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COPYRIGHT 1998 Transaction Publishers, Inc.
There is an underlying tension in much of the work on immigrant women. On the one hand, a growing number of studies show that women experience marked improvements in their status as women as a result of migration. These range from increased control over decision making in the household to greater personal autonomy and access to resources in the community at large (e.g., Foner, 1986; Grasmuck and Pessar, 1991; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Lamphere, 1987; Pedraza, 1991; Pessar, 1998; Simon, 1992; Brettell and Simon, 1986). On the other hand, the literature also emphasizes migrant women's continued oppression - what some call a triple burden or oppression, as gender inequalities are compounded by discrimination on the basis of class and race or ethnicity. Increasingly, recent research seeks to reconcile these two perspectives. As Patricia Pessar (1998) notes in a recent review of the literature, to ask whether migration is emancipating or subjugating for women is to couch their experiences in stark - and misleading - either/or terms. Feminist scholars now caution that migration often leads to losses as well as gains for women, and that, despite improvements, patriarchal codes and practices may continue to have an impact (see, for example, Espiritu, 1997; Morakvasic, 1984; Pessar, 1998).
In the spirit of the new feminist scholarship, this article offers an analysis of the complex and often contradictory ways that migration changes women's status - both for better and for worse. The focus is on the impact of women's incorporation into the labor force. This issue has been in the forefront of research on migrant women since it is wage work that so often empowers migrant women at the same time as it places severe burdens and constraints on them. The article is based on my larger comparative project on immigrants in New York City.(1) It draws on my own first-hand research on Jamaican women (see Foner, 1983, 1986, 1994)(2) as well as on available sociological and anthropological accounts for other immigrant populations. New York City continues to be a preeminent destination for the nation's immigrants: in 1996, about a third of its population was foreign born (Moss, Townsend, and Tobier, 1997). The city's immigrants include a wide variety of Asian, Latin American, and Caribbean groups; in 1990, the top five were Dominicans, Chinese, Jamaicans, Russians, and Guyanese, in that order. While the analysis presented here is sensitive to different patterns of labor-market incorporation and cultural background among the various groups, the emphasis is on common themes, experiences, and processes that emerge.
Female Immigrants: The Background
To set the stage for the analysis of the impact of wage work on New York City's migrant women, some basic background information is necessary on their numbers, migration patterns, and labor force and occupational profile.
Women migrants now outnumber men in virtually all of the major groups coming to New York. In large part, this is because United States immigration law favors the admission of spouses and children as a way to reunite families and has made it possible for certain kinds of workers, like nurses, to get immigrant visas (Donato, 1992; Houston, Kramer, and Barrett, 1984). In the early 1990s, there were ninety-two male immigrants for every one hundred female immigrants entering New York City, up from ninety-eight males per one hundred females in the 1980s (Lobo, Salvo, and Virgin, 1996).
It is not just that women predominate. Many women come on their own rather than follow in men's footsteps. The structure of U.S. immigration law, changing gender roles, and economic opportunities for women are all responsible for this trend. Immigrant women's concentration in specific high-demand occupations - like private household work and nursing - has also enabled many to play a pivotal role as pioneer immigrants, establishing beachheads for further immigration (Salvo and Ortiz, 1992). This has been especially true for certain groups like Filipinos, with large numbers of nurses, and West Indians, with substantial numbers of private household workers.
Once in New York, the majority of immigrant women go out to work. At the time of the 1990 census, 60 percent of foreign-born female New Yorkers of working age were in the labor force. The percentages are much higher for certain groups. Filipino women, who often came specifically to work in health-care jobs, stand out as having the highest labor force participation rate at over 85 percent. West Indian women are not far behind, with labor force participation rates in the 70-80 percent range. Dominicans come out near the bottom, with 52 percent in the work force, and they have a relatively large proportion unemployed as well (Kasinitz and Vickerman, 1995). In trying to explain these different rates, Sherri Grasmuck and Ramon Grosfoguel (1997) argue that Dominican women's lower levels of education and limited English language skills have made it more difficult for them to find jobs, especially jobs that pay enough to cover the costs of child care. Because Jamaican women arrive with English and, on average, higher educational levels, they have better employment prospects. They are also more disposed to go out to work because they come from a society with a strong tradition of female employment: almost 70 percent of women in Jamaica were in the work force in 1990 compared to only 15 percent in the Dominican Republic.(3)
In New York, there is an enormous variety in the kinds of jobs occupied by female immigrants; a good many have professional and managerial positions while others end up in low-level service and factory work. Census data for 1990 on immigrant women in the labor force who arrived in the 1980s show this variation. Twenty-seven percent of Asian women, 13 percent from the Caribbean, and 10 percent from Central and South America were classified as professionals and manager; at the same time, 21 percent of Asian women, 14 percent from the Caribbean, and 23 percent from South and Central America were operators (Mollenkopf, Kasinitz, and Lindholm, 1995).
That many immigrant women are able to obtain professional and managerial jobs is not surprising given the human capital they bring with them. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) data, although limited, show that a fifth of the working age women intending to live in New York City who reported an occupation to the INS when admitted for permanent residence between 1982 and 1989 were in professional/technical and administrative/managerial positions; in the early 1990s, the share in these categories went up to 36 percent. In both the 1980s and early 1990s, about one in every six immigrant women were in administrative support occupations such as secretaries, typists, and general office clerks (Lobo, Salvo, and Virgin, 1996).(4)
Of course, many immigrant women who had professional or white-collar jobs in their home society experience downward occupational mobility when they arrive in New York. Without American-recognized training, English proficiency, or green cards, highly qualified women are often consigned, at least temporarily, to relatively low-level positions when they arrive. Many Jamaican private household workers I interviewed in my research, for example, had been teachers and clerical workers back home, some experiencing what Maxine Margolis has called the transition from "mistress to servant" (Margolis, 1994; see also Colen, 1990). A number of Haitian and Hispanic aides in the New York nursing home I studied in the 1980s were full-fledged nurses before they emigrated, but their qualifications were not recognized here and language problems stood in the way of passing the requisite licensing exams to practice nursing in New York (see Foner, 1994).
In a time-worn pattern, women in each immigrant group gravitate in large numbers to particular occupations. As among men, English language ability and work skills help women in some groups gain a foothold in certain jobs; lack of English and specific job skills limit the employment possibilities of others. Once a beachhead is established, co-ethnics are likely to follow through a process of network hiring and referrals as well as employer preferences. Thus, for example, West Indian women are heavily concentrated in health care. Indeed, in 1990, close to a third of employed Jamaican women in New York were nurse's aides, orderlies, and attendants and registered or practical nurses (Kasinitz and Vickerman, 1995; see also Waldinger, 1996). Garment work has drawn in Dominican and Chinese women because it requires no English language ability, is quickly learned, and is often close at hand, in factories owned and managed by their compatriots. In the early days of the migration, Dominicans' entry into garment factories was also facilitated by the fact that the industry had already adjusted itself to Puerto Ricans, using bilingual supervisors and employee mediators (Grasmuck and Grosfoguel, 1997). Although the proportion of...
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