Gendered Global Migrations

DIVERSITY AND STRATIFICATION

ELEONORE KOFMAN
Nottingham Trent University, UK

Abstract ———————————————————————
The globalization of migration has entailed a greater diversity and stratification of
migration. Integrative approaches, such as transnationalism, structurationism and
alternative circuits of globalization, have helped to place migration in broader socio-
cultural fields but have not adequately addressed the complex gendered stratification
generated in countries of origin and destination. Much literature focuses on the socio-
economically disadvantaged, especially those undertaking domestic and sex work, but
the opening up of skilled migration in developed countries, increasingly in feminized
welfare sectors, is creating new lines of exclusion and inclusion and privileging the
skilled and educated of the Third World. It also means that a neat division between
the masculine high-tech sector and the feminine intimate, racialized and menial ‘other’
does not do justice to the complexity of gendered migratory flows. This article explores
diverse forms of female migrations, labour market positions and the intersection of
class, racialization and gender. I argue that we need to question the relegation of
female migrants to the subordinate circuits of globalization and to extend our analysis
beyond productive and reproductive labour in less skilled sectors. The inclusion of
female skilled migrants can add a distinctive counter narrative, which includes care
for and education of people, to our conceptualization of a knowledge economy and
society, which tends to be based on scientific and technological sectors.
——————————————————————— Keywords
female migrations, gender division of labour, integrative approaches, knowledge
economy, stratification

International Feminist Journal of Politics, 6:4 December 2004, 643–665

ISSN 1461–6742 print/ISSN 1468–4470 online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1461674042000283408
 INTRODUCTION

Despite decades of studies of female international migration, mainstream

theorizations have been slow to incorporate the relevance of gender issues
(Gabaccia 1995; Kofman 1999; Strum and Tarantolo 2002; Willis and Yeoh
2000). Too often women are associated with the socio-cultural, the domestic
and the family (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1999). Men, in contrast, inhabit the
economic and the workplace, and pursue a career rationality untainted by
everyday domestic concerns. This separation is paralleled more broadly by
the dominance of narrowly economic preoccupations divorced from broader
social and cultural considerations, which feminist scholarship on migration
has challenged (Koser and Salt 1997).
A number of new approaches have opened up spaces for the inclusion of
gender differences and relations more centrally in theorizations of migration.
In particular, integrative approaches (Massey et al. 1993; Grieco and Boyd
1998), such as transnationalism (Glick Schiller et al. 1994 Vertovec 1999),
structuration (Goss and Lindquist 1995) and counter circuits of globalization
(Sassen 2000), have, to varying degrees, deepened, thickened and broadened
our understanding of the mechanisms of migration. They have done this
through the inclusion of households, networks and institutional arrangements,
and the connections between sending and receiving countries. Furthermore,
Grieco and Boyd (1998)1 suggest that a gender-sensitive framework should
break down all the major stages of the process: pre-migration, which involves
a consideration of the factors that encourage or discourage individuals from
migrating; the act of migration, primarily covering immigration policies of
origin and receiving countries and institutional arrangements; and post-
migration, concerned with the impact of settlement policies and incorporation.
They argue that such a perspective focuses on the entire migration policy,
that it defines the migration process as a change of status and is capable of
analysing types of migration other than labour, such as family reunification
and refugees.
Though all of these developments have yielded enormous advances in our
understanding of gendered migratory movements, they have not challenged
reductionist views and have failed to take into account more complex
gendered stratification generated both in origin and destination countries.
Grieco and Boyd (1998) recognize the diversity of migration and the differen-
tial impact that macro-systemic causes have on different groups, but they do
not explore the dynamic of changing divisions of labour and selective
inclusion and exclusion. The globalization of migration (Castles and Miller
2003), as an interconnected and interdependent system of migratory move-
ments, has entailed a greater diversity of forms of migration, which vary in
their significance in different countries and macro regions.
Economic and social transformations brought about by globalizing pro-
cesses are drawing up new lines of selective inclusion and exclusion resulting
in complex systems of stratification (Beck 2000; Castles 2003). Castles (2002)

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argues that globalization is producing a system of hierarchical mobility within
a hierarchical nation-state system.2 And increasingly, as Bauman (1998: 2)
argues ‘mobility has become the most powerful and most coveted stratifying
factor . . . the riches are global, the misery is local’.
Such a pattern of stratification reflects the ability of the skilled in states
lower down the hierarchy to be able to move to states higher up, which are
experiencing severe labour shortages and are engaged in the competition for
skilled labour (Beneria 1999). Citizens of transition countries with well-
developed higher education structures, especially in science, technology and
medicine, such as China, India and Eastern European accession states, have
been the best placed to share in the expansion of skilled labour migration.
China and India, two countries that have been able to resist the full imposition
of neoliberal trading regulations, supply the largest numbers of permanent
and temporary skilled migrants to the USA and Canada, the countries with
the largest migrant intakes.3 The UK4 too has vastly expanded its skilled
intake, though one does not yet know how many of the recent migrants will
decide to settle. The movement of students, skilled and wealthy are encouraged
and new regional blocs such as the EU and NAFTA have also opened up
intra-regional migration. In contrast, the lesser skilled and their dependants
are either allowed to enter with lesser rights, or prevented from entering
legally, while asylum seekers and refugees are contained as far as possible in
their region of origin.
Consequently, states in the European Union, North America and Australasia
have constructed an intricate categorization of immigration statuses with
attendant rights (or lack of them) within a managed and stratified system of
globalized migration (Kofman 2002; Morris 2002). Such a variable geometry
of power in accessing mobility (Massey 1994) needs to take into account not
just the location of the state within a global hierarchy, but also the intersection
of class, gender and race, among the most significant social divisions (Anthias
and Yuval-Davis 1992), and the transferability of skills and qualifications.
The conditions of entry to a developed state generate a complex and
dynamic stratification in countries of origin and destination. Yet analysis of
this has been very schematic with little consideration of gendered systems of
stratification. So while Pessar (1999: 580) notes that ‘researchers have only
begun to explore how changing politico-economic conditions in labor
exporting and labor-importing societies differentially affect men and women’,
most immigration literature has either focused on socio-economically dis-
advantaged groups (Hodagneu-Sotelo 1999: 570) or has studied the skilled
separately. At the same time, writing on gendered migrations allocates women
lowly occupations ‘as exotic, subservient or victimised, or relegated to playing
supporting roles’ as homemakers (Pratt and Yeoh 2003: 159). Men, on the
other hand, are the breadwinners and, particularly in the literature on
globalization, pursue careers in the financial, scientific and technological
spheres (Castells 1996), the protagonists of knowledge-driven economies.5
I argue in this article that, though enriching our understanding of the

–––––––––––––––––––––––– Eleonore Kofman/Gendered Global Migrations 645

 mechanism of migration, integrative approaches nevertheless retain a reduc-
tionist view of female migration, focusing almost exclusively on the less
skilled. While it is not possible in this article to sketch out a comprehensive
mapping of the complexity of gendered migrations and their stratification, I
aim to explore the diverse forms of contemporary female migration in
countries positioned at the apex of the hierarchy of states and tentatively
suggest some ensuing stratifications in countries of origin. In particular, I
highlight the full range of migrant positions in the labour market and the
intersection of class, racialization and gender.
The first section briefly outlines the increase of female labour migrations
and the continuing significance of family-related migrations, which are
usually treated as analytically separate in migration literature, but in reality
represent a major source of female migrant labour. In the second section, I
argue that key integrative approaches, though placing migration within wider
social fields, have not incorporated the diversity of changes engendered by
female migration. In the third section I illustrate how a focus on a broader
range of gendered migrations presents a very different picture of increasing
stratification and contradictory class and social mobilities.

FEMALE INTERNATIONAL MIGRATIONS: DICHOTOMIES AND DIVERSITY

Though a substantial literature has been compiled on the feminization of

international migration (Phizacklea 1983; Morokvasic 1984), it took some
time to filter through to mainstream accounts and theories of international
migration (Castles and Miller 2003). While women had been significant in
labour flows from countries such as Ireland and the Caribbean for some
decades, it was really the globalization of female labour flows, particularly
in Asia, that could no longer be treated as irrelevant. Even when females
formed the majority in migratory flows, as in the USA since the 1930s
(Houston et al. 1984), this could be discounted because they were portrayed
as simply following the adventuresome male as his dependant and a member
of the family. Today female migration is continuing to grow in significance
throughout the world. In the developed world over half of international
migrants were women in 2000. Women outnumber men in major countries
of immigration, often due to higher proportions of Asian immigrants (Ryan
2002). Labour migration has expanded most strongly in Asian Pacific Rim
countries and oil-rich Gulf countries while the proportion of women rose in
sub-Saharan Africa in line with increasing numbers of refugees (Zlotnik
2003).
While many women still migrate through family migration it has not been
thought to require any explanation (Kofman 2004) and is often assumed in
official policy not to contribute to the labour market or at most to supplement
household income. In the European context, where family-related migration
was not encouraged, the amnesia about past migrations held back, even more

646 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

than in other macro regions, an awareness of female migration and its
incorporation into mainstream theories (Kofman 1999; Erel and Kofman
2003). Only with the new migrations into Southern Europe (Anthias and
Lazaridis 2000), where the majority of labour migrants from the Philippines,
Eastern Europe and Latin America, were female, was the presence of women
in the labour market difficult to ignore.
Moreover, the family as a social entity has been marginalized in theoriza-
tions that considered only the individual and the state (Zlotnik 1995). Instead
some have argued that families can be seen as socializing agents; they support
a geographically dispersed social group and constitute networks of assistance,
information and obligations (Boyd 1989: 641; Yeoh et al. 2002). Nauck and
Settles (2001: 462) argue that the decision to migrate is seldom the product
of individual decision making; its timing is closely related to the family life
cycle and major events in the life course of the first and second generation
of immigrants, and is not necessarily to be understood as a direct response
to labour market opportunities.
Recomposition of families occurs at all stages of the life cycle and these
changes may result directly and indirectly from economic activities. For
example, women and men who move abroad for study and work may marry
a non-citizen (Kofman 1999; Piper and Roces 2003; Thai 2003). Whether
women move abroad to join a migrant from their own country of origin,
move as a member of a family unit, especially in societies which have
encouraged permanent migration, or meet someone in the course of education,
work or tourism, this does not necessarily lead to their departure from the
workforce.
Women may seek to combine work, career and marriage but these multiple
rationalities are difficult to grasp using a classification of migratory moves
based on a single reason, such as labour, family or asylum. Immigration rules
force the migrant into a category, as for example, the female migrant who
enters through a family-related route and becomes the dependant of a male
labour migrant (Hyndman 1999; Kofman 1999). The principal applicant is
assumed to be male, placing spouses in a state of dependence in relation to
rights of residence and employment, and disadvantaged in access to settlement
services. Patriarchal relations in the family also direct women towards a
dependant status (Boyd 1997), though married women may nowadays have
the requisite qualities to become principal applicants, for example linguistic
knowledge, higher level of education, employability in shortage skilled sectors
and age. They may be able to obtain more points than their male partner in
countries that select immigrants on the basis of points and shortage occupa-
tions, e.g. Australia and Canada, but also increasingly some European states.
Dichotomies based upon a constellation of the economic, male and work-
place in opposition to the socio-cultural, female and family, frame the way
migration is traditionally explained. The dominant form of explanation of
migratory phenomena is economic, usually associated with the masculine,
and is demarcated from the social, considered to apply to the female. Men

–––––––––––––––––––––––– Eleonore Kofman/Gendered Global Migrations 647

 pursue an economic, career rationality supposedly divorced from the everyday
concerns of the family. Women alone are enmeshed in family matters, care
and social reproduction. However, we should reflect on the meaning of
family matters. Men are also affected by familial considerations, though not
necessarily in the same way or to the same extent as women (Baldassar and
Baldock 2000; Kofman and Raghuram 2003). In a recent study of knowledge
migrants in the UK, familial considerations in decision making were raised
in interviews with individuals in male-dominated groups such as medical
consultants (DTI/Home Office 2002).
As noted previously, integrative approaches have placed migrants within
wider social fields, and in particular, situated them in family/households,
networks and migratory institutions, which should help us to shed more light
on the process of changing status while crossing borders.

INTEGRATIVE APPROACHES

In the past fifteen years one of the most notable theoretical developments in
research on international migration has been the search for integrative
theories, usually including a meso level that links the agency of the individual
with economic, social and political structures across space and time. It is also
seen as a means of cutting through the contradiction between increasing
individual desire and freedom to migrate, on the one hand, and accrued
institutional and legislative restrictions enforced by receiving countries, on
the other (Koser 1997). In effect, integrative approaches conjoin different
types of economic and social relationships and institutional arrangements
with state practices and policies.
The main integrative approaches are transnationalism, structuration theory
and circuits of globalization. Transnationalism (Glick Schiller et al. 1992;
Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Portes et al. 1999; Vertovec 1999) offers a way of
understanding how links between two or more places are maintained and
how the economic, social and political relations in these places structure
migrants’ experiences. Transnationalism can be defined as political, economic,
social and cultural processes that extend beyond the borders of a particular
state, and includes actors that are not states but are shaped by the policies
and institutional practices of states (Glick Schiller 1999). The engendering of
transnationalism (Mahler and Pessar 2001) has commonly invoked households
(Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994) and networks (Boyd 1989) as the connecting glue.
Transnationalism from below, or the ways that individuals and groups
negotiate home and away and build transnational communities, has focused
on the lesser skilled and disadvantaged. For the skilled, transnationalism is
largely confined to workplaces and professional networks. Significantly,
transnational theories have failed to take into account issues of class.
For Phizacklea (2003: 80), accounts of transnationalism often lack class
transparency, and should recognize that as a strategy it is not open to all

648 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

actors who have very different points of departure or degrees of autonomy
over the nature of those transnational transactions. Others have begun to
focus on processes that alter class positions through migration (Gibson et al.
2001) and result in contradictory class mobility (Parreńas 2001a, 2001b).
Such analyses have been primarily applied to domestic workers. To a large
extent, the structuration perspective also suffers from the need for greater
awareness of class positions and changes brought about through migration.
Structuration theorization attempts to transcend the dichotomy of function-
alist and structuralist perspectives. In particular, Goss and Lindquist (1995:
32) pursue an institutional analysis broadly defined as ‘practices which are
deeply sedimented in time-space, that is, are enduring and inclusive laterally
in the sense that they are widespread among the members of a community
or society’. Their objective is to overcome what they see as the problematic
uses of households and networks as principal elements forming the meso
level and mediating the micro and the macro. They argue that these are
chaotic and imprecisely used concepts and that the key component of large-
scale international labour migration is the complex of international and
national institutions that transcend the boundaries of states and locales,
bringing together employers in the developed world with individuals who
migrate from the Third World. Such an institutional complex encompasses
knowledgeable individuals, the agents of organizations (migrant associations
and multinational corporations), kinship networks and the state. However,
they do not specifically address the differential access to and channelling of
women and men by migratory institutions (Grieco and Boyd 1998).
The third approach critiques dominant conceptualizations of globalization
and offers alternative narratives by juxtaposing and integrating different
gendered circuits of capital and people (Chang and Ling 2000; Sassen 2000,
2003; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). For Sassen (2000: 510), globalization
has produced another set of dynamics in which women are playing a critical
role, particularly in the developed world, where the strategic site of global
cities is witnessing the return of serving classes in both shadow and formal
economic activities, composed largely of immigrants and migrant women.
She seeks to uncover the systemic connections between low-income indi-
viduals, who are represented as a burden rather than a resource, and what
are emerging as significant sources for profit and government revenue
enhancement (2000: 506). In the developing world, women are crucial in the
circuits of counter-geographies of globalization, ensuring the survival of
their families and national economies. Chang and Ling (2000) distinguish a
masculinized high-tech world of global finance, production and technology
which corresponds to Castells’ (1996) elite space of flows, and a feminized
menial economy of sexualized, racialized service. Ehrenreich and Hochschild
(2003) analyse the global transfer of labour from poorer to richer countries
of services associated with a wife’s traditional role – child care, homemaking
and sex. In drawing attention to the different gendered circuits of globaliza-

–––––––––––––––––––––––– Eleonore Kofman/Gendered Global Migrations 649

 tion, these authors provide very useful and suggestive antidotes to the
hegemonic elitist world depicted in far too many accounts of globalization.
Yet these authors too leave unexamined the diversity of circuits, through
which women and men migrate, and a more complex stratification or
articulation between class, gender and race, that migration produces and
reproduces. Integrative approaches enclose women and men in their own
spheres of segmented labour. Women are exclusively occupied with domestic
labour, care and sex work, while men occupy the commanding heights of the
knowledge economy and society (Castells 1996), a segmentation that over-
looks the opening up of skilled employment, often in feminized sectors
(education, health) (Kofman 2000; Raghuram 2000). Reducing migration to
the movement of third world migrants to supply the needs of the less
skilled sectors ignores the extent of migration, including circulations between
developed countries. In the next section I shall explore the range and diversity
of lesser, intermediate and highly skilled migrations.

GENDERED DIVISION OF GLOBAL TRANSFERS OF LABOUR

Globalization has brought about increasing interdependence, integration and

unequal access to mobility. At the same time that integrative approaches have
attempted to connect different places in the circuits of migration, gendered
accounts of migration have shifted from a focus on women in productive
activities to what could be called the production of care in its material and
emotional manifestations (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). Carework can
be theorized as fundamental for social reproduction, nurturing and sustaining
the labour force and providing the social infrastructure for the maintenance
of economic and social institutions (Litt and Zimmerman 2003: 156–7).
Though largely applied to the use of lesser skilled labour primarily in the
domestic sphere, and to some extent in more public spaces such as residential
homes, this concept of care has, as I shall show, a far wider application to
more skilled occupations, such as nursing (Yeates 2004).
The study of the involvement of female migrants in productive and
reproductive labour is problematically restricted to several less skilled sectors.
Oishi (2002), for example, examines temporary labour migration and focuses
on the unskilled because as she states the majority of women migrants in
Asia fall into this category. Studies overwhelmingly concentrate on domestic
work, entertainment and prostitution (Anderson 2000; Sassen 2000, 2003;
Lutz 2002; Agustin 2003; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003), with some studies
of homeworking (Ng 2000) and export processing zones.
The dramatic expansion of domestic labour has captured the attention of
researchers on female migration. As far back as the nineteenth century
domestic labour constituted the main source of employment for female
migrants and has in recent decades expanded considerably in many parts of
the world, especially Asia and Europe. In Singapore 140,000 women registered

650 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

as domestic workers in 2002; there were 162,000 in Malaysia in 2001, 170,000
in Taiwan in 2002 and more than 150,000 in Hong Kong, who accounted for
three-quarters of its unskilled labour force. At the same time, Sri Lanka
reported 570,000 women working as domestics in the Middle East (Yamanaka
and Piper 2003). In Europe it is the most overtly feminized sector of labour
migration, especially in Southern European states, where inadequate provision
of welfare services (child care, and care for the elderly and disabled) and the
reduced role of the family in providing care mean that there is substantial
demand for migrant labour (Anderson 2000; Anthias and Lazaridis 2000).
Everywhere in Europe, the majority of domestic workers are women. However,
domestic work is often overlooked in employment quotas6 or more rigidly
controlled than other kinds of less skilled labour, such as construction (Huang
and Yeoh 2003).
Domestic work is now part of a global chain of care defined by Hochschild
(2000: 131) as a series of personal links between people across the globe
based on the paid or unpaid work of caring and a globalized domesticity,
which facilitates participation in the labour force (Ribas-Mateos 2002). As
McKay (2002) points out much of the female migration from the Philippines
for domestic work abroad is made up of middle-class women who have
combined or expected to combine education and careers with traditional
marriages. For example, the Live In Care Giver Programme in Canada,
overwhelmingly undertaken by Filipina women, expects them to have college-
level qualifications in midwifery, nursing or teaching. Together with the
racialization of migrant women, their concentration in the domestic work
sector reifies them in an inferior position, which devalues their skills and
portrays them as unskilled and only fit for domestic work (Pratt 1999). In
Europe, too, studies of domestic work (Friese 1995; Andall 2000; Zontini
2002) highlight the severe degree of deskilling and disqualification that many
migrant women with full high school education and even university degrees
experience. This applies particularly to Filipinas, Latin Americans and Eastern
Europeans. On the other hand, the inequality of the global system means that
their remittances may enable them to improve their class position (Gibson
et al. 2001) or to sustain class positions and lifestyles that they would not
otherwise be able to support in the country of origin. Parreńas (2001a:
1150) conceptualizes the latter as contradictory class mobility, which is the
dislocation resulting from the simultaneous experience of an increase in
financial status from overseas work, and decline in social status, mainly
because of their occupation as domestic workers. They have traded their quest
for material security, unavailable in countries poorly situated in the global
economy, for devalued but relatively well paid (in terms of the country of
origin) employment.
As with others sectors domestic work is stratified by nationality, religion,
race and language skills, leading to different conditions and pay (Andall
2003). In European states, Filipinas are generally viewed as the most valuable
domestic workers, being Christian, English-speaking and well educated. On

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 the other hand, Albanians in Greece or Moroccans in Spain are considered
less valuable and have less negotiating power with their employers, often
doing less rewarding work and receiving lower wages (Anthias and Lazaridis
2000). In Asia the demand for less expensive and more docile workers results
in the grading of wage scales and replacement by new sources of domestic
labour, for example the replacement of Filipinas by Indonesians and Sri
Lankans in Hong Kong or by Indonesian and Vietnamese in Taiwan (Yama-
naka and Piper 2003). On the other hand, new regulations prolonging the
duration of employment, as in Taiwan, open up possibilities for a more secure
status for some (Lan 2003). Consequently, globally there are different degrees
of partial citizenship in relation to residence, employment, family life and
reproductive rights (Parreńas 2001b).
Deskilling and downward social mobility are not confined to those moving
as labour migrants; it is a major issue for many skilled and educated women
migrating within a family context. Although downward mobility arising from
the non-recognition of skills and qualifications is not the prerogative of
women, it is in part determined by the conditions applicable to different
forms of entry and access to settlement services (Iredale 2004). Canadian
research, for example, has demonstrated the extent of deskilling of educated
migrant women who enter as family members and far outnumber principal
applicants (Mojab 1999). Among dependants of skilled workers, women are
more educated (51.63 per cent with a university education and 16.38 per cent
with certificate/diploma in 2001) than men (41.8 per cent and 12.37 per cent
respectively) (CIC 2002). The marginalization of migrant women in Canada is
less to do with low educational standards than with their inability to overcome
barriers to entry into the labour force. There is a need to separate out the
transfer of skills through official labour channels and their embodied transfer
through persons who may migrate in other ways, such as spouses or family-
sponsored migrants. Refugee women in particular face almost insurmountable
problems in obtaining employment commensurate to their qualifications.
The development of sectors related to migrant services and rights is
enabling some migrant women to break out of manufacturing and low-level
service employment to deploy cultural and social skills in mediation, advo-
cacy, interpreting and community work (Kofman 2003). Migrant associations
and service providers (NGOs and state-funded) employ many migrant women
who may have difficulties getting their qualifications recognized (Lee 1999;
Federal Institute for Vocational Training 2000). Such employment, though
flexible and poorly paid, can nevertheless be rewarding. Women’s take-up of
languages can pay off in a global labour market with greater demand for
inter-cultural skills. A recent study of Japanese women in Singapore (Thang
et al. 2002) highlights the fact that many use their bi-lingual skills as
cultural and linguistic intermediaries for the Japanese male expatriate. Self-
employment (Morokvasic 1991) offers possibilities for combining work and
familial responsibilities with a degree of independence, though often with
little support from partners or families (Anthias 2000). These intermediate and

652 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

often contradictory positions thus call into question a bipolar occupational
structure based on the division between skilled and unskilled. In her typology
of Asian migrants in the USA, Le Espiritu (1999) provides a more nuanced
tripolar structure covering salaried professionals, self-employed entrepreneurs
and wage labourers, each with a distinctive gender dynamic.
While the majority of female migrants undertake lesser skilled work, we
need to question the relegation of migrant women to unskilled labour and
the subordinate circuits of globalization (Kofman 2000; Pratt and Yeoh 2003).
The emphasis on the lesser skilled and the disadvantaged has had the effect
of leaving numerous lacunae with respect to gender in the formation of the
many highly educated professional and entrepreneurial immigrants who came
to the USA in significant numbers in the 1970s and 1980s (Hondagneu-Sotelo
1999: 570–1). In the 1990s, large numbers of skilled migrants entered the
USA initially through temporary non-immigrant visas (overwhelmingly men)
though many subsequently converted them into immigration visas. Unlike
the USA, in Australia and Canada, the emphasis on skill has in recent years
dominated permanent migration policies. The result of the shift to skilled
immigration is that high proportions of recent immigrants enter in managerial
and professional categories. While fewer women than men fall into these
categories, they are nevertheless significant as Australian data on Asian
immigrants demonstrates. By the 1991 census, 53.1 per cent of men born in
Malaysia, 46.9 per cent in Hong Kong and 43.7 per cent in Singapore were
in managerial, professional and para-professional occupations; for women
the percentages were 44.3 per cent, 33.8 per cent and 38 per cent respectively
(Ryan 2002).
The inclusion of female skilled migration (Kofman 2000) contests prevailing
notions of globalization and adds a distinctive counter narrative to what
constitutes a knowledge economy and society. Though some define knowledge
workers as those in possession of a university degree (Zhao et al. 2000),
others prioritize employment in scientific and high-tech employment and
managers in transnational corporations (Mahroum 2001; Lavenex 2002;
OECD 2002). It is the innovators, transmitters and managers of information,
science and technology who propel the global economy; they are the elite
who live in the space of flows and enjoy hypermobility (Castells 1996). Given
male and female differences in relation to skills and social competencies, it
is obviously a highly gendered interpretation of the global economy, in which
care, social reproduction and women are evicted from the narrative. Yet critical
assessments of the contribution of knowledge industries to employment (Brint
2001) have encompassed a much broader range of workers including many
of the feminized sectors concerned with people and care. For Brint (2001:
116) knowledge workers comprise both those in industries based on fast-
changing technologies or events, as well as professional services that require
high levels of training, and have not yet been commodified. Knowledge is
thus embedded in the provider as in medical, educational and legal personnel.
The professional services sector in the USA quantitatively constitutes the core

–––––––––––––––––––––––– Eleonore Kofman/Gendered Global Migrations 653

 of the formal knowledge economy, even though the technology they use may
be relatively stable. Thus in this conceptualization, knowledge encompasses
productive and reproductive sectors and includes those who are trained to
deploy social skills and competences relating to people.7
Skilled migration is indeed a heterogeneous phenomenon (Iredale 2001). In
effect, women and men circulate differently in an unevenly globalized
economy where significant sectors are still heavily regulated by states and
corporatist bodies (Boyd and Thomas 2001; Raghuram and Kofman 2002;
Bauder 2003). Men dominate movements within transnational corporations,
information and communication technology sectors and science; women
circulate through reproductive sectors such as education, health and social
work. The shortage areas in IT in the 1990s favoured male migrants while
during this period qualifications in teaching and health (doctors and nurses)
in many classic countries of immigration were either awarded no immigration
or even negative points, and thus devalued. In Canada, for example, annual
migration of post-secondary schoolteachers fell by 30 per cent between 1990
and 1997, 50 per cent among elementary and secondary teachers, 40 per cent
among physicians and 70 per cent among nurses (Zhao et al. 2000). Skilled
workers in these professions had to seek other less skilled routes to emigrate,
for example, Filipinas in Canada who entered through domestic labour
programmes.
Those who did gain entry as skilled workers did not necessarily subsequently
fare well. In the regulated professions, which encompass many of the old
occupations, entry was strictly controlled, and with increasing numbers of
skilled immigrants, its effects were felt most severely by those with degrees
from non-western countries. The degree of devaluation experienced by Asian
and Eastern European migrants in Canada has amounted to almost systematic
exclusion from the upper echelons of the labour market or ‘brain abuse’
(Bauder 2003).8 These migrants were generally forced into subordinate posi-
tions within a profession (Boyd and Thomas 2001), or went into sectors where
social and cultural competence is valued more than qualifications, as in
community services for migrants, or into a secondary labour market. The
place where educational qualifications are obtained becomes a labour-market
distinction (Bauder 2003: 702) and serves to differentiate indigenous from
migrant workers, the former increasingly delimited to the regional level (EU,
NAFTA). This systemic discrimination operates in a gendered manner since a
disproportionate number of the regulated professions, including medicine,
have become feminized (Raghuram and Kofman 2002). The newer fields,
such as information technology are male-dominated and not regulated by
corporatist professional bodies.
However, by the end of the 1990s the devaluation of qualifications and
credentials, and inadequate and restricted investment by the state in education
and professional training under neoliberal regimes (Rosewarne 2001), could
no longer meet labour shortages in both regulated professions and the rapidly
growing newer areas. Shortages were also exacerbated in some countries by

654 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

emigration, such as Canadians to the United States (Zhao et al. 2000) or from
the UK to Old Commonwealth countries, the Middle East and the the USA
(Raghuram and Kofman 2002), and geographical inequalities of service
provision in inner city and remote rural areas.
In a number of states, such as Canada, the UK and Germany, new
immigration policies have been put in place as well as changes in professional
regulation and discriminatory practices to extract greater benefits from the
globalization of skilled labour. Canada implemented its Immigration and
Refugee Protection Act on 28 June 2002 and shifted from more occupation-
based criteria, unlike Australia, to an emphasis on education, language
competence, experience, age, arranged employment in the country and
adaptability9 (Tolley 2003). The UK too brought in new immigration policies
from September 2000, including the streamlining of work permits, expansion
of labour routes and the introduction of a Highly Skilled Migrant Programme
in January 2002. States have globalized their labour markets to meet short-
ages. In the first stage they opened up entry to skilled workers in the newer
areas and, more recently, in the regulated professions through a number of
measures such as streamlining the recognition of foreign credentials (Canada),
increase in the number of places for migrant professionals (Canada), opening
up direct recruitment into the higher echelons, such as medical consultants
(UK) or increasing the number of work permits (UK).
International migration reinforces the gender division of labour as migrants
move between and to western countries. In part this is due to the few
women given overseas assignments and the difficulties spouses of males in
transnational corporations and producer services have in finding employment
or being allowed to work, as in the USA (Hardill and MacDonald 1998).
Emigration from former socialist countries, where women were present in
scientific jobs, is not matched by the gender division of employment in these
sectors in western countries. For example in Germany from 1990 to 1993, 80
per cent of scientists from Russia, Poland and Bulgaria were male (Morokvasic-
Müller 2002). Labour market positions further interact with differences in the
channels of migration10 (Findlay and Li 1998), which vary according to
employment sector and family strategies (Raghuram 2000) to create highly
gendered trajectories.
In the UK, which is by far the largest importer of skilled labour in Europe,
the fastest growth and priority areas are the welfare sectors of education,
health and social work which literally recruit globally. Nurses have become a
truly globalized (Kingma 2001) and portable profession with the WHO
estimating that 250,000 Filipinas are employed globally (Ball 2004). The
notion of the global chain of care can equally be applied to the more
professional and public face of nursing as much as to care in the home. Data
from the UK Nursing and Midwifery Council on registrants and work permits
(new and extended) reveal that foreign nurses have more than doubled in the
past three years and are no longer seen as a short-term solution but as a core
aspect of workforce planning strategies (the Guardian 2003). The biggest

–––––––––––––––––––––––– Eleonore Kofman/Gendered Global Migrations 655

 increases have occurred in the past few years from the Philippines (7,422
work permits granted in 2001), India (1,759) and South Africa (1,163) (Buchan
2002). As a result Filipinas have become one of the main nationalities entering
as labour migrants (Robinson 2002). Nurses and other medical staff are
attracted not just by higher pay but by possibilities of career progression,
training and access to better equipment. The UK is beginning to be concerned
about losing its own and overseas nurses to the USA, where nurses can earn
higher salaries, and shortages are likely to become more acute in the future.
It is therefore likely that nursing will continue to provide employment
opportunities for migrant women from the Third World, Eastern Europe and
other developed countries.
It is not just nursing which is experiencing shortages; these extend to other
social services (education, health, social work), all of which are feminized to
varying degrees. Shortages in these sectors occur at different levels of skills
and qualifications and are providing more opportunities for women to migrate
officially for short and long periods from developed and developing countries.
The mode of incorporation of overseas labour in these sectors is also shifting
in some countries from inclusion in subordinate and peripheral positions,
often with poor and insecure conditions, to that of incorporation into core
sectors. Demand for skilled labour is also leading to European states relaxing
conditions for the migration of family members and the employment of
spouses (Kofman 2004).
The question that needs to be asked is what will be the effect of the
expansion in demand for skilled female labour in developed countries on the
geography of recruitment, and what are the consequences for patterns of
stratification in the countries of origin. Most of the research on emigration
from countries of origin focuses on the role of recruitment agents, the state
and problems of labour shortages, and of families left behind. We know little
about who migrates where in terms of their class, educational and ethnic
background, i.e. their economic, social and cultural capital. To gain some
insights into the changing stratified geographies of migration, we can examine
developments related to Filipina migrants who are present in both nursing
and domestic work. At the top end of nursing, the acquisition of the
recognized qualifications for work in countries such as the USA or the UK is
expensive (Ball 2004). In some countries, such as South Korea, China or India,
student flows have increasingly become a means of gaining settlement and
citizenship in developed countries, but the Philippines is not one of the major
source countries for international students. In the domestic sector, there is
also a stratified geography of migration. So, for example, Canada imposes
more stringent and costly requirements for entry, which, as McKay (2002)
notes, is becoming a graduate school for domestics. Some in the Philippines
will have sufficient resources to gain immediate entry to the better paid and/
or more secure employment in nursing and domestic work in the countries
at the apex of the hierarchy of states, but many will have to move to a
staging post in order to obtain the requisite capital and experience. The

656 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

amount of remittances will in turn vary according to their ability to enter the
wealthiest countries, which shapes their class position and mobility.11 And at
the same time domestic work in many states is being increasingly filled by
other nationalities than the Filipinas, who are cheaper and considered more
docile such as Indonesians in Hong Kong or Vietnamese in Canada.

CONCLUSION

Integrative approaches have helped to place migration in broader socio-

cultural fields but have not adequately addressed class differences in the
gendered and stratified geographies of mobilities. The opening up of skilled
migration in developed countries, in privileging the skilled and educated of
the Third World, is widening the disparity of the value of migration. For the
skilled with educational qualifications, class intersects with ‘race’ as the
principal criteria of immigration entry, unlike in earlier periods where nation-
ality acting as a surrogate for ‘race’ excluded migrants from the Third World.
Especially for those with high-level qualifications in shortage sectors, this is
enabling the transfer of credentials and for some it is reducing the dislocation
arising from the devaluation of qualifications, which characterized profes-
sional migration in the past. The devaluation may not have constituted for
all Parreńas’s contradictory class mobility. Many medical personnel still
worked as doctors but in the less desirable areas, both in sectoral and
geographical terms or were denied promotion as a result of racism. And
whereas in the 1990s, the greatest opportunities existed in the male-dominated
occupations, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, occupations with
sizeable female presence have once again become more valued. However
they remain the most regulated, and hence may remain closed, even when
immigration hurdles are overcome.
This is only part of the story of changing geographies of mobility and
stratification, which for women continue to be shaped by their migration
through family routes and power relationships in the household. Immigration
regulations may place women in a position of dependency, but their trajec-
tories and strategies are also influenced by power relations within the
household, in both countries of origin and destination. All I have been able
to do in this article is to suggest some aspects of the interaction between
labour, family and immigration regulations.
We also need to question the notion of the knowledge society, which
privileges scientific and technological sectors as the driving forces of growth
in the global economy. In this version particular transferable skills are
privileged as the core of the new economy; they are embodied in specific elites
in the First and Third World who are able to circulate, largely unhampered by
borders. Markets regulate the degree to which mobility occurs. In other
sectors, more closely tied to state and corporatist regulation, skills have so
far been less readily transferable. With the slowing down in the expansion of

–––––––––––––––––––––––– Eleonore Kofman/Gendered Global Migrations 657

 information technology coupled with the continuing shortages in welfare and
social services, the gender composition of skilled migratory flows has become
less skewed. And, as briefly discussed, there are also sectors, which have
expanded to cater for migrant populations and which provide intermediate-
level employment, which though insecure, may be rewarding. And at the
same time the demand for the lesser skilled and valued (in terms of skills but
not of need) in the global chains of care continues apace. Hence, a neat
division between the masculine high-tech sector and the intimate, racialized
and menial other, does not do justice to the complexity of gendered migratory
flows or provide a basis for a non-reductionist theorization.

Eleonore Kofman
Department of International Studies
Nottingham Trent University
Clifton Lane
Nottingham, NG11 8NS, UK
E-mail: eleonore.kofman@ntu.ac.uk

Notes

1 Grieco and Boyd (1998) also mention a synthetic framework that incorporates
numerous theories and works across different theoretical levels (macro and micro)
and analytical units (individuals, family/household, nation). Their paper did not
take into account transnationalism or counter circuits.
2 Castles (2002) lists five levels in terms of hierarchical citizenship and level of
protection with the USA at the top, followed in second position by other developed
countries such as those in the EU, Japan, Australia, and in third position,
transition countries of the East and newly industrialising countries (NICs) in Asia
and Latin America, in fourth position least-developed countries and at the
bottom countries devastated by long-term conflicts, declining economies and
disintegrating states. It is not clear what is counted towards citizenship; many
might want to argue that although the USA is indisputably the most powerful
state, its citizens do not have superior rights compared to the next level down in
terms of welfare, security and human rights, including protection from the death
penalty.
3 In 2001 Canada took in 137, 119 skilled migrants and their dependants and
13,000 under the business class (CIC 2002). In the USA over 80 per cent of the
employment-based preference system (179,176 of whom 83,134 were principal
applicants) favours the highly skilled. Temporary workers for skilled occupations
have also risen sharply, for example from 105,899 in 1994, to 302,326 in 1999
and a peak of 384,000 HIB visas for specialist occupations and 95, 479 for NAFTA
professional workers (Kramer 2002: 35). In Canada, the largest numbers of
immigrants are from People’s Republic of China and India; in the USA it is
Mexico, India, Mainland China and the Philippines.

658 International Feminist Journal of Politics –––––––––––––––––––––––––––

 4 In 2002 120,115 work permit holders (largely for medium to highly skilled work)
and their dependants were admitted compared to 68, 385 in 1996 (Dudley et al.
2003). This does not include EU citizens who do not require a work permit,
working holiday makers or those with UK ancestry. Thus in 2000 work permit
holders constituted 35.1 per cent out of a total of 190, 830 who entered under
labour immigration routes.
5 Of course many male migrants undertake less skilled work and experience de-
skilling but they are passed over in the positive accounts of globalization where
the emphasis is on the innovative and knowledge-creating sectors.
6 In the European Union, only Italy, Spain and Greece include quotas for domestic
labour although other countries, such as Germany, are now developing pro-
grammes. Many countries allow foreign nationals on business, diplomats or
citizens returning from abroad to bring in domestic workers with them.
7 Within large multinational companies, women are often disproportionately found
in the human side: public relations, human resources (Hochschild 2000: 141).
8 Bauder analyses the exclusion of migrant professionals through the devaluation
of their credentials and insistence on Canadian experience in terms of Bourdieu’s
concept of institutionalized cultural capital in which cultural privilege is distrib-
uted to the bourgeoisie, in this case nationals.
9 Status of Women Canada undertook a Gender-Based Analysis of immigration
legislation and some of its suggestions fed into the points system in which
migrants need to obtain 75 out of a total of 100 points. Years of experience,
often unfavourable to female migrants, was limited to four years maximum and
spouse’s education and arranged work could be taken into account.
10 These include being assisted by the company, using a recruitment agency or
social and professional networks, or making the move as an unassisted individual.
11 The pay for domestics in Parreńas’ (2001b) study ranged from $200 a month in
Singapore to $410 in Hong Kong, $700 in Rome and $1,400 in Los Angeles.

Acknowledgements

This article has benefited from a Canadian Faculty Research Programme

Skilled International Female Migrants: Migratory Strategies and Settlement
Experiences, 2002–3. Thanks to my colleague, Parvati Raghuram, for the
many rewarding discussions we have had about these issues.

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