(SOM2) Gender, Transnational Migration, and Social Reproduction: Intersectionalities

This session brings together theoretical and empirical research papers examining the experiences, agencies, and activism of individuals within immigrant families who are engaged in the work of caring/social reproductive work, both locally or transnationally. In particular, the papers will address the following questions: How do social, economic, political, and cultural processes shape these women’s social reproductive work locally and/or transnationally? How do gender and other intersectionalities complicate social reproductive/care work locally and/or transnationally? This session invites papers pertaining to migrants/ migration that interrogate intergenerational relationships, care and support of older persons, the work of young/adult carers, and the implications of multigenerational households for adult women. Tags: Gender, Migration and Immigration

Organizer: Guida C. Man, York University; Chair: Guida C. Man, York University

Presentations

Guida C. Man, York University; Sadie Gibson, York University

Transnational Migration of Chinese Immigrant Women Professionals in Canada: An Intersectional Analysis on the Experience of Social Reproductive Work

This paper is based on data analysis from a SSHRC Insight Grant research project entitled “Transnational Migration and Social Reproduction: Eldercare Work of Chinese Immigrant Women Professionals in Canada”. Drawing on the theorization of transnational migration and social reproduction, and using an intersectionality framework of analysis, this paper explores the myriad caring work experience of Chinese immigrant women professionals from Hong Kong and Mainland China to Canada. In particular, the paper examines how these immigrant women devise various strategies to accomplish all the work they do (paid work, eldercare work, childcare, housework etc.) both locally and transnationally. The paper elucidates how eldercare work is shaped by social, economic, political, and cultural processes in an era of neoliberalism, complicated by the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, and immigration status; and mediated by individual woman’s agency.

Rajdeep Sidhu, York University

Guest Workers, Family Members or Both?: The Role of Canada's Family Reunification Programs in Meeting the Caregiving Needs of Newcomer Households

Since 2016, there has been an influx of young and racialized (im)migrants to Canada – including many with young families (Census, 2021; StatsCan, 2023) – who struggle to meet their daily caregiving needs without the support of their families which left remain in the home country. Due to the restrictive nature of Family Reunification Programs (FRPs), (im)migrants engaged in precarious employment, many of whom face challenges accessing and affording childcare across Canada (Prentice and White, 2018; Ma, 2021) – also struggle to meet the households’ caregiving needs (Evergeti and Ryan, 2018). To help meet these needs, many newcomer (im)migrant families opt to sponsor their parents and/or grandparents. Parents and grandparents (P&GPs) can be sponsored on a Super Visa by citizens/permanent residents, or they may be self-sponsored for a Visitor Visa. The Government of Canada has long committed to uniting family members who are separated by (im)migration on humanitarian grounds through programs like the (FRPs). However, policies within FRPs often neglect the caregiving and reproductive needs of recent (im)migrant families. This research paper examines the role of the Government of Canada’s FRPs in supporting the caregiving and reproductive needs of recent (im)migrant families. It investigates three FRPs – the Parent and Grandparent Sponsorship Program (PGSP), the Super Visa (SV), and the Visitor Visa (VV) – and seeks to develop an understanding of the caregiving and domestic work undertaken within newcomer (im)migrants’ households in the context of increasing employment-based (im)migration. I ask: what are the implications of Canada’s Family Reunification Programs for Parents and Grandparents in meeting newcomer households’ household work and childcare needs? Who bears the burden of unpaid care work and how are daily survival and reproductive needs managed in newcomer households? This research utilizes the conceptualization of social reproduction emerging within feminist political economy and decolonial feminist scholarship to analyze unpaid and paid care work that supports newcomer (im)migrant households. In exploring how P Casas-Cortes et al., 2015), which I argue, following Vosko (2020), allows for conceiving inclusion and exclusion as continuous processes. Vis a vis my case study of P&GPs, particularly those on temporary visas, the conceptual framework of differential inclusion is useful in addressing the continuum of inclusion and exclusion as it relates to age/ageism, an under-explored axis of (im)migration policy. This research adopted a mixed-method approach, which includes the quantitative analysis of census data and policy analysis of the various migration mechanisms. This research explores that, by enabling P Family; Parents and Grandparents, Caregiving; Childcare; Newcomers; (Im)migrants; Social Reproduction; Precarity; Exploitation; Policy Making; Temporary Residency; Labor Market

Melanie Smith, Dalhousie University

Belizean migrant women: Recasting and reenforcing ​transnational social reproduction

Belize, like many global-south countries exprience the feminization of labour migration (Parreñas, 2005; Kofman, 2014; Kofman and Ranguram, 2015). Many Belizean women are following long-standing migration streams towards the United States (Smith and Hendrix, 2013). Once there, they instert themselves in various sectors of the care economy. Since social reproduction is usually organized by gender, women are the ones who dominate the care dimension of social reproduction (Laslett and Brenner, 1989; Kofman, 2014). However, caring is more than affective tasks, it includes a host of economic activities meant to create and maintain people and communities (Bakker, 2003). Care is embedded in many actions and processes. It entails paid and unpaid activities that promote and maintain the wellbeing of people (Folbre, 2014). It includes visible activities such as the daily upkeep of the household as well as intangible ones such as emotional support. Thus, it can be argued that Belizean migrant women in the U.S., through their care labour, are contributing to social reproduction of several people in multiple domains. As migrant women, they often become engaged in domiciliary care work as nannies, caring for the infirm and elderly especially when they lack proper documentation or academic preparation. During the neoliberal era of global capitalism where care in all its variations has been commodified, racialized women from the global south feature prominently (Ferguson and McNally, 2014; LaFleur and Romero, 2018). This is because global south women often migrate to maximize household incomes, thus, tend to insert themselves in jobs that easily absorb them. They are often willing to accept wages below market value. Since the care economy generally devalues what they consider women’s work’, this type of labor is often underpaid. In addition, they arrive ‘job ready’. Considering that they have already been trained to do this work in their country of origin because of the traditional gendered division of labor and cultural ideas regarding women’s caring nature (Barber, 2008). Added to this, the isolated nature of domiciliary work allows them to remain hidden, avoiding spaces where they lack social citizenship until they can regularize their status. This isolation also places them in conditions of vulnerabilities and precarious working arrangements. This multi-sited ethnographical research incorporates the perspective of forty-eight participants. The multi-method study involved data collection in Belize and the United States. Respondents included current migrants in the U.S as well as retired and returned migrant women and members of their traditional households and beneficiaries of remittances. Findings show that despite precarity, these women contribute to the social reproduction of the employers household and simultaneouly thier own. Thier wages, converted into remittances, subsidize reproductive needs of thier own household, thier family and extended kin. Findings also demonstrate that money is not the only resource being exchange. Care is resource and labour intensive. It involves the exchange of financial, material, emotional and moral support (Baldassar, Kilkey, Merla and Wilding, 2016). Caregiving strategies such as ‘childminding’ which are powered by cultural norms can be tapped into before and after migration (Fog Olwig, 2012). Kinship obligations and cultural norms such as reciprocity allows them to mobilize resources for parents or family members back home (Baldassar and Merla, 2014). These same norms can be utilized to facilitate the migration or settlement of others in the community of destination. Transnational social reproduction entails a range of strategies to give, receive, and exchange care. These strategies are also contested and reconfigured as resources and ideas move across transnational social fields. Since transnational studies analyses objects, persons and symbols moving beyond the borders of nation-states (Glick-Shiller, 2007 it becomes evident that Belizean migrants are contributing to national develoment as well. Through collective remittances, they mobilize resources to meet care needs of people in thier communities of origin. Thus, releasing the state from a range of socail protections and welfare investments. In all these domains, gendered expectations at the household, family, community, market, and state levels, plus views held by these women themselves compel them to contribute to the reproductive needs of people in multiple domains.

Wanda Chell, Educational Policy Studies

Exploring Language Settlement Program and Social Reproductive Work through the lens of Racial Capitalism

Canada aggressively recruits and welcomes the waged and social reproductive labour required for maintaining the Canadian economy, through well-crafted im/migration policies and international branding as a friendly, inclusive, and multicultural nation (Abu-Laden and Gabriel, 2015). Some Black and People of Color (POC) immigrants upon arrival, however, experience differential economic and health outcomes, and/or degrees of welcome (Chen and Hou, 2019; Johnston, 2022; Lightman and Gingrich, 2018). In response governments, non-governmental organizations, and community groups have established networks of settlement programming to assist immigrants better integrate: participate in the labour market, society (civic engagement), the building of a successful life (Guo and Guo, 2016; Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada [IRCC], 2023). The federally funded Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program, delivered via settlement organizations offers approximately 8000 language and settlement classes across 200 sites across Canada (IRCC, 2020). The literature on the LINC program largely focuses on single, isolated initiatives such as the Canadian Language Benchmarks (Haque and Valio, 2017), Portfolio-Based Language Assessment (Abbot, Lee and Ricioppo, 2021; Desyatova, 2020) and/or curriculum/instruction (Apedaile, and Whitelaw, 2012; Diepenbroek and Derwing, 2013). Scholarship utilizing more critical frameworks argue an attentiveness to labor market participation and/or “Canadian values, may facilitate (un)intentional assimilation or homogeneity within language programming (Haque, 2017). A small body of scholarship explores the ways LSPs may operate as an instrument of differentiation, disciplining and/or ordering immigrants (Barker, 2021; Fleming 2010). The (economic) structures into which immigrants may be assimilated, however, are taken for granted and while the latter disrupts the discourse of settler care it stops short of the purpose/role such reproductions serve or consider the deeper socio-cultural and political implication of recruiting im/migrant (un)waged labour. Drawing on a comprehensive review of the empirical research pertaining to LSPs, program documents, and practitioner insights, I suggest the theoretical framework of racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya, 2018; Gilmore, 2020; Kelley, 2017; Kundnani, 2023; Robinson, 2020) may have utility in exploring LSPs, not only as an instrument in preparing immigrants for particular forms of waged labour but as a means to relegate and shape those for social reproductive and/or surplus/precarious labour. Racial capitalism, rooted in the work of South African anti-colonial/racist/capital scholars/activists and later developed as a theoretical framework, may highlight the “benefit” derived from differentiation and for whom, in the racialized unequal allocation of economic, political, social and/or psychological rewards. Capitalism not only makes spaces for non-capitalism by defining some as productive labour and others non-productive, but it also demands (social) reproductive labour to function (Fraser, 2016:2017). Generational replacement and the work of social reproductive work need not be limited to kin and home. The care of children, the aging, and those with disabilities, by immigrant women of colour, has allowed white wo/men to participate in higher compensated waged labour (Razack, Smith and Thobani, 2010). From positioning LINC instructors as “second” wage earners to the monetary as well as social debt to the state incurred by refugees by way of transport fees and gratitude, to the long wait times and punitive attendance policies of LINC, we may consider the possible role LSPs might have in “pushing” or “trapping” some participants in reproductive labour, or as a site of reshaping social reproductive labour to be better suited to the particulars of a local environment whether in course offerings, curriculum or in program structure. This paper intends to contribute to critical theorizations of LSPs and/or stimulate discussion within educational spaces purportedly designed, and claiming to, welcome and support immigrants. For too long the field of settlement has hidden behind the protective cloak of white innocence, settler care, and good intentions (Chell and Kapoor, 2018). This is critical if the federal Anti-Racism Strategy is to be more than a performative goodwill gesture.