Migrant Women

Rwanda is recognised for its strong implementation of the Beijing Plan of Action and Millennium Development Goal 3 on gender equality and women’s empowerment. Australia, as an immigrant nation, has a strong multicultural society that has taken in waves of migrants since the Second World War, who have endeavoured to quickly become contributing citizens. This paper presents case studies of seven women foundation students of the Centre for Gender, Culture and Development (CGCD) at the University of Rwanda and ten migrant women in Australia. The outstanding contribution these 2011 Master of Gender and Development (MGD) graduates have made to Rwanda and abroad in the areas of politics, public service, international and national non-government organisations, private sector and civil society were presented and showcased by two of the graduates, Donatha Gihana and Shamsi Kazimbaya and the CGCD Founding Director, Prof Shirley Randell AO.

Success stories of ten migrant women in Western Australia representing government, academia, private sector, community, civil society and not-for-profit sectors who have made a difference to the communities they belong to, their work places and who also then empower other migrant women, were presented by Associate Professor Jaya Earnest.

This comparative study highlights? the concepts of empowerment, resilience, peer mentoring, family and how they impact women.
• Part 1 commences with concise literature on resilience, empowerment, family resilience and mentoring.
• Part 2 presents the case study methodology used to highlight the life stories of the women from Rwanda and Australia.
• Part 3 showcases Rwanda and the stories of seven Gender, Culture and Development graduates from the inaugural cohort of the Master in Gender and Development.
• Part 4 will highlight the narratives of ten migrant women from Australia. The final section will propose some overall findings that focus on women, education and making a difference.

Ecuadorian migration to Spain can be described as an emblematic case of feminization of international migration. As the scholarship showed, this migration flow has been shaped by transnational female social networks in which different types of capital circulate and which are reproduced across generations, providing social protection for people involved in them, both migrants and non-migrants. Starting from three ethnographic studies conducted with Ecuadorian adults and teenage migrants in Seville and in different Ecuadorian localities between 2004 and 2011, this paper has two aims. First, it investigates the crucial role played by migrant women of the first and second generation to create a safety net for the members of their transnational households, in terms of child and elderly care, combining tactically both informal and formal social protection along the different stages of their migratory projects. Second, adopting an intersectional lens, which looks particularly at the dialectic between gender and generation, it analyses the tensions and conflicts generated by the re-positioning of these women within their transnational households. The paper contributes to the literature through questioning the changing gender role and relations in transnational social protection.

This report draws from the findings of a small-scale study conducted by Mas Giralt in 2013-4 at the University of Leeds, which involved 19 semi-structured interviews with key informants from migrant support and community organisations and staff in public services in the UK, Spain and Italy. This study sought to develop a better understanding of the issues faced by people re-migrating (both at origin and destination), and more particularly, of the impacts that recent migration and policy reforms in the UK have had for those newly arrived. The issues identified by this study affected migrant women in particular due to their predominant role as heads of household and family carers. Following these findings, and as a way of ‘giving back’ to the community, an information event was organised in collaboration with Latin American Women's Rights Service (LAWRS) with the funding support of Care-Connect at the University of Leeds. During this event, which was held on 21st June 2014 and attended by over a 100 migrants, a consultation questionnaire was completed with 37 attendees, randomly chosen. The report also presents the results of this consultation, which further illustrate the issues analysed in Mas Giralt’s research, and provides examples of migrant women’s first hand experiences of the barriers highlighted by this study.

Key points:

- Latin Americans migrating from other European Union (EU) countries to the UK face a range of difficulties when settling in London, where they often become employed in low paid,
fragmented and insecure jobs (particularly in the cleaning sector). These difficulties affect women particularly, as they
are often the main carers for children and family.

- Reduced outreach, interpretation and information services from local authorities for new arrivals often result in ‘practical exclusion’ of migrants and their children from public services to which they are entitled, undermining their ability to integrate and secure appropriate standards of living.

- Diminished resources in public services provision and welfare restrictions for recent EU migrants (due to public misperceptions that these migrants overburden the welfare
system) create barriers for vulnerable migrants to access social protection, particularly for women.

- Barriers of access have been identified in healthcare, education, housing and employment, which have particular
detrimental effects for those migrants working in precarious jobs, making them vulnerable to labour exploitation and poverty.

Migrants who establish connections in the host culture, particularly through nonprofit organizations, are more likely to integrate successfully into host societies (Martinez Garcia and Jariego 2002). Yet, anthropologist Maria Olivia Salcido and sociologist Cecilia Menjívar have noted, “gender hierarchies are embedded in the formulation, interpretation, and implementation of immigration laws, as experienced by immigrants” (2013:336). Our research, which compares two field sites in Apopka, Florida and Barcelona, Catalonia, demonstrates that despite the presence of vibrant organizations in both places, legal barriers in the U.S. hamper social integration by preventing women from accessing basic services necessary for survival. The criminalization of migration in the U.S. forces Apopka migrants into what Giorgio Agamben has called “bare life,” living in a political system that both criminalizes their presence and excludes them from the benefits offered to citizens (Agamben 1998). In Barcelona, however, political autonomy within the Catalonian region has motivated local governments to offer greater support to migrants than is true for Spain more generally. While migration produces gendered vulnerabilities exacerbated in situations where women lack support networks, ethnographies of local migrant women in both places reveal these vulnerabilities can be reduced by cooperation between non-profits and local governments.

Esta ponencia tiene dos objetivos. En primer lugar presenta resultados de un estudio cualitativo sobre la acción colectiva de migrantes en el AMBA, prestando especial atención a i) el papel de las mujeres en la configuración y desarrollo del campo organizativo migrante; ii) la incidencia y el alcance de sus luchas en la ampliación de derechos de la población migrante y de la sociedad en general.
El segundo objetivo de esta ponencia es compartir unas notas conceptuales con la intención de cuestionar la naturalizada vinculación entre nacionalidad y ciudadanía. En sintonía con los posicionamientos de Etienne Balibar y Saskia Sassen, no entendemos la ciudadanía como un estatus, sino como una práctica colectiva en permanente reconfiguración; un campo de conflicto susceptible de ser ocupado. Proponemos entonces pensar el accionar colectivo de las mujeres migrantes como prácticas de ciudadanía.