Engendering Migration Studies: The Case of New Immigrants in the United States

Abstract

This review highlights contributions made by scholars who have treated gender as a central organizing principle in migration and suggests some promising lines for future inquiry. Many significant topics emerge when gender is brought to the foreground, such as how and why women and men experience migration differently and how this contrast affects settlement, return, and transmigration. A gendered perspective demands a scholarly reengagement with those institutions and ideologies immigrants create and encounter in order to determine how patriarchy organizes family life, work, law, public policy, and so on. It encourages an examination of the ways that migration simultaneously reinforces and challenges patriarchy in its multiple forms. Several migration scholars have replaced early feminist frameworks in which gender hierarchy was privileged with more comprehensive and flexible models. These map the simultaneity of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and legal status on the lives of immigrant and native-born men and women.