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LITR 5831 Seminar in World / Multicultural Literature: American Immigrant: model assignments 2014
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research post 1
Heather Minette Schutmaat
June 11, 2014
Immigrant Women Working
as Domestics in the United States
I first became acquainted with
the rapid growth of the number of women migrating the globe – a trend known as
the feminization of migration – while taking a senior seminar for my Bachelor of
Arts in Humanities. Owing to the expansiveness of the study of humanities, we
were given the liberty to choose the topic of our capstone paper. Because I had
recently become both interested in and profoundly moved by the experiences of
the Mexican-American, female immigrants whom I knew personally, I chose to
research and write about the migration of women from the Global South to the
Global North and the similarities of their experiences. Ultimately, my paper
strayed from the topic of domestic work and centered on the experiences of women
that migrate from the Global South in search of financial survival and enter the
industry of prostitution in the Global North. However, during my research I also
discovered much about women who migrate from poor countries to the United States
to work as nannies and maids. For this research post I decided to revisit the
sources I used for my senior capstone paper and focus on this issue in
particular. I will first examine the feminization of migration, the vast number
of female immigrants in the United States, and then (begin to) answer the
question: Why do immigrant women typically work as maids and nannies in the
United States?
The Feminization of Migration and
the Number of Immigrant Women in the U.S.
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and
Sex Workers in the New Economy,
published in 2002,
is a collection of fifteen essays that center on
exactly what the title alludes to. In the introduction, editors Barbara
Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild state that “Immigration statistics show
huge numbers of women in motion, typically from poor countries to rich” and that
“thanks to the process we loosely call ‘globalization,’ women are on the move as
never before in history” (2). The editors affirm that “throughout the 1990s
women outnumbered men among migrants to the United States, Canada, Sweden, and
the United Kingdom, Argentina, and Israel” (6). According to an even more
recently conducted study that I discovered on
migrationpolicy.org and focuses
specifically on the United States, in 2008 “there were 18.9 million immigrant
women who accounted for 12.3 percent of the 154.2 million women in the United
States. Immigrant women represented approximately 6.2 percent of the total
population of the United States.” Another recent article published in 2013 on
americanprogress.org states that “the face
of today’s U.S. immigrants is more female than male. In 2011 51.1 percent of all
foreign-born individuals residing in the United States—and 55 percent of all
people obtaining a green card—were women. That same year, women comprised 48
percent of all refugee arrivals, 49 percent of all people granted asylum, and 54
percent of all people who naturalized to become U.S. citizens.” Although I
didn’t find any information online stating exactly how many immigrant women are
Hispanic and are leaving Mexico and Central America and coming to the United
States,
americanprogress.org does state that “in
2010 11.7 million foreign-born residents—29 percent of the foreign-born
population—came from Mexico.”
Immigrant Women in the United
States and the Demand for Domestics
Assumedly, these immigrant women are coming to the United States for the same
reasons we’ve identified in any other immigrant narrative thus far – to start
anew in the land of opportunity, to rise up with hard work and resilience, and
to better provide for their families (whether their families live in the United
States or in their country of origin and are supported by remittances). However,
one of the most interesting features that is unique to the experience of
immigrant women is the vast majority of immigrant women who work as nannies and
maids. According to Rhacel Salazar Parreña, author of
Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and
Domestic Work, “In the United States, domestic
work has been an occupation historically relegated to women of color and
immigrant women” (2). Ehrenreich and Hochchild also point out in their
introduction to Global Woman
that “Female migrants overwhelmingly take up work as maids or domestics. As
women have become an ever greater proportion of migrant workers, receiving
countries reflect a dramatic influx of foreign-born domestics.” They also state
that, “In the United States, African-American women, who accounted for 60
percent of domestics in the 1940s, have been largely replaced by Latinas, many
of them recent migrants from Mexico and Central America” (6).
The
most apparent explanation for the overwhelming number of immigrant women working
as domestics in the United States is global inequality and an increase of the
number of American women joining the workforce. As Ehrenreich and Hochchild
fluently explain, “The reasons are, in a crude way, easy to guess. Women in
Western countries have increasingly taken on paid work, and hence need other –
paid domestics and caretakers for children and elderly people – to replace
them.” Further explaining the situation, they state “For their part, women in
poor countries have an obvious incentive to migrate: relative and absolute
poverty. The ‘care deficit’ that has emerged in the wealthier countries as women
enter the workforce pulls
migrants from the Third World and postcommunist nations; poverty
pushes them.” In
short, because the number of women entering the workforce is increasing, so is
the demand for nannies and maids to fill their domestic roles. Meanwhile, the
rich countries have becomes richer and the poor countries have become poorer, so
the incentive for women of poor countries to migrate to the United States in
search of financial stability has also increased.
Second Research Post Prospect
For my second
research post, I may examine the other factors that contribute to the tendency
of immigrant women to find work primarily as domestics in the United States.
However, the subject of immigrant women is so significant that the directions
one may go with it as a focus of study are seemingly endless. In
Global Woman,
Enrenreich and Hochschild also explain that although some female migrants from
the Third World do find something like liberation in the First World, or at
least the chance to improve their children’s living conditions, many other less
fortunate migrant women end up in the control of criminal employers – their
passports stolen, their mobility blocked, and forced to work without pay in
brothels or to provide sex along with cleaning and child-care services in
affluent homes (3). Another question I’m interested in exploring is how the
female immigrant experience differs from the male immigrant experience, and in
what ways female immigrants in the United States are more likely to be exploited
than male immigrants.
Works Cited
Ehrenreich, Barbara, Arlie Russell Hochschild, and Denise Brenna.
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the
New Economy. New York: Metropolitan, 2003.
Print.
Parreñas, Rhacel S. Servants of
Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford, 2001.
Print.
Web Links:
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/immigrant-women-united-states#1
