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Rubén
Rumbaut
helped define
the field of
immigration
studies.
crossing borders
immigration and gender in the americas
This photo
by Linda
Schaefer
was taken
in 1988 in
Tijuana for a
project called
The Face of
America.
since the 1930s. But until fairly
recently, Rumbaut said, academics
studying this topic had not
looked at gender “as a factor that
can be analyzed on a continuum
from patriarchal to matrifocal”
that affects the actions of men
and women migrants. A turning
point came in 1994, when the
Social Science Research Council
appointed an interdisciplinary
committee to help define
the field of immigration stud-
ies. That committee—which
included Rumbaut and “Crossing
Borders” conference participants
Mary C. Waters and Nancy
Foner—set up working groups,
conferences, and fellowships to
encourage research on immigration
across disciplines. One of
those working groups focused
on migration and gender, and its
findings have since infl
uenced
the work of historians, anthropologists,
sociologists, psychologists,
political scientists, legal
scholars, and others in the field
of immigration studies.
The Feminization of
Immigration
Of the 11 million undocumented
immigrants currently in this
TONY RINALDO
country—a total that Mary
Waters, the conference chair
and a Harvard sociology professor,
compared to the number of
African Americans living in the
southern United States during
the Jim Crow era—51 percent are
women and children. “Americans
in general are quite ambivalent
about immigration,” Waters
noted. “We’re proud of our own
immigrant ancestors . . . but
we’re worried about the immigrants
who keep arriving.”
During a panel titled “The
Gendering of the International
Migration,” Donna R. Gabaccia,
chair of the University of Minnesota’s
Immigration History
Research Center, cautioned
against characterizing the increased
mobility of women and
children in the 21st century as
“an aberrant, or revolutionary,
or negative development.” She
maintained that what some term
the “feminization” of immigration
might better be described as
a “long-term, global convergence
towards gender balance in international
migration”—a convergence
that is creating immigrant
populations with male-to-female
ratios that more closely resemble
those in their new countries.
Yet Gabaccia acknowledged that
women and children migrants
face distinctive challenges—a
theme taken up by the panelist
Carola Suárez-Orozco, a professor
of psychological studies in
education at the University of
California at Los Angeles.
Suárez-Orozco said that female
migrants are twice as likely
as their male counterparts to be
widowed, divorced, or separated
and are more likely to bear finan-
cial and caretaking responsibility
for children, either in their new
countries or in the homes they
left behind. Both Suárez-Orozco
and the City University of New
York sociology professor Robert
C. Smith emphasized the particular
burdens that undocumented
immigrant status places on
women. Vulnerability to violence
during crossing, exploitation
once they arrive, the threat of deportation
and family separation,
poverty, and domestic violence
create persistent psychological
and physical stress.
Smith, who has worked with
immigrant women who are
victims of domestic violence
in the United States, noted
that many are from countries
where the police are unlikely to
intervene when the perpetrator
is the victim’s husband or father.
“One woman told me, ‘What
I learned from my mother
was silence,’” Smith reported.
An innovative New York City
program that offers enhanced
legal status to immigrant women
who press charges against their
abusers has begun to empower
women and alter some of these
attitudes, he said. In other parts
of the United States, however,
undocumented women who call
the police because of domestic
violence almost certainly risk
deportation.
Asylum from Violence
During a panel on law and asylum,
Nancy Kelly, a co–managing
director of the Harvard Immigration
and Refugee Clinic and
6 radcliffe magazine Summer 2013