gender-related persecution
had difficulty in fitting into the male political figure of the refugee enshrined in the
1951 Refugee Convention and the attempts to incorporate such concerns as well as
sexual orientation and gender identity in asylum determination. The second part
examines the contemporary ‘Migrant/Refugee Crisis’ generated by recent and
protracted conflicts in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and Middle
East, especially Syria (Freedman, 2016). Although initial flows were male domi-
nated and gave rise to representations of male refugees as cowardly and threatening
to European societies, after the summer of 2015 the gender balance shifted towards
References 9

women. In particular, we engage with the critique of the prioritising of certain

asylum categories through the application of the concept of vulnerability by states,
the European Union and international organisations.
In Chap. 6 we move to academic critiques and debates about integration and the
application of the concept to target certain categories of migrants. It has been
recognised that integration fails to take into account class and race (Schinkel,
2018) but we argue that gender considerations have also been absent, yet integration
measures and policies have targeted migrant women, too often assumed to have
come from backward and patriarchal societies in the Global South and are either
reluctant or held back by men from integrating. The second section examines the
different gendered discourses applied to integration of women and men in the past
20 years, especially targeting Muslims as disrupters of a modern society. The third
section seeks to go beyond integration and how migrants have sought to contest
discrimination and lack of rights, especially in the workplace, as well as claims to
political subjectivities seeking to recognise them as fully participating members of
society.
In the Conclusion we suggest that that it is important to understand the history of
gender and migration and the way in which particular issues, such as feminization
and intersectionality, have evolved. We end by highlighting the emergence of
significant events – the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and Black Lives Matter –
which have implications for the scholarship of gender and migration and our
engagement with broader societal developments.

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Chapter 2
Gendered Migrations and Conceptual
Approaches: Theorising and Researching
Mobilities

2.1 Shifting Analytical Parameters: From Women

to Gender in Contemporary Migration Studies

While the repetitive rhetoric of ‘discovering’ women as active agents in mobility

decisions, plans and the execution of such, might have had a major contribution in
filling an important lacuna in migration studies literature several decades ago now
(Morokvasic, 1984; Kofman, 1999), there are a number of analytical problems with
continuing claims that seem to either conflate ‘gender’ with women or tend to nearly
essentialise the ‘feminization of migration’ in reflecting discursive stereotypes. In
the latter case, gendered migration research requires taking on board the historicity
and local embeddedness of particular case studies which should clearly frame socio-
political and development strategies when conducting studies to understand women
migrants and female migration (Cornwall et al., 2008; Dannecker & Sieveking,
2009; Amelina & Lutz, 2019). This perspective becomes clear in the following
sections and in the box included in this chapter where we include exemplifications
from case studies and our own research findings.
The dominating portrayal has been that of international migrants as young males
crossing borders primarily consciously for livelihood reasons, either through
documented or undocumented means. Yet, even recently through protracted dis-
placement we continue to realise that there is a clear need as migration researchers to
generate more disaggregated data by gender, age and family status as to reflect the
complexity of vulnerabilities, mobilities and gendered findings (Kofman, 2019). The
notion of the popular, but at the same time quite traditional, representation of
international migration viewing female migrants as members of family mobilities
in the diasporic sense and by extension as more passive followers than active agents
in the global mobility phenomenon, along with victimisation discourses in the
migrant sex worker industry (Agustin, 2007), has obscured a wider awareness of
the autonomy and subjectivities of women migrants. The lack of such awareness of
the complexities and intricacies of the historicity of countries of origin and

© The Author(s) 2022 13

A. Christou, E. Kofman, Gender and Migration, IMISCOE Research Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9_2
14 2 Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches: Theorising and Researching. . .

destination as well as the embeddedness of social, temporal and biographical

parameters (Christou & Michail, 2019) is an added element to why the ‘feminiza-
tion’ of the ‘age of migration’ can appear as an over-inflated generalisation.
Conceptually, for almost three decades (Braidotti, 1992; Altamirano, 1997;
Silvey, 2004; Nawyn, 2010) feminist theories have increasingly highlighted their
developments and contributions to migration research. Two decades ago, Kofman
still exclaimed that: ‘Methodologically, we are more equipped than ever to probe the
temporal and geographical complexities of individual, household and group itiner-
aries. There no longer is any excuse for the gender blindness of European main-
stream research’ (1999: 289). And, in the 2000s and currently, migration scholarship
now accepts that mobilities are gendered phenomena which by extension require
more sophisticated analytical and theoretical tools than ‘studies of sex roles and of
sex as a dichotomous variable allowed in the past’ (Donato et al., 2006: 4).
Such a sophisticated and more complex set of tools mirrors what Mahler and
Pessar (2001) term as a ‘gendered geographies of power’ approach which links the
interconnectedness of the temporal, spatial, scaler, biographical and other intersec-
tions on the individual and family level in shaping experiences. Gendered power
should be seen as a core catalyst to unravel our understanding of those individual and
collective experiences. Migration as a gendered and gendering process is an impor-
tant realisation for research into the civil, social and political rights of migrants in
any destination society (Szczepaniková, 2006). Gendering perceptions are also
characteristic of sustaining hegemonic representations of ‘white male breadwinner’
categories in the post-war (Western) European context despite migrant women
filling in important labour market gaps where local origin women would have
otherwise been expected to take on (Kofman et al., 2000: 136).
Following Parreñas (2009), in our interrogation of how gender is constituted in
migration studies there is a lack of emphasis on gender as a relation of inequality
between women and men, and, thus our research should not solely be pointing to
differences in femininities and masculinities. That is, in the study of migratory
processes it is important that we understand the gendering of such as the study of
the emergence of inequalities among women and men migrants. More importantly, it
is crucial that discussions on gendered migration continue to explore the gendered
experiences of men migrants, especially their vulnerabilities, marginalisations,
affective channels, personal and family ties in a nuanced approach which embraces
critical insights of their inequalities (Pasura & Christou, 2018). The invisibility of the
migrant man while reduced in recent literature (Charsley & Wray, 2015), still
requires a holistic approach to understanding migration trajectories in tandem with
structures impacting migrant identities and life stories, the nuances of migrant
agency, the complexity of societal spheres, familial, personal and social relation-
ships. As Wojnicka and Pustułka (2019: 91) assert, ‘migration as a process influ-
ences the changes in defining, negotiating and performing masculinities, while male
migrants create a myriad of migration forms. Stating that migration is a gendered and
gendering process has conspicuous consequences for men, women and societies,
with the notion of migrants’ sex preconditioning our reception of migratory flows’.
At the same time, it is crucial to underscore that ‘migrant men’ should not be
2.1 Shifting Analytical Parameters: From Women to Gender in Contemporary. . . 15

conflated into a unified homogeneous group as parameters of intersections and/or the

matrices of age, generation, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, etc. are all
generative of multidimensional outcomes for male migrant trajectories and their
positionalities within given societies. Added to these are the usual translocal and
transnational layers that might also shape their mobilities and identities in host and
home countries. In this direction, we see an intersectional and holistic approach to
the study of migrant masculinities as being an alternative conceptualisation to the
more insular view on ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Christou, 2016a).
Transnational approaches to migrant masculinities also deepen understandings of
how gendered migrations are constituted and how identities might be reconfigured in
the process. In such a process, new forms of hybrid masculinities might emerge and
so they are also socially constructed, fluid and transformative. Migrant masculinities
can also become translatable to otherwise patriarchal hegemonic versions when men
are on the move (Datta et al., 2009; Pasura & Christou, 2018) but also in the
messiness of everyday life where identities are constantly reshaped by experiential
means (Noble, 2009). Ultimately, components of dysfunctional practices in social
and familial relations can bring into conversation the public and private spheres
where migrant masculinity can be further shaped by struggles, contradictions and
power impacts. The crafting of migrant masculinities is also contingent to the
aesthetic labour and reproductive labour demands that shape how they are
constructed as gendered subjectivities (Warren, 2016; Fiałkowska, 2019; Gallo &
Scrinzi, 2019).
Recent research on immigrant men has also sought to bring them back into the
analytical frame ‘not as androcentric agents, but as actors with gendered,
intersectional social locations imbued with both masculine privilege and social
marginality’ (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2017: 112). Migrant men thus can be recipients
of the empowerment that masculine privilege brings while at the same time they can
be racialised and marginalised when their working class ethnicised status intersects
with regimes of social and labour geographies that allow for new hierarchies to
emerge. This leads to exciting new theorisations drawing from a Bourdieusian lens
on ‘ethnic habitus’ in how marginalised groups ‘construct and perform situated
dominant masculinity’ (Grosswirth Kachtan, 2019: 1489). Such research demon-
strates that in particular ethnocultural settings performances of ‘worthy dominant
masculinity’ leads to the exposure of a separation between social and masculine
status thus unveiling masculinities as performative, relational and contextual social
practices in specific settings (ibid).
Male migrant masculinity and agency can also be viewed through a feminist lens
to analyse the complexities of gendered mobility, familial and gender relationships.
Choi (2019) proposes the concept of ‘masculine compromise’ to explore the material
impacts on gender practices within family life, gender identity and gender attitudes.
Additional research by Vlase (2018: 195) on men migrant subjectivities reveals how
migration not only deeply shapes but extensively transforms masculinities often
threatened by life events, lack or complexity of life milestones and other social
encounters which prompts migrants to ‘discursively resecure their sense of
16 2 Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches: Theorising and Researching. . .

adult-male status by framing their experiences transnationally, in a broader socio-

cultural context of both home and host countries’. Discursive and experiential
accounts of migrant masculinities point to their malleable aspect but this should
not been seen as devoid of agency, conscious planning and individual
reconfiguration.

2.2 Intersectionalities and Conceptual Approaches

in Researching Gendered Social Transformations

The shift from women to gender in migration studies has also seen the opening
toward a more generative and intersectional approach to the research on contempo-
rary gendered mobilities (Näre & Akhtar, 2014). The incorporation of multiple
categories relevant to the understanding of intersectional hierarchies can unveil
inequalities, relationships and meanings in migration that can inform how gendered
identities and roles emerge as shaped by social reproduction, class division, gener-
ation and other institutional and structural practices.
Such analytical gaps make the more intersectionally theorised works compelling
in providing wider insights into social categories, hierarchies and inequalities (Bas-
tia, 2011; Grosfoguel et al., 2015). More specifically, significant contributions on
intersectionality in migration studies have reflected on how we theorise through a
‘translocational lens’ (Anthias, 2020) in order to address the connections between
social divisions and identities and to understand hierarchies/inequalities through
modalities of relational, processual and spatio-temporal instances of power.
In explaining the origins of ‘intersectionality’ and its meaning, it is Kimberlé
Crenshaw, a law professor at Columbia University and UCLA who coined the term
‘intersectionality’ more than three decades ago (1989) to describe the way people’s
social identities can overlap in instances of inequality and discrimination. The
concept has triggered heated debates in academic and public discourse, frequently
has been misused in its application to research and theorising, has led to the
politicization of the idea, as well as a lasting relevance and re-visiting of its
parameters in affirming that inequalities are indeed multidimensional and not
uniform.
So, if we aim to condense intersectionality into a succinct definition, we can say
that it is an analytic framework that attempts to understand and transcend how
interlocking systems of power, oppression and privilege interact, and specifically
to address through this lens their combined impact on those who are marginalised
and disempowered within a given society.
At its crux, intersectionality theory asserts that multiple forms of oppression, such
as those relating to gender, class, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, disability, age,
generation, etc. are not experienced separately, but interact upon and reinforce each
other.
2.2 Intersectionalities and Conceptual Approaches in Researching Gendered. . . 17

In feminist scholarship, intersectionality has been accepted as an approach of

major significance to inclusive research while also being criticized as ambiguous
(Bilge, 2013; Davis, 2008). The conflation of intersectionality as a theory, a meth-
odological approach and an activist application has further weakened its robustness
and these three aspects require disentangling (Bürkner, 2012). By focusing on the
axes of social divisions and categorisations in a dynamic way we can locate the
experiences of those marginalised and excluded by framing through key multi-
dimensional structural oppressions.
Moreover, it is important to acknowledge that only quite recently we find more
critical conversations in the academic literature combining queer migration
theorisations with sexual citizenship studies and wider human rights based
approaches in the gender and sexuality areas of research (Lewis & Naples, 2014;
Luibhéid, 2018). Such a conceptual approach makes a major twofold contribution to
migration studies: by enhancing the visibility of LGBTQI+ migrants, refugees and
asylum seekers (see also Chap. 5) within a combined rights and sexual citizenship
rights context, and that we also expand a critical engagement of those intersections
of sexuality, gender, culture and migration in challenging essentialisations ‘in
individual expressions of desire and identity and border politics more generally’
(ibid: 911). That is, in queering the transnational political economies of mobilities of
scale we highlight queer social movements politics and multiscalar citizenship
practices (Grundy & Smith, 2005; Lewis, 2013).

Box: Queer Theory

Queer theory emerged in the 1990s from two different stands, the post-
structuralist thought of Judith Butler, and lesbian and gay politics. Queer
theory problematises assumptions of identity politics that sexuality constitutes
a stable identity which informs specific lesbian and gay lifestyles, practices
and cultural expressions. Queering renders fluid the categories of sexualities
and genders and underscores the artificiality of boundaries. More importantly,
it gives visibility to any hierarchical division of particular categories of desires,
sexual practices and the intimacy of social subjects, frequently excluded as
‘dissident’ or ‘other’. ‘Queer’ rather stands against homogenizing and contests
normativity, whether such practices descend from hegemonic heterosexual
discourses or from mainstream lesbian and gay politics in the framing of
identities as sites of ‘becoming’ and questioning of norms. As a result, in
migration studies we might consider a ‘queer’ approach to research, as a
distinct methodological approach that aims to perform an act of ‘queering’,
to de-naturalise taken for granted categories of analysis, even beyond issues of
sexuality and gender.
Queer theory in migration studies has been applied as a distinct methodo-
logical approach to the study of mobility themes shaped by gender and
sexuality in seeking to denaturalise categories of analysis and to make

(continued)
18 2 Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches: Theorising and Researching. . .

normativity visible. The implications for queer migration scholarship are new
opportunities to develop the field in interrogating the politics of queer mobil-
ities, the ambivalent spatialities where these might emerge, the fragmented
contexts of diverse societies for queer inclusion and the challenging of border
regimes, normative and state violence, racial capitalisms and the carceral
geographies of bordering as well as the carceral spectacle of suffering of
detention centres and refugee camps.
Queer migration scholarship critically engages heteronormative as well as
homonormative arrangements of borders, bodies, desires and movements
shaped by the bureaucratic institutions of the neo-liberal nation-state and
capitalist discourses (Murray, 2014). While sexualities issues are at the centre
of these discourses, interconnections with other intersectional categories and
their resulting oppressions, exclusions and marginalisations experienced by
mobile social actors such as migrants, refugees, returnees and asylum seekers,
are the articulations of such encounters. This is because processes of move-
ment and belonging are amalgamated with dynamics of institutions and social
relations where intersectional inequalities emerge. These are analytical oppor-
tunities for ‘queer intersections’ to be further investigated (cf. Manalansan,
2006). For instance, queering migrant representations despite elements of
contestation and ambivalence can offer a new repertoire of how queer sub-
jectivities and socialiaties emerge and are reconfigured along fixed notions of
‘nationhood’ and ‘citizenship’. These are important conversations that we
need to have and even more critically imperative research that needs to be
undertaken to inform policy countering a dangerous mixture of xenophobia,
homonationalism, transborder transphobias and toxic binaries of othering
difference.
For more information see the open access book volume on ‘Queer Migra-
tion and Asylum in Europe’ edited by Richard Mole (2021) here:
https://www.uclpress.co.uk/products/141641#

On an individual basis, otherwise repressed (non-heteronormative) sexualities

and the re-negotiation of ageing masculinities involves a disruption of identities
constructed during (return) mobilities that requires deconstructing power relations
shaped by ethnonational signifiers (Christou, 2016a). In exploring such gendered
personal and social transformations it is important to keep in mind the tensions that
might intersect when structural, individual and cultural parameters collide with
respect to affective and gendered meanings of migrant identities. Methodologically,
hermeneutical phenomenological analyses on empirically grounded studies can
address the multiple layers of power in transnational gender relations (ibid). More-
over, since sexual normativity is a core exemplification of power and exclusion, it is
revealing to acknowledge the provocation by Carastathis and Tsilimpounidi (2018:
1120–1121) about the ‘omnipresence of methodological heteronormativity in the
(visual) discourse surrounding the declared “refugee crisis”’ (see Chap. 5). They
2.2 Intersectionalities and Conceptual Approaches in Researching Gendered. . . 19

assert: ‘All migration politics is reproductive politics. The nation-state project of

controlling migration secures the racialised demographics of the nation, understood
as a reproducible fact of the social and human body, determining who is differen-
tially included, who is excluded, and who is exalted. Citizenship, illegality, and
asylum are often affirmed or rejected as inheritable transitive properties that adhere
to a person by virtue of heteronormative (or, more rarely, homonormative) config-
urations of kinship’ (ibid).
As a theoretical and methodological approach to migration research,
intersectionality draws on the relationality within social contexts of migrancy,
power and inequalities, thus drawing out the complexity of mutually constitutive
forms of oppression. Critical social geographers continue to advocate for more
inclusion of black feminist intersectional perspectives and for an ethically-driven
care of its application. This is so it does not reproduce inadvertently white, mascu-
linist, racist and colonialist perspectives including foci on transnational migration
and embodiment (Hopkins, 2019).
Critical theorising in this direction can also surpass the impasse of embracing the
political implications of migration as emergent of migrant agency. Such an approach
is articulated in a theoretically motivated recent piece by Jonsson (2020) in
underscoring the profound political implications of ongoing conceptual turns and
methodological shifts combining ‘borders’ and ‘agency’ while analysing the inter-
connections of these theoretical contexts. Namely, this piece by Jonsson highlights
that the legacies of colonialism and the significance of protest as political agency are
intrinsic to the realisation of democracy and should not be ignored in European
societies and histories when it comes to migration.
The importance of intersectionality as an analytical framework in migration
studies generates an inclusive understanding of migrants as members of multiple
(under/privileged) groups and the barriers they might face. These intersections
underscore the inequalities of interconnectedness at a personal and systemic global
level. While migration has been theoretically placed within approaches that embrace
a broad range of sociocultural, transnational and translocal social fields (Anthias,
2012), one of the frequently missing social categories examined has been consis-
tently ‘class’ in the corpus of literature on the gendered geographies of mobilities
(Kofman, 2004; Cederberg, 2017; Fresnoza-Flot, 2017). Class, is quite often, a
neglected social signifier in intersectional analyses, yet, its inclusion fills important
gaps in integrating social stratification for a more nuanced intersectional analysis of
migrant experiences and positionalities (e.g. Anthias, 2012). A Bourdieusian anal-
ysis of class and migration has been prominent in migration studies (Erel, 2010;
Oliver & O’Reilly, 2010; also see Chap. 3) and class has historically been a
significant social categorisation in the study of gendered understandings of migrant
ethnicity (Anthias, 1992).
Unlike research about marginalised and underprivileged groups, Mastoureh
Fathi’s (2017) research, drawing on intersectionality and class analyses of narratives
of Iranian women migrants in the UK, focuses on the social positions of highly
skilled professional migrant women who as medics grapple with class subjectivities,
social location performativities and social hierarchies. These interconnections point
20 2 Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches: Theorising and Researching. . .

to the complexity of othering processes especially in the interplay of gender, class

and racializations which tend to operate in contradictory and multiple ways. This is
intriguing since intersectional studies concerning the treatment of more privileged
groups has been by and large disregarded. The study reveals two crucial components
of intersectional class: the persistence and importance of power relations on the one
hand and the performative legitimacy of belonging in varying social fields.
Issues of power and belonging are also linked to how intersectionality can easily
become ‘depoliticised’ in the direction that Erel et al. (2010) conceptualise multiple
oppressions in critical sexuality studies. Their work highlights the often neglected
exclusionary effects of the concept and in particular transgender and transsexuality
queer discourse. The authors contend that intersectionality has conceptually failed in
crafting progressive impulses within the multiculturalism debate and as a result there
are methodological implications that point to interconnected webs of power and
hierarchies.
In the next section we inform this discussion with further insights on key
conceptual turns in migration studies. This section is not meant to be exhaustive in
providing an inventory of central conceptual trends and directions in migration
studies, but rather it aims to highlight some of the key turning points that shaped
its trajectory over the past three decades. This sets the scene for further reflective
insights in the final section on theoretical, methodological and ethical issues of
significance in research concerning gendered mobilities.

2.3 Key Conceptual Turns in Migration Studies

The study of gender and migration has historically seen the entire migration process
perceived as a gendered phenomenon, across a variety of spatial and temporal scales
and various intersections of individual and family cycles, biographical, historical and
national time, the politics and governance of states and capitalist world systems
(Donato et al., 2006). Such research insights of gender and migration have not only
strengthened the interdisciplinary field of migration studies but have also theorised
new research approaches and strategies from qualitative, quantitative and mixed
methodological perspectives. In this section we outline some of the key conceptual
turns in migration studies, make links to the gendered layers of these, or lack thereof,
and, reflect on methodological and ethical issues.
In their historical tour of methodological nationalism Wimmer and Glick Schiller
(2002, 2003) contend that the shift towards the study of ‘transnational communities’
is the last historical conceptualisation in post-war social sciences entering the study
of migration. This occurring, as they explain in detail in their 2002 and 2003 joint
articles, as an epistemic move to disconnect from methodological nationalism rather
than an embrace of new objects of observation for migration studies scholars. Since
Chap. 4 discusses key parameters of the transnational approach, here, we only
highlight the impetus toward this conceptualisation and the diversions from there
to other approaches.
2.3 Key Conceptual Turns in Migration Studies 21

One of the approaches going beyond methodological nationalism according to

Biao Xiang’s (2016) ‘epistemological behaviouralism’, might on the one hand,
redress the limitation of taking the nation-state as pre-given container of social life
for migrants in erasing the conceptual divide that internal and international create, on
the other, it creates new problematic thinking in ‘behaviouralizng’ the migration
phenomenon. Remarkably, Xiang addresses both conceptual limitations by
interlinking them as ‘constituted and constitutive assemblages’ (ibid: 669) and
while reconfigured by mobilities as an analytical perspective to explore broader
social changes.
Another recent call recognising the need to go beyond methodological national-
ism (and multiculturalism) to identify epistemological approaches to produce new
migration knowledge is that of ‘methodological interculturalism’ as argued by
Zapata-Barrero (2019). The core recognition here is the unit of analysis being
‘diversity’ itself rather than the migrant, the state, the nation or any other lens that
does not take a diverse public culture of justice approach linked to solidarity and
cosmopolitanism as its core analytical framing. In this sense, methodological
interculturalism aligns well with research foci on race and discrimination and
wider migration policy research driven by an anti-racist, equity, justice and solidarity
agenda. In other words, it aligns with analytical frameworks that focus on unveiling
power and exclusion while putting forward policy agendas embracing diverse, just
and equitable societies.
Theoretical constructions of migration pose both epistemological and ethical
problems that correlate with methodological nationalism. According to Anderson
(2019) the two paradigm shifts of the mobilities turn and methodological transna-
tionalism have been highly generative and that is why Anderson builds on critiques
and alternatives in proposing an approach Anderson terms ‘methodological
denationalism’. This particular conceptualisation builds on a clear distinction: that
of ‘migrant’ and ‘citizen’ in ‘migrantizing the citizen’ in understanding exclusions of
‘non-citizenship’. Anderson (ibid) draws attention to how global, regional and local
institutions and processes impact on the migrant/citizen in underscoring the sensi-
bilities of historicising concepts, theories and practices informing research. Ander-
son suggests that, ‘in this way it has the potential to recover relationalities and
interdependence to shed light on the impacts of methodological nationalism beyond
the academy and into politics’ (p. 7). The latter is the core objective of an approach
that migrantizes the citizen as Anderson contends it will enable research to make
connections between formal and informal exclusions which are often multiple and
go beyond citizenship.
Exclusions and belongings have figured in a variety of conceptual turns but that
of the cultural and materialities approach to migration studies has sought to engage
with migrant cultures from a material, embodied and identities perspective. The
latter do not overlap but find an impetus in how culture and cultural geographies of
migration (e.g. cultural and diasporic landscapes, see Christou & King, 2010) can
trigger paradigmatic trends in examining the materialities and emotionalities of
migration (Christou & Janta, 2019), the affectivities of embodied mobilities
(Christou, 2011; Christou & King, 2011), and, how these can shape identities
22 2 Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches: Theorising and Researching. . .

(King & Christou, 2010). Basu and Coleman (2008) utilised early on the term
‘migrant worlds’ to firstly acknowledge the materiality of migration, secondly the
material consequences of mobilities and thirdly the interconnections of movements
of objects and migrants simultaneously. This last third point referring to the binaries
and divides between people and things is considered to be one of the biggest ‘blind
spots’ that prevents ‘from seeing the full picture and complexity of migration
trajectories and pursuit’ (Wang, 2016: 2).
These are all phenomenological insights to material and migrant cultures in the
study of place-making, identity construction and meaning making in how migrants
interact with the world surrounding them, the stuff surrounding them and how
sensorial reactions emerge in the mundane experiences of mobile lives. Migrant
embodied and sensorial engagements with the materialities of their transnational
worlds happen through emotions, living, consuming, interacting with others and
objects. Some of these aspects are linked to consumption and lifestyle. As previ-
ously, it is important to explore how such experiences and stories of migrant
gendered narratives in a psychosocial intersectional perspective articulate implica-
tions for gendered migrations (Phoenix & Bauer, 2012).
Further recent conceptualisations include that of the concept of ‘lifestyle migra-
tion’ which Benson and O’Reilly (2016) closely consider in capturing its application
as analytical tool and alternative way to thinking about mobilities. Operationalising
‘lifestyle migration’ points to synergies of movements as practices and how they are
understood as meanings in the sociological imagination, including aspiration and the
processes that situate them. It is a vibrant field of research which over the years has
examined a range of groups and destinations reflecting the definition of lifestyle
migration as the movement of ‘relatively affluent individuals, moving either part-
time or full-time, permanently or temporarily, to places which, for various reasons,
signify for the migrants something loosely defined as quality of life’ (Benson &
O’Reilly, 2009: 621). As a conceptual approach, ‘lifestyle migration’ can be seen as
a driver of migration (or return), having a direct impact in shaping post-movement
living and the longer-term implications of settlement and integration as these
processes unfold over time. The approach extends beyond the economic and political
parameters in shaping the kinds of lives that migrants imagine, experience, plan and
dream. This for example has implications in recent calls to problematise the theo-
retical underpinnings of lifestyle migration and to critically examine the conceptual
construction of lifestyle migrants. Recent research has initiated a response to this call
by demonstrating how social hierarchies add a depth of dimensions such as class,
gender and sexuality interconnected to prisms of ‘cosmopolitanism’ (Dixon, 2020).
There is an implication of agency here in the imagination of lifestyles but these
should not be romanticised in stripping away the impacts of the social geographies,
social structures and social constructions which are a part of mobile lives. For
instance, lifestyle mobilities can become ‘discordant’ (Botterill, 2017) when material
challenges can lead to a sense of emotional entrapment and immobility when
practices, state policy, economic constraints and other insecurities can curtail free-
dom and destabilise initial enthusiasm. Such outcomes directly point to the rela-
tional framing of this conceptual approach in situating the experiential aspects of
2.4 Tackling Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Issues in Research on. . . 23

particular case studies and understanding that migrant agency can be confronted by
wider structures during the mobility and settlement process. Indeed, we can talk
about the intersections of the mobilities paradigm with movement and lifestyle
choice as ‘lifestyle mobilities’ (Cohen et al., 2015) in grasping the complexities of
migration, leisure and travel. We understand that the corporeality of mobility cannot
be easily deconstructed in the traditional binaries of work and leisure, home and
away, place and movement, lifestyle and identity. All these patterns of movement
and living can become enmeshed or uncoupled as defining avenues to research
lifestyle mobilities.
Another key ‘turn’ being recently re-visited in migration studies is that of the
reflexive turn. Its emergence in the social sciences and humanities during the 1980s,
especially within ethnographic methodologies and stemming from critical theory and
feminist politics and philosophy shaped much thinking in textual, social and cultural
theory about the production of knowledge. The complex entanglements of knowledge
production along with the ‘tyranny of categories’ (Stewart, 2015) and multiple
contestations emerging in decolonial thought recently has posed renewed challenges
to migration scholars to question epistemic communities (see Kofman, 2020 for a
current intervention on gender and migration). Concomitantly, others have recently
argued that reflexivity among research participants should be incorporated in a
renewed definition of reflexivity as mutually constitutive by both researchers and
research participants in the co-construction of knowledge (Dahinden et al., 2020).
Amelina (2020) also inspired by the reflexive turn, underscores the need to develop a
‘doing migration approach’ that will embrace mobility, immobility and
intersectionalities in discursive knowledge and other configurations in practices
which are generative of social orders of migration and how we situate migrants
conceptually. Amelina sees potential in this analytical approach as being beyond
reflexive and ‘doing’ migration which leads to a conceptualisation of a social produc-
tion of the migrant in paying attention to performativities of routines, knowledge and
power involved in these processes. This clearly connects with the earlier ‘gendered
geographies of power’ approach advanced by Mahler and Pessar (2001) two decades
ago in understanding how a gendered optic in transnational mobilities plays a crucial
role in the creation, transformation and fortification of transnational social spaces.
In the next section we round up this discussion with further insights on issues of
power and hierarchies in research on gendered mobilities highlighting theoretical,
methodological and ethical considerations.

2.4 Tackling Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical

Issues in Research on Gendered Mobilities

Migration as a phenomenon and its topical themes have been researched from a
variety of humanities and social science disciplines (sociology, geography, econom-
ics, demography, anthropology, media and film studies, cultural and literary studies,
24 2 Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches: Theorising and Researching. . .

etc.) through multi-method approaches in investigating regional, urban, suburban

and rural locations, primarily dominated by a focus in the Global North with some
recent explanatory shifts to the Global South and through a number of schools of
thought.
Migration studies has benefited from interdisciplinary explorations with qualita-
tive, quantitative, mixed methods, ethnographic, digital and other tools integrated in
small and large-scale single case study or comparative studies. It appears that the sky
is the limit in studying mobilities, with generations now of trained migration scholars
at the postgraduate and doctoral level at a burgeoning number of academic
programmes and through a flourishing of funded studies globally.
It is undeniable that migration studies has developed in multi-faceted directions
over a number of decades, incorporating different thematic and topical foci,
conceptualisations and methodological directions. The shift to acknowledging the
Global South as an important angle in the knowledge production within mobility
studies (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020) has been important and, so has, as mentioned
previously, the gendered, feminist and queer lens. What a recent mapping of
migration studies, through an empirical analysis of the research field, shows is that
a recovery of topical connectedness points to a ‘theoretical and conceptual coming of
age of migration studies’ (Pisarevskaya et al., 2019: 1).
Indeed, pushing the boundaries in liberating our analyses from concepts and
instead leaping to the realisation that conceptual heuristic devices might probably
be ‘impositions’ as perhaps the body of scholarship of migration studies is itself, can
be frightening but also freeing analytically. For one, freedom from clearly defined
conceptual devices can possibly become a productive immersion into new theoret-
ical terrains in the tradition of grounded theory often misused and misunderstood in
research. Such an inductive approach enables researchers to seek out and conceptu-
alise social phenomena through processes of interpretative and comparative
deconstructing of data.
Yet, it is important to acknowledge existing conceptual and theoretical bound-
aries and not conflate them unnecessarily. For instance, we would disagree with
Stephanie Nawyn’s (2010: 749–750) assertion stating that: ‘Because most people
studying gender and migration use a feminist analytic lens, feminist methods, I often
refer to gender and migration scholars as feminist migration scholars’. We would
avoid such a conflation of gender with feminist approaches as one does not
pre-suppose the use of the other. So, for instance, while in studies of diasporas,
tourism mobilities, youth migrants, and masculinities we encounter a feminist lens in
researching gendered issues (Christou, 2016a, b; Pasura & Christou, 2018; Janta &
Christou, 2019), in others we clearly do not see feminist theorisations in analysing
gender (Kanaiaupuni, 2000; Liversage, 2009; King et al., 2013). Hence, it might
appear self-explanatory, but obviously it is not, so remains important to avoid fixed
assumptions that, either gendered migration research refers to women only or that
gendered migration research is at the same time feminist in its approach, methods
and conceptualisation.
2.4 Tackling Theoretical, Methodological and Ethical Issues in Research on. . . 25

As migration is a phenomenon deeply connected to relationships, emotions,

experiences, etc. of the lived experience, biographical, narrative and life history
methods are a means of capturing the complex, multi-layered and nuanced under-
standings of migrant lives. The migrant life story can become a way to learn from in
how wider issues of social policy can be addressed. This is equally important in
social policy research with refugees and asylum seekers where biographical methods
can expand the theorising and understanding of asylum (O’Neill & Harindranath,
2006). Narrative inquiry is a means by which we systematically gather, analyse, and
represent migrant stories as told by migrants themselves, which challenges more
traditional and modernist views of truth, reality, knowledge and personhood. Sub-
jective meanings and a sense of self and identity are negotiated as the stories unfold,
bearing in mind that stories are re/constructions of the migrant experience, remem-
bered and told at a particular point in migrants’ lives, to a particular researcher and
for a particular purpose.
This all has a bearing on how the stories are told, which stories are told and how
they are presented and interpreted. They do not represent ‘life as lived’ but our
representations of those lives as told to us. Hence, stories can be viewed as socially
situated knowledge constructions in their own right that value messiness, difference,
depth and texture of experiential life. In narrative analysis the emphasis is on
co-construction of meaning between the researcher and participants. As researchers
while being involved in listening we are in a sense ‘translating’ the conversations.
Researchers take in what is being said and compare it with their personal under-
standings, without filling in any gaps in understanding with ‘grand narratives’, but
rather inquiring about how pieces of the stories make sense together. The process of
‘data gathering’ and ‘analysis’ therefore becomes a single harmonious and organic
process.
Recent theoretical dialogues on migration in China (Zhu & Qian, 2020) highlight
migrant identity and subjectivity as an evolving process of reconstruction shaped by
scales, spaces, encounters, interactions and practices unfolding in everyday experi-
ences where ‘the purpose of highlighting banality and everydayness is beyond
merely providing thick descriptions of migratory experiences but to demonstrate
that proper conceptualisations of migration must exceed pure economic reason or a
singular rationality. Migration is always complicated by needs, aspirations, interests
and pursuits that are situated, unpredictable and contingent on the immediate milieus
of movement and encounter. Whether migrants have resources and abilities to adapt
to such contingencies affect their wellbeing in profound ways’ (ibid 13–14). These
processual approaches give insight to subjective nuances which are revealing of
migrant life stories and there has been a rich and prolific literature in this domain
(Eastmond, 2007; Gómez-Estern & de la Mata Benítez, 2013; Fathi, 2017; Baran,
2018).
Stories of mobility can also be stories of trauma, displacement and exclusion
culminating in recent years in a proliferation of new research in this area linked to
wider geopolitical developments in the last decade. In this context, migrant children
26 2 Gendered Migrations and Conceptual Approaches: Theorising and Researching. . .

and refugee youth have come to be constructed as ‘crisis figures’ in Europe (Lems
et al., 2020) but such a sense of exceptionality can trigger conceptually flawed
categorisations that essentialise accompanied minors (see Chap. 5). Any research
requires a process of ethical reflexivity but research with vulnerable populations
raises several ethical questions in upholding research integrity (Akesson et al.,
2018). Ethnographically driven research with such populations can focus on how
research participants make sense of some of the ascriptions and social
categorisations applied to them.
It is important to note that research with unaccompanied youth also illustrates that
young mobiles are frequently struggling with how the ambiguity of their refugee
figurations are portrayed as ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ (Wernesjö, 2020). Mobile
youth narratives of un/deservingness articulate how they are constituted as social
subjects in defending themselves as hard-working, responsible, diligent and not
threatening or victimised (ibid). These processes of narration can be seen as ‘man-
ifestations of conditional belonging’ (ibid: 389) contingent on negotiations of
deservingness.
While research into vulnerable migrant groups can be revealing and of particular
ethical significance to inform policy and teaching, as researchers we often find that
procedural ethics might tend to be overly burdensome, lengthy, irrelevant and, at
times paternalistic, when it comes to vulnerable groups. Research taking place in
volatile settings following war, disasters, environmental displacement, etc. can
trigger much onerous ethical processes which might delay and even hinder research
with populations in those areas. In a sense, this is stripping them from a voice to
sharing their stories with the rest of the world and hinder more participatory action
research or critical ethnographies to be carried out.
An ethical and reflexive approach should inform the entire research process. This
begins with obtaining formal institutional approval, subsequently establishing net-
works and relationships with potential participants and/or gatekeepers to negotiate
access, the collection of data, interpretation, analysis, writing and representation.
These processes of reflexive ethical practice are akin to micro-ethical perspectives
that require researchers being attentive to managing the dis/comfort zones, affective
encounters and boundaries to harm (Akesson et al., 2018). Conducting ethical
research with migrant populations at large, and more vulnerable in particular,
requires adherence to all these procedural and practical safeguarding steps.
Finally, although it has been pointed out repeatedly, the advice of more conscious
efforts to decrease the divide between qualitative and quantitative methodologies is
beneficial to the field of migration studies in its entirety, but especially in the analysis
and theorising of gender in migration studies (Donato et al., 2006). Yet, this remains
one of the challenges of furthering analytical approaches of gender and migration,
often a tension that could be harnessed in capturing rich insights (see Chap. 5 for the
need to disaggregate data by gender and other social divisions) of the situational and
relational categories we explored in this chapter. Quantitative data can also be useful
in developing comparative perspectives as with the prevalence and types of trans-
national families and parenting (see Chap. 4).
References 27

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Chapter 3
Gendered Labour

As we saw in Chap. 1, the gendered transfer of labour globally and within Europe
has been the focus of attention and the core of the discourse concerning the
feminization of migration. Whilst gendered labour migrations are not new, their
composition, extent, and how we analyse them, theoretically and methodologically,
have evolved. As data show, migrants and especially females, are heavily concen-
trated within certain sectors producing not just a migrant division of labour (Wills
et al., 2010) but a gendered migrant division of labour. Some sectors such as
household services (domestic work and care) or social reproductive labour are not
only predominantly female but, especially in Southern Europe, overwhelmingly
filled by migrant women. Although this type of work has attracted much attention
in studies of female labour migration, other sectors, both lesser skilled and more
skilled, have also relied heavily on female migrant labour but have been much less
studied. Mirjana Morokvasic (2011) questioned the basis of our preoccupation about
migrant women as subaltern and victims, exclusively filling low skilled sectors. Thus
domestic and care workers have become the emblematic figures of globalised
migrations in stark contrast to the easily mobile male IT worker (Kofman, 2013).
This is not to deny that domestic and care work globally employ more migrant
women than any other sector, and that demand has not grown in response to the
inadequacies of public provision across different welfare regimes, leading to the
search for cheap solutions to fulfil reproductive needs by using migrant workers,
including men. However it does raise issues around our lack of attention to other low
skilled sectors such as hospitality and contract and commercial cleaning in hospitals,
offices and public spaces, which also employ large numbers of migrants. Skilled
labour (IOM/OECD, 2016), especially in welfare sectors, such as education, health
and social work is also sourced globally to make good shortfalls in professional
reproductive labour (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). Thus at all skill levels migrant
women are employed disproportionately in diverse sectors of social reproduction in
sustaining the wellbeing of the household and of society more generally.
Theoretically the focus on domestic and care work and the privileging of the
household as the key site of labour (Kofman, 2013) adopted the framework of an

© The Author(s) 2022 33

A. Christou, E. Kofman, Gender and Migration, IMISCOE Research Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9_3
34 3 Gendered Labour

international transfer of gendered labour based on the concept of global chains of

care (Hochschild, 2000). Despite its critiques and extension to nursing as a skilled
sector (Yeates, 2009), we argue that we should consider a broader analysis of
gendered division of migrant labour drawn from a range of sources, European and
beyond. We also need to place the demand for migrant labour in a broader context of
the transformation of labour markets, deregulation and the intensification and
embedding of neo-liberal capitalism, so as to capture the different sectors, skills
and sites in which migrants work (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015; McDowell, 2016;
Williams, 2018).
Methodologically studies have often focused on a particular sector without
tracing the trajectory of individuals into and out of a sector over time (Ryan et al.,
2016). Yet the aspirations, personal projects and changing life course shape the
attitudes of migrants towards their working lives and strategies they use to deal with
their situation. Many remain trapped in precarious, low paid and devalued work but
even within low skilled work, there may be opportunities to move out of the most
exploitative strata, for example through becoming regularized and accessing pub-
licly provided services, as Moré (2019) shows for domestic workers in Barcelona.
Those who have a legal status even where there is little exit from the domestic and
care sector may find satisfaction in their employment if earning decent wages,
highlighted in a quantitative study in Italy (Barbiano di Belgiojoso & Ortensi, 2019).
Others may take entry level jobs, such as domestic work for women and con-
struction for men, as they learn the language and how to navigate the labour market
before managing to move into better paid and higher level employment, as has been
the case of a number of Eastern Europeans in the UK (Parutis, 2014). The ability to
resist, find alternative employment and contest individually or collectively (see
Chap. 6) their working conditions and discriminatory practices they face will depend
on class, gender, race and age as well as on legal and employment status. Although
migrants may face exploitation, deskilling and over qualification in their workplaces,
emancipation, empowerment and the fulfilment of personal projects may also be the
outcome of migratory trajectories.
In this chapter, we firstly trace the development of analyses of gendered migrant
labour which tended to focus on female labour migration with less attention paid to
male migrants or to predominantly male sectors. Secondly, we outline how the
growth of domestic and care work led to theorisations of the global transfer of
labour and the focus on this sector in relation to women’s increasing participation in
the labour market, neo-liberalisation of welfare provision and the commodification
of this kind of work. Thirdly, we extend the study of gendered labour to encompass
other less skilled and skilled sectors and highlight the stratification between and
within sectors. Finally we examine overqualification and deskilling faced by many
migrants and suggest this should be understood within a transnational and spatio-
temporal perspective.
3.1 Early Studies of Female Labour Migrations 35

3.1 Early Studies of Female Labour Migrations

The analysis of women and migration in the 1980s (Morokvasic, 1984; Phizacklea,
1983) sought to make migrant women visible in the labour force and examine how
they were incorporated into labour markets. The dominant narrative was of a post
war migration comprising males, usually single, with women entering as dependants
after the stoppage of labour migration in the early 1970s. This view, however, was
contested by a number of scholars. Even though men were the majority, women
contributed significantly to labour recruitment as domestic workers, in manufactur-
ing for their nimble fingers, and in the health sector as nurses (Kofman et al., 2000).
The flows included women from the Caribbean (Byron & Condon, 2008), Eastern
Europe (McDowell, 2005, 2009), Southern Europe (Oso, 2005) and from Turkey
(Erdem & Mattes, 2003). From the 1980s female migrants clearly dominated flows
in Southern Europe (Campani, 1993) as the need for domestic labour, formerly
supplied by internal migration (Escriva, 1997), emerged to fill gaps in provision. By
the 1990s, Eastern Europeans could move within Europe without visas and began to
contribute to the supply of labour. Female migrants from Poland to Germany, for
example, adopted pendular mobility or ‘settling in mobility’, often moving for short
periods between neighbouring countries to work in rotation as cleaners, babysitters
and care workers or traders (Morokvasic, 2004). As interest turned to international
labour migration to Europe and North America, the earlier concern with internal
migration in the Global South (Bunster & Chaney, 1985; Chant, 1992) slipped into
the background.
At the beginning of this century two key scholars (Morokvasic, 2007; Phizacklea,
2000) reflected on what had changed in the past two decades of feminist research on
migrant women and labour markets, what lessons could be drawn from this body of
work, and how it could be situated in relation to broader theoretical developments in
migration and economic and political changes in Europe and globally. In reviewing
30 years of studies of women migrant workers, Morokvasic reflected that gender
orders and hierarchies have not been overturned. The segregation of women into a
number of generally low paid reproductive occupations has reinforced gender hierar-
chies. For Morokvasic (2007: 92) the reproduction of the gender order in migration
reveals contradictory outcomes. She argued that most migrant women look for
‘compromises rather than confrontation and rejection of the gender division of labour
and values’. Differences in terms of class, ethnicity, age and occupation are likely to
shape such outcomes. In a recent study of Ukrainian care givers of elderly persons in
Italy, Tyldum (2015) concludes that exploitation and empowerment may coexist.
Though the conditions of work may be exploitative in Italy, it is often better than
the situation in the Ukraine where they are often performing similar care work unpaid
and dealing with problematic marital relationships with limited access to divorce.
Similarly, looking back at several decades of studies of female migrant workers,
Phizacklea (2000) critiqued the earlier structural neo-Marxist political economy
analyses treating migrant women as cogs in the capitalist world order. She advocated
endowing migrants with more agency through a structure-agency approach (Goss &
36 3 Gendered Labour

Lindquist, 1995) and engagement in transnational processes from below as a means

of subverting the logic of transnational capital. At the same time, she noted that this
may not be equally available to all, as we see in the access to the internet and social
media.
The view of the role of migrant women in the labour force since the earlier waves
of migration has also changed. In the 1970s domestic work was considered to be
pre-modern, evoking labour contracts and relationships of bygone eras (Friese,
1995), and thought likely to die out. What demand existed was being provided by
working class women and/or internal migrants, although a few studies highlighted
the presence of women from the European periphery in the wealthy areas of cities, as
with Spanish maids in Paris (Oso, 2005). Nonetheless, some writers (Gorz, 1988)
noted the increase in the servant class in the 1980s in response to the push towards
economic rationality and growing inequalities in income between the middle classes
and working classes whose work was far less well remunerated.

3.2 Care and Social Reproduction

It was the emergence in the 1990s of domestic and care work as forms of reproduc-
tive labour across a range of welfare regimes in the Global North, which generated
extensive empirical research and a theorization based on the transfer of labour within
a global system. Care can be defined “as the work of looking after the physical,
psychological, emotional and developmental needs of one or more other people”
(Standing, 2001: 17) which includes a wide range of people requiring care, some of
whom are vulnerable (children in care, homeless, frail elderly, mental health) or with
a pronounced degree of dependency (young children, those with disabilities). The
commodification and marketisation of care, especially after the financial crisis of
2008 and ensuing austerity policies, led to downward pressure on the remuneration
of domestic and care workers. The number of migrants has expanded dramatically to
meet the inadequacies of welfare provision and ageing populations (Farris, 2015;
Lutz, 2008). The female domestic’s work, though increasingly indispensable, is
lowly valued, poorly remunerated and minimally recognised in European immigra-
tion policies. The skills required for these services are embodied (McDowell,
2015; Wolkowitz, 2006), transferred from practices in the domestic sphere, and
thereby depicted as innately female.
Theoretically, the concept of global chains of care (Hochschild, 2000; Parreñas,
2001), denoting the transfer of emotional and physical labour from poorer house-
holds in the Global South to those in the Global North, became the dominant lens
through which this transfer was construed. In turn, those in poorer countries gener-
ated another chain, usually drawing in poorer women or other family members to
supply the care deficit, though this aspect only drew attention some time later
through an interest in children and elderly left behind (see Chap. 4 on transnational
families). The concept caught on rapidly and was quickly applied to the use of
migrant labour from beyond Europe and later within Europe from poorer countries in
the East and South East as well as on Europe’s borders (Lutz & Pallenga-
3.2 Care and Social Reproduction 37

Mollenbeck, 2012; Palenga-Möllenbeck, 2013; Vattinen, 2014). Indeed in Europe,

we can discern cascading care chains with migration from Eastern and South Eastern
Europe to Western and Southern Europe and the replacement of labour by migrant
women from beyond the EU, for example, Ukrainians to Poland and the Czech
Republic (Sowa-Kofta, 2017).
However, the concept has been subject to a number of criticisms. In its initial
version, the global chains of care focused narrowly on transnational mothers as the
vehicle for transferring care, thereby ignoring the familial diversity of transnational
carers and its heteronormative assumptions (Manalansan, 2006). It has also been
critiqued for its narrow focus on a particular form of care, failure to take into account
changes in caring relationships and circumstances throughout the life course.
While child care underpinned the global chains of care perspective, care for the
elderly has come to play a much bigger part and the elderly person, female or male,
may themselves be the direct employer of the worker (Cangiano et al., 2009). So too
have elderly family members, often unpaid, formed a care chain quite different to the
original version. Transfers of labour also included older women, as in the case of
Ukrainian women to Italy (Tyldum, 2015) and migrant men supplying care, espe-
cially for the elderly (Gallo & Scrinzi, 2016).
More recently, new perspectives have sought to place recourse to migrant labour
in a broader context of the political economy of care and transnational labour
operating at different scales (micro, meso and macro) (Williams, 2018) and across
different sites of the market, state, NGOs and households in what has been called the
care diamond (Razavi, 2007; Kofman & Raghuram, 2015). The crisis and contra-
dictions of care in neo-liberal capitalism, especially after the 2008 financial crisis
(Fraser, 2016) and the role of the state through its employment and social policies in
shaping household demand for services (Carbonnier & Morel, 2015; Shire, 2015) are
also seen as having contributed to marketisation and privatisation of low waged and
low skilled labour (Aulenbacher et al., 2018). The discourses behind the expansion
of household services in a number of European states (Austria, Belgium, France,
Germany, Sweden) have revolved around providing employment for the low skilled
and curbing informal employment, responding in a more cost effective way to social
needs through private schemes, promoting female employment and supporting the
productive potential of the highly skilled. Whilst care activities especially for the
elderly and disabled, have been targeted through the use of vouchers, tax credits and
legal employment of 24 hour carers, as in Austria and Germany (Haubner, 2020),
eligible household tasks encompass a range of services well beyond care, including
cleaning, home maintenance and gardening in other countries (France, Sweden).
This range of activities serves to support the social reproduction of households,
especially those of high income households who tend to be the main beneficiaries.
By social reproduction we mean the production of people through various kinds of
work – mental, manual and emotional – aimed at providing what is necessary to
maintain existing life and to reproduce the next generation. It includes:
how food, clothing and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, the ways in
which the care and socialization of children are provided, the care of the infirm and the
elderly, and the social organization of sexuality. . .And the organization of social reproduc-
tion refers to the varying institutions within which this work is performed, the varying
38 3 Gendered Labour

strategies for accomplishing these tasks, and the varying ideologies that both shape and are
shaped by them (Laslett & Brenner, 1989).

Social reproduction thus encompasses a range of activities, including but not

restricted to care, within and beyond the household. And very importantly it is not
limited only to those who are dependent such as children, the frail elderly or the
disabled. It also includes tasks often undertaken by migrant men such as household
maintenance (Kilkey et al., 2013), gardening (Ramirez, 2011) as well as domestic
work and care (Davalos, 2020; Gallo & Scrinzi, 2016).
Given that much of the employment generated by these employment-generation
policies has been part-time and of variable hours, low skilled and poorly valued, that
is non-standard employment relations, it is not surprising that migrants, and espe-
cially recent as opposed to more established ones, have disproportionately filled
these sectors. Furthermore, income earned from mini jobs in Germany is capped
(Haubner, 2020) whilst in Belgium and France travel time is not included (Morel &
Carbonnier, 2015).
The role of migrants in providing household labour differs between countries and
regions, types of tasks involved and whether live-in or live-out. It depends on
immigration policies, welfare regimes, gender ideologies and cultural attitudes
towards provision of care within the household and externally. The countries with
the highest reliance on migrant labour for domestic work and care are the Mediter-
ranean ones which are part of familial welfare regimes in which migrant women in
particular have replaced the housewife and other family members in household tasks
and care of children and the elderly. In Italy, for example, 90% of domestic workers
were foreign-born (Rostgaard et al., 2011). In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the
employment of migrant labour in the household is well below the European average.
The use of migrants in the household also varies between tasks eg. cleaning and care
for children and the elderly (Box 3.1).

Box 3.1: Outlines the Hierarchy Between Different Forms of Household

Employment in France
Within household employment, there exists a hierarchy. For example, the
foreign-born in France comprised 40% of cleaners but only 15% of child
and elder carers (Avril & Cartier, 2014). Among domestic workers overall,
60% had no qualifications with 29% of the group being foreign; among home
caregivers 36% had no educational qualifications with 8% of this group being
foreign-born according to the 2011 French Employment Survey (Devetter &
Lefebvre, 2015: 163). Cleaning, whether domestic or contract, is often an
entry job, especially for those without knowledge of the language (Abbasian &
Hellgren, 2012; McIlwaine, 2020; Parutis, 2014). In the Swedish study
(Abbasian & Hellgren, 2012: 171), there were, on the other hand, over 20%
female and male migrants with a university degree. Although there may be an
overlap between domestic work and care givers, the symbolic significance and
social recognition of the two is quite different (Devetter & Lefebvre,
2015: 163).
3.3 Understudied Sectors and Gendered Migrant Division of Labour 39

The extent to which migrants are used in household work also varies between
localities and regions. It is likely that migrants contribute to household labour more
in large cities. In the UK, while London and the South-East have high percentages of
migrants both from the EU and non-EU, in most other regions, the percentage is
much lower. In London only 60% of care workers are British compared to the North
East, the region with the lowest percentage, with 96% British. Similarly the propor-
tion of minority ethnic groups employed in the care sector is much higher in London
where some local authorities have over 80% from minority ethnic groups in care
employment (Howard & Kofman, 2020).

3.3 Understudied Sectors and Gendered Migrant Division

of Labour

Though domestic and care work have provided a major source of employment
globally (ILO, 2018), other forms of labour have also generated employment with
non-standard employment relationships, such as part-time, fixed term, zero hours,
and precarious work (Vosko, 2010) for migrant workers as states strive to fill low
paid and often poorly regulated work. In the EU, both EU migrants from Central and
Eastern Europe as well as non-EU from Latin America, Africa and South East Asia
provide labour across the different sectors. We should also note that those in the
labour force may enter through a variety of routes (van Hooren, 2012), such as
family reunification (see Chap. 4), asylum seekers and refugees (see Chap. 5) and
students (Maury, 2020). So, while construction is overwhelmingly male dominated,
and household services female, in OECD countries the majority of sectors are to
varying degrees mixed as Table 3.1 shows.
For EU-27 countries (see Table 3.2), migrant labour is also spread across a
number of sectors beyond those employed by households. It is only in Southern
Europe, in what has been called the migrant in the family welfare model (Bettio
et al., 2006), that migrant women are concentrated in the household as employer

Table 3.1 Gendered division Sector Male Female

of migrant labour by sector
Agriculture and fishing 71.9 28.1
(percentage)
Manufacturing, mining, energy 67.8 32.7
Construction 93.8 6.2
Wholesale and retail trade 57.8 42.2
Hotels and restaurants 55.4 44.6
Education 37.7 62.3
Health and social work 40.6 59.4
Household services 15.4 84.6
Administration 53.6 43.7
Other services 59.5 40.5
Source: OECD (2017)
40 3 Gendered Labour

Table 3.2 Employment of male and female native- and foreign-born workers, 25–54 years, by
occupational category in EU-27 in 2008a
Sector Native-born Foreign-born
Men
Manufacturing 22 22
Construction 13 19
Wholesale and retail activities 13 12
Accommodation and food 2 8
Transportation and storage 8 8
Administration and support services 3 5
Human health and social work 4 4
Professional, scientific, technical 5 4
Information and communications 4 3
Public administration, defence, security 8 3
Women
Human health and social work 17 18
Wholesale and retail 15 13
Manufacturing 12 11
Accommodation and food 4 10
Activities household as employers 1 10
Administration and support services 4 8
Education 4 4
Professional, scientific, technical 5 4
Other services 3 4
Public administration, defense 8 4
Source: Eurostat (2011: 46)
a
The subsequent 2014 ELFS ad hoc module focuses primarily on indicators of labour market
integration, such as activity rates, employment status, unemployment and overqualification rather
than sectors

sector. Such a concentration is much greater than in any of the male dominated
sectors such as construction. In the accommodation and food sector, both foreign-
born women and men are disproportionately present. However, the important health
and social work sector, covering a variety of skill levels and sites of public and
private sector employment, is also one in which there is generally not a large
disparity between the presence of native and foreign-born proportion of the working
population though they may occupy different strata within an occupation.
The almost exclusive focus on the female domestic/care worker in feminist
research of gendered labour markets, though understandable, is problematic. It
reinforces stereotypes of migrant women (Catarino & Morokvasic, 2013) and fails
to recognise the much broader gendered migrant division of labour extending across
a diversity of skill levels and sites (private and public). As we have outlined, the
household has captured our attention and become a privileged sector of employment
for the less skilled encouraged by state and EU policies. However as both Michael
Bittman et al. (1999) and Mignon Duffy (2005) have asked, though in slightly
3.3 Understudied Sectors and Gendered Migrant Division of Labour 41

different terms, why do we not study the outsourcing of labour from the household
stemming from changing consumption patterns. Sassen’s (1992) dissection of the
global city has also drawn attention to this aspect. Precarious employment typifies
both the labour insourced (domestic and care work, gardening) into the household as
well as that which is outsourced, such as production of ready-made food and its
external consumption, which have dramatically altered reproductive labour in the
household. This outsourcing has been accentuated in large and global cities,
resulting in precarious employment becoming a dominant feature of social relations
between employers and workers in the contemporary world (Standing, 2011) and
constitutive of a new global disorder (Schierup et al., 2014). Welfare restructuring
has also led to costs of social reproduction and transactional costs (making applica-
tions, travel to interviews for a series of temporary employment) of entering and
continuing in the labour market being increasingly borne by individual and families.
Thus the growth of global labour migrations has been accompanied by the intensi-
fication of non-standard employment relationships, contracting out of services and
deregulation of labour. And as Linda McDowell (2009: 7) has commented there is a
“hierarchy of desirability within the category of ‘economic migrants’”.
Among the less skilled, the gendered division of labour encompasses a wide range
of sectors (Amrith & Saharoui, 2019; Dyer et al., 2011). Female-dominated sectors
or those with substantial numbers beyond those employed by households, include
hospitality (Adib & Guerrier, 2003; Batnitzky & McDowell, 2013; McDowell et al.,
2009, 2012), contract cleaning in hospitals (Stournara, 2020; von Bose, 2019),
offices and public spaces and bodywork, such as beauty parlours, hairdressers,
manicurists (McDowell, 2009; Wolkowitz, 2006) and sex work, to name a few.
What is seen as dirty work is often divided along gender lines such that cleaning and
care are undertaken by women while refuse collection and street cleaning are male
domains. Work that is physically tainted or physically dirty may be identified with
particular class, race and migrancy characteristics where workers’ bodies are seen as
being suitable for this kind of work (McDowell, 2009; Wolkowitz, 2006) or what has
been called ‘suitable embodiment’ (Simpson & Simpson, 2018). Privatization and
worsening and precarious working conditions and social security since the 1990s
have made these jobs even more ‘suitable’ for migrants than ever. For example, in
Sweden at the beginning of the century cleaners represented one of the 20 most
common occupational groups with 80% of women and 31% of foreign origin, of
whom those in hourly and part-time work were more likely to be from non-EU
countries. Among migrants there tend to be more men in this sector than among the
native population.
Sex work has been commonly associated with trafficking and the sexual exploi-
tation of women (Kempadoo, 2005) without recognising that it may stem from other
forms of work or that women, men, transgender people and children can be traf-
ficked into diverse forms of exploitative labour (Howard, 2019). Nonetheless the
gendered and sexualised victimisation of migrant women is still a dominant para-
digm in the field (Palumbo & Scuirba, 2018). Sex work has also generated polarised
views. So whilst some have portrayed women as passive victims of trafficking, a
number of authors have begun to challenge this particular framing which presents
42 3 Gendered Labour

women in a way, which negates their agency and decision-making capacity when
opting for sex work (Agustin, 2005). ‘Sexual humanitarianism’ (Mai et al., 2021) is a
concept which analyses how migrant sex workers (men and women) are impacted by
policymaking and social interventions based on their presumed vulnerability to
trafficking and exploitation (see Chap. 5) and “neo-abolitionist discourse, which
systematically conflates prostitution with trafficking, seeking its abolition by remov-
ing the demand for sexual services”.
Studies using ethnographic methods, including films, have given women their
voice, showing how they decided to undertake sex work. Research over a number of
years with women from the North of China who had migrated to Paris after losing
their jobs following economic restructuring in China in the 1990s. (Lévy & Lieber,
2009) showed how having found themselves in an unexpectedly precarious situa-
tion, they utilised sex as a resource through diverse sexual-economic arrangements,
such as cohabitation with a fellow national, marriage with a French man which could
lead to regularisation of their legal status or prostitution. The latter situation, though
looked down upon, brought them much more money than working for South
Chinese families as child minders which was the most demeaning for them. Nigerian
women in Italy have been associated with sex work and therefore assumed to have
been trafficked (Plambech, 2017), which may make it difficult for them to have their
asylum claims or the violence they experienced in their home countries and on their
journeys, taken seriously (Rigo, 2017). In Italy and Spain many migrant women,
including from the recent EU enlargement countries such as Romania, are hired for
seasonal and temporary labour in agriculture. Their dependence for future contracts
may make them vulnerable to exploitative sexual relations (Palumbo & Sciurba,
2018).
The dominant focus on less-skilled employment pushes into the background the
circulation of skilled female migrants and endorses the paradigmatic separation of
(male) skilled and (female) less-skilled understandings of migration. Females work-
ing in skilled sectors tend to dominate reproductive sectors, such as health, social
work and teaching, which often do not pay as much as male occupations, although
many educated women work in mixed or male dominated sectors (Raghuram, 2008).
So, too, is gender largely absent in studies of international student migration (Sondhi
& King, 2017; Raghuram & Sondhi, 2021) due in part to the assumption that female
migrants are largely of working class origin, yet the gendered mobilities of students
may feed into flows of skilled migrants.

3.4 Skilled Sectors and Gendered Migrant Division

of Labour

Skilled immigration, as Boucher (2007) commented “has slipped by as a genderless

story in which the androgynous skilled migrant is the central character and econo-
mists do most of the storytelling”. Meares (2010: 473) stated that “despite the now
3.4 Skilled Sectors and Gendered Migrant Division of Labour 43

significant body of scholarship on the relationship between gender and international

migration, scant attention has been paid to the gendered transition experiences of
highly-skilled migrants”. Yeoh and Willis (2005) too make a strong argument for
more research in this area, noting that existing work on the devalued and often
“racialised” labour of unskilled women must be complemented by a greater focus on
professional and entrepreneurial women who remain largely absent in the broader
analysis of ‘transnational elites’. Yet the current global race for talent in which states
seek to attract skilled migration, “is profoundly gendered, with significant implica-
tions for the skill accreditation, labour market outcomes, rights of stay, and gendered
family dynamics” (Boucher, 2016: 30).
Furthermore, Dumitru (2017) argues that theories of feminization linked with the
analysis of globalization and international division of labour have tended to ignore
the educational qualifications of women. Dumitru asks whether we should be
referring to feminization of migration (see Chap. 1) as skilled migration since
women migrants are increasingly educated and a higher percentage of those with
tertiary education are migrating more than men (Docquier et al., 2009; Dumitru,
2014). For example, tertiary educated among female migrants rose from 18% in
1980 to 40% in 2010 so that women now form a majority of skilled migrants (Weinar
& Klekowski von Kopenfels, 2020). Discriminatory practices in employment,
family practices and public participation may also act as drivers of migration
(Ruyssen & Salamone, 2018). However being highly educated does not mean either
entering through skilled routes or working in skilled occupations (Boucher, 2020;
Carangio et al., 2021), hence the conversion of education into skilled employment
post migration may be fraught with barriers, especially where income constitutes a
major determinant of entry through skilled channels (Boucher, 2016; Kofman,
2014), as in the UK and the EU Blue Card. Women in skilled sectors are concen-
trated in regulated professions where they encounter barriers to recognition and
consequently circulation.
Furthermore, large numbers of educated female migrants enter through family
migration (see Chap. 4) but we know little of their work aspirations or experiences.
There is some evidence that they may face particularly high levels of deskilling
(Ballarino & Panichella, 2018; Triandafyllidou & Isaakyan, 2016 (see Sect. 3.5).
Migrants, and particularly the skilled, who are able to benefit from bringing an
accompanying spouse or being reunified with them, will frequently migrate together.
For example, among Indian migrants many males enter the IT sector, while female
highly educated spouses often come with or follow them shortly afterwards and
succeed in entering the labour market (Kõu et al., 2015). Though entering the labour
market, they are often simply described as trailing spouses (van Bochove &
Engbersen, 2015), a term that goes back to the 1980s when there was a concern
about obstacles to the international migration of those in management positions
(Weinar & Klekowski von Koppenfels, 2020). It is only with more interest in the
gender dimensions of skilled migration that questions are being asked about spouses
of the highly skilled who themselves are highly educated.
In general, studies of skilled migration streams focus on the economic realm
where the social dimension barely intrudes. Studies of skilled migration reproduce
44 3 Gendered Labour

the notion of economic man and social woman (Kofman & Raghuram, 2005; Schaer
et al., 2017). As Kõu et al. (2015) state: “There has been little attempt to link highly
skilled migrants with life course analysis so as to study their parallel careers of
migration, employment and household. . . and gain a deeper understanding of the
influence of life paths, social networks, diasporas and immigration policies”.

Box: Gender Inequalities, Academia and the Lifecourse

One sector in which studies have explored how gender inequalities are
reproduced through work demands and life course changes is that of young
academics and researchers (Ackers & Bryony, 2008). Studies (França &
Padilla, 2017) have found that academic careers follow a male linear career
structure with little room for family responsibilities to impinge and thereby
reproduce gendered inequalities, such as glass ceilings, gender pay gap, sexual
harassment and exclusionary dynamics, found in other domains of the labour
market However, Schaer et al. (2017) note that gender inequalities in academic
mobility may acquire a complexity beyond a traditional representation. They
reflect on examples of both female and male tied movers to counteract a
simplistic view of the trailing spouse and a rather negative view of what
spouses do when they accompany partners. In some cases, and especially
when it is planned, the spouse may elect to train or to study (Raghuram,
2004). Yet in other cases, women’s migration may lead to downward mobility
for their husbands, who find themselves doing jobs as security guards, retail
and carers, as was the case of spouses of Nepalese nurses in the UK (Adkikari,
2013).

Studies of health care professionals have tended to focus on macro issues of

supply and demand with much less attention paid to working conditions or the
family and social dynamics of their lives. It is a sector where, despite reductions
following the 2008 financial crisis, recourse to migrant labour subsequently
increased to fill shortages due to an increase in demand as a result of population
ageing, technological advances and higher patient expectations (Castagnone & Salis,
2015), combined with inadequate supply arising from attempts to cut back expen-
diture and training as well as poor working conditions (Yeates, 2010). Nursing, as a
mobile profession, has become a major sector of migrant women’s employment
globally (Kingma, 2006) based on an export-oriented production system combined
with recruitment strategies from wealthy countries (Wojczewski et al., 2015; Yeates,
2009). In Europe, those from new EU countries in particular have filled the gap. In
most countries, with the exception of Germany, there has been a reliance on
recruitment agents to navigate entry restrictions and barriers to recognition of
credentials which are faced by non-EU healthcare professionals in Europe and in
other major countries of shortages, such as Australia, Canada and the United States
(Walton-Roberts, 2021a). Together with a range of actors, including the state and
recruitment agents in both countries, connections between countries form complex
global and highly dynamic chains of nurse care framework (Yeates, 2009) and
3.4 Skilled Sectors and Gendered Migrant Division of Labour 45

Table 3.3 Percentage of female migrants in the healthcare workforce

Sector Germany Spain Italy UK
Doctors and health professionals Foreign 72.3 47.0 64.4 57.9
National 72.1 58.2 49.6 61.1
Nurses Foreign 90.1 89.9 83.1 82.5
Nationals 86.0 83.3 75.5 90.2
Source: Villosio (2015)

pathways (Walton-Roberts, 2021b), encompassing both circuits in the Global North

and between the South and the North. Thus the United States takes nurses from
Canada which recruits both from the UK and countries in the South. The UK in turn
is the main recruiter in Europe attracting both those from the European periphery,
especially Portugal and Spain after the 2008 crisis and Romania since enlargement,
as well as countries in the South. Certain countries such as the Philippines, India and
Vietnam have developed nurse export strategies and emerged as the main source
countries for nurse migration (Thompson & Walton-Roberts, 2019; Yeates, 2010).
The pathways from poorer countries to their insertion in the wealthier are not
always smooth for nurses (Näre & Nordberg, 2016). They may confront racialized
attitudes from other healthcare workers as well as patients. Data on their working
conditions in selected European countries reveal that they may have to do more
unsocial shifts and have less secure contracts (Castagnone & Salis, 2015).
Although nursing is an overwhelmingly feminised profession (see Table 3.3),
there are male migrants who in the UK are more prevalent than native men. Some
come from countries where men have trained as nurses in the country of origin as
with the Philippines, while others come from countries where it is unusual for men to
work in this sector but who have taken it up as a profession at a time when there were
pronounced shortages and opportunities for training. This was the case with Zim-
babwean men who as black men also encounter racism at work. Yet as Panopio
(2010: 12) comments: ‘there is a lack of contextual analysis that allows for inter-
sections of race, class, sexuality, and other identity formations in mainstream
accounts of male nurses and international nurse migration’. In Panopio’s study of
Filipino male nurses in London, most had been helped by family members into a
profession that endowed them with social mobility and would enable them to help
others in turn. Some, especially gay men, also wanted a softer or more feminine
environment to work in but within nursing tended to orient themselves to male
spaces of work, as in operation theatres. And the possibilities of social mobility
through a global profession attenuated to some extent the feminine resonances of the
profession.
In contrast, there is little gendered analysis of masculine sectors of work
(Grigoleit-Richter, 2017; Raghuram, 2008), such as IT, which unlike the regulated
professions have little state control of accreditation and for which barriers to
mobility are lower, especially for those only moving temporarily. As Raghuram
(2008) comments, it is particularly interesting to compare female and male migrants
in this sector. In Europe and other major countries of permanent migration, the
number of women in STEM has declined while in a number of sending countries of
46 3 Gendered Labour

highly skilled ICT migrants, such as India, women form a notable proportion of
students in STEM subjects (over 40%). So too has ICT employment grown rapidly
among women in India (30% in 2016) compared to its stagnation in many countries
in the West. This is not a migration of survival; for women in particular, it gives them
the opportunity for career development, travel and, for some, to move away from
restrictive cultural and social practices (Kõu et al., 2017). The intersectionality of
gender and class plays out very differently to other skilled sectors such as nursing
which is at the lower end of health care professions. Indian ICT migrants, for
example, are from a solidly middle class background and women, even more than
men, have both parents who work and mothers with tertiary degrees (Sondhi et al.,
2018).

3.5 Deskilling and Devaluation

Despite the growing number of highly educated migrants (Dumitru, 2017; OECD,
2018), both those from the European Union and non-Europeans have faced consid-
erable levels of deskilling (Sert, 2016, OECD, 2018) and devaluation of their cultural
capitals (Bourdieu, 1986). Over-qualification (higher educational qualification than
what is required for the job) in Europe affects 36% of migrant women and 31% of
migrant men compared to 22% of native women and 20% of men. It is particularly
pronounced in Southern Europe countries where for migrant women it may reach
50% level of over-qualification (OECD, 2018).
The poor labour market integration of highly educated migrant women is linked
to issues of foreign degree recognition, emphasis on host country work experience
and a preference for local accents in relation to language skills. The latter is shown to
disadvantage women, particularly considering their concentration in relational work
such as support, service, and caring labour, and in regulated sectors such as health
care, in contrast to male-dominated financial and technical occupations. National
privileges may result in occupations being reserved for national and EU citizens
forcing migrants to be employed on less secure and less well paid contracts, for
example, with doctors and nurses in hospitals (Castagnone & Salis, 2015). Differ-
ences in national regulations and difficulties of obtaining accreditation may mean
that migrant nurses are unable to continue to undertake routine duties in the
destination country and are forced to work instead as nursing assistants or care
workers in residential homes and private households (Cuban, 2013).
Racial discrimination on the part of recruiters and co-workers may mean that they
are forced to accept positions they are overqualified for, or do not have the same
opportunities for career progression as co-workers (Wojczewski et al., 2015).
Female migrant workers therefore often face a double penalty in terms of labour
market segregation and discrimination. And as previously discussed in relation to
dirty work, migrant women and men, such as Eastern Europeans (Fox et al., 2012)
and Latin Americans (Cederberg, 2017), may be racialised and stereotyped as being
appropriate to perform certain kinds of low skilled work. Women from Central and
3.6 Conclusion 47

Eastern Europe in the UK, as Samaluk (2016) comments, are portrayed either as
objects of desire for front-line service work or as traditional and docile workers
suitable for domestic and care work. Indeed Favell (2008: 711) presented the
dangerous outcome of free movement of “ambitious ‘New Europeans’ ... becoming
a new Victorian servant class for a West European aristocracy of creative-class
professionals and university educated working mums,” with female migrants hold-
ing a teacher’s diploma or even a PhD working in Austria in the fields of child or
geriatric care.
Migrants may thus experience contradictory class position (Parrenas, 2000) in the
course of migration, consisting of a lower status job but earning more money in the
destination country than in their homeland. Here transnational contexts (Nowicka,
2013, 2014) and family class background play a major role in the extent to which
their institutionalised cultural capital or educational qualifications are transposed. As
Oso (2020) highlights for Spanish migrants to Paris, even those with degrees find it
more difficult to get a job commensurate with their qualifications if they come from a
family of modest means who could not assist them or did not have social networks or
social capital.
Migration researchers (Cederberg, 2017; Erel, 2010; Kelly, 2012; Nowicka,
2013, 2014; Oliver & O’Reilly, 2010; Ryan et al., 2015; Samaluk, 2016) have
increasingly turned to a Bourdieusian analysis (Bourdieu, 1986) to gain a better
understanding of the modalities of the international transfer of cultural and other
capitals between different societies. As we have seen, linguistic capital (ability to
communicate as well as accents) is essential in accessing skilled sector jobs and
moving out of elementary employment that may not require much language profi-
ciency. For many migrants, this entraps them in menial work whilst others are able to
improve their linguistic capital and move after a time into higher level employment
as with Polish migrants in the UK (Ryan et al., 2016). An analysis of how Central
and Eastern Europeans found their jobs in Western Europe indicates that a much
higher proportion than natives used social networks and there was a correlation with
overqualification. Hence their social capital is likely to have facilitated obtaining a
job but at the cost of being in a job below their educational levels. The link with
linguistic proficiency is less clear as in fact those in hospitality where many find
themselves despite having a reasonable linguistic level (Leschke & Weiss, 2020).
Attitudes to the disparity in status may differ according to their migratory projects
and the extent to which this is aligned with social mobility and status in the country
of origin.

3.6 Conclusion

As we have outlined in this chapter, a gendered division of labour encompasses a

broad range of both less skilled and skilled sectors. Migrant women are concentrated
in feminised sectors of social reproduction ranging from domestic work, care and
nursing. Migrant men too are more likely to be found in feminized sectors and, as
48 3 Gendered Labour

with women, often deskilled. However, over-qualification and devaluation of

migrant cultural capitals resulting in positions of contradictory class mobility need
to be situated within a transnational lens, take account of the migratory projects
pursued and the intersectionality of class, gender, race and nationality. For some
deskilling is a temporary situation either in relation to social mobility within the
country of destination or their social status in the country of origin; for others it
represents a long-term entrapment. Loss of employment may also lead to onward
migration for some through free movement in the European Union (Ortensi &
Barbiano di Belgiojoso, 2018) and to complex mobility pathways (Parreñas, 2020).
And at the time of completing the book, the major upheaval has been the global
pandemic with countries locking down and closing borders to migration, thus
disrupting migratory flows, especially of those circulating regularly, as with some
care workers between Poland and Germany or Romania and Austria and seasonal
agricultural workers. At the same time, the public came to realise the value of
workers categorised as low skilled and of little worth but now deemed as essential
and key workers (Fasani & Mazza, 2020; Rasnaca, 2020). On average in the EU,
migrants (EU and non-EU) represented 13% of key workers but in some sectors
considerably more, especially among non-EU migrants as in Cyprus, Germany, Italy
and Sweden. In particular two groups stand out: agricultural workers who guarantee
the food chain operates smoothly and ensure food security and care workers,
enabling our physical and mental well-being. The evidence shows how much we
rely on migrant workers to provide labour in the key occupations, including the
supposedly low skilled ones.
During the pandemic itself a number of countries regularised the undocumented
in key employment sectors and most significantly there have been calls to acknowl-
edge the need to reconsider immigration policies prioritising the highly skilled and
devaluing the less skilled (Fasani & Mazza, 2020). It is not clear whether the
essential work that migrant women and men undertake will continue to be appreci-
ated, although it does seem clear that the work they perform will persist despite
higher levels of unemployment.

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Chapter 4
Transnational Families, Intimate Relations,
Generations

Chapter 3 examined the gendered nature of a migrant division of labour. In this

chapter we turn to family migration, traditionally associated with women as depen-
dents and followers of men. The term is used to categorise the international movement
of people who migrate due to new or established family ties. People moving for family
reasons constitute the largest group of migrants entering OECD countries, ahead of
labour and humanitarian migration (OECD, 2019). To move for family reasons may
encompass an array of different kinds of migration trajectories, from the adoption of a
foreign child to family members accompanying migrant workers or refugees, as well
as people forming new family units with host country residents or family reunification
(when family members reunite with those who migrated previously).
While international migration had traditionally been equated with the movement
of men, women were depicted as the followers in what was seen as secondary
migration. However, the growth of female labour migrants in domestic work, care
work, and nursing, meant that women too became the sponsor of husbands, children,
and parents. In the early 2000s, Bryceson and Vuorela (2002) drew attention to
transnational families in Europe and countries of origin, leading to the consolidation
of family migration as a field, which has burgeoned in the ensuing years.
In this chapter we first outline the growing interest in family migrations, theoret-
ically and in policy terms, which has generally sought to restrict flows and been
based on particular gendered representations of family members and women in
particular. Recently marriage migration has generated interest, though the area of
greatest expansion has been that of transnational families.

4.1 Developing Family Migration

Starting in the late 1980s, theoretical and methodological research on family migra-
tion emerged as a subject of scholarly work (Boyd, 1989). The role of the family in
internal migration and a number of country case studies of family reunification to the

© The Author(s) 2022 57

A. Christou, E. Kofman, Gender and Migration, IMISCOE Research Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9_4
58 4 Transnational Families, Intimate Relations, Generations

US were published (see International Migration Review, 1977, 1986). In Asia, too,
family migrations, and especially marriages, gave rise to articles in the Asia and
Pacific Migration Journal (1995, 1999). European research, however, lagged behind
as family migration drew less attention than labour migration due to its association
with dependency upon a primary migrant, and its majority of women and children.
Even so, as labour migration grew in numbers, so too did family migration increase
as a result of increasing family reunifications, a trend that also characterises southern
European countries since the 1990s (Ambrosini et al., 2014). Hence, over the past
two decades, we see consistent growth of publications about family migrations in
relation to its different forms, the experiences of different family members, familial
strategies, and the formation of transnational families.
While earlier studies focused on countries of destination and often assumed that
migrants wished to bring their family members with them, more recent studies take a
more nuanced and critical view of migratory processes and question the desire to
complete family reunification. Theoretically, studies have adopted a migration
systems approach in which all forms of migration (permanent, temporary, circular,
return) occur simultaneously. Increasingly, studies are multi-sited and transnational,
in which people, services, and cultural and social practices circulate between places,
underscoring the interdependency between the mobile and immobile to ensure
successful migration outcomes (Bélanger & Silvey, 2019).
Although family-related reasons play a significant role in intra-European migra-
tion (depending on the data source), this perspective has been somewhat neglected
among researchers. Some of the difficulties of identifying family-related movements
arise from the fact that individuals are often not counted as such because they do not
hold a residence permit under this category and because restrictions on movement
for family reasons do not apply to the same extent for EU nationals. Yet, large-scale
migration from Eastern Europe post-EU enlargement in 2004 drew attention to the
family strategies deployed by Polish migrants in their migration to and settlement in
western Europe and relationships with their homeland (Ryan et al., 2009).
However, it has not only been academic interest in family migration that contrib-
uted to the growth of publications and comparative European projects. The
Europeanisation of migration policy from Tampere onwards gave rise to the adop-
tion of the Family Reunification Directive 2003/86 EC in 2003 (adopted by all
Member States except Denmark, Ireland and the UK). The Directive outlines the
minimum rights third-country nationals should have in reuniting with a family
member living in an EU member state, but does not address the situations of third-
country nationals who are family members of an EU citizen.
The Directive also provides more favourable rules for refugees. It has been
progressively adopted over a number of years by old EU states as well as the new
enlargement states. The Commission has monitored (2008, 2014, 2019) the imple-
mentation of the Directive while the European Migration Network (EMN, 2017) has
produced reports on issues and problems regarding family reunification and related
issues. In part, concerns about family migration are due to the fact that, for the past
30 years family reunification has been one of the primary drivers of immigration to
the EU. In 2017, 472,994 migrants were admitted to the EU-25 on grounds of family
4.1 Developing Family Migration 59

reunification, or approximately 28% of all first permits issued to third-country

nationals in the EU-25. And although, employment has since 2016 become the
main reason for permits due in part to large-scale emigration from the Ukraine, it
still accounts for a substantial percentage – in 2019 (Eurostat, 2020).
While earlier research focused on family reunification of migrants and co-ethnic
marriages, more recent research has turned to how family migration policies define
the acceptable family and permissible intimate relationships which includes a range
of family members and familial and kin relationships, but also other affective
relationships (e.g., love and marriage, parenting of children, and parental care)
(Mai & King, 2009). It should be noted that ‘family’ for the purposes of migration
policy was conceptualised as a traditional nuclear family comprised of a married
couple and dependent children under 18 years of age.
Migrants benefitting from family migration regulations are expected to demon-
strate they have the capacity to be productive, comply with acceptable cultural
practices, and not be a burden on the welfare state. The complexity of how family
members contribute to the social reproduction of the family tends to be given little
attention in the migration literature. Rather, attention is paid to the nuclear family in
immigration legislation while the roles of parents and other kin are marginalised (see
transnational families below).
The right to family reunification and formation – income, other resources such as
housing, integration conditions – has generated inequalities. Family reunification
policies are most restrictive in northern countries, as they align the conditions for
sponsorship increasingly with economic conditions for labour migration, especially
the high-income requirements in a number of countries (Kofman, 2018; Pellander,
2021; Staver, 2015), which has rendered class (see also Chap. 2) more significant in
the stratification of access to family life together with gender inequalities.
Marriage migration (D’Aoust 2013) as a separate issue to family reunification is a
more recent area of study within family migrations. In Europe, research tended to be
focused, initially, on marriages between co-ethnics such as Turks, Moroccans or
Pakistanis marrying with someone from their homeland and seen as a problem for
integration of the migrant in the receiving society (see Chap. 6). Cross-border
marriages between a wider range of nationalities than co-ethnic as a means of
migrating legally and acquiring citizenship have begun to receive more attention.
Such migrations raise questions about regulation of who belongs and who deserves
citizenship (Fresnoza-Flot & Ricordeau, 2017) (see Chap. 6) and has become
increasingly politicised (Moret et al., 2021).
Intra-European binational couples have been surprisingly under-studied (De Valk
& Medrano, 2014) due in part to the assumption that intra-European mobility is
primarily driven by work reasons. However, Migali and Natale (2017) found that
familial reasons are nearly as significant as work motivations. For many individuals
the movement for familial and intimate reasons represented a second mobility,
following an initial move for education or work (Gaspar, 2012). Having the privilege
of EU citizenship and free movement rights, couples do not have to marry, but may
cohabit. However, same sex marriages are only recognised and performed in some
60 4 Transnational Families, Intimate Relations, Generations

northern, western and southern European states (16 states as of July 2020). A few
others, such as Croatia and Hungary, also recognise same sex partnerships.
In the next section, we turn to the growing interest in transnational families as the
outcome of large-scale migrations, some of which have permitted the reconstitution
of the family in one place, whilst others have led to separated families, especially
amongst those who do not meet the requirements for crossing borders or fulfilling
integration criteria (see Chap. 6).

4.2 Transnational Families: Concepts, Generations,

Relations

As a historical phenomenon of social organisation under globalisation and an

inevitable result of migration, the emergence of transnational families marks the
development of ‘familyhood’ relations (Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002) across national
borders. Transnational familyhood offers the opportunity to negotiate family life
through intersecting individual and familial objectives but with structural constraints
as crucial as mobile opportunities can possibly become (Fesenmyer, 2014). Trans-
national families are also organised under the rubric of sustained familial ties,
kinship networks and fluid relations spanning two or multiple nation states. There
is a clear realisation here that migration and other kinds of mobilities are not
unidirectional and do not focus on permanency of settlement and relocation with a
country of destination as the core objective. The more crucial realisation is that under
such arrangements of long-distance transnational familyhood, the maintenance of
familial connections, kinship feelings, collective belonging to a family unit with
notions of shared welfare, shared responsibilities, caring arrangements, participation
in social reproduction and group consumption are all part and parcel of such relations
(McCarthy & Edwards, 2011).
As Bryceson (2019: 2) confirms: ‘transnational families are not new but they are
definitely more numerous now than ever before. They are an evolving institutional
form of human interdependence, which serve material and emotional needs, in the
twenty-first century’s globalising world. The transnational family constitutes a
multi-dimensional spatial and temporal support environment for migrants, as well
as providing motivational impetus for migration’. The breadth and depth of family
relations will fluctuate according to the specific needs, be that economic or emo-
tional, as will the strategic incentive to extend the social networks within or beyond
the ethnocultural or religious parameters that might define the boundaries of the
group. It is then obvious that the concept of ‘transnational familyhood’ is framed
around how borders are perceived, understood, experienced, negotiated and socially
constructed by migrants.
Individual migrants and their families don’t just navigate psychic and emotional
borders in their mobile lives or in pursuit of settlement. They frequently contend
with a number of logistical, legal, bureaucratic and pragmatic ‘border-crossings’
4.2 Transnational Families: Concepts, Generations, Relations 61

such as residency, citizenship, immigration and labour policies etc. often in the midst
of sudden geopolitical shocks and wider global turbulences. Their circumstances
might give navigational direction but the wider global scope engulfing their acts and
actions is what inherently defines most outcomes. As Bryceson (ibid) argues: ‘Since
the turn of the millennium, a tendency for transition from blurred to brittle borders
has gained momentum in the European Union and North America. ‘Blurred borders’
refer to migrants’ low risk border crossings and light regulation of their visits,
affording relative openness to migrants seeking legal residence and citizenship in
the receiving countries. ‘Brittle borders’ represent the opposite, involving physically
and legally hazardous crossings with enforcement of stringent restrictions on tem-
porary as well as permanent residence and remote possibility or impossibility of
migrants gaining citizenship or family reunification’.
Transnational families might seek to secure their immigration status and citizen-
ship in the destination country, or, they might further enhance affective locational
nodes with the ancestral homeland or the country of origin. However, there is a third
way in the option of maintaining both a new livelihood niche setting in the country of
destination while also continuing the exchanges and family dynamic communica-
tions back ‘home’. A variety of factors (e.g. class, educational capital, networks etc.)
might shape the prioritisation of the children’s educational and cultural integration in
the destination country and as a result more ‘hybridised’ transnational identities
might emerge for the offspring and subsequent generations.
Generations are also integral to understanding dynamics, constraints and oppor-
tunities for transnational families. Before we disentangle the concept of ‘generation’,
it is important to clarify that within the varying typologies of the ‘migrant’ category,
transnational families do evolve. That is, be it economic or irregular migrants and
refugees or the more privileged status of highly skilled mobile professionals or
scientific and student migration, transnational familyhood becomes relatively central
among those groups when it comes to motivations with regard to settlement,
employment or potentially return. All indicative migrant categories above might
compete for welfare and employment opportunities but also face similar dilemmas as
regards their potential settlement or return migration. Additionally, some of the
drivers shaping their trajectory might be similar, such as experiences of racism,
exclusion, discrimination as regards housing, work and other social encounters. In
the case of those envisaging returning to their country of origin, often, the mainte-
nance of transnational ties becomes strategically useful in keeping aware of the
political, social and economic situation in the sending country. As a result, the
propensity, intensity and desire for transnational engagement can only be fully
understood in the context of each national group and geographic context (Bloch &
Hirsch, 2018; Carling & Pettersen, 2014).
A similar kind of fluidity exists when we try to operationalise the concept of
‘generation’. As a migration chronotope, a spatially and temporally situated phe-
nomenology, and, the ontological, imaginary and state policy parameters within
which we emplace genaeologies, the concept of ‘generation’ is multidimensional
and complex (King & Christou, 2010; Christou & King, 2015). That is, ‘generation’
is not simply a matter of linear, temporal and geographic origins that have a neat
62 4 Transnational Families, Intimate Relations, Generations

trajectory from the zero, first, to second and subsequent generations. The evolving
identities of those offspring born in the country of destination are even further
challenged by the ‘tyranny of ethnic consciousness’ of each parent, the family
context experiences, their schooling and of course their own sense of agency and
belonging. As a result, we slip into more complicated percentages when beyond
‘first’ and ‘second’ generation migrants we talk about the 1.25; 1.5; 1.75 (Portes &
Rumbaut, 2006) or even 2.5 generations (Ramakrishnan, 2004) mostly in the US
literature but with increasing interest in the rest of the international literature (Safi,
2018).
One alternative way to move beyond the chronotype limitations of confining
groups to ‘generations’ is to utilise the concept of ‘cohort’ in conceptualising the
succession of migrant waves as ‘diasporic’ (Berg, 2011) but also sociologically in
terms of genealogical spheres of historical contexts and group accounts (Kertzer,
1983). The generational element is also integral to contemporary research on
transnational grand-parenting in the digital age (Nedelcu, 2017; Janta & Christou,
2019) in understanding the role of the ‘zero generation’, in this case being the
grandparents, who although might not have migrated do engage in transnational
grand-parenting (Nedelcu, 2017). Here, the dynamics of transnationalism become
enmeshed with multiple modalities, not only three generational relations (parents,
children, grandparents) but also implications of technologically mediated
co-presence, leisure travel and hosting in shaping new social practices. Transnational
family practices in the digital age are shaped by new media and polymedia regimes
which in a sense reinvent social reproduction practices (Madianou & Miller, 2012;
Baldassar et al., 2016). This kind of ‘cyber-transnationalism’ with its digital webs of
connectedness defines new intra and inter-generational possibilities of collaboration
and conflict. The motivation however remains to maximise contact and in the case of
transnational grand-parenting to enhance caring circuits. We will revisit this aspect
of generations as regards parenting, ageing and caring in the next two sections that
follow.
However, beyond the digital context, affective negotiations remain intact, as even
in the case of digital transnational relations, elements of disagreement and tensions
render dysfunctionality as a normalising aspect of transnational communication for
families. This way ‘doing family’ (Christou & Michail, 2015) and ‘doing caring’
transnationally (Baldassar, 2014) is subject to mainstream normalising processes of
emotional labour and relational negotiations.
At the same time, while the strategic reference for migration is often perceived as
individualistic in its motivation and execution, both motives and outcomes are
frequently linked to the family. The scope and dynamics of parenting as well as
the impact on childhoods is inextricably linked to the context of such which in the
case of transnational migration poses additional challenges. In the next section, we
cover some of the core themes emerging in the literature on family studies of
transnational parenting.
4.3 Transnational Parenting and Childhood 63

4.3 Transnational Parenting and Childhood

The proliferation of studies on transnational families from a variety of inter/disci-

plinary perspectives over the past two decades (Zontini, 2010; Carling et al., 2012;
Menchavez-Francisco, 2018) might have engaged with the wider topic of transna-
tional familyhood but less frequently with gendered impacts on the emotional well-
being of parents and children (Jordan et al., 2018; Caarls et al., 2018).
It has been observed that ‘a relatively neglected trigger of migrants’ transnational
involvement is their position in the life course and, at a macro level, the stage of a
migration cycle they belong to’ (Boccagni, 2012: 42). Parenting and grand-parenting
can be considered as roles pivotal to both the life course and the migration cycle that
migrants experience. Empirical studies focusing on transnational (grand) parenting
practices help us understand transnational families as a ‘living strategy’ (Kofman,
2019) relevant to a broader spectrum of transnational sociologies of the family.
Moreover, the focus on how family migration can be disruptive to gender roles (ibid)
illuminates new directions for the study of gender and migration.
Family relations transnationally are both complex and fluid especially when it
comes to young people and those in a vulnerable context such as unaccompanied
asylum-seeking youth (Devenney, 2020). However, an additional layer of analysis
observed in this body of works is that of perceiving unaccompanied children and
young migrants as victims and by extension using language mirroring saviour
mentality and saving mechanisms. These migrants are perceived primarily in terms
of their physical dislocation from family members (in legal terms the status of
‘unaccompanied’ is framed that way) and by extension have focused on their
sense of loneliness, trauma, separation, vulnerability, victimhood, fragility, passivity
and neediness (Herz & Lalander, 2017; Devenney, 2020). As a result, the wider
discourse of ‘saviour social institutions’ readily aware of their role in stepping in to
rescue youth who are seen as totally severed from any kind of emotional and
logistical transnational networks tends to proliferate, while the actual transnational
connections and family relations of those young people are mostly overlooked in
otherwise fascinating studies.
Moving away from a solely ‘Western-oriented’ perspective, for instance, in a
study by Kõu et al. (2017) on the Indian migrant context to the Netherlands and the
UK, the presence of parents and extended family in the constellation of migration
trajectories highlights that life course events of linked lives shaped by key elements
of care-giving and care-receiving becomes a setting for negotiating social norms and
expectations. This particular study explored how family members facilitate through
social norms migration and how such norm negotiations involve expectations for the
provision of care-giving. In other contexts, such as different Southeast Asian
households, the emergence of transnationally stretched families and global
householding practices at different parameters of the care chain could give rise to
different kinds of gender politics influencing the social provisioning of everyday and
generational care (Yeoh, 2016).
64 4 Transnational Families, Intimate Relations, Generations

This brings us to some of the useful conceptual tools or heuristic explanatory

frameworks that help us explain experiential transnationality in migrant familyhood.
For example, Goulbourne et al. (2010) have emphasised the usefulness of different
spheres within which transnational family lives unfold, be that in socio-economic or
politico-cultural parameters which might overlap or even intersect. They contend
that such an approach contributes another critical lens in disrupting and de-centring
the ‘normative’ status of the ‘the family’ (ibid).
Another conceptual approach that has been advanced by Anthias (2008, 2009,
2012) as providing a more integrated analysis in terms of locations and identities in
moving away from specific ‘groups’ or ‘categories’ (gender/ethnicity/class) is that of
an ‘intersectional translocational positionality’ (for an elaboration refer to Chap. 2).
This approach argues for a more intersectional framing that pays particular attention
to social locations and processes than social divisions. While the approach appears
compelling, it might also signal an indirect tension between understanding the
particularities of specific figurations shaped by social categories when one of the
intersectional formations appears more pronounced in specific social circumstances
(be that age, gender, class, ethnicity, race, generation, ability) driving those experi-
ences in time and space.
A third conceptual approach to understanding transnational childhood and par-
enting is that of incorporating an affective lens. Despite the invisibility of migrant
children as active members with agency in transnational families, a focus on
‘emotional labour’ can address them as actively engaging with transnational
socialisation processes (King et al., 2011; Zeitlyn, 2012). Indeed, Mand (2015)
suggests that the focus on the emotional labour of children as social actors can
illuminate the nature of their agency, their emplacement and power relations
performed as part of the transnational familial habitus. The lens of emotions also
highlights that within transnational mobility an ‘affective habitus’ (Christou & Janta,
2019) underlines the significance of emotional encounters with transnational kin
networks in refining social practices. It is intriguing to keep in mind that the
emotional labour performed by migrant children, embodied and active, is a clearly
agential effort by children to capture and acquire the appropriate socio-cultural
capital to legitimise their belonging (King et al., 2011; Zeitlyn, 2012). While there
is ambivalence in emotions and transnational lives, acts of agency by children are
often overlooked as their experiences are not always analysed as socialising pro-
cesses enmeshed with mobility. Hence, emotional experiences and embodied per-
formances of transnational childhood should be viewed as constellations of
socialising activity in mobility.
The agency of children’s practices in transnational familyhood transforms but
also reproduces transnational social fields and as a result children actively develop
and negotiate relationships with family members across transnational spaces (Gard-
ner, 2012). Children exhibit active agency into transnational migration decisions (Ní
Laoire et al., 2010; Cebotari et al., 2017) but it is relevant to examine changes to this
as regards cultural factors, age, personal development. One core aspect of this
discussion is to unpack the relationship between parental migration and child well-
4.3 Transnational Parenting and Childhood 65

being but also the various dimensions in transnational parenting, some of which are
discussed in the box below drawing on key empirical global evidence.

Box: Transnational Parenting: Some Indicative Research Results

Insights on reframing transnational mothering when it is seen as being ‘trou-
bling’ when induced by the act of migration since children are left behind has
been explored by Irena Juozeliūnienė and Budginaitė (2018) who combine
interviews with transnational mothers over a period of a decade, but, also
includes analyses from 79 articles on transnational families published over a
9 year period, along with national press and media sources in Lithuania. The
analysis of the transnational migrant mother portrayals reveals that mothering
is scripted and as an indication of agency, migrant mothers ‘normalise’
troubling narratives of their mothering and discredit those, thus bringing
new meanings to migrant mothering performativities. These new storied
accounts of mothering demonstrate agency in shifting previous ones and
crafting alternative mothering performances. Hence, migrant mothering
while being contested is also constructed and reinvented.
Research by Kufakurinani et al. (2014) regarding ‘transnational parenting
and the emergence of “diaspora orphans” in Zimbabwe’ draws from inter-
views with adults providing childcare for left behind youth and children in
Zimbabwe, including single parents, grandparents, siblings and care profes-
sionals. The research adds innovative debate strands from an intersectional
aspect in focusing on the middle class, gender and the life stages. It also fosters
more refreshing debates on diverging the analysis from poverty entrapment
and subsequent labour migration during the crisis period in Zimbabwe, to
issues of morality and emotionality on changing parenting practices and social
discourses. One of those is on the emergence of ‘diaspora orphans’ as a
negative stereotyping of moral parameters and a crisis of wealth when middle
class families migrate but leave the children behind. It addresses aspects of
transnational parenting from the angle of the carers and issues of intimacy in
relationships and childcare.

Another politically charged aspect of transnational parenting has to do with

changing gender ideologies when these are a result of migrant mothers engaged in
labour migration (see Chap. 3) and have to redistribute caring responsibilities and
carework required for children. The research by Lam and Yeoh (2018) draws on both
quantitative and qualitative interviews with returning migrants and left-behind kin
from communities in the Philippines and Indonesia. There are a number of emerging
implications for left-behind fathers when mothers are absent.
Similarly to ‘doing gender’, ‘doing care labour’ not only reflects existing social
hierarchies, it also reproduces or even exacerbates them. The evolving of new father-
driven caring in the absence of migrant mothers in the Southeast context of Lam and
Yeoh’s (2018) research creates ‘new package deals’ of reconstructing masculinities.
66 4 Transnational Families, Intimate Relations, Generations

These point to harnessing elements of responsibility, capability, adaptability and

control in retaining on the one hand a sense of power and pride but also adjusting to
the circumstances for successful provision of care (ibid: 113–114). Masculinities of
fathering practices are thus strongly anchored on enduring obstacles while
safeguarding self-image. These conclusions mirror to a great extent those findings
of Pasura and Christou (2018) who have moved away from conceptualisations of
black transnational forms of masculinities in perpetual crisis and have explored
diverse notions of such as being challenged, reaffirmed and reconfigured. Moreover,
beyond major global structural changes, both these research studies point to the
sociologies of family relations as a livelihood shifting arrangement that combines the
messiness of intimacy, affectivity, bonds, normative framings and pragmatic
decision-making. In a sense gender identities and family roles appear to be blurred
or undone when fathers become both mothers and fathers and mothers increasingly
breadwinners in the household division of labour.
To an extent, these reconstructed and negotiated figurations of gendered scripts
point to the mouldable capacity of roles as shaped by economics and not just socio-
cultural framings. That is, as Lam and Yeoh (2018: 114) suggest: ‘In the era of
migration and family survival, “doing family” may thus become more important
than “doing gender”’. While the scale, intensity and practices in transnational
parenting will differ across generations and geographies shaped by social locations,
by and large, they illustrate that gender is an important parameter in the process.
There are instances where its meaning is re-discovered in being re-invented and
reconstituted, but above all, it is a defining dynamic for families, relations and
identities.
Interesting findings emerge from a study by Gassmann et al. (2018) using
household survey data from Moldova and Georgia to measure and compare multi-
dimensional aspects of child well-being while ‘left behind’. Gassmann et al. (ibid) in
their study are challenging normative accounts which claim that parental migration
can have negative, harmful or destructive impacts on children’s well-being out-
comes, and, instead focus on dimensions of wellness as regards education, health,
housing, safety, communication and emotional well-being. Their study
operationalises well-being in a holistic and multidimensional framework that refutes
opposing narratives of transnational parenting as dysfunctional.
Gender ideologies also intersect with layers of dynamism in how caring unfolds
given the transnational habitus that children experience. In the instance of the global
South, Kofman and Raghuram (2012) alert us to a dynamism and diversity of caring
arrangements and point to the importance of empirical studies taking on board a
wider interplay of the household that incorporates elements of communities, the
state, financial markets and intra-family relationships. In the case of the research with
Zimbabwean children, it appears that money for instance, undermined the impact of
‘authority in families’ (Kufakurinani et al., 2014: 127) and actually shaped the
quality of caregiving which was dependent on remittances received when there
were no complaints of their service provided. As an extension of this however,
children appear to have a degree of agency in not accepting or resisting the authority
of caregivers since the latter for fear of losing their source of income would not
4.3 Transnational Parenting and Childhood 67

contest the children’s behaviour. Wider external and outsider opinion would highly
criticise the above strategic lax child control on the basis of personal interest rather
than appropriate child developmental practices. Bluntly put, the employed care-
givers seemed to ‘care’ more about the money they received rather than properly
caring for the left behind children.
As Christou and Michail (2015: 72) observe in their research on migrant mothers,
there is a ‘continuous complexity that the dichotomy of private and public invokes’
as they seek to understand how those spaces intertwine and intersect with mothering
practices. Their research with women in their 40s and 50s from Albania, Bulgaria,
Romania and Poland who have migrated to Greece and within a transnational habitus
are raising children there is premised on viewing migrant mothers as co-producers of
‘inclusive socialization of the second generation as agents of intercultural citizen-
ship’ (ibid).
Indeed, as Kufakurinani et al. (ibid: 135) suggest, research on transnational
families with a ‘focus on the nodes of the “care triangle” that are often overlooked
in studies of transnational parenting can be particularly revealing – i.e. the views of
the foster parental caregivers and those in positions of authority over such children
within schools and communities, as well as the children themselves’. Hence, it is
integral to also view children as agents of change, often involved in the migrant
transnational caring context and not simply as passive recipients of migration,
parenting decisions and practices.
Cross-border family arrangements linked to the increase of ‘mother-away’ fam-
ilies can also lead to questions of ‘moral accountability’ of migrant mothers regard-
ing the actual well-being of their children (Juozeliūnienė & Budginaitė, 2018) as
linked with the significant increase of international migration patterns of Lithuanians
following the country’s 2004 accession to the EU. Juozeliūnienė and Budginaitė
provide some core insights to these issues based on interviews with transnational
mothers over a decade (2004–2014) combined with media depictions of transna-
tional families. Such long-distance mothering practices and cross-border family
arrangements are considered as problematic in being designated as ‘troubles’ for
the children who remain in Lithuania while their mothers migrate to work overseas.
There are gendered ways here through which applications of ‘moral standing’ as
regards childcare are enacted in classifying mothering practices through narratives of
parental ethical stances. These are situated within discussions of how transnational
parenting can become politicised and policed scripts.
At the same time, there is research (Haagsman, 2018) that suggests links between
transnational family life and negative outcomes for job prospects when comparing
Angolan parents with ‘left behind’ children and those who live in the Netherlands
with all their children. The findings, cross-cutting migration studies and
organisational psychology through mediation analysis, indicate that transnational
family life has a direct impact in increasing migrant parents changing jobs due to low
levels of happiness. This is an integral aspect of a more holistic study of transnational
family relations in redirecting attention of how transnational family life circum-
stances affect the employment potential outcomes for parents, especially as labour
prospects and financial returns are seen as a core objective to the choice of living
68 4 Transnational Families, Intimate Relations, Generations

transnational lives. So, where transnational migration and family studies have been
preoccupied with the affective impact for children, similar investigations regarding
parental transnational working lives have been scarce. In the next section, we’ll
explore additional affective realms of transnational lives, namely those surrounding
intimacies and sexualities.

4.4 Transnational Intimacies and Sexualities

The expansion toward more diverse forms of intimacy in familial relations as well as
issues of sexuality are imperative for both research and policy in returning to the
moral sense of facilitating less economic driven regulation and more socially just
reunification, at present, when it comes to family migration (Kofman, 2019).
Transnational intimacies and sexualities are important as gendered practices and
inextricably linked to global mobilities. However, the study of transnational inti-
macy, sexual relations and sexual migrant identities, has, for a long time, been
confined to heteronormative parameters defining relationships and families under
such a unidirectional gaze. Although a decade or so ago Mai and King (2009) argued
for a combined ‘sexual’ and ‘emotional’ turn in mobility studies in underscoring the
intersectionalities of these two dimensions and their grounding in more productive
queer theory driven research (see Chap. 2), there has been slow progress in global
investigations informed by those intersections. Queer mobilities account for the
emotional and embodied dimensions as shaped by desires and intimate attachments
(Gorman-Murray, 2009) and the possibilities of transnational feminist queer
research can contest configurations of power and hierarchies of the Global North/
Global South (Browne et al., 2017). Engagements with the multiplicity of the
politics of place, as well as across geographical locations, highlight not only spatial
nuances but also brings researchers into dialogue with diverse flows and boundaries.
Yet, as highlighted in the queer migration literature, homemaking in diverse
home spaces tends to be negotiated in spaces of liminality, dislocation and opposi-
tion especially to homonationalism and heteronormativity (Luibhéid, 2008; Mole,
2016; Wimark, 2019). At the same time, some of those tensions have been used as a
springboard for research focusing on the potential benefit of ‘queer diaspora’ as a
heuristic device to think about identity, belonging and solidarity among sexual
minorities in the context of dispersal and transnational networks (Mole, 2018).
Moreover, there is a continued call to apply gender analysis when studying post-
migration experiences of lesbians and gay male immigrants (Fournier et al., 2018).
As a research instrument, a transnational sexualities approach is committed to
being theoretically, epistemologically and ethically self-reflexive to the
co-production of knowledge and the de-centring of established categories. It is an
inclusive approach in embracing largely marginal populations in the process of
knowledge production, in intersectional terms, (for instance, working-class queer
disabled religious ethnic minority sexualities) queering and questioning social
categories, politics, practices and ideologies that reproduce exclusion. Hence,
4.4 Transnational Intimacies and Sexualities 69

transnational sexualities approaches provide a critical lens to explore connections

and circulations of sexual subjectivities, sexual discourses and mobile practices
across two or more national contexts. Within the conceptual parameters of
transnationality, sexualities and intimacies are understood as sexual formations
imbued with mobility meanings in a terrain whereupon local, global and national
hegemonies and politics intersect.
Research on transnational sexualities and intimacies maintains a sustained atten-
tion to both cultural and historical figurations within circuits of transnational mobil-
ity, relational dynamics in space, time and embodied performances. By extension,
transnational sexualities and intimacy studies need to locate their analyses within
contexts of cultural, political and historical connections while being informed by
broader questions highlighting issues of globalisation, modernity, development,
capital, nationalisms, colonialisms, imperialisms, racialisations, etc. as departure
points to problematise discourses, otherwise reified, naturalised or normalised.
Contestable and ‘notoriously obscure, due to its conceptual complexity, historic-
ity and political situatedness’ (Chattopadhyay, 2018: 149), the concept of borders is
also compelling and pivotal to challenging Eurocentric representations of migrant
intimacies in understanding everyday lives of migrant trajectories from the Global
South to Europe. Such insights forge parallels of the biopolitics of borders with the
geopolitical histories of colonialism and imperialism in Europe. Again, these (often
critical and feminist informed) conceptualisations deepen understandings of migrant
experiences, identities and intimacies. In various social spheres there is an increased
emergence of experiences of everyday borderings which are differentiated according
to situated circumstances and social positionings of migrants (Yuval-Davis et al.,
2018).
Indeed, borders and bordering lives have become ‘a flourishing research agenda
on everyday geographies and ontologies of personal (in)security’ (Vaughan-
Williams & Pisani, 2018: 1). While the recent 2015 ‘Mediterranean Migration
Crisis’ has brought to the fore and made visible a number of long-standing border
regime crises (ibid), there is also a body of works that has examined the border as a
social construction within historical, geopolitical and socio-cultural underpinnings
always undergoing varying processes of transformation (Johnson et al., 2011) (see
Chap. 5). It is argued that marriage migration ‘is integral to many transnational
communities, that is, those that have established themselves in several countries
across the world. In other cases, marriage migration may represent a first migration
step which creates a potential for future links between countries’ (ibid, p.1).
Examining the intersections between marriage, sexuality, migration and citizen-
ship contributes to understanding all concepts outside their singularity as a social
phenomenon or social status (Chauvin et al., 2021) and underscores that these need
to be located within the larger political economy and historical trajectories encoun-
tered in particular regions (Ibrahim, 2018). For instance, in ‘the context of South
Asia, contemporary cross-border migration builds on networks of trade, labour, and
marriage that have endured across partition, and is a potent reminder that new
borders drawn up in 1947 or 1971 were not the definitive hiving-off of territory so
much as the inauguration of new regimes of citizenship and border management on
70 4 Transnational Families, Intimate Relations, Generations

the part of the state, and of new expressions of identity and belonging for its citizens’
(ibid: 1665). It becomes clear that cross-border marriage mobility should be viewed
within sociological and historical parameters, discursive conditions and negotiations
of belonging and citizenship. Hence, transnational ‘marriage-scapes’ gender our
understanding of contemporary transnational migration by highlighting the effects
of border-crossings on familial and gender roles.
A redirection to the study of ‘intimate mobilities’ has occurred because ‘much
migration research remains desexualized and overlooks emotional and intimate
relationships’ (Groes & Fernandez, 2018: 1). Reconfigurations of gender relations
are also complex in transnational marriage contexts and those can revert to tradi-
tional roles, be amplified or even reversed and undermined depending on the
parameters of socio-cultural integration (Charsley, 2012; Charsley et al., 2016).
But integration and gender are also pertinent in the discussion of migrant care and
ageing in transnational fields (Zontini, 2015). Findings by Zontini (ibid) from her
long-term study of transnational ageing Italian migrants in the UK, reveal that
community and belonging enhance successful ageing but above all, strength and
reciprocity of bonds with co-ethnics locally and transnationally showed a sense of
well-being linked to those experiences. Nevertheless, overall, findings of studies on
transnational caring of ageing migrants demonstrates that there are many challenges
involved, from negotiating the expectations and obligations of caring to issues of
loneliness and trauma when those expectations and obligations are disrupted by
migration of the children or even the complications of ‘crises’ phases in the care
responsibilities of transnational families (King & Vullnetari, 2006; Baldassar, 2007,
2014).
Useful terminology to conceptualise the complexities, fluctuations and network-
ings regarding ageing care are, for instance, the one proposed by Baldassar and
Merla as ‘circulation of care’ referring to the ‘reciprocal, asymmetrical and multi-
directional exchange of care’ (2013: 25), as well as ‘family care regimes’ (Kilkey &
Merla, 2014) to denote the micro-sociologies of family arrangements. Rather reveal-
ing of wider social organisation is the fact that counter to such positive accounts of
transnational family care in the international literature, there are compelling research
contributions that highlight the challenges and difficulties encountered as funda-
mentally linked to transnational care and that strong transnational family ties are not
necessarily the only or an inevitable outcome of transnational migration
(e.g. Schröder-Butterfill & Newman, 2019; Schröder-Butterfill & Fithry, 2014).
Transnational family relations and the circulations of care are social practices that
incorporate performativities of intimacy and affectivity. Such relations involve a
number of challenges and their dynamics reveal the interplay of migrant agency and
wider institutional structures. In the box content we focus on a few core empirical
case studies and link their central findings to the wider literature to draw some wider
reflections on interdisciplinary research on migration and family studies. While there
are numerous empirical examples to draw on from the proliferation of research over
the last 25 years on transnationalism and more recently on transnational families
(Glick Schiller et al., 1992; Faist, 2000; Levitt, 2001; Chee, 2005; Parreñas, 2005;
Carling et al., 2012) there is still much to highlight in focusing on a few selective
References 71

case studies and drawing some key insights with a lens to gender and migration. In
selecting case studies to illuminate some core insights regarding transnational
families, we are also guided by the call to set aside methodological nationalism in
providing a more global perspective on how migration driven social theories can
explain global, national and local phenomena in a mutually constitutive way (Glick
Schiller, 2009). We thus see both families and transnational family processes as
components of transnational dynamics whereupon nation-states are core in shaping
their relations but are also arenas of power dynamics (Glick Schiller, 2005).
For one, the large volume of literature on transnational families has focused
almost exclusively on migrant transnational mothering, and, less so on fathers and
fathering (Kilkey et al., 2014) (see Chap. 3), and, even less so from a queer
perspective which reaffirms normative universalisations of gendered scripted lives
of domesticity in heteronormative framings (Manalansan, 2006; Kosnick, 2011).
Recent studies on black, migrant and gay/lesbian families (Moore, 2011; Capps &
Fix, 2012) are seminal in extending issues of relationality, connectedness and
intimacy by challenging heteronormative paradigms and introducing intersectional
diversities and complexities in family lives.

4.5 Conclusion

Though previously understudied, movement due to familial and intimate reasons has
grown enormously, especially as a result of the interest in how families live
separated across space and time, the changing gendered and generational structures
of the family, and how economic and emotional resources circulate between family
and kin members to ensure their social reproduction. More recently, comparative
research, both qualitative and quantitative, has yielded a better understanding of
differences between countries and regions. As we have also seen in this chapter, a
number of new perspectives have been developed to include men and masculinities
in familial movements, tasks such as transnational parenting and to question the
heteronormativity of assumptions. Increasingly same sex couples have been
included within immigration regulations for family migrations, especially in Europe
and other major societies of immigration.

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Chapter 5
Gendering Asylum

By the end of 2019, 79.5 million people of concern (refugees and internally displaced)
around the world had been forced from their home countries. It represents over three
times the number of people of concern compared to the figure at the beginning of the
twenty-first century. The major development since the peak in asylum applications in
2015 in Europe has been the large-scale emigration of Venezuelans, who as of 2019 are
now among the top three nationalities in Europe, especially in Spain, and the outflow
from Afghanistan since the takeover by the Taliban in August 2021. On the other hand,
Covid-19 has led to a significant reduction in applicants in 2020, especially among
Colombians and Venezuelans arriving by air (EASO, 2021).
Women comprise the majority of those escaping generalized conflict, but only a
minority of those who manage to seek asylum in the Global North due to the fact that
moving long distances requires considerable resources and frequently necessitates the
use of smugglers (Damir-Geilsdorf & Sabra, 2018). In many of the countries with large
numbers of populations of concern, such as Colombia, DR Congo, South Sudan and
Syria, women form the majority or almost half of the displaced population (UNHCR
Statistical Yearbook, 2016, table 13). For example, Syria, which had become the
largest refugee producing country, had an estimated 6.5 million Syrian citizens inter-
nally displaced and more than 4.8 million in neighbouring countries by the end of 2016.
Women form the majority of the internally displaced in Syria itself and about half in
neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey (Freedman et al., 2017;
Williams et al., 2020).
It was only in the 1980s that concerns about women in forced migration came to the
fore among academics and international organisations (Indra, 1999). A gender
approach, she noted, was still in its infancy in the 1990s, and would require more
attention being paid to situationally specific and in-depth knowledge of women and
men forced migrants, including the class, ethnic, national and transnational systems of
which they are part (ibid: 21). Yet, as with other forms of migration, international
statistics on the gender breakdown of refugee populations was for a long time not
available, leading to the erroneous idea that the majority of assisted refugees in the
Global South were women and children (Zlotnik, 2003). Though more statistics have

© The Author(s) 2022 77

A. Christou, E. Kofman, Gender and Migration, IMISCOE Research Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9_5
78 5 Gendering Asylum

become available since 1998, these are often not collected systematically for each stage
of the asylum process and the different outcomes (Belloni et al., 2018; Kofman, 2019).
In this chapter we firstly outline the growing attention paid to gendered aspects of
forced migrations in the 1990s in the Global South (Hyndman, 2010; Fiddian-
Qasmiyeh, 2014) and the ways in which such gendered movements have been
represented. Whilst it was men who reached the Global North, far fewer women
were able to submit claims for asylum and thereby obtain refugee status. According
to the 1951 Refugee Convention a refugee is defined “as a person who owing to a
well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality,
membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country
of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of
the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the
country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or,
owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it”. Feminist scholars drew attention to
the fact that the Convention failed to incorporate gender-related persecution and
suggested ways in which such considerations could be incorporated within the limits
of the Convention (Crawley, 1999; Macklin, 1999).
Although following the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s,
Europe had known large-scale displacement from East to West with a peak of
700,000 asylum seekers in 1992, the 2015 influx brought in twice the number of
persons as in the earlier period. The high level reflected both recent conflicts in Syria
as well as protracted conflicts in Afghanistan, Eritrea and Somalia. Furthermore, in
the past few years a large-scale exodus of over four million persons from Venezuela
have also sought refuge, largely in the Americas as well as Spain.
In the second section we highlight how the large-scale flows of 2015, labelled as a
migration or refugee crisis by politicians and the media, were characterised as one of
the most significant post-war developments. This time, the large-scale displacement
into Europe, as opposed to refugees located in the Global South, intensified some of
the ongoing critical discussions around gender and refugee issues. These included the
need for more disaggregated data, not just by gender but also in relation to other social
divisions, and greater knowledge about the gendered experiences of border crossings
and journeys (Holloway et al., 2019; Pruitt et al., 2018). One of the contentious issues
has been the depiction of refugee women as victims and vulnerable (Belloni et al.,
2018; Kofman, 2019; Parrs, 2018), the critique of the concept of vulnerability in
humanitarian policies (Sozer, 2020; Turner, 2019b) and its implications for women,
men and unaccompanied minors. Another emerging topic in academic and policy
circles has been the treatment of sexuality-based asylum claims (Arbel et al., 2014)
and the reception experiences of LGBTQI individuals (Henley, 2020).

5.1 Emergence of Gendered Perspectives on Forced

Migration

The study of gender and refugees was slow to take off and remained fragmented for
some time until the 1990s (Hyndman, 2010; Indra, 1999). Until gendered
disaggregated data became available, there was an assumption that displaced persons
5.1 Emergence of Gendered Perspectives on Forced Migration 79

were overwhelmingly female but the figures released in 1998 demonstrated that
women only amounted to just less than half of assisted refugees in Africa (Zlotnik,
2003). Even now disaggregated data by sex are available for only 46% of the total
UNHCR population of concern.
It has been argued that gendered imagery fundamentally shifted the representa-
tion of the refugee from a heroic European male to a depoliticised Third world
mother and child or the womananddhild (Enloe, 1989) depicted as victims of
generalised violence and poverty. This made it easier to attract funding for human-
itarian assistance in the South through which the state played out its paternalistic role
of saviour and protector (Johnson, 2011). Although UNHCR (1991) had adopted its
policy on refugee women in 1990s, this tended to focus on women in their repro-
ductive and domestic roles as defined in the World Conference on Women in Nairobi
in 1985 rather than gender equality. Instead, it has been argued that traditional
gendered images of the vulnerable and dependent female in need of protection
have dominated refugee policies (Baines, 2004). Hyndman and Giles (2017) also
argue that those who stay in the Global South are viewed positively as genuine,
immobile, depoliticised, and feminised, while those on the move, in particular if
aiming to reach the Global North, are perceived in negative terms as potential
liabilities and/or security threats, which, as we shall see, is particularly associated
with young refugee men.
Another area of critique and activism involved the 1951 Refugee Convention
which, though supposedly neutral, was formulated around male norms and did not
acknowledge gendered experiences of persecution (Crawley & Lester, 2004). It
privileged the persecution of the actor in the public sphere in contrast to experiences
in the private sphere of the family and home which might include familial and
domestic violence, rape, and female genital mutilation. UNHCR recognized that
‘historically, the refugee definition has been interpreted through a framework of
male experiences, which has meant that many claims of women and of homosexuals
have gone unrecognised’ (UNHCR, 2002: n. 1), but suggested such recognition
should be done through gender sensitive guidelines. The list of grounds of discrim-
ination in the Convention were race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or
membership in a particular social group, but did not include sex or gender. While
gender sensitive guidelines had been passed in Canada (1993), United States (1995)
and Australia (1996) (Macklin, 1999), progress was much slower in Europe (Ali
et al., 2012). Although the guidelines have no status at the level of international law,
they do spell out what it means to take into account gender-related persecution and
issues of evidence and credibility assessment in refugee determination (Arbel et al.,
2014). Importantly they enable women to make claims on the basis of persecution by
private actors and in private spaces and have paved the way for sexuality-related
claims. UNHCR argued that persecution based on gender, gender identity, and
sexual orientation all stem from a common source, that of non-conformity to rigidly
defined gender roles and gender norms (UNHCR, 2002, 2012). In its Guidelines, the
UNHCR stated that “female applicants may be subjected to the same forms of harm
as male applicants but they may also face forms of persecution specific to their sex,
80 5 Gendering Asylum

such as sexual violence, dowry-related violence, female genital mutilation, domestic

violence and trafficking”.
Yet the way in which gendered and sexual persecution should be recognised in
the Convention also gave rise to debate between divergent ways of responding to its
absence. The first is to classify women and LGBTQI claims within the remit of
membership of particular social groups, the preferred option favoured by the
UNHCR and the European Union for claims on the basis of gender and sexual
persecution (Arbel et al., 2014), and which has prevailed in virtually all European
countries (Ali et al., 2012); the second is to recognize these forms of persecution
through the nexus of political opinion, nationality or religious identity (Crawley,
1999, 2021).
Within the EU in the first decade of the century, an average of about a third of
female asylum seekers masked substantial differences from just over 10% to just
under 50% in Poland. Another difference was whether disaggregated data were
published (Ali et al., 2012). In addition the extent to which women asylum seekers
were granted the more secure refugee status as opposed to subsidiary protection also
differed markedly. For example, in Sweden the higher percentage given subsidiary
protection statuses, a lower level than the Convention refugee status, reflected the
fact that membership of a particular social group, to which gender-related persecu-
tion was aligned, was granted a lower level of protection. Only Romania included
gender as a ground of persecution, while other countries interpreted gender-related
persecution as falling in the category of a particular social group (Ali et al., 2012).
How each form of persecution was interpreted and recognised for purposes of
asylum determination also varied between countries. Following the gender guide-
lines, issues of sexuality began to draw attention.

Box: Sexuality and Grounds for Persecution

The subsequent decade saw quite a lot of activity around the recognition of
sexuality as grounds of persecution with the UNHCR (2008) publishing its
guidelines on claims relating to sexual orientation and gender identity in 2008
and the European Union recognizing sexual orientation as a cause of perse-
cution in Article 10 of the EU Asylum Qualification Directive (2011) (Lewis
& Naples, 2014). As with gender, this form of persecution was slotted into the
category of particular social groups even though there might be other relevant
grounds, such as cases where activism around LGBT issues might be seen as
being in opposition to prevailing political or religious views and practices
(Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014). However unlike gender-related persecution, a
comparative report on fleeing homophobia (Jansen & Spijkerboer, 2011)
found there was virtually no data collected and a substantial disparity on
how claims were dealt with.
5.1 Emergence of Gendered Perspectives on Forced Migration 81

Despite advances on gender-sensitive guidelines in some countries in the 1990s,

there were still few comprehensive studies of women asylum seekers and refugees
(Bloch et al., 2000). Indeed it was surprising that a large-scale intra-European forced
migration phenomenon received so little attention from a gendered perspective. As
previously noted, the disintegration of Yugoslavia and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia
and Herzegovina (BiH) in the first half of the 1990s led to massive outflows to
countries such as Australia and the United States as well as to other European states.
Germany, which received the largest number, only gave a temporary status (tolerated
or humanitarian). Thus at the end of the conflict in December 1995, the vast majority
in Germany were repatriated to BiH. Of the 320,000 from BiH in Germany in
1992–5, only 22,000 remained in 2005. Unlike the minority of women applying
for asylum in Europe, estimated to be about 29% in the mid 1990s (Crawley &
Lester, 2004), Bosnian emigration according to statistics for BiH emigrants in
OECD countries comprised 51.4% women. There were generally more women
than men among refugees in the 15–29 years group, and especially for those
20–24 years old. It seems surprising that this large-scale displacement has generated
few publications (Franz, 2003; Kačapor-Džihić & Oruč, 2012; Muftić & Bouffard,
2008), thus maintaining a binary portrayal of a female refugee majority in the South
and a minority of female asylum claimants who have manged to cross borders into
Europe (Johnson, 2011) to prevail.
In terms of conflict-inducing displacement, the role of sexual violence in gener-
ating displacement gained credence through the systematic use of rape in Bosnia in
the 1990s and later Rwanda. Article 7(1g) of the Rome Statute of the International
Criminal Court, in force since 2002, includes ‘Rape, sexual slavery, enforced
prostitution, forced pregnancy, enforced sterilization, or any other form of sexual
violence of comparable gravity’ as crimes against humanity when they are commit-
ted in a widespread or systematic way. Subsequently it has been argued that the
practice of gender-based violence against boys and men in war and post-conflict
situations has also to be recognised rather than treated simply as degrading treatment
(Carpenter, 2006).
During the 1990s and the increase in refugee numbers in Europe, states prolifer-
ated legal statuses and associated rights to work and generated a stratified system of
social protection (Kofman, 2002; Morris, 2002). However by the first decade of this
century, the number of asylum seekers had been much reduced, in part due to
increasingly restrictive bordering measures. Soon this would change as a series of
new and protracted conflicts in the Middle East, North Africa and Africa combined
to produce the unprecedented numbers seeking asylum and refugee status in Europe
(see Table 5.1). The percentage of women hovered around a third.
In the next section we turn our attention to issues concerning the gendered aspects
of the 2015 influx and an increasing percentage of female applicants (38.1% of first
applicants out of a total of 612,700 in 2019 and 36.1% out of 416,600 in 2020 for
EU-27 countries).
82 5 Gendering Asylum

Table 5.1 Asylum seekers in the European Union (by sex and year of application)
Year Female applicants Male applicants Percentage of women
2008 72.745 183.331 28
2009 93.950 203.075 32
2010 97.170 187.650 34
2011 106.355 235.315 31
2012 126.240 247.205 34
2013 150.760 307.710 33
2014 195.885 466.100 30
2015 384.995 1.006.160 28
Source: EUROSTAT online database

5.2 Displacement to Europe

Ever since the 1990s and the end of the Cold War, European states and then the
European Union had been tightening rights to access not just into the territory and
residence through its bordering processes, both externally and though everyday
practices within states. Bordering is not only about who moves but also who controls
the movement and under what conditions (de Genova, 2017; Yuval-Davis et al.,
2019). In doing so, it filters and stratifies according to categories of nationality,
education, age and gender, and who is perceived as likely to belong to and integrate
into a modern society (see Chap. 6). Both within the EU and in individual states, an
arsenal of policies contributed to an intensification of classifications, categories of
eligibility and special spaces designated for asylum seekers. These included policies
designating which country was responsible for asylum claims, for example, as in the
Dublin Regulation, originally implemented in 1997 and changed several times since
then with the aim of reducing ‘asylum shopping’. Some countries were designated as
safe and from which claims for asylum claims were set aside; others were recognised
as places of conflict and thereby valid sites for claims. This gave rise to very different
rates of recognition of claims from the Syrians with at the end of 2016 the highest
rate of recognition of 98% (refugee, subsidiary protection, humanitarian) and
Eritreans with 93% whilst others, particularly from sub-Saharan Africa, such as
Nigerians, and Pakistan had had very high rates of rejection of over 80% (Eurostat
Asylum Statistics). Special spaces or hotspots (D’Angelo, 2019) effectively serving
as spaces of detention, were also created in several sites in Sicily as from the end of
2015 and then on the Greek Islands to filter the ‘genuine’ asylum seeker, often
reduced to nationality, from the economic migrant (Crawley & Skleparis, 2018).
However as D’Angelo (2019) cautions, for Italy these were simply factories
manufacturing illegality since applicants were rarely repatriated but left to remain
undocumented and without rights. In part the nationality classification is inflected by
humanitarian principles influenced increasingly by categories derived from the
concept of vulnerability (Peroni & Timmer, 2013). Those to whom the label of
‘vulnerable’ is affixed are given priority in border crossings and access to resources.
As we shall show, women disproportionately fall into these categories (pregnant,
5.2 Displacement to Europe 83

single parents) in contrast to men who are more likely to be seen as threatening or
able to look after themselves (Kofman, 2019).
Whereas the early flows of asylum seekers in Europe were predominantly men,
the share of women rose as from the end of 2015 and until the EU-Turkey deal in
March 2016 which closed off this particular route. The visible dominance of men
generated negative, though sometimes contradictory, comments on men who had
fled to Europe (Herz, 2019; Scheibelhofer, 2017, 2019). Analysis of social media
portrayed them as threatening to society and women in general or as cowards
unwilling to fight, having left women and children behind to fend for themselves
(Helms, 2015; Pruitt et al., 2018; Rettberg & Gajjala, 2016). So men emerged as
potential terrorists and security threats, which would be reinforced by subsequent
events in the Paris bombings of November 2015, the incident on the Thalys train
from Brussels to Paris and the bombings in Brussels in March 2016, for which it was
suggested that some of the perpetrators had returned among refugees. This and
security fears also had repercussions on resettlement programmes resulting in the
Canadian government excluding single, except gay, men from its Syrian
resettlement programme (Kingsley, 2015). Others questioned taking in such male-
dominated populations, especially among unaccompanied minors who would soon
transition to adulthood, and pose a threat to Europe’s gender equal societies (Hud-
son, 2016; Pruitt et al., 2018). A majority of tweets on #refugeesNOTwelcome
invoked gender-based arguments or imagery against immigration or refugee settle-
ment and explicitly linked the arrival of refugees to gender-based violence or the
subjugation of women (Ingulfsen, 2016; Kreis, 2017).
For the Mediterranean sea crossings as a whole in 2015, 58% of the 1,015,078
were men, 17% women and 25% children though masking quite divergent patterns.
However, by November 2015, a shift to an increasing number of women, including
single and pregnant women, and children was being reported for the Greek route
(UNHCR et al., 2016), a 10% increase since May 2015. The percentage of women
among asylum applicants in Germany had increased from 21% in 2015 to 32% in
2016 (Damir-Geilsdorf & Sabra, 2018). It is likely that one of the reasons this
happened was family separation at different stages of the process and the difficulties
in re-joining family members (Costello et al., 2017; Damir-Geilsdorf & Sabra,
2018). The slow process of family reunification in countries of origin with very
long waiting times to obtain papers meant that some left without waiting for official
permission (Squire et al., 2017). Getting out of Greece to join family members could
also take time, especially once Germany and Sweden put a brake on family
reunification from the end of 2015 and 2016 for those with subsidiary protection
(see Chap. 4). Yet in Italy, with much lower numbers in 2015, and which had very
different source countries primarily from Africa, the percentage of female migrants
remained low (Table 5.2).
The percentage of women also varied considerably between nationalities. In
Greece, at the end of 2015 the nationalities with highest shares of women were
Syrians (43%), Afghanis (29%) and Iraqis (12%). In Italy, it was Nigerians who had
the highest rate of women (25%) followed by Eritreans (22%) and Somalis (21%).
Refugee women are a sizeable and growing group. According to data from
Eurostat, about half a million women obtained international protection in Europe
84 5 Gendering Asylum

Table 5.2 Percentage of men, women and children among arrivals in 2015 and 2016
2015 2016 (Jan–Sept)
Greece Italy Greece Italy
Men 55 75 41 61
Women 17 14 21 12
Children 28 11 38 27a
Source: UNHCR
a
In Italy unlike in Greece, there were large numbers of unaccompanied minors so that the 27%
children was made up of 14% accompanied and 13% unaccompanied children

since 2015, of whom 300,000 are in Germany. The presence of refugee women is
also expected to rise further through family reunification (see Chap. 4), as the
majority of spouses concerned are women. The greatest gender differences were
observed for asylum applicants who were 14–17 or 18–34 years old, where 67.9%
and 69.0%, respectively, of first-time applicants were male, with this share dropping
back to 58.0% for the age group 35–64 years (Eurostat, May 2020). Unaccompanied
minors remain overwhelmingly male but there is very little gender disaggregated
data of children as if they were gender neutral (Kofman, 2019).
However despite the growing availability of data on gender breakdown together
with age, disaggregation does not reveal the heterogeneity of asylum seekers char-
acteristics, with whom refugees have travelled and their aspirations. Disability
(Rohwerder, 2018) and age too are highly relevant in the way asylum seekers and
refugees experience their journeys and settlement. Yet we have little information or
data on disability, despite the UNHCR having recognised refugees with disabilities
as a group to whom it had obligations (Fiske & Giotis, 2021). It can be seen as
reflecting a focus in forced migration on heternonormative productive bodies (Pisani
& Grech, 2015).
Disaggregating data would allow us to gain a better understanding of the politics
of gendered mobilities and unequal access to mobility (Uteng & Cresswell, 2008).
For this we need to turn to smaller surveys and qualitative research based on
ethnographies, interviews and films. A number of surveys were conducted during
the peak of the Mediterranean crossings. For example, in the first wave of the survey
(March–July 2016) for the project EVI-MED: Constructing an evidence base of
contemporary Mediterranean migrations (Blitz et al., 2017), women in Greece were
far more likely than men to be divorced or widowed (9 women compared to 2 men),
while 9 were single so that a third were, therefore, without a husband. The majority
had children with them in Greece, few (2) had left children behind in the country of
origin with 9 of them having children elsewhere. Few women (5) had travelled alone
compared to men (26). UNHCR (2016a, b) also conducted interviews at the begin-
ning of 2016 with Syrians and Afghans on the islands (Lesvos, Chios, Samos and
Leros). Of the 524 Syrians interviewed, 23% were women of whom 2% were
pregnant and 2% lactating. 80% had travelled with close family, 10% with extended
family, 7% with friends and colleagues and only 11% were alone. 18% of respon-
dents were part of a single male-headed household and 19% a female-headed
household. 7% had left behind a spouse, 40% a parent and 13% children.
5.3 Vulnerability 85

In Italy, as previously noted, there were far fewer women. The EVI-MED survey
comprising 202 individuals (March–June 2016) indicated that of the 23 women
surveyed, 14 were single and three widowed. 12 did not have any children and, of the
11 who did, only 3 were living with them in Sicily. Although fewer women had
travelled alone (60%) compared to men (76%), this is considerably higher than for
women in Greece.
We therefore need to delve more deeply to capture the experiences of women,
men and children (UNICEF, 2020) as they cross international borders under inhos-
pitable conditions and understand the relationship between the harm, distress and
violence many are subjected to as well as the agency they deploy (Grotti et al., 2018;
Holloway et al., 2019; Oxfam, 2016). It is particularly important we do so in order
not to insert their stories into prevailing stereotypes of asylum seekers and migrants.
As we have previously noted, sex work is frequently coupled with sex trafficking
(Chap. 3), especially for certain nationalities, such as Nigerian women in Italy, who
are rendered as pure victims without any agency. Most had traversed Libya, a highly
dangerous and violent country where many individuals had experienced serious
harm of sequestration, forced labour, kidnapping and sexual violence from a variety
of sources. It is not easy to distinguish sex trafficking from using transactional sex to
undertake a journey (Crawley et al., 2016; Hodal, 2020). Nigerian women in
particular are closely associated with sex work (Plambech, 2017; Rigo, 2017).
Taking away agency has also been problematic in the increasing application of
vulnerability criteria in relation to particular categories of asylum seekers and
refugees, often pushing them to perform vulnerability in order to be prioritised for
allocation of resources. For example, November 2015, UNHCR financed NGOs in
Greece to offer housing, either in hotels or apartments, to eligible asylum seekers,
such as those enrolled in the EU Relocation Scheme, Dublin family-reunification
candidates, and, since 2016, “vulnerable” applicants. Others may self-vulnerabilise
in order to gain access to resettlement schemes to wealthier countries (Parrs, 2018).
The name of the UK Syrian Vulnerable Persons Scheme reflects this in its stated
preference for families, thus excluding single men (Turner, 2017).

5.3 Vulnerability

The concept of vulnerability has emerged in the past two decades in political, social
and legal theory (Fineman, 2008; Turner, 2006), in ethics and public health (Luna,
2019) and in humanitarian policies (Heidbrink, 2021; Sozer, 2020; Turner,
2019a, b). Martha Albertson Fineman starts from a critique of the liberal notion of
the autonomous individual which she argued should be replaced by the vulnerable
subject ‘describing a universal, inevitable and enduring aspect of the human condi-
tion that must be at the heart of our concept of social and state responsibility’ (2008:
8). For her the condition of vulnerability should be understood as stemming from our
embodiment which carries the possibility of harm, injury and misfortune in the past,
present and future, and which may render us more dependent over the life course.
86 5 Gendering Asylum

Thus vulnerability represents connectivity between individuals and applies to every-

one, and not simply to designated groups, as in the approach to vulnerability adopted
in the European Human Court of Human Rights case law (Al Tamini, 2015; Peroni
& Timmer, 2013) and in UNHCR humanitarian interventions (Sozer, 2020;
UNHCR, 2014).
A number of critiques have been levelled at the application of vulnerability and its
classification of vulnerable individuals and groups. Initially asylum seekers as a
group (ECRE, 2017) were considered to be vulnerable and in need of special
protection as in the case of M.S.S. v Belgium and Greece (ECtHR [GC] 21 January
2011, no. 30696/09 (M.S.S. v. Belgium and Greece) in which the systematic
deficiencies of the Greek asylum system, such as a lack of reception centres, inability
to access the labour market, lengthy procedures in having asylum requests examined
and the traumas asylum seekers had been through during the process of migration
could be said to contribute to ‘the institutional production of vulnerability of asylum
seekers in Greece’ (Peroni & Timmer, 2013: 1069). Yet, as the number of asylum
seekers increased, so too has the label of vulnerability been restricted to particular
groups (ECRE, 2017) designated by the European Union in its Qualification Direc-
tive (2011) and the UNHCR (2013).
However, we know little about the recipients of prioritisation and what the impact
of being designated vulnerable has had on their lives. A partial exception was the
pre-registration exercise in summer 2016 in Greece which provided a picture of the
composition of the vulnerable population (see Table 5.3). The majority of adults
were women due to the large numbers of those who were pregnant, had recently
given birth or were single parents with children. Among the vulnerable categories
listed, there seemed to be a tendency to privilege protection based on past harm, such
as disability, torture, and exploitation, or those who care for or are dependent on

Table 5.3 Vulnerabilities by type and gender in Greece. Pre-registration June–July 2016
% of total male % of total female Total
Category of vulnerability Male adults Female adults no.
Single parents with minor 104 15.3 627 38.4 731
children
Pregnant women/recently 0 – 522 32.0 522
given birth
Incurable or serious diseases 174 26.6 174 10.7 348
Disability 209 30.8 104 6.4 213
Elderly 104 15.3 139 8.5 243
Post-traumatic disorder 39 5.7 39 2.4 78
Torture 39 5.7 10 0.6 49
Rape or serious exploitation 10 1.5 17 1.0 27
Total adults 679 1632 3481
Total adults and unaccompa- 1688 1841 3481
nied minors
Source: Hellenic Republic, Ministry of Interior and UNHCR pre-registration data analysis 9 June-

30 July 2016
5.3 Vulnerability 87

others, such as single parents with young children, or those who require additional
support, for example, pregnant women, the elderly, the disabled and unaccompanied
children. What also distinguishes most of these categories are that they are the most
visible and easily identifiable, though those with mental health problems may not
want to disclose this. This check list expedites the process of classification, as a hard-
pressed doctor working with disembarking asylum seekers in Italy, stated
(Heidbrink, 2021).

Box: Vulnerable Groups

However, an odd absence from this list are single women travelling on their
own who have been identified in a number of reports (Women’s Refugee
Commission, 2016a, b) and their own stories of dangerous and threatening
situations and gender- based violence from a variety of actors (Rigo, 2017).
Transactional or survival sex was demanded to cross a border or advance on
their journey, especially amongst those travelling from sub-Saharan Africa
through Libya. Yet, the reliance on a labelling or listing approach to facilitate
the governance of asylum and refugee management neglects those whose
vulnerability derives primarily from their insecure situations.

Apart from the critique of this classification having become a listing exercise that
fails to take into account a more contextual and situated concept of actual and
potential harm, others have highlighted the absence of men from this
conceptualisation (Turner, 2019a). Indeed the remit of organisations is often limited
to assessment of risks faced by individuals though they have noted risks for boys and
men arising from forced conscription and traumatic journeys (UNHCR et al., 2016).
More comprehensive critiques have surfaced recently in relation to its close associ-
ation with neo-liberal humanitarianism and rationing of resources with problematic
consequences in its redistribution between refugees (Sozer, 2020). For Heidbrink
(2021), it is a means that states and humanitarian actors deploy to govern contem-
porary mobility and restrict access to much reduced services in increasingly
privatised welfare regimes. Turner’s shift in position is quite instructive. Having
argued for the inclusion of men as vulnerable subjects, which consequently would
‘disrupt prevailing humanitarian understandings of refugeehood as a feminized
subject position’ (Turner, 2019a), he subsequently (Turner, 2019b: 17) forcefully
argued that we do not need more studies of refugees’ “vulnerabilities” or categories
such as men and LGBT (Myrttinen et al., 2017) to be incorporated. Instead we need
studies of refugees’ lives that are grounded in their own concepts and understandings
and do not force them into performing powerlessness in order to acquire vulnera-
bility. And as others have also commented, vulnerability has reduced their subjec-
tivity to this aspect and stripped them having any agentic qualities. Yet at the same
time, others see the addition of categories such as LGBTI into EU Directives as a
good solution to pushing governments to recognise claims made on this basis (FRA,
2017).
88 5 Gendering Asylum

With women in particular, the focus on vulnerability has emphasised sexual and
gender-based violence in their journeys crossing the Mediterranean and Europe and
in reception facilities, especially in Germany and Sweden which received the largest
number of asylum seekers (Bonewit & Shreeves, 2016; Honeyball, 2016; Women’s
Refugee Commission, 2016a, b). A number of scholars have critiqued the reduction
of their situation to one of the official definitions of vulnerability (Belloni et al.,
2018; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014; Freedman, 2015; Freedman et al., 2017) and the
failure to take account of the complexity of their situations. Some have argued that
the excessive emphasis of women’s victimisation (Pittaway & Bartolomei, 2018),
has rendered it difficult to develop appropriate measures for supporting them in
transit and in the country of destination in relation to sexual and gender-based
violence (Grotti et al., 2018; Ozcurumez et al., 2020).
So, too, have unaccompanied children been represented as quintessentially vul-
nerable (Heidbrink, 2021; Pruitt et al., 2018) without taking into account their aims
and aspirations, especially for those escaping countries of protracted conflict without
any sense of future or opportunities (Belloni, 2020). Their categorisation as vulner-
able persons fixes them temporally into a particular status in their life course without
taking into account their continuing vulnerability, especially as they confront the
insecurity of their transition into adulthood (Heidbrink, 2021).
Whilst sexual orientation and gender identity are included in the Qualifications
Directive 2011 (FRA, 2017) laying down which grounds are eligible for interna-
tional protection, they are not enumerated in the Reception Directive 2013 as
grounds of vulnerability though it has been argued that the grounds can be extended.
Above all, many asylum seekers complain about the expectations that are expected
of them to demonstrate that they are LGBTI, that is the credibility assessment.
Across Europe, four in ten asylum seekers with such claims experience a ‘culture
of disbelief’ that they had suffered or were at risk of persecution (Danisi et al., 2020;
Henley, 2020). Sexuality and gender identity intersected with other reasons (country
of origin, cultural background, demeanour, educational background, religion) in
leading to their claims being rejected. In terms of reception facilities, there have
over time been attempts to provide LGBTI asylum seekers, who are often harassed,
with more secure accommodation, as has been the case in Germany (AIDA/ECRE,
2020).

5.4 Conclusion

In this chapter, we have traced the growing attention paid to gender and sexuality
aspects of asylum and refugee flows, claims making and protection. No longer is it a
matter of the analysis of the displaced being located some distance away in the
Global South. It is important to adopt an historical perspective since as, we
highlighted, the rapid growth of refugee claims had an earlier presence in the
1990s following the break-up and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.
Then, as now, the common response on the part of European states has been to
References 89

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and access legal and socio-economic rights in the Global North.
Today 20 plus years on, we see a humanitarian system in crisis where states and
the European Union under neo-liberal governance and hostile environments towards
migrants and refugees have left humanitarian and profit-making sectors to manage
securitization of borders, including the filtering into categories. One of the means of
processing asylum seekers into groups, between those to be settled with rights, those
left in limbo and those to be deported, is the application of vulnerability in conjunc-
tion with nationality, often reflecting racialised notions of the other. As we have also
explored, vulnerability has generated considerable critique, initially around which
categories were included and excluded followed by a more radical questioning of the
application of vulnerability altogether and the ways it has served to restrict access to
protection and services. As Judith Butler (2016: 15) commented: ‘Once groups are
marked as ‘vulnerable’ within human rights discourse or legal regimes, those groups
become reified as definitionally ‘vulnerable’, fixed in a political position of power-
lessness and lack of agency. All the power belongs to the state and international
institutions that are now supposed to offer them protection and advocacy’.

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Chapter 6
Engendering Integration and Inclusion

In this chapter we turn to issues of how migrants participate in society and especially
their gendered aspects. Why is gender important in this regard? It is a consideration
that is usually absent from both theoretical and policy discussions of what is
commonly termed integration or the basis on which migrants are incorporated into
a society, a term widely used across different societies but with different meanings
(Rytter, 2019). Whilst integration policies might seem to be neutral, they may in
effect target women and men differently and have different outcomes for them. Such
policies may also apply primarily to certain categories of migrants, although the
categories and nationalities change over time. As we shall see, concerns over what
constitutes problematic integration vary, such as: lack of knowledge of the language
of the country, non-participation in the labour market and traditional cultural and
social practices transferred from societies of origin. These have generated demands
to impose integration measures and contracts as conditionalities of immigration and,
if applicable, to the different stages in the pathway to citizenship.
In the first section we examine an increasingly critical debate on the notion of
integration. This debate has probably been more visible in academic writing than in
policy interventions, where discourses of securitisation, targeting of Muslim
populations, their unwillingness to ‘integrate’ (Kontos, 2014) and the retention of
transnational ties and practices, prevail. The relationship between academic dis-
courses and policies is a difficult one in which the critical edge of academic studies
may be lost (Rytter, 2019). There has also been, with a few exceptions (Anthias &
Pajnik, 2014; Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013), little reflection on gendered or
intersectional aspects. For Schinkel (2018: 4) class and race have been purified from
integration and, we would add, so too have gender and sexuality.
In the second section, we show how integration discourses are gendered in the
way they represent and target migrant women and men (Anthias & Pajnik, 2014;
Kofman et al., 2015). Those entering through family migration routes (Bonjour &
Kraler, 2015; OECD, 2017), whom as we have seen in Chap. 4 are in the majority
women, were the first to be subjected to integration measures. In terms of integration,
women are supposedly reluctant to ‘integrate’ and ‘become one of us’, while men’s

© The Author(s) 2022 95

A. Christou, E. Kofman, Gender and Migration, IMISCOE Research Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9_6
96 6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion

patriarchal culture, especially if Muslim, holds women back and is dangerous for
contemporary values of gender and sexual equality (see also Chap. 5 in relation to
recent discourses on young refugee men). In effect, in gendering, racializing and
classing certain categories, it is the ‘migrant with poor prospects’ (Bonjour &
Duyvendak, 2018) who must be forced to integrate. In earlier years of proposals to
implement integration measures in particular, a gendered argumentation was evident
in a number of states (Kofman et al., 2015; Korteweg, 2017). And as a number of
scholars have critically commented, the analysis of what is to be done in relation to
integration strips migrants of any heterogeneity or probes the relationship between
the different aspects of their subjectivity i.e. intersectionality (Korteweg, 2017) or
problems the receiving society puts in the way of their insertion (Korteweg &
Triadafilopoulos, 2013). Women’s bodies have become the battleground, for exam-
ple through the targeting of garments worn by Muslims as inimical to Western liberal
values and a threat to security. At the same time, the skilled are depicted as
unproblematic in terms of their integration and hence not requiring any support to
settle (Weinar & Klekowski von Koppenfels, 2020: 3–4).

6.1 Immigration and Integration: Insights and Debates

Migration scholarship has applied a number of terms to denote processes by which

immigrants participate or not in the new societies they move to, the degree and
context of such participation, the impact on their identities and their offspring’s
identities and so on. The terminology includes such concepts as ‘integration’,
‘incorporation’, ‘assimilation’, ‘acculturation’, as well as the evolving phenomena
transforming societies termed ‘multiculturalism’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and recently,
‘superdiversity’. Theorists (Brubaker, 2001; Favell, 2003; Schinkel, 2018) have
argued about the validity, usefulness and limitations of these concepts and have
exemplified their usage in particular historical and geographical zones (Alba &
Foner, 2015).
Indeed, integration has been reconceptualised ‘as a two-way process’ and as such
conceived as ‘primarily a matter of social standing, and not legal or socioeconomic
status’ (Klarenbeek, 2019: 2). In this sense the evaluative standard is viewing society
with no social boundaries demarcating participation between those legitimised as
members and thus societal insiders and those non-legitimised members and hence
outsiders. In another sense, the grappling between the need for migrants to maintain
their ethnic differences and cultural identities and the functionality of becoming
‘absorbed’ in their new place of residence points to the ability to interact on a
normative equal level with those of the majority population and established as
residents. In other words, according to Castañeda (2018: 2–3) ‘integration means
upward social mobility, no residential segregation, intermarriage, and the potential
for equal participation in politics and public activities. . . .Unlike assimilation,
integration does not imply losing the culture of the country of origin but actually
being able to sustain it while also adapting to a new city’. Castañeda finds the term
6.1 Immigration and Integration: Insights and Debates 97

integration to be similar to the concept of incorporation in pointing to the inclusion

of excluded groups into the political and social structures of a given city and thus
important in understanding feelings of belonging for migrants to the cities where
they are residing. From a more intersectional perspective, the notion of integration
for some scholars produces gendered and racialised non-belonging (Korteweg,
2017).
Furthermore, others have underscored that the concept ‘further risks concealing
and perpetuating power dynamics and (colonial) hierarchies’ (Meissner & Heil,
2020: 1). Such hierarchies contribute vastly to social differences and the relational
practices, power asymmetries and everyday life materialities that create group
dynamics and reconfigure social relations. As a result, some researchers find more
analytical purchase and conceptual utility in the concept of ‘disintegration’ (ibid) as
a provocation to moving away from integration processes and the examination of
group or individual performance in a given society.
However, policy aspects of integration impact on immigrant labour, families and
refugees. Recent literature (Birkvad, 2019) delineates the significance of citizenship
in a ‘Western’ country of residence as naturalisation has important meanings for:
mobility which in turn facilitates transnational connections; denoting legal stability
offering a sense of security for those in precarious situations and liminality of
legality; designating a formality of recognition of equality and belonging. Such
meanings placing importance on citizenship in achieving migrant access to mobility,
stability and recognition combine both strategic and more instrumental
conceptualisations aligned to more emotive and symbolic meanings around civic
status.
Some of the conceptualisations we discussed in Chap. 2 (affective, performed/
embodied, intersubjective and spatial) are key dimensions in how the key concept of
‘lived citizenship’ has been applied in the last two decades since its emergence
(Kallio et al., 2020). Lived citizenship has been conceived as a ‘locus of political
agency in participatory policy’ (Kallio et al., 2015) while acknowledging the spatial
complexities in transnational mobilities (Wood, 2013) and the emotional geogra-
phies of citizenship participation. In this direction, an intersectional lens can be
applied to contesting integration (Anthias & Pajnik, 2014) as an interconnected
analytical venture with larger social inequalities and hierarchies within transnational
experiences and perceptions of migrants as active social agents in contemporary host
societies. This inevitably links integration discourses with migrant experiences and
negotiations in their everyday life practices and instances of marginalisation. This
approach points to the way gender hierarchies are intertwined with gendered social
relations of power and renders integration a highly normative and problematic
concept (Anthias, 2013; Anthias et al., 2013).
Approaches to the study of migrant integration are multiple and range from
focusing on social, political, cultural or economic integration and even expand to
literatures in the second and subsequent migrant generations. In this chapter, the
gendered focus on integration and citizenship is on contemporary issues regarding
policy matters of immigrant generations primarily in the European landscape but
with a few global examples supplementing the debates. From a policy objective, the
98 6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion

foci are primarily on interventions and practices that make integration successful or
problematic. While meanings of successful and unsuccessful integration might
diverge, the emergence of an increasingly hostile environment, everyday bordering
and efforts towards activism in combating such phenomena suggest that by and large
policy approaches to integration require re-thinking (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018).
While migration has always been a divisive political issue as it concerns issues of
sovereignty and identity, the increasing ethno-cultural diversity of receiving socie-
ties requires governments to find ways to respond to such changes. Subsequent
immigrant generations have grown up protesting exclusion, racism and discrimina-
tion in the societies where they claim their right to equal opportunities. Political
tension and conflictual clashes have evolved in the form of riots such as those in the
UK and France over the last two decades. At the same time, there are politicians and
media outlets who shift the blame to the migrants themselves by underscoring their
failure to integrate in privileging their distinct cultures and religion, thus
jeopardising social cohesion and becoming a threat to national security (de Haas
et al., 2019; Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013).
More reflexive approaches to the study of integration have advocated a shift
outside the normalisation discourse in order to disentangle research from the migra-
tion apparatus. This has led to methodological strategies to de-naturalise and
de-ethnicise integration (Amelina & Faist; 2012; Levitt, 2012) and even to the
more ambitious approach to ‘de-migranticize’ integration studies to be more reflex-
ive in this regard by distinguishing analytical and commonsense categories, by
aligning social theory to research on migration in order to remove the ‘migration
container’, and by challenging the object of study from the entire migrant population
to segments of the overall population (Dahinden, 2016). It appears that Dahinden
(pp. 2219–2220) does not argue either for ‘more’ or for ‘fewer’ migration and
integration studies, but for different ones which would reconcile these contradictions
through following a triple strategy, of firstly, centring migration studies within social
theory; secondly, moving out of ‘migration containers’ to alignment with and within
social science; thirdly, ‘migranticizing’ general social research by embedding ethnic
and migration studies into disciplinary university curricula. This, Dahinden calls, a
plea to establish a ‘post-migration’ social science that embraces migration and
integration transversally within social science research and theory.
While these elements are sound endeavours to a more inclusive alignment of
migrant integration approaches and social theory, social science research and aca-
demic curricula, there appears to be an oversight of a more gendered and
intersectional engagement which would address some of the extractive and power
laden entanglements of who is ‘integratable’, who is not, who is more, who is less,
why and when some groups are allowed to integrate and others are continuously
marginalised. A gendered and intersectional awareness of these issues also has
implications about the ways we teach our curricula, the research that informs and
drives the pedagogies we produce, what gets to be on those curricula and what is
excluded, who teaches what, what kind of research is conducted, what is published
and receives funding to co-produce gendered and intersectional knowledge on these
themes. Thus, are we yet entering additional spaces of neo-colonialities of epistemic
6.1 Immigration and Integration: Insights and Debates 99

communities if we don’t consciously engage with a gendered and intersectional

approach within and beyond integration. But this does not mean that just as
colonialism expertly abused nations and people for raw materials, diverse episte-
mologies should also become extractive mines for the accumulation of knowledge
and the development of theory in the global North. The intellectual and epistemic
reparations we envision are those dismantling existing epistemic hierarchies to
prevent the reproduction of similar damaging dynamics. We need to think about
what knowledge has been denied or silenced and how we give voice, not in a
paternalistic context, but a critical, uncomfortable, and meaningful way to think
differently about dominant knowledge. Perhaps future research is what is needed to
claim new spaces of knowledge production which are not superficially dismissive of
integration, but instead, seek to situate its limitation and harness its public policy
potential.
In terms of the public policy and activist potential for migrant groups, more novel
interpretive frameworks use the lens of ‘communities on the move’ (CoM) and focus
on the idea of such cultural communities capitalising on shared values and network
ties which produce knowledge and opportunities to facilitate integration (Parrilli
et al., 2019). In a sense this is the next phase of the ‘social capital’ migration theories
approach which underscores the capacities of mobile communities to shape migrant
well-being and innovation through knowledge production aiding integration. In
essence, this approach focuses on the bonding and bridging of migrant groups as a
complementary performance to embed them into the regional context.
Other studies show that national narratives of negative expatriate nationalism
might even prevent integration into the host society. The study of Isaakyan &
Triandafyllidou (2014) on Anglophone marriage-migrants in Southern Europe
focusing on expat nationalism and integration dynamics has revealed that their
own understanding of themselves as ‘long-term visitors’ evaluating an ‘inferior’
culture of the country they are ‘visiting’, coupled with their Anglophone culture of
origin, leads to them coining the term of ‘broken integration’. This term is a useful
heuristic device to explain the challenges of adaptation, interaction and ultimately
integration within the host country culture. This is a particularly intriguing insight
into the reverse kinds of power dynamics that can stimulate nationalisms that
obliterate pathways to integration when migrants perceive themselves in a cultural
hierarchy above the host society which they consider inherently inferior. Ultimately,
this is also ‘resistance agency’ on the part of migrants who perceive ‘broken
integration’ as their sole option in accepting their settlement as inherently problem-
atic because of their superiority and not that of the majority residents.
Those studies continuing and contributing to the strand of literature that bridges
social, political and acculturation psychological theories on immigrant integration
aim to disentangle how the objective of citizenship and the subjective of perceived
social status and belonging correspond in different societal contexts to socio-
political integration. These studies examine integration as a mutual intergroup
process between immigrants and the receiving society and utilise a person-oriented
approach, such as the study by Renvik et al. (2020) with their survey exploring the
patterns of socio-political integration among Russian-speaking minority group
100 6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion

members in three neighbouring countries in the Baltic area: Estonia, Finland, and
Norway. While three profiles were obtained in all countries (critical integration,
separation and assimilation) that of ‘critical integration’ was the most common and
when examined in relation to the citizenship and integration context.
Finally, extending the concept of ‘critical integration’ to delving into more critical
explorations of the utility of the concept of integration, in a recent themed issue of
the journal Comparative Migration Studies (2019) on debating integration as a
central, yet increasingly contested, concept, Willem Schinkel’s (2019) article trig-
gered a flurry of responses and then a rejoinder by the author concluding that
migration studies should be seen as an ‘imposition’. Schinkel’s initial paper entitled,
‘Against “immigrant integration”: For an end to neocolonial knowledge production’
(2018), based on his book Imagined Societies. A Critique of Immigrant Integration
in Western Europe (2017), and intended as a provocation piece, outlined three core
arguments: firstly, immigrant integration research has been lacking robust concep-
tual grounding and in particular sociologically rigorous notions of core concepts
such as ‘society’; secondly, the very process of monitoring immigrant integration is a
form of neo-colonial knowledge production deeply entangled with contemporary
workings of power; and, thirdly, makes a bold proposition for a more critical social
science perspective, one that bypasses notions of ‘immigrant integration’ and ‘soci-
ety’ in perhaps embracing more of a sociological imagination. This approach would
focus on the actuality of migrants crossing social ecologies without the deterministic
aspects of policy categories or commonsense explanatory frameworks.
Penninx (2019) in his response signals three building blocks as alternative
solutions to the problems that Schinkel advances with the concept of integration.
The first proposed is that research uses the broadest heuristic definition of ‘processes
of integration’ as analytical concept to study a threefold approach (individual,
collective and institutional) of a threefold dimensional context (legal, socio-cul-
tural/economic and religious) of interaction between migrants and receiving society.
The second proposition is to distinguish the study of integration policies as funda-
mentally distinct from the processes of integration and hence key questions should
be framed to reflect perceived causes and solutions. The third component of an
alternative practice is rather a sensitive one alluding to pressures in ‘safeguarding
scientific independence against mounting pressures on programming and content of
research – often through funding of research’ where the challenge is seen as the
strong politicisation of the topics of migration and integration, as can be seen in the
ways in which the need for integration of selected migrant categories are framed
(Kofman et al., 2015; Korteweg, 2017).
Adrian Favell (2019) proposes a series of 12 propositions to rethink the utility of
‘integration’ as a concept, given that it is deeply embedded in methodological
nationalism and by extension produces colonial, nation-state centred visions of
societies while sustaining inequalities and orders of social power hierarchies
(Anthias & Pajnik, 2014; Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013). In the next section
we explore in greater depth how integration policies have been framed in the past
two decades (Eggbø & Brekke, 2019), highlighting the key role of gender and
sexuality in othering non-Western populations and regulating their family practices.
6.2 Integration Policies, Gendered Interventions and Outcomes 101

Whilst for national populations not requiring integration (Schinkel, 2018), family
life has become a matter of individual responsibility, for families with a migrant
background it requires a tutorial state (van Walsum, 2012: 6).

6.2 Integration Policies, Gendered Interventions

and Outcomes

National policies on migrant integration in the EU have emerged within regimes and
debates shaped by a ‘Euro-crisis’ that sees fundamental disagreement about migra-
tion issues at large and certain aspects of the debate constructed in discourses of
moral panics, deviance, crime and securitisation (Trimikliniotis, 2014). This is also a
reflection of how historical contexts have shaped governance practices in different
EU countries and by extension integration agendas reflect distinct agendas and
institutions in turn shaped by politics, history, and culture (Hernes, 2018). As
such, Nicos Trimikliniotis (ibid) suggests we need to map integration agendas as
we map contestations about the meaning and priorities of integration while locating
the debates in the neoliberal transformations taking place.
As a consequence of a neoliberal conceptualisation of integration and the implicit
accusation of migrants as ‘unwilling to integrate’ into their host societies this has led
to a normative framing of action in the form of the ‘integration contract’. The latter
has been implemented in a number of European countries such as the Netherlands
since 2002, Austria since 2003, France and Denmark since 2006, Luxembourg and
Germany since 2011. This constitutes a form of an explicit agreement between states
and migrants setting out what measures and support the state offers and what needs,
responsibilities and expectations the migrants have in order to integrate. The com-
pelling of compliance with the core (‘westernised/democratic’) values of the respec-
tive society are summarised as the basics of gender relations, diversity, equality and
freedom of speech. In an assimilationist understanding of cultural negotiations of
values and expectations, often women’s rights and compliance with particular
understandings of gender equality are instrumentalised for a synthetic subordination
(Kontos, 2014; Kostakopoulou, 2014).
While gender relations and inequality had largely passed without comment in
discussions of the crisis of multiculturalism in academia or in the media (Phillips &
Saharso, 2008), migrant women moved from the invisible periphery to the all too
visible core (Prins & Saharso, 2008) in discourses around the need to impose
integration measures for migrants.
It can be seen most clearly in the conflicting positions adopted around the veiling
of Muslim women. Opposition to the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim women
emerged as a major political issue, especially in France where it was seen as
undermining secular values, in the 1990s. Some feminist voices have highlighted
the continuation of colonial practices of controlling colonised bodies (Bassel, 2021)
evident in this intervention in which the colonial trope of unveiling women as
102 6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion

liberation prevails (Scott, 2007), and the role of liberal feminism in refusing to
acknowledge the voices and demands of Muslim women (Korteweg & Yurdakul,
2020). The oppressed Muslim woman is pitted against the opposite of the free,
gender-equal citizen in what Dahinden and Manser-Egli (2021) have called
“gendernativism”, a “gendered and racialized form of xenophobia that constructs
the ‘Other’ as the opposite of the free, gender-equal, ‘real’, ‘authentic’, ‘rooted’
citizen”.
The arguments for and against the banning of different forms of veiling
(headscarf, niqab, burqa), its contestation, the role of the state, the place of religion
in the public sphere, and the recognition of diverse practices are too complex to
address in this chapter. In the box below on the comparison of headscarf debates we
briefly outline the legal and political tussles in states in which the issue has been
politicised. Courts have more often adopted rights-based perspectives while the
political realm has focussed more on the issue in terms of integration, national
unity, expression of political Islam and security (Joppke, 2009).

Box: Comparison of Headscarf Interventions

Only a few states in the European Union (Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland,
Portugal, and Romania) have not implemented or debated proposals to ban the
headscarf either in public space in general or more commonly in specific sites,
such as schools, or among particular occupations such as teachers or civil
servants (Weaver, 2018). France is the most restrictive and after 15 years of
contestation since 1989, over what was known as l’affaire du foulard’,
Parliament passed overwhelmingly in 2004 a law banning the wearing or
display of ostensible religious symbols in public schools, seen as the crucible
of Republican values. In Germany it was teachers as civil servants who were
targeted by many regions. In 2003 in response to a teacher (Fereshta Ludin),
who had been prevented in 1998 from working wearing a headscarf, the
Constitutional Court ruled in her favour but passed the matter to the political
level stating that those Länder seeking to prohibit the wearing of the veil had to
pass legislation. However in 2015 the Federal Constitutional Court issued a
clarification stating that if ‘there is no concrete danger to disrupting the peace
at school or the state’s duty of neutrality, headscarves are permissible for
women in the teaching profession’ (Chang, 2021).
In addition the firing of women for wearing the headscarf in workplaces has
also been challenged. Initially the European Court of Justice concluded in a
ruling (2017) of cases brought by Muslim women in Belgium and France that
the employer could ban an employee from wearing visible religious symbols
as long as they had a policy in place (Weaver, 2018). However a more recent
judgement by the European Court of Human Rights concluded that a Belgium
court had no right to insist that women appear uncovered in court, which was

(continued)
6.2 Integration Policies, Gendered Interventions and Outcomes 103

the first time this court has ruled in favour of the right of Muslim women to be
veiled (Cox, 2018).
In terms of face veiling, France and Belgium banned in 2011 the niqab and
the burqa in public which has been followed in other countries such as the
Netherlands in 2015 (only on public transport and public areas but not on the
street), Austria (2017) and Denmark (2018). Actual bans or proposals to ban
the wearing of the full veil have happened in almost all European countries
(Open Society, 2018), the latest being supported in the Swiss referendum in
March 2021.

In terms of interventions relating to immigration and integration, one can discern

several, often overlapping, discourses from the beginning of the century.
1. Gender inequality in relation to work where migrant women have low rates of
participation in the labour market which has generally been the core element of
equality. In Scandinavia, the emphasis on emancipation and independence is to
be achieved through the labour market (Eggbø, 2010). A satisfying family life
would be achieved by women working and independently earning their own
income (Bech et al., 2017) working was an integral part of being a good citizen. In
other countries, such as the UK, the desirability of labour market independence
might be more about reducing reliance on public services. As has been pointed
out (Korteweg & Triadafilopoulos, 2013), there was little consideration of dis-
crimination faced by migrant women in the labour market or the actual level of
participation of different groups of migrants, some of whom had higher levels of
participation than native women. Instead the focus has been on Muslim women
from Morocco and Turkey in Germany and the Netherlands, and from
Bangladesh and Pakistan in the UK.
2. The failure of integration due to socio-economic marginalisation and the for-
mation of an ethnic underclass arising in part from poorly educated spouses who
as mothers do not have the requisite skills to educate their children to succeed in
society and hence contribute to the continuing reproduction of socio-economic
inequalities (Joppke, 2007). This emerged quite clearly in the Netherlands. The
motto ‘if you educate a woman, you educate a family’ was used in the Dutch
PaVEM Commission (Prins & Saharso, 2008) where women were seen as the
reproducers of the next generation and thus required a better start (Kirk, 2010).
Dutch parliamentary debates mentioned that the marginalisation of specific
population groups could be passed from generation to generation, hence the
need to ensure that women have a better starting position in the Netherlands
(cited in Bonjour & de Hart, 2013). Though most explicitly stated in the Neth-
erlands, this theme of the social reproduction of family members (love, marriage,
parenthood, fertility, adult dependency) as future citizens would implicitly under-
pin a series of future regulatory controls over intimate and family relationships
seeking to steer migrants’ belonging to the nation (Bonizzoni, 2018.)
104 6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion

3. Family practices incompatible with liberal societies and the formation of couples
within transnational marriages (see Chap. 4). Western ‘liberal’ and open societies
had to be protected from patriarchal and traditional gender roles where the body
of the female Muslim migrant served to demarcate the boundary between the
civilised Westerner and the uncivilised illiberal outsider (Kirk, 2010; Razack,
2004). Gay emancipation was also mobilised to frame Muslims as non-modern
subjects (Mepschen et al., 2010). These illiberal practices included forced mar-
riages, honour killings and transnational marriages with cousins, a particular
concern in Denmark.
There was widespread agreement that the problem lay in the laxity of family
reunification policies (Schmidt, 2011) and high levels of transnational marriages,
hence family migration became the terrain for the control of cultural differences
beginning with admission but extending to further stages of permanent residence and
citizenship. Hence, dealing with forced marriages generated demands for language
proficiency prior to entry. Thus Ann Cryer, at the time a Labour MP for a constit-
uency with a large Muslim Asian population, made a direct connection between
arranged marriages, difficulties in learning English and the success of different
ethnic communities in the UK and thus called for English tests (Kofman et al.,
2015). In Germany too it was argued that those caught up in forced marriages were
prevented from leading an independent life because of poor language proficiency
(Yurdakul & Korteweg, 2013) and resisting parental authority and other family
pressures (Lechner, 2011). Initially men were not envisaged as being affected by
forced marriage though in the UK gay men were subsequently included (Samad,
2010). In Denmark, politicians conceived of forced marriage as primitive and ‘un-
Danish’ with no place in the country (Schmidt, 2011: 362–3).
Whilst certain attitudes were shared, policy responses differed. An understanding
of options pursued would need to take into account the strategizing deployed by
politicians, NGOs and individual feminists and the interplay of political forces in a
particular context. As Hagelund (2020) suggests, migration studies require more
focused attention to discursive processes of policy construction in understanding
how integration policies vary, not just in sense-making, but also in the implications
for policy choices in crafting policy agendas.
From about 2005 to 2006, three major policy initiatives ensued in a number of
countries in North western Europe. These were implementation of language and, in
some cases knowledge of society pre-departure tests; raising the age of marriage; and
the imposition of a minimum income for the sponsor to be able to bring in a spouse
or children.
Language tests were adopted in a number of countries (Austria, Denmark,
Germany, the Netherlands, the UK) (Goodman, 2011). In the Netherlands an analysis
of the effects of the application of the language test of an A1 knowledge in Dutch as
from 2006 showed that it had upgraded the human capital of the entrants but this may
have been as much the effect of the selection of a spouse who was capable of passing
the test (Scholten et al., 2012). Their effect was to change the socio-economic
6.2 Integration Policies, Gendered Interventions and Outcomes 105

composition of family migrants and/or reduce the numbers entering through family
migration.
Though forced marriage had played a part in the rationale for language tests, the
predominant argument came to be the improved chances for integration. It was in
relation to an increased age in marriage where the argument of prevention of forced
marriage dominated. The targeted political subject was the Muslim woman but in
order to avoid accusations of discrimination no one was exempt, including partners
with non-migrant backgrounds. Only in the UK was the lifting of the age of partners
in overseas marriages from 18 to 21 years in 2008 successfully challenged in the
courts and lifted in 2012. The judgement found that imposing a blanket rule in order
to deal with about 4% potentially of forced marriages was unjustified and dispro-
portionate. Age of marriage was raised first in Denmark to 24 years in 2003 where it
was strongly felt that intervention in the private sphere was seen as appropriate to
ensure conformity to social norms (Fog Olwig, 2011). Furthermore, an attachment
condition stating that one had to have more links with Denmark than with any other
country was stipulated. In Norway, on the other hand, although forced marriages
were hotly debated in the Immigration Act Commission of 2004, policy attempts to
regulate forced marriages among Pakistani and Turkish populations did not take the
route of raising the age of marriage for migrants, which was scrapped in 2007, but
through imposing a minimum income rule (Eggbø, 2010; Staver, 2015).
Minimum income regulations represent the drift towards economic imperatives
and links labour market participation to family migration (Kofman et al., 2015;
Staver, 2015; Sirriyeh, 2015), in this case by the sponsor. As such, it reflects the
transposition of economic criteria normally demanded of skilled migrants to family
migration based on normative principles. In an increasingly neo-liberal immigration
policy, not only migrants but those sponsoring migrants, are expected to demonstrate
that they are able to be autonomous and responsible for themselves (Schinkel & van
Houdt, 2010) and not be a burden on welfare services. In countries that imposed the
highest income criteria – the Netherlands in 2004, Norway in 2010 and the UK in
2012 – the latter two demand high income levels in which only the individual, and
not the family as a whole, can provide the necessary resources, that is the individual
must demonstrate that he/she is responsible for themselves. The outcome is to
produce a class and gendered and discriminatory impact. Other countries have
since then also adopted minimum income requirements (European Migration Net-
work, 2017).
Let us take the case of the UK to probe the gendered and intersectional possibil-
ities in the right to family life. The objectives of the policy were: ‘ensure that
migrants are supported at a reasonable level that ensures they do not become a
burden on the taxpayer and allow sufficient participation in everyday life to facilitate
integration’ (Home Office, 2011a). The premise is that low income British citizens as
sponsors would lead to difficulties of integration. It’s clear that the unspoken
assumption is that sponsors would be either settled migrants or descendants of
migrants, and probably of South Asian origin. When the original level of minimum
income of £18,600 was introduced in July 2012, it was set at 140% of the minimum
wage, at which level it was calculated that the couple would not qualify for any
106 6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion

income-related benefits. The Migration Observatory estimated at the time that 47%
of British citizens in employment would not qualify as sponsors but that women,
certain minority ethnic groups, especially Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, young peo-
ple between 20 and 30 years and those living outside of London and the South East
would be disproportionately affected.
Analysis of Labour Force Survey data for 2012–2017 confirms that women are
the most affected followed by ethnic minorities overall (Sumption & Vargas-Silva,
2019). In general the gender pay gap, concentration in low paid and greater propen-
sity to work part-time, and their caring responsibilities, mean that women’s annual
incomes are lower than men. However when we combine gender and ethnicity using
data from the January to March 2017 UK Labour Force survey a much more
complex picture emerges. The median salary of women employed full-time is
about 88% of the UK median income. It is slightly lower for white women, much
higher for Chinese, Indian and the category of other ethnic, but substantially lower
for Bangladeshi and Pakistani women. Including part-time work as well pushes the
median below £18,600 for everyone except the group Mixed Ethnic, itself a very
heterogeneous category. Thus family migration is only a possibility for full-time
workers.
An interesting dimension of this requirement was that as a result of the increasing
precarity, even middle class highly educated citizens could also be caught in its
tentacles. Global mobility by working holiday makers, students and workers has led
to an expansion of intimate relations and partnerships (Wagner, 2015) complicating
stereotypes of transnational marriages. While 10 nationalities made up almost 50%
of marriage migrants in the UK, a very large number of diverse nationalities
comprised the rest (Home Office, 2011b). However, those with some flexibility
and cultural capital turned to remedies available in international law, for example,
exercising their free movement rights to go to another European Union country
which allows them to move and reside freely with their spouse and children and even
parents without any income requirement. A small scale study of 20 couples in the
UK, who fell short of the stable minimum income, highlighted their high cultural
capital and flexibility in relation to types of work and age of children (Wray et al.,
2021). We do not know how common this strategy has been in the European Union,
although as a result of Denmark’s stringent attachment rule, it is estimated there are
2000–3000 Danes unable to reunify who have moved to neighbouring Sweden,
especially those living in Copenhagen.
Though an attitude shared with other countries, Denmark probably exemplifies
more than any other a fixation with transnational marriages by minority ethnic
groups (van Kerckem et al., 2013) arising from the stringent attachment rule
(Bissenbakker, 2019). From 2000 to 2018, the Danish attachment requirement stated
that family reunification in Denmark could only be granted if the spouses’ combined
attachment to Denmark was stronger than the spouses’ combined attachment to any
other country (Ministry of Integration, 2002 [L152] §9, part 7). It had followed from
an increase in the marriage age to 24 years for both partners but had effectively been
raised to 28 and then dropped to 26 years as the length of the attachment period.
Following a court ruling of the European Convention of Human Rights in 2016
6.3 Beyond ‘Integration’? Activism and Inclusion 107

(European Commission, 2019) finding the requirement to be discriminatory against

some Danes, both major parties agreed to replace it with an integration requirement.
However this makes the conditions even harsher with stipulations of language
requirement for both sponsor and spouse together with three out of five other
requirements. A draconian extension has been that the housing criteria has been
expanded to cover not living in a ghetto defined as an area of non-profit social
housing, in which ‘the proportion of immigrants and descendants from non-western
countries exceeds 50 percent’ and in which, ‘compared with the country as a whole,
residents in the designated areas will generally have a significantly lower educational
level, a weaker connection to the labor market and the educational system, a lower
income, or have committed more criminal offenses’ (Ministry of Foreigners and
Integration 2018 [L231], 23). One wonders how long this extraordinary form of
discrimination will survive without a legal challenge.
Today the integrationist imperative applies to other categories of the population,
including skilled labour migrants, and refugees who are increasingly exhorted and
compelled to integrate, particularly through participation in the labour market
(Rytter, 2019; Schultz, 2020). The conditionalities of entry have also been extended
to the pathway to citizenship, which are increasingly accompanied by criteria and
requiring resources en route. Thus the path to citizenship is less than smooth with
numerous hurdles of language, economic resources and dependency through the
increasingly lengthy probationary period, potentially locking spouses into harmful
relationships and subjected to gender violence in order to remain in the country
(Briddick, 2020). The Council of Europe Istanbul Convention preventing and
combating violence against women and domestic violence (adopted in 2011) covers
asylum-seeking, refugee and migrant women. Chap. 7 Article 59 asks states to do all
in their power to give partners who are dependent on their spouse for a residence
permit to be given an autonomous residence permit in case of dissolution of the
marriage due to violence irrespective of the duration of the relationship. However the
Convention has not been signed by a number of countries, especially those in
Eastern Europe and the UK. Furthermore, Poland notified in July 2020 its intention
to withdraw which Turkey did officially on 22 March 2021.

6.3 Beyond ‘Integration’? Activism and Inclusion

Overall, the concept of integration has been problematic with limited heuristic value
when it shifts away from the functionalistic underpinnings that most policy-driven
approaches offer. Reframing the concept in the direction of more democratising
discourses which are transnational and intersectional can uncover some of its
paradoxes away from its purely normative considerations (Anthias et al., 2013).
To ameliorate its conceptual framing from an instrumentalising apparatus of dom-
ination over migrants and revitalise its meaning-making to one of social inclusion
requires the consideration of critical citizenship studies combined with activism
practice.
108 6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion

Migrant voices count, migrant experiences count and their agency is how these
are actualised in activism. The mobilisation of migrant agency happens in both
organised movements but also everyday acts of resistance and solidarity. These can
be digital but also embodied. Karayianni and Christou (2020: 11) talk about ‘new
geographies of empowerment’ in the digital era during which misogyny, sexism and
gendered violence continue to explode and perceive feminisms of resistance in
relation to social media as a renewed opportunity for activism. Embodied activisms
are particularly pronounced with direct public interventions as in the case of the
Athenian context where the socio-political forms of migrant squats and the socio-
spatial interactions they foster and generate, represent not just sites, but also embod-
ied practices for contesting citizenship (Raimondi, 2019). Raimondi (2019: 559)
explores such migrant acts of resistance and activism by looking at them from a
particular angle that draws on the ‘gaze of autonomy’ in also reinventing migrants
and non-migrant activists in urban spaces.
As political struggles, these are historical strategies to gain access to urban space
as a ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey, 2008), including gendered rights to
participate and reclaim the city for migrant and minority women (Vacchelli &
Kofman, 2018) whose claims to rights to the city and assertion of everyday citizen-
ship take a number of forms. Muslim women, particularly those who are most visibly
from the banlieue (suburbs) in the Paris Region, have experienced discrimination
and harassment and a restricted “right to the city”, particularly in affluent or middle-
class areas, which has forced them to modify their use of transportation and shopping
(Hancock, 2015; Hancock & Mobillon, 2019). However on International Women’s
Day eighth March 2015, some feminist groups staked a claim to central areas of Paris
in marching in an alternative demonstration comprising women wearing a veil,
lesbian, bisexual and queer persons and sex workers in opposition to the official
march in which they were often placed at the end (Hancock et al., 2018). Another
example of claiming urban rights are those engaged in heightened mobility, such as
circular live-in-care workers, whose numbers have increased substantially in many
European countries, have also fought through the courts and through collaboration
with researchers and unions to overcome the lack of rights stemming from their
in-betweenness and lack of protection for workers in household. In the example from
Basel, Switzerland, they successfully gained recognition and financial compensation
for the work they undertake. Beyond the successful outcome, Chau et al. (2018) note
the way in which the gendering of the right to the city draws attention to the bridging
of the divide between public space and private households beyond the more typical
focus on formal citizenship and the public sphere.
Domestic work (see Chap. 3) has been increasingly politicised and an issue
bringing together the global, national and the local in activism seeking to improve
conditions of work and social protection (Cherubini et al., 2018; Mulally,
2015; Schwenken, 2017). Global networking (International Domestic Workers
Network in 2006 subsequently Federation in 2012) together with collaboration
with trade unions and institutions of global governance, namely the ILO led even-
tually to the passing of Convention 189 on domestic work in 2011. Though global in
reach, it has only been ratified by 31 countries, largely in Central and South America
6.3 Beyond ‘Integration’? Activism and Inclusion 109

(17) and Europe (8) as of March 2021. However ratification has not necessarily
brought mobilisations and enactment of rights. Cherubini et al. (2018) note that the
Convention has tended to generate mobilisations and extended rights where it is
embedded in prior local struggles and political projects and involves national
workers and internal migrants from rural areas, as in the case of Colombia. Where
it largely concerns international migrants, as in the case of Italy, which ratified the
Convention in 2013, it has been treated as a bureaucratic matter with advocacy
organisations not particularly visible.
In France, on the other hand, which has not ratified the Convention, the sector is
much more regulated due to a national collective convention for salaried workers
employed in the private sector since 1982 and updated in 1999 (Lepetitcorps, 2018).
Furthermore undocumented workers are also recognised as having employment
rights unlike in the UK and Ireland (Murphy, 2015). Though traditional trade unions
in France have tended to treat activist groups in this sector as ethnic ones despite the
fact they have moved beyond an initial network of those belonging to a single
nationality or regional focus to one that embraces a wider spectrum of migrants.
Lepetitcorps’ study drawing on the experiences of two activists in this sector, notes
their previous work experience in their countries of origin and their diversity of class
backgrounds. Their engagement in political mobilisation stemmed from different
trajectories. For the person from Mauritius it was to regularise her status and those of
other domestic workers, for the middle class woman from the Ivory Coast it was to
organise in a specific sub-sector of child minding, which was becoming
professionalised, respect for clearly demarcated tasks in their contracts. Citing
Rancière (2001), Lepetitcorps (2018: 92–93) comments that these women belong
to three groups (women, domestic workers, foreigners) which the state had tradi-
tionally excluded from citizenship, and that their activism in fighting for their rights
has generated a new political subjectivity in which they brought a private issue into
the public domain.
At the same time, one needs to recognise the intersectionality of these activisms
for as Kudakwashe (2019: 30), in relation to Zimbabwean domestic worker activism
in South Africa, argues ‘any intervention or mobilisation that does not take
intersectionality into account cannot redress the specific manner in which they are
subordinated. . . . African women do not constitute a homogenous category politi-
cally or otherwise and do not necessarily share or perceive “objective” gender
interests as they are both united and divided by ethnicity and nationality’.
There are few systematic studies of migrant associations and networks that focus
on women’s and gendered issues at national levels. In Ireland, De Tona and Lentin
(2011) identified 40 women’s groups in Ireland in the first decade of the century
finding that they tended to have very loose multi-national, multi-ethnic and multi-
faith boundaries and that most of the networks were inclusive and expanding,
usually avoiding the more traditional hierarchical community structures where
networking assumes a gendered act of resistance to communitarian discourses and
politics. Some of the key associations have played major roles in challenging and
transforming politics. For example, AkiDwA (African and Migrant Women’s Net-
work) worked to mitigate the shift from a jus soli to a jus sanguinis citizenship policy
110 6 Engendering Integration and Inclusion

(removing automatic Irish citizenship from children born in Ireland) in 2005 and
campaigning to have migrant mothers have the right of residence to care for their
children which had been removed in 2003. It was restored in 2005, 6 months after the
change in citizenship laws. This network has also been involved in issues of gender-
based violence and black women in the labour market. Another organisation of
Muslim women (NOUR), set up by an Algerian woman who entered through family
reunification, sought to enable women to debate the nature of Islam in Ireland,
advocate for gendered services for women and destabilise stereotypes of Muslim
women. Since the 2008 financial crisis and the growing privatisation of welfare,
competition, commodification and the struggle for resources have made it more
difficult for NGOs and networks to survive and engage in solidarity, as a compar-
ative study of France and Britain highlights (Bassel & Emejulu, 2018).
Finally, wider international networks of migrant activism can shape more trans-
national and ideally global efforts of mobilisation for migrant justice. For instance,
the European Network of Migrant Women (https://www.migrantwomennetwork.
org/) is a feminist secular migrant-women led platform of NGOs and individual
women that advocates for the rights, freedoms and dignity of migrant, refugee and
ethnic minority women and girls in Europe. Their membership ranges from grass-
roots service providers to NGOs focused on advocacy and research. Members cover
a diverse range of subjects in the area of human rights of migrant and refugee
women, with economic empowerment, anti-discrimination and access to justice
and combatting ‘Male Violence against Women and Girls’, being the most frequent
activities.
Various analyses (Lahusen & Theiss, 2019) show that most solidarity organisa-
tions remain active primarily at the local and/or national level/s, and that only a
minority of solidarity organisations are engaged in cross-national activities. Trans-
national activism entails a web of transnational partners, organisations and activities
for a politicised mission which will lead to more global activism. It is important that
such cross-national organised activisms start developing at the grass-roots level
where there is no direct dependence on supra-national and inter-governmental
governance of organisational linkages while adhering to more organic forms of
organising activisms.

6.4 Conclusion

As we have seen in this chapter, the notion of integration as a form of policy

intervention has been subjected to increasing academic critique. Whilst its links
with the transposition of colonial governance to settler societies has been
highlighted, its historical embeddedness in gendered dimensions of othering of
non-Western populations, also warrants our attention. It has been extensively argued
that the trope of women portrayed as vulnerable, in a state of victimhood and in need
of protection (see Chap. 5) is one aligned to their integration seen as both problem
and solution for the project of migrant integration at large. Frequently, the discussion
References 111

of socio-economic aspects of integration policies are overlain with discourses

focusing on challenges with integrating Muslim women, thereby shifting the debates
to ethnoreligious undertones with significant policy exclusions. In the past 20 years
or so, Muslim women have been propelled to the foreground of integration debates
and their bodies a battleground over which national identity and security are fought.
Gendered perspectives on integration discourses thus require a more nuanced
intersectional lens to understand how integration measures affect the diversity of
family and labour migrants and refugees. Mechanisms of the hostile environment
function as assemblages that ignore such intersectional situatedness in policy and
thus exacerbate exclusions.
In seeking to go beyond integration discourses, migrant associations and net-
works have sought to resist the exclusion of migrant and refugee women from
citizenship, extend their socio-economic rights and challenge stereotypical images.
Political subjectivities of rights claims are thus political possibilities for inclusion
underpinned by those progressive struggles that understand the politics of resistance
as the politics for belonging. This is occurring at national, European and interna-
tional levels though the degree to which rights-based instruments are able to effect
change and improved conditions depend on local and national contexts, as can be
seen in the application of the decent work for domestic workers agenda.

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Chapter 7
Conclusion

At the end of a short journey, we can attest to the flourishing production of

knowledge on gender and migration that has built up over the past 30 years in
particular. Though we have on the whole referred to works in English, there is an
extensive literature in other major languages, such as French, German, Italian and
Spanish which have emerged from different social science traditions, in recognition
of the significance of gendered migrations and feminist movements. English has
come to dominate writing in this field (Kofman, 2020), ironically in large part
through the European funding of comparative research as well as transatlantic
exchanges (Levy et al., 2020). The past 20 years have been a rapid period of
intellectual exchange in this field through networks and disciplinary associations,
such as the International and European Sociological Associations or IMISCOE
which supported a cluster on Gender, Generation and Age (2004–2009). The
IMISCOE Migration Research Hub (https://www.migrationresearch.com/) demon-
strates the extensive production on gender issues and their connections with other
theories and fields of migration. The economic and social transformations brought
about by globalisation and transnationalism, and how its unequal outcomes and
identities need to be understood through an intersectional lens (Amelina & Lutz,
2019), have heavily shaped studies of gender and migration (see Chap. 2). Indeed
intersectionality has been suggested by some as the major contribution of contem-
porary feminism to the social sciences, and, has certainly been a theoretical insight
that has travelled widely and rapidly from the Anglo world to Europe (Davis, 2020;
Lutz, 2014) since it was defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). We should, how-
ever, also remember that it had antecedents in the writing of anti-racist feminists on
racist ideology and sex by the French sociologist Claude Guillaumin (1995), on the
trinity of gender, race and class in the UK (Anthias & Yuval-Davis, 1992; Parmar,
1982) and by scholars in Australia (Bottomley et al., 1991) and Canada (Stasiulis &
Yuval-Davis, 1995).
What the application of an intersectional approach has brought to the fore are the
complex and intersecting inequalities in the experiences and outcomes of migration,
reinforced by restrictive borderings and categorisations generated by immigration

© The Author(s) 2022 117

A. Christou, E. Kofman, Gender and Migration, IMISCOE Research Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91971-9_7
118 7 Conclusion

policies regulating labour, family and asylum flows. The three main categories of
intersectional analysis have been gender, race and class. The latter is often poorly
captured, though there has been growing attention to how migration shapes class
positions transnationally, for example in the concept of contradictory class mobility
(Parreñas, 2001) and class differences among migrants of the same nationality (Horst
et al., 2016). New social divisions have also been incorporated into intersectional
approaches. Amongst the most significant are men and masculinities, sexualities, age
(youth and older migrants) and, to a lesser extent, disability (Fiske & Giotis, 2021).
As we saw in Chap. 2 in our discussion of the shift from women to gender, the latter
often continues to be reduced to women. The tendency to focus on women and a call
for a more gendered approach has been prominent in the critical discussion of the
application of the concept of vulnerability in migration governance and humanitarian
management (see Chap. 5). These divisions intersect with immigration and integra-
tion measures and policies (see Chap. 6). Though supposedly gender neutral,
immigration policies have profound gender implications through their
conceptualisation of the deserving and the undeserving in relation to entry, right to
residence and citizenship (Boucher, 2016; Kofman & Raghuram, 2015; Stasiulis,
2020).
As Stasiulis et al. (2020) underscore, the analytical gains when deploying an
intersectional lens have to do with making apparent the oppression, violence,
discrimination and dehumanisation of specific migrant groups. This focus draws
attention to the interconnected dynamics of power structures and agonisingly reveals
that the relationship between migration and social injustice continues to be histor-
ically and contemporaneously a phenomenon of social erasure within states, poli-
cies, laws and social consciousness. Linking back to Chap. 6, these are intertwining
resource, not just for scholars who seek to understand them, but also for activists
who wish to transform and eradicate inequities.
We have highlighted the development of intersectionality among migration
scholars and would argue that adopting an historical perspective, including the
role of colonialism and how categories of gender, sexuality and race were
constructed during colonial modernity (Mayblin & Turner, 2021; Chap. 7), is
important in acquiring a better understanding of how particular topics and
approaches have emerged and evolved. Throughout the book we have sought to
draw out the changing theorisations and approaches to gender and migration as a
whole (Chaps. 1 and 2) and in relation to specific forms of migration (Chaps. 3, 4,
and 5) and participation (Chap. 6). The feminisation of migration provides a good
example of the need to place trends in the longue durée and questions the idea that
the process has consisted of a linear progression. Equally important is the geograph-
ical dimension highlighting considerable variations between localities, regions and
states. One often hears that domestic and care work is being performed largely by
migrants, but a more detailed picture becomes apparent in the analysis of major
metropolitan and other areas. It is in metropolitan centres that migrant labour in these
sectors is the highest (Kofman & Raghuram, 2015) whereas in rural areas and
regions without a strong history of immigration, the work is still undertaken by
working class women (Howard and Kofman, 2020). As Glick Schiller and Çaglar
7 Conclusion 119

(2009) point out, we must be careful about extracting from particular localities,
especially in major cities where most migration research takes place, to the national
level.
Arriving at the destination of our collaborative writing journey and completion of
this book has culminated with three key critical moments: ‘COVID-19’, an unprec-
edented new pandemic with its devastating impact on the loss of lives, shattering of
economies, gendered inequalities in social reproduction and transformation of life-
styles and mobilities; the surrealistic, in our view, outcome of the ‘Brexit’ referen-
dum in the UK and its aftermath; and, the intellectual and political consequences of
the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in the United States and globally.
In terms of the COVID-19 pandemic, Alan Gamlen (2020) contemplated the fate
of migration and mobility after it ends and posed ten key questions about future
transformations. These range from the future of labour migration, migrant decision-
making, anti-immigrant sentiments and autocratic regimes, migration restrictions,
international student migration etc. Above all Gamlen asked whether we are
witnessing the end of the age of migration (Castles et al., 2014), at least temporarily.
We have seen unprecedented closures of borders, even within countries and a radical
reduction of mobility, including tourism, and migration. Some have suggested, in
line with current trends in major immigration countries, of privileging the skilled and
restricting the lesser skilled to strictly temporary periods of residence which could
approximate to a Singapore model and, what Stasiulis (2020) notes for Canada, as
the disposability of the less skilled. As we saw in Chap. 3, the distinction between
the skilled and the less skilled, has clear implications for labour markets and migrant
rights.
Migrant domestic care workers, who often already have less labour rights and
social protection, have frequently been called upon to provide the essential work to
sustain households and societies (Rao et al., 2021). A report (Leiblfinger et al., 2020)
on the impact of the pandemic on live-in care workers in Germany, Austria and
Switzerland highlights the fact that the pandemic had extensively reduced circular
migration of live-in care workers between their home countries in Central and
Eastern Europe and their live-in care worker residences. The report offered insights
into the impact of travel restrictions during the pandemic and transnational live-in
care. While differences are identified between countries, the authors draw on simi-
larities of the impact of such measures in reducing the interests of migrant care
workers in comparison to care receivers. We can infer that the pandemic will not
probably lead to positive changes to the working conditions of migrant carers or
immigration policies after the initial championing of essential and key workers. At
the same time, the pandemic has also exposed Western Europe’s reliance on seasonal
Eastern European migrants for other parts of the economy, with future border
closures certainly impacting on economic stability (Kondan, 2020). At the time of
submitting the final manuscript in October 2021, European states have begun to
emerge from the second lockdown and benefitted from widespread vaccination but
80% of vaccines have gone to upper and upper middle income countries, with poorer
countries in Africa in particular lacking access to vaccines and having less ability to
sustain lockdowns (https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations). It is also not
120 7 Conclusion

clear what will emerge in relation to gender inequalities relating to gender violence,
unemployment, changes in the labour market and the additional burden of social
reproduction in the home.
The future of diaspora engagement will also be an important avenue shaping the
future of nation-states and their transnational networks as they have again been
disrupted by the pandemic and travel restrictions (ibid). Nevertheless, diasporas have
proven that they can serve as ‘legitimate’ actors during current periods of crises
leading to more efficient policy implementation at both local and transnational level
(Dag, 2020).
Travel restrictions and post-pandemic changes in organising social and research
life will most likely see an increase in the shift to ‘digital’ research in migration
studies. This will have methodological, analytical and ethical implications but also
opportunities in perhaps reaching more groups and gendering more of our migration
research, while being more in tune with intersectional implications of this work. This
direction might unveil more ‘digital passages’ (Koen, 2015) in capturing migration
processes which involve digital identity construction, transnational caring arrange-
ments which involve online provision of migrant care (Janta & Christou, 2019) and
the negotiation of gendered diaspora and generational cultural expectations.
Our second major event impacting on European mobility migration patterns is
that of Brexit which was voted in favour of by a narrow majority of 51.9% in a
referendum held on 23 June 2016. After the end of the transition period in January
2021, a new immigration policy has come into force to reflect the UK’s withdrawal
from the EU and its free movement policies. The vote reflected an imperial nostalgia
and global reach, in which Britannia ruled the waves (Agnew, 2020) and an
Englishness ‘reasserted through a racializing, insular nationalism’ (Virdee &
McGeever, 2018: 1804). The referendum has already had the effect of reducing
EU immigration and encouraging those already settled to leave. A sharp distinction
between the skilled and the less skilled based on income levels has been imposed as
well as an accrued control of migrants in which future EU and non-EU migrants are
both subjected to the hostile environment of everyday bordering practices (housing,
health, education, deportation). As we saw in Chap. 3, high income favours men in
terms of eligibility for immigration. According to the UK Institute for Public Policy
Research (Morris, 2020) under current immigration proposals, 36% of men would be
eligible for a skilled visa but only 26% of women. 59% of construction workers and
66% of the people currently working in the health and social care sector would not be
eligible.
Thus care labour is likely to be particularly hard hit. For immigration policy the
value of one’s labour is equated with the price of it, and given that care remains
discounted and under-valued, it not only fails the entry level income criteria but also
has not been given any special consideration as a shortage occupation. It is not clear
whether those in need of care will be left with poorer quality care or, as commonly
happens, families, and in this instance, largely women, will be left to care for
members of their family. As has been evident during the COVID-19 pandemic,
women, especially those with children (Fisher & Ryan, 2021), have assumed, to an
even greater extent than previously, caring responsibilities. At the same time,
References 121

restrictions imposed by COVID-19 have, for the time, being delayed by the gendered
impact of new immigration policies for the entry of workers. However, new post
Brexit regulations will also have implications for the right to family life as future EU
migrants will have to comply with extremely high minimum income levels (see
Chap. 4) to bring in spouses and children as they cease to benefit from the more
generous European freedom of movement. They will once again return to the status
of mobile workers rather than fellow citizens (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018). It is
likely to have a negative impact on student flows and on youth mobility as the UK
has imposed expensive international student fees on EU students and withdrawn
from the EU Erasmus+ scheme.
The third event of Black Lives Matter is yet another reminder that any migrant
crisis is a racial crisis (De Genova, 2018; Kirtsoglou & Tsimouris, 2018). As Bridget
Anderson (2020) argues, migration studies in the past 30 years has drifted apart from
race and ethnic studies in the UK, although there are scholars who have tried to bring
them together. While immigration policies are no longer as blatantly racist as they
were in the past, especially in settler societies, it operates in part through the more
restrictive economic criteria favouring the skilled through a dynamic geopolitical
landscape of centre and periphery. China and India, are now two of the major sources
of skilled migrants. Even so, these nationalities, may also face the visible and
invisible walls of white privilege in accessing professional employment and dis-
crimination in the workplace in the country of destination (Carangio et al., 2021).
Racism is most forceful in the application of immigration regulations, for example in
detention and deportation where Black Lives can be discarded and are equated with
being a migrant whose belonging is questioned (Anderson, 2020). Many have
suggested we need a better historical education about immigration to bring out the
effects of slavery and colonialism (Mayblin & Turner, 2021; Yeo, 2020). We also
need to recognise the role of Islamophobia in immigration and integration policies
and its gendered representations of migrants and refugees (see Chap. 6). The very
mobility of these populations as well as Roma, Gypsies and Travellers, who have
experienced some of the most systematic racism in Europe, also have to be included
in our migration scholarship of the past, present and future in our curricula and
research.
These recent and momentous developments will undoubtedly have an important
impact on both the nature of migration and mobility globally, and, will need to be
engaged with critically from gendered and intersectional perspectives. They will be
part of the continuing and lively debates that we have shown characterise writings on
gender and migration and efforts to take forward social justice initiatives based on
insightful critiques.

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