Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations : A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st Centuries [1 ed.] 9789004251380, 9789004251366

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Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations

Studies in Global Social History VOLUME 12

Studies in Global Migration History Editor

Dirk Hoerder

Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA

VOLUME 1

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgsh

Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st Centuries Edited by

Dirk Hoerder and Amarjit Kaur

Leiden • boston 2013

Cover illustration: Burmese migrant workers use boat transport to cross the border illegally at Mae Sot in Thailand which lies opposite to the Burmese border town Myawaddy. Photo was taken in Mae Sot by Amarjit Kaur on a field trip in 2008.

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1874-6705 ISBN 978-90-04-25136-6 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-25138-0 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents List of Illustrations ...........................................................................................

ix

Part one

introduction Understanding International Migration: Comparative and Transcultural Perspectives ......................................................................... Amarjit Kaur and Dirk Hoerder

3

Transcultural Approaches to Gendered Labour Migration: From the Nineteenth-Century Proletarian to Twenty-First-Century Caregiver Mass Migrations ......................................................................... 19 Dirk Hoerder Globalizing the Household in East Asia ..................................................... 65 Mike Douglass PART Two

ATLANTIC WORLD: EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS Domestic Service and Urbanization in Latin America from the Nineteenth Century to the Present ......................................................... 85 Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof Feminization and Problematization of Migration: Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ..................................................... 103 Marlou Schrover Migration and Family Systems in Russia and the Soviet Union, Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries ........................................................ 133 Gijs Kessler

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Femina migrans: Agency of European Women Migrating to Domestic Work in North America, 1880s to 1950s .............................. 151 Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder PART three

THE AFRICAS AND THE EASTERN MEDITERRANEAN Interdependence and Convergence: Migration, Men, Women, and Work in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1800–1975 ........................................ 175 Dennis D. Cordell Migrations in the Maghreb and Western Mediterranean ..................... 217 Kamel Kateb and Hassène Kassar “Women Were Strong”: Gender and Migration from the Eastern Mediterranean ............................................................................................... 241 Akram Khater PART four

THE ASIAS Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940 .................................. 263 Adam McKeown Japan, Labour Migration, and the Global Order of Difference ............ 293 Vera Mackie Shifting Geographies of Migration in Southeast Asia: Continuity and Change in Proletarian and Gendered Migrations ...................... 317 Amarjit Kaur Migration into Thailand: Change and Continuity from a Gender Perspective ...................................................................................................... 365 Patcharawalai Wongboonsin



contents

vii

PART five

CASE STUDIES: SOUTHEAST ASIAN DOMESTIC AND CAREWORKER MIGRATIONS Indonesian Domestic Workers Overseas: Their Position and Protection in the Global Labour Market ............................................... 385 Muhamad Nadratuzzaman Hosen and Aswatini Raharto From Amah-chieh to Indonesian Maids: A Comparative Study in the Context of Malaysia circa 1930s–1990s ........................................... 405 Ooi Keat Gin Women Migrant Workers and Visibility in Malaysia: The Role of Media in Society ............................................................................................ 427 Kiranjit Kaur PART six

ADJUSTING FAMILY LIFE/GLOBALIZING CAREWORK AND HOUSEHOLDING Rethinking the “Left-Behind” in Chinese Migrations: A Case of Liberating Wives in 1950s South China .................................................. 451 Shelly Chan Marriage Migration: Love in Brokered Marriages in Contemporary Japan .................................................................................... 467 Tomoko Nakamatsu Migration and Transformation: The Gendering of International Migration from the Philippines in the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries ................................................................................ 485 Rochelle Ball Notes on Contributors .................................................................................... 511 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 517 Index .................................................................................................................... 563

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Douglass Table  1 Dimensions of global householding ...................................................... 67 Schrover Table  1 Foreign population in the German Reich 1890–1910 ....................... 118 Figures  1 Percentage of immigrant men in 228 countries, 2005 ....................  2 Percentage of immigrant men in 228 countries, 2005, frequency .......................................................................................................  3 Percentage of men among immigrants, 1999, Europe ....................  4 Percentage of men among non-nationals, 2000 ................................  5 Percentage of men (immigrants and emigrants) 1999 ....................  6 Percentage of foreign women in European countries among the total immigrants of certain countries of origin, 2004 ..............  7 Percentage of men among emigrants from Hungary to European countries, 1901–1913 ................................................................  8 Percentage of emigrant and immigrant men from and to Belgium to and from other European countries, 1884–1924 .........  9 Percentage of men among aliens arrived at the British Isles from Europe (excluding transmigrants), 1891–1905 ......................... 10 Percentage of men among emigrants from Ireland to Great Britain, British colonies and foreign countries, 1856–1921 ............. 11 Percentage of men among aliens arriving with passports across the Russian frontier during the Imperial period, 1884–1915 .......... 12 Percentage of men among Russian citizens who worked as seasonal emigrants in Germany (bearing 8-month passports), 1901–1913 ........................................................................................................ 13 Percentage of men among immigrants to Sweden, 1875–1924 .....

115 115 116 116 117 117 119 119 120 120 121 121 122

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14 Percentage of men among immigrants from colonies and foreign countries to the Netherlands, 1865–1924 .............................. 15 Percentage of migrant men worldwide, 1960–2000 ......................... 16 Percentage of migrant men (flow), 1945–2003 .................................. 17 Percentage of men among immigrants to the Netherlands, 1865–2002 ......................................................................................................

122 124 124 125

Kessler Figures  1 Average age of first marriage—RSFSR/ RF, 1959–1998 ................... 145  2 Gender balance—rural population RSFSR/RF .................................. 148  3 Urban migration ratios—rural population RSFSR/RF .................... 148 Kateb and Kassar Tables  1 Growth of the non-Islamic population in Algeria, 1833–1954 .......  2 Proportion of French and foreigners in the non-Islamic population of Algeria (per 1000) ............................................................  3 Proportion of immigrants and emigrants in the total population (in %) .......................................................................................  4 Population in France born in the Maghreb, censuses 1946–1962 ......................................................................................................  5 Immigrants in Western Europe, 1970s .................................................  6 France’s population born in the Maghreb by sex ............................  7 Immigrant population by level of education (OCDE) 2008 ..........

226 228 232 234 235 239 240

Figure  1 Arrival of Maghrebians in the OECD countries ................................ 237 McKeown Map  1 South China emigrant ports .................................................................... 269



list of illustrations

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Tables  1 Destinations of Overseas Chinese migration, 1840–1940 ................ 267  2 Return rates for Chinese ports, 1861–1939 (%) .................................. 271  3 Some peak emigration rates ................................................................... 275 Figures  1 Annual overseas migration from South China, 1851–1939 ..............  2 Proportion of emigrants from Chinese ports, 1875–1939 ................  3 Emigration rates from Guangdong, Hebei and Shandong, Italy and Iberia, 1872–1939 .................................................................................  4 Return rates of major emigrant flows, 1870–1938 .............................  5 Chinese returns rates from Singapore, Manila and Bangkok .......  6 Return rates of diverse migrants flows, 1881–1938 ............................  7 Male and female emigrants from Hong Kong, 1858–1939 ..............  8 Women as a proportion of Chinese migration to Singapore, 1887–1928 .......................................................................................................  9 Women as a proportion of migrants from Hong Kong to various destinations, 1860–1939 ............................................................. 10 Women as a proportion of total migrants from Europe and Hong Kong, 1820–1939 ............................................................................... 11 Women as a proportion of migrants to and from Hong Kong, 1861–1939 .......................................................................................................

268 270 276 279 279 280 284 286 287 290 291

Amarjit Kaur Maps  1 Southeast Asia ............................................................................................. 320  2 Labour Migration in Southeast Asia since 1980 ................................ 342 Tables  1 Malaya—FMS Estate Labour Force by ethnicity, 1907–38 ............ 330  2 Malaya—Labour Employed in Commercial Crop Cultivation, 1911–57 (Number and percent) ............................................................... 332  3 Estimated Population Outflows from China to selected Southeast Asian countries, 1851–1925 (thousands) ........................... 334

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 4 Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines— Main Economic Indicators 2010 .............................................................  5 Selected Asian Women’s Migrations in Labour Outflows, 2000–7 (Percent) .........................................................................................  6 Singapore: Employment Pass Framework and R Pass (Work Permit) Information .....................................................................  7 Malaysia: Criteria for Employment of Foreign Workers in selected sectors ...........................................................................................  8 Malaysia—Country of Origin of Foreign Workers Approved for Recruitment in Designated Sectors, 2006 ...........................................  9 Malaysia—Migrant Workers by Citizenship and Sector, November 2007 ............................................................................................

341 343 350 357 358 359

Figures  1 Malaya: Assisted and voluntary Indian immigration, 1844–1938 (numbers) ..................................................................................................... 329  2 Malaya: Ethnicity and population growth, 1911–47 .......................... 337 Wongboonsin Figures  1 Population in Siam during 1880s ...........................................................  2 Migratory Chinese in Siam by Sex, 1919–1947 ...................................  3 Magnitude of Registered Migrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, 2002 and 2009 ....................................................  4 Registered Migrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, by Sex, 1988–2004 .................................................................  5 Major Economic Activities Engaged by Registered Migrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, by Sex, 1992 .........  6 Labouring Jobs and Domestic Work Engaged by Registered Migrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, by Sex, 2007–2009 .....................................................................................................

368 371 374 375 378 379

Hosen and Raharto Map  1 Indonesia ....................................................................................................... 387



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Tables  1 Slave imports into Batavia on Asian ships (and annual averages), 1663–82 ......................................................................................  2 Indonesian Migrant Workers Deployed Overseas, 1969–99 ..........  3 Indonesian Migrant Workers Employed Overseas, 1994–2000 ....  4 Indonesia: Indonesian workers deployed overseas by destination country, 2001–2007 ..............................................................

388 393 395 400

Ooi Tables  1 Sex ratio of Chinese Immigrants in Malaya, 1881–1938 (Males per 1,000 females) ....................................................................................... 410  2 Average remuneration of amahs, c. 1950s . .......................................... 417  3 Average Remuneration of Rubber Plantation Workers, c. 1950s ........................................................................................................... 417 Kiranjit Kaur Table  1 Newspaper article headlines from the New Straits Times and the Star newspapers pertaining to stories on migrant domestic workers in Malaysia, January 2009 to July 2010 (selected) ............ 441 Figure  1 Issues associated with migrant workers in Malaysian newspapers, 1 June–15 July 2007 ............................................................ 439 Ball Tables  1 Number of deployed land-based overseas Filipino workers (OFW) by major occupational category, new hires* 2003–2009 ..................................................................................................... 499

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 2 Number of deployed land-based overseas Filipino workers (OFW) by top occupational category and sex, new hires* 2009 ................................................................................................................. 503  3 Adverse conditions confronting Asian service sector employed female temporary migrants ..................................................................... 505

Part one

introduction

Understanding International Migration: Comparative and Transcultural Perspectives* Amarjit Kaur and Dirk Hoerder Research on labour migration up to the 1980s focused primarily on emigration of Europeans to the New World, corresponding with nineteenthcentury industrialization, and on Asian indentured migration to colonial plantation and mining economies. In both sectors, scholars assumed, jobs were for men and thus migration was “a men’s thing”. In the frame of this assumption, a feminization of migration has been identified since the 1990s with the near collapse of industrial production in Europe and North America and the shift to service economies in western advanced countries with fast developing aging populations. The demand for domestic workers, nurses, and caregivers suddenly began to be highlighted and thus migration became “a women’s thing.” In the curiously gendered academic world, most male researchers continue to work on male proletarians of the past, while women scholars analyze female working migrants of the present. Thus, two parallel research agendas and discourses co-exist with porous, but not often crossed, borders between fields. In addition to the problem a majority of researchers had with gender, most also uncritically used the free versus forced dichotomy of labour and labour migrations. They treated slaves and indentured workers of colour (i.e. other than white) separately from European, white, and “free” migrants. However, the “free” migrants were forced to leave unacceptable living conditions and those labelled coolies were, according to the data, mostly free or, more cautiously, self-willed migrants. Only some 10 per cent of the Indian Ocean migrants were indentured servants. In critiques of exclusionist racism and sexism, writer Ralph Ellison conceptualized African-Americans as “invisible” men (and women), and the German feminist author, Luise Pusch, decried the “symbolic annihilation” * Some of the essays in this volume were first presented as draft versions at the 21st International Congress of Historical Sciences, Amsterdam, August 2010, in the sessions organized by the International Social History Association. The editors are grateful for reprint permission for two essays, McKeown and Douglass (see headnotes to the essays). Particularly helpful were the comments of three anonymous readers who evaluated the manuscript of this volume.

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of women.1 In addition, in many societies, conventional language usage loads the terms “worker” and “migrant” with the unspoken connotation of maleness. Even at the turn of the twenty-first century, according to Monica Boyd and Elizabeth Grieco, in everyday understanding “migrants and their families” was “a code for ‘male migrants and their wives and children.’ ” Such discourses assume that men predominate in migration flows. Since common language usage also suggests that “men leave their families behind”, the implication that men are distinct from the appended family is added to the skewed everyday and, unfortunately, scholarly language. Are men “non-practicing family members” as Canadian sociologist Jean Burnet once called them?2 In this collection of chapters by scholars from many parts of the world and inclusive of both genders, we attempt to advance the ongoing process of recasting the men-versus-women debate in migration studies. We thus highlight gender and race as parallel to class, and by including all migrations, distinguish between labels such as self-decided, under contract or indenture, or forced. Since the old “ethnic” history and the far older “passive” slaves version of interpretative historical narratives, when referring to post-migration communities the studies have observed the presence of women and children, the authors might have looked for gendered and racialized patterns, for relationships both emotional and sexual, supportive or obstructive, and economic or spiritual. The chapters in this volume deal with men and women—and sometimes with migrant children or children left behind—across the whole period from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. While sex ratios varied depending on job options at destinations, or on societal views/ clichés of types of work said to be characteristic for women or for men, or on societal practices relating to gender roles and constraints, and on nation states’ gendered admission regulations, the data for Europe indicate, as Marlou Schrover and others3 point out, a 50:50 sex ratio; the data

1 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, 1952); Luise Pusch, Das Deutsche als Männersprache. Aufsätze und Glossen zur feministischen Linguistik (Frankfurt/M., 1984, reprint 1996), 11. 2 Monica Boyd and Elizabeth Grieco, “Women and migration: Incorporating gender into international migration theory”, Migration Information Source, 1 March 2003, http://www .migrationinfromationsourse.org/Feature/display/cfm?ID=106, accessed 14 January 2007; Dirk Hoerder, interview with Jean Burnet, 9 November 2000, York University—Glendon College (Toronto). 3 Katharine M. Donato and Donna Gabaccia, eds., “Gender ratios and international migration”, topical section, Social Science History 36, no. 2 (Summer 2012), 191–274.



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for the transatlantic white migrations, a 60:40 ratio (and after 1930 a 50:50 ratio); and for transatlantic black migrations, a 67:33 ratio. In Asia, Chinese sex ratios to Malaya (the main immigrant colony in Southeast Asia), diverged from a 70:30 ratio at the beginning of the 1880s to a 75:25 ratio at the end of the 1920s, and, by 1938, to a 43:57 ratio, when the entry of Chinese males was regulated through quotas and women were not subject to these quotas. Unlike the freer Chinese migration, Indian indentured servant (coolie) migration comprized mainly men as Saw Swee-Hock has shown. However, in the early twentieth century, the colonial government took measures to normalize ratios (see Amarjit Kaur Chapter 13), and the sex ratio of “recruited/assisted” Indians was nearer parity, compared to the sex ratio of “independent” Indian migrants. Furthermore, when recruited Indian labour migration was prohibited with the beginning of the depressed economic conditions of the early 1930s, the entry of women and children increased.4 Since the data of the respective specific migration periods never supported a migrant-equals-man simplification, the recently diagnosed “feminization” of migration is not supported by the statistics available. In the context of the present anti-immigrant rhetoric—anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-rural Chinese—gendered role ascriptions have assumed an additional aspect. The anti-immigration lobby, which may well be compared to the anti-Semitism and anti-Oriental movements of the past, turns mobile human beings into problem cases, “in which migrant men are seen as causing problems and migrant women as having them” (Schrover below). Both migrant men and women need to be discussed in relation to their own agency and agendas for their life plans—whether in the context of expectations for a decent existence or prospects for a better future. When, after the global economic changes of 1973, many of the labour migrants in the post-World War Two Atlantic World’s migration systems, the guest workers and the “braceros”, decided to settle down, they defied a hidden aspect of state power in the seemingly free migrations. The documentation they had been given upon entry required return—circulation of a mobile labour force was meant to be enforced—, “nations” were not to be diluted by “foreign workers.” Through their life-course decisions and everyday practices the women and men turned themselves from temporary or disposable migrants circulating between labour markets (transeconomic), societies (transcultural), and countries (transstate or, 4 Swee-Hock Saw, The Population of Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore, 1988), 20–21, 34–36.

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with different emphasis, transnational) to permanent immigrants. The male and female “hands,” “arms” or “braceros,” and “guests”—common language employs a body part designation—came with hearts and minds, with plans for their future and, often, that of their children. Like migrating men and women of the nineteenth century and across the ages, they were agents of their own destinies. They invested their skills and social capital; they adjusted life-course projects to new societies: In Europe, “workers were called but human beings came,” in the words of Swiss author, Max Frisch; in today’s Africa, as Amartya Sen commented, “A Hutu labourer from Kigali . . . is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a labourer and a human being.” In these two and all other cases the workers may be women.5 A United Nations expert group, as late as 1991, was critical of the fact that women were still often being labelled “associational” migrants, that is, “moving as passive companions of other family members” and that a substantial bias was apparent in nation-state data collected—under a value regime that underrated women’s roles and (unpaid) labour—by male census-takers from male heads of households. Did they collect data, points of view, or stories? Are men as under-represented in family life as they are over-represented in statistics?6 The experts’ critique questions the data collection at international borders; and recent analyses of nationbuilding and nationalism have emphasized, from its inception, the male aspects of the project. Data about place of departure and of destination also indicate that it is not a nation to which migrants head but a place5 Max Frisch, “Vorwort”, in Alexander J. Seiler, “Siamo italiani. Gespräche mit italienischen Arbeitern in der Schweiz” (Zürich, 1965); Amartya Sen quoted in UNDP, Human Development Report 2009—Overcoming barriers: Human mobility and development (New York, 2009), 17. 6 Richard E. Bilsborrow and Hania Zlotnik, “Preliminary report of the united nations expert group on the feminization of internal migration”, International Migration Review 26, no. 1 (1992), 138–61, quote 140. Recent summaries of research on women’s migrations include Pamela Sharpe, “Introduction. Gender and the experience of migration”, in Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London, 2001), 1–14; Christiane Harzig, “Women migrants as global and local agents. New research strategies on gender and migration”, in Women, Gender and Labour Migration, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London, 2001), 15–28; Patricia Pessar and Sarah Mahler, “Transnational migration: Bringing gender in”, International Migration Review 37, no. 3 (2003), 812–46; Raingard Esser, “Out of sight and on the margins? Migrating women in early modern Europe”, in Women on the Move: Refugees, Migration and Exile, ed. Kath Holden and Fiona Reid (Newcastleupon-Tyne, 2010), 9–24. See also Caroline B. Brettell, “Theorizing migration in Anthropology. The social construction of networks, identities, communities and globalspace”, in Migration Theory. Talking across Disciplines, ed. Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield (New York, 2000), 97–137.



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space where they can earn their living. Migration is, and was in the past, translocal, transregional, and transcultural rather than transnational. Even the famous cliché—across the Atlantic “to America” or across the Pacific to “the gold mountain”—did not refer to the United States as a nation state or, in fact, one of many nations, but to San Francisco (via Angel Island), or the east-coast industrial belt via Ellis Island. Chinese migrants passing through Singapore, the gateway to the Malayan Peninsula, did not go to some particular state or a section of the British Empire, but to specific mines or other jobs. Female migrant amahs took positions with specific local or emigrant Chinese families, mainly for child-care but also for domestic tasks.7 Migrants lead transcultural lives and create trans­cultural communities. New Geographies of Migration Globally, after the Second World War, when the United States emerged as the dominant economic power in another wave of globalization, a further integration of economic activities and labour markets began. Moreover, in the 1970s and 1980s, as international migration expanded, there was a revival of interest in the economics of labour migration and the benefits of transborder/transnational labour movements. This led to a shift, if hesitant, from political rhetoric to political reality in viewing international labour migration as an integral component of broader socio-economic transformation processes. Thus, migration for Asian countries, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia and Cambodia, represents a livelihood diversification strategy and, through the migrant women’s and men’s remittances, a pathway to development. Several of these countries have transformed themselves into labour brokerage states and their fortunes, that is, their budgets, are intertwined with destination states’ economic up- or downswings. Viewed from this perspective, individual migrants are now acknowledged as “agents of development” and the focus is shifting to workers’ agency or, ominously, state agencies are beginning to set target numbers for workers to be supplied to other state

7 Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants: The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East (Singapore, 1988); Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home. Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, 2000).

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economies.8 Concurrently, the burden of “development” or merely the balancing of state foreign currency flows has fallen squarely on migrant workers’ shoulders.9 In the arena of development studies and policy consultancy, migration has been extolled as an important diversification strategy for poorer states. Black et al., for example, state that the different kinds of migration can directly “structure” outcomes for different groups, and that inequality has to be defined in broader terms than simply “income or wealth.” Outcomes, in turn, emerge from pre-existing structures: Migrant workers are most likely to be employed in sectors where labour standards are not applied or are not even in place. Women migrants are concentrated in the domestic and caregiving work sector which offers little security or social protection. Their role needs to be analyzed in the context of the effects of power relationships in the international political order. Other inequalities include labour restrictions such as labour organizing and collective bargaining rights, gendered aspects of inequality, and a lack of labour protections and enforcement standards. Migration thus highlights the inequalities and marginalization of migrant workers, the disparity between local and migrant workers, as well as disparities in international power relations between societies and states.10 International labour migration at the turn of the twenty-first century has created a large underclass with limited opportunities for upward mobility and access to universal human rights, a class different in composition and internationally accessible labour market segments from the nineteenth century. These changes in the global hierarchies involve an increasing importance of Asian societies-economies-states both in terms of economic growth and in terms of global labour supply. In contrast, Latin American economies—long studied under the “dependency” concept of global power hierarchies—and African countries, often labelled as slow to develop but increasingly discussed as suppliers of raw materials for both the “old world” of industrial countries and the “new world” of the fast-growing BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), have received less attention in terms of research on global migrations. In a way, this 8 Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export. How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis, 2010). 9 J. Brodie, “Reforming social justice in neoliberal times”, Studies in Social Justice 1, no. 2 (2007), 93–107. 10 Richard Black, Claudia Natali, and Jessica Skinner, Migration and inequality (2005), Background paper for the World Development Report 2006 (World Bank, 2006), siteresources .worldbank.org/INTWDR2006/. . ./Migration_and_Inequality.pdf.



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is justified because macro-regional internal migrations in Latin America and segments of sub-Saharan Africa are quantitatively larger than outmigration from the many societies. In this volume, we privilege Asia as a migration arena—both as regards global migrations and intra-regional migrations—in order to reflect the change from the Atlantic to the Asian macro-region. While all major regions have been included, the case studies concentrate on migrations within and from Asia as well as on circular migration beginning and ending in one of the societies of Asia.11 Approaches and Topics This volume brings together major interdisciplinary chapters on important aspects of international migration in both historical depth and contemporary perspectives. The contributors draw upon a variety of frames, predominantly history, political economy, labour studies, sociology, and human geography, to provide viewpoints on the structural dimensions of globalization and their effects on the nature and processes of international migration. The different sections of the book deal with wide-ranging global and transcultural themes at the level of states, in the Introduction by the editors, and in the section on Transcultural Dynamics: Societies Migration Systems and Family Strategies (Dirk Hoerder, Michael Douglass), at the level of the family. The book’s sections deal with broad global and transcultural issues at the level of states as well as at the level of families in the “Introduction” by the editors and the section “Transculturations: Societies—Migrations Systems—Families” (Dirk Hoerder, Michael Douglass). The following three sections provide studies on the Atlantic World, Latin America and European Russia; on the Africas, northern and subSaharan, as well as the Eastern Mediterranean (“Middle East” in older Western-imperial terminology); and on the Asias. A section providing case studies attempts to deal with present migrations in the Asias in as much detail and conceptual sophistication as traditional migration studies employed for the (white) North Atlantic World. The concluding section,

11 Australia, with its shifting position between a white and British-background country and a player in the Asian economic sphere, has not been included. The state’s early “White Australia” policy (1901) which resonated a decade later in (British-background) South Africa’s immigration restrictions demand separate analysis. Until the change of immigration policy under the Labor Government in 1973, Australia remained a special case.

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“Adjusting Family Life/Globalizing Carework and Householding,” returns, on the one hand, to topics discussed globally, for example the separation of families as well as the formation of emotional relationships through migration, and on the other, the worldwide moves into local intra-family caregiving arrangements in which globally mobile women replace parents, or more particularly mothers, who were—and sometimes still are— expected to socialize infants-children-adolescents into “national” value systems and norms. In this introductory chapter the editors emphasize, first, the key role international migration has played, and continues to play in shaping political, economic and social processes in the world economy. Second, they place migrant workers in all places in the frames of host states’ policies and broader socio-economic issues which acutely disadvantaged and disadvantages them. All chapters link migrants’ experiences to fundamental structural and social processes in global power relationships connected with the international economy. In the framing chapters, Hoerder emphasizes the importance of relying on a transcultural rather than transnational approach to gendered labour migration, and critiques traditional male-centred migration studies in an academia excluding women scholars. He advocates the use of regional rather than national data in combination with interpretative studies within societal frames, and interdisciplinary transcultural societal studies. From the viewpoint of the migrants’ strategies, he states that the presentday migrations resemble the European migrations of the pre-World-War I period, when women and men migrated to earn a livelihood, and also to get funds to further the education of their children. He also notes a major difference between the two migration periods; in the earlier period, men often migrated first, while in the present, women leave first. The emotional loss is, according to many migrant women’s calculations, less than the advantage gained by better education for their children through remittances or through family unification when possible. Michael Douglass, starting from families, argues—in keeping with recent empirical research and scholarly theoretizations—that the household is not merely a unit of consumption dependent upon a larger economy, but is instead the foundation of society and economy, reaching from local to global scales. He points out that the change in the householdstate relationship in many societies presents the portent of increasingly severe limitations on national economies and, ultimately, the capitalist world system. Currently, more than fifty countries are experiencing below replacement fertility, with some already experiencing absolute population



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decline. High divorce rates, late marriage without children, the institutional warehousing of the elderly, and the phenomenal increase in single resident housing units (more than 50 per cent in major cities in the North) are all indicators of retrenchment of the household. He emphasizes developments in East Asia that are being documented in the West. Absolute population decline has recently begun in Japan. Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, the original “tiger” economies of Asia, are not far behind. These trends present an impending crisis in the respective national economies as the labour force has already begun to dramatically shrink, dependency ratios are rising, and welfare systems are becoming insolvent in rapidly aging societies. In the section on the—broadly conceived—Atlantic World, Elizabeth Kuznesof discusses how, over a long period of time, rural-urban migrants in Latin America often became domestic servants. Though migration by itself did not increase domestic service, and though the prospect of domestic service was not a major reason for migratory movements, nevertheless large proportions of urban domestic servants arrived in cities as migrants; this was true in the early nineteenth century and became even more striking after 1850. She notes that the long history of patron-client relations and a highly skewed social structure can be seen as having “naturalized” domestic service as a social and economic institution in Latin America. The “migration system” which continues to feed domestic service in Latin American cities is functional, with domestic servants from some families and villages working for generations of elite or middle-class families in cities. While changes in both the legal and the educational systems have resulted in substantial declines in the use of child labour for domestic service, it certainly has not disappeared. Marlou Schrover, comparing data mainly for European societies, observes that while the opportunities for migration for men and women have changed over the past two centuries, new opportunities have been created and some restrictions have disappeared. Despite these changes, the percentage of migrant women remained more or less equal to the percentage of migrant men. This does not deny that there were groups of migrants or periods and countries in which the sex ratio was less balanced. This is, for instance, true for the migration from the Philippines to several European countries, in which women outnumber men. In the interwar period, when several European countries restricted the migration of men, there was to some measure a feminization of migration. Within the guest worker migration regime, too, there has been a masculinization of migration, which has not been addressed or problematized. She also

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contends that the discourse on the feminization of migration springs from the fact that more attention is paid to the migration of women and by the campaigns on behalf of migrant women in an attempt to gain equal rights. Most importantly, the emphasis on the protection of migrant women is linked to issues of safety and control, and under a label “women as problems”—to use her term, a “problematization” of women—is increasingly used to legitimize restrictions on their migration. Turning to Russia, Gijs Kessler observes that the case for connecting migration history to the study of family systems has been repeatedly and eloquently made. Not only does migration decision-making usually take place in a family context, but prevalent patterns of household formation, or “family systems”, also have a profound influence on migration directions and volumes. This is principally because family systems determine who is available for migration and at which point in the life cycle; the type and nature of the connection migrants will retain to the household of origin, as well as patterns of household formation in the regions of arrival and settlement. Kessler also discusses how, following the collapse of the Soviet system, labour migrants from Central Asia presently include a fair share of educated people whose qualifications have ceased to be income-earning assets in a changed economic environment. In this sense their migration for work in Russia is in many respects an experience of downward social mobility, and this above all sets them apart from their nineteenth-century counterparts. Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder explain the continuity and change in the transatlantic migrations of women into domestic service and caregiving occupations. They also find that racial policies juxtaposed white West and North European women with colonial Irish, olive South, and dark East European ones. After 1945, when white Europe no longer provided a reservoir for voluntary migrants, recruitment of women temporarily shifted to employment from within Europe’s post-1945 Displaced Persons’ camps. When the camps emptied, the Caribbean and other formerly colonized societies emerged as new sources for domestic labour. Race again served as marker, but changing societal attitudes reduced its impact. Finally, women of all colours avail themselves of options or create their own and, wherever possible, move on to live more independent lives. In the section on North and sub-Saharan Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean, Dennis D. Cordell surveys the migration of women and men in West Africa and beyond since 1800, examining how their forms of mobility related to each other, and how they were intertwined with work and



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social reproduction in different and complex ways. Like Kessler, he asserts that the relationships between gender and migration (or non-migration) grow out of the internal dynamics of households and societies, just as they are also shaped by external influences and demands. Critically, he points out that women moved, even though research on the history of migration in Africa has overwhelmingly focused on men. In the chapter on the Eastern Mediterranean, Akram Khater states that both men and women migrated overseas as part of a family investment strategy. This disproves the prevailing idea that women migrated as associational migrants. Further, men and women’s moves were important because migration was seen as the path to a more comfortable life over time. Kamel Kateb and Hassène Kassar provide a survey of the diversity of emigration and immigration flows in the countries of the Maghreb, namely Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. They show how French colonization of Algeria from 1830 had two important implications. First, French rule ended the traditional patterns of migration of family and kin groups in the region and turned it into flight and dispossession. Second, France’s need for workers led to emigration from the Maghreb to France, beginning with men but quickly also involving women. The authors show these migrants’ subsequent integration into French and European Union societies. This has enabled them to circumvent the rules in a region where the circulation of capital and goods is relatively free, but that of citizens from developing countries is frequently—and severely—restrained. The section on Asian migrations is introduced by Adam McKeown who asserts that histories of mass migrations are almost always comparative, whether explicitly or implicitly. For example, claims about the modernity of the transatlantic migrations of the nineteenth century and their embeddedness in the processes of industrialization, liberalization, globalization and improved communication technologies, seek to establish a difference from earlier times. Crucially, they also try to differentiate between migration from places such as Asia that did not undergo such massive transformation at the time and which are assumed not to have experienced mass mobility. Similarly, studies of Chinese emigration are suffused with assertions and counter-assertions about the distinctness and specific “Chineseness” of these events. The debate is on whether or not Chinese had a unique propensity to be sojourners: to be unwilling to migrate; to be attached to their homes; to have a bias against female migration; to form associations; to resist assimilation; to engage in business; or to establish resilient networks and personal relations (guanxi). Thus a better understanding of global migration patterns will help create an understanding

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of world history that does not project European—implicitly racialized “white”—models as global templates. Vera Mackie explores how Meiji Japan became prominent as a destination country for labour migrants in the last few decades of the twentieth century due to its economic dominance in the region. The patterns of labour migration underwent several changes related to the gender and nationality of migrants and the migrants’ occupations in Japan. These changing patterns depended on demand for particular forms of work in the country, on Japan’s border control policies, and on the economic situations of sending countries—on power relationships. Additionally, the changing patterns of labour migration to Japan conform to Japan’s position in what has recently been called the “global gender order”. In other words, the gendered patterns of labour migration can only be understood by considering the interaction of local gender orders in sending and receiving countries and situating these patterns in the context of a global gender order. Amarjit Kaur provides a comparative account of international labour migration in Southeast Asia in two periods: the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries and the period since the 1970s. During the first period, imperial-led globalization facilitated European empire building in Southeast Asia, the acquisition of colonies and emergence of new commercial and trading networks between empires and dominions. An empire-wide sourcing of labour then resulted in mass migration from India and China to sparsely populated Malaya and other colonies to work in the mines and plantations to produce commodities for industrial Europe. Colonizer powers not only sanctioned the export of labour, but also established indenture or contract labour regimes that enabled migrants to finance their travel and passage costs and provided investors in plantations and mines with labour constrained by legal frames. Male migrants dominated these migrations, but women also migrated as indentured and free workers for commodity production and domestic work. Migration practically ceased after the Second World War but resumed in the 1970s and 1980s when countries like Singapore and Malaysia again faced labour shortages. In the context of the new economics of migration, and regional wage differentials, migration came to be regarded as an important labour diversification strategy for the Philippine and Indonesian states. Migration also mirrored the dual trends of the new international division of labour and the “new world domestic order”, linking spaces between the high- and middle-income and poorer countries in the region. These transformed



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migration patterns also underscore issues of gender, ethnicity and a racialized hierarchy of foreign workers within destination states. Patcharawalai Wongboonsin investigates in historical depth the diverse migratory flows into Thailand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as since the 1970s, tracking the shifting gendered patterns of migration. She recounts that migratory movements into the Thai state in the earlier period were male-dominated, and included both free and coerced flows. The migrant workers’ main occupations in the first period were consistent with the three main “male” dominated job categories: manual labour, trade, and court/regal services. The majority of the female migrants went as dependents rather than as primary breadwinners. The situation changed in the twentieth century with women migrating as primary migrants and a distinct pattern of migration of women engaging in the sex trade emerged. Since the second half of the twentieth century, both male and female migrant workers have been employed in an expanded range of activities. Male migrant workers concentrate in manual jobs, including construction, manufacturing, and in the agricultural and fishery sectors. Women migrant workers’ occupations currently include labour-intensive manufacturing production (textiles, garments, and footwear), and agricultural and fishery-related processing activities. Apart from sex-work, migrant women are also concentrated in care-giving activities, like their counterparts in other Southeast Asian states. In the section “Case Studies: Southeast Asian Domestic and Care-Worker Migrations” the authors of the three chapters deal with Indonesia and Malaya/Malaysia both before and after independence in the context of the region. Muhamad Nadratuzzaman Hosen and Aswatini Raharto briefly review Indonesian labour migration overseas during the colonial period, when the Dutch colonial government sent Javanese workers as contract coolies to the newly opened plantation areas in Sumatera and Kalimantan (Borneo) and the Dutch colony of Suriname. These labour flows involved men and women, the latter undertaking specific tasks on the plantations. However, records show that some Javanese women were selected from among the coolies to work as housekeepers (baboe) and also combined domestic and sexual service to European staff on the plantations. Since the 1980s, the percentage of female international labour migrants from Indonesia has increased substantially, and women who work as domestic workers/caregivers in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia have dominated the officially registered migration outflows. The involvement of Indonesian women in domestic work has attracted considerable controversy. Most

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women migrants are exposed to exploitation and discrimination, not only on the basis of race and class but also on the basis of gender, since domestic workers are outside the protection provided by labour legislation both in Indonesia and in several destination countries. Keat Gin Ooi compares the experiences of domestic workers in Malaya during the colonial and the post-1970s periods. He recounts how the Cantonese domestic amah-chieh literally “ruled” most upper-class households in Malaya from the late 1930s to the early 1970s. These domestic workers were adept at all household tasks from shopping for groceries and other necessities to cooking, and other laundry, ironing, and cleaning tasks as well as serving as nursemaids or nannies to infants and young children. They also worked as caregivers to the aged and infirm in the family. Close emotional bonds developed and most were regarded as part of the family or even accepted as honorary family members. This generation of domestic servants died off by the 1970s and early 1980s. In the 1980s, employment of domestic workers became an acceptable lifestyle choice among urban and upper middle-class households where the mistress of the house often pursued a career or managed a business. Most Malaysian households prefer Indonesian maids due to the common language and the low costs involved. A comparative study of Cantonese domestic servants and Indonesian domestic workers is useful in evaluating the impact of imported domestic help from without in the Malayan/Malaysian household. Kiranjit Kaur compares the experiences of migrant workers in Malaysia during the colonial and contemporary periods through an analysis of media reports. She recounts how attempts were made by ethnic migrant groups to highlight, in Malayan newspapers in China and India, and also in local newspapers, workers’ poor working conditions and their plight. But migrant workers were largely invisible and powerless, as were the Malayans. Nevertheless, frames of agency are changing with the growth of associational activity and the role of non-state actors working as human rights defenders. Intense negative reporting in the Indonesian press about the abuses suffered by domestic workers has contributed to deteriorating relations between the two countries. In turn, the Malaysian media has retaliated by highlighting the problems faced by employers, the “poor” quality of migrant workers, and the role of agents/intermediaries in Indonesia who have contributed to the situation. Reports of ill-treatment of Indonesian domestic workers by Malaysian employers have repeatedly resulted in temporary bans on migration. The last three chapters deal with migration and adjustment in family life. Shelly Chan argues for an integrated approach to the history of



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Chinese migrations that neither treats China as passive and changeless, nor privileges mobility, but asks how the homeland actively shaped trans­ national experiences in the context of changing national and global phenomena. During the early 1950s, the new Communist government sought to redefine marriage in the emigrant villages of south China. Under the broad vision of creating socialist subjects and unions that laboured and produced locally, the Party-state assumed that all wives left behind by emigrant men (qiaofu) were oppressed, adulterous, and dependent, thus fundamentally misunderstanding the complex gender and generational dynamics in the transnational family and the productive role of women in the household economy. Soon after encouraging the wives to end their assumedly unhappy marriages to absent men under the 1950 Marriage Law, the Party-state found the divorces contradicting its divergent goal of attracting the loyalty and remittances of men overseas. As a result, it reversed the attack on transnational marriages and demanded that leftbehind wives preserve their marriages in the interest of the new state. Like their Chinese counterparts in Southeast Asia and North America whose political loyalty became intensely questioned, the unexpected changes facing the left-behind in China show that transnational experiences were at the centre of controversies in the 1950s. Tomoko Nakamatsu examines a relatively new phenomenon in East and South East Asia—the dramatic rise in international brokered marriages and marriage migration. Most of these marriages are contracted between East Asian men in the wealthier East Asian countries (including Southeast Asian Singapore and Malaysia) and women from poorer Southeast Asian countries. She recounts how the field of marriage migration has intensified over the last twenty years and the ways in which the transnational marriage business has played a considerable role in shaping the processes of migration. The commodification of marriage by brokers also reveals the ways in which the globalized business capitalizes on changing local demography, gender relations, and regional economic stratifications. She points out that romantic love also matters in brokered marriage, its potential is vital to the rhetoric of selling introduction services, and it affects women migrants when they attempt to define their marriage migration experiences and rebuild their personal, familial, and social identities in the host country. Paying attention to the place of love in brokered crossborder marriages helps us to articulate the nexus of gender, mobility, the economy, and human agency. In the concluding chapter, Rochelle Ball, in a broad sweep, traces the gendering of international migration from the Philippines in the twentieth

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and early twenty-first centuries. She points out that since the early 1970s, international labour migration has been a mechanism of globalization and has transformed the Philippine polity and society. Policy relies heavily on women’s labour as the “model” and on making the Philippines an internationally dominant labour-exporting nation. Within this broader gendered labour migration context, Ball’s research highlights how this dynamic has impacted within the Philippines itself, and the historical and contemporary significance of this transformative process. Thus, the chapters indicate how state and family, migration traditions and family economies, and regional economic as well as structural societal contexts influence women’s migration. While women’s migrations have a history as long as those of men and, like men’s, are independent as well as family-contextualized, the role their migrations and their decision-making plays in family and state economies has changed in recent decades. The impact of both their remittances in societies of origin and their labour in receiving societies has become increasingly important.

Transcultural Approaches to Gendered Labour Migration: From the Nineteenth-Century Proletarian to Twenty-First-Century Caregiver Mass Migrations Dirk Hoerder Migrant men and women in the past and in the present have moved between societies. They migrate from a specific local and regional socialization to a specific labour market segment elsewhere—translocal and transregional within their country of birth and citizenship or transstate and transnational outside of it. Researchers have often looked only at industrial or agricultural labour but until recently hardly at work in the service sector. They have segmented slave, so-called coolie, and allegedly free labour into different subfields. They also, for long, concentrated on migrating men. In this chapter, I will 1. discuss, critique, and historicize recent anchor terms in scholarly and public discourses: globalization, transnationalism, feminization of migration, and the skilled/unskilled categories; 2. explicate the development of inclusion of women’s migrations into the field from the 1880s; and 3. suggest a shift from national to regional data, interpreted within societal frames, approached by an interdisciplinary Transcultural Societal Studies methodology, and develop how migrant agency involves “Otherness as a resource” if under severe constraints. After these re-conceptualizations, I will in gendered perspectives 4. historicize the emergence of the nineteenth- to mid-twentieth century migrations in a perspective of centuries-long global connectivity; and 5. discuss the migration systems that emerged with the shift from industrial to service economies in the western and the oil-extracting segments of the world, as well as the change from de-colonized nationstates to (female) labour-exporting states. Current Concepts and Catchwords? Historicizing Migrations and Migration Research In recent scholarship the scale of migration has expanded from transcontinental and transoceanic to “global.” At the same time, the concept of

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“transnational” migrants has reemphasized nations and, to a lesser degree, states. The new visibility of women is caught by the questionable term “feminization of migration” which also implies unskilled work. The “global” scale of economic and migratory interactions receives emphasis since the so-called Third (coloured) World has begun to impact the so-called First (white) World in a frame of worldwide shifts of “lightfooted” capital, capitalists’ interests, and “Western-global” financial institutions like the World Bank or International Monetary Fund.1 Export of jobs to countries with lower wages and lower cost of living severely curtails production facilities and jobs in the “West” but increases profitability of capital and expands the global impact of capitalist economic relations/ hierarchies. However, long-distance connectedness is not at all new. The three continents of the Asian-African-European (“old”) world were linked by land routes and sea lanes. So were, overland, the Inca, Aztec, and Pueblo societies as well as those further north in the (“new”) world of the Americas. Globalization began, at the latest, with the late fifteenthcentury connections from Europe’s Atlantic rim to both, the Americas’ Caribbean societies by stateside conquest and the attempt to achieve control over the Indian Ocean lanes of trade and private investments, as well as with the establishment of distant commercial and plantation economies. It continued with forced colonization of ever larger segments of the globe. The European expansionists destroyed trade protocols and cultural exchanges through superior firepower and imposition of an ideology of white men’s—and women’s—superiority. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Asia, Chinese entrepreneurs and their capital investments shaped segments of Southeast Asian societies (which had formed an integrated macro-region in the first millennium ce), and merchants’ capital from particular regions in South Asia shaped the hierarchy of trade relations in the Indian Ocean rim’s port cities. The power of European colonizer states and trading companies, at first very limited, centred on fortified trading posts, whether Goa, Batavia, or other. Immanuel Wallerstein’s early “world systems” conceptualization has been critiqued as Eurocentric and amended by Janet Abu-Lughod to incorporate Asian circuits of capital accumulation and trade.2 A new form of eco1 Anthony H. Richmond, Global Apartheid. Refugees, Racism, and the New World Order (Toronto, 1994). 2 Immanuel M. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York, 1974–1988); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, 1989).



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nomic institutions, stateside chartered private companies of investors, most prominently the English and the Dutch East India Companies (EIC and VOC), were, except for the charter privileges, largely independent of the state’s governments in which they had their headquarters. By signing treaties with distant rulers and hiring military migrants as mobile armies, such private investors developed zones of interest. Soldiering work in armies and navies, whether seasonal or multi-annual, required large numbers of mobile men (and, often, female support staff), and private “condottiere” or state-chartered buccaneers as well as state armies initiated labour mass migrations of armed men. The intention was to dominate trade networks through monopolies and replace or, at least license and thus profit from, the respective region’s resident merchants. Despite superiority in armament, European company men, deficient in language and cultural knowledge, continued to be just one group of traders among many. In some specific locations, they achieved rule and imposed slave labour regimes, as did the VOC’s first Governor General on the Moluccans to control spice production. They could also provide jobs as evidenced by the Jesuits outsourcing the production of Catholic devotional objects from Iberia to Portuguese Goa. In the Europe-South America-West Africa expansion, the transatlantic exchange (sometimes personalized as “Columbian” exchange) had significant demographic consequences. The unwitting introduction of diseases brought demographic collapse to the peoples of the Americas, and brutally exploitative labour regimes caused havoc in family relations and demographics. In Africa, the new plantation and mining regimes’ high demand for bound labour resulted in cooperation between militarized coastal raiding states in the Guineas and fort-based European traders. After the near-genocide in the Americas and population depletion, that created a demographic “gap” in Africa,3 the import of South American food plants, the potato in particular, made possible a demographic boost in Europe which would increase potential for out-migration. Within a century, the heavily armed over-the-seas migrants from the emerging northern White Atlantic’s rim annexed the Indian Ocean rim’s 3 From the 1440s to the 1870s, 12.4 million men, women, and children were shipped off with 10.6 million survivors of the “Middle Passage” arriving in the Americas. The total human toll includes the deaths during the raids and during the forced march to the coastal trading forts. Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007), 3, revising Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade. A Census (Madison, 1969), and Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Volume of the Atlantic Slave Trade: A Synthesis”, Journal of African History 23 (1982): 473–502.

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production and migration systems and imposed forced migrations in the World of the Black Atlantic. Usually discussed in terms of European colonizer states and their colonies, expansion and migration connected particular regions of birth and socialization to particular regions of resources and options though profit-interest-driven mediation of private investors’ commercial power or plantation regimes. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the debate about ending chattel slavery4 and its stepby-step abolition, 1800s-1880s, occurred in the frame of continuing high demand for labour. Two replacement labour regimes emerged: a system of involuntary contract labour or indentured servitude in segments of Asia and a regime of so-called “free” migrations in the North Atlantic economies. The latter was “self-willed” or “self-decided” under extreme economic constraints rather than “free.” Labour demand and labour supply interacted globally. If men’s out-migration balanced labour markets, it unbalanced marriage or partnership markets in the region of departure and thus changed interactions in the reproductive sphere. Wherever capital was invested in view of natural climate and fertile soils or to access mineral deposits, labour was required and men and women were mobilized locally or afar under incentives or force.5 Unbalanced sex ratios demanded place-specific reconstructions of gender relations and partnership formation. In the north, the fur trade economy extended from Scandinavia eastward to Russia-Siberia and westward through northern North America to connect in Alaska-Kamchatka. Across the globe’s tropical and sub-tropical zones, European investors—subsidized by their states through tax-funded military and administrator personnel—established the export-driven Plantation Belt and mining zones. Such economic realms, planned by men, involved women. In North America, conjugal unions—“tender ties” in Sylvia van Kirk’s words—provided the base for the fur business: in-migrating men contributed long-distance trade connections and resident women the knowledge of local languages, cultural practices, and resources.6 In Southeast Asia’s plantation econo4 In the Indian Ocean World’s Arab and Indian societies, after the end of productive slavery, the system was limited to service in the domestic sphere, commerce, or statecraft and ended late in the nineteenth century. 5 Dirk Hoerder, “Segmented Macrosystems and Networking Individuals: The Balancing Functions of Migration Processes”, in Migrations, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, eds. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen (Bern, 1997), 73–84. 6 Sylvia van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties:” Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg, 1980). Elsewhere “ties” might involve violence, abduction, and unintended or involuntary acculturation to the ways of the more powerful. See James F. Brooks,



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mies, women—like men—were used as workers and, often, exploited sexually by white overseers. Male plantation workers were brought, often under duress, from distant societies; some came with families, others consorted with co-migrant or local women, again others paid for sex.7 Gender also determined wages. In Malaya’s rubber plantations in the 1870s, for example, women’s wages were often only half of those paid to men. Macro-regional labour regimes in a capitalist world system set the terms for who could pay for food and accommodation and under which constraints sexual and emotional unions could be formed.8 These imperial state and capitalist-dominated power relationships were far more relevant to the colonized than Europeans’ “nation-state”-concept that emerged or was invented in the nineteenth century.9 The concept of transnationalism, based on the nation-state paradigm, seems to overcome the fragmentation into bordered territorial states. The nation, as an allegedly innovative and modern organization of polities, easily coexisted with traditional dynastic constructions of states and colonizer empires. The paradigm of the nation-state is premised on a contradiction in terms, perhaps intentionally so: On the one hand, Enlightenment intellectuals’ thought and people’s agency in the “Age of Revolution” re-conceptualized subjects of dynastic rulers, that is, persons, into republican states’ citizens equal before the law—gendered, since, with few exceptions, women’s belonging was mediated though fathers or husbands. On the other

Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002), and Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA, 2008). 7 From among many publications see Margaret Strobel, Gender, Sex, and Empire (Washington, 1993); Ann L. Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures”, American Ethnologist 16 (1989), 634–60, and Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt 1870–1979 (New Haven, 1985); Douglas M. Peers, “Privates off Parade: Regimenting Sexuality in the 19th-Century Indian Empire”, International History Review 20 (1998), 823–54; Jan C. Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial Order in Southeast Asia (Delhi, 1987); Jan C. Breman and E. Valentine Daniel, “The Making of a Coolie”, Journal of Peasant Studies 19, nos. 3/4 (1992), 268–95. Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, N.C., 2002), chapters 11 and 16. 8 For a detailed analysis of recruitment, migration, and working conditions see Amarjit Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia since 1840: Globalisation, the International Division of Labour and Labour Transformations (Basingstoke, 2004). Norman J. Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy and Administration: A History of Labour in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1960). 9 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983, 3rd ed., London, 1986); Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983).

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hand, the parallel construction of nation placed nationals above resident “minorities”, a newly invented term, and above (im)migrants from other, “alien”, cultures. The component “state” postulated equality before the law, the component “nation” inequality regarding access to resources and legal institutions. The nation-states’ gendered and unequal structures had direct consequences for data collection on migration. Men’s dominance in governments’ bureaucracies and their reluctance (up to the 1950s) to grant women independent citizenship made data-collection gender-biased. Framed by male nation-state discourse, male administrators collected information at inter-state borders with women’s citizenship derivative. Also, cultural “minorities” counted as nationals—both women and those of different ways of life were deprived of cultural specificity.10 In a further obfuscation, “inter-state” borders are usually designated “inter-national” to imply cultural homogeneity within each territory though, empirically, internal cultural diversity and cross-border ethno-cultural continuity are the rule. If women become invisible in statewide statistics, they are present in data registered below the national level, in municipal records for example. Marriage registers, studied for Vienna or Amsterdam, give brides’ and grooms’ birth-place. Small-town, village, or parish vital records often list departures, arrivals, and returns of everyone. Thus municipal and regional data permit correction of gender bias in national data.11 Traditional migration historians uncritically adopted the nation-state ideology and, as their corollary, developed the “nation to ethnic enclave”-paradigm for migration in the Atlantic World and, under “the West and the rest”-simplification, subsumed the world’s societies under European models. The term “transnational”, introduced in the early 1990s by anthropologists concentrating on migrations from Central America and the Philippines to the United States, seemed to have merit: migrants keep their ties to the polity-society of departure and state borders matter for entry regu10 Candice L. Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own. Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship (Berkeley, 1998); Jacqueline Bhabha, Francesca Klug, Sue Shutter, Worlds Apart: Women under Immigration and Nationality Law (London, 1985). 11  Sölvi Sogner, “Young in Europe about 1700: Norwegian Sailors and Servant-Girls Seeking Employment in Amsterdam”, in Mesurer et comprendre. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Dupâquier, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardet, François Lebrun, and René Le Mée (Paris, 1993), 514–32; Andreas Weigl, “Residenz, Bastion und Konsumptionsstadt: Stadtwachstum und demographische Entwicklung einer werdenden Metropole”, in Weigl, ed., Wien im Dreißigjährigen Krieg. Bevölkerung—Gesellschaft—Kultur—Konfession (Wien, 2001), 31–105, esp. 91ff.; Sylvia Hahn, Migration—Arbeit—Geschlecht. Arbeitsmigration in Mitteleuropa vom 17. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2008), 160–70.



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lations. This emphasis on “trans”, on continuing relations, critiqued the mistaken “uprooted” or “disorganization” paradigm of earlier historians. But the two case studies did not support the “national” in transnational.12 Migrants/refugees from Central American states with right-wing regimes supported by the state of destination, the US, were “Indios”, cultural groups not recognized by “their” state as full citizens and though the people of the Philippines are characterized by high regional and religious diversity. Migrants, identify with micro-regions rather than a state. A multi-layered gendered analysis of region and state, polity and economy, global and local is required. Scholars face another problem in the division of labour as skilled or unskilled. Seemingly a categorization, it reflects in fact a gender ideology. Historically, work was skilled if certified—a useful construct in the Central and, later, Western European urban world where the (predominantly male) craft guilds granted certificates upon the successful completion of an apprenticeship, assuring customers of high-quality products. During industrialization the categorization was adapted to industry and labour union formation. In contrast, capabilities learned during childhood socialization by observing, imitating, and practising (“on-the-job training”), whether women’s reproductive work, agricultural families’ labour, or families’ home production of marketable goods, were not certified and were, in a non sequitur, labelled unskilled in bureaucratic record-keeping practices, capitalist employers’ wage scales, and in scholars’—uncritical— analyses. While women’s household labour was symbolically annihilated, agricultural work of men in the fields (and of women in farmyards) posed a problem: It is production but serves the reproductive aspects of life. Some societies’ language usage upgrades farmers to society-supporting yeomen (not yeo-women or yeo-families); others—perhaps in other periods— downgraded them as peasants or country-girls and -boys. The certificateskill connection is a social convention from which an interest-driven regime of remuneration and valuation was and is deduced. Most women, in periods when marriage was the norm, acquired a certificate by migrating as brides to the patri-local new family home. The marriage certificate

12 Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, Cristina Blanc-Szanton, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York, 1992), esp. “Introduction”, and same, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration”, Anthropological Quarterly 68 (1995), 48–63; Dirk Hoerder, “Historians and Their Data: The Complex Shift form Nation-State Approaches to the Study of People’s Transcultural Lives”, Journal of American Ethnic History 25, no. 4 (2006), 85–96.

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entitled them to room and board in return for unpaid service labour. In a concise, somewhat simplifying summary that reflects the simplifying ideology and the interests behind it, rural and mechanized food production, the home or factory-based production of clothing, and domesticcaregiving work have been labelled unskilled, the production of durable goods and machinery have been labelled skilled. Thus, hewing stones for a cathedral’s pillar is skilled work, raising a child is unskilled work. In reproductive work—in the household—some repetitive tasks may indeed be learned quickly. However, women cook and sew as well as coddle, train, and educate children. On farms they would sow, harvest, and cut firewood. Most of these tasks, when certified, change categorization to “skilled” and entitle the worker to adequate remuneration. From the 1880s, capitalist Taylorization, the division of certified skilled labour into ever smaller repetitive and uncertified tasks, deskilled class-conscious male (and female) workers. The arbitrary and gendered character of the classification system is also obvious in hierarchies of industrial sectors: work in heavy industry was designated as skilled, industrial production of clothing and food as un- or semi-skilled. Even at the height of steel-based industrialization—on which historians have placed so much emphasis— the majority of wage-earners worked in the latter sectors.13 Migration historians, in particular, would have been in a position to challenge the skilled-unskilled dichotomy. Industrialization required a massive expansion of infrastructure: canals, dikes, roads, railroad track beds. Thus, many earth-working men migrated from tilling the soil and clearing rocks on farms to moving soil and clearing rocks for “internal improvement” projects. Through migration they changed skills as little as women moving between households. Scholars, instead, ethnicized training and migration: Early labour migrants to North America—from England, German-language Central Europe, and some regions of Scandinavia—became skilled factory workers; East and South European immigrants—like those from China and Mexico—unskilled ones. It needs to be added that migration from skilled (but not certified) agricultural or household labour to industrial work, in which many or most of the previously acquired skills become obsolete, involves de-skilling and, in the conceptualization of labour market theorists, results in “spoiled identities.”14 13 Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: a Global History (New York, forthcoming), chapter 9. 14 F.C. Valkenburg and A.M.C. Vissers, “Segmentation of the Labour Market: The Theory of the Dual Labour Market—The Case of the Netherlands”, Netherlands Journal of



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Finally, it is necessary to gender migrants with high qualifications, like Dutch drainage experts in Russia, Chinese merchants in Manila, German craftsmen in New York—all men. Among women, language teachers, governesses, highly competent seamstresses, and migrating merchants’ or colonial officials’ wives brought their skills to new locales. In the present, female software programmers migrate from Bangalore to Canada. Such women move over as large distances as men. All gendered constructions of skilled migrations and cultural belongings need to be revised. Gendering Migration Research: Aspects of the Conceptual Trajectories At the very point in time at which scholars made women migrants invisible, their presence was publicly debated and assessed by employers as regards work, reproduction, and sexual services. Thus, in addition to migrant women’s own sources, public ones are available. Female and male migrants and potential migrants were highly aware of the issues involved—emotional life and family formation required presence of both sexes, gendered migrations were closely related. Across the globe, societies assigned gender roles differently and migration strategies, both developed by migrants and imposed by political institutions and employers, adjusted to such frames and interests. We will first survey the presence of women in major regions of migration. In sub-Saharan African societies and in the slave trade, the valuation of women depended on the cultural-economic region. Most bound women, a rights-in-persons dependency, remained within the region since most societies valued their family and agricultural labour capacity. In the eastward slave trade to Arabian and Indian societies many became concubines, a regulated position in Islamic societies and at Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist courts. They remained persons. In the Euro-American plantation regime, investors depersonalized slaves into chattel and assumed men to be stronger. Profit-driven capitalist planters, in cost-benefit and profit analyses, calculated that importation of newly caught slaves was cheaper than raising slave women’s children to working age. Thus, while profits

Sociology 16 (1980), 155–70; Dirk Hoerder, “An Introduction to Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies, 1815–1914”, in Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies, ed. Dirk Hoerder (Westport, Ct., 1985), 3–31, and “Introduction”, in Hoerder, ed., “Struggle a Hard Battle”— Essays on Working-Class Immigrants (DeKalb, Ill., 1986), 3–15.

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accrued to the plantation societies, the cost of reproduction was borne by African societies. Still, about one third of the enslaved Africans arriving in the Americas were women. European intruders, across the globe, favoured male workers because, contrary to many other societies in the world, their system of gender roles assigned agricultural work to men. In Asia, specific gender regimes emerged in the several distinct migration systems. Among South China’s diasporic free, credit-ticket, and indentured migrants, women were few. Confucian gender and intergenerational prescripts assigned women a low position and demanded that sons return to take care of their parents. Thus, no male-female intergenerational communities could emerge in the diaspora. Rather, men often formed partnerships with local women in Southeast Asia, the port cities of East Africa, or Hawai’i. Chinese amahs, single women taking care of children, migrated to Southeast Asian communities. In British-India’s version of the indenture regime, changing over time and varying by port of departure, imperial authorities came to mandate a ratio of women of 1:5, 1:3, or 2:5—a professed humanitarian approach of the imperial “protectors of emigrants.” While most plantation owners hardly valued women, some calculated that migration of families or of single women who could form relationships with men would stabilize the labour force, increase re-indentures, and though sex and birth provide the next generation of workers. Others considered men more tractable if they lived with or had access to women. Widows and some single women migrated on their own to escape the rigorous constraints imposed by village societies. In India, inter-regional men’s, women’s, and family migration depended on type of work and destination. Migrating married men might call for their wife and children when deciding to settle at mines or factories. In passenger migrations, family migration was common: all members formed a pool of labour for small trade and wives provided status for merchants. In Europe, during the early stages of colonization, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands prohibited or discouraged emigration of women. But sources reveal that some migrated to meet their husbands or establish new lives independently. Agricultural settlement migration to the Americas, South Africa, or Australia, included women since farming requires family labour. Often whole families departed. Migrating single men formed unions with local women—under duress, in hierarchies, or by consent and emotional exchange—but colonizer states’ racial identity policies forbade their return with such families. Thus, Dutch men with Southeast Asian partners/ wives either had to stay or could “return” only half-way as far as the Cape Colony. In transatlantic migrations the gender ratio amounted



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to 60:40, between 1815 and 1914. Women’s migration was promoted when family formation and procreation were to stabilize a regional society. In the early period of French colonization in the St. Lawrence Valley, filles du roi were sent to New France under the protection of the king. For similar reasons, men in the US West—whether rural regions, towns, or cities— sought to recruit women from the country’s East. The British “Empire Settlement Scheme” of the turn of the twentieth century intended to rid the “motherland” of single women (as well as orphans, children of the poor, and slightly disabled veterans of colonial wars). Male population planners considered them a burden on resources. In the colonies the women were to become housekeepers, companions, or wives (perhaps in sequence) of white (British) men who would thus be kept from consorting with nonwhite women.15 Similarly, Germany, after destroying itself during World War II, tried to rebuild from the ruins by preventing men from emigrating and encouraging war widows and single women to depart—male bureaucrats considered them a cost-factor rather than an asset. National belonging and access to resources has always been gendered and heavyhandedly so. Nation is not a cultural or genetic given, nations are made by male administrators with the power to include or exclude.16 This highly visible presence of women was disregarded by male scholars. A mere two studies, both data-based, appeared in the mid-1880s. In Great Britain, with its early expulsion of rural families through enclosure as well as mobilization of factory labour, social geographer Ernest G. Ravenstein, a migrant from the Germanies, noted that according to census data “woman is a greater migrant than man” if, in his interpretation, over short-distance internal routes to options in domestic service, shops, or factories. Men moved further and crossed state borders. A recent project, re-evaluating his data, indicated that he suppressed part of the data on women’s migrations.17 Highly skilled women migrated across state borders and transcontinentally; even women in domestic work migrated from the 15 Lisa Chilton, Agents of Empire. British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s–1930 (Toronto, 2007); Janice Gothard, “ ‘The healthy, wholesome British domestic girl’: Single Female Migration and the Empire Settlement Act, 1922–30”, in Emigrants and Empire. British Settlement in the Dominions between the Wars, ed. Stephen Constantine (Manchester, 1990), 72–95; Joanna Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters. Women of the British Empire (London, 1983). 16 For details and research references see Hoerder, Cultures in Contact. 17 Ernest G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration”,  Journal of the Statistical Society of London 48, no. 2 (June 1885), 167–235, and addendum 52, no. 2 (June 1889), 241–305. On-going research at the Immigration History Research Center, Univ. of Minnesota—information courtesy of Donna Gabaccia.

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Germanies to Paris and to Swiss cities or from Slovenia via Trieste as far as Alexandria, Egypt. Some women undertook multiple short- and longdistance migrations and might use their savings from service jobs to establish themselves in business. In countries like China and the United States, women’s “internal” migration involved huge distances; nineteenth-century European women crossed the Atlantic to take jobs as “maids.” In imperial China a court-ordered centralization of silk manufacture prompted massive migrations by women and men engaged in all parts of the process from raising silk-worms to weaving to embroidering tapestry.18 In the 1880s, the Habsburg-Austrian statistician Albert von Randow demonstrated that the most significant factor for migrant self-selection involved gendered regional labour markets in which specific socialization and training provided (potential) migrants with options to access jobs in one or more specific destination regions. Empires or states had little meaning for migrants’ selection of destinations. Interregional information exchange incorporated details on job availability and broad assessments of economic cycles. Such exchange was mediated at first by craft or trader migrants; then by recruitment through local, experienced, and trusted middlemen or women; finally by recruiting through distant entrepreneurs. Through such backward and forward linkages, transregional migrations became self-sustaining. In the second half of the nineteenth century, gendered information flows expanded into the transatlantic exchange.19 Women’s (and men’s) destinations—circumscribed by capital flows and migrant-created networks—included not only the oft-cited big cities, but small towns with a middle class in need of (female) service personnel and of (male) workers in craft and factory production as well as often isolated mining, lumbering, and other resource-extracting regions. In-migrating women, as cooks, influenced whole regional cuisines which would come to be appropriated by the resident ethno-culture, for example the Bohemian- and Hungarian-flavoured “Vienna” cuisine. This— and many other cases—involves incorporation of migrant contributions without recognition. In the frame of networks, male and female migrants selected specific nearby or distant labour markets, and interregional linkages extended beyond state borders. Many destination regions offered 18 Hahn, Migration—Arbeit—Geschlecht, 217–218; Dieter Kuhn, Die Song-Dynastie (960 bis 1279). Eine neue Gesellschaft im Spiegel ihrer [materiellen] Kultur (Weinheim, 1987), 121–123, 143–155, 287–392. 19 Albert von Randow, “Wanderbewegung der centraleuropäischen Bevölkerung”, Statistische Monatsschrift (1884), 285–305 (Teil 1), 602–32 (Teil 2).



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overlapping—but usually not competing—labour market segments for migrants from neighbouring (or distant) regions of different culture and language, for example from Italian, Slovenian, and Croatian or Hungarian areas adjacent to the German-language spaces of the Habsburg Empire. Intercultural unions and families emerged but never became part of national master narratives.20 Geographic distances traversed by migrants are obvious, but the social and economic ones are often overlooked. Scholars took note of the changes involved in migration from rural to factory labour but assumed that women migrating from household of birth to that of employer remain “in their sphere.” The women, however, crossed the class border to (lower) middle-class families as well as the lifestyle border from rural to urban. As live-in domestics they had to adjust immediately without access to a support group. Men, moving over similar distances, might not cross any social borders and live in supportive work-centred communities. The lifestory of a Sardinian man with work stints in Naples, Panama Canal construction, and Pennsylvania, shows that he neither left his earth-working occupation nor his reference group of fellow Sardinians. In contrast, the life experiences of domestic workers everywhere on the globe indicate constant close contact with employer families. They had no “room of their own”—spaces that male factory workers could create by distancing themselves from foremen, building labour union halls, or immersing themselves in pub or sports cultures.21 Parallel to von Randow and Ravenstein—and almost as neglected by subsequent scholars—women in several countries, as social workersscholars-activists, collected data and provided interpretations on (migrant) women’s work in homes and as nurses. The Austria-born Swiss citizen Ina Britschgi-Schimmer studied Italian “foreign workers” in the German Reich.22 The women of the Hull House settlement in one of Chicago’s immigrant neighbourhoods—the first Chicago School of Sociology— collected data on women’s and families’ acculturation, work, and needs 20 Hahn, Migration—Arbeit—Geschlecht, 157–59. 21  Salvatore J. LaGumina, The Immigrants Speak. Italian Americans Tell Their Story (New York, 1981), “John Chessa”, 25–32. Christiane Harzig, ed., Peasant Maids, City Women. From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca, 1997). 22 Ina Britschgi-Schimmer, Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Lage der italienischen Arbeiter in Deutschland (Karlsruhe, 1916). Recently a large cooperative research project assessed the role of domestic women in Europe: Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, ed., Domestic Service and the Formation of European Identity: Understanding the Globalization of Domestic Work, 16th-21st Centuries (Bern, 2004).

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with the aim of inducing reform legislation. Most prominent was Jane Addams, a founding member of the American Sociological Association. Sophonisba Breckinridge, Edith Abbott, and others moved into economics to analyze the context of impoverishment and (female) immigrants’ lives.23 The later Chicago Men’s School of Sociology, particularly Robert E. Park, remained an advocate of “disorganization” theory in the exploration of alleged immigrant deviant behaviour that needed to be countered to promote stability in US cities and elsewhere.24 Differentiated approaches of the 1930s and 1940s at New York’s (Jewish) Columbia University, in Canada’s bi-cultural Montreal, in Cuba, and in Brazil remained on the margins of male-gendered und US-centred academic discourse. Caroline Ware, as part of a large, well-conceived Columbia University project, provided a detailed and sensitive community study analyzing change in families and intergenerational cultural transfer among Irish and Italian immigrants in Greenwich Village (1935). In Canada, Everett Hughes and Helen MacGill Hughes, in many-cultured Montreal, argued that receiving societies provide no single model of acculturation for migrant men or women. Further removed from the Englishlanguage core of the Atlantic World’s knowledge production, sociologist and anthropologist Gilberto Freyre discussed power and interaction that transculturated African-background slaves and Portuguese-background slave-owners into Brazil’s society. In many-cultured Cuba, ethnographer and economist Fernando Ortiz conceptualized transculturation. Both Freyre’s and Ortiz’s studies became available in the US in English translation in 1946 and 1947, but their sophisticated theoretizations did not influence migration research. Rather Oscar Handlin’s The Uprooted of 1951 set the tone for decades of research. He was seemingly unaware of Caroline Ware’s work or that of the “foreign” authors.25

23 Edith Abbott, Women in Industry. A Study in American Economic History (New York, 1910). See Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Jill Niebrugge-Brantley, The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory (New York, 1998 [new edition 2008]); Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with their Hearts. Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Prince­ ton, 2002); Mary Jo Deegan, Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1988); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Anja Schüler, Susan Strasser, Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany. A Dialogue in Documents. 1885–1933 (Ithaca, 1997). 24 Dirk Hoerder, “ ‘A Genuine Respect for the People’: The Columbia University Scholars’ Transcultural Approach to Migrants”, Journal of American Ethnic History (forthcoming 2013). 25 For details and citations see Hoerder, “ ‘A Genuine Respect for the People’ ”. Caroline F. Ware, Greenwich Village, 1920–1930: A Comment on American Civilization in the Post-war Years (Boston, 1935; re-edition 1994), quote 427. Other women historians of the



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Similarly, when between the 1890s and 1937 tens of millions of northern Chinese men and women migrated to Manchuria (after 1932 Japanesecontrolled Manchukuo), China’s educated elite paid little attention to what it considered “faceless ciphers.” In contrast, in the 1920s and 1930s, the (Japanese-owned) South Manchuria Railway Company, which transported the migrants, hired social scientists to collect data, assess labour demand in Manchuria, and research the conditions that pushed rural men and families out.26 A little noticed work was Persia C. Campbell’s Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire (1923). Indian indentured servitude research began with Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery (1974). Women, though not central to these studies, were not overlooked altogether. Thus, when research on migration systems and gendered patterns of migration would change in the 1950s, standard usage of data remained restricted to the highly problematic nation-state-level statistics, and theoretical and methodological frames for the inclusion of migrating women were missing.27 Even in the 1990s, decades after the admission of women into academic life and the development of women’s studies and gendered research, a United Nations Expert Group criticized that women were still often labelled “associational migrants, i.e. moving as passive companions of other family members.”28

time include Emily Balch, Charlotte Erickson, Phyllis A. Williams, Grazia Dore et al. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston, 1951; revised ed. 1973). 26 Joshua A. Fogel, “Introduction: Itō Takeo and the Research Work of the South Manchurian Railway Company”, in Life along the South Manchurian Railway: The Memoirs of Itō Takeo, transl. Fogel (Armonk, NY, 1988), vii–xxxi; Franklin L. Ho, Population Movement to the North Eastern Frontier in China (Shanghai, 1931). 27 See Christiane Harzig, Dirk Hoerder, with Donna Gabaccia, What is Migration History? (Cambridge, 2009), Chap. 3. 28 Richard E. Bilsborrow and Hania Zlotnik, “Preliminary Report of the United Nations Expert Group on the Feminization of Internal Migration”, International Migration Review 26, no. 1 (1992), 138–161; Monica Boyd and Elizabeth Grieco, “Women and Migration: Incorporating Gender into International Migration Theory”, Migration Information Source, 1 March 2003. http://www.migrationinfromationsourse.org/Feature/display/cfm?ID=106, accessed 14 January 2007. Mirjana Morokvasic, ed., “Women in Migration”, International Migration Review 18, no. 68 (1984); Christiane Harzig, “Women Migrants as Global and Local Agents. New Research Strategies on Gender and Migration”, in Women, Gender and Labour Migration. Historical and Global Perspectives, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London, 2001), 15–28.

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Reconceptualizations: Transcultural Approaches to Gendered Translocal and Transregional Migration Migration researchers, whether historians, sociologists, political scientists, or anthropologists, have discarded the linear push-pull perspective that implies one-directional moves and “uprootedness.” The cliché that individual men move as pioneers to distant and challenging regions or as unskilled workers to factories has always been a distortion of the data. People move in stages, in multiple directions, for different anticipated time periods, and they adjust their plans to circumstances. Temporary moves may become permanent, short-distance ones may lead to unanticipated migration over larger distances; unsatisfactory results may precipitate return. A combination of agency approaches with migrationsystems theory perceives migration as movement of women and men, individually or in families, with complex trajectories in the triple frame of society-of-origin, existing and newly emerging patterns of mobility, and receiving society. Migration studies include (1) family factors, emotional and economic as well as hierarchized, (2) broader societal causes, that is, structural determinants such as regional and state-wide economic context, government policies, institutionalized gender inequalities, and socio-cultural framing of gender roles and relations, and (3) women’s— like men’s—agency in terms of decisions, networks, and backward linkages to family of birth through remittances.29 Migrations emerge from the decisions of individuals in the context of family economies and transregional networks, local traditions and patterns of migration and gender roles, regional labour markets, and knowledge of potential destinations. The sum of the myriads of decisions, as well as the larger frames of macro-regional economic development, is reflected in the emergence (and decline) of migration systems. Such systems are self-regulating processes in the framework of macro-level as well as regional and micro-level options and constraints. They are sufficiently flexible to react to specific fluctuations in supply and demand and economic cycles. Information flows about demand for labour could be initiated by active recruitment by potential employers (top-down), or through mediating men and women travelling as small-scale producers or ped-

29 Dirk Hoerder, “From Migrants to Ethnics: Acculturation in a Societal Framework”, in European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie P. Moch (Boston, 1996), 211–262.



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dlers, or through prior contacts. In classic labour (and agricultural settlement) migrations, the information flow regulates quantity of arrivals by evaluating chances for quick insertion in terms of recession or expansion through telecommunication whether traditional intercontinental mail or modern cell phones. Where a power-wielding state exerted or exerts domination over regions of labour supply, systems of forced labour migration could be established. Similarly, internally repressive states may become refugee-generating areas and such refugees need to insert themselves into labour markets at the point of arrival. A migration system, empirically observable in geographic space, thus is a cluster of moves between a region of origin and a receiving region that continues over a period of time. On the macro-level, migration systems connect at least two distinct societies each characterized by degree of industrialization and urbanization, by political structures and current policies, by specific educational, value, and belief systems, by ethno-cultural composition, demographic factors, and by traditions of internal and external multi-distance migrations. Potential migrants, rightly or wrongly, perceive comparatively fewer constraints and increased opportunities at the destination. Within these systems and along particular corridors in them, men and women move according to their perception of known paths or new directions. Their trajectories follow mental maps and discourses about what is possible and what is not.30 Men and women depart from regions defined by labour markets which circumscribe their options, their ability to feed themselves, and their training and socialization in particular types of work. In the context of information and migration networks, they select a region and its labour markets where they may earn a living—better than at the unsatisfactory or unsustainable “home.” Their decisions are influenced by gendered patterns of inheritance and dowry, by patterns of landownership and access to urban crafts or acceptable factory work, by constraints on men through military draft and on women (and sometimes men) through societal gender restrictions. Some will factor in post-migration possibilities to help families of birth or their own new family by remittances. Others will depart as adolescents or delay marriage in the hope of achieving an income that permits family formation later. All will weigh the loss, the cost of ruptured emotional proximity and relationships (sometimes

30 Based on concepts developed by Jan Lucassen and Leslie Page Moch, adapted from Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, Chap. 1.

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called “homesickness”) and compare the cost to the benefits of potential achievements. Such assessments include their bodies and physical (and potential sexual) exploitation, their emotions in terms of loss as well as options to establish new relationships, and their spirituality, that is, the possibility to practise their religion. Employers often assess capability to work only—reflected in “body-parts” language usage, the hiring of “hands” or “braceros.” Societies often refuse to acknowledge that fully socialized human beings arrive and they segregate migrant workers in camps or circumscribed neighbourhoods, refuse access to societal resources like education, or demand return/ enforce exit after a few years of labour. Societies and states also assess the moving bodies’ (not human beings’) colour of skin and base institutional admission and exclusion regimes on this phenotype-cliché. Migrants’ assessments are often differentiated by gender, since many men seem to experience loss of relationships less intensely then women, and since societies usually assign care of children to women. Just as nineteenth-century men and women from specific regions in southern Italy selected specific regions of destination, so women and men from specific places and spaces in the Philippines today move to specific sites and labour markets. Migration, thus, is translocal and, within the frame of regional options, transregional. Around 1900, 94 percent of the North America-bound transatlantic migrants declared that they moved to kin and friends. Presently, Filipinos move to acquaintances, who provide information on working conditions. Such translocality was the practice of overseas moves whether across the Indian Ocean, into the Chinese diaspora, or within Europe. In the present, macro-regions have integrated even further, communication has become faster, cost of transport cheaper, and thus migration may be local-global, “glocal”, or imperial-local. The regional approach does justice to migrants’ experiences and proceeds from inclusionary data which enumerate all residents, regardless of gender, age, and generation. The recent transnational approach, relying on aggregate data, needs to be differentiated into trans-state and trans-national aspects. Since the late nineteenth century—and earlier—states framed migrations by entry requirements and excluding citizenship legislation. Borderlines between “nations” more often cut through cultural regions than separating distinctive cultures from one another. Nations demand cultural conformity and thus affect migrant acculturation. Under dynastic rule, newcomers negotiated their position and could retain (some of their) specifics, whether Fujian Chinese in eighteenth-century Manila or French Huguenots in seventeenthcentury Berlin. Since the late nineteenth century, self-constructed mono-



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cultural nation-states demand assimilation. This may be expressed as a “melting pot” approach in immigration societies or as exclusion in closed European societies and Japan. Since their inception, nation-state circumscribed societies have developed institutional frames as regards values, religious beliefs, and social security provisions. These need to enter translocal analyses. The overarching concept for processes of migration-induced (and other) cultural change that combines the three levels of local, regional, and state-wide agency is thus one of transcultural adjustment. Conceptualized in the 1930s and 1940s, this approach permits empirical determination of how multi-layered processes of cultural interaction develop. Culture, as a complex system, includes tools, spoken and body language, arts and beliefs, created—in gendered versions—by human beings who must provide for their material, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual needs in order to survive. It is transmitted and acquired in the process of childhood socialization. Transculturalism denotes the competence to live in two or more cultures and create border-crossing transcultural spaces—whether translocal, -regional, or -national. Strategic transcultural competence involves conceptualization of life projects in more than one society and choice between options. Transculturation is the process in which societies and individuals change themselves in contact zones by negotiating different lifeways into a dynamic plural new whole. Subsequent interactions and new migrants’ input will again change this transitory culture—the dynamism involves “structured processes” (rather than acts of autonomous individuals) and “processual structures” (rather than immutable institutions). Such conceptualization accommodates agency and avoids the fallacies of seeing geographies as fixed in place, and societies as fixed in time. Allen Roberts created the term “processual geographies” for this constant adjustment in order to capture the continuous, if not always perceptible change that individuals, communities, and societies undergo across space.31 Scholarly analysis requires attention to both whole lives and complex cultural and institutional settings. A Transcultural Societal Studiesapproach integrates the study of society and its patterns and institutions (“social sciences”), all types of representations of it (“discursive sciences”),

31 Dirk Hoerder, “To Know Our Many Selves”: From the Study of Canada to Canadian Studies (Edmonton, 2010), Chap. 14; Allen F. Roberts, “La ‘Géographie Processuelle’: Un nouveau paradigme pour les aires culturelles”, Lendemains 31, nos. 122/123 (2006), 41–61.

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and the actual practices (“lifeway or habitus sciences”) in the context of legal, religious, and ethical norms (“normative sciences”), the somaticpsychic-emotional-spiritual-intellectual characteristics of individual men and women (“life sciences”) and the physical-geographic context (“environmental sciences”). They analyze “becoming”, the historical dimension, with “being”, and “aspirations”, the present and the projects for the future. This adds an intergenerational approach to the gendered one. The division of history and the other social sciences into ever more subdisciplines and fields has led to constraints on research agendas. If scholars look at slavery as bound labourers only, they will not find agency—the slaves unbound, if in constraining frames, will provide insight into their lives. If historians posit iron and steel as central to economic development, they will not find agency outside of these particular factories. If researchers let themselves be ensconced by the heavily laden connotations of their languages, “mother tongues”, generic constructs like the slave, the peasant, the worker appear to be male by connotation and thus they will not find the agency of families or of women and children. Community formation and procreation, as well as family formation and life projects, have always involved men and women as well as their male and female children. Homo oeconomicus is concerned about food and shelter, homo and femina migrans about whole lives.32 People act out their life-projects or, in minimalist contexts like refugee camps, react on a day-to-day basis to circumstances, within the options and limits of the capabilities acquired through their socialization in family, local community, regional society and economy. Such arenas are located within structures and institutions of a polity, the institutional aspect, but by crossing a border people move into another society and its norms, discourses, and practices, the dynamic, processual aspect. In cases of problems, institutional fault-lines—skewed job-markets, racism, fundamentalist impositions—and snags in individuals’ transculturation need to be addressed. Any institutional imposition of borders by marginalizing, labelling, confining, or other will make interaction and acculturation

32 Hoerder, “To Know Our Many Selves”, 373–86; Christiane Harzig, “Domestics of the World (Unite?): Labor Migration Systems and Personal Trajectories of Household Workers in Historical and Global Perspective”, Journal of American Ethnic History 25 (2006), 48–73, and Christiane Harzig, “The Migration of Domestic Workers in Global Perspective: Gender, Race and Class in Canadian Recruitment Policies”, in Mass Migrations: Their Economic, Political and Cultural Implications, ed. Adam Walaszek. Topical issue of Przegląd Polonijny 31 (2005), 143–56.



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more difficult. Politicking of governments creates problems that policymaking might avoid. This approach to agency and decision-making avoids the victimization paradigm which ascribes passivity to those designated victims. Of course, African societies and individuals became victims of the imposition of power and, in the present, women in particular, but also men, become the victims of an exploitative service economy and human trafficking. But within power structures, some are actively involved in producing victims and the victimized men and women, rather than remaining passive, are actively struggling to survive or to regain at least some agency. If all enslaved African men and women were victims without agency, how did Afro-Brazilian culture emerge or the flight of US slaves? If all Filipino domestics and caregivers are victims of a service economy imposed by rich societies, how could they create a social space of their own in Hong Kong or Rome? Individual actions and strategies often include developing a migration habitus and supportive translocal networks. Victimization approaches have been applied to both male (and female) industrial workers of the late nineteenth century and to female (and male) service workers in the present. In terms of exploitation of labour power under brutal conditions such analysis reflects actual hierarchies. East and South European men in US industry around 1900 could clearly express that they felt treated more badly than draft animals on the smallholdings “at home.” The animals received shelter and fodder because, under peasant families’ poverty, they could not be replaced and needed to be cared for. Employers in the “more advanced” US and other countries did not need to care for workers. This, too, is an aspect of “modernization.” They could hire a replacement easily, just as slaveholders could order replacement labour from Africa, or a Hawai’ian plantation owner another Filipino from Manila. Similarly, women in present-day domestic service often complain of extreme exploitation and sexual harassment. The categorization as “victim” directs analysis to suffering rather than agency (if constrained by given power relations) and resistance.33 To counter such approaches, Christiane Harzig has argued that agency and migrant strategies may be analyzed under the concept of “Otherness as cultural resource.” Just as whiteness was a resource of powerful 33 See Hoerder, “Struggle a Hard Battle”, for the US; Ronald Takaki, Pau Hana. Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835–1920 (Honolulu, 1983); and Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London, 2000), for women migrants in the present.

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colonizer migrants, domestic workers’ “foreignness or otherness is one of the most substantial and tangible aspects of socio-cultural capital.” In a dialectical relationship, being different permits both entry into a segment of the labour market—the migrants’ goal to be achieved—and exploitation, a consequence to be avoided, if in any way possible. Nineteenthcentury industrial workers sought entry into receiving societies’ un- and semiskilled labour market segments as a pathway to a society that, in the future, would provide better options than their society of birth. Excluded from many immigration entryways, service workers in the late twentieth/ early twenty-first century seek household and caretaking jobs as a stepping stone for improved lives. They “are hired precisely because they carry a different cultural baggage.” Demand for labour cannot be and could not have been satisfied without the in-coming Others.34 Otherness also permits a “domestic worker to situate herself outside the very same culture with its specific hierarchical power relationships, which inevitably places her at the bottom. She may take recourse to the knowledge about her own social position at home and to her being essential [through remittances] to the family’s survival. She may also have a strong sense about her own culture’s superior food habits and child rearing practices.” Women need such resilience because: “The race-class-gender systems of ‘importing’ cultures (North America, Europe, the Middle East) provide for ready access to stereotypes in order to structure and organize historical ‘knowledge’ and present ‘experience.’ Cultural markers are attached to the women.”35 Ascriptions and hierarchizations are explicit. In Italy, women from the Philippines are considered suitable for caretaking since they are Catholic and speak Spanish or English (in addition to Tagalog), while Somali women, who are black and from Italy’s former colony, are assigned inferior jobs.36

34 Industrial employers sometimes bore the cost of recruitment and travel to obtain a reliable labour force; domestic workers often receive help from sympathetic employing women in negotiating bureaucracies and in language acquisition. 35 The preceding paragraphs on “otherness” follow closely, sometimes near-verbatim, Harzig, “Domestics of the World (Unite?)”, but—even in case of quotations—are adapted to allow for comparison with nineteenth-century migrations. 36 Victoria Chell, “Gender-Selective Migration: Somalian and Filipina Women in Rome”, in Southern Europe and the New Immigrations, ed. Russell King and Richard Black (Brighton, 1997), 75–92; Alessandra Venturini, Postwar Migration in Southern Europe, 1950–2000. An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, 2004).



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In the cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Gulf states, migrant women’s position is often extremely difficult due to multiple discriminations based on gender ascription, religion, colour of skin, language, cultural background and others. Their Otherness permits migrant women little but to earn an income to support the part of their families staying behind. Working conditions are exploitative and often involve sexual harassment. But conditions “at home” can be worse. Neither is (sexual) violence against women nor exploitation of women’s labour restricted to post-migration status.37 To summarize: Under economic and social stresses in their society of birth, labour migrants use their individual and social capital to find an income-generating occupation afar. They transculturally negotiate the structures of their society of birth and the income-providing one. They have to compromise as to income levels and working conditions. Some feel forced to accept exploitation and humiliation given that poverty “at home” is equally demeaning. For others, migration is a familial duty to support an increasingly marginal life “at home” for the rest of the family. The remittances prevent a complete break with the past which would force the whole family to move to a location in a different labour market and with different social norms. Migration internal to a country, from Slovakia to Budapest or from Mindanao to Manila, also requires major adjustments and may subject migrants to miserable living conditions. It may be a palliative against social decline or a long-term betterment project. Migrants of the past and of the present move in transworld migration systems that are not merely formed by a global capitalist order. While the frame of capitalist strategies and imposition of political power by strong states has exacerbated worldwide inequalities, migration systems emerge from migrants’ agency as well-informed global players. They act in multiple gendered roles and in transcultural communities to negotiate as positive an outcome as possible under the circumstances in globalized labour market segments.

37 Ray Jureidini, “Criminalization and Human Rights of Migrant Domestic Workers under the Kefala System during Peace and War in the Middle East”, unpublished paper presented at the Global Migration Systems of Domestic and Care Workers Conference, Toronto, November 2008.

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Migration Systems over Time: Transregional, Transcontinental, and Transoceanic Migration systems connecting large parts of the globe have existed for a long time. Migrants’ trajectories were part of complex multi-directional moves, in the Atlantic World the intra-European (transcontinental) ones, those across the Atlantic (transoceanic), and those in the Americas (transcontinental). Such systems emerge from demand for labour in regions of capital investment—whether, mining, plantation, industrial, or service— and depend on migrant decisions self-willed under severe economic constraints. They may involve refugees displaced by international warfare, warlordism, or intra-societal ethnic, religious, economic, or political violent strife. Refugees, at their destination, need to insert themselves into labour markets (or niches of them) to ensure physical survival and, perhaps, rebuild life-courses. Syntheses of transsea and transoceanic migration systems have, for a long time, started from Europe and the Atlantic World. This is partly explained by the clustering of migration researchers in this segment of the globe and by power relationships in knowledge production. For Imperial China—with far less research—scholarship did emphasize the land-based transregional or even trans-macro-regional migrations. Some ten centuries ago Uighur refugees, men-women-children, had to insert themselves into China’s border regions or the Tarim Basin’s oasis cities’ labour and commercial markets. For millennia the societies of the rims of the Indian Ocean have been linked by migrations. Historicizations A decisive change in global power relations and patterns of (future) migrations emerged from a coincidence of unconnected mid-fifteenth-century developments in East Asia and Iberian Europe. In the 1440s, the Chinese Empire ended its overseas outreach of fleets 300 times the size of Columbus’s 1492 fleet,38 while the tiny Kingdom of Portugal began its outreach and (1) introduced slave-trading from West Africa to the Iberian Peninsula

38 Jeannette Mirsky, ed., The Great Chinese Travelers (Chicago, 1974); Dirk Hoerder, “Crossing the Waters: Historic Developments and Periodizations to the early 19th Century”, in Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims: Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans and China Seas Migrations from the 1830s to the 1930s, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Dirk Hoerder (Leiden, 2011), 12–41.



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and soon across the Atlantic, and (2) replaced the century-old negotiating protocols of merchant exchange by state-backed, heavily armed trade.39 The Indian Ocean’s and the East and Southeast Asian Seas’ patterns of mobility preceded those of the Atlantic and were larger, while largescale migration across the Pacific Ocean’s expanses began only much later. By 1492/1498 South Asian mariners’ understanding of the monsoons and resulting seafaring had a 1500-year history and the Fujian Chinese migrants’ diaspora in Southeast Asia was beginning its 500-year history. Along the rims of the East Asian Seas and the Indian Ocean, human mobility was free—under constraints. In these and in the transatlantic migrations, poor migrants could move by selling their labour power in advance. From Fujian’s ports they departed with passage cost advanced by earlier migrating family members and, from the nineteenth century, by shipowners or captains to be worked off after arrival (hence: “credit ticket system”). In the European-American counterpart, from the sixteenth century, such migrants’ service was longer and contracts more constraining. They “redeemed” freedom by working for 3 to 7 years, depending on the country of origin’s legal frame. While this redemptioner system ended in the 1820s, a “prepaid fares” system emerged among sequentially migrating kinspeople and acquaintances. The borrowed fare was to be repaid as in the credit-ticket system. In the 1830s, parallel to the legal ending of African slavery in the European-owned plantation economies, a new Asian regime of indentured labour was intensified in the frame of the British imperial and the plantation regime. The impact of Europeans’ arrival in Asia after 1498 was, at first, small in numbers but large in terms of military power and ideological impositions. Expanding from commercial nodes to territorial plantation regimes, the colonizers required labourers to make investments profitable. Workers or working families moved voluntarily, under severe constraints, or under compulsion. Even where mercantile travel and labour migration was overwhelmingly male, women provided service work for the culturally inexperienced newly arriving men or agreed to become spouses at stations along the routes and at destinations. Assigned gender roles and willed interactions were a constituent part of migratory and post-migratory cultural and economic exchanges. During the shift from coastal posts to territory-wide 39 See the seminal works by Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415–1825 (London, 1969), and Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (London, 1965), and, for the British, Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge, 1984).

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colonization, the new rulers, often with support of (segments of the) resident elites, reorganized century-old migration systems according to their profit-interests. Gender relations varied by region and culture. In East African port cities, Chinese in-migrants and local women formed emotional partnerships and families. In West and Central African trading circuits, Hausa men married at trading nodes into local families of standing and each woman provided local trading expertise and networks and remained in charge of the husband-trader’s depot during his travels. Research needs to trace the gendered sexual and material aspects of trading culture. In contrast, the forced slave migration system, imposed by European trader migrants and African warrior-states, involved men more than women—on average in a ratio of two to one. Slaves’ selection of partners was often replaced by owners mating men and women or, in the worst case in the nineteenth-century U.S, with systematic slave breeding. The trade was abolished in 1807/08—with Brazil following suit only in the 1860s— and slavery itself in the British Empire in 1833/34 (with an apprenticeship tacked on), later in the United States (1863/65) and in Spanish Cuba and formerly Portuguese Brazil (1880s). Slaves arriving in Brazil, due both to numbers and ethnic clustering, could and did develop gendered cultures of their own. The brutal “breaking in” under the Caribbean plantation regime and owner-control in the southeast of North America prevented the re-building of African cultures—though Caribbean societies and the US South were bi-cultural African-American and European-American. In different ratios, all migrations involved men and women.40 Once a migrant had established her- or himself in a “free” labour market segment, s/he could call for or send prepaid tickets to others, men and women establishing gender-specific migration corridors. In the Africa-tothe-Americas forced slave migrations an estimated one third of the commodified human beings were women. In the migrations from the several distinct regions of Asia to the Plantation Belt’s many regions, indentured workers, who accounted for only about 10 percent of all migrants, were to include—according to British regulations—one third women. Creditticket migrants were overwhelmingly male, self-paid “passenger” migrants often moved in families, sometimes sequentially over time. In the nineteenth century, labour migrations involved five major systems: (1) the still burgeoning (West) Africa-to-the-Americas slave migration, dis40 Based on Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, Parts II and III.



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continued in the 1870s; (2) the Indian Ocean system with the hemispherewide British-Empire imposed system of indenture from particular regions in Asia from the 1830s to the 1930s; (3) the proletarianizing mass migrations from Europe’s peripheral societies to its industrializing core and to US and Canadian industrial and mining regions; and, transcontinentally, (4) the Russo-Siberian system from the 1820s or earlier; as well as (5) the northern China-to-Manchuria system from the 1880s. In addition, smaller systems operated in Africa and Latin America. All were framed by global power relations and capital investment strategies. According to Adam McKeown, the migrations of the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the China-Manchuria macro-region involved similar numbers of about 46–58 million each in the century from the 1840s to the 1940s. McKeown and Jose Moya estimate the total number of international migrants in this century to amount to 320 million men, women and children who had to connect family lives between local spaces and regional economies across continents and oceans. Family of birth, families formed before or after migration, sequential partnerships or multiple marriages affected gender relations, patterns of emotional and sexual lives, child-care and children’s socialization, and identities or identifications. Men and women acted under conditions that ranged from (rigorously) bound to as free as the constraints and circumstances permitted.41 The migration systems of the Plantation Belt, the Black Atlantic, and the White Atlantic form three distinct regimes that influenced each other. Capitalist labour demand sought out specific recruitment reservoirs in Asia, Africa, or Europe. Labour migrants in the (sub-)tropical Plantation Belt produced for the industrializing white northern world. Migrant working men and women from specific recruitment regions in India mass-produced rice in specific regions of Burma for regions of the Plantation Belt employing Asian contract labouring men and women. In some locations, like Hawai’i, working men and women of all colours, white included, laboured side by side. In others, white immigrant workers pushed for the exclusion of yellow ones or for discrimination against black ones. On the individual level, emotional ties could cross colour lines and subvert the imposed racial hierarchies. Wherever women were a minority among migrants or even a “scarce commodity”, their value—emotionally, 41 Adam M. McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940”, Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2005), 155–89; Jose Moya and McKeown, “World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century”, in Essays on Twentieth-Century History, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia, 2010), 9–52.

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economically, and sexually—increased but men’s competition for them made life difficult and, in view of deadly violence, even tenuous. Linkages and Hierarchies over Time: Labour Regimes and Food Consumption With the end of slavery a debate about free and unfree labour emerged. “Free” workers, men and women, had to ensure their own reproduction, freeing employers from wage costs in periods of low demand for labour. Planters and imperial authorities in the Plantation Belt debated ratios of men to women when they accessed new “recruitment reservoirs” for workers, male or female, for the “factories in the field” as Carey McWilliams and Eric Wolf called the plantations;42 for mining, lumbering, and, later, industrial crops such as rubber; for large infrastructural earthworks like the Suez (1869) and Panama (1914) canals; and for the new factories. Industrialization involved several core regions: the centre of (still dynastic) Europe, parts of Tsarist Russia, the North American New YorkPittsburgh-Chicago triangle, and Meiji Japan. Historians’ “steam enginesteel machinery”-view of development is not only core-centred, it also focuses on male labour without taking into account women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labour. In many regions, differences between bound and free labour were fluid. In Russia, wage-working serfdom existed before serf emancipation in 1861, as did industrial slavery in the US before abolition in 1863/65. Countrywide perspectives need to be regionalized. Tennessee was the core of industrial labour of migrant slaves rented out by their owners from plantations. In Tsarist Russia’s serfdom, the noble landowners’ high labour requirements in the southern barschina-system characterized by rich soils tied serfs to the land. In the less productive northern region, the obroksystem emerged as a quitrent practice that monetarized serf duties: serf families paid an annual sum obtained from sale of crops, cottage industry, or migration into wage labour. Migrating serfs could become literate and accumulate modest savings. Since men migrated to the cities first, families were truncated; when women followed, they often did the reproductive work for several men in boarding-house or commune-type arrangements (arteli). In Meiji Japan, state-driven fast industrialization was funded by

42 Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field. The Story of  Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston, 1935); Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley, 1982).



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heavy taxation of peasant families which forced men and women into labour migration. In several segments of the global economy, labour was recruited regardless of colour of skin according to the lowest transportation and maintenance cost. At the end of African-American slavery, plantation owners in the Caribbean and Hawai’i first experimented with shipments of commodified human beings from Asia and Europe but settled on indentured South Asian, southern Chinese, and Dutch-Southeast Asian workers. More men and women moved as self-willed credit-ticket or self-paid (“passenger”) migrants. Racializers applied colour schemes also to Europeans. The fourfold white-black-brown-yellow division does not reflect that according to popular prejudices and so-called scientific racism Jews were not white, colonized Irish not Anglo-Saxon white, East Europeans dark, and South Europeans swarthy or olive. Whiteness was a property, self-allocated in powerful imperial-intellectual constructs, which entitled the owner to a higher standard of living. Colour of skin, race, gender, and culture of origin affected wages received and thus food on the table. Intergenerationally it meant healthy or hungry children.43 The regionally differentiated gendered nineteenth- and twentiethcentury—labour, refugee, and professional—migrations, as an interlinked whole, involved production and reproduction, inextricably entwined. Far more important than production of steel was “the travelling” of clothing and food. When South American food plants reached the tricontinental “Old World”, availability of food increased in Europe. Globally, sugar and cotton became sought-after commodities. By the nineteenth century; “curry” became a national dish in England; village stores in the Germanlanguage areas sold Lebensmittel und Kolonialwaren (victuals and colonial produce). European families ate what migrating men and women produced

43 Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis, 1993); Donna Gabaccia, “The ‘Yellow Peril’ and the ‘Chinese of Europe’: Global Perspectives on Race and Labor, 1815–1930”, in Lucassen and Lucassen, Migration, Migration History, 177–96; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color. European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA, 1998); David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991); and numerous studies on specific groups, especially the Jews and the Irish. “Whiteness and the Historians’ Imagination”, topical issue, of International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (Fall 2001), 1–92; Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property”, Harvard Law Review 106 (1993), 1707–1791. John W. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, 1982). In Latin America, administrators, politicians, and advocates of “racial hygiene” developed plans for massive immigration from Europe to “whiten” the respective state’s population.

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a continent away. Similarly, the production of cloth and clothing in India’s many societies and England’s Midland counties stimulated or undercut each other, attracting or pushing out migrants. Historians of food and material culture have demonstrated the impact and cultural interaction involved in the spread of potatoes, tea, and coffee, other stimulants and, finally, under the auspices of the British government as a macro-regional drug pushing cartel, of opium.44 Migrant men, women, and children built their lives, developed plans, and translated prospects into everyday practice in family economies. Changes in production, reproduction, and pricing influenced their life-ways. When rural families in England migrated to the new factories to eke out an often meagre subsistence, the result of their machine-driven labours were exported to and imposed on South Asia’s many societies. There, home-producing weaving families faced economic decline, famine, and death from starvation. Migrants, across the centuries, went “to bread”, (“pane”, “za chlebom”) to feed themselves and the family, and, ideally, increase options for men and women individually or in family units and intergenerationally. All of these complexities are lost in approaches that deal only with wage differentials, with government-sponsored billboards advertising “unlimited opportunities”, or with working men seemingly bereft of social life. Economic historians have, for good reasons, emphasized entrepreneurial achievements whether local investment, productive innovation, or seizing of opportunities afar. Migrant men and women were—and are—entrepreneurs in their own lives. Nineteenth-Century Geographies of Migration: The Atlantic Worlds European societies, as empires or states, supplied male and female labourers for the globe’s temperate zones. The centre of whiteness, self-allocated superiority and work ethic, Europe was an economic disaster zone for many of its lower-class people. An estimated 55 million left from the 1820s to the 1950s. Far more migrated within Europe inter-regionally from ever more marginal agriculture to the urban margins. While migration 44 Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900– 1900 (Cambridge, 1986); Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: the Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1880 (Oxford, 1991); Earl J. Hamilton, “What the New World Gave the Economy of the Old”, in First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old, ed. Fredi Chiappelli et al., 2 vols. (Berkeley, 1976), 2, 861–65; J. Sermet, “Acclimatation: les jardins botaniques espagnols au XVIIIe siècle et la tropicalisation de l’Andalousie”, in Mélanges en l’honneur de Fernand Braudel, 2 vols. (Toulouse, 1973), 1, 555–582.



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to thinly settled regions within Europe (involving colonization of marsh lands, steep hills, and mountainsides) usually involved families, the migrations to towns’ and cities’ segmented labour markets were gender-distinct. Across this industrializing world, low wages prevented a one-to-one relationship of waged (male) to unwaged reproductive (female) labour and women had less access to funds to migrate on their own. Like co-migrants regardless of colour of skin and region of the world, all migrated trebuhom za kruhom, the Slovenian expression for “with stomach after bread”, or, in German usage, to get away from Brodherrschaft, from employers who ruled over their bread. Such popular views of social relations, in contrast to national histories, include both genders as well as children. The nineteenth-century transatlantic migrations—in the macro-region that extended from Russia in Europe to North America’s Pacific Rim— caught the attention of scholars. Inter-regional migrations, however, were quantitatively larger. Europe’s industrializing core—England, the Scottish Lowlands, France and the Netherlands, the Germanies, Bohemia, Austria, and Switzerland—in a dependency relationship attracted migrants from the peripheral circle that extended from Ireland via Scandinavia, East Central Europe, Russia’s Jewish Pale of Settlement, the Balkans, and Italy to the Iberian Peninsula. In North America, mobility continued after arrival. Migration decisions reflect macro-regional socio-economic frames and micro-regional economic socializations. Potential migrants socialized in the economic-discursive frame of port cities would not target mining regions as destination. The designation of migrants by nation-states (like “France”) is misleading. This type of state organization emerged only in the nineteenth century and the entry regulations, “the invention of the passport” (Torpey), date from the turn of the twentieth century.45 The “states of many peoples”, the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Romanoff, and Ottoman empires, disintegrated themselves by ethnicization/ nationalization and warfare as late as 1914–1918. Leslie Page Moch discerned three inter-regional systems in western Europe from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth-century: from stagnating agricultural regions of France to the dynamic centre of the Iberian peninsula with mainly male migrants who would marry local women after arrival, a North Sea system centred on the urban regions of the Netherlands with male and female migrants, and a Baltic coastal one that

45 John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge, 2000).

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included family formation. For south-central and south-eastern Europe, Sylvia Hahn studied men’s and women’s seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury migrations to Vienna, Prague, and, later, Budapest. Ottoman Istanbul, the gateway between the Balkans and Asia Minor and between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, also attracted men and women. So did the capital cities and trading centres of Eastern Europe, whether Moscow or Warsaw, Riga or Kiev, or new cities like Petersburg (f. 1703) and Odessa (f. 1792). Because of service jobs in urban middle-class households often more women than men migrated to the cities.46 Even when migration involved “male” sectors of the economy, like mining and most crafts, families and partnerships were involved. Women migrated on their own and in some regions children had to do so to contribute to family income by herding flocks or sweeping chimneys.47 Small and mid-size towns exerted a pull both on local working men and women and on experts, women included, from afar. Such destinations, in comparison to regions of departure, have often been designated “wealthier” regions, but labour market options rather than wealth were decisive. The gendered and intergenerational character of these migrations is obvious from the demographics of family formation and procreation.48 These inter-regional moves expanded to become the transatlantic “proletarian mass migration” (Willcox and Ferenczi)—a proletarianizing migration, in fact, since most of the men and women came from rural backgrounds, if often from strata that faced proletarianization before migration.49 “Proletarians” have been assumed to be mainly men, but the 46 Weber-Kellermann, Landleben, 132–98. See also Abel Chatelain, “Migrations et domesticité feminine urbaine en France, XVIIIe–XXe siècles”, Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 4 (1969): 506–528, and Abel Chatelain, Les migrants temporaires en France de 1800 à 1914, 2 vols. (Lille, 1976). 47 Teenage girls in poor regions east of Vienna were sent to the city as domestics without accompanying adults and with an injunction never to return. Richard Klucsarits and Friedrich G. Kürbisch, eds., Arbeiterinnen kämpfen um ihr Recht. Autobiographische Texte rechtloser und entrrechteter “Frauenspersonen” in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Wuppertal, n.d.). 48 Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington, 1992, 2nd ed., 2003); Hahn, Migration—Arbeit—Geschlecht; 165–70; Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, for eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire; Jan Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea, translated by Donald A. Bloch (Dutch original 1984; London, 1987). In general see Hoerder, ed., Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies. The European and North American Working Classes during the Period of Industrialization (Westport, 1985); Nicholas Canny, ed., Europeans on the Move. Studies on European Migration 1500–1800 (Oxford, 1994); Klaus J. Bade, Migration in European History, trans. Allison Brown (German original 2000; Oxford, 2003). 49 Walter F. Willcox and Imre Ferenczi, International Migrations, 2 vols. (New York, 1929, 1931).



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migrants targeted transport, commerce, service, and two-gender industries like food and textile; even mine labour involved women and children to sort ore and coal. Re-examining the data, Marlou Schrover (see below in this volume) concluded that women and men migrated in relatively equal numbers. Transatlantically, the ratio was 60 to 40 (after 1930: 50:50)—with wide variations by ethno-cultural group and stage of a group’s migration. But men returned more often than women.50 Migrating men and women’s remittances “home”, that is, to their family of birth, also need a critical re-evaluation. The often idealized “home” had provided no life-course perspectives but had forced them to seek their bread elsewhere. At their parents’ death, the migrant children’s share of the inheritance was transmitted to the US—to the early 1870s more funds were forwarded to America then remitted to Europe. In distinct sequential migrations, men and women did not migrate “to America” but to local economic spaces where jobs were available and kin, friends, or acquaintances could provide help.51 They moved translocally between regionally defined labour markets in an entity generically designated as the transoceanic “Atlantic World.”52 In North America, the newcomers from Europe—like resident, earlier arrived Americans—did not stay put. (Mexico attracted no European labour migrants because of the forced mobilization of “Indio” women and men in the mid-1850s.53) The numerous interregional migrations included among others sons and daughters of New England farming families to the Ohio Valley, and families from Quebec’s stagnating rural regions to New England textile mills. Children of rural Ontario farm families migrated to the Prairies after their annexation. To make room for them and satisfy land speculators, the Canadian government expelled the self-governing

50 Donna Gabaccia, “Women of the Mass Migrations: From Minority to Majority, 1820– 1930”, in Hoerder and Moch, European Migrants, 90–111. 51 Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich and Ulrike Sommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom. German Immigrants Write Home, trans. Susan Carter Vogel (German original 1988; Ithaca, 1991). 52 Donna Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World”, Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 1–27. Comparatively see Matthew Guterl and Christine Skwiot, “Atlantic and Pacific Crossings: Race, Empire and ‘the Labor Problem’ in the Late Nineteenth Century”, Radical History Review 91 (2005), 40–61; Cécile Vidal, “La nouvelle histoire atlantique. Nouvelles perspectives sur les relations entre l’Europe, l’Afrique et les Amériques du XVe au XIXe siècle”, Revue Internationale des Livres & des Idées, no. 4 (mars–avril 2008), 23–28. 53 Delia Gonzáles de Reufels and Dirk Hoerder, “Migration to Mexico, Migration in Mexico—A Special Case”, in Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: CrossBorder Life Courses, Labor Markets, and Politics in Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and the United States, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires (Durham N.C., 2011), chap. 8.

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resident Manitoba Métis families—descendants of the fur-trading couples mentioned above. The allegedly mono-linear westward settlement of the continent was a sequence of small moves of rural settler families; of a “jumping ahead” of men as miners and of women as storekeepers or entrepreneurs in the business of prostitution; and of trading men, women, and families with long-distance supply connections. All of these westward moves generated refugee migrations of native peoples. A generation or two after establishment of Prairie farms, land became insufficient for descendants who, in eastbound migrations, targeted urban labour markets in Minneapolis, St. Louis, Chicago, and Cleveland. Other internal migrations included, in the southern plantation economy, planter families with their slaves from the depleted soils of the coastal plains to the Mississippi region. After the end of slavery—three decades later than in the British Empire and later than serf-emancipation in Tsarist Russia—a brutal regime of lynch-violence as well as lack of labour-market options in racist northern industries retarded large-scale out-migration until the early 1900s. It became a mass movement during and after World War I. Again parallel, un- and underemployed Mexican men and women, “Hispanics”, in a US term for “of brown colour of skin”, began to migrate northward around 1900. This movement, too, became a mass movement as the Revolution (1910–21) against the US-supported dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz disrupted job options. The oft-cited assembly line work, suitable for unskilled immigrants and defined as men’s sphere in automobile production, began as disassembly line in the slaughterhouses of Kansas City and Chicago where animals were killed and taken apart along conveyor belts by men and women. The 1930s Depression reduced migration to North America but increased (sometimes forced) return migration to Mexico and Europe. Such return shifts the social cost of unemployment to the societies, regions, and families of origin. Also in the 1930s, independent farming families driven off their land by banks calling in mortgages or by environmental degradation (the “dust bowl”) migrated from Kansas and Oklahoma to California, and from Saskatchewan to other regions of Canada. Most were reduced to itinerant agricultural labour. From the Caribbean, migration to Mexico and, in the US, Florida and cities and farms along the East Coast intensified from the 1920s. North America’s many specific regions were part of a large but segmented system of transcontinental gendered migrations.54 54 Hoerder and Faires, Migrants and Migration in Modern North America.



transcultural approaches to gendered labour migration 53 Nineteenth-Century Geographies of Migration: the Asias55

As in all segments of the globe, specificity of regions and regional cultures characterize migrations in Asia. In the Indian Ocean migrations, for example, Tamils from southern India selected destinations different from Gujarati migrants in the northwest. As elsewhere, ethno-cultural designations involve a terminological fallacy: Migrants do not come from ethno-cultural groups as a whole but from specific strata in them and from specific regions. “The Chinese”, in the nineteenth century, departed almost exclusively from two southern provinces: from Fujian to Southeast Asia and from Guangdong to destinations in the Americas and the Plantation Belt. And, within the two provinces, the migrants originated from specific localities.56 Like migrants from Italy’s many regions, they spoke dialects not mutually intelligible and thus had to develop a language of communication to even function as a group. Those leaving in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century for Manchuria came from Shandong and neighbouring northern provinces. The Chinese were—and are—many cultural groups. Thus, the geographical units or, better, social spaces to be studied are regions and localities rather than continents or dynastic, national, and imperial states. Transoceanic migrations connect the respective rims and their many regions with different job options upon arrival and different socializations and (lack of) options before departure.57 Though less than 10 percent of the migrants moved under indentures, Europeans summarily labelled all Asian labour migrants coolies to juxtapose them rhetorically and ideologically to “free” white Europeans. In view of the uneven distribution of research institutions across the globe, 55 This section is based on research by Amarjit Kaur, especially Wage Labour in Southeast Asia since 1840. I am grateful to the author for sharing even unpublished work which I follow closely. 56 A synthesis is Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese among Others. Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, 2008). For region-specific origins of migrants: Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor. The Story of the Overseas Chinese (London, 1990), especially 3–22; James F. Warren, Pirates, Prostitutes & Pullers. Explorations in the Ethno- and Social History of Southeast Asia (Crawley, 2008), 158, and Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san. Prostitution in Singapore 1870– 1940 (Singapore, 1993), 26, 185, 186. 57 Klaus Friedland, ed., Maritime Aspects of Migration (Cologne, 1989); Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York, 2004); Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, Kären Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu, 2007); Rainer F. Buschmann, Oceans in World History (Boston, 2007); Torsten Feys, Lewis R. Fischer, Stéphane Hoste, and S. Vanfraechem, eds., Maritime Transport and Migration: The Connections between Maritime and Migration Networks (St Johns, 2007); Gabaccia and Hoerder, Connecting Seas and Connected Ocean Rims.

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research on Asian migrations began much later than on the Atlantic ones. In the colonized regions of the globe, imposition of power, migration, and establishment of racial distinctions were closely entwined. Most societies followed the classic pattern of exporting a few primary commodities and importing consumption and capital goods from the colonizer power and other western countries. Malaya and Indonesia became important rubber and tin producers while Burma, Thailand, and South Vietnam (Cochin China) emerged as rice producers for substantial intraregional trade and for distant segments of the Plantation Belt. Differentiation by region of destination and period permits more accuracy in determining cultural background of migrants. For example, “Indian” labour migration to Burma and Malaya in the late nineteenth century coincided with the region’s greater integration into the international economy. The ratio of migrants in the population amounted to up to 6.9 percent from the 1870s to 1931. In Lower Burma it reached 11 percent in the 1920s. Preference for male migrants, occupations defined as male, and seasonality of employment explain the widely varying sex ratios, as do—from the migrants’ side—occupational and caste (or class) differentiation. High caste/ class men left families behind since they travelled back and forth frequently; shipping workers, mainly Chittagonians and Oriyas, moved without families; living conditions of urban factory workers discouraged the bringing of spouses.58 Thus, among these migrants, birth rates were low and prostitution frequent. In less densely settled Malaya, with fewer arrivals, Indians nevertheless comprised 10 to 14 percent of the population, 1911–1947. Workers, mainly Tamils and Telugus, too poor to pay even their own passage, were recruited by overseers (kangani) with kin and village community relations. Married men were discouraged from emigrating since employers paid only “single person wages” and provided mass accommodation for men only. Malaya was exempted from the British-India government’s provision for a proportion of 25 women to 100 men. However, with extended stays of the men and employers’ need for stable labour forces, family migration increased. The Emigration Act of 1922 reduced the number of unaccompanied men to one in five migrants and regulations stipulated accommodation for married couples and educational facilities for migrant children on plantations. As a result, the proportion of women for every 1,000 men grew from 171 in 1901 to 637 in 1947.

58 Ratios of men to women varied from 8.2 to 1, to as high as 250 to 1, C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 1838–1949 (New Delhi, 1951), 92.



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The insertion of women into plantation labour and the birth of children contributed to the transition to a permanent settlement as a pool of workers. In the exploitative and sexualizing strategies of plantation investors, labouring men with women were considered more tractable. Under the extremely exploitative regime of Natal planters, women who worked as much as men were not accorded food rations when they were pregnant and could not work.59 The movement of voluntary “economic” migrant workers into a region to work in the export-oriented plantation and mining sectors established the structure for migrant labour diasporas and, in consequence, the emergence of plural societies. Since plantations and mines were often far from urban centres, migrant workers usually experienced de facto or enforced segregation in plantation compounds. This pattern worked against their integration into society at large and perpetuated ethnic and occupational differentiation. By the 1930s, when the respective colonizer powers— in the frames of world markets—had created plural economies, a close correlation between ethno-cultural groups and economic function had emerged, paralleled by residential segregation, separate languages, different religions, and even different educational experiences. Through migration, gendered “plural societies” emerged in Southeast Asia in which the various ethno-cultural groups mixed but did not combine.60 In an East-West or developed-developing world comparison, gross migration to Burma, British Malaya, and Thailand, between 1911 and 1929, was over twice as high as gross migration to the United States. Southeast Asia experienced much faster population growth in the late nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century than either China or India.61 The development of export industries was sustained by massive labour migration and the formation of communities by the migrant men and women. To summarize: Analyses of differentiated but interactive migration regions have been or may also be undertaken for the eastern Mediterranean’s

59 Based on Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, 27–58; Jo Beall “Women under Indenture in Colonial Natal 1860–1911”, in South Asians Overseas. Migration and Ethnicity, ed. Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach, and Steven Vertovec (Cambridge, 1990), 57–74, and numerous other authors for conditions in Natal; Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, chap. 15. 60 J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge, 1948), 304–05. 61 G. Huff and G. Caggiano, “Globalization, Immigration and Lewisian Elastic Labor in Pre-World War II Southeast Asia”, Journal of Economic History 67, no. 1 (2007), 1–36.

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Ottoman Empire,62 for South America,63 and for the forced labour migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to Brazil (where composition of the slave labour force differed from that in the US). Migrants came with cultural-regional specifics and, depending on region of origin, came with differing skills.64 In all systems, migrants retained some, if under duress minimal, options for agency—thus they survived and established themselves and, over time, formed gendered multigenerational communities. These migration systems ended during the decades from World War II (in Asia in 1937, earlier in Manchuria/ Manchukuo) to the independences which began with India’s, the partition of which in 1947 generated millions of refugees. New Globalizations: Post-Colonial Capital, Industrial Delocalization, and Service Sector Migrations since the 1950s According to the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report (HDR) of 1995, the richest 20 percent of the world population were almost 60 times as wealthy as the poorest 20 percent, a gap which has doubled since 1960 and continues to grow. Thus, selfwilled migrations from many developing countries occur under extreme economic constraints—as did the European mass migrations. Refugee migrations, internal to states, into camps, and across international borders—need to be added. Male, female, and child refugees’ insertion into labour markets and societies is more difficult than that of self-willed migrants: they come unprepared, without intention and means, and are often unwanted. Self-willed migrants from countries with low Human Development Index levels have most to gain: They may, ideally, expect a 15-fold increase in income and a 16–fold decrease in child mortality. The surviving children’s enrolment rate in education would double to 95 percent. Migration is a life, family and intergenerational project.

62 Ahmet İçduygu and Kemal Kirişçi, eds., Land of Diverse Migrations: Challenges of Emigration and Immigrations in Turkey (Istanbul, 2008); Reşat Kasaba, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle, 2009). 63 Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro, eds., Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (Philadelphia, 1989), especially Elizabeth Kuznesof, “A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1980”, 17–35. 64 José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France, eds., Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade (Trenton, 2005). On Brazil see Kátia M. de Queiros Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1880 (1986; 4th ed., New Brunswick, 1994), among many recent studies.



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In the 1960s and 70s, before the “service revolution”, men dominated in the moves from the Mediterranean periphery to the North European core. The present “feminization” of migration is balanced by continued male migration to the transport, construction, and the oil-extractive sectors. From the Philippines, men leave to work in merchant shipping, from Bangladesh and Pakistan to work in the West Asian and Arabian oil economies. From India, families leave to enter niches in societies of the Atlantic world such as the motel business in the US or software production. Overall “numerical gender balance was largely reached some time ago” and remained stable, though present macro-regional variations in trends are observable. For example, the share of women going to the European Union has increased from 48 to 52 percent while their share has dropped from 47 to 45 percent in Asia.”65 Thus the concept of a “feminization” of migration in the present needs to be placed in perspective both by the presence of women in the pre-World War II migrations and by the high incidence of male migration in the present. However, the term “feminization of migration” serves as corrective to the long neglected women’s migrations. On the macro-regional level, less than 40 percent of migrants move from developing to developed countries. Some 60 percent move either between developing or between developed countries. The alarmist view that the North Atlantic World is being “overrun” has no basis in the data: “Intra-Asian migration accounts for nearly 20 percent of all international migration and exceeds the sum total of movements that Europe receives from all other regions” and, furthermore: “Nearly half of all international migrants move within their region of origin and about 40 percent move to a neighbouring country.” The proximity between region of departure and of destination “is not solely geographical: nearly 6 out of 10 migrants move to a country where the major religion is the same as in their country of birth, and 4 out of 10 to a country where the dominant language is the same.”66 In the North Atlantic World, the migratory connection came to an end in the mid-1950s. Two south-north temporary migrant worker systems developed, from Mediterranean societies to western and northern Europe 65 Andrea Tyree and Katherine Donato, “A Demographic Overview of the International Migration of Women”, in International Migration. The Female Experience, eds. Caroline Brettell and Rita J. Simon (Totowa, 1986), 21–44; Harzig, “Women Migrants as Global and Local Agents”, 15–28; UNDP, Human Development Report 2009, 22. 66 UNDP, Human Development Report 2009, 22–24. Map 2.1 on global migrations, 24.

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and from Mexico (and subsequently other parts of Latin America) to the United States. Both involved men and women who worked in industries and in services. Industrial work of women was often in the electrical industry, called light (as opposed to heavy) industry—thus they could be paid “light” wages. In Europe, the “guest workers” were integrated into wage-scales according to union standards (including unions’ discrimination against women). In the US they became a racialized sub-proletariat (“the browning of America” according to one slogan). After the 1973 rise in oil prices and the subsequent economic crisis in the highly developed and highly oil-dependent world, recruitment in the two south-north systems ended. However, the temporary migrant men and women did not return as expected/ demanded. They settled and formed families through self-sustaining sequential migration of kin, at first mainly under legal entry regulations, but with increasing entry restrictions partly without documentation.67 In the decolonizing and decolonized world, wars for independence, armed struggles between political factions, and conflicts between ethnic groups—often prompted by social and economic ethnicized hierarchies introduced either by a colonizer power or by locally powerful multinational companies—generated displacement and refugees, among whom women and children are often overrepresented. At the locality of arrival they need to reinsert themselves into labour markets. The departure or flight of colonizer personnel, the self-interest of some of the post-colonial new elites, and the traditional limitations and new shambles of the colonizer economy led to both refugee generation and large-scale outmigration options, often to the former colonizer countries, the language of which the migrants speak, or to regional growth economies like those of South Africa, South Korea, and Singapore. As regards gender ratios, migrants usually move according to job options and traditional roles, that is, under constraints for women. In the 1950s and 60s much migration was still to industrial jobs defined as male though many women entered the same sectors. Some labour market segments became “gender-integrated neighbourhoods.” In parallel, the western textile industry’s delocalization of jobs began and often targeted areas with a “surplus” of women, for example, North African societies from which men were leaving. From North and West Africa’s French-language states, men and, subsequently,

67 Unless otherwise noted, this section is based on Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, chapter 19. For an outline of migrations macro-region by macro-region see there.



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women left to install themselves in metropolitan France; from Kenya and other English-language countries they moved to Great Britain; and from Egypt to other Arab states’ oil economies—the older (on Africa’s side unwanted) linguistic colonial connection became a new (on Europe’s side unwanted) migratory connection through language affinity. Far larger self-willed migrations took place within North and sub-Saharan Africa’s many regions to towns, cities, and metropoles, as well as to centres of investment and demand for services such as Lagos’ or Nairobi’s labour markets. After the independences, capitalists of the former colonizer countries began to re-establish themselves in the new states by replacing formal empires—British, French, or other—with the model of the US informal one. Informal penetration and rule through private investors, Western banks, or international monetary institutions led to (on the surface) ethnicized conflicts that resulted and result in vast refugee migrations. Since men were, often against their will, fighting for one of the many factions, such flight involved mainly women and children. Children often had to move on their own and became known as Independent Child Migrants—which sounds better than “hungry, in rags, threatened by sexual violence.”68 Lack of job options as well as high birth rates—similar to Europe’s demographic development in the nineteenth century—provided a reservoir of labour that induced ever more investors and industries in the capitalist countries to “delocalize” production facilities. In the so-called Third World both male and female labour was extremely cheap and—often with help of the regions’ governments—easily exploitable. Consumers in capitalist countries supported the delocation strategy by shopping for the cheapest consumer goods available. Thus the WCC conglomerate, Western capital and consumers, initiated a new phase of globalization. Since the 1990s, Russian and Chinese (state) capital has pursued a similar course. The new migration systems result from disparities between segments of the world, acerbated by floating investment capital as well as speculative vagabond capital, and from million-fold gendered migrant decision-making in the context of internationalized segmented and gendered labour markets under a regime of “global apartheid.” State bureaucrats and politicians no longer regard a state’s inhabitants as citizens but as an exportable,

68 Millions of dislocated children had been the result of the two world wars in Europe, in particular in Russia after 1918 when civil wars ravaged the country.

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remittance-sending labour force. Some establish annual target quantities of women and men to be exported—the reverse of the padrone or snakehead systems of the recruitment of bound labour in the past.69 The new globalization—like that of 1492 and after—was thus initiated from the West and, later, Arabia. It is not an aggressive threat emerging form low-wage countries with lower cost of living. The publicized discourse of “the West” threatened by globalization as well as by fast developing countries with political-social-economic systems as different as India, China, and Brazil turns the data on their head. Capitalist demand for labour and some states’ demand for revenues turn whole populations from citizens and agents in cultural contexts to commodified, moveable bodies. Demographic shifts in the societies of the Atlantic World (increasing longevity, a growing aging and declining young population), a change in gender roles brought about by women’s/ feminist struggles, and a reluctance of women (and of men) to work in poorly paid caregiving jobs (domestic service, cleaning, hospital nursing, care for the elderly, childcare), led to a demand for foreign women workers employable at low wages from the 1970s and more so in the 1980s. After the post-1973 flow of capital to the oil-extracting economies of Arabia and the Gulf of Hormuz, demand for women in domestic service soared in that region, too. So did demand for male labour in construction and on oil rigs. But even if men and women migrated from the same or similar regions of origin, they were domiciled separately, women in homes as live-in servants, men in camps. Furthermore, the burgeoning societies of Asia—Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia—also require caregiving, domestic, and service workers.70 As a result, women’s migration increased, as did their visibility. The term “feminization” reflects a new visibility and increased self-assertion— Philippine and Somali women in Rome, Filipinos congregating in the centre of Hong Kong on their free Saturdays, African and African-Caribbean women in London and Paris, immigrant women “of colour” in white US neighbourhoods. Migration into domestic and caregiving labour—now usually differentiated to emphasize the emotional aspect of caring—follows four major

69 For women and global capitalist structures see Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, 1989); Richmond, Global Apartheid. 70 Amarjit Kaur, “International Labour Migration in Southeast Asia: Governance of Migration and Women Domestic Workers”, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 15 (May 2007), no pagination.



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directions: (1) South and Southeast Asia to the Gulf, (2) South and Southeast Asia to Europe, (3) Eastern Europe and Africa to Western Europe, (4) Mexico and Central America to North America, especially the United States. All four are internally differentiated and migration may also target multiple destinations.71 The system relating Asian labour-exporting and the Gulf labour-importing countries concerns domestic rather than caregiving labour. In the 1980s an estimated 1 to 1.7 million women from Bangladesh, Burma, Indonesia, the People’s Republic of China, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand migrated or were sent to the Gulf States. Others went to Brunei, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, and Canada.72 Some countries, Pakistan for example, are at the same time sending and receiving countries. As emphasized in the UNDP Human Development Reports and in many other publications, the decisive aspects that distinguish the sending from the receiving countries are the striking wealth/ income disparities. Asian countries, the Philippines in particular, also supply these labour market segments in the US and Canada. In the US, however, the majority of female workers come from Latin American countries, especially Guatemala and El Salvador, and the Caribbean, especially the Dominican Republic and Jamaica. Neighbouring Mexico, since the mid-nineteenthcentury connected by a dependency relationship to the US, is by far the largest supplier. The system that provides European households with domestic labour, since 1989, has incorporated Central and East European countries.73 Recently, Spain became a destination for women from Latin America. Dangerous trans-Mediterranean connections bring women from Ethiopia and Somalia to Italy and Greece. Women from Albania and Kosovo also work in Italy and Greece, those from Moldavia mainly target neighbouring Turkey. Migrant entry to the European Union may be mediated by legally operating agencies, may involve asylum claims, or be 71 This section is based on Christiane Harzig, “Women Migrants as Global and Local Agents” and “Domestics of the World (Unite?)” cited above. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Woman. Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York, 2002), especially appendix 275–80. See also Noeleen Heyzer, Geertje Lycklama à Nijeholt, and Nedra Weerakoon, eds., The Trade in Domestic Workers: Causes, Mechanisms, and Consequences of International Labor Migration (London, 1994); Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work. 72 Canada receives a continuous in-migration from the Philippines; the US has been a destination since its annexation of the islands at the end of the war against Spain, 1898, and the quelling of the independence movement. 73 Helma Lutz, Vom Weltmarkt in den Privathaushalt. Die neuen Dienstmädchen im Zeitalter der Globalisierung (2nd ed., Opladen, 2008).

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arranged through tourist visas. Many migrants, women in particular, are undocumented—a status that almost requires invisibility.74 In addition to these four regional and intercontinental systems, the Latin American and sub-Saharan African systems remained intra-/transcontinental. In South America migration into domestic service was/is largely a self-contained system in which women move regionally and countrywide but also to richer countries where households have higher capability to pay for services. As in the past, women migrate from the countryside and the periphery to towns and cities. Cultural attitudes among the middle and upper classes traditionally have caused high demand for services. In the 1970s and 80s about 20 percent of the female labour force were domestic workers. In Bogotá live-in domestic workers, 98.2 percent of whom were women, accounted for 17.4 percent of the population. In Buenos Aires, where the percentage was lower and declining, in absolute numbers, 567,000 women were domestics in the 1980s. According to Harzig, “domestic work, often constructed as a pre-modern type of employment, was and is not on the decline.” Modernity has an uncanny resemblance to what ideologues have called pre-modern.75 In Africa, macro-regional patterns of service migrations are similarly grounded historically and culturally. They often involve kinship networks as when children from rural areas are sent to relatives in urban surroundings to both provide services and learn a trade. Thus, migration occurs mainly within culturally or state constructed boundaries from the peripheries to centres. South Africa provides a special case because of its internal spatial division and separation of the “races” before 1989. Men in the mining sector and women in the services were and, since the end of apartheid, to some degree are forced to pursue the same trajectories to temporary employment. They rotate between villages and job locations. In the late

74 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Trends in International Migration. Annual Report 2004 (OECD Publishing online); Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work; Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization. Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford, 2001); Felicitas Hillmann, Jenseits der Kontinente. Migrationsstrategien von Frauen nach Europa (Pfaffenweiler, 1996). 75 Historically see Kuznesof, “A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America”, 17–36. For the present, Janet Henshall Momsen, ed., Gender, Migration and Domestic Service (London, 1999), 81, especially Katina Pappas-Deluca, “Transcending Gendered Boundaries: Migration for Domestic Labour in Chile”, ibid., 98–113; Mary Garcia Castro, “What is Bought and Sold in Domestic Service? The Case of Bogotá: A Critical Review”, in Chaney and Castro, Muchachas No More, 105–126, and Mónica Gogna, “Domestic Workers in Buenos Aires”, ibid., 83–104.



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1990s, domestic work was the fifth largest source of formal employment.76 Whether viewed from the periphery or urban shantytowns, the lack of accessible transportation as well as long working hours often make living-in the best option. In addition to the post- or neo-colonial migration corridor to Europe’s former colonizer states, French-speaking African and Afro-Caribbean women (as well as men) are actively recruited to Canada’s francophone Quebec. Some of the movements emerged out of refugee and asylum migrations but, with access to segments of the labour market, become self-sustaining whether in legal frames or without. In general, the dependency of numerous decolonized societies on the World Bank and globalized capital, as well as damage caused by internal warfare and natural disasters result in low job options and high migratory potential. In the formerly industrialized countries, migrant families experience the global economic shifts in terms of intergenerational problems. Sons could no longer follow their immigrant fathers into jobs through family socialization and help—the unskilled/ semiskilled/ skilled industrial labour market has been closed down and re-established elsewhere. Daughters, on the other hand, could take advantage of the expansion of the service sector’s job options. Thus the resident locally-born second or third generation of male migrants found themselves in dead-end situations—as evidenced by high unemployment rates (and rioting) in England and in France and by tensions in Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Since the resident national lower classes are as much hit by deindustrialization, racialized and ethnicized tensions grow around increasingly scarce labour market options. Competition for jobs—and delocalizations—further increased with the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989. Liberalist economic policies in Russia and the East European states—advocated by the free-market economists of the University of Chicago, who profited from sizable consultant fees— mobilized further millions of men and women. To the “push” factor the demand side has to be added—the services are needed by whole societies and individual families. All of these developments reflect dependency relationships, a theoretization first developed for the relations of Latin America and the United States and Europe. 76 Roger Sanjek, “Maid Servants and Market Women’s Apprentices in Adabraka”, in At Work in Homes: Household Workers in World Perspective, ed. Roger Sanjek and Shellee Colen (Washington, 1990), 35–62; Tessa LeRoux, “ ‘Home is Where the Children Are’: A Qualitative Study of Migratory Domestic Workers in Mmotla Village, South Africa”, in Momsen, Gender, Migration and Domestic Service, 183–182.

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Given the gendered character of purchasing power and the dire need to earn incomes for themselves or their families, women from migrantsending societies have also had to turn to sex labour. Like some male day labourers, they are often exploited by human traffickers. Some victimization is countered by self-organization and help from NGOs. While the sex business has hit the headlines, most migrants are employed in households, services, or “light” industries. Increasingly, the EU’s “Great Wall” against migrants from Africa raises cost of entry whether by payments to “facilitators” or by exploitation, financial and physical, from traffickers. In the societies of the Arab World, male and female migrants are forced to retain temporary status and to leave the respective country after the end of their contract. In Europe and North America some options for permanent entry exist but have been curtailed since the 1990s. In terms of the interests of the societies of origin, numerous sending states’ budgets have become dependent on migrant remittances for their balance of trade. States supply labourers from among their citizens—a disposable population?—at cheap rates to economies with a demand for labour. Around 1900, Chinese middlemen who supplied indentured workers to the exploitative plantation regime were called “snakeheads”, at the turn of the twenty-first century whole state budgets rely on “snakeheading”, on trafficking of their citizens, women in particular, to labour abroad.77 Viewed from the migrants’ strategies, the present-day migrations resemble the European ones of the pre-World-War I period: Women and men migrate to feed themselves and the families and, often, to earn funds for a better education for their children. This truncates families and affects children—often left out of migration studies. One difference between the two periods, to the 1940s/50s and since the second half of the twentieth century, is that in the earlier period men often migrated first, while in the present women leave first. The emotional loss is, according to many migrant women’s calculations, less than the advantage gained by better education for their children through remittances or through family unification when possible. People will continue to seek the best options for their lives and those of their children. The life-projects of women and men are difficult to counter by anti-immigrant legislation. 77 Jose Napoleon Duarte, who led the military junta’s violent coup d’état in El Salvador in 1979, begged the Reagan government not to send back the refugees, whom the junta was creating, because their remittances were keeping the country financially afloat. See María Cristina García, Seeking Refuge. Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada (Berkeley, 2006), 170, and Cecilia Menjívar, Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America (Berkeley, 2000), 260.

Globalizing the Household in East Asia* Mike Douglass The Household and Globalization Households are seen neither as isolates nor as small units of social organization related to national economies, but instead as basic units of an emerging world-system.1

A quarter of a century ago, Smith, Wallerstein, and Evers put forth the thesis that the household is not merely a unit of consumption dependent upon a larger economy, but is instead the foundation of society and economy reaching from local to global scales.2 In being charged with the physical and daily reproduction of society and economy, the household carries out its tasks through pooling of unpaid and paid labour and resources, among its members. It also serves as a base to organize and socialize individuals for the rigors of employment outside of the household.3 Their thesis goes even further to state that without the household playing its assigned roles, “any economy would collapse.”4 Given this thesis, the apparent demise of the household in many societies presents the portent of increasingly severe limitations on national economies and, ultimately, the capitalist world system. Currently, more than fifty countries are experiencing below replacement fertility, with some already experiencing absolute population decline. High divorce rates, late marriage without children, the institutional warehousing of the elderly, and the phenomenal increase in single resident housing units (more than 50 percent in major cities in the North) are all indicators of retrenchment of the household.

* Reprinted by permission from The Whitehead Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations 11, no. 1 (2010), 63–77. Slightly revised by the author. 1 Joan Smith, Immanuel Wallerstein and Hans Dieter Evers, eds., Households and the World-Economy (Beverly Hills, 1984), 8. 2 Ibid. 3 Labor does not simply “magically appear that the factory gates” where it is organized by labor market principals. Its power and availability is instead daily reproduced in the household. Ibid., 65. 4 Ibid., 24.

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East Asia is not immune from the stresses on the household that are being documented in the West.5 Absolute population decline has just begun in Japan; Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, the original “tiger” economies of Asia, are not far behind. These trends present an impending crisis in the respective national economies as the labour force has already begun to dramatically shrink, dependency ratios are rising, and welfare systems are becoming insolvent in rapidly aging societies. One emerging way of attempting to overcome these disjunctures in forming and sustaining households within a given society is to go global. Referred to in this paper as global householding, the major dimensions of this process are as follows; marriage, child-bearing and adoption, education of children, hiring foreign domestic helpers and caregivers, and moving not only from low to high-income economies, but as retirement ages approach, also moving from higher to lower income societies as a way of stretching fixed incomes. None of these elements exist in isolation of the others, but are more accurately part of life cycles for the household through time. Despite the importance of the household in its many dimensions, it remains a phantom in migration studies. Mainstream research continues to view the global movement of people as part of a transnational labour process composed of individual decision makers or members of ethnic Diaspora who migrate around the world for work and income. Global householding represents a significantly different take on migration and is put forth here to theorize more explicitly about linkages between the household and larger structural issues, such as demographic transitions and shifts in the global economy. Table 1 presents key dimensions of global householding, each of which contrasts with other formulations, including transnational family.6

5 East Asia is used here to include East and Southeast Asia, or Pacific Asia, extending from Japan to Indonesia. 6 Research under the rubric of “transnational family” tends to treat the household as a backdrop for gender negotiations rather than for its role in intergenerational social reproduction. See Michael P. Smith and Luis E. Guarnizo, eds., Transnationalism from Below (New Brunswick, 1998); Luis E. Guarnizo, “The Economics of Transnational Living”, International Migration Review 37 (2003), 666–699; Peggy Levitt, Josh Dewind, and Steven Vertrovec, “International Perspectives on Transnational Migration: an Introduction”, International Migration Review 37 (2003), 565–575; Brenda Yeoh and Katie Willis, eds., State/ Nation/Transnation (London, 2003); Nicole Constable, ed., Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia (Philadelphia, 2005); Ninna Sørensen, “Transnational Family Life across the Atlantic: The Experience of Colombian and Dominican Migrants in Europe”, paper represented at the International Conference on Migration and ­Domestic



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Table 1. Dimensions of global householding Dimension

Global Householding

(1)  Basic unit

Household as an income pooling/ (paid and unpaid) labour division and sharing social institution; not only kinship or marriage-based. Cooperative as well as contested; ‘economy of affection’ as well as ‘mini-political economy’. Social reproduction—reliance on the household in the physical and daily reproduction of society. Longitudinal through life cycles and generations: marriage/forming household partnerships; childbearing/adoption; children rearing, including education; daily household maintenance; care of others in the household, including the elderly. Sustaining households with individual betterment; non-economic as well as economic motives. Multiple local-global scales within and beyond the nation-state; not simply “transborder” or “transnational”.

(2) Relations in the household (3) Household-society relationship (4) Time

(5) Migration motive and driver (6) Spatial scale(s)

First, the household is used as a way to open the treatment to many possible configurations that go beyond kinship or marriage typically used in conjunction with the term family.7 Family is defined here as a social unit that reproduces itself not only through the physical bearing of children, but more broadly through mutual nurturing, psychological support, forming identities and social values, income-pooling, and labour-sharing. The household also does not need to be based on biological relationships or Work in a Global Perspective, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, 26–29 May 2009; Nicola Piper and Mina Roces, eds., Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration (Lanham, Md., 2003); Rhacel S. Parreñas, Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes (Palo Alto, 2005). Definitions of what constitutes a transnational family also vary and are contradictory concerning whether it is based on different national origins. For more information on this, the definition of a nuclear family as a whole living abroad, or individuals living abroad, see Susie Jolly with Emma Bell and Lata Narayanaswamy, “Gender and Migration in Asia: Overview and Annotated Bibliography”, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies, BRIDGE Bibliography 13 (2003); Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, 2001); Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela, “Transnational Family Strategies and Education in the Contemporary Chinese Diaspora”, Global Networks 5, no. 4 (2003), 359–377; Rachel Silvey, “Consuming the Transnational Family: Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers to Saudi Arabia”, Global Networks 6, no. 1 (2006): 23–40. 7 Nancy Folbre, “Hearts and Spades: Paradigms of Household Economics”, World Development 14, no. 2 (1986): 245–255; Joan Smith and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Creating and Transforming Households: The Constraints of the World-Economy (Cambridge, UK, 1992).

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on a common residence. It can take many forms, including those with fictive kin, same-sex and unmarried couples, and friends who develop longterm co-residential arrangements.8 By the definition used here, domestic workers often become household members as well. Second, an open view is taken of the household with regard to the expected interpersonal relationships within it. This perspective is not intended to dismiss research that shows the many ways in which patriarchy and traditional family structures make the household a “mini-political economy.”9 Rather, it is to accept that households are also an arena of genuine caring and selfless actions for the good of others and the household as a whole. Third, a key concern is presented about the role of global householding in social reproduction and the world economy. By the beginning of this century, countries accounting for more than half of the population in the world were already experiencing below replacement fertility.10 How this will impact local economies and social capacities to care for aging populations is already a question of high importance. In East Asia, the same policy question has also emerged as to how a society can continue to enjoy prosperity and basic levels of social support, in the face of chronic population decline and in spite of the diminishing capacities of its households. Similarly, can global migration and transactions support the household and the societal roles it is expected to play? Fourth, as suggested above, householding is a longitudinal process; it is not solely about the fate of one member or one generation. Studying

8 Lea Jellinek, The Wheel of Fortune: the History of a Poor Community in Jakarta (New York, 1991). In the United States, what is now termed “non-family households”—residential units with only one person or those headed by an unmarried person—now comprise approximately one-third of all households (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). 9 Intra-family contestations over roles and power constitute one of the major themes of transnational family research, adding the important understanding that the family has power relations and differential distribution of its resources among its members. See United Nations Population Fund, State of World Population 2006 (New York, 2006); Jutta Lauth Bacas, “Cross-border Marriages and the Formation of Transnational Families: A Case Study of Greek-German Couples in Athens”, Transnational Communities Programme Working Paper Series, WPTC-02-10, http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/ WPTC-02-10%20Bacas; Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela, eds., The Transnational Family (New York, 2002); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996); Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan, Border Identity: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge, 1998). 10 Harbison and Robinson, “Globalization, Family Structure, and Declining Fertility in the Developing World”, Review of Radical Political Economics 35, no. 1 (Winter 2003), 44–55.



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this process as moments in theorize about the impacts on households of macro elements of globalization, such as the current global shift of labourintensive manufacturing to China, or the rise of an urban middle class in Asia that is presenting a high demand for foreign domestic workers. Given all that is at stake at both micro- and macro- societal levels, whether global householding will effectively compensate for local householding and broader economic disjunctures is a question worth considering. Fifth, global householding goes beyond the economist view of crossborder migration solely as a labour process for economic gain. It instead allows for more multi-faceted understandings of the motives for migration. Genuine desires to form households, have progeny, and care for others are incentives as powerful as the lure of higher incomes.11 Sixth, by using the term global instead of invoking the term transnational, global householding avoids reifying the nation-state as a singularly meaningful scale to distinguish local from global movements of people. As with the world economy as a whole, the use of nation-state and national borders to sequester social, political, and economic phenomena from those beyond the border is increasingly anachronistic. Globalizing households, for example, often have de facto, if not de jure, dual citizenship. Local governments, rather than only national governments, are taking an increasingly larger role in promulgating immigration policies. Similarly, the difference between a rural person migrating to a big city for a job in a global factory or moving abroad for the same work is not captured by distinguishing domestic from international migration. Both are part of a globalizing local economy. Likewise, householding also has global-local, rather than separate internal versus transnational linkages. Porio, for example, shows how extended families combine remittances and unpaid labour to move members from the countryside to Metro Manila and abroad in constantly shifting patterns of rural-urban migration, migration abroad, and return migration to various parts of the ­Philippines.12 Currently, more than 200 million people live outside of their country of birth.13 Multiplying this number by 4 or 5 to account for non-migrating household members increases the number of people engaged in global

11 Joan Smith and Immanuel Wallerstein, eds., Creating and Transforming Households: The Constraints of the World-Economy (Cambridge, 1992). 12 Emma Porio, “Global Householding and Filipino Migration: A Preliminary Review”, Journal of Philippine Studies 55, no. 2 (2007), 211–242. 13 International Organization for Migration, “Migration Facts & Figures”, IOM (2009), http://www.iom.int/jahia/jsp/index.jsp.

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householding to a range of 800 million to 1 billion people. One-quarter of global migrants originate in Asia, suggesting that more than 200 million people in Asia are involved in one or more dimensions of global householding. These shares can only be expected to increase in the coming decades. Global Householding in East Asia With the beginning of the twenty first century, household formation in Taiwan unfolded as a picture full of the imprint of globalization. In 2003 one in every 3.5 newly wedded couples was a cross border marriage. . . . Nearly 120,000 foreign healthcare givers are tending the elderly in Taiwanese families, and new destinations to retire overseas, including China and Vietnam, have become part of the householding agenda.14

As the region with the most rapidly advancing economy in the world over the past several decades, East Asia is now beginning to experience the gamut of global householding. There are many sources of this global turn. Most are due to difficulties in forming and sustaining households within a nationally constituted territory. Among the most crucial indicators of these strains on householding is the demographic transition toward below replacement fertility, which is resulting from extreme difficulties in finding candidate spouses, implicit choices made by women and men to develop careers instead of marrying or having children, education systems that parents do not want for their children, climbing rates of divorce, and the high costs of living in home countries after retirement. These trends are already creating burdensome impacts. East Asia already has a number of societies that are, or will soon be experiencing absolute population decline, including Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, ­Taiwan, and China. Japan, for example, will see its population decrease by 20 million people by 2050. But the impact is even greater on the labour force, which already began shrinking in the 1980s and, according to some estimates, will decrease by 70 percent by 2050; very few children are being born and more than 40 percent of the population will be over the age of 65.15 The labour forces in Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan

14 Li-ling Huang, “Going Global: Householding and the Demographic Transition of ­Taiwan”, Philippine Studies 55, no. 2 (2007), 183. 15 Blaine Harden, “For Japan, a Long, Slow Slide”, Washington Post (February 3, 2008), A17.



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are already shrinking as well, resulting in similarly rising ratios of nonworking to working populations among their citizenry. At the same time, although largely unanticipated only two decades ago, global migration has now become a major dimension of local life in East Asia.16 In 1993, approximately three million people were documented as having moved across national boundaries to other destinations in East Asia for work, study, marriage, family reunion, retirement, or as political or environmental refugees. A decade later in 2003, the estimated number jumped to 10 million.17 Due to immigration laws declaring much of this migration to be illegal, both the 1993 and 2003 figures significantly underestimate actual numbers. As noted above, the cross-border movement of people is increasingly related to global householding, which is revealed in its key dimensions: • marriage/partnering, • bearing/adopting children • raising and educating children (and adults), • maintaining/reproducing the household daily • dividing labour and pooling income from livelihood activities • caring for elders and other non-working household members. Marriage The marriage market in Asia is becoming rapidly globalized, and just in time for tens of thousands of single-but-looking South Korean men, most of them in the countryside where marriageable women are in scant supply. With little hope of finding wives of their own nationality and producing children to take over the farm, the men are pooling their family’s resources to raise up to $20,000 to find a spouse abroad.18

16 Until the late 1980s, migration to Japan from other East Asia countries almost wholly consisted of women in the sex industry. See Mike Douglass, “The Singularities of Female Migration to Japan: Past, Present and Future”, in Michael Weiner, ed., Japan, Race and Identity: Three-Volume Set of Essential Scholarship of the 20th Century on Japan (London, 2004), 230–253. 17 With more than 300,000 emigrants leaving per year, China became the largest source of international migrants in the world by the beginning of this century. See United Nations, International Migration 2002 (New York, 2002). 18 Barbara Demick, “S. Koreans Search Far and Wide for a Wife Facing a Shortage of Prospective Rural Brides, Many Men Are Forced to Look Abroad”, Los Angeles Times, 24 September 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/cgibin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/24/MNGHU LA2T61.DTL, 1.

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Marriages with spouses from foreign countries are increasing in several East Asian societies. One of the factors behind this trend is the continuing urban transition. This transition has already depleted rural populations in higher income societies and left men, who are obligated to carry on with family farms and the family line, unable to find brides due to an observed preference by women for urban work, urban householding, and urban lifestyles. In Korea, local governments have joined with farmers to sponsor searches for potential spouses from other Asian countries. For example, Haenam—a district in the southwest of Korea—has provided unmarried men with 5 million won (US$ 5,500) for expenses spent on finding and marrying foreign spouses. In 2005, 14 percent of all new marriages in Korea were between a Korean and foreign spouse. More prominently, nearly 40 percent of all rural marriages were with a foreign spouse.19 As summarized by a newspaper reporter in Korea, “As the number of international marriages increases in the rural areas, rural villages are experiencing their own kind of ‘globalization.’ ”20 In Taiwan, one-third of all marriages involve a non-Taiwanese spouse. In addition to Mainland China, Vietnam has become a principal source of spouses for Taiwan men. Over the past three years approximately 80,000 women have moved from Vietnam to Taiwan for marriage. In recent years, 1,000 Vietnamese women and Taiwanese men have been marrying every month. Between 1993 and 2002, approximately 148,000 brides moved to Taiwan from Mainland China for marriage.21 The number of marriages in Japan between Japanese men and foreign women reached about 30,000 per year by 2000. While only about 1.4 percent of the population in Japan is from abroad, in 2002, these marriages accounted for about 5 percent of the national total.

19 “More Koreans Marry Foreigners or Tie the Knot Again”, Chosun Ilbo, 22 October 2006, http://english.chosun.com/cgi-bin/printNews?id=200603300034; Asia Pacific Post, “Koreans Marry International Soulmates”, August 10, 2006, http://www.asianpacificpost .com/portal2/ff8080810d224e23010d23.d. 20 “More Bi-racial Kids Being Born in Korea”, JongAng Daily, 7 April 2006. 21 In 2003 one-third of international marriages registered in Ho Chi Minh City were between Vietnamese women and Taiwanese men. See Tsai Ting-I, “Foreign Spouses Need to Wait for Residency: MOI [Ministry of Interior]”, Taipei Times, 26 March 2003.



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Bearing/Adopting Children By 2020 nearly 50 percent of the population below age 19 in South Korea’s rural regions will be biracial due to the quickly growing number of interracial marriages.22 “There are only old people around here,” said Le Pho, a 22-year-old Vietnamese woman who married a South Korean a year ago and is now pregnant. Her child will be the first born in the village, Seogok-ri, in more than 20 years.23

Among the principal motives for marriage to a foreign spouse is to have children and carry on the family line. In 2005, South Korea and Taiwan tied for the lowest birthrates in the world at 1.1 children per woman, with Japan close behind.24 For men, particularly those in heavily depopulating rural regions of high-income countries, namely Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, marrying a foreign woman is their only chance of having a family and children. While at current levels this is not yet sufficient to reverse trends toward below replacement fertility in these countries, data on rates of birth clearly show that these marriages result in more children than do local marriages. When having their own children becomes impossible, couples can turn to international adoption.25 Sending Asian babies to the West for adoption has long been practiced, and continues today. The preference for male children in many Asian countries not only results in highly imbalanced sex ratios favouring males, but paradoxically, also a very large number of female children made available for adoption abroad. China, which now has 120 boys for every 100 girls under the age of four, is experiencing significant levels of orphaned or abandoned female children, and is now a principal source of female babies for adoption in the West. Vietnam has also become a source of children for adoption over the past two decades. From 1951 to 2001, children from abroad adopted in the United States totalled 265,677. Of that number, 156,491 came from Asia; the annual number more than doubled between 1991 and 2000.

22 Jane Han, “50% of Rural Kids to Be Biracial by 2020”, Korea Times, 9 April 2009, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/04/123_42911.html, 1. 23 Demick, “S. Koreans Search Far and Wide”, Los Angeles Times, 24 September 2006. 24 Ibid. 25 Up to the late 1980s as many as 9,000 Korean children were being sent abroad for adoption every year. See M. Freundlich, and J.K. Lieberthal, The Gathering of the First Generation of Adult Korean Adoptees: Adoptee’s Perceptions of International Adoption (Washington, DC, 2000).

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Openly adopting children from abroad is as yet uncommon in most East Asian countries; however, unreported adoptions are said to be numerous in many countries. In the case of Singapore, adoption is becoming a more open option; in 2005, applications for adoption processed by the Singapore Government totalled 556, of which 56 percent were foreign children. Smuggling babies from Indonesia—some are stolen from parents—is reported to be a significant part of adoption in Singapore.26 In 2003 the Government of Japan banned surrogate motherhood. As a result, women from Japan are now going to Korea and paying other women to bear their children.27 Just as the marriage of rural men to foreign women seemed improbable just a few years ago yet is now becoming routine, so might the adoption of foreign children or finding surrogate mothers abroad.28 Child Rearing and Education  . . . [Korean] Fathers were not passive or reluctant participants . . . to the contrary, they were often the initiators of this family splitting [sending wife with children abroad for education] for the sake of children and, despite the great difficulties they have to endure, they seem to have no regret about their ­decisions.29

One of the most striking trends in householding in East Asia is sending children abroad for education. In Korea and Taiwan, it is common for husbands to remain at home while wives and children move abroad for many years. Since the beginning of its reforms in the late 1970s, China has sent the largest number of people to study abroad. From 1976 to 2006, 10.6 million people travelled abroad to study. This number increased from 860 in 1978 to 1.3 million students abroad in 2006.30 By 2008, the annual

26 A. Arshad, “The Baby Trade”, Straits Times, 22 January 2006. 27 “Korea’s Surrogate Mother Industry Draws Japanese”, Chosun Ilbo (2006), http://english .chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200610/200610170016. html. 28 Late marriage and other factors such as rising divorce rates are leading to physical and social barriers to bearing children. Yet the desire to have children remains strong. As of 2004 some 640,000 couples in Korea were unable to conceive and were spending about 8.6 billion won a year on fertility treatment. See Yean-Ju Lee and Hagen Koo, “Wild Geese Fathers’ and a Globalized Family Strategy for Education in Korea”, International Development Planning Review 28, no. 4 (2006), 533–553. 29 Ibid., 551–552. 30 People’s Daily Online (2008), http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/6367789 .html.



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increase reached 180,000, with 60 percent claiming to be financed by their families in China.31 Parallel with these trends, such countries as the US and Australia have been positioning themselves as a centre for schooling and higher education for people from Asia. In the US—which had 572,000 foreign students in its educational system in 2003—such prestigious universities as Massachusetts Institute of Technology have classes with as many as 70 percent of their graduate students from abroad. Three-quarters of all long-term visitors from Asia in Australia are in educational programs. Global householding is providing a critical economic boon to Western schools and universities. Again, this is not about migrants using either labour or income as their motive for migration. Contrary to migration data on worker remittances, this is a reverse flow of money from the middle class, going from lower to higher-income economies. Daily Household Maintenance and Family Care In the eyes of the state, the FDW ( foreign domestic worker) is not so much a worker within a key industry in the national economy but an appendage of the Singaporean household, brought in by private contract, and made necessary only because the “family” (and within it, women in particular) are no longer able to absorb what was traditionally unpaid work).32 “Maid agencies” in Singapore estimate that 30% of the 150,000 foreign domestic workers are hired specifically to care for the elderly.33

Global householding in Asia is most observable in the millions of domestic helpers, and caretakers for children and the elderly circulating among higher income countries. For the first time in history, middle class families, not just elites, can avail themselves of full time domestic workers due to the ease and much lower cost of recruiting them from such countries as the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, China and, more recently, Vietnam.34 In 2003, 750,000 legal foreign workers, almost all women, were working in 31 People’s Daily Online (2009), http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/ 6648966.htm. 32 Shirlena Huang, Brenda Yeoh, and Maruja Asis, “Filipino Domestic Workers in Singapore: Impacts on Family Well-being and Gender Relations”, UNESCAP [United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific], Ad Hoc Expert Group Meeting on Migration and Development, 27–29 August 2003, Bangkok, 93. 33 “Tailor-maid for the Elderly”, Straits Times, 11 January 2006. 34 Vivien Wee, and Amy Sim, “Transnational Labor Networks in Female Labor Migration: Mediating between Southeast Asian Women Workers and International Labor ­Markets”, Southeast Asia Research Centre (SEARC) Working Papers Series, City University of Hong Kong, 49, 2003.

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these occupations in just Hong Kong (240,000), Taiwan (120,000), Singapore (150,000), and Malaysia (240,000).35 In Singapore, one in seven households now has a domestic worker from abroad, and two-thirds of households say that they cannot take care of domestic chores, including taking care of children and the elderly, without a domestic helper.36 As a result of their limited stay of up to a few years in any one country by host governments and with the dense networks that the workers have created among themselves at home and abroad, foreign domestic workers use Asia as just one source of employment as they further deploy themselves around the world.37 Domestic workers typically find themselves involved in two or more households in their home countries and in the countries in which they work. Filipina domestic workers in Taiwan, for example, are simultaneously breadwinners for their households in the Philippines and surrogate mothers for children of Taiwanese families.38 Foreign workers are increasingly involved in caring for the elderly. In Taiwan, where adult family members are likely to be occupied with their individual careers, foreign workers have become the backbone of a system of filial piety that makes putting elders in long-term care facilities unthinkable. On call twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, these foreign caregivers provide the semblance of a caring Taiwanese family. Japan, facing a similar situation, is now opening its doors for very limited number of nurses for elderly care in hospitals. Whether these workers are considered to be members of the families that employ them is perhaps debatable.39 Nonetheless, they are clearly indispensable to the reproduction of hundreds of thousands of households in many countries in East Asia.

35 “Asia”, Migration News 11, no. 3 (July 2004). 36 Theodora Lam, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Shirlena Huang, “ ‘Global Householding’ in a City-State: Emerging Trends in Singapore”, International Development Planning Review 28, no. 4 (2006), 475–497. 37 Emma Porio, “Global Householding and Filipino Migration”. 38 Pei-Chia Lan, “Political and Social Geography of Marginal Insiders: Migrant domestic workers in Taiwan”, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 12, nos. 1–2 (2003), 99–126. Also see Li-ling Huang and Mike Douglass, “Foreign Workers and Spaces for Community Life: Taipei’s Little Philippines”, in Amrita Daniere and Mike Douglass, eds., Building Urban Communities: The Politics of Civic Space in Asia (London, 2008), 51–71. 39 Lam, Yeoh, and Huang, “ ‘Global Householding’ in a City-State”, 475–497.



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Labour Migration and Household Remittances An estimated 2.2 million contract workers and immigrants, largely women, remitted some US$ 3.3 billion from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia “on monthly averages ranging from US$ 300 to US$ 500,” said the ADB [Asian Development Bank] study, Southeast Asian Workers’ Remittances.40 Human Rights Watch criticized Singapore for collecting S$ 530 ($ 314) million a year in levies from the employers of 150,000 foreign maids, but does not protect the maids under its regular labour laws. Employers pay S$ 200 to S$ 295 a month for the privilege of importing a foreign maid. There are about 600,000 foreign workers in Singapore.41

The number of people moving abroad for work is escalating. Filipino/ as deployed abroad increased from less than 40,000 per year in 1975 to nearly 1 million per year in 2004. One-third of those in 2004 went to other countries in East and Southeast Asia. Approximately 20 percent of the entire Philippine labour force is now working abroad. In Vietnam, about 31,400 workers were sent abroad in 1999, a fifty percent increase over 1998. In 2001, about 50,000 workers were sent overseas for work.42 In 2000, ­Indonesia—also a major source of global labour—had more than 1.5 million workers in Malaysia alone, and another 90,000 in Taiwan, 70,000 in Singapore, 40,000 in Hong Kong, 12,000 in Korea, and 3,000 in Japan.43 In all cases, the numbers continue to increase and are extending through expanding migrant networks to even more countries. Worldwide remittances from these global workers are now more than double the amount of global aid by governments and international institutions combined, and are now equal to annual amounts of foreign direct investment in developing countries. In 2003, East Asia accounted for 14 percent of these remittances. In 2008, worker remittances to the Philippines alone were sent at a pace of US$ 1 billion per month, or more than 10 percent of the country’s GDP.44 Remittances to Indonesia from its 1.2 million legal workers abroad were almost $ 3 billion in 2003.

40 M. Jeremiah Opiniano, “More Remittances from Women Emphasize Feminization of Migration? ADB Study”, Tinig.com, (2006), http://www.tinig.com/2005/more-remittancesfrom-women-emphasize-feminization-of-migration-%E2%80%93-adb-study, 1. 41 “Asia”, Migration News 13, no. 1 (2006), 9. 42 Note: Numbers from various government documents compiled by the author. 43 “Indonesia’s Labor Looks Abroad”. Migration Information Source (2002), http://www .migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=53. 44 John M. Glionna, “Philippine Workers Abroad: The Boon Has a Price”, Los Angeles Times, 26 August 2009.

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The ­Vietnamese government earned S$ 1.25 billion in remittances from overseas workers, making labour one of the country’s key exports.45 The shares of incomes sent home can be extremely high. Indonesian domestic workers in Singapore, for example, are found to be remitting about two-thirds of their average US$ 150 a month wages to their families in Indonesia.46 Their lives in Singapore are exceptionally frugal, often without even a room of their own in the houses in which they work. When considering in-kind support from families at home, remittances do not go just one way from migrants to households in their country of origin. In a great number of instances, household members at home take care of the children of the migrants and provide sanctuary for migrants between migration episodes. They also give meaning to the sacrifices that especially low-wage migrant workers endure in harsh, highly exploitative employment overseas. Household support is very frequently cited as the main reason for migrating and is the principal source of emotional wellbeing for people working abroad. Retirement Migration [Interview with Japanese retiree living in Thailand]—I do not want to burden my children . . . .I have three sons and have established good relationships with my daughters-in-law and I want to maintain this pleasant relationship until I die. . . . I want to maintain my pride as a respected father-in-law. That is why I decided to come to Chiang Mai. I can afford to hire a live-in maid or nurse to look after me here. This arrangement gives me better peace of mind towards ageing.47

For seniors facing fixed incomes and a diminishing ability to rely on children, an alternative is appearing: less expensive residences in Southeast Asia or China where retirement villas are being built complete with health care and assistance in daily household tasks.48 By 2002, one-quarter of the population in Japan was already over the age of 65. This share is projected to reach 42 percent by 2050. In 2050, Korea will also have more than 40 percent of its population over the age of 65 and will have surpassed

45 Nguoi Lao Dong, “Guest Workers Send $1.5b Back Home”, Labourer, 22 December 2003. 46 “Asia”, Migration News 11, no. 2 (2004), 8. 47 Mika Toyota, “Ageing and transnational householding: Japanese retirees in Southeast Asia”, International Development Planning Review 28, no. 4 (2006), 515–531, 524. 48 Ibid.



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Japan as having the oldest population in the world.49 Taiwan’s population has a similar trajectory. Governments and developers in Southeast Asia are already putting forth programs and retirement communities for Japanese and Korean retirees.50 Retirement migration is appearing from other parts of East Asia as well. Old soldiers of the Chinese Nationalist Party who came to Taiwan in the late 1940s are returning to China. Others, too, are also moving from Taiwan to China not only to take advantage of lower costs, but also to participate in China’s booming economy.51 Conclusions What is surprising in discourses on global migration is the neglect of the household as a vital institution not only in social reproduction, but also as a locus of decision-making and motives for migration. It remains a phantom that is only vaguely or incidentally revealed as a background for assessing migrants as labour, spouses, or diasporas, yet global house-holding, not labour migration per se, represents the singularly most important transformative process in East Asia. Migrants recruited only for their labour typically have visas limited to short-term stays, and are never afforded the chance to become either permanent residents or citizens. Families cannot accompany them, and they are also often forbidden to marry or have children in the host country. Global householding through marriage and having children, for example, has a quite different outcome that includes permanent stays and possibilities of citizenship, and, according to said citizenship, rights to all privileges. In bearing children, global households contribute to intergenerational multicultural linkages within and among societies in the region and beyond. Globalization of householding is much more likely than people recruited as labour alone to produce the layers of cultural sedimentation in the host country that, in the longer-term, will transform ethnically homogeneous societies in Asia into genuinely multicultural

49 Korea National Statistical Office, Labor Force Survey (Seoul: KNSO, July 2008). 50 For example, See “Retirement Resort”, Leisure Club (2005), http://www.retirementresort.com/concept.htm. 51 Li-ling Huang, “A World without Strangers? Taiwan’s New Households in the Nexus of China and Southeast Asia Relations”, International Development Planning Review 28, no. 4 (2006), 447–473.

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ones. Few other challenges to the identities and cultures of East Asia are as profound as global householding. Once it is seen as a key social institution in local and global socioeconomic systems, and once available data and cases are brought together to reveal its importance in contemporary globalization processes, the question that arises is whether or not global householding can be a phoenix that renews energies of householding that otherwise seem to be declining. The answer to this question is unclear for at least three reasons: (1) policy regimes are not, in general, hospitable to global householding; (2) social acceptance is also needed for it to flourish; and (3) the trends are not yet documented sufficiently to be able to make trajectories. First, policy regimes throughout Asia tend to be inimical to the needs of global householding. Marriage across national boundaries is fraught with difficulties, including, on one end of the spectrum, trafficking and fraudulent representation; on the other end, immigration policies often disallow citizenship rights until several years after marriage and residence, with many countries disallowing non-citizen spouses the right to work outside of the household in the local economy.52 Second, social attitudes and discriminatory practices against various elements of global householding are pronounced in many countries. Discrimination in access to private housing, community services, and public spaces are common and usually without legal recourse. Negative attitudes about the traits of people from other Asian countries, such as sensationalized criminal behaviour, are allied with this discrimination. Societies in receiving countries are known to systematically channel migrants through unregulated discrimination into certain neighbourhoods, which are tantamount to ghettos. Governments also participate in private sector and community regulation through law making and police powers. In addition, popular and academic writing on the various dimensions of global householding often take a pejorative view of its nature and impacts. Among the more commonly expressed views are that it is exploitative, morally improper, undermines local culture, and brings in migrants to steal jobs from locals.53 The many experiences that counter or caution these views remain in the shadow of the more negative treatments. 52 Li-ling Huang, “Going Global: Householding and the Demographic Transition of ­Taiwan”, Philippine Studies 55, no. 2 (2007), 183–210. 53 Mike Douglass, “Global Householding in Pacific Asia”, (2006), as exemplified by such statements by a foreign bride support group that “Multinational marriage matching



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Third, with tracking of the many dimensions of global householding not yet routine, trends are difficult to assess.54 In some areas, such as marriage, available statistics show stunning growth patterns. Nonetheless, even this data is not easy to retrieve, and other aspects of global householding, such as adoptions, schooling abroad, remittances, and retirement migration, are typically found in case studies, rather than national data level. Placing householding in the centre of migration analysis is necessary to assess its future prospects. When householding goes global, a myriad of agents, governments, and local social reactions present formidable challenges to its success, yet those engaged in global migration and householding are beginning to find allies in civil society and government alike. While much attention has been given to the nation–state represented by the central government, what is apparent from numerous studies is the heightening role of the local state—prefectural, district, and municipal governments—in global householding. Local governments, for example, have been a vanguard in recruiting foreign brides for men in rural areas. Local governments have also developed programs to assist in the education and welfare of foreign household members and were the vanguard in ending discriminatory fingerprinting of Korean residents in Japan.55 Where local governments have significant autonomy from the centre, the differences between the national and local state seem to be widening across a number of areas of work and residential issues faced by foreigners and globalizing households. Yet the local state, like global householding, remains relatively unexplored in the governance of migration; it merits much more attention in order to assess the future of global householding. Despite the manifold barriers confronting global householding, current trends and their underlying drivers indicate that it will continue to expand is mainly operated by marriage brokers and the process is quite the same with a business transaction” and thus “the value of marriage is distorted”. See Cecilia Liao, “An Observation of the Multinational Marriages in Taiwan”, Garden of Hope Foundation, E-News, 014 (27 July 2003). 54 John Parker, “International Migration Data Collection”, Global Commission on International Migration (2005), http://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/shared/ mainsite/published_docs/books/wmr_sec03.pdf; and Graeme Hugo, “Improving Statistics on International Migration in Asia”, International Statistical Review 74, no. 3 (2006), 335–355. 55 Katherine Tegtmeyer-Pak, “Foreigners are Local Citizens, Too”, in Mike Douglass and Glenda Roberts, eds., Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society (Honolulu, 2003), 242–269.

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in East Asia, especially in terms of marriage and childbearing, education of children, and recruitment of domestic workers. Other forms, such as international adoption, might very well increase over the longer term, as will retirement migration. Though it cannot be predicted how or if difficulties appearing in domestic householding in East Asia will somehow be compensated by global householding, it can be concluded that global householding has become a permanent and expanding feature of this world region, the future of which will, in part, depend on its successes.

Part two

Atlantic world: europe and the americas

Domestic Service and Urbanization in Latin America from the Nineteenth Century to the Present Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof Rural-urban migrants in the history of Latin America have often become domestic servants. However, migration does not by itself increase domestic service, nor is the prospect of domestic service a major reason for migratory movements. Nevertheless, large proportions of urban domestic servants arrived in cities as migrants; this was true in the nineteenth century and is even more striking since 1850. For example, until the 1980s the main source of domestic workers in Latin American countries was internal migration.1 At the same time only a small proportion of migrants in any period are domestic servants. Instead, migration in Latin America can be said to feed into a social context and circumstances that are propitious for domestic service as an occupation. These include ideologies related to patriarchy, gender, race, and social status, as well as the processes of urbanization and industrialization, the distribution of income, and technologies related to household management and consumption. Furthermore, children have been an important dimension of domestic service, so questions of age and education also have an important part in this story. This chapter will look at internal and international migration and changes in urban household economies and the feminization of domestic labour in Latin America from the sixteenth century until the present. Particular attention will be paid to colonialism, the transition from slave to free labour, urbanization and industrialization, and their implications for domestic service. I will argue that 1) domestic service is especially suited to Latin America because of its colonial past, social structure, long-term neglect of basic city services, and high levels of income inequality; 2) domestic service draws migrants; and female migrants came to dominate in Latin America after 1920; 3) female domestic servants since the nineteenth century have typically remained single. Those who are migrants have maintained strong links to their birth families and kin and often gave birth to ­illegitimate children; 1 J. Rodriguez Vignoli, Migracion interna en America Latina y el Caribe: estudio regional del period 1980–2000, CELADE Serie Poblacion y Desarrollo No. 50 (Santiago, 2004), 100.

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4) children have been integral to internal migration and domestic service throughout history, particularly in Latin America; 5) the expansion in domestic service in Latin America after 1920 and the continued use of servants today is a function of urbanization and the expanding middle class. The existence of high proportions of households with domestic servants means that many households can afford servants, which also implies a middle class. At the same time, there must be sufficient unskilled available women with few employment opportunities, which indicates high levels of poverty and limited employment options for women.2 Latin America as a Region Is Especially Suited for Domestic Service Domestic service as an occupation is especially suited to Latin America, though it was a significant occupation throughout the world in the nineteenth century.3 In these societies the basic structure and relationships of the family and household, the construction of houses, and the infrastructure of communities demand and reinforce the use of domestic servants. The original geography of colonialism included urban nuclei founded by neo-European elites and rural indigenous populations, along with mixedblood peasant populations. This geography of social separation more or less predetermined that domestic service workers (always a lesser occupation generally composed of subaltern population groups seen as socially inferior) would be internal migrants among domestic populations.4 For Latin American societies with a history of colonialism, slave labour, or indigenous servitude, the domestic hierarchy also reproduced society’s relationships. For example, in colonial Brazil these relationships included those of master and slave, and patriarch and wife/dependents. Relationships related to race, class, and colonial status, were incorporated into family and household relationships. The construction of Brazilian cities and the houses in those cities was generally primitive, based on slave labour. The houses were internally segregated between the public rooms in front, the family rooms along a 2 Janine Rodgers, “Changes in Domestic Service in Latin America”, International Labour Office-Santiago de Chile (2005), 7–8. 3 Christiane Harzig, “Domestics of the World (Unite?): Labor Migration Systems and Personal Trajectories of Household Workers in Historical and Global Perspective”, Journal of American Ethnic History 25, nos. 2/3 (2006), 48–73. 4 Nestor Goulart Reis Filho, Quadro da Arquitetura no Brasil (São Paulo, 1970), 28–30.



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corridor, and the “service” rooms including the kitchen, the yard and an area for the servants or house slaves to sleep. The least finished areas of the houses were outside and in the back, particularly the kitchen. Dirt floors and construction materials combining straw, earth and twigs (paua-pique) were in general use until the nineteenth century. Thatch roofs were common. This type of construction made household work unattractive, difficult and time-consuming. Often houses fell down around families even while they were living in them. Nestor Goulart Reis Filho argues that it was the existence of slave labour in Brazil which accounted for the primitive construction of houses and the persistent absence of city services for water and sewage, long after they were available elsewhere in the world. Even the low market availability of food supplies is often attributed to the presence of slaves.5 The lack of technology and availability of finished products in the market was such that households had to find a means of producing many goods that became commonly available in the market only in the late nineteenth or even the twentieth century. Clothing, flour, candles, gunpowder, and many utensils and articles of furniture were usually produced in the home. In addition, water and firewood had to be procured daily and arrangements had to be made to dispose of sewage. The absence of contraception and high birth rates also meant that considerable labour was needed to care for infants, even though high infant and child mortality resulted in death for about half of new-born babies before age five. This primitive level of technology set a context in which domestic service was seen as essential for households in Brazil (and Latin America as a whole), even after slavery was abolished. Domestic servants have always been important to Latin American economies and society.6 In the colonial period, the patriarchal household was the primary basis of juridical identity and social control in Spanish and Portuguese America, with all persons being controlled through the male head of household. The Spanish casa poblada (the home of the encomendero) was literally viewed as the basis for Spanish civilization in the New World.7 In sixteenth-century Latin America domestic servants were

5 Reis Filho, Quadro, 28–30. 6 Elizabeth Kuznesof, “A History of Domestic Service in Spanish America, 1492–1980”, in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (Philadelphia, 1989), 17–36. 7 The encomendero was an elite Spaniard who was in charge of the education and care of a specific group of Indians, and also had a right to their labour. His house, the casa

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found, not only in the urban houses of encomenderos and rural plantation owners, but also in the houses of merchants and artisans, numbering anywhere between one and forty servants per household. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Brazilian and Spanish-American censuses suggest that about 40 percent of households had at least one slave or domestic servant. In addition, Spanish and Portuguese law determined that women be maintained in a position of tutelage, which implied that most employment options for women prior to the end of the nineteenth century were domestic, in terms of where the work was executed, the type of labour demanded, and often—particularly in craft industries—the type of family relationship necessary to exercize the trade.8 The dominant race of domestic servants varied by location, depending upon the ethnic mix of the population. This changed over time. However, Indians, freed slaves, persons of mixed races, and white men and women were all part of the sixteenth-century servant population. In Brazil, African and Indian slaves dominated domestic service through the eighteenth century. In Mexico and Peru, Indians were the dominant form of domestic labour in the sixteenth century, but black and freed slaves became more important in the seventeenth. By the eighteenth century most domestic servants were castas of mixed racial descent.9 Nevertheless, Spanish servants continued to be considered prestigious. Women seeking employment as wet nurses in Mexico City frequently claimed Spanish blood—probably because of the idea that a baby would imbibe qualities of character common to an ethnic group along with its milk. Due to the colonial circumstances of conquest and caste/race relations, domestic service in Latin America became an aspect of race and class subordination rather than the “stage of life” learning experience it usually was in pre-industrial Europe.10 Domestic service was often necessary because of social hierarchy and primitive technology, but it was also a matter of social status.

poblada, was required to be in the urban centre of town and to include housing for numerous soldiers. These houses usually had 40 or more indigenous servants. 8 Jose Maria Ots Capdequi, “El sexo como circunstancia modificativa de la capacidad juridica en nuestra legislacion de Indias”, Anuario de Historia del Derecho Espanol (Madrid) 7 (1930), 311–80. 9 Dennis Valdes, “The Decline of the Sociedad de Castas in Mexico City”, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1978, 140. 10 Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978), 20; Kuznesof, “A History of Domestic Service”, 31.



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Everywhere in Latin America domestic service has historically been the most important form of female employment. In the sixteenth century many (perhaps half of the) domestic servants were male, and some were white. By the eighteenth century most domestic servants were female and predominantly of mixed blood, and those who were male were also of mixed blood or of slave status. Domestic service in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became an almost entirely female and lower-class occupation, and generally was limited within households to a staff of three or less. The feminization trend was enhanced by the process of urbanization and the gradual decline in status for the occupation.11 While studies before the 1970s focused primarily on male migrants, aggregate studies since 1970 have shown that women have become the predominant internal migrants in Latin America, contrary to patterns in Africa and Asia. Understanding these patterns of migration requires analysis of gender differences in migration decisions. One conclusion appears to be that women see migration as a process of extending ruralurban networks, rather than as a rejection of home communities. There is increasing evidence that women maintain strong ties with their home communities even after permanent migration. Their periodic returns to their communities reinforce relationships and claims to land and property. At times members of the original community perform childcare for the migrant. Domestic service in this context is a temporary income­generating strategy.12 However, the strong association between internal migration and domestic service did not necessarily contribute to the feminization of the latter.13 Orphaned relatives, adopted children, manumitted slave children and women, Indians captured in frontier wars, illegitimate or “natural” off-spring of the head of household, or pre-adolescent and adolescent children of neighbours or kinsfolk were natural components of the servant category and contributed to the personalized, paternalistic master/ servant relationship which was often strengthened through ritual kinship.14 11 Jose C. Moya, “Domestic Service in a Global Perspective: Gender, Migration and Ethnic Niches”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (2007), 559–579. 12 Ann V. Millard and Patricia E. Hubbard-Garcia, “Demography”, in Latinas of the Americas: a Source Book, ed. Lynn Stoner (New York, 1989), 76–80. 13 Moya, “Domestic Service”, 568. 14 Ritual kinship or compadrazco is based on godparenthood as defined within Catholicism. It played an important role in strengthening and extending the ties of kinship in Latin America. Parents selected godparents for a child at his or her baptism, confirmation, and marriage. The godparents were then tied to the parents as coparents. Godparents were

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At the same time the association of domestic service with the lower end of the class/caste/colour system which dominated Latin American society caused a gradual alienation between employers and servants as well as a loss of status for the occupation of domestic servant. Domestic Service as an Occupation Attracts Migrants Female migrants to large cities in Latin America have very high labour force participation rates. In general, recent migrants are much more likely to work than earlier migrants, and even more likely to work than nativeborn women. In Buenos Aires in 1970, 51.5 percent of recent internal female migrants were working as domestic servants, as compared with 35 percent of earlier migrants, and only 5 percent of native born women.15 The consistent results of several studies on female employment and migratory status provide sufficient evidence to conclude that the native–migrant differences in the type of labour force participation of women are large and consistent across cities.16 Domestic service, historically the numerically most important occupation for women in urban Latin America, has been predominantly filled since 1850 by young women who recently migrated alone to the cities. While many leave domestic service as they grow older, the continuous influx of migrants replenishes the supply of young domestic servants for urban households. The relationship between migration and domestic service in Latin America is so long-standing and significant that it can legitimately be called a “migration system.” According to Christiane Harzig “emerging migration systems are as much determined by structural aspects as they are initiated and maintained by the activities of those who are involved.” Harzig goes on to explain that “in order for them to flourish, these structural factors have to be compounded by personal and discursive relationships.” These are relationships of people within the system who also recruit new migrants.17 Domestic service in Latin America is historically and culturally grounded and often functions through kinship networks, also considered to be related to all of those related to their godchildren and were theoretically forbidden to intermarry with them. 15 Adriana Marshall, Inmigracion, demanda de fuerza de trabajo y estructura ocupacional en el area metropolitan Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1976). 16 Elizabeth Jelin, “Migration and Labor Force Participation of Latin American Women: The Domestic Servants in the Cities”, Signs 3, no. 1 (1977), 133. 17 Harzig, “Domestics of the World”, 50–51.



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with children from rural areas sent to provide services to better-off relatives in the city. Discussions of domestic servants often stress the frequent change in positions. Rural-urban migrants in Latin America constantly and repeatedly migrate back to their original communities, sometimes for a weekend and sometimes for a year, after which they return to the city again to a different position as a domestic servant. Child domestics frequently lived with other families between the ages of seven and sixteen. These children were migrants from rural communities who came to work or be educated in the houses of the elite or middle class.18 Migrants are especially drawn to as well as sought out for domestic service. One important reason is that migrants often arrive in urban areas with few resources, and with little education or formal skills. They are likely to be referred for employment from a relative or friend who previously migrated from the same rural area. Domestic service is often the only viable employment option. Another reason is that these migrant women are often in need of housing as well as a job. The live-in opportunity is thus an advantage for them in the short run. Sometimes domestic service is seen as a possible means of acculturation to the urban environment. In addition, migrants often come from a different culture and/or race than the would-be employers. According to Christiane Harzig this “otherness” is “one of the most substantial and tangible forms of socio­cultural capital.”19 “Their otherness, while it enhances the opportunities for extreme exploitation, also hides the unequal power relationship and hierarchy because it takes place outside the system of classed social reality of which the employer household is a part.”20 As Dirk Hoerder puts it, “In a dialectical relationship, being different permits both entry into a segment of the labour market—the migrants’ goal to be achieved—and permits their exploitation, a consequence to be avoided, if in any way possible.”21 The migrants’ need for wages, housing, protection, and aid

18 Kuznesof, “History of Domestic Workers”, 20–21; Margo L. Smith, “Domestic Service as a Channel of Upward Mobility for the Lower-Class Woman: The Lima Case”, in Female and Male in Latin America, ed. Ann Pescatello (Pittsburgh, 1973), 191–207; Elizabeth Kuznesof, “The Puzzling Contradictions of Child Labor, Unemployment and Education in Brazil”, Journal of Family History 23, no. 3 (July 1998), 225–239. 19 Harzig, “Domestics of the World”, 65–67. Also see Dirk Hoerder, “Transcultural Approaches to Gendered Labour Migration: From the Nineteenth-Century Proletarian to Twenty-First Century Caregiver Mass Migrations”, in this volume. 20 Hoerder, “Transcultural Approaches”, in this volume. 21 Ibid.

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in ­negotiating the new cultural experience coincides with the employer household’s need for inexpensive, live-in, around-the-clock service. This combination of characteristics facilitates the kind of paternalistic hierarchy and dependency relationships common to domestic service, and which are more comfortable to the employers. This “otherness” also contributes to the fact that migrants often will work for lower wages and for longer hours than non-migrants. This is both because of their particular needs and because of their background in less advantaged situations. High rates of rural to urban migration since 1920 in Latin America led to rapid urbanization.22 Urban growth was concentrated in one or two urban centres in each country. By 1960, from 60 to 100 percent of the urban population (those living in places with 20,000 or more inhabitants) lived in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants. Urbanization was a result of industrialization and also of rural economic crises, which meant that migrants arriving in cities faced problems with employment, and subsequent rapid growth of the service sector. These problems manifested in rapid growth of the informal labour sector, including domestic service. The most common explanation for the dramatic positive trends in employment of domestic servants in the twentieth century concerns the process of urbanization and industrialization and the development of a servant-employing middle class. For example, Ester Boserup argued that “it is a characteristic feature of countries at an intermediate stage of economic development for a large number of women to be engaged in paid housework.”23 According to this argument, as economies mature the employment opportunities for women also expand and domestic service as an occupation declines rapidly. Clearly the history of urbanization and industrialization are strongly correlated with the expansion in domestic service in Latin America in the period from 1920 to 1950. However, this process of economic development provides only a partial explanation. For example, since 1950 there are higher proportions of domestic servants among female employees in periods of economic decline.24 However, when employment in domestic service increases poverty tends to decrease due to the positive impact on poor households’ income.25 Between 1990 22 Jelin, “Migration and Labor Force Participation”, 130. In the region as a whole the annual urbanization rate was 1.26 percent from 1920 to 1930 and 2.5 percent from 1950 to 1960. 23 Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New York, 1970), 103. 24 B. W. Higman, “Domestic Service in Jamaica since 1750”, in Chaney and Garcia Castro, Muchachas No More, 47–48. 25 Rodgers, “Changes in Domestic Service”, 8.



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and 2003 the proportion of domestic servants in the employed population in Latin America as a whole increased somewhat, with the greatest increases in the Southern Cone and slight decreases in Mexico and Central America.26 The continued strength of domestic service as an occupation suggests that in Latin America occupational options for women are still lacking. Most Female Domestic Servants in Latin America Remained Single Female domestic servants did not typically marry or even form consensual unions at least before 1950. They did maintain strong links to their birth families and kin and often gave birth to illegitimate children. This pattern formed because of the strong preference developed, especially in the late nineteenth century, that domestic servants be young single women without children. This preference can easily be linked to the fact that domestic servants were included in the definition of those governed by the private and personal power of the patriarch. According to Portuguese and Spanish law, which continued unaltered in this respect until civil codes were passed in the twentieth century, patria potestas included wife, children and other household dependents, including domestic workers. This circumstance made the presence of a married domestic servant a problematic and contradictory element in the household. If the domestic servant had children, this was clearly seen as a factor that would interfere with the focus of the servant on their duties as a domestic servant. As Nara Milanich concludes, “The single most important source of employment for women was live-in domestic service, a labour both logistically and ideologically incompatible with caring for one’s own children. According to [Chilean] census data, service accounted for almost 26 percent of female employment in 1854 and some 41 percent in 1920. The records of the Casa de Huerfanos indicate that many children were abandoned by mothers working or seeking to work as domestics.”27 Consequently, young women with children either left them with family members in their original communities or abandoned them to orphanages so that they could make a living. 26 Ibid., 5–6. 27 Nara Milanich, Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 (Durham, 2009), 166.

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Though female domestic servants in the nineteenth century were overwhelmingly unmarried,28 Sandra Lauderdale Graham argues that the young women in Rio de Janeiro found ways of creating personal lives in the streets, in the bars, and even in churches. Some managed to rent private rooms where they could meet a lover, even when they worked as a live-in maid. It is impossible to know how many servants were able to establish independent quarters and pursue private relationships in this way. However, Lauderdale Graham points out that live-in domestics did this sufficiently to prompt lawyers and laymen in the 1880s and 1890s to draft work agreements aimed at regulating domestic service and specifically to forbid a servant who “sleeps at the place of employment” from renting a room in any other dwelling, and before 1888, to forbid a slave domestic “even with her owner’s authorization” to “establish her own residence.”29 The high rates of illegitimate births among single women in the nineteenth century can also be seen as indirect evidence that domestic servants pursued their private lives even as they gave the appearance of total dedication to their employment as domestic servant.30 Nara Milanich has argued that marriage and reproduction in the nineteenth century was seen as appropriate for only the elite and middle class populations.31 It was expected that the popular classes would be servants, and therefore unmarried, and that their illegitimate children would also be raised to be servants. The logic of this system required a continuation of a social structure of extreme economic and political inequality, and probably high numbers of illegitimate children. Feminists have often emphasized oppressive discursive aspects of prescribed roles of marriage and motherhood in paternalistic societies. However, these roles may well have been limited to certain classes in the past. They may be viewed as

28 Jelin, “Migration and Labor Force Participation”, 137, emphasizes that marriage would necessarily cause the domestic servant to lose her position. Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Austin, 1988), 73. In São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro in 1872, 95 percent of live-in servants were single. 29 Lauderdale Graham, House and Street, 61, quoting from police reports in Rio de Janeiro. 30 Elizabeth Kuznesof, “Sexual Politics, Race, and Bastard-Bearing in Nineteenth­Century Brazil: A Question of Culture or Power?” Journal of Family History 16, no. 3 (1991): 241–260, and Kuznesof, “Household and Family Studies”, in Stoner, Latinas of the Americas, 313–315. 31 Nara Milanich, “From Domestic Servant to Working-Class Housewife: Women, Labor and Family in Chile”, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe 16, no. 1 (2005), 30–32.



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privileged roles that have only recently become accessible to women of all social ranks. Children Integral to Domestic Service in Latin America Domestic labour outside the natal household was a common form of child labour throughout Latin American history. There is a long record of children from rural areas introduced to adjacent urban environments as they joined better-off households as servants.32 In addition, girl children of female domestics almost always became domestic servants, either joining their mothers as live-ins in her work, or attached to another household as a domestic. The “homelessness” of most female domestics placed an extraordinary burden on their capacities to care for their own children. Child migrants often eventually became founding members of urban clusters of migrants (many kin or fictive kin) who originated in the same villages. Such clusters were nurtured by the additional phenomenon of circular migration, as migrants to urban areas continued to return to their natal villages to visit relatives and even to eventually buy property. The phenomenon of “child circulation”, that is, children brought up in non-natal households, greatly augments the flexibility of family and kinship in Latin America. This phenomenon also testifies to the extent that children themselves are migrants, independent of their parents, as they move between households. Child circulation has been analyzed by Nara Milanich for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Chile, for nineteenthand twentieth-century Mexico by Ann Blum, and by Elizabeth Kuznesof and Claudia Fonseca for nineteenth-century Brazil and early twentiethcentury Porto Alegre, Brazil, respectively.33 Child circulation is closely 32 Catherine Komisaruk, “Indigenous Labor as Family Labor: Tributes, Migration, and Hispanicization in Colonial Guatemala”, Labor Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 6, no. 4 (2009), 59–61; Laura Shelton, “Like a Servant or Like a Son? Circulating Children in Northwestern Mexico (1790–1850)”, in Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America, ed. Ondina E. Gonzalez and Bianca Premo (Albuquerque, 2007), 219–237; Milanich, Children of Fate, 183–213; Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill, 2005), 54–58; Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, “The Puzzling Contradictions of Child Labor, Unemployment and Education in Brazil”, Journal of Family History 23, no. 3 (1998), 229–230. 33 Milanich, Children of Fate; Ann Blum, “Public Welfare and Child Circulation, Mexico City, 1877 to 1925”, Journal of Family History 23, no. 3 (1998), 240–271; Claudia Fonseca, Caminho da Adocao (Sao Paulo, 1995); Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, 1992), 98–113. Kuznesof, “Puzzling ­Contradictions”, 229–230.

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associated with high levels of consensual unions, female-headed households and illegitimacy. Household fluidity includes the frequency with which children are born in the houses of grandparents and might live some part of their lives in the houses of godparents, aunts and/or uncles, or even neighbours. Children are often sent to “help out” in the household of needy relatives, or siblings might be divided up among relatives in the event of a mother’s death. The presence of a non-related child in a household might also be a means of educating that child into the manners of a better class or an apprenticeship in a particular occupation. It is also a means to solidify a connection of kinship or ritual dependency. In her research in northeastern Brazil in 1988 and 1989, Scheper-Hughes found in “38 percent of the more than fifty households sampled, an adult woman had at one time or another helped to rear a child who was not her own for periods ranging from several weeks to several years or more.”34 Child circulation is, however, hard to trace.35 This is especially true as many children were not labelled as servants and did not receive wages. However, recent historians of childhood have paid more attention to the 20 percent or more of non-related children in households listed in ­nineteenth-century censuses.36 Other historians have provided particular cases of children between the ages of five and fourteen who were taken by their parents to live with other, usually better-off families in order to “further their education” and to “enter service.” We know of these because they ended up in the courts for abuse or because the parents actually made a contract with the employer that was found in the notarial archives. Another source is from wills of individuals in families in which such children lived and worked. Sometimes the child or criada was thanked and even named as an heir. For example, in Santiago, Chile, in 1850, an analysis of wills indicated almost 17 percent of testators made a bequest to un nino que he criado (a child whom they had reared).37 Families sent their children to other households to relieve subsistence problems, to bring in income, and in the hope that the child would learn new skills and also forge useful social links with the other more prosperous family. Other children likely to end up in non-natal households were those who 34 Scheper-Hughes, Death without Weeping, 104. 35 Claudia Fonseca, “Patterns of Shared Parenthood among the Brazilian Poor”, Social Text 74, 21, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 111–127. 36 Kuznesof, “Puzzling Contradictions”, 229–230. 37 Milanich, Children of Fate, 161.



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were orphaned, or of illegitimate birth. For many child servants their pay was simply “room and board.”38 Records of charitable and state institutions for the protection of orphaned and abandoned children are another important source of information about children and policies toward them.39 While some institutions to care for orphans or abandoned children originated early in the colonial period, most of those were intended to educate and protect the honour of legitimate, white children. However, in studies focused on Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, it is clear that by the mid-nineteenth century most institutions which took in children were primarily admitting members of the popular classes, predominantly non-white and often of illegitimate birth. It became common to require domestic and manual labour of children while they were resident in these institutions. Also, over time these institutions became more focused on educating boys and girls to support themselves in adulthood. Particularly, most institutions for girls prepared them for domestic service rather than marriage. In Brazil, the colonial law stated that non-related children should receive a salary from the age of seven because it was assumed that such children worked.40 Children were seen as having “reason”, being morally responsible for their acts, and the child’s labour was seen as having value. This perspective continued and was reinforced by the courts until the Civil Code of 1917.41 In Mexico, child labour was also seen as ­appropriate

38 Blum, “Public Welfare and Child Circulation”, 240–271 and Blum, Domestic Economies: Family, Work, and Welfare in Mexico City, 1884–1943 (Lincoln, 2009), 50; Helio Zylberstajn, Carmen Silvia Pagotto, and José Pastore, A mulher e o menor na forca de trabalho (São Paulo, 1985), 45–59; Isabel dos Guimaraes Sa, “Up and Out: Children in Portugal and the Empire (1500–1800)”, in Gonzalez and Premo, eds. Raising an Empire, 31, and Teresa C. Vergara, “Growing up Indian: Migration, Labor, and Life in Lima (1570–1640)”, ibid., 79, 91, and Laura Shelton, “Like a Servant or Like a Son? Circulating Children in Northwestern Mexico (1790–1850)”, ibid., 219, 229. 39 Premo, Children of the Father King, 79–108; Blum, Domestic Economies, 71–102, and passim; Erica Melissa Windler, City of Children: Boys, Girls, Family and State in Imperial Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, PhD dissertation, University of Miami, 2003; Silvia Arrom, Containing the Poor: The Mexico City Poor House, 1774–1871 (Durham, 2000). 40 Repertorio das ordenacoes e leis do reino do Portugal, 4 vols. (Coimbra, 1795), livo I, titulo 88, paras. 10–15, and livro 4, titulo 31. Orphans and legal cases involving children or disabled persons came under the jurisdiction of the Juiz dos Orphaos (Court of the Orphans). The court protected the property rights of minors and the welfare of propertyless children who lacked one or more parents, or any case involving children and their rights. 41 Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, “The House, the Street, Global Society: Latin American Families and Childhood in the Twenty-First Century”, Journal of Social History 38, no. 4 (Summer 2005), 863–864.

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for working class children. Early twentieth-century Mexican law and public policy endorsed child labour for the working class. According to Ann Blum, “In 1906 a government lawyer asserted that children as young as seven could work to support themselves, and a law issued the following year allowed seven-year-olds to work in factories if they had parental permission.”42 In the wake of slavery’s abolition, nineteenth-century Latin American countries experimented with a panoply of coercive labour forms including indenture, debt peonage, military conscription, penal labour, and forced impressment in public works, all of which tended to involve men or patriarchal households. For individual women and children, meanwhile, labour discipline often took the form of coerced domestic servitude. Local officials were empowered to place immoral, vagrant, needy, or vulnerable women and children as servants in respectable households and several studies suggest they did so with frequency. In Brazil, Chile, Peru, Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina such arrangements were common in the nineteenth century.43 Households of all levels employed servants. Modest households employed one servant; for the poorest households the servant was often a child. By the 1880s newspaper ads for specialized positions in urban areas became common. Many of these specified that the desired domestic servant had to be single and without children. The result was that many poor women took their babies to orphanages so that they could work.44 Somewhat ironically, it was common for the orphanages in Mexico, Chile and Brazil to raise the girls to be domestic servants. Very few married or took a different occupation.45 This almost made domestic service into a “hereditary occupation.”46

42 Ann Blum, “Speaking of Work and Family: Reciprocity, Child Labor, and Social Reproduction, Mexico City, 1920–1940”, Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (2011), 64–66. 43 Donna J. Guy, “Lower-Class Families, Women and the Law in Nineteenth-Century Argentina”, Journal of Family History 10, no. 3 (1985), 322–324; Milanich, Children of Fate, 183–190; Joan Meznar, “Orphans and the Transition from Slave to Free Labor in Northeast Brazil: The Case of Campina Grande, 1850–1888”, Journal of Social History 27, no. 3 (1994), 499–515; Carlos Aguirre, “Patrones, esclavos y sirvientes domesticos en Lima (1800–1860)”, in Familia y vida privada en la historia de Iberoamerica, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru y Cecilia Rabell Romero (Mexico City, 1996), 401–22. 44 Nara Milanich, “Women, Children, and the Social Organization of Domestic Labor in Chile”, Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (2011), 29–62. 45 Milanich, “From Domestic Servant”, 11–39, and Milanich “Women, Children”. 46 Thanks to Dirk Hoerder for this observation.



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Industrialization/Urbanization and the Expanding Middle Class Explain Continued High Use of Domestic Servants For most of the Western World domestic service as an institution and a significant occupation was radically diminished by 1910. The advent of industrialization, technological change and the demographic transition were important factors in that change. However, in Latin America domestic service continued as the most significant female occupation and expanded further after 1940. How do we account for that difference from other world areas? What does the persistence of domestic service in Latin America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries imply with respect to changes in gender, labour, and family relationships in Latin America over time? What does it say about distribution of income and the continued inequities related to race and gender? Dramatic economic and social changes in nineteenth century Latin America profoundly changed the circumstances of domestic labour. Capitalist expansion of commercial crops (emphasizing male labour) in the countryside led to the dissolution of many family farms. The subsequent surge of women migrants to urban centres can probably be seen as a stopgap measure for household survival.47 Urban domestic labour was more specialized; it focused on cooking, childcare, cleaning and laundry. In this period it is estimated that as many as half of women migrants to the cities became domestic servants.48 While most countries in late nineteenth-century Latin America followed a pro-immigration policy in the effort to bring in more “white” European population to support their modernization efforts, only the most developed countries, with a strong labour demand, actually attracted significant immigrant population. Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile were all somewhat successful in bringing in European immigrants, particularly from Spain, Italy, and Germany. Less successful countries such as Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Cuba brought in Chinese labourers under contract to work in circumstances hardly distinguishable from slavery. Immigrants to Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile expanded the urban labour force.49 In the years between 1850 and 1900, populations in Latin America doubled 47 Kuznesof, “A History of Domestic Service”, 23–27. 48 Millard and Hubbard-Garcia, “Demography”, 77. 49 Jose C. Moya, “A Continent of Immigrants: Postcolonial Shifts in the Western Hemisphere”, Hispanic American Historical Review 86, no. 1 (2006), 2–4; Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, 2002), 357–361.

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from 30.5 million to 61 million. From 1900 to 1930 the population further increased to 104.4 million. Much of the new population was concentrated in urban areas.50 Female labour participation during industrialization followed a U-shaped path, according to studies on Brazil, Mexico, and Peru. In these countries high proportions of women working in the mid-nineteenth century were followed by dramatic declines from the 1890s to the 1930s. In this period, employment in domestic service declined proportionately as well, though less so than other forms of female employment. In the period from 1940 to 1970, female employment expanded throughout Latin America in response to generally improved economic conditions. Middle- and upperclass women entered the white-collar sector, which enlarged the demand for domestic service.51 This contrasts strongly with the experience of the United States and Europe where domestic servants substantially disappeared in this period. The difference in Latin America may be attributed to the much larger unskilled lower-class population desperately in search of jobs, many of them rural migrants. Jose Moya has argued that global industrialization contributed to a transformation of class structures and the expansion of the servantemploying class.52 Thus, in the case of Latin America the entrance of ­middle- and upper-class women into the workforce was accompanied by a new demand for domestic labour from the middle class. This finding also explains why high levels of domestic service are not explained by ­levels of income inequality, as many scholars previously suggested. Instead, while income inequality is an important factor in explaining the use of domestic service, even more important is the growth of the middle class and the consumer society. Domestic service is less ubiquitous in Latin America today than in the past. More households hire specialized domestic servants as day labourers instead of the previously common live-in situation. Rural-urban migrants continue to be a rich source of domestic labour, though more have been able to utilize domestic service as a bridge toward social mobility, with many domestic workers going to school while they work.53 Also, many 50 Nicolas Sanchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America: A History (Berkeley, 1974), 168 and table 5.11. 51 Sanchez-Albornoz, Population of Latin America, 171; Jelin, “Migration and Labor Force Participation”, 129–141. 52 Moya, “Domestic Service”, 565–566. 53 Jayne Howell, “Changing Patterns of Domestic Service: The View from Oaxaca”, Paper delivered at the Latin American Studies Association Meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rice, 15–18 March 2006, 3, 5–6.



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children are still pulled out of school to take jobs as domestic servants. In addition, more poor non-migrant urban women and international migrants are entering the labour pool as domestic servants. Indeed, the São Paulo Journal of May 19, 2011 reported on a nanny who was able to purchase a two-bedroom apartment with her monthly salary of $3,100.54 The salaries of domestic workers in Brazil rose 34 percent from 2003 to 2009, more than twice the increase of other workers. Another trend is the migration of Latin American women to Europe (especially Spain) to work as domestic servants there. The heightened security focus in the U.S. since 2011, along with a welcoming situation in Europe, has diverted many migrants to Europe because of economic advantages.55 Conclusion In this essay I have argued that both domestic service and migration can be seen as embedded characteristics of Latin American society. The geography of colonialism and the social separation of races, along with patriarchal political and gender relations determined that domestic service would be integral to the elite household and that migration would be necessary to recruit workers in that system. Even the primitive construction of cities and houses (with service areas always of a lesser standard) reinforced systems of coerced labour, which were succeeded by domestic servants to perform the same labour. Over time, the system of domestic service has been substantially feminized. The system of migrant domestic servants very much included a prohibition on personal family life for domestic servants. The high level of illegitimate births is closely related to this phenomenon and many children of domestic servants became domestic servants themselves. The expansion in the middle class with urbanization in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries had the effect of greatly increasing the demand for domestic service. The constant ruralurban migration related to domestic service is also significant because of the frequent return of migrants to their original communities, and their role in bringing resources into those communities, and recruiting other members of the community to migrate and become domestic servants.

54 São Paulo Journal, www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/world/americas/20brazil.html. 55 Esther Cuesta, “We’re Better Off Outside Our Country: Diasporic Ecuadorian Women in Spain since the Mid-1990s”, Journal of Developing Societies 23 (2007), 113–143; Brad Jokisch and Jason Pribilsky, “The Panic to Leave: Economic Crisis and the New Emigration from Ecuador”, International Migration 40, no. 4 (2002), 75–102.

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This is what Christiane Harzig called a “migration system” and it continues to be strong as demand for domestic servants also continues to be strong. Indeed that demand continues, though more domestic servants now do specialized work, rather than working as live-ins. This may also give domestic servants more opportunity to marry and raise children. Domestic service continues colonial relationships in many ways. The long history of patron-client relations and a highly skewed social structure can be seen as having “naturalized” domestic service as a social and economic institution in Latin America. The “migration system” which continues to feed domestic service in Latin American cities is healthy and ongoing, with domestic servants from some families and villages working for generations of elite or middle class families in cities. While changes in both the legal and the educational systems have resulted in substantial declines in the use of child labour for domestic service, it certainly has not disappeared. Children continue to be expected to bring income to poor families and it is an accepted value among children themselves.56 Domestic service as an occupation also provides a particular type of social mobility in the paternalistic mode for migrants and the urban poor who otherwise would have no access to resources. Finally, the continued importance of domestic service in Latin America attests to the fact that these economies have so far failed to transcend the intermediate stage of development, which involves a middle class plus a large unskilled lower class population and limited employment options for women.

56 Kuznesof, “The House, the Street”, 868.

Feminization and Problematization of Migration: Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Marlou Schrover Migration researchers and policy makers endlessly repeat the claim that a feminization of migration has taken place.1 Authors use phrases like: “women workers form the majority in movements as diverse as those of Cape Verdians to Italy, Filipinos to the Middle East and Thais to Japan.”2 The countries mentioned are not chosen randomly, although the phrase “as diverse as” might suggest this. These are the cases in which migrant women do outnumber men. Examples of precisely the opposite could as easily be given: immigrant men outnumber immigrant women in Saudi Arabia (70 percent men), Cuba (73), or Bangladesh (86).3 In some countries, such as Singapore, the number of documented migrant women has increased. In 1978, Singapore introduced the Foreign Maids Scheme which made it possible for women from the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh to enter Singapore as “live-in” domestic workers. The migrant domestic worker population grew from 5000 in 1978 to 150,000 in 2005.4 These data are to some extent misleading. The Scheme was introduced to fight the exploitation and abuse of foreign domestic workers, and registration was part of that fight. The above data partly reflect an increase in the number of documented 1 See, for example: Catharine Wihtol de Wenden, “Young Muslim Women in France: Cultural and Psychological Adjustments”, Political Psychology 19, no. 1 (March 1998): 136; Russell King and Elisabetta Zontini, “The Role of Gender in the South European Immigration Model”, Papers 60 (2000): 35–52; OECD SOPEMI, Trends in International Migration. Continuous Reporting System on Migration. Annual Report 2001 (2001), 27; Tanja El-Cherkeh, Elena Stirbu, Sebastian Lazaroiu and Dragos Radu, EU-Enlargement, Migration and the Trafficking of Women: the Case of South Eastern Europe. HWWA-report 247 (Hamburg, 2004); Mary Kawar, “Gender and Migration: Why Are Women More Vulnerable”, Femmes et Mouvement: Genre, migrations et nouvelle division internationale du travail, (Geneva, 2004), 71–87; Laura Oso Casas and Jean-Pierre Garson, The Feminisation of International Migration. Migrant Women and Labour Market Diversity and Challenges, OECD and European Commission Seminar Brussels, 26–27 September 2005. 2 Stephen Castles and Mark J. Miller, The Age of Migration. International Population Movements in the Modern World (New York, 2003), 7–9, and 188. 3 Data refer to 2005. For references see tables. 4 Human Rights Watch, Maid to Order. Ending Abuses Against Migrant Domestic Workers in Singapore, Human Rights Watch 17.10c, December (New York, 2005), 19.

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domestic workers. Before 1978, women also migrated to Singapore as domestic workers, but these older migrations were largely not registered. The current percentage of women among migrants in Singapore is 50 percent. There are no data available that allow us to compare the current percentage of migrant women to that in the past. Examples like these, which refer to an increased demand for domestic workers, an increased number of documented migrant women and increasing complaints about the maltreatment of migrant women, are used to claim worldwide trends of feminization of migration and, at the same time, to turn the migration of women into a problem. Frequently it is not clear what feminization means. It is used to indicate that women outnumber men in migration and to indicate that the number of women equals the number of men now, but did not in the past. It also refers to (assumed) changes in migration: increased long-distance migration of women (as opposed to mostly short-distance migration in the past), or an increase of the number of women who are pioneers or single migrants (as opposed to the assumption that they were dependent migrants in the past). Authors generally offer no proof for feminization and only observe that women today form about 50 percent of the migrants— then to move on to issues such as migrant women’s health hazards, the problems of care-workers, domestic servants, or mail order brides, or to prostitution, trafficking and illegality.5 In this way the assumed feminization of migration is paralleled by a problematization.6 5 Wihtol de Wenden, “Young Muslim Women in France”, 133–146; Ursula Biemann, “Remotely Sensed: A Topography of the Global Sex Trade”, Feminist Review 70 (2002): 75–88: Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham NC, 2002), 517–519; Saskia Sassen, “The Feminization of Survival: Alternative Global Circuits”, in Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries, vol. 1, Gender on the Move, ed. Mirjana Morokvasic, Umut Erel, and Kyoko Shinozaki (Opladen, 2003), 61; El-Cherkeh et al., EU-Enlargement, 13; Keiko Yamanaka and Nicola Piper, “Feminized Migration in East and Southeast Asia: Policies, Actions and Empowerment”, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development Occasional Paper 11 (December 2005); Belinda Dobson, “Gender, Migration and Livelihood: Migrant Women in Southern Africa”, in New Perspectives on Gender and Migration. Livelihood, Rights and Entitlements, ed. Nicola Piper (New York and London, 2008), 137–158, 152. 6 A very large number of references can be given at this point. For examples see: Jan Ryan, “Chinese Women as Transnational Migrants: Gender and Class in Global Migration Narratives”, International Migration 40, no. 2 (2002): 93–116; Annalee Lepp, “Trafficking in Women and the Feminization of Migration. The Canadian Context”, Canadian Woman Studies. Les Cahiers De La Femme 21/22, no. 4 (2002), 90–99; Nicola Piper, “Feminization of Labor Migration as Violence Against Women: International, Regional, and Local Nongovernmental Organization Responses in Asia”, Violence Against Women 9 (2003), 723–745; Petra Dannecker, “Transnational Migration and the Transformation of Gender Relations:



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Recently more systematic attention has been paid to feminization. After I first presented the preliminary data on which this chapter is based at the 2008 SSHA conference in Miami,7 Gabaccia, Zanoni, Steidl, and Alexander followed up on some of my suggestions and, partly using the same data, added their findings at the 2009 SSHA conference in Long Beach.8 They focussed on the US, and aimed to assess sex ratios. In this chapter I first look at the changes that took place in the migration of men and women in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The focus is on Europe because on the one hand long term data are available (when for many other parts of the world they are mostly not), and on the other hand the debates on feminization of migration are concentrated in Europe. Secondly, I discuss why the claim that migration has been feminized has gained so much popularity. Attention is far greater than changes in percentages justify. Changes in the Number of Migrants: Data Providing an overview of levels and trends in international migration is difficult because many countries either lack a system of continuous registration of international migration or, if they have such a system, do not process and publish the data. Only a handful of countries gather data on the inflow of foreigners.9 Claims about the feminization of migration are based on ambiguous data, weak statistical evidence, and no statistics at The Case of Bangladeshi Labour Migrants”, Current Sociology 53 (2005), 655–674; Glenda Labadie-Jackson, “Reflections on Domestic Work and the Feminization of Migration”, Campbell Law Review 31 (2008), 67–90. 7 This chapter is based on a talk given at the American Social Science History Association Conference in Miami in 2008: Marlou Schrover, Who counts? Differences in numbers between women and men in European immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth century. 8 Their presentations have in the meantime been published. Katharine M. Donato, “Introduction: Variation in the Gender Composition of Migrant Populations”, Social Science History 36 no. 2 (2012) 191–195; Donna Gabaccia and Elizabeth Zanoni, “Transitions in Gender Ratios among International Migrants, 1820–1930”, Social Science History 36, no. 2 (2012) 197–221; José C. Moya, “Commentary: Gender and Migration: Searching for Answers to Basic Questions”, Social Science History 36, no. 2 (2012), 269–274; J. Trent Alexander and Annemarie Steidl, “Gender and the ‘Laws of Migration’: A Reconsideration of NineteenthCentury Patterns”, Social Science History 36, no. 2 (2012), 223–241. 9 Hania Zlotnik, “International Migration 1965–1996: An Overview”, Population and Development Review 24, no. 3 (September 1998), 429–430; Oso Casas and Garson, Migrant Women and the Labour Market; Roel Jennissen, Macro-Economic Determinants of International Migration in Europe (Groningen, 2004). Jennissen offers a wealth of data but does not break them down according to sex.

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all, or authors refer to others’ data.10 Lack of data does not stop authors from claiming that the feminization of (labour) migration has become a well-established fact.11 Data, which are presented, are frequently highly selective. Authors write about feminization of migration in Australia, for instance, but produce data on the percentage of women among the Asianborn Chinese only (and even those do no pass the 60 percent mark).12 Authors suggest increases when there are none.13 Graphs are presented with Y-axes that terminate at 55 percent to emphasize increases.14 Data refer to labour migration only, or to the migration from specific countries, such as the Philippines. The migration of women from this country is encouraged by the Philippine government and the percentage of women is exceptionally high compared to other countries. Even in the Philippines, however, it did not exceed 60 percent in the period 1993 to 2007.15 Some authors mention an under-registration of migrant women as an explanation for the meagre percentages.16 For the nineteenth century and before this is plausible because states were as a rule more interested in men, as taxpayers and potential soldiers.17 A systematic under-registration of migrant women today has not been proven. For the countries that do produce statistics on international migration, the meaning and scope of those statistics vary in reliability, and they are not comparable because different legal and statistical concepts are

10 For instance Lepp refers to Kempadoo and Doezema, who refer to the ILO website. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds., Global Sex Workers (New York, 1998), 17; Lepp, “Trafficking in Women”, http://www.ilo.org/public/english/region/asro/mdtmanila/training/unit2/asiamign.htm. 11  Piper, “Feminization of Labor Migration”, 726. 12 Ryan, “Chinese Women as Transnational Migrants”, 96. 13 See for example María José Alcalá, UNFPA State of the World Population 2006. A Passage to Hope. Women and International Migration (New York, 2006), 22. 14 Alcalá, UNFPA State of the World Population, 22; Katharine M. Donato, J. Trent Alexander, Donna Gabaccia and Johanna Leinonen, “Variations in the gender composition of immigrant populations: how they matter”, International Migration Review 45, no. 3 (2011), 495–526. 15 Aniceto Orbeta, Jr., and Michael Abrigo, Philippine International Labor Migration in the Past 30 Years: Trends and Prospects, Discussion Paper Series No. 2009–33, Philippine Institute for Development Studies (Makati City, November 2009), 7, 11. 16 Khalid Koser and Helma Lutz, “The New Migration in Europe: Contexts, Constructions and Realities”, in New Migration in Europe, ed. K. Koser and H. Lutz (Basingstoke, 1998), 1–20. 17 Marlou Schrover, Joanne van der Leun, Leo Lucassen, and Chris Quispel, “Introduction: Illegal Migration and Gender in a Global and Historical Perspective”, in Illegal Migration and Gender in a Global and Historical Perspective, ed. M. Schrover, J. van der Leun, L. Lucassen, and C. Quispel (Amsterdam, 2008), 9–38.



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used.18 Most are not broken down according to sex. Several publications take stock of the sources, which are available, and the problems that arise when attempts are made to compare migration data.19 Data have been collected by SOPEMI, in censuses, by Ferenczi and Willcox, and in the UN’s Demographic Yearbooks.20 The last two offer the best possibilities for comparison. In 1973 SOPEMI (Système d’observation permanente sur les migrations) was established to provide European member states of the OECD with mechanisms to share information on international migration. SOPEMI annually publishes Trends in International Migration. Data in these reports are not comparable (as is true for all other sources)21 and they are broken down according to sex only for the last decades and only for a few European countries. From censuses, which are not available for all countries, data on migration stock can be collected. Statistics that relate to nationality are problematic because migrants can have more than one nationality, and it is often not clear how these migrants are dealt with in statistics.22 Donato et al., and Alexander and Steidl have recently drawn attention to another problem with data on stock.23 They showed that immigrant populations feminized because men tend to die at an earlier age than women. Donato et al. 18 Alan B. Simmons, “The United Nations Recommendations and Data Efforts: International Migration Statistics”, International Migration Review 21, no. 4 (Winter 1987), 996–1016; Heinz Fassmann and Rainer Münz, “Patterns and Trends of International Migration in Western Europe”, Population and Development Review 18, no. 3 (September 1992), 457–480; OECD SOPEMI, Trends in International Migration, 19; Beate Winkler, Migrants, Minorities and Employment: Exclusion, Discrimination and Anti-discrimination in 15 Member States of the European Union. On Behalf of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC). By the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) (October 2003), 15. 19 Nicola Piper, Gender and Migration. A Paper Prepared for the Policy Analysis and Research Programme of the Global Commission on International Migration (Singapore, 2005); John J. Kelly, “Improving the Comparability of International Migration Statistics: Contributions by the Conference of European Statisticians from 1971 to Date”, International Migration Review 21, no. 4 (Winter 1987), 1017–1037. For a good discussion of sources see Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940”, Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004), 155–189. 20 John Salt, “A Comparative Overview of International Trends and Types, 1950–80”, International Migration Review 23, no. 3 (Autumn 1989), 431–456. 21 John Salt, “The SOPEMI Experience: Genesis, Aims and Achievements”, International Migration Review 21, no. 4 (Winter 1987): 1067–1073. 22 Currently, eighteen countries (Algeria, Argentine, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Eritrea, Greece, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Mexico, Morocco, Nauru, Nicaragua, Syria, Tunisia and Uruguay) do not allow migrants to give up their original nationality when they acquire a new one. Some countries allow dual nationality by choice. 23 Donato et al., “Variations in the gender composition of immigrant populations”; Alexander and Steidl, “Gender and the “Laws of Migration”.

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showed that what was called a feminization of the U.S. foreign-born population, for instance, was not the result of more migrant women entering the country, but of excess mortality of men over women. Data on flow (arrivals and departures) make it possible to see year-toyear changes. Data on flow do have the disadvantage that a difference in sex ratios might reflect a difference in migration patterns, and not in the make up of the immigrant population or final migrations. If a man moves, for instance, from a European country to the U.S., lives there for a few years, returns to Europe, marries and moves again to the U.S. with his wife, the man appears twice in the data on flow and the woman only once (and the data on flow thus show a low percentage of women among incoming migrants). Moya recently pointed out immigration statistics indicated a lower percentage of women among Italians entering Argentina than among those entering the United States. He convincingly argued this reflected the temporal migration of agricultural labourers, who were all men and who yearly crossed the Atlantic to harvest in Argentina, and returned home to harvest in Italy. They were counted every year in inflow statistics as if they were new immigrants.24 For transatlantic migrations from Europe this pattern has been observed, for intra-European migrations less so.25 When it comes to flow, not all countries use the same length of stay as a measure to distinguish migrants from, for instance, tourists.26 A matrix of data on migration, constructed in 1972, showed that figures for a particular flow reported by the country of immigration were substantially higher than the figures for the same flow reported by the country of emigration. Of the 342 flows between pairs of countries in the matrix, the total reported number of immigrants was 57 percent higher than that of the number of emigrants (1,072,500 versus 683,200) because countries used different definitions of migrants with varying measures for the minimum duration of stay.27 There were differences between “actual” or “intended” duration of stay and some countries used additional criteria such as nationality, and whether incoming persons intended to work or study. Some countries reported exclusively on nationals (and excluded

24 Moya, “Commentary: Gender and Migration”. 25 See for instance: Suzanne M. Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880–1920 (Urbana, 2002). Gabaccia and Zanoni, “Transitions in Gender Ratios among International Migrants” do not mentioned this potential bias in the flow data they use. 26 Simmons, “The United Nations Recommendations and Data Efforts”, 996–1016. 27 Kelly, “Improving the Comparability of International Migration Statistics”, 1020.



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the emigration of non-nationals who had been living in their country for a considerable time), or they excluded emigrants whose destination was not known (as Belgium did), or they only registered those emigrants who left with a work permit (as Spain did). Data have improved since 1972, but data on flow remain less reliable for emigration, than for immigration. For this reason, only data on immigration are used in this chapter for the post-World War Two period. For the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, this chapter makes use of the statistics collected by Imre Ferenczi and Walter F. Willcox, in their 1929 publication International Migrations.28 The emphasis in this work is on emigration, mostly from Europe, but it also includes a wealth of other data. For the last sixty years of the twentieth century, I have extracted data on immigration to European countries from the United Nations Demographic Yearbooks.29 In the Yearbooks, only the data on flow are broken down according to sex. The tables in the Yearbooks come with very long explanatory footnotes that are not reproduced here. Many of these have to do with comparability. Since for this chapter absolute numbers have been converted into percentages, this difference between countries is less relevant because criteria are likely to differ between countries, but they are less likely to differ between men and women within one country. There is proof for the first—in the discussion of the data in the Yearbooks—but there is no proof for the second. In the Demographic Yearbooks data on flow (arrivals) are only available for some countries over any length of time. Albania, Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, Greece, Malta, Romania, and the USSR never supplied data on immigration or emigration well into the 1980s or later. Data on Eastern European countries and the USSR are missing for almost

28 Imre Ferenczi and Walter F. Willcox, International Migrations, 2 vols. (New York, 1929–1931). 29 UN Demographic Yearbook 1948, 1949/50, 1952, 1954, 1957, 1959, 1962, 1966, 1970. Hania Zlotnik has earlier used these data to provide overviews per region: Zlotnik, “Data Insight: The Global Dimensions of Female Migration”, in United Nations, International Migration Report: 2002. No. E. 03. XIII. 4 (New York, 2002); see also Zlotnik, “The Concept of International Migration as Reflected in Data Collection Systems”, International Migration Review 21, no. 4 (1987): 925–946, especially 942; Zlotnik, “Women as Migrants and Workers in Developing Countries”, International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 30, no. 1 (1993): 39–62; Zlotnik, “The South-to-North Migration of Women”, International Migration Review 29 (1995): 229–254; Zlotnik, “The Global Dimensions of Female Migration”, Migration Information Source, http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=109, accessed 18 August 2011.

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all years, except the last. Portugal only supplied data on emigration, not immigration.30 The data in the Yearbooks only include people who were regarded as foreigners. This means that people who returned from former colonies, such as the pieds noirs in France and repatriates in the Netherlands, are not included, and neither are the Aussiedler or Spätaussiedler who came to Germany. Many of these people were not born in the country of settlement, but they did have its nationality (or right to it) and were thus not regarded as foreigners. Data also do not include people who entered illegally. Before analyzing the data, the next section briefly describes changes in migration opportunities for men and women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Differences in Migration: An Impression Authors frequently refer to one of Ravenstein’s “laws” on migration, which he formulated at the end of the nineteenth century.31 Ravenstein found that women in Europe migrated as much as men, but that women tended to make short journeys while men dominated long distance migration.32 Donato et al. observe that many authors fall back on this so-called Ravenstein law but few have tested it.33 Alexander and Steidl have recently discussed the number of references to Ravenstein.34 Authorities did differentiate between the migration of men and the migration of women. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, older rules that restricted the mobility of women, but not of men, were still in place. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish state, city councils, and the Church forbad the migration of single women, which had been important in the first half of the eighteenth century. Announcements about these restrictions were endlessly repeated, indicating that they might not have

30 Kelly, “Improving the Comparability of International Migration Statistics”, 1024. 31  For references see: Suzanne Sinke, “Gender and Migration: Historical Perspectives”, International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 82–103; Rachel Silvey, “Geographies of Gender and Migration: Spatializing Social Difference”, International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 64–81. 32 Ernest G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration”, Journal of the Statistical Society 48/2.9 (1885), 167–235 and 52/2 (1889): 241–305; Silvey, “Geographies of Gender”, 67. 33 Katharine M. Donato, Donna Gabaccia, Jennifer Holdaway, Martin Manalansan, and Patricia R. Pessar, “A Glass Half Full? Gender in Migration Studies”, International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 8. 34 Alexander and Steidl, “Gender and the ‘Laws of Migration’ ”.



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been very effective.35 In 1816, in Austria, women needed the permission of local authorities to emigrate, while men needed authorization from the Court Office.36 German states forbade the migration of women who were planning to leave their children behind, but not of men who were planning to do the same.37 The growth of European cities and growing wealth of the middle classes in the nineteenth century meant an increase in the demand for domestic servants, most of whom migrated as single women.38 Conscription led to new movements of men within countries and to the disappearance of the migration by mercenaries (such as Hessians or Swiss). Groups of mercenaries had as rule been accompanied by a train of camp followers (servants, wives, prostitutes), which equalled the mercenaries in numbers.39 Guild regulated journeymen tramping systems (which had included only men) disappeared and older large-scale migration systems, which also mainly consisted of men—such as the North Sea system40—did likewise. Several European countries restricted the movement of unaccompanied women after World War One, by refusing them passports.41 During the economic depression of the 1930s, several European governments

35 Carmen Sarasua, “Leaving Home to Help the Family? Male and Female Temporary Migrants in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-century Spain”, in Women, Gender and Labour Migration, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London, 2001), 29–59. 36 Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1: 585. 37 Marlou Schrover, “Women and Long Distance Trade Migration in the NineteenthCentury Netherlands”, in Women, Gender and Labour Migration, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London, 2001), 85–107. 38 Rachel G. Fuchs and Leslie P. Moch, “Getting Along: Poor Women’s Networks in Nineteenth-Century Paris”, French Historical Studies 18 (1993): 34–49; Moch, “Networks Among Bretons? The Evidence for Paris, 1875–1925”, Continuity and Change 18, no. 3 (2003): 431–455; Jose M. Moya, “Domestic Service in a Global Perspective: Gender, Migration and Ethnic Niches”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (2007), 559–579. 39 John A. Lynn II, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2008). Lucassen and Lucassen have presented overviews of changes in migration in European migration in the period 1500–1900. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “The mobility transition revisited, 1500–1900: what the case of Europe can offer to global history”, Journal of Global History 4 (2009): 347–377; Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, The mobility transition in Europe revisited, 1500–1900 Sources and methods. IISH-Research Paper 46: http://www .iisg.nl/publications/respap46.pdf, accessed August 2011. On page 106 of the last publication the authors give estimates for the sex ratio among European migrants in the period 1501–1900, but without offering data to back up the estimates. 40 Jan Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe 1600–1900. The Drift to the North Sea (London, 1987). 41 D. Christie Tait, “International Aspects of Migration”, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 6, no. 1 (1927): 31.

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restricted possibilities for migrant men, but not for women.42 German domestic servants migrated to the Netherlands, to Scandinavian countries, and to a lesser extent to Switzerland, while the migration of men was restricted. In 1922 the Kölnische Zeitung reported that there were 100,000 German domestic servants in the Netherlands. Organizations for the protection of young girls on railroads reported that 10,000 girls had come to the Netherlands in the first seven months of 1922 alone.43 In the post-war period the creation and the expansion the European Union (and its forerunners) was important. The European Coal and Steel Community (1951) liberalized the migration of workers within the six partner states, but since miners and steel workers were all men, it was mostly men who profited from this liberalization. The fast economic growth in North-Western European countries in the period 1945 to 1975 led to guest worker migration. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Luxemburg, Sweden, and the Netherlands actively recruited guest workers while the Southern European countries supplied the labour. About 70 percent of the recruited guest workers were men. In the 1960s, Portuguese officials kept women, especially those with children, from migrating by denying them visas in the hope of receiving remittances from men at work elsewhere in Europe.44 Eastern European countries also recruited guest workers; East Germany, for example, Vertragsarbeiter from Cuba, Mozambique, and Vietnam. About 85 percent of these were men. The economic downturn after 1975 signalled the end of guest worker recruitment. In recent decades Italy, Greece, and Spain have started to attract large numbers of migrants, both men and women. The high demand for care-givers in these countries creates possibilities for women and much less for men. In Italy there are now 2.2 million foreign residents; among them 1,344,000 women from Romania, Ukraine, Albania and Morocco (59 percent). Within these groups there are numeric differences. The Ukrainian community in Italy consists of 84.6 percent women. The

42 This type of difference is, of course, also found in other continents. The migration of women from some countries increased when bans were lifted. For example, when migration of Chinese women to Australia was forbidden, numbers were very low. Once the ban was lifted their percentage gradually increased from zero in 1861 to 33 percent in 1966. C.Y. Choi, Chinese Migration and Settlement in Australia (Sydney, 1975), 22, 42. 43 Barbara Henkes, Heimat in Holland. Duitse Dienstmeisjes 1920–1950 (Amsterdam, 1995). 44 Anthony Leeds, “Work, Labor, and Their Recompenses: Portuguese Life Strategies Involving Migration”, in Migrants in Europe. The Role of Family Labor, and Politics, ed. Hans Christian Buechler and Judith Maria Buechler (New York, 1987), 36.



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same numerical dominance is found among Poles, other East-Europeans (Russians, Moldavians), and migrants from Latin America. Moroccans, Tunisians, Senegalese, and Egyptians are, by a large majority, men.45 In 2000, there were 32,000 Peruvians in Italy (mostly cleaning houses), 22,000 of them were women (69 percent). In Spain, migrants from Eastern Europe and Latin America, mostly women, have partly replaced earlier migrants from Morocco, which included men and women.46 In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the labour market position of women has changed more for the worse than that of men. Labour market participation of women was generally high before the end of communism. It has considerably dropped since its demise because many of the state organized arrangements, which were to the benefit of women, have disappeared.47 These changes led to new migrations.48 Several European countries now offer opportunities to migrant women, while they restrict the opportunities for migrant men. In Ireland, for instance, there are opportunities for nurses from the Philippines. In 2003, there were 2500 nurses from the Philippines in Ireland, all women. The spouses of non-EU nurses were allowed entry into Ireland, but were not permitted to take up any paid work,49 a measure meant to discourage the migration of men. This brief overview cannot be exhaustive. Its aim is merely to point at differences in opportunities for men and women and changes within them. It is clear that opportunities for men and women were not the same and both changed, but neither increased nor decreased linearly over time. New migrations of women have, however, received more attention in recent decades than new migrations of men.

45 Anna Triandafyllidou and Ruby Gropas, eds., European Immigration. A Sourcebook (Aldershot, 2007), 190. 46 Winkler, Migrants, Minorities and Employment, 55; Brian Gratton, “Ecuadorians in the United States and Spain: History, Gender and Niche Formation”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 May (2007): 581–600. 47 Thanh-Dam Truong, “Gender, Exploitative Migration and the Sex Industry: A European Perspective”, Gender, Technology and Development 7, no. 1 (2003): 37, 43 and 45; ElCherkeh, et al., EU-Enlargement; Angela Coyle, “Resistance, Regulation and Rights. The Changing Status of Polish Women’s Migration and Work in the ‘New’ Europe”, European Journal of Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (2007): 41. 48 Mirjana Morokvasic, “ ‘Settled in Mobility’: Engendering Post-wall Migration in Europe”, Feminist Review 77 (2004): 7–25. 49 Nicola Yeates, “A Dialogue with ‘Global Care Chain’ Analysis: Nurse Migration in the Irish Context”, Feminist Review 77 (2004): 89–90.

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marlou schrover Differences in Migration: Numbers

This section looks at which changes can be seen at the statistical level. Figure 1 presents the percentage of immigrant men for all 228 countries in the world in 2005 based on UN statistics.50 Each needle size column stands for one country. Figure 1 shows that in some countries immigrant women outnumber men: Nepal (31 percent men), Mauritius (37), Haiti (38), Barbados (40), Poland (40), and Estonia (40). In other countries immigrant men outnumber women: Saudi Arabia (70 percent men), Greenland (73), Cuba (73), Qatar (74), Oman (79), and Bangladesh (86). However, in almost all countries the number of men is more or less equal to the number of women. In Figure 2 the same data as in Figure 1 are presented in a different form. Both figures clearly show that it is not true that the majority of people who migrate are women. Not surprisingly the picture is the same for Western Europe only. In all countries the number of immigrant men is more or less equal to the number of women (Figure 3). The picture is also the same if we look at nationality: the percentage of men is roughly 50 percent (Figure 4). The same is true for countries in Central or Eastern Europe (Figure 5). In Hungary and Slovenia men outnumber women among emigrants. In Slovenia this is also true for immigrants. In the Czech Republic and in the Slovak Republic the percentage of women is larger than the percentage of men among the emigrants. If we look in even more detail at some countries we do see some differences (Figure 6). For some groups of migrants—mainly from the Philippines—the percentage of women is higher than the percentage of men. These women, however, only form a small part of the immigrant populations of the countries presented here.51 On the basis of these data we can conclude that currently immigrant women in general do not outnumber immigrant men. This brings us to the next question: has the percentage of migrant women increased? According to German population censuses (which were carried out every decade in December and which did not include seasonal migrants),

50 This list includes all 192 official member nations at the time plus all dependent countries (such as colonies) and disputed areas, http://data.un.org/DocumentData. aspx?q=migrants&id=57. 51 Triandafyllidou and Gropas, eds., European Immigration, 25.



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100 90 80 70

%

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

Countries

Calculated on the basis of UN statistics (each bar stands for a country) (http://data.un.org/ DocumentData.aspx?q=migrants&id=57 (accessed October 2008; site has since been replaced by http://data.un.org/Explorer.aspx?d=POP).

Figure 1. Percentage of immigrant men in 228 countries, 2005 25

frequency

20 15 10 5 0

0

10

20

30

40

50 60 percentage

70

80

90

100

Calculated on the basis of UN statistics, http://data.un.org/DocumentData.aspx?q=migrants &id=57.

Figure 2. Percentage of immigrant men in 228 countries, 2005, frequency

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100 90 80 70 60 %

50

40 30 20 10

UK No rw ay

ur Ne g th er lan ds Au str ia Po rtu ga l Fi nl an d Sw ed en

ly

bo

Ita Lu

xe m

lan d

ain

Ire

Sp

an y

k

rm

ar

Ge

nm

De

Be

lgi

um

0

Calculated on the basis of European Social Statistics Migration 3 (European Communities, Luxembourg, 2002).

Figure 3. Percentage of men among immigrants, 1999, Europe 100 90 80 70 60 %

50

40 30 20 10

UK No rw ay

ur Ne g th er lan ds Au str ia Po rtu ga l Fi nl an d Sw ed en

bo

Ita ly Lu

xe m

lan d

Ire

Sp ain

an y m

ar k

Ge r

nm

De

Be

lgi

um

0

Calculated on the basis of European Social Statistics Migration 3 (European Communities, Luxembourg, 2002).

Figure 4. Percentage of men among non-nationals, 2000



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100 90 80 70

%

60 50 40 30 20 10

% men immigrants

ia Slo

Re p

ve n

ub lic

ia an Slo va k

a

Ro m

ua th Li

La

tv

ni

ia

y Hu

ng

ar

ia to n Es

Cz

ec

h

Re p

Cr

oa

ub

lic

tia

0

% men emigrants

Calculated on the basis of European Social Statistics Migration 3 (European Communities, Luxembourg, 2002).

Figure 5. Percentage of men (immigrants and emigrants) 1999 100 90 80 70 %

60 50 40 30 20 10

India

Morocco

Philippines

ite

dS

ta te s

om gd in dK

ite Un

China

Un

ly Ita

ce ee Gr

Fr an ce

in Sp a

an y m Ge r

Au s

tri a

Sw itz er lan d

0

Turkey

Calculated on the basis of Laura Oso Casas and Jean Pierre Garson, Migrant Women and the Labour Market; Diversity and Challenges. The Feminisation of International Migration (Brussels, 2005). Sources: European Community Labour Force Survey (data provided by Eurostat); United States: Current Population Survey, March Supplement.

Figure 6. Percentage of foreign women in European countries among the total immigrants of certain countries of origin, 2004

118

marlou schrover Table 1. Foreign population in the German Reich 1890–191052

Year

Men

Women

% women

Total

1890 1900 1910

244,086 464,274 716,994

189,168 314,463 542,879

44 44 43

433,254 778,737 1,259,873

women accounted for 43 to 44 percent of the foreign citizens in the German Reich in the period 1890–1910 (Table 1). Men thus slightly outnumbered women. To what extent is this true for other countries? As has been observed above, data are not available for all countries and all years. The data presented below are not a selection but included all data available on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox’s International Migrations. In Hungary, the percentage of men fell from 60 to 50 in the period 1901 to 1913 (Figure 7). In Belgium, the percentage of men among immigrants and emigrants was 50 in the period 1884 to 1924 (Figure 8). For the British Isles the picture is slightly different. The percentage of immigrant men arriving from Europe is 70 in the period 1891 to 1905 (Figure 9). The percentage of men among the emigrants from Ireland to Great Britain, the British colonies and foreign countries in the period 1856 to 1921 is again 50. Immediately after World War One it drops, and this could be called a feminization of migration (Figure 10). In the Russian Empire, the percentage of men among aliens in the period 1884 to 1915 was high: 80 to 100 percent (Figure 11). The number of migrants was, however, very low (500,000 migrants yearly to this vast country). The percentage of men among the Russian citizens who worked as seasonal labourers in Germany in the period 1901 to 1913 (800,000 Russian men and women) is slightly above 50 (Figure 12). The same is true for the immigration to Sweden for the period 1875 to 1924. The percentage of men is slightly higher in earlier years and then levels out to about 50 (Figure 13). In the Netherlands, there is a difference between immigration from the colonies and that from other countries in the period 1865 to 1924 (Figure 14). The percentage of men among the migrants from the colonies is high: 80 at the beginning of this period and 60 at the end. This percentage 52 Christiane Reinecke, “Policing Foreign Men and Women: Gendered Patterns of Expulsion and Migration Control in Germany, 1880–1914”, in Illegal Migration and Gender in a Global and Historical Perspective, ed. Schrover et al., 62.



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100 90 80

%

70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1901

1902

1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

1909

1910

1911

1912

1913

Year

Calculated on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:719.

Figure 7. Percentage of men among emigrants from Hungary to European countries, 1901–1913 100 90 80 70

%

60 50 40 30 20 10

18 84 18 86 18 88 18 90 18 92 18 94 18 96 18 98 19 00 19 02 19 04 19 06 19 09 19 10 19 12 19 14 19 16 19 18 19 20 19 22 19 24

0

Year emigrant men

immigrant men

Calculated on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:606, 610.

Figure 8. Percentage of emigrant and immigrant men from and to Belgium to and from other European countries, 1884–1924

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marlou schrover

%

100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 Year

Calculated on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:655.

Figure 9. Percentage of men among aliens arrived at the British Isles from Europe (excluding transmigrants), 1891–1905 100 90 80 70 %

60 50 40 30 20 10 1919

1913

1916

1910

1907

1901

1904

1895

1898

1892

1889

1886

1883

1880

1874

1877

1871

1868

1862

1865

1856

1859

0 Year

Calculated on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:730.

Figure 10. Percentage of men among emigrants from Ireland to Great Britain, British colonies and foreign countries, 1856–1921



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100 90 80 70 %

60 50 40 30 20 10

08 19 10 19 12 19 14

19

19 00 19 02 19 04 19 06

98

96

94

18

18

92

18

90

18

88

18

18

86 18

18

84

0 Year

Calculated on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:805.

Figure 11. Percentage of men among aliens arriving with passports across the Russian frontier during the Imperial period, 1884–1915 100 90 80 70 %

60 50 40 30 20 10 0

1901

1902

1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

1909

1910

1911

1912

1913

Year

Calculated on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:810.

Figure 12. Percentage of men among Russian citizens who worked as seasonal emigrants in Germany (bearing 8-month passports), 1901–1913

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marlou schrover

100 90 80 70 60 %

50 40 30 20 10

18 76 18 79 18 82 18 85 18 88 18 91 18 94 18 97 19 00 19 03 19 06 19 09 19 12 19 15 19 18 19 21 19 24

0 Year

Calculated on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:761.

Figure 13. Percentage of men among immigrants to Sweden, 1875–1924 100 90 80 70

%

60 50 40 30 20 10

18 65 18 68 18 71 18 74 18 77 18 80 18 83 18 86 18 89 18 92 18 95 18 98 19 01 19 04 19 07 19 10 19 13 19 16 19 19 19 22

0 Year from colonies

from foreign countries

Calculated on the basis of Ferenczi and Willcox, International Migrations, 1:744.

Figure 14. Percentage of men among immigrants from colonies and foreign countries to the Netherlands, 1865–1924



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is not surprising since this was mainly return migration of civil servants, soldiers, and traders, and most of these were men. The percentage of men among migrants from other countries to the Netherlands is 50 but declines in the 1920s. Overall, the data for the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century show that the sex ratio among migrants was rather balanced. The data do not allow us to see if women travelled shorter distances than men, or if women travelled as dependents while men did not. Data to answer such questions are not available. We now turn to the period after World War Two. In 2002, Zlotnik presented data that showed for various regions in the world that between 1960 and 2000 the percentage of men in migration hardly changed. It was 50 percent throughout and there are no differences between regions (Figure 15).53 This does not mean that there are no differences between groups, such as in the case of migration from the Philippines. Figure 16 is based on data extracted from the Demographic Yearbooks for the period from 1945 to 2003. The lines for Denmark, Norway, and Sweden oscillate closely around the 50 percent line. In the UK, women slightly outnumber men in the early years and again in the mid 1980s, but not to a very large extent. For the guest worker recruiting countries Germany and the Netherlands the pattern is clearly different. The percentage of men strongly increases in the early 1960s, drops in the late 1960s, increases again in the 1970s and levels out after 1975, when countries stopped recruitment. Figure 17 presents data for the Netherlands for the period 1865 to 2002. It was, until recently, the only country for which data are available for such a long period. The percentage of men is about 50 between 1865 and 1920. In the interwar period the immigration of men was restricted, while women were still allowed to immigrate (mainly as domestic servants). If there ever was a period of feminization, it was in this interwar period. In the 1960s, during the period of guest worker migration, there was a masculinization of migration. This masculinization did not lead to discussions at the time or later. After 1975, we see a return to the 50 percent level. This return could be the reason why authors talk about feminization, although actually it was a correction for the earlier period of masculinization.

53 Zlotnik used the same flow data as I have done for this research. Zlotnik, “Data Insight the Global Dimensions of Female Migration”.

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Based on Zlotnik, “Data Insight the Global Dimensions of Female Migration”, in United Nations, International Migration Report: 2002. No. E. 03. XIII. 4 (New York, 2002).

Figure 15. Percentage of migrant men worldwide, 1960–2000 100 90 80 70

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Figure 16. Percentage of migrant men (flow), 1945–2003



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100 90 80 70 60 %

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Figure 17. Percentage of men among immigrants to the Netherlands, 1865–2002

The data for the Netherlands can be compared to those presented by Gabaccia and Zanoni for the U.S.54 In the U.S., the percentage of women among incoming U.S. migrants rose and stabilized in the 1830s at around 40 percent. During the depression of the mid-1890s, the percentage of women fell to about 30 percent. In the mid-1920s, the percentage of incoming women immigrants increased to 50 percent. The data of Gabaccia and Zanoni terminate in 1924, but seem to indicate that restrictive policies in the U.S. on migration affected men more than women, as was true for the Netherlands. Problematization of Migration Overall changes in percentages hardly justify the very large literature on feminization. How may, in the light of the data presented above, the extensive academic and political debate about feminization of migration and the keenness for using the concept be explained? Emphasis on feminization is part of the problematization of migration. Problematization is the process in which actors (academics, politicians, journalists, NGOs, lawyers, or others) analyze a situation, define it as a problem, expand it 54 Gabaccia and Zanoni, “Transitions in Gender Ratios among International Migrants”.

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by attaching other issues, and finally suggest a solution.55 Problematization creates inflated ideas about threats via extensive or overdone media attention, rapidly succeeding media reports, exaggeration of numbers, costs and consequences, and expansion to other problems.56 Exaggeration of numbers or speculations about numbers (for instance the number of women migrating) is a crucial element of problematization.57 The current dominant discourse on migration is that of problems, in which migrant men are seen as causing problems and migrant women as having them.58 The migration of men is associated with fears about losing control over borders and the labour market. In the post-9/11 era, immigration control and anti-terrorism efforts are conflated.59 The difference between causing problems and having problems is mirrored in that between being a risk and being at risk.60 Migrant men are seen as a risk because of the destabilising effects they might have on society as a whole, or on security, while migrant women are portrayed as running the risk of being trafficked, ending up in prostitution, forced marriages, situations of domestic violence or becoming the victims of honour killings.61 The way the migration of women is currently problematized shows similarities to the so-called White Slavery Scare of around 1900, which was triggered by a perceived increase in the migration of women, a disapproval of women’s migration and stories about the risk migrant women encountered.62 55 Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics and Problematisations: an Interview with Michel Foucault”, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London, 1984), 388–389. 56 Peter Vasterman, Mediahype (Amsterdam, 2004). 57 Marlou Schrover, “Family in Dutch Migration Policy 1945–2005”, The History of the Family 14 (2009), 191–202, and Schrover, “Why Make a Difference? Migration Policy and Making Differences Between Migrant Men and Women (The Netherlands 1945–2005)”, in Gender, Migration and the Public Sphere 1850–2005, ed. M. Schrover and Eileen Janes Yeo (New York, 2010), 76–96. 58 Teun A. van Dijk, “Discourse and the Denial of Racism”, Discourse & Society 3 (1992): 87–118, 100; Connie Roggeband and Mieke Verloo, “Dutch Women are Liberated, Migrant Women are a Problem: The Evolution of Policy Frames on Gender and Migration in the Netherlands, 1995–2005”, Social Policy & Administration 41, no. 3 (June 2007): 271–288. 59 Wayne A. Cornelius, “Controlling ‘Unwanted’ Immigration: Lessons from the United States, 1993–2004”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 1.4 (2005): 775–794. 60 Phyllis Pease Chock, “ ‘Illegal Aliens’ and ‘Opportunity’: Myth-Making in Congressional Testimony”, American Ethnologist 18, no. 2 (May 1991): 279–294. 61 Schrover, “Why Make a Difference?”, 76–96. 62 Jo Doezema, “Loose Women or Lost Women? The Re-emergence of the Myth of White Slavery in Contemporary Discourse of Trafficking in Women”, Gender Issues 18, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 23–50; Petra de Vries, “ ‘White Slaves’ in a Colonial Nation: the Dutch Campaign Against the Traffic in Women in the Early Twentieth Century”, Social & Legal Studies 14 (2005): 39–60; Jo Doezema, “Now You See Her, Now You Don’t: Sex Workers at the UN Trafficking Protocol Negotiations”, Social Legal Studies 14 (2005): 61–89; Dina



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The protection of “innocent” foreign women was used to legitimize restrictions on their mobility.63 Part of the process of problematization is the introduction of new terms, with a semi-academic ring to them,64 such as feminization, which helps to legitimize the problem. The word “feminization” stems from the medical discipline, where it refers to men becoming feminine because of hormonal changes or castration. In demography, “sex ratio” and “sex composition of the population” are standard terms to describe the number of women in relation to the number of men. Introduction of the word “feminization” in a demographical context and preferring it to “sex ratio” or “sex composition” emphasizes the newness of the phenomenon. Four factors explain the emphasis on feminization. In the first place, policy makers and migration researchers have in the last decades started to pay equal attention to the migration of men and women.65 This created the idea that the migration of women is new, rather than the attention for the subject. Second, the idea of feminization is strengthened by the concentration of migrant women in a few sectors of the labour market only. The labour market is segregated according to both sex and ethnicity. Migrant women

Francesca Haynes, “Used, Abused, Arrested and Deported: Extending Immigration Benefits to Protect the Victims of Trafficking and to Secure the Prosecution of Traffickers”, Human Rights Quarterly 26 (2004): 221–272. 63 Deirdre M. Moloney, “Women, Sexual Morality, and Economic Dependency in Early U.S. Deportation Policy”, Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 2 (2006): 95–122. 64 Luisa Martín Rojo and Teun A. van Dijk, “ ‘There was a Problem, and it was Solved!’: Legitimating of the Expulsion of ‘Illegal’ Migrants in Spanish Parliamentary Discourse”, Discourse & Society 8 (1997), 523–566. For emphasizing newness by introducing a new term see: Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation—Analysis of Government—Proposals for Redress (Washington, 1944), 79–96; Drazen Petrović, “Ethnic Cleansing: an Attempt at Methodology”, European Journal of International Law 5, no. 4 (1994): 343. 65 Since the 1980s, many studies about women and migration have been published. For recent overviews of the literature see: Donato et al., “A Glass Half Full?”; Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America. Irish Immigrants Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1983); Schrover and Yeo, eds., Gender, Migration and the Public Sphere. See also: Annie Phizacklea, ed., One Way Ticket. Migration and Female Labour (London, 1983); Rita James Simon and Caroline B. Brettell, eds., International Migration. The Female Experience (Totowa, 1986); Katie Willis and Brenda Yeoh, Gender and Migration (Cheltenham, 2000), xi–xxii; Sharpe, ed., Women, Gender and Labour Migration; Eleonore Kofman et al., Gender and International Migration in Europe (Gender, Racism, Ethnicity) (London, 2001); Morokvasic, Erel, Shinozaki, eds., Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries, vol. 1, Gender on the Move (2003), and Ilse Lenz, Helma Lutz, Mirjana Morokvasic, Claudia SchöningKalender, Helen Schwenken, eds., Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries, vol. 2. Gender, Identities and Networks (Opladen, 2002).

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and men cluster in certain sectors, but the number of sectors in which women cluster is less than that of migrant men.66 This concentration has increased the visibility of migrant women and has resulted in numerous studies on domestic servants, sex workers, and nurses.67 This literature is characterized by endless repetitions: there is emphasis on restricted rights, poor labour conditions, abuse, and exploitation.68 This adds to the idea that the migration of women is not only new but also problematic. Third, ideas about feminization are influenced by the sameness/difference dilemma. In an attempt to gain (legal) equality, differences between migrant men and women are stressed. In asylum cases, for instance, rape, female circumcision, honour killings, domestic violence, coercive family planning, forced marriages, or repressive social norms have been introduced as new grounds for asylum.69 The result is that migration of women and the risks they run are seen as new.70 Since the 1970s, organizations acting on behalf of migrants have used highly personalized cases to fight for immigrant rights via media campaigns. While this tactic increased the chances of success at an individual level, it also created an image of migrant women (and much less migrant men) as at risk and in need of protection.71 Prostitution and the trafficking of women dominate the academic, public and political discourse on women and migration.72 This

66 Marlou Schrover, Joanne van der Leun, and Chris Quispel, “Niches, Labour Market Segregation, Ethnicity and Gender”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (May 2007): 529–540. 67 Janet Henshall Momsen, ed., Gender, Migration and Domestic Service (London, 1999); Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, 2001); Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (London, 2003); Sheba M. George, When Women Come First. Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (Los Angeles, 2005). 68 Nicole Constable, Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (Ithaca, 1997); Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London, 2000); Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization. 69 Thomas Spijkerboer, Gender and Refugee Status (Aldershot, 2000); Kitty Calavita, “Gender, Migration, and Law: Crossing Borders and Bridging Discipline”, International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 104–132, 106. 70 Connie G. Oxford, “Protectors and Victims in the Gender Regime of Asylum”, National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17, no. 3 (Fall 2005), 18–38; Calavita, “Gender, Migration, and Law”. 71 Schrover, “Family in Dutch Migration Policy 1945–2005”, 191–202. 72 Annie Phizacklea, “Migration and Globalization: A Feminist Perspective”, in The New Migration in Europe, ed. Koser and Lutz (Basingstoke, 1998), 21–38; Denise Brennan, “Women Work, Men Sponge, and Everyone Gossips”, Anthropological Quarterly 77, no. 7 (2004): 705–733; Gretchen Soderlund, “Running from the Rescuers: New U.S. Crusaders Against Sex Trafficking and the Rhetoric of Abolition”, National Women’s Studies Association Journal 17, no. 3 (2005): 65; Laura Agustin, “Migrants in the Mistress’s House: Other



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has resulted in calls for stronger monitoring of migrant women.73 The narratives of victimhood, and the information provided by NGOs working on behalf of women, have brought about protective measures, which sometimes help women but also restrict their choices.74 Countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Burma, and Nepal have restricted the emigration of women, arguing that they need protection.75 In the fourth place, discussions on the feminization of migration are related to a feminization of the discourse on integration.76 Since the 1970s, many North-Western European countries followed a multiculturalist policy, which “allowed” immigrants to be different from the rest of the population, and encouraged them to hold on to their language and culture.77 The policy fitted perfectly with the idea that guest worker migration was temporary migration. The policy, as it took shape in the late 1970s, created, stressed and maintained differences between immigrant men and women because it reproduced stereotypical ideas about the roles of men and women in countries of origin. As part of this policy all migrant women were seen as wives and mothers. When the idea of temporariness was dropped, discourse shifted to religion and especially the assumed oppression of women in Islam. Women’s issues—such as the wearing of headscarves—currently take centre stage in debates on integration.78 Feminization of migration is linked to domestic violence, Voices in the ‘Trafficking’ Debate”, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society 12, no. 1 (2005): 97, 108. 73 Umut Erel, “Soziales Kapital und Migration: Die Kraft der Schwachen?”, in Migration, Gender, Arbeitsmarkt; Neue Beitrage zu Frauen und Globalisierung, ed. Maria Do Mar Castro Varela and Dimitria Clayton (Königstein/Taunus, 2003), 154–185. 74 Soderlund, “Running From the Rescuers”, 65. 75 Tarneen Siddiqui, “An Anatomy of Forced and Voluntary Migration from Bangladesh: A Gendered Perspective”, in Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries, vol. 1, ed. Morokvasic, Erel and Shinozaki (Opladen, 2003), 155–176; International Seminar on Cross Border Movements and Human Rights, 9–10 January 2004, New Delhi, India (Report on seminar published by the Centre for Feminist Legal Research); Dannecker, “Transnational Migration and the Transformation of Gender Relations”, 655–674; Marina de Regt and Annelies Moors, “Migrant Domestic Workers in the Middle East”, in Illegal Migration and Gender in a Global and Historical Perspective, ed. Schrover et al., 151–170. 76 Roggeband and Verloo, “Dutch Women are Liberated, Migrant Women are a Problem”. 77 Ibid.; Marlou Schrover, “Pillarization, Multiculturalism and Cultural Freezing: Dutch Migration History and the Enforcement of Essentialist Ideas”, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden—The Low Countries Historical Review 125, nos. 2/3 (2010): 329–354. 78 Dominic McGoldrick, Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe (Oxford, 2006); Lina Molokotos Liederman, “Religious Diversity in Schools: the Muslim Headscarf Controversy and Beyond”, Social Compass 47, no. 3 (2000): 367–382;

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genital cutting, honour killings, and forced marriages. In all these cases there are gross overestimates of the number of women involved. In countries with a large numbers of emigrant women, there are discussions about the problem of the children who are left behind, and about socalled transnational mothering.79 It is a debate that is not matched by a similar debate about men who left their families behind, or transnational fathering. In addition some authors have stressed that the migration of girls is responsible for the fact that the boys, who are left behind in the villages, fail to make the transition from boyhood to manhood, and compensate for their lack of money or status by showing aggressive sexual behaviour.80 Conclusion The opportunities for migration of men and women changed over the past two centuries; new opportunities were created, some restrictions fell away, while new ones were installed. Despite these changes the percentage of migrant women remained more or less equal to the percentage of migrant men. This does not deny that there were groups of migrants or periods and countries in which the sex ratio was less balanced. This is, for instance, true for the migration from the Philippines to several European countries, in which women outnumber men. In the interwar period, when several European countries restricted the migration of men, we see to some measure a feminization of migration. Within the guest worker migration regime we see a masculinization of migration, which is not addressed or problematized. In current debates the feminization of migration is presented as a recent and general phenomenon. Partly, the image that migration has feminized springs from the fact that more attention is paid to the migration of women. Partly, it can be explained by the

Susan B. Rottmann and Myra Marx Ferree, “Citizenship and Intersectionality: German Feminist Debates about Headscarf and Antidiscrimination Laws”, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, Special Issue: “The Veil: Debating Citizenship, Gender and Religious Diversity”, (Winter 2008): 501. 79 See for instance: Yeates, “A Dialogue with ‘Global Care Chain’ Analysis”; Filomenita Mongaya Hoegsholm, ed., In de Olde Worlde: Views of Filipino Migrants in Europe (Quezon City, 2007); Mojca Pajnik and Veronika Bajt, “Migrant Women’s Transnationalism: Family Patterns and Policies”, International Migration (2010): 1–25 (pre-publication online version: 28 APR 2010 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1468–2435.2010.00613.x). 80 Rebecca Elmhirst, “Tigers and Gangsters: Masculinities and Feminised Migration in Indonesia”, Population. Space Place 13 (2007): 225–238.



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campaigns on behalf of migrant women in an attempt to gain equal rights. Most importantly a large number of “problems”, in the countries of origin and settlement, is linked to the feminization of migration. Protection of migrant women is linked to issues of safety and control, and is used to legitimize restrictions on migration.

Migration and Family Systems in Russia and the Soviet Union, Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries Gijs Kessler In recent years the case for connecting migration history to the study of family systems has been repeatedly and eloquently made.1 Not only does migration decision-making usually take place in a family context, but prevalent patterns of household formation, or “family systems”, also have a profound influence on migration flows in that they determine who is available for migration at which point in the life cycle, the type and nature of the connection migrants will retain to the household of origin, as well as patterns of household formation in the regions of arrival and settlement. Particularly for studying migration from a gendered perspective, it is essential to take account of the family context of migration and mobility decisions. A focus on proletarian migrations also causes us to look at household and family systems and their changes over time. Where migration proletarianizes, it tends to alter demographic behaviour and the family system, thus changing the equation and making households, reliant on wage labour, inherently more conducive to migration and mobility than they would be in a continuing agricultural or an artisanal setting. This chapter traces these continuities and discontinuities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for Russia, one of the great migration systems of the time and unique in that it was so large that it was predominantly a system of internal migration, even if spanning two ­continents and involving extensive cross-cultural contact. While the Americas were colonized and settled by overseas migrants from Europe, the RussoSiberian system was one of overland colonization which brought Slavic settlers from Europe to the Amur River and the shores of the Pacific Ocean, meeting up with the great Chinese overland colonization from the 1 Adam McKeown, “Global Migration 1846–1940”, Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004), 178; Leslie Page Moch, “Connecting Migration and World History: Demographic Patterns, Family Systems and Gender”, International Review of Social History 52, no. 1 (2007): 97–104; Jan Kok, “The Family Factor in Migration Decisions”, in Migration History in World History. Multidisciplinary Approaches, ed. Jan Lucassen et al., (Leiden, Boston, 2010), 215–250.

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South.2 What is striking, furthermore, is its continuity over time in spite of profound changes in the nature of settlement and colonization in the macro-region. Started in earnest in the nineteenth century as agricultural colonization, the settlement of Russia’s Asian territories continued in the twentieth century as industrial and urban colonization, fostered by the state and developing within the general framework of the country’s transformation from an agricultural to an urban and industrial society. Proletarian and Non-Proletarian Migrations In their recent attempt at a quantification of early-modern European migration in a way which lends itself to comparative analysis, Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen have documented a migration rate in Russia for the second half of the nineteenth century well in excess of the European average.3 Although regularly mistaken for it, this upsurge was not a result of the 1861 abolition of serfdom. Instead, the increase in migration was attributable to the effects of industrialization, railroad construction, the rise of export-oriented agriculture in some regions, the growth of a labour market and an intensification of agricultural settlement in Siberia from the 1880s onward.4 Although coinciding with the great intra-European and transatlantic proletarian migrations of the late nineteenth century, Russian migration during this period was different in nature. To start with, it originated overwhelmingly in the countryside, where the great majority of the population was located, and was therefore in any case not proletarian in origin. Secondly, most of it was not in the first instance a proletarianizing experience. Because of the economic base of the household in immobile assets, that is, land, migration either involved the relocation of entire households, as in resettlement beyond the Urals, or sending out one or more members of the household for seasonal or temporary work elsewhere. Whereas the first type of migration was not proletarian a priori,

2 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, 2002), 306–330; McKeown, “Global Migration 1846–1940”, 156–157. 3 Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “The Mobility Transition Revisited, 1500–1900: What the Case of Europe Can Offer to Global History”, Journal of Global History 4, no. 3 (2009): 373. 4 David Moon, “Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom, and the Internal Passport System in the Russian Empire, c. 1800–1914”, in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford, Cal., 2002), 333–334, 350–355.



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the second type could well have resulted in proletarianization, but, for several reasons, largely stopped short of this. To start with, as Joseph Bradley has shown in his study of peasant inmigration in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Moscow, many of the peasant migrants were small-time entrepreneurs rather than proletarians, working as vendors, cab-drivers and in carting, transport and haulage, often with their own horses, or worked as self-employed manufacturers in crafts and trades.5 In many cases they either sold or processed goods and produce from the countryside, and the livelihood of such migrants in fact depended on their simultaneous involvement in both the rural and the urban economy. Moscow appears to have been atypical in this respect because it had a far larger presence of small production and trade establishments than other large towns. As there are no detailed studies of peasant migrants’ economic pursuits in other urban agglomerations, it is difficult to gauge how widespread such entrepreneurial peasant migrants might have been at the level of the economy as a whole. At least one other significant category of entrepreneurial migrants which was widespread were hucksters and peddlers, travelling from one village to the other to ply their trade.6 Secondly, even those who did go and work in employment rather than engage in trade or self-employment did not as a rule tend to become fully proletarianized. The perseverance of rural ties among Russia’s urban workforce and the absence of a process of proletarianization like the one which had taken place in other areas of Europe during industrialization, have been highlighted time and again in historiography.7 As I have argued elsewhere, pre-revolutionary Russia in fact offers an early example of a pattern of rural-urban migration which has been characteristic for large parts of the globe throughout the twentieth century.8 Only compared to other European countries did Russian industrialization take a somewhat peculiar course, in that it involved a largely peasant workforce which moved in 5 Joseph Bradley, Muzhik and Muscovite. Urbanization in Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, 1985), 88–94, 129, 148. 6 Robert Grube, Das Wandergewerbe in Russland (Berlin, 1904), 90–111. 7 Robert E. Johnson, Peasant and Proletarian. The Working Class of Moscow in the Late 19th Century (New Brunswick, 1979); Peter Gatrell, The Tsarist Economy 1850–1917 (London, 1986), 67; Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics. Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905 (Pittsburgh, 1998). 8 Gijs Kessler, “The Rural-Urban Nexus in Russian Labour History, 1860s–1930s: Suggestions for a Global, Comparative Perspective”, in Labour Matters: Towards Global Histories. Studies in Honour of Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ed. Marcel Van der Linden and Prabhu P. Mohapatra (New Delhi, 2009), 207–225.

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and out of urban and industrial employment to a much greater extent and retained much stronger links to the agricultural sector and smallholder farming over a much longer period of time. The reasons for this are manifold, interlocking and in need of further systematic study, but are related to the relative instability of urban employment and the importance of the family farm as a social safety net, to systems of communal land tenure and collective responsibility for taxes which necessitated the maintenance of active and personal ties to the village, as well as to family systems and patterns of household formation in the countryside. To start with, people married at a very young age, and would therefore often already be married when they would leave the household to work elsewhere. These were the regions of the East European Marriage Pattern as distinguished by John Hajnal, characterized by universal and early marriage and co-residence of married couples from two or more generations in multiple or joint family households.9 The two phenomena were related because peasants married at such an early age that they were barely able to care for themselves, let alone set up a household of their own.10 Instead, the bride would move in with the household of the groom, adding to the family pool of labour. The complement to this marriage and household formation pattern was a system of communal land tenure which matched land to labour reserves in order to maintain the economic viability of households as successive generations were added. The commune (­Russian: obshchina) provided a household with extra land if there was a newly married couple in the household. Considerable debate in historiography on the origins and functionality of this system of communal land tenure, in a way, revolves around a chicken-and-egg question: Was the communal system of land tenure and periodical repartition of allotments an answer to a marriage pattern and family system which favoured co-residence in the parental household after marriage? Or did patterns of household formation and marriage strategies evolve from a system of land tenure which put a premium on the formation of larger households? To be sure, in the age of serfdom feudal lords had always promoted marriage among serfs to obtain a fresh supply of labour from their children. In a more general sense, the scarcity of labour in relation to land, which has been referred to as one of the underlying

9    J. Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective”, in Population in History. Essays in Historical Demography, ed. David E. C. Eversley et al. (London, 1965), 101–143. 10 A. G. Vishnevskii ed., Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia Rossii, 1900–2000 (Moskva, 2006), 55.



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causes for the re-introduction of serfdom in the seventeenth century, promoted early marriage and the higher fertility rates associated with it. Subsequently this seemingly translated itself into a cultural norm and a set of matching institutions which remained in existence long afterwards, even if low labour to land ratios had by the nineteenth century changed into their opposites.11 Whatever the origins, what is relevant for our argument here is that the prevailing combination of marriage pattern and system of land tenure created an inherent tendency for households to retain rather than release labour, which is the general background to the reluctance of peasant migrants in Russia to sever their ties to the village which I have described above. Of course, in practice, households could not retain labour indefinitely. Due to early marriage, high fertility and co-residence of married children, households could grow to contain substantial numbers of people and although these were accommodated by extra land allotments and incrementally by adding-on new sections to the house, tensions could rise and at a certain point the household could partition itself into several new core-households. This moment would generally come when the head of household, the bolshak, died. The inheritance system was one of partitional inheritance, in which all married sons who were part of the household would receive equal shares.12 And it is here that we arrive at a further reason for the fact that peasant migrants wanted to retain their links to the household; it ensured them of their right to the full share at the time of partition. Beside remittances and periodical return to participate in the field work, it could well be argued that one of the main ways in which absent migrants contributed to the parental household was through the labour of their wives who remained in the village. Therefore, it was considered essential to marry before departing for outside employment,13 and here of course we have come full circle. Marriage patterns, systems of land tenure, the instability of urban employment, and the attachment to the village as a social safety net against the misfortunes of the urban world combined to perpetuate a pattern of outmigration characterized by the bifurcated household, split between village and town and rather different from proletarianization patterns characteristic for industrialization in other parts 11   Evsey Domar, “The Causes of Slavery or Serfdom: A Hypothesis”, The Journal of Economic History 30, no. 1 (March 1970): 18–32. Gatrell, Tsarist Economy, 50–56. 12 Cathy Frierson, “Razdel: The Peasant Family Divided,” Russian Review 46, no. 1 (January 1987): 35–52. 13 Burds, Peasant Dreams, 72–75.

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of Europe. The value of maintaining such active links to the countryside was demonstrated with a vengeance during the economic collapse of the Civil War which followed the 1917 Revolution, when peasants working in urban employment returned to the village en masse, back into the fold of the rural household.14 From a gendered perspective, nineteenth-century Russian migration was an overwhelmingly male affair, with the exception of agricultural colonization beyond the Urals, which involved entire families. Seasonal labour migration, which by far accounted for the largest numbers of migrants, involved mostly men, although not exclusively so. Women migrated in rather large numbers to work as domestics or as cooks hired by peasant migrant work-gangs (arteli) for the duration of the season.15 With the advent of mechanization, demand for female labour also increased in certain industries, most notably in textile production, but also, for example, in brick-making in the St. Petersburg area, and on the grain-growing estates of New Russia and the North Caucasus, both of which relied almost exclusively on peasant seasonal migrants.16 This notwithstanding, women were largely absent from the tremendous increase in mobility and migration which the country witnessed as a result of Russia’s industrial take-off. A Footloose Society The migration regime of the last half of the nineteenth century as described above persisted into the twentieth century, by and large up to the years of economic collapse and Civil War which followed the 1917 Revolution. By the 1920s, some crucial aspects of the equation had changed, to be followed by a transition to a completely new pattern in the course of the 1930s. This transition partly coincided with the slowing of migration which can be observed around the world during the 1920s and 1930s. But the timing of

14 Eugene M. Kulischer, Europe on the Move. War and Population Changes, 1917–47 (New York, 1948), 57–58; Diane P. Koenker, “Urbanization and Deurbanization in the Russian Revolution and Civil War, in Party, State, and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History, ed. Diane Koenker et al. (Bloomington, 1989), 81–104. 15 Barbara Alpern Engel, Between the Fields and the City: Women, Work and Family in Russia 1861–1914 (Cambridge, 1994); Timur Valetov, “Migration and the Household: Urban Living Arrangements in Late 19th–Early 20th Century Russia”, History of the Family 13, no. 2 (2008): 165. 16 T. F. Sanotskii, Kirpichnoe proizvodstvo na r. Neve i ee pritokakh (Sankt Peterburg, 1904), 71, 73; S. Sagorsky, Die Arbeiterfrage in der Südrussischen Landwirtschaft (München, 1907), 740.



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these changes was largely unrelated and in Russia a decrease in migration occurred only initially, soon to reverse into the exact opposite. The essence of the changes was twofold, relative to the pre-First World War migration regime. First, Russia practically withdrew from international migration flows. In part this was due to territorial changes—as a result of the Soviet-Polish war of 1920 the country lost a large part of the territories belonging to the former Pale of Settlement, from which the Jewish and other non-Russian populations had migrated to Western Europe and on to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as part of the so-called Atlantic System.17 But much more importantly, this was related to the stance of the Soviet regime, which gradually sealed the country off from the rest of the world, made emigration impossible and immigration conditional upon political affinity. For most of the twentieth century, therefore, Russia was a system of migration in itself, something which only changed with the reforms leading to the break-up of the Soviet Union in the last decade of the century. Within this confined territorial space, and this is the second change, migration became a strongly proletarianizing experience. Several processes came together. To start with, non-proletarian forms of migration by and large ceased to exist. Entrepreneurial economic activities became nearly impossible after the Revolution. Grudgingly condoned for a few years, they were finally repressed altogether from the late 1920s on.18 Secondly, agricultural colonization of the Asian territories beyond the Urals lost its significance relative to the pre-war period, and practically disappeared altogether as a phenomenon during the 1930s. Initially, war and civil war simply disrupted the resettlement program, but the land distributions which came with the Revolution of 1917 also lessened the incentives, because peasants in the European parts of the country now had more land at their disposal than before, but also because all land had been nationalized by the Bolshevik state and the newly settled lands beyond the Urals would, in contrast to the pre-­revolutionary period, never become a person’s or family’s private property. From the mid-1920s the authorities attempted to revive the colonization movement and encouraged peasants to resettle to Siberia, the Far East and, increasingly, Central Asia, where they had to compete with nomad populations resenting the encroachment on their lands. In the late 1920s the Soviet state intervened

17 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 306. 18 A. M. Ball, Russia’s Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921–1929 (Berkeley, 1987).

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on behalf of European settlers and formally opened up Kazakhstan and other areas hitherto closed to settlement. Soon after, however, the agricultural colonization program came to a sudden end as the forcible collectivization of agriculture, started in late 1929, threw the entire countryside into turmoil.19 Most importantly, though, the collectivization of agriculture signalled the start of a fundamentally different regime of rural outmigration compared to the one which had existed before 1917. In the short run collectivization and the violence, terror and famine which accompanied it, sparked off a virtual exodus from the countryside.20 In the longer run it brought an end to previous patterns of seasonal migration in favour of outright urbanization. Collectivization dealt a blow to the moral resources of the village from which it never really recovered.21 Throughout the Soviet period, and indeed up to the present day, the attraction of the countryside remained low, both in terms of living standards and in terms of the prospects it held for the future. Consequently, peasant migrants had little or no reason anymore to remain committed to the agricultural sector or the rural household and to invest either time or money in it. This created strong incentives towards a permanent relocation to the towns and cities, often with subsequent relocation of elderly parents to the urban environment, the first cases of which begin to be reported from the mid-1930s on.22 By that time, the household context of migration had also changed—the culmination of a process which had already started before the revolution, but greatly accelerated afterwards. The age of marriage rose, both for men and for women, and large multiple family households increasingly became a rarity in the 1920s countryside.23 Collectivization likely did away with the last remnants of previous family systems in that it deprived the household of its landholding and most of its productive functions.

19 Kulischer, Europe on the Move, 81–92. 20 Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Great Departure: Rural-Urban Migration in the Soviet Union, 1929–33”, in Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization, ed. William G. Rosenberg and Lewis H. Siegelbaum (Bloomington, 1993), 15–40. 21 Andrea Graziosi, The Great Soviet Peasant War. Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–33 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 75. 22 “Dokladnye zapiski, spravki, svodki partiinykh, sovetskikh organov o sostoianii kollektivizatsii, finansovom polozhenii kolkhozov, prichinakh vykhodov iz kolkhozov,” Tsentr dokumentatsii obshchestvennykh organizatsii Sverdlovskoi oblasti (TsDOOSO), fond 4; Sverdlovskii oblastnoi komitet VKP(b), opis 13, delo 479, ll. 58–61, 71. 23 Iu. A. Poliakov and V. B. Zhiromskaia, eds., Naselenie Rossii v XX veke. Istoricheskie ocherki (Moskva, 2000), T. 1. 1900–1939 gg, 195–197, 211–213.



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The consequence of this fundamental change in patterns of rural outmigration was that from the 1930s on the country steadily urbanized. Increasingly, migration flows originated from among the urban population, and increasingly the family context in which migration decisions were taken was that of urban households. Urban patterns of household formation are a somewhat neglected topic in family history. This is true in particular for Eastern Europe, with its complex rural households and specific marriage pattern that have dominated the discussion. A first attempt at retracing patterns of urban household formation in Russia during the twentieth century has recently been published in The History of the Family.24 Generally speaking, urban families are inherently more mobile and more conducive to outmigration because their economic base is not primarily tied up in immobile economic assets such as land, but consists in the very first place of the human capital of its members. This is particularly true for households deriving the means of existence from waged or hired labour, rather than from self-employment, in which production assets like workshops or shops and larger trade establishments might act as a restricting or dampening factor on mobility. However, as the Soviet Union effectively banned most forms of self-employment and entrepreneurial activity from the early 1930s onwards, particularly in the urban economy, virtually all of the economically active population came to make its living from waged employment, which made this a society inherently conducive to mobility.25 And indeed, mobility there was. Contrary to common assumptions, the Soviet century was a period of rampant migration and mobility, forced in some cases, but mostly spontaneous or voluntary. What has given rise to images of Soviet society as immobile was the uneasy attitude of the Soviet authorities towards mobility and migration—their migration policy was highly ambivalent.26 Its overriding concern was to facilitate the allocation 24 Sergey Afontsev et al., “The Urban Household in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900– 2000. Patterns of Family Formation in a Turbulent Century”, History of the Family 13, no. 2 (2008): 178–194. 25 On household income structure and the growing significance of waged employment, cf. Gijs Kessler, “Work and the Household in the Inter-War Soviet Union”, Continuity and Change 20, no. 3 (2005): 409–442; Andrei Markevich, “Soviet Urban Households and the Road to Universal Employment from the End of the 1930s to the End of the 1960s”, Continuity and Change 20, no. 3 (2005): 443–473. 26 Gijs Kessler, “The Origins of Soviet Internal-Migration Policy: Industrialization and the 1930s Rural Exodus”, in Russia in Motion: Politics, Society and the Culture of Human Mobility, 1850–Present, ed. John Randolph and Eugene M. Avrutin (Champaign, Ill., 2012), 63–79.

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of labour to industry, primarily by safeguarding supply from the countryside, and this dictated as little obstacles to migration and mobility as possible. At the same time, though, it also wanted to rationalize labour allocation, mainly by preventing what was usually referred to as “excess” mobility. Labour turnover and changes of employment other than those dictated by the plan were seen as disruptive and harmful to the functioning of the economy, and repeatedly measures were taken to limit the occurrence of these phenomena. Much has been made in this respect of the system of internal passports introduced in December 1932 and often referred to as a system of “managed” or “controlled” migration.27 As I have argued elsewhere, this system of internal passports and settlement restrictions (propiska) did not aim so much at managing or reducing migration, as rather at monitoring migration and keeping a tag on population flows to contain the inflow of people considered a political or social security risk into strategic areas like industrial construction sites, administrative capitals, frontier-areas, and military settlements.28 The system had been set up in such a way so as not to jeopardize the free flow of labour to industry, and did not in fact have a dampening effect on levels of mobility and migration in itself, other than in a few selected urban areas where strict settlement limitations were in force, in particular Moscow, Leningrad and, in the later decades of Soviet rule, other republican capitals. Instead, a much more determining factor of mobility and migration in Soviet society was housing and the availability of it. This brings us back to patterns of family and household formation and the gendered perspective so inextricably tied up with it. Housing, Family Formation and Migration The relationship between housing and mobility in the Soviet system is a complicated one. Chronic shortages and the absence of a market made the general system of housing allocation highly inflexible. Without any doubt this had a graded dampening effect on mobility, at least in as far as spontaneous mobility was concerned. One of the strengths of the Soviet 27 Cynthia Buckley, “The Myth of Managed Migration: Migration Control and Market in the Soviet Period”, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 896–916. 28 Gijs Kessler, “The Passport System and State Control over Population Flows in the Soviet Union, 1932–1940”, Cahiers du monde russe 42, nos. 2–3–4 (avril–décembre 2001): 477–504.



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system was its ability to rapidly direct resources to priority tasks, and although this generally went at the expense of non-priority issues, it did allow for the rapid provision of housing to people whose migration was considered important. This notwithstanding, Soviet planning and centralized allocation of resources were particularly inept at serving the housing needs of the population29 and, together with other factors, this must have reduced levels of mobility. At the same time, though, housing shortages also influenced levels of mobility and patterns of migration in an indirect manner by shaping patterns of household formation. A crucial variable in family systems is whether the younger generations secede from the parental household before marriage, at marriage, or not at all. Each of these options is wellrepresented among variations in patterns of household formation worldwide, but the main debate concerns the issue of what can be considered the norm in human behaviour—is the human species naturally inclined to secede from the parental household at some point in time, or would young people, to the contrary, be inclined to remain within the framework of the parental household until the older generation passes away? What is at stake in this debate is above all a methodological issue. If people can be considered naturally inclined to leave the parental household, the explanandum becomes why they do not do so, or do so only in a later stage, in certain family systems. If, on the other hand, the normal state of affairs would be for them to remain within and eventually take over the parental household, it is to be explained why they do secede in some cases and family systems.30 Needless to say, the debate is unresolved, but it can help us to gauge the nature of the relation between Soviet housing shortages and mobility. Obviously, societies in which children secede from the parental household have much higher natural mobility rates than societies in which this is not the norm. But this is not the full story. Because, as we have seen in relation to the Russian countryside of the late nineteenth century, where children would remain within the parental household until it was divided among the sons, migration would take the form of seasonal migration by the male members of the household, whereas the women would remain at home. Thus, migration in such societies is not necessarily low, but 29 Henry W. Morton, “Who Gets What, When and How? Housing in the Soviet Union”, Soviet Studies 32, no. 2 (1980); 235–259. 30 Michel Verdon, Rethinking Households: An Atomistic Perspective on European Living Arrangements (London, 1998), 3–7.

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migration or relocation of entire families is. Finally, the issue is tied up with inheritance systems and the way they divide the means of livelihood. In agricultural societies the incentive for children to remain within the parental household after marriage is confined to the eldest son or daughter in systems of impartible inheritance and universal in case of partible inheritance, as in the pre-revolutionary Russian countryside. An urban wage employment setting, to the contrary, can be expected to be conducive to the secession of married children from the parental household, as no land or other assets have to be inherited first before the couple can set up a household of their own. This would also be a factor contributing to greater mobility. Of course, in practice the expense and availability of housing can put up formidable barriers here, and unless people postpone marriage until they have assured appropriate living quarters, newly-wed couples might have to remain within the parental household for as long as this takes to achieve. All of these factors appear to have been at play in the Soviet Union, but at different times and in different combinations. During the 1930s and 1940s there was mass migration of young people who broke away from the parental household, both from village to town and from established urban centres towards the construction sites and boomtowns of Stalin’s industrialization drive in European Russia and beyond. Living standards and housing conditions (barracks) in these new areas of settlement were such that they effectively prevented setting up a family at the place of settlement. One of the consequences was a steady increase of the age of marriage31—Russian urban society appeared to be firmly on the way towards a convergence with patterns of household formation in the rest of Europe.32 As the era of industrial take-off and frontier settlement passed, living conditions improved and some sort of stability and predictability emerged. However, a remarkable return of some of the central elements of the Eastern European marriage pattern may be observed, albeit in an urban setting. Most conspicuously, the average age of first marriage started to decline, from around 25 in 1959 to just under 22 at the end of the Soviet period for urban women, and from just under 27 to just over 24 for men (see Figure 1). 31 Vishnevskii, Demograficheskaia modernizatsiia, 115. 32 Gentiana Kera and Gijs Kessler, “History of the Family, Special Issue, Urban Household and Family in Twentieth-Century East and South-East Europe—Introduction”, History of the Family: An International Quarterly 13, no. 2 (2008): 122.



migration and family systems in russia and the soviet union 145 27 26

Age

25 24 23 22 21

1959

1964

1969

urban women

1974

Year

rural women

1979

1984 urban men

1989

1994 rural men

Figure 1. Average age of first marriage—RSFSR/ RF, 1959–199833

In combination with the housing shortages in urban areas this marriage pattern worked against separation from the parental household because people would marry at an age when they would still have to wait for years before being entitled to an apartment of their own. Indeed, there is direct evidence from the 1960s that, for a number of years after marriage, young couples considered co-residence with one of the parents as the preferred living arrangement.34 As the age of first birth kept track with the age of marriage, patterns of household formation tended to consistently reproduce three-generational, complex households—a second hallmark of the Eastern European Marriage Pattern. What is more, in a similar twist to the land commune of the nineteenth century, adding a married couple to the household also improved one’s position in the waiting list for obtaining new living quarters, thus providing an extra stimulus for early marriage. The analogy does not end here. Given the fact that living quarters were generally cramped in Soviet ­Russia, co-residence of three generations in one apartment created a strong incentive towards secession from the parental household when an opportunity presented itself—a phenomenon widely observed during the oil and gas boom of the 1970s and later, when particularly young families moved to the new cities in these outlying territories where apartments were made more readily available to attract the ­necessary

33 Calculated by author from data available at “Demografiia Rossii i Rossiiskoi Imperii,” maintained by A. Blum (Ined, France) and A. Avdeev (MGU, Russia), http://dmo.econ.msu .ru/demografia/Demographie/Mariages/index.html. 34 N. S. Volga, “Nekotorye osobennosti demograficheskoi struktury goroda Severodonetska”, in Voprosy demografii, ed. P. I. Bagrii et al. (Kiev, 1968), 205.

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labour force.35 Thus, the pent-up pressure which resulted from the combination of patterns of household formation and housing shortages did not only facilitate state reliance on mobilization techniques through migration policy, it could also on occasion determine the direction of migration flows. Let us now look at migration patterns in the Soviet Union and the modern-day Russian Federation from a gendered perspective. Available data only allow us to study the degree to which men and women participated in the urbanization process. Soviet migration statistics were based on the registration records of the internal passport system which excluded the countryside until 1974, and even thereafter data on rural arrivals and departures are generally considered too inaccurate to be used.36 Consequently, migration data record the number of people taking up residence in urban areas and the number of people departing from urban areas. After excluding those merely changing residence within one and the same urban area, net migration vis à vis the countryside is calculated by subtracting the number of departures from the number of arrivals. Although the passport system was introduced in 1932, record-keeping during the pre-war period was beset with problems, and more or less reliable data are available only for the post-war period. From circumstantial and fragmentary evidence, however, it is clear that rural-urban migration of the 1930s was not exceptional by historical migration standards, in that it initially involved primarily men, although by no means exclusively so.37 In as far as this involved married men, they most likely transferred their wives and children to the towns or cities as soon as possible, considering the lack of prospects for a decent life in the collectivized countryside. Those who were single when leaving would marry and set up families in the towns and cities. Patterns of rural outmigration appear to have continued in a similar vein during the immediate post-war years, although women accounted for a larger share because many elderly women would join their chil-

35 Stammler, Florian, and Elena Khlinovskaya, “Einmal ‘Erde’ und zurück. Bevölkerungsbewegung in Russlands Hohem Norden”, Osteuropa 61, nos. 2–3 (2011): 347–369. 36 V. I. Perevedentsev, “Migratsiia naseleniia v SNG: opyt prognoza”, Politicheskie issledovaniia 2 (1993): 69–79. 37 Poliakov and Zhiromskaia, Naselenie Rossii, 228.



migration and family systems in russia and the soviet union 147

dren who had set up urban households.38 But the majority moved to urban areas in search of work and were young and mostly male. To judge the extent to which men and women participated in rural-urban migration it is essential to relate urban net migration to the size and gender-composition of the rural population, which was distorted due to male outmigration and massive male mortality during the war and the repressions of the 1930s. Only the first population census after the war, in 1959, allows us to do so. Figures 2 and 3 present, respectively, the data on the gender composition of the rural population and the net urbanization figures weighed against them. The choice of years is determined by the dates of population censuses and a publication by the State Committee for Statistics of the Russian Federation on the occasion of the hundred-year-anniversary of the first-ever Russian population census of 1897.39 As Figure 2 shows, the gender imbalance in the countryside was significant in 1959, and although the gap narrowed over the post-war decades, it never entirely closed. Had men and women participated in rural-urban migration proportionally to their share among the population, this would have resulted in the majority of migrants being women. But in fact the exact opposite was the case—men outnumbered women among rural out-migrants throughout the Soviet period. If we then proceed to divide the net urban migration figures for men and women by the number of men and women among the rural population, we obtain a migration ratio which expresses the likelihood in a given year for rural men and women to migrate to the towns (Figure 3). As is evident, these ratios differed vastly for men and women up till at least the end of the 1970s, and were only reversed during the post-Soviet period, if we can judge by the figures for 1997 alone.

38 E. M. Andreev et al., Demograficheskaia istoriia Rossii: 1927–1959 (Moskva, 1998), 178–181. 39 Naselenie Rossii za 100 let (1897–1997) (Moskva, 1998).

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60.0 50.0 40.0 30.0

Men Women

20.0 10.0 0.0

1959

1970

1979

1989

1997

Figure 2. Gender balance—rural population RSFSR/RF40 3.0 2.5 2.0 Men Women

1.5 1.0 0.5 0.0

1959

1970

1979

1989

1997

Figure 3. Urban migration ratios—rural population RSFSR/RF41

40 Calculated by author from Naselenie Rossii, 45–46. 41  Calculated by author from Naselenie Rossii, 45–46, 181–183.



migration and family systems in russia and the soviet union 149

What are the explanations for, and implications of these findings? Further and more systematic research is required, but one likely factor behind these migration patterns could have been the presence of an ageing female population in the countryside of the generation which lost its men on the battlefields of the Second World War. Too old to migrate themselves, unless they could join children who had set up urban households, they would remain in the village, while the younger generations left, men and women alike. By the late 1990s this generation would have largely passed away and this explains why overall female migration ratios pick up. Post-Soviet Changes With the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989, emigration restrictions were lifted and Russia re-entered the world of international migration. Contrary to some expectations, however, this did not lead to mass emigration, with the exception of the exodus of people of Jewish and German descent to Israel and Germany, respectively.42 Visa restrictions in the preferred areas of settlement, Europe and the US, might have been a factor in determining this outcome during the 1990s, when the country faced a crisis of formidable proportions. With the resumption of economic growth in the late 1990s, however, Russia soon became a target for mass immigration from the former Soviet republics, most of which have fared considerably less well economically than Russia. During the first decade of the twenty-first century Russia, and in particular its larger cities, faced a sustained immigration from above all Central Asia, as well as parts of the Caucasus. Without a claim to comprehensiveness, this essay concludes by summarizing some of the most salient changes in migration patterns from a family, gendered, and proletarian perspective. In terms of patterns of household formation, the major change relative to the Soviet period concerns the housing factor. Although waiting lists and shortages became a thing of the past, so did state housing programs. This meant for young couples that the possibilities of secession from the 42 For two overviews of migration trends during the years of break-up and the 1990s, cf. Zhanna Zayonchkovskaya, “Recent Migration Trends in Russia”, in Population under Duress. The Geodemography of Post-Soviet Russia, ed. George J. Demko et al. (Boulder, 1997), 107–136; Stephen Wegren and A. Cooper Drury, “Patterns of Internal Migration During the Russian Transition”, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 17, no. 4 (2001): 15–42. Other information based on personal observations by the author during the 1990s and the early 2000s.

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parental household came to be determined above all by financial factors. This appears to have caused two conflicting tendencies. On the one hand married couples apparently remained within the parental household for a longer period of time, considering that the share of extended and multiple households among the urban population increased in the course of the 1990s.43 On the other hand, though, as shown by Figure 1, people started to marry later, suggesting that some of them chose to postpone marriage until the housing issue had been solved. Needless to say, these two tendencies are mutually exclusive, and quite likely therefore, they reflect behaviour of different social groups, or perhaps different regions or urban centres of different sizes. At the same time, and partly reflecting this trend towards a longer period of non-married adulthood in the life cycle of individuals, an upwardly mobile type of migrants made its appearance, which was essentially new to Russia, consisting of young professionals living in rented rooms or apartments in the larger cities, either as solitaries or in cohabitation. Without any doubt, considering the changes in female migration ratios outlined above, men and women are represented equally in this group. But by far the most important development from a gendered and proletarian perspective is the mass immigration from the former Soviet republics, which is overwhelmingly male and strongly proletarianizing. Migrant workers from Central Asia and the Caucasus currently working in the Russian Federation in some respects resemble the seasonal peasant migrants of Russia’s nineteenth century.44 Apart from the fact that they are overwhelmingly male, they generally leave their families behind and transmit most of their earnings to the country of origin. They also work in similar sectors, like construction and other menial jobs, but what is different is that their migration is more of a proletarianizing experience. In what is a characteristic feature of the economic and social crisis which followed the collapse of the Soviet system, labour migrants from Central Asia include a fair share of educated people whose qualifications have ceased to be income-earning assets in a changed economic environment. In this last sense their migration for work in Russia is essentially an experience of downward social mobility, and this above all sets them apart from their nineteenth-century counterparts. 43 Afontsev et al., “The Urban Household in Russia”, 182. 44 Timur Valetov, “Mekhanizmy samoorganizatsii sezonnykh trudovykh migrantov v SSSR i na postsovetskom prostranstve”, in “Sovetskoe nasledstvo”. Otrazhenie proshlogo v sotsial’nykh i ekonomicheskikh praktikakh sovremennoi Rossii, ed. L. I. Borodkin et al., Sotsial’naia istorii Rossii XX veka (Moscow, 2010), 253–278.

Femina migrans: Agency of European Women Migrating to Domestic Work in North America, 1880s to 1950s* Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder The International Labour Organization emphasizes that female domestic workers are a significant proportion of today’s migrant workforce. Though this is equally true for the past, mainstream migration researchers’ prototypical homo migrans is male, single, young, and unattached. He is also often forward-looking and entrepreneurial-minded. Femina migrans, on the other hand, if mentioned, is constructed as a dependent, attached to husband and family, moving in kin-groups and networks, held back by family obligations and haunted by homesickness. In contrast, the empirical data show that for centuries women in their teens and twenties, labelled “girls,” left home to work in another household in the next village, the “big house” of nobles or plantation owners, a town in proximity, or a distant, even transoceanic, burgeoning urban centre. Inevitably, the move to another household involved crossing the many borders of county, class, race and ethnicity, nation, continents, and oceans. Transcultural experience was and is an integral part of domestic or other femina migrans’ employment. Domestic workers have long been situated at the intersection of two dominating images and practices. While migrating independently to a distant labour market, they are viewed as female and domesticated. In high demand on internationalized labour markets, they are poorly paid. Though they often migrate alone, they are confined by family responsibilities. State and private agencies concoct elaborate recruitment programs for domestic workers, but femina migrans is often forced to work undocumented (“illegal”) in exploitative employments. She often pursues her own pragmatic goals as close to legal prescriptions as possible under the circumstances. Finally, women are considered to be the future mothers of

* This paper is based on research by Christiane Harzig. Because of her untimely death of cancer in November 2007, Dirk Hoerder, as her intellectual partner and husband, has developed the argument—occasionally verbatim—from her published and unpublished papers and notes and has added findings from his own research on global migrations and migrant women’s life-writings.

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the nation, but “reproductive work,” a problematic term in itself, whether paid or unpaid, occupies the lowliest position in an unwritten hierarchical job scale. The data present a different story.1 In this chapter we outline the continuities and changes in transatlantic migrations of women into domestic and caregiving labour. We emphasize the continuities from seventeenth-century intra-European to nineteenthcentury North America-bound migrations. We discuss the racialization that juxtaposed white West and North European women to colonial Irish, olive South, and dark East European ones. After 1945, when white Europe no longer provided a reservoir for voluntary migrants, recruitment of women temporarily shifted to those in Europe’s post-1945 Displaced Persons’ camps who had no other options. When the camps emptied, the Caribbean and other formerly colonized societies emerged as new sources for domestic labour. “Race” again served as marker, but changing societal attitudes reduced its impact. Subsequent shifts to migration from Asian, Latin American, and African societies are the topics of other essays in this volume. Historicization and Theoretical Considerations Migration of young women to service positions either on farms or in city households was common in most parts of Europe for centuries.2 If many such moves were short-distance within regions of similar culture and dialect, they led women from small rural or lower-class urban households to those of a large farm or an urban middle-class household. Women crossed the spatial boundaries of status and class, negotiating them daily in hierarchized contexts. Major adjustments were required of “girls” departing at age 14 to 16 or even younger. If in the nineteenth century “childhood” was less of a recognized phase in the lifecycle, women’s life-writings indicate the severe emotional disruption often involved when having to enter service at a very young age. The ease or hardships of the transition depended on material and emotional context in the family of birth, ranging from nurturing to abusive, and from secure subsistence to constant scrimping 1   Christiane Harzig, “Carriers of Modernity: The Migration of Domestic Workers in Global Perspective”, outline for a research project, 2003, first begun as a Diefenbaker Fellow of the Canada Council, 2004–05. 2 Ernest G. Ravenstein noted the involvement of women in migration as early as the 1880s: “The Laws of Migration”, Journal of the Statistical Society of London 48, no. 2 (1885): 167–235 and 52, no. 2 (1889): 241–305.



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with food. It depended on age at departure, sending community support, and migration distance. At the receiving side it depended on working conditions and emotional support if any. In the sending society, socio-economic reasons dominated the choice to migrate: departure of a child who would not inherit and whose labour was not needed meant one less mouth to feed. Adolescent women migrated to work for a self-paid dowry—though dowry-giving was self-understood in contemporary practices, some women expressed unhappiness about having to package themselves with household utensils, linens, and even farm animals to become marriageable. Transatlantically migrating women, in letters to friends “at home,” emphasized that in their new “home” society no dowry was required. This frame of—often extreme—constraints in family of birth and region of childhood socialization needs to be reflected in scholarly terminologies and in everyday language. “Mother tongue” and “home society” imply nurturing and may be ideologized as in the German Heimat or the English “my home is my castle.” Women migrating to service did not leave from a castle but from cottages in which food was scarce and parental support limited. In many societies, structural arrangements made “home” unfair, unjust, and unsupportable. We need to remind ourselves of such conditions when evaluating the often exploitative workplaces in the receiving societies. Decision-making migrants assessed conditions at both ends of their trajectory in a comparative perspective. Even if exploited after arrival, their evaluation might unequivocally indicate that conditions “at home” were worse. Domestic workers are “Others”—of different class, of a different, frequently rural, way of life, often “alien” in ethno-cultural background, distinguishable by phenotypical denominators ranging from “the healthy skin of country girls” to colour of skin of darker than Anglo-white. Even within families, helping female relatives, called “spinsters,” were different since they had failed to marry. These social differences often result in intentional otherizing and racializing. The difference (but usually not the construction) may be an asset. Since domestic labour “naturally”—i.e. by unquestioned societal convention—involves constraints on both independent life and level of remuneration, many locally-born women will avoid such jobs. This labour market segmentation provides migrant women of different cultures with an uncontested entry space and a starting step towards the receiving society. When they develop social capital and break down borderlines of segregation, femina migrans may enter labour market segments that provide better working conditions and wages.

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In terms of agency and individual life projects, such poorly paid and socially restrictive jobs provided an arena to achieve specific, if often very limited goals: an independent income, the possibility to accumulate a dowry or save for children’s education. In this frame of goal achievement, some seemingly constraining conditions appear as helpful: living-in and handing-down of clothes saves expenses, even simple food was often more plentiful than “at home.” In immigration societies, household work also usually involves guided acculturation to the receiving culture. (Low) wages may be saved to bring over female friends on prepaid tickets and create a network and social capital. Sequential migration lowered opportunity cost since jobs would be available immediately. Fare was advanced when the sender knew of an opening.3 To generalize: In this labour market segment job seekers did not face competition (and ­hostility) from native-born women—it was a “protected zone” to which Otherness ­provided access. Destinations in Europe and to Dependent and Colonized Spaces4 The oft-studied North America-bound migrations emerged from a context of intra-European regional, transborder, and even transcontinental ones. Only from the mid-1980s have scholars begun to provide comprehensive data and interpretations on women’s migrations on a state-by-state basis.5 Research began with studies of poverty, rural life, and migration. For France, Olwen Hufton generalized the experiences of eighteenth-century servant women: At age 12 to 14, a girl of rural or urban lower-class background would embark on her working life “with the vision of equipping herself to cope with a predictable set of economic circumstances.” She faced a double challenge, “her own family was uncommitted to providing very much for her future” and societal constraints limited “her earning power as a single woman.” She would usually move no more than one or two days’ walking distance and her trajectory followed earlier migrants from her place of birth. Servantes, working in homes or as help in artisanal 3 Christiane Harzig, “Domestics of the World (Unite?): Labor Migration Systems and Personal Trajectories of Household Workers in Historical and Global Perspective”, Journal of American Ethnic History 25 (2006): 48–73. 4 For reasons of space, citations in this section have been kept to a minimum. For each country discussed numerous studies exist both for the past and the present. 5 In the German context, migration research began to pay attention to women only late. The first workshop ever on German women’s migration was convened only in March 1990 by Christiane Harzig with Monika Blaschke: Harzig and Blaschke, eds., Frauen wandern aus: Deutsche Migrantinnen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Bremen, 1990).



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workshops, “could constitute up to 13 percent of the total population of a town or city.” They stopped working upon marriage, thus “accelerating an already rapid turnover” in this labour market. They experienced poor living conditions and often employer or male co-worker assumptions of sexual accessibility. Decisions whether to return home or not, depended on distance, contacts in town, and prospects. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Breton women, as cultural Others, worked in Parisian households. Like many of their migrating sisters, they were constructed by employers as not particularly bright or adept, yet, accepting discrimination and migrating permitted them to earn “their keep” which was impossible “at home” or, more neutrally, in their place of birth.6 For the German-language regions of Central Europe7 the studies of servants in nineteenth-century rural life by Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann and in turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban contexts by Dorothee Wierling provide analytical surveys. Like Hufton, Wierling found domestic service to be a highly mobile occupational category. Mobility involved (1) the initial migration from the countryside to nearby towns, (2) onward moves to urban centres, and (3) frequent change of position and location at the destination. Job mobility of female servants was less dependent on economic cycles than that of male industrial workers and thus less subject to fluctuations. But for live-in servants each change of employment involved a change of residence. The high turnover indicates widespread dissatisfaction with working conditions—on the side of the domestics as well as, often under pretence, by employers. In Berlin in one year, 1895, 61,063 servants registered 82,948 job changes. Contemporary advocates of stability disparagingly called servant women the “gypsies of the nation.”8 6 Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France 1750–1789 (Oxford, 1974), and Hufton, “Women and the Family Economy in Eighteenth-Century France”, French Historical Studies 9 (1975): 1–22, quotes 3–9; Abel Chatelain, “Migrations et domesticité feminine urbaine en France, XVIIIe–XXe siècles”, Revue d’histoire économique et sociale 4 (1969), 506– 528, and Chatelain, Les migrants temporaires en France de 1800 à 1914, 2 vols. (Lille, 1976); Cissie C. Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore, 1984); Leslie Page Moch, “Bretons in Paris: Regional Ties and Urban Networks in an Age of Urbanization”, Quaderni Storici 86, no. 106 (2001): 177–199. 7 The term refers to the numerous states combined in 1871 under Hohenzollern rule, the Austrian-German lands under Habsburg rule, and the German-language Swiss cantons. From the latter’s valleys and mountainsides, where rural economies could not expand, dairying maids (and master dairying men) moved to large farms in the North German plains: “Schweizer” became a job designation rather than remaining an ethno-cultural label. 8 Ingeborg Weber-Kellermann, Landleben im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1987), 160–87; Dorothee Wierling, Mädchen für alles: Arbeitsalltag und Lebensgeschichte Städtischer

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Two examples indicate the range from long-term hierarchical respect in domestics’ lives to extreme exploitation. In northern Germany a domestic who had continuously worked in one family was honoured with both a valuable gift and a pastor’s speech on continuity and mutuality in employeremployee relations for her 25-year jubilee in the position.9 A strikingly different picture emerges in life-writings of rural Austrian girls sent away by families unable to feed them. Many went to Vienna as the only possible destination. In the households of the self-designated “respectable” bourgeoisie they were sexually harassed, dismissed if ill so as not to infect the employer’s children, cheated out of their wages, accused of stealing, and mistreated in other ways. Their memories are almost uniformly bitter. For some, the Social Democratic Party provided an anchor point.10 Vienna was also the destination of urban women, especially cooks, from Prague or Budapest. The “Viennese cuisine” with its Bohemian flavours and Hungarian menus is their creation. By considering such migrant-created delicacies as nationally “Austrian,” hegemonic public discourse incorporated the service women’s contributions without recognition.11 In Britain, where literature and the media created and immortalized the prototypical servant, service legislation which bound rural and urban labourers to employers emerged from the labour shortages after the midfourteenth-century plagues. The gentry’s and nobility’s service personnel, often numbering dozens or even hundreds, induced economist Adam Smith in 1776 to consider service work as superfluous and thus detrimental to the nation’s commerce and production. These polemics against the unproductive upper classes devalued reproductive work and thus women’s work in general.12 From the mid-nineteenth-century, a segment of the servant population—in Britain both female and male—arrived from

­Dienstmädchen um die Jahrhundertwende (Berlin, 1987), 67–70; Heidi Müller, Dienstbare Geister: Leben und Arbeitswelt städtischer Dienstboten [exhibition catalogue] (Berlin, 1981).    9 Michaelis Family Papers, letters of Auguste Michaelis, 1894–1902, in possession of the authors, especially letters from January 1895 to November 1898. 10 Richard Klucsarits and Friedrich G. Kürbisch, eds., Arbeiterinnen kämpfen um ihr Recht. Autobiographische Texte rechtloser und entrechteter “Frauenspersonen” in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Wuppertal, n.d.), 86–107. 11   Monika Glettler, Die Wiener Tschechen um 1900. Strukturanalyse einer nationalen Minderheit in einer Großstadt (Vienna, 1980). 12 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact. World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham N.C., 2002), 71–72, 287–88. For an exposition of duties and legal relations see for example Almaric Rumsey, Handbook for employers and employed (London, 1892).



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colonized Ireland. They were considered to be an inferior race.13 Educated English and Scottish women worked as governesses. Though located in the domestic sphere, such teachers enjoyed higher status, whether in British households, on the continent, or as far as Russia.14 From British and other European societies servants migrated to the North American, Caribbean, Australian, and African colonies.15 Nationalist and imperialist authors alike encouraged “surplus” women, those who could not find a husband “at home,” to emigrate to the colonies as domestics. There they would tame men’s rugged pioneer behaviour and, in matrimony, become mothers of the (expat) nation.16 For Germany’s African colonies, German elites hoped that educated middle-class women with the means to support themselves in a class-acceptable fashion would preserve and maintain the German “race.” Few efforts were made to send working-class domestics to the German colonies as the working classes had not yet been fully accepted as members of the nation. In general, European colonizer families almost exclusively had recourse to African male servants to do their reproductive and dirty work.17 Scholars in a recent transeuropean “Servant Project” assessed the role of service in the societies’ social renewal and the late-nineteenth-century formulation of nation-state law. By analyzing master/mistress-maid relationships and hierarchies, and lower-class women’s capability to adapt to changing labour markets they discerned a connection between the institution of domestic service and the formation of European identity. Since women, disenfranchised in the nineteenth century but ideologically 13 Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981); Joseph Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1956); Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750. Life and Work in the London Household (Harlow, 2000). 14 Patricia Clarke, ed., The Governess: Letters from the Colonies, 1862–1882 (London, 1985). French women served as governesses in educated and noble families in Russia. 15 Barbara Roberts, “A Work of Empire. Canadian Reformers and British Female Immigration,”, in A Not Unreasonable Claim: Women and Reform in Canada 1880s–1920s, ed. Linda Kealey (Toronto, 1979), 185–201; Anthony J. Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–1914 (London, 1979), 187–94. 16 See Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley, 1989), 181–83; Janice Gothard, “ ‘The healthy, wholesome British domestic girl’: Single Female Migration and the Empire Settlement Act, 1922–30”, in Emigrants and Empire. British Settlement in the Dominions between the Wars, ed. Stephen Constantine (Manchester, 1990), 72–95; Joanna Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters. Women of the British Empire (London, 1983). 17 Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945. Politics, History, and Culture (Durham N.C., 2001); Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia (Ithaca, 1989), 24–84.

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e­ levated to status of mothers of the nation, were to inculcate national virtues into children, the work of foreign domestics raises issues never addressed in either national ideology or political science. The impact of such women on nation-state societies is strikingly obvious in their numbers: three out of four children aged 15 to 24 (English data) lived in servant positions outside of their family of birth. The relevance of migration into domestic labour for individual and societal development is beyond question.18 Historical data point to long-distance flexibility in adaptation to changing social structures and the deliberate cultivation of labour markets elsewhere. When, in the seventeenth century, young men from Norway’s small ports and surrounding villages took work as sailors in Amsterdam, young women followed to work. When emancipation of peasants from feudal corvée in the Habsburg Empire’s Slovenian and Trieste regions in 1848 impoverished segments of the once homogeneous rural population, young women and men migrated for work to the port of Trieste, a centre of trans-Mediterranean exchange for goods and labour. At mid-nineteenthcentury, the construction of the Suez Canal involved Slovenian men as workers and Alexandria’s trade Trieste mercantile families and, for both, Slovenian women in service positions. These developed their own continuities and, by 1900, two thirds of Slovenian migrants in Alexandria and Cairo were women.19 The multiple traditions of migration for service labour on farms, in artisanal production, but most often in households, provided the context for the emergence of transatlantic migrations. Transatlantic Migrations from the Nineteenth Century to the 1920s Before the 1820s, European men and women, intending to cross the Atlantic but too poor to pay their passage to the North American and other

18 Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, ed., Domestic Service and the Formation of European Identity: Understanding the Globalization of Domestic Work, 16th–21st Centuries (Bern, 2004); Richard Wall, “The Age at Leaving Home”, Journal of Family History 3 (1978): 181–202. 19 Sölvi Sogner, “Young in Europe about 1700: Norwegian Sailors and Servant-Girls Seeking Employment in Amsterdam”, in Mesurer et comprendre. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Dupâquier, ed. Jean-Pierre Bardet, François Lebrun, and René Le Mée (Paris, 1993), 514–32; Sylvia Hahn, Migration—Arbeit—Geschlecht. Arbeitsmigration in Mitteleuropa vom 17. bis zum Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 2008), 217–19.



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colonies, indentured themselves as servants. At the destinations, where better options seemed to be available, they worked off or “redeemed” their fare by three to seven years of service. Of all migrants to the North American colonies, between one half and two thirds came as indentured servants before the system’s end in the 1820s. Ideally, they would be able to lead independent lives after completing their service.20 When the British colonies became independent (1776) or achieved Dominion Status (1867) voluntary migrations into domestic service continued and, from the 1870s, were part of the “proletarian mass migrations.” This concept, introduced by demographers and statisticians Walter F. Willcox and Imre Ferenczi in the late 1920s, needs to be amended: Migration was a proletarianizing experience since many of the transatlantically mobile men and women came from peasant families. Given societal restrictions on women’s independent access to income and to travel, many young women were called—with prepaid tickets—by earlier migrating brothers. Such calls might include the suggestion to marry a friend or acquaintance. In transoceanic marriage markets, these women have been called “mail order brides,” the transatlantic counterpart to the transpacific “picture brides.” Such arrangement of marriages in terms of family inheritance and land ownership was common in their societies of birth.21 One woman from a northern Italian village commented that she was so happy to fulfil the traditional societal expectation of marriage and to achieve her personal future-oriented project, America, that she did not care who the man was. For transpacific migrants the experiences were similar. Maki Fukushima from a village in Japan, a day after her arrival and wedding, had to start cooking for her husband’s logging camp crew on Canada’s Pacific coast. Transoceanic labour markets resulted in imbalanced gender ratios in the social spaces of origin and thus led to transoceanic marriage markets. The difference between the two was small when, for women, marriage migration was migration into unpaid domestic labour.22 20 David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America. An Economic Analysis ­(Cambridge, 1981). 21   Walter F. Willcox and Imre Ferenczi, International Migrations, 2 vols. (New York, 1929, 1931); Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder with Donna Gabaccia, What is Migration History? (Cambridge, 2009). 22 Marie Hall Ets, ed., Rosa. The Life of an Italian Immigrant (Minneapolis, 1970), 163; Maki Fukushima in Tomoko Makabe, Picture Brides. Japanese Women in Canada, trans. Kathleen C. Merken (Japanese original Tokyo, 1983; Toronto, 1995), 39–65; Suzanne M. Sinke, “The International Marriage Market: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives”, in People in Transit. German Migrations in Comparative Perspective, 1820–1930, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nagler (Cambridge, 1995), 227–248.

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As regards waged domestic service in North America, research has expanded considerably if again only from the 1980s. The classic study for the U.S. is David Katzman’s Seven Days a Week (1981)23 and for Canada Marilyn Barber has studied the “traditional” and Bakan and Stasiulis the more recent migrations.24 Most early studies deal with domestic service in general, failing to distinguish housekeeping from caregiving. For the United States and Canada we use the term “immigrant” rather than the more open concept of “migrating” women because their rates of return were far lower than those of men. Separation from networks of female friends and kin notwithstanding, women realized that in the societies of arrival gender restrictions were fewer. For years, both North American societies were “settler” societies and thus recruited immigrants and permitted women—like men—to stay after their initially contracted positions came to an end. Societies admitting only a temporary, rotating labour force do not offer this option.25 At the intersection of immigration and labour history, U.S. research often began only with arrival—the “Ellis Island”-view of human lives. Migrant women and men, however, arrive fully socialized and their narrow insertion into an economic niche or broad societal acculturation can only be analyzed with the culture of socialization in full view. Since socialization occurs in a particular region of origin, migration scholars need to employ a regional rather than nation-state perspective, be fluent in the respective language, and have a deep understanding of both society of origin and of arrival.26 A comparative project on women from 23 David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York, 1978). See also Phyllis M. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia, 1989); Susan Tucker, Telling Memories among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (Baton Rouge, 1988). For transpacific migrants see for example Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia, 1986). 24 Marilyn Barber, Immigrant Domestic Servants in Canada (Ottawa, 1991) and, for more recent migrations, Abigail B. Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, eds., Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada (Toronto, 1997). 25 Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender and Immigrant Life in the United States, 1820–1990 (Bloomington, 1994), and Gabaccia, “Women of the Mass Migrations: From Minority to Majority, 1820–1930”, in European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Moch (Boston, 1996), 90–111. 26 Christiane Harzig, project coordinator, with Maria Anna Knothe, Margareta Matovic, Deirdre Mageean, Monika Blaschke, Peasant Maids—City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997). See also Dirk Hoerder with Inge Blank and Horst Rössler, eds., Roots of the Transplanted, 2 vols. (New York, 1994), 1: 311–74; Silke Wehner-Franco, Deutsche Dienstmädchen in Amerika 1850–1914 (Münster, 1994).



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four specific regions of departure, Mecklenburg in northeastern Germany, Munster in southern Ireland, Dalsland in southwestern Sweden, and the Zaborów parish in Polish Galicia, all with Chicago as destination, demonstrates cultural differences. In Canada the same culture-of-origin-andculture-of-arrival paradigm brought forth major studies on women in and from Finland among others.27 In the four cultures of origin—as elsewhere in Europe—young rural women usually worked as maids either on large estates or in nearby peasant households that employed few servants. Since departure from the family of birth was as customary as were very low wages, labour migration had long existed. Established patterns provided information for travel and for quick insertion after arrival. Any day lost in search of a job meant a day’s income lost. The “work hard and be successful” adage of immigrant societies existed prior to migration, as some kind of home industry might supplement the substantial daily work in farmyard and household. Those women (and men) who decided to migrate travelled with many skills given the wide variety of tasks they had accomplished in rural households. The employer family or “head maid” would train or punish any mistakes made. While the labelling of reproductive work as unskilled is the result of men’s domination over discourses about job classification, migrant women did experience issues of cultural change or even rupture. In the intimate sphere of the home the skills and patterns of work they brought with them could not be transposed since work processes, tools, cooking ingredients, childcare traditions, and everyday customs were different. The comparative approach indicates to what degree domestic service was time- and culture-sensitive. The German-origin community showed a strong sense of traditional family formation and felt its patterns of childrearing to be superior to native-born Americans’ practices. Thus, in the 1890s, only a small number of German-origin women entered Chicago’s labour market, domestic service in particular. Due to the extended process of community formation and migrant women’s life-cycle stage, most were in childbearing age and married. Irish women, from a society in which male and female cultures had diverged, a well-developed school 27 Varpu Lindström-Best, “ ‘I Won’t Be a Slave!’—Finnish Domestics in Canada, 1911– 30”, in Looking into My Sister’s Eyes: an Exploration in Women’s History, ed. Jean Burnet (Toronto, 1986), 33–53, and Lindström-Best, Defiant Sisters. A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada (Toronto, 1988); Wenona Giles and Sedef Arat-Koc, eds., Maid in the Market. Women’s Paid Domestic Labour (Halifax, 1994); Magda Fahrni, “ ‘Ruffled’ Mistresses and ‘Discontented’ Maids: Respectability and the Case of Domestic Service, 1880–1914”, Labour/ Le Travail 39 (Spring 1997): 69–97.

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system existed, and British colonization had reduced availability and variety of food, entered domestic service but more often worked as waitresses or washerwomen. Racialization in the U.S. made them less than white.28 Swedish women, in contrast, could refuse to work as waitresses. They were in high demand as live-in domestics and could enter other wage work. Coming after the 1880s, Polish women faced both anti-Slavic racialization by potential domestic employers and the option to work in the new factories. Industrial slaughterhouses provided jobs especially for people who before migration had done their own slaughtering and thus came with the required skills. They underwent a process of deskilling because, rather than completing the whole process from live animal to tasty meat on the table, they performed endlessly repetitive tasks on the animal disassembly line. Arriving in North America, women who faced the change from rural to urban lifestyles, a different language (unless they could find work in their ethno-cultural community), and new patterns of childcare and cooking, had to learn fast. A woman from northern Italy, coming to a Missouri mining town to run her husband’s boarding house, arrived one evening and, by the next morning, had to prepare the men’s coffee—a luxury restricted to the rich in her home village. She then had to shop with a German-language farmer couple and get the mail from an English-language post-master. By noon she served a meal that was palatable to Italians originating from many regional food habits different from her Lombardo one.29 Of the younger Mecklenburg women in waged employment, almost half were domestic servants or washerwomen. Of those from Munster, few married women worked for wages but widows often accepted domestic service positions. Given their schooling and their fluency in English, they could also become teachers, a career option closed to women from a different language background. By 1900, almost one third of Chicago’s female servants and waitresses were of Irish parentage. The cliché of “Bridget,” the uncouth Irish maid, and similar ones for other ethno-cultural backgrounds, provide the societal underpinning for elite women’s discourses on exorbitant demands by servants and the burden of training them—a discourse that may well be compared to the racial ideology of the white man’s burden in the colonies. Transitions and skills need to be carefully evaluated: Migration from impoverished rural cottage life to an urban 28 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995) and, in general, David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991). 29 Hall Ets, Rosa, 174–77.



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servant-employing middle-class household involved major disjunctures. Servant women might lack skills in general and the specific culinary skills desired by Chicago’s middle-class families. Swedish maids with their good reputations30 and the favourable labour market established a well-travelled route with single young women arriving “just in time” for a job, informed by one of the millions of transatlantic letters that migrants sent to their communities of origin and mobilized by a prepaid ticket from a female friend or acquaintance.31 Control over disbursing their wages permitted women to establish gender-specific migration routes and to decide whom to bring in. Some stayed in service for a decade or longer. A few invested in Dalsland and established a farm for themselves—a feat they could never have achieved without migration. In Chicago, the customary half-day off allowed them to socialize and exchange information about employers and positions. Swedish men in Chicago coveted marriage to a maid—who had English-language skills and could prepare both Swedish and “American,” that is, Chicago-regional food. Many of the women, however, were disinclined to marry. Living in middle-class employers’ homes permitted a standard of living that immigrant husbands could not necessarily provide. Some Swedish-American publicists begrudged these lifestyles and cautioned men not to wed a domestic, who allegedly had not learned (or had unlearned after arrival) to be frugal. What seems to be and, in the view of the women, was a success story needs to be contextualized: First, the women had protested working conditions in Sweden by emigrating. Rather than build a labour movement in Sweden, the main protest option of European workers, they had withdrawn their labour and skills from employers. Second, evaluating their lives, they also provided the next generation with a critique of domestic service. Far fewer second-generation women saw such jobs as an option. In terms of their community’s cultural codes, the Swedish domestics achieved a major transition: From pigor, girls in service, they advanced to hemmadotter, a term used in Sweden for girls whose parents

30 The cliché of “Sweedie, the silly maid” was an invention of Chicago’s first moviemakers, especially the Essanay Studio. Matovic in Harzig et al., Peasant Maids—City Women, 289. 31   The best discussion of letter writing as well as the quantity of transatlantic mail traffic is Helbich’s introduction to Walter D. Kamphoefner, Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer, eds., News from the Land of Freedom. German Immigrants Write Home, translated from the German by Susan Carter Vogel (German original Munich, 1988; Ithaca, 1991), 27–35. H. Arnold Barton, ed., Letters from the Promised Land. Swedes in America, 1840–1914 (Minneapolis, 1975), follows the “pioneer and great farmer” approach and does not provide letters from domestics.

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could provide for them at home but in Chicago referring to young women who provided for themselves.32 Another group, Finnish immigrant women, lived and worked on both sides of the permeable U.S.-Canada border. They experienced patterns of employment similar to those of the Swedish women. In Canada, according to Barber, 75 percent of domestics before World War I and 60 percent in the 1920s still came from the several cultures of the British Isles—the whitest segment of Europe as racial discourse had it. Of other migrants, Scandinavian women had a high propensity for domestic labour and, in 1929, three quarters of all Finnish women listed “domestic service” as intended occupation.33 Arriving, according to Lindström-Best, with as much pride in their skills as the Swedes, they were far more assertive given the strong class consciousness and Communist movement in Finland. The Finnish community discussed these women’s situation, establishing employment agencies that warned of employers with a poor reputation and hostels where women could stay in between jobs—support that Viennese domestics or Irish women in Chicago did not have. Demand permitted maids to quit whenever working conditions were not acceptable. The radical newspaper Toveritar (The Women Comrade), published in Astoria, Oregon, 1911–1930, printed a short poem:34 I am not beautiful,/ Yet, I am the most wanted woman. I am not rich,/ Yet, I am worth my weight in gold. I might be dull, stupid,/ Dirty and mean, Yet, all doors are open for me./ I am a welcome guest All of the elite compete for me. I am a maid.35

32 The previous paragraphs are based on Harzig et al., Peasant Maids—City Women; Christiane Harzig, “Women Migrants as Global and Local Agents. New Research Strategies on Gender and Migration”, in Women, Gender and Labour Migration. Historical and Global Perspectives, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London, 2001), 15–28, and Christiane Harzig, “The Migration of Domestic Workers in Global Perspective: Gender, Race and Class in Canadian Recruitment Policies”, in Mass Migrations: Their Economic, Political and Cultural Implications, ed. Adam Walaszek, topical issue of Przegląd Polonijny 31, no. 1 (2005): 143–56. 33 Marilyn J. Barber, “Below Stairs: The Domestic Servant”, Material History Bulletin 19 (1984): 37–46, and Barber, “The Women Ontario Welcomed: Immigrant Domestics for Ontario Homes, 1870–1930”, Ontario History 72, no. 3 (September 1980): 148–72. 34 Poem by Arvo Lindewall, Toveritar, 10 February 1925, reprinted in Lindström-Best, “Finnish Domestics in Canada”, 34. Varpu Lindström-Best and Allen Seager, “Toveritar and the Finnish Canadian Women, 1900–1930”, in The Press of Labor Migrants in Europe and North America 1880s to 1930s, ed. Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder (Bremen, 1985), 243–64. 35 Seven decades later, a Filipina domestic worker in Hong Kong wore a T-shirt imprinted “Young talented Filipina” and proudly consented to have her photo taken by C. Harzig.



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The North American Finnish socialists in 1916 debated the class position of domestics. While some considered them a mere “appendix to the parasite class,” most noted that domestics, in distinction to factory workers, needed to face their boss on a daily basis, were self-taught, highly skilled, and worked for middle-class or even prosperous working-class employers rather than capitalists. The following guidelines were adopted: 1. Because the maid meets her employer as a human being she must have the self-confidence and the sense of self-worth to demand decent human treatment. 2. Maids must become professionals by improving their skills to the utmost of their ability. The key to successful bargaining is the ability to perform well. 3. They must organize maids’ clubs, cooperative homes, employment exchanges and raise the class-consciousness of the maids before they can put forth strong demands.36

Women domestic workers were thus placed in the tradition of class-conscious skilled male industrial workers. Patterns of employment changed dramatically after 1900. Live-in work declined and day work increased. Racialized U.S. legislation, which had reduced in-migration from Asia in the 1880s, did so for Europeans in the 1920s. The Canadian government kept doors open in view of the demand for immigrants but regulated entry more rigorously. It kept the explicit preference for Anglo-white in place, followed by white continentals— whiteness does come in many shades. During the Depression Thirties migration declined and from this period women held a slight majority in the migrants to North America. After World War II, when demand for domestics increased again, six years of total war in Europe had disrupted life-projects of those surviving and changed life-plans and the frame for migration decisions. New migration and employment patterns ­developed.37

36 Toveritar 9 May 1916, quoted in Lindström-Best, “Finnish Domestics in Canada,” 47. 37 In the case of domestics from Asia the objectification was far stronger. On the Pacific Coast white people who could afford to pay a servant only for half a day or a day per week “took a share [in a] Chinaman” according to their view of human relations. Dirk Hoerder, Creating Societies: Immigrant Lives in Canada (Montreal, 1999), 224.

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christiane harzig and dirk hoerder The Efforts to Recruit White Domestic Servants from Europe’s Displaced Persons38

At the end of the war in Europe, some 30 million refugees tried to regain control over their lives including, in Germany’s Western zones, some 10.8 million civilian refugees, forced labourers, and Jewish survivors, called “displaced persons” (DPs). Suffering was as intense among the far larger numbers of refugee women, men, and children in Southeast and East Asia. But the Atlantic World’s population planners and labour recruiters concerned themselves only with “Europeans”—a term originating in physical geography but implying “whiteness.”39 Though, under wartime exigencies, the U.S. had ended Chinese exclusion in 1943, it set the annual quota at a mere 105 persons. Canada’s prime minister asserted continuance of the Whiteonly immigration policy in May 1947: “Any considerable Oriental immigration would be certain to give rise to social and economic ­problems.” DP camps in Europe became the recruiting ground to fill labour shortages. During the war years, North American domestics had once again “protested” working conditions by departing to better-paying jobs in war industries with regular working hours and better pay. After the war, housewives were said to be “worn out” because they had had to shoulder the workload of absent husbands: Domestic “help” was needed—“help” receives a gratification, workers receive wages. “Girls” from the DP camps were recruited by Argentina, Brazil, Australia, and Great Britain. The British government, partly responsible for the camps’ cost, urged Canada to recruit domestics in large numbers. While officials at External Affairs and the Department of Labour were reluctant to consider such a scheme, potential employers—the labour market’s demand side—were vocal in their support. Complex and contradictory interests prompted Deputy Minister of Labour, Arthur MacNamara, to assign high priority to the project. Employers, like women in the camps, wanted immediate recruitment. Trade unionists, trying to raise wages for domestics, were reluctant. The Imperial Order of Daughters of the Empire, racist and religiously bigoted, opposed

38 This section, quotes included, is based on Christiane Harzig, “MacNamara’s DPDomestics: Immigration Policy Makers Negotiate Class, Race and Gender after World War Two”, Social Politics 10, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 23–48. 39 Wolfgang Jacobmeyer, Vom Zwangsarbeiter zum Heimatlosen Ausländer. Die Displaced Persons in Westdeutschland, 1945–1951 (Göttingen, 1985) and Mark Wyman, DP. Europe’s Displaced Persons, 1945–1951 (Philadelphia, 1988). Similarly comprehensive studies of refugees in Asia are still missing.



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bringing in camp-scarred women. Humanitarian concerns were irrelevant: With no thought about the potential immigrants’ disrupted lives as slave workers in Fascist Germany or displaced from family and homes, the IOD-spokeswomen demanded servant women who were strong, mentally stable, and unattached; Catholics should be few and Jews—who were said not to accept domestic jobs—fewer. A “strict medical examination” was to ascertain that the women recruited would not be pregnant. By July 1947, the program got underway: If a first “batch” of 1,000 women would be “found satisfactory” another 1,000 should be brought in. Some bureaucrats’ sounded like cattle dealers trying to buy the best of the herd on their terms. MacNamara as well as other officials, however, strove to be fair. Almost in terms of Toveritar these officials wanted “self-reliant” women, able to work without supervision, and unwilling to be exploited. Reception centres operated by the YWCA and the Catholic Women’s League provided help upon arrival. Government-mandated supervision ensured that complaints would be addressed immediately. The program was a success; some 14,000 women came. When demand continued but the camps emptied, an Assisted Passage Loan program involving several European countries was established in 1951: Women would have to repay the travel loan from their post-arrival wages. Fairness again became an issue—why should they repay, asked one official: If Canadian society needs and recruits them, it should pay for their coming. By 1953, a revised program provided better terms since Canadian officials noted that working conditions in many European countries had improved to a degree that they were better than those in Canada. The number of women seeking to enter Canada (as well as under different provisions, the United States and other countries) attests to the attractiveness of the conditions the Department of Labour offered and, more importantly, to their intense desire to leave Europe: Women in the age group 35 to 45 had endured the interruption of two transeuropean wars and the 1930s depression to their life courses. Some bureaucrats created problems, considering the women, often coming from traumatic, dirty, lice-infested camps, as unfit for clean middle-class households and a potential danger to employers. Camp survivors had been culturally displaced and physically and emotionally abused. Having been mistreated by fascist bureaucrats and armed guards, the last thing they wanted was bureaucrats who considered them inferior in Canada.40 They opted to 40 Franca Iacovetta, Gatekeepers. Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (Toronto, 2006).

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immigrate for domestic labour to regain control over their lives. Many expected to leave this segment of the labour market when other, better jobs became available. The citizenship information and instruction in the YWCA hostels and the help of employer families were one step in their trajectory to a new future. For them, like so many feminae migrantes before, domestic labour provided an entry space. Breaching the Colour Bar or Seeing It Crumble? Caribbean Women in Canada from the mid-1950s41 By the mid-1950s, Western Europe’s economies had recovered with massive U.S. financial assistance. As a result, recruitment of European white women for domestic service was no longer an option. Recruitment in Asia was not discussed. Predictably Caribbean societies—and that means women “of colour”—appeared centre-stage. During World War II, Britain had recruited airmen and soldiers from its Caribbean colonies. High unemployment in Jamaica and other island economies induced these Black men to return to Britain; the oft-cited 500 men of the steamer “Windrush” in 1948 were the first. The Foreign Office suggested that Canada accept migrants from the British West Indies, perhaps from a concern for these segments of the Commonwealth, perhaps to redirect Black men and women. Such migration was not altogether new: Canada had recruited “Blacks” from the Caribbean from 1900 to 1932, if in small numbers. By 1951, the Canadian government admitted a small quota of 150 professionals and skilled workers. More importantly, in the early 1950s the Negro Citizenship Association, the Sleeping Car Porters’ Brotherhood, and the Ontario Labour Committee for Human Rights challenged the racializing immigration policy. Finally, some 1,500 Canadian firms had business connections to the Caribbean societies. Canadians who worked there hired local personnel. Other Canadians, who spent winters in the Caribbean, hired local caregivers for their children. Both groups saw no reason why their personnel, if willing to migrate, should not accompany them to Canada upon return. However, the Immigration Board adamantly refused

41 This section, quotes included, is based on Christiane Harzig, “ ‘The Movement of 100 Girls.’ 1950’s Canadian Immigration Policy and the Market for Domestic Labour”, Zeitschrift für Kanada Studien 19, no. 2 (1999): 131–146.



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admission. Imperial, family-level, and internally divided Canadian governmental discourses combined, clashed, and interacted.42 Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King reiterated the importance of Whiteness to Canadian immigration policy in 1947, stating that future immigrants’ culture and race should conform to “the present character of our population.”43 Avoiding reference to race, the Immigration Board’s racist Director noted that Caribbean women were accustomed to a warm climate and non-admission would protect them from harsh Canadian winters and thus be in their own interest. In contrast, officials in the Department of Labour, aware of the undersupply of domestics as well as of the high quality of potential migrants, supported immigration. In the general public, racists opposed admission as vociferously as potential employers demanded admission regardless of colour. Both the end of a “White” supply in Europe and the availability of “Coloured” persons in the Caribbean coincided. While in the minds and practices of segments of Canada’s society the colour bar was crumbling, the Department of Immigration’s bureaucrats attempted to reinforce it.44 Policymakers, however, came to agree that women from the Caribbean should be admitted on the same terms as all other labour migrants. It was explicitly, if diplomatically stated, that they should not be accorded “special status,” that is, be discriminated against.45 In late 1955, one hundred “girls” recruited and screened for domestic labour arrived in Montreal from Jamaica and Barbados—the first “batch” of post-war European women had numbered 1000. In the following years, immigration bureaucrats increased the quota to 280 per year and set out to develop ever more guidelines and procedures to create the “perfect girl” for what they considered their perfect policy: They slowed down 42 Agnes Calliste, “Canada’s Immigration Policy and Domestics from the Caribbean: the Second Domestic Scheme”, in Race, Class, Gender: Bonds and Barriers, ed. Jesse Vorst et al. (Toronto, 1989), 133–165, and Calliste, “Race, Gender and Canadian Immigration Policy: Blacks from the Caribbean, 1900–1932”, Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 4 (1993): 131–48. 43 Accordingly, the 1952 Immigration Act (Sec. 61) permitted exclusion on the basis of nationality, citizenship, geographical origin, inability to assimilate, and ethnic origin as well as occupation. 44 Vic Satzewich, “Racism and Canadian Immigration Policy: The Government’s View of Caribbean Migration, 1962–1966”, Canadian Ethnic Studies 21, no. 1 (1989): 77–97. The historian-economist and Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Eric Williams, as well as other Caribbean governments criticized Canada’s approaches as well as the “keep Britain white” racism on the British Isles in the mid-1960s. 45 See Harzig, “ ‘The Movement of 100 Girls’ ”, for documentation in the records of the Immigration Branch and the Department of Labour in the National Archives.

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r­ ecruitment by sending bureaucrats and medical personnel to the societies of recruitment and demanded information on marital status, children, and relatives in addition to data on height, weight, and health. To be admitted women had to be unattached and childless, of excellent health and morally flawless, fairly well educated, and capable of handling modern kitchen appliances. They had to pay for their own transportation—in contrast to the White women of the preceding years. In return, Immigration provided reception facilities and placement services and—only upon top policymakers’ insistence—landed immigrant status after one year of domestic service. This latter right was the most important aspect for the Caribbean women, who could thus leave the entry space. As immigrants they were free to accept other jobs, to apply for citizenship after four years in the country, and as citizens they could bring in close relatives and marriage partners. While the “perfect policy” of the immigration bureaucrats was a story of heavy-handedness and incapability, it was a perfect, if cumbersome, entry-gate for women migrants. The market response undercut the Immigration Board’s over-regulation. Potential and actual employers very creatively worked within, around, or against the system. Canadian families chose a domestic worker they knew, induced the woman to enter with a tourist or student visa and then lobbied for a change in status. Caribbean women initiated their own contacts by placing ads in Canadian newspapers, advertising themselves as experienced, dependable, and child-loving. While, on the whole, the program was too restrictive and worked too slowly, the policy provided a frame for initiative and change. In subsequent decades women from other societies would follow suit and negotiate the constraints and aspirations.46 Was the society which the Black women entered prepared for diversity? Many domestics felt lonely and socially isolated. In 1950s and 1960s issues of Chatelaine, the leading Canadian women’s magazine, a society working to change itself is revealed. The magazine established contours for a

46 For the complex interplay between agency and structural constraints see Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People. Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto (Montreal, 1992), 77–102; as regards Irish women, Lorna A. McLean and Marilyn Barber, “In Search of Comfort and Independence: Irish immigrant Domestic Servants Encounter the Courts, Jails, and Asylums in Nineteenth-Century Ontario”, in Sisters or Strangers? Immigrant, Ethnic and Racialized Women in Canadian History, ed. Marlene Epp, Franca Iacovetta, and Frances Swyripa, (Toronto, 2004), 133–160 and, for the 1930s, Hoerder, Creating Societies, 243–47; for Filipina (and other) women in the present Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan, Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System (Toronto, 2002), and Geraldine Pratt, Working Feminism (Edinburgh, 2004).



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discourse on Otherness by chastizing racism, comparing immigrant and “Canadian” life experiences, describing the process of “becoming” Canadian, and opening windows into the lives of foreigners in Canada. What made the “soul-searching” specifically Canadian was that the “­Others” were not blamed, rather the “fault” was sought within. Immigration regulation and legislation changed from 1962 (in the U.S. from 1965) to nonracial criteria. Diversity would win out with the Canadian announcement of the policy of multiculturalism in 1968.47 For Caribbean women the road to acceptance could be arduous and identity-threatening. One of them, Joyce Fraser, experienced old-style racism as well as new options. Departing her native Guyana in 1970 at age 26, she had liabilities—a husband with little initiative and an economic environment with few jobs—and she had duties—four children to feed. Her assets included an open mind, a willingness to strike out into new directions, and a network of friends both in Guyana and in Toronto. At Toronto International Airport an immigration officer wished her “a happy stay,” a Black friend welcomed her, a white woman helped her. However, Joyce’s visions shrank quickly with a basement apartment, a hostile landlady, domestic service jobs with poor food and endless work. She wondered “where I really belonged”: Entering as a tourist and overstaying, she was illegal as well as Black. Once a four-year-old boy whom she coddled as caregiver, said, “Mom says white people are better than black people.” She had to live segregated, “where other black people lived.” Canadian society was opening up but the process was slow. Some Canadians indoctrinated racism in their children, others circumvented racist regulations. Among Joyce’s acquaintances was one care-giving woman who, undocumented, was deported. The “child she used to baby-sit was grief-stricken, so the employer wrote to the woman, had her change the name on her passport and sponsored her back.” Joyce, for a time, lived on the margins of criminality. To regain a sense of belonging she looked for Afro-Caribbean friends and African roots, renaming herself Haile Telatra Edoney. Finally, she found an employer who “treated all his workers with equality and respect. . . . It was the first company where I had seen so many different races united together.” Her persistence, as well as an immigration system

47 A 1965 pilot study by McGill-based Frances Henry found high rates of dissatisfaction among women from the Caribbean, “The West Indian Domestic Scheme in Canada”, Social and Economic Studies 17, no. 1 (1968): 83–91.

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that permitted appeals, finally gave her landed status. She found a new partner, brought her children to Canada and became a citizen.48 While admission of the “first hundred girls” had created a stir, the changing societal discourse and laws made the newcoming women of 1955 and after the nucleus for large-scale further migration. Between 1956 and 1981 225,750 Caribbean-origin persons were admitted, 55 percent of them women.49 Half a century later at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Toronto’s Caribana drew a million spectators. The migrating women had used domestic service—if frequently exploitative—as a stepping stone for self-determined lives and community formation. Within the community, women reached income levels comparable to Canadian-born women faster than Caribbean-born men compared to Canadian-born men. Conclusion The framing of Canada’s new policy was, unintendedly, in sync with the times. It coincided with the Bandung, Indonesia, Conference of NonAligned Countries and the publication of Aimé Césaire’s “Discours sur le colonialisme” in the famous Présence Africaine. Century-long colonizer outreach and exploitation was converted by women and men from the bottom up into migratory connections. Migrant agency, femina migrans at the forefront, defeated governmental policies and racist exclusion. The demand for domestic help and increasingly, skilled caregivers, provided entry options for migrant women in a labour market segment in which competition from native-born women was low. “Entry” posits a long-term perspective towards establishment in the receiving economy-society-polity. Selection of the entry option is premised on conditions in the migrants’ societies of birth that do not offer sustainable lives or possibilities for advancement. Gender relations in the cultures of origin may involve violence to and exploitation of women. Thus, even the long hours of unregulated live-in service may appear as an improvement. Women of all colours of skin have availed themselves of options, have created their own, and wherever possible have moved on to more independent lives.

48 Joyce C. Fraser, Cry of the Illegal Immigrant (Toronto, 1980); Hoerder, Creating Societies, 281–307. 49 Anthony H. Richmond, Caribbean Immigrants. A Demo-economic Analysis, series “Current Demographic Analysis”, (Ottawa, 1989).

Part three

the africas and the eastern mediterranean

Interdependence and Convergence: Migration, Men, Women, and Work in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1800–1975 Dennis D. Cordell Migration, Work, and the Demographic Regime This chapter examines migration of women and men in sub-Saharan Africa since 1800, how their forms of mobility related to each other, and how they were intertwined with work and social reproduction in different and complex ways. The premise of the chapter is that relationships between gender and migration (or non-migration) grow out of the internal dynamics of households and societies, just as they are also shaped by external influences and demands. It also makes the point that women moved, even if research on the history of migration in Africa has overwhelmingly focused on men. Given the vastness of the topic, analysis focuses on several types of mobility directly related to social reproduction: the slave trades, slavery and the cultivation of early export crops, marriage, forced labour, military conscription, contract labour for infrastructure, large-scale cash crop production, mining, and urbanization. Examples from many regions of Africa are cited, but the coverage does not pretend to be exhaustive or necessarily representative. For West Africa, many case studies come from former French colonies. Overall, cases were selected in part because evidence in the historical record permits analysis of, or at least intimations about, the mobility of women as well as men, and insights into migration dynamics at the level of household or local society. The migrations of men and women in Africa over the last two hundred years constituted two parts of interdependent systems even though men and women also migrated independently. Moreover, even when women did not move at all, the fact that they stayed put and supported their families and households often made it possible for men to migrate alone. To understand these forms of mobility, how they changed over time, and how they related to each other, migration must be situated within larger histories of social reproduction—the ways that societies have reproduced themselves from generation-to-generation and from day-to-day. In African societies, the locus of social reproduction has been the domestic unit— the household or homestead—whose precise composition varied widely across societies and among different social groups within societies.

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Reproduction from one generation to the next, or the replacement of people in the household, involves all three fundamental demographic phenomena: birth, death, and migration. Birth adds individuals to the household biologically, death removes them biologically, and migration adds or subtracts people socially. To be sure, patterns of birth, death, and migration in any society are influenced by broader economic, political, social, and cultural contexts, which they influence in turn. Day-to-day reproduction encompasses the reproduction of labour, food, shelter, and daily life—all also necessary for the survival of the household. Strategies for the reproduction of the household from one day to the next are also influenced by more immediate effects of birth, death, and migration and the larger milieu. Taken together, these two dimensions of the reproduction of the household make up what has come to be called the demographic regime.1 As Sharon Stichter has pointed out, “the household mediates between the larger structure and a myriad of individual decisions, such as migration, labour force participation, consumption, and fertility.”2 Understanding migration, the larger demographic regime, and social reproduction also requires looking into the household to examine relations among its members.3 Household strategies—the ways that households attempt to reproduce themselves socially and biologically—do not grow out of collective decision-making by parties with equal power or the same individual interests. Nor do all people in the household often sit down together to develop strategies together. More often, strategies emerge implicitly from tacit agreement, tension, or conflict among people in the household, or from the unilateral actions of individual household members. Decisions about whether or not to migrate, who goes, where people go, how they get there and with whom, what they do upon arrival, and when they return, if ever, are also influenced by gender and age. The most common fault lines in the household arise between women and men, and between younger and older people. Stichter notes that, “This

1 See Dennis D. Cordell, Joel W. Gregory, and Victor Piché, “African Historical Demography: The Search for a Theoretical Framework”, in African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives, ed. Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory (Boulder, Col., 1987; Reprint, with a foreword by Samir Amin, Madison, 1994), 14–32. 2 Sharon Stichter, “The Migration of Women in Colonial Central Africa: Some Notes towards an Approach”, in Demography from Scanty Evidence: Central Africa in the Colonial Era, ed. Bruce Fetter (Boulder, Col., 1990), 208. Stichter cites M. Schmink, “Household Economic Strategies: Review and Research Agenda”, Latin American Research Review 19 (1984): 87–101. 3 Stichter, “The Migration of Women in Colonial Central Africa”, 207–18.



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consideration is of particular importance for women’s migration in Africa, since at least some of that migration has assumed the character of protest against oppressive family conditions.”4 The same may also be said of young men. Fundamental to social reproduction and the history of migration in Africa is the gendered division of labour in agriculture. Across many African societies, men often cleared land for fields, but women have been the major players in subsistence farming—the dominant form of economic production in the past which is still very important today. In the 1970s, Ester Boserup first highlighted sub-Saharan Africa as “the region of female farming par excellence,” claiming that nearly all tasks pertaining to food production were performed by women.5 Elizabeth Schmidt notes that “[a]lthough Boserup’s work has since been critiqued and reinterpreted, it led to a number of studies assessing the importance of women’s contributions to agricultural production.”6 If women’s labour has been absolutely essential for food production in sub-Saharan Africa, over the last two centuries young men have dominated the production of cash crops, particularly as migrants on plantations, but also as producers on individual or family-held plots of land. The gendered division of agricultural labour and the disposition of power between men and women, and between younger and older members in households have been crucial factors in “liberating” younger men for migration. Abebe Zegeye and Shubi Ishemo offer a succinct analysis: “We are reminded that the study of migrant labour solely in terms of men periodically entering wage labour is meaningless unless it takes on board the question of gender relations, not only in terms of a restructured division of labour in peasant households but also in the context of how women responded to male labour migration and the use of patriarchal and colonial state ideological apparatuses as mechanisms of social control directed at women.”7 African societies displayed many different patterns of social organization, economies, political institutions, and culture, just as they found themselves in different places and environments. These factors shaped 4 Ibid., 209. 5 Ester Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Development (New York, 1970), 16, cited in Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives: Shona Women in the History of Zimbabwe, 1870–1939 (Portsmouth, NH, 1992), 3. 6 Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives, 3. 7 Abebe Zegeye and Shubi Ishemo, “Introduction”, in Forced Labour & Migration: Patterns of Movement within Africa, ed. A. Zegeye and S. Ishemo (New York, 1989), 2.

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and conditioned the demographic regime and social reproduction, influencing the rise of different dynamics and patterns of migration between women and men and younger and older people. Upending stereotypes, for example, Zegeye and Ishemo observe that “[i]n some places, the disruption of peasant material production produced a situation in which entire families were involved in migration, with females and juveniles, in particular, representing the cheapest and most exploited form of labour.”8 Jay O’Brien’s research in the villages of Um Fila and El ‘Igayla in Sudan illustrates the variety and complexity of inter-relationships between social reproduction, the demographic regime, and migration.9 The detailed data that he collected are rarely available for other times and places, but his work provides a valuable model. In 1974, O’Brien described Um Fila as a village of 426 people descended from West African migrants. Villagers lived in extended families whose male members worked family fields, shared a common food supply, and contributed to common funds managed by the eldest man. Family members sometimes also grew vegetable gardens along nearby rivers, and herded goats, sheep, and cattle. Successfully engaging in all of these activities required a group of men numerous enough to work the fields and still send another adult male to tend the gardens and herds—ideally accompanied by a boy. Women in Um Fila were secluded in household compounds where they often planted gardens. O’Brien observed that “the ability of men to build and maintain large extended family production units has depended on their reproductive success—particularly their luck in fathering an appropriately spaced group of sons.”10 Success required a household work force of at least three adult men and three boys. Men tried to assure success through carefully timed polygynous marriages. In the 1920s, British colonial taxes and laws prohibiting local cloth production led to increasing needs for cash and challenged the usual disposition of labour. Elders responded by adding sesame, a cash crop, to their cultivation schedule. But growing sesame for market increased the size of the required household labour force. Pressures for cash continued 8 Ibid., 2.    9 Jay O’Brien, “Differential High Fertility and Demographic Transitions: Peripheral Capitalism in Sudan”, in African Population and Capitalism, ed. Dennis D. Cordell and Joel W. Gregory, 173–86. Also see Jay O’Brien, “The Formation of the Agricultural Labor Force in Sudan”, Review of African Political Economy 26 (1983): 15–34; and O’Brien, “The Political Economy of Semi-Proletarianisation under Colonialism: Sudan, 1925–1950”, in Proletarianisation in the Third World, ed. Barry Munslow and H. Finch (London, 1984), 121–47. 10 O’Brien, “Differential High Fertility and Demographic Transitions”, 179.



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to mount, necessitating greater agricultural production and a still larger adult male workforce. By the 1960s, some households began hiring tractors in order to cultivate larger tracts of land; which, in turn, required still more cash for rental fees. Villagers also began asking for cash in exchange for helping neighbors with the sesame harvest, a task done earlier through reciprocal community labour. Pressures to have more boys to create still larger extended family work groups continued to grow, while the increased possibilities of migrating to work elsewhere made it harder to achieve this goal. Looking at fertility in Um Fila, O’Brien suggests that the pressure for an ever-larger male family workforce led to a decided preference for boys over girls and periods of nursing that were twice as long for boys as for girls. Through the 1970s at least, then, village elders in Um Fila tried to maximize their number of sons and hold on to them by discouraging migration to zones of wage labour. In contrast, the people of El ‘Igayla, a village east of the Nile near the Gezira region, sustained social reproduction differently—in a combination of ways that indeed included the migration of men, women, and children. In 1925, the British colonial government launched a massive scheme for producing cotton in nearby Gezira which attracted workers from nearby and from as far away as West Africa. Over the next two years, spurred on by the need for cash to pay taxes and survive drought, both men and women from El ‘Igayla migrated to work in the Gezira cotton scheme. When they returned, they used their earnings to acquire more land and hire migrants to work on their farms. They encouraged the migrants to settle in their village permanently even though some of them migrated seasonally to work elsewhere. Households also shifted from growing cotton and millet, a subsistence crop, to sorghum, sesame, and peanuts for consumption and for market. Over time, entire families—women, men, and children—began to migrate seasonally to harvest cotton in Gezira. Each family member earned cash income. This availability of large supplies of family labour kept wages in the cotton fields low through the 1960s. In the 1970s, when better paying jobs become available in nearby towns, teenage boys began to abandon the family workforce. Adult men also began to hire out their labour for the sorghum harvest which paid better. As a result, the family labour force both for village agriculture and for seasonal migration to the cotton fields was often reduced to women, children under 13, and a few older people. Since young and adult men were leaving, the need to sustain the family workforce for village fields and for migration to the cotton harvest in Gezira led to maximizing the numbers of child workers between 6 and 13 years old. Such pressures brought reduced

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birth intervals and the weaning of both girls and boys after only six weeks. Both had negative effects on child mortality, although in the short term the strategy did put more children in the fields. The villages of El ‘Igayla and Um Fila illustrate how migration behaviours and strategies are linked to other demographic phenomena and to larger strategies for social reproduction. Um Fila households avoided migration by producing a variety of crops which required fielding work groups of adult men with a few young boys. Initially in El ‘Igayla, entire families migrated to earn cash. Later, when faced with the individual migration of adolescent boys and men and rising costs for the factors of production, households emphasized the addition of young children to the family labour force. To be sure, such detailed data at the level of the household about the disposition of family labour, migration and reproduction over time are rare. However, these two cases illustrate the value of identifying and analyzing the inter-relationships between migration histories and other components of the demographic regime. They also underscore the importance of inquiries into how individual and household agency, how gender roles, and how local contexts and global influences impacted the histories of the migration or non-migration of women and men. Turning now to histories of the migration and non-migration of men and women in sub-Saharan Africa since about 1800, we begin with the slave trades from Africa to the Atlantic world, to the Muslim and Indian Ocean worlds, and within the continent. The largest forced migrations in world history, they severely disrupted and reshaped demographic regimes and social reproduction among African societies for a millennium. They also robbed African households of millions of young women and men at their most productive ages. Migration, Slave Trades, Slavery, Women and Men, and Early Export Crops To be a slave meant to be a migrant. As Claude Meillassoux and Phillip Curtin have noted, women and men taken into slavery were only valuable in so far as they were removed from their homelands, societies, and families.11 Close proximity allowed for the possibility of rescue or escape. 11 Claude Meillassoux, ed., The Development of Indigenous Trade and Markets in West Africa (London, 1981), 55; Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, 1975), 155.



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Removing captives from familiar surroundings also robbed them of their social identities, sometimes rendering them more pliable. The violence and coerced mobility of slave-raiding, slave-trading, and slavery fostered necessary dehumanization.12 While both female and male captives became forced migrants, differing preferences and practices meant that slavery affected them in different ways. In addition, more women than men were probably taken as slaves, given the high levels of male mortality in slave-raiding.13 Meillassoux maintained that women were prized more for their capacity as agricultural labourers than for child-bearing because slave women had quite low levels of fertility.14 Market preference for slave migrants of one gender affected the positions of slaves of the other gender. Paul E. Lovejoy submits that by 1800 sub-Saharan Africa was divided into three zones related to slavery and the slave trade: The Islamic frontier zone from the Sahel of West Africa east to the Nile Valley and south to the hinterland of East Africa was characterized by slave-raiding, slave-holding, and slave-­exporting. The market for captives in the Muslim world favored women and children slaves, leaving large numbers of male slaves in this zone whose labour supported plantation production. The second zone ranged from the West African coast and hinterland from today’s Guinea south and east to the Bight of Biafra and south to Angola in west central Africa. It also included the Zambezi River valley in southeast Africa. Given the preference for male slaves in the Atlantic world, the European export trade from this area left behind slave populations with large percentages of women. In areas such as eastern Angola, then, it was women who provided labour for plantations. Between these two zones in 1800 lay a third zone where the slave trade, slavery, and forced migration were less ­common.15 Just before and after 1800, however, European powers and the United States abolished the slave trade, but obviously not slavery, in the Atlantic north of the equator. They did the same south of the equator later in the century. The official ending of the ocean-borne commerce led to increased slave-raiding, slave-trading, and slave-holding in Africa. In the 12 On this crucial concept, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). 13 For details about several raids in the eastern Sahel in 1903, see Dennis D. Cordell, Dar al-Kuti: The Last Years of the Transsaharan Slave Trade (Madison, 1984), 109–10. 14 Claude Meillassoux, “Female Slavery”, in Women and Slavery in Africa, ed. Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, (Madison, 1983), 49–66. 15 Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2000), 130–32, 134, 137–39.

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zone that had exported slaves to the Atlantic world, societies economically dependent on slave-raiding continued to capture people. The increased numbers of captives for sale led to a drop in prices and the expanded use of slaves in production. Political and religious upheavals also turned societies upside down in many parts of the continent and increased the number of people taken and held as slaves. Meanwhile, the slave trade to the Muslim world continued. Violence associated with slave-raiding, flight to escape it, and the removal of captives from their places of capture contributed to high levels of migration in much of the continent.16 Bands of slave-raiders marauded during the dry season after the harvest when travel was easier. Both the raiders and the men who organized the slave caravans that took them away for sale were, in effect, seasonal, circular labour migrants. Women and men taken into slavery became permanent labour migrants.17 Some women and men who fled raiders settled elsewhere, becoming permanent migrants. Others were circular migrants who returned to their homelands to plant their fields after dry season raiding. As late as the 1910s, slaveraiding in sub-Saharan Africa provoked migration in the form of flight.18 About 1700, the earliest plantation production of crops for export to Europe in West Africa was the work of a mixed migrant labour force of free and enslaved men. European traders on the African coast north of Senegal River began trading Indian indigo-dyed cloth for gum arabic, a sap valuable in Europe as an agent for fixing stamped color patterns onto cloth in the rapidly expanding textile industry. Gum arabic came from acacia bushes which were grown on plantations in the arid desert-edge environment. Over time, production shifted south to the Senegambia (today’s Senegal and The Gambia). Exports grew over the eighteenth century, reaching 1,000 tons by 1800 and doubling again by 1830.19 The price of gum also rose dramatically. Male slaves tended and harvested the gum,

16 For overviews, see Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge, 1990); Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery in Africa. 17 Dennis D. Cordell, “The Labor of Violence: Dar al-Kuti in the Nineteenth Century”, in The Workers of African Trade, ed. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch and Paul E. Lovejoy (Berkeley, Cal., 1985), 169–92. 18 Dennis D. Cordell, “The Delicate Balance of Force and Flight: The End of Slavery in Eastern Ubangi-Shari”, in The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (Madison, 1988), 150–71. 19 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa and the Africans in the Nineteenth Century: A Turbulent History, trans. Mary Baker (New York, 2009), 43.



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but gum production was part of a larger system that included tributary villages of dependent women and men who produced grain for food.20 The increased numbers of slaves within Africa in the nineteenth century coincided with the rise of European demand for other export crops, which were termed “legitimate” crops—legitimate because they replaced the export of slaves. Ironically, they were often produced with slave labour. This model, if you will, of export crops produced by enslaved or free migrant men, whose subsistence was supported by a household or village workforce of women and men has displayed surprising resiliency. In far West Africa, the association between “traditional” mobility associated with slavery and “modern” labour migration became increasingly apparent.21 By 1850, migrant or “stranger” farmers from the upper Senegal River valley, the border of today’s Senegal and Mauritania, and from the Niger River valley in today’s Mali began migrating to the coastal regions of Senegambia, where they worked for several years at a stretch on farms producing peanuts for sale to French buyers. Peanut oil was desirable as a lubricant for the wood parts in the machines of the early industrial revolution. African merchants and traders brought contingents of migrants from the interior made up of slaves as well as free workers.22 By the 1890s, even nobles from the Senegal River valley migrated to the cash-crop producing regions to earn money for the purchase of slaves at home who maintained subsistence production. Other free migrants also used their earnings to purchase male and female slaves for their fields at home. This form of labour mobility continued after the abolition of slavery. By the early twentieth century, 100,000 migrant workers made their way to Senegambia each year from today’s Mali and Guinea as well as Mauritania and the upper Senegal River valley. Many were former slaves. The Gambia received large numbers of these immigrants, known as “stranger farmers.” By the 1980s, between 20,000 and 40,000 stranger farmers worked in The Gambia. A quarter of them came from Mali, another quarter from the 20 James A. Webb, Jr., Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850 (Madison, 1995), 23–24, 100–09. 21 Kenneth Swindell, “Pre-Colonial and Labour Migration in West Africa: The Gambia and Northwest Nigeria, 1850–1955”, paper presented to the Tenth World Congress of Sociology, Mexico City, 1982, 2–4. 22 François Manchuelle, “Slavery, Emancipation and Labour Migration in West Africa: The Case of the Soninke”, Journal of African History 30 (1989): 89–106; François Manchuelle, “The ‘Patriarchal Ideal’ of Soninke Labor Migrants: From Slave Owners to Employers of Free Labor”, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne des etudes africaines 23 (1989): 106–25; François Manchuelle, Willing Migrants: Soninke Labor Diasporas, 1848–1960 (Athens, Ohio, 1997).

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Futa Jalon highlands in Guinea, and most of the rest from Senegal and The Gambia itself. They made up about 11 percent of the country’s population. In Senegal, the circular migrants were called navétanes. They, too, came from the western Senegal River valley—Mauritania, Mali, and Senegal itself.23 While most of these migrants were men, their responsibilities included providing support for their wives and households at home. As early as 1905, the British colonial administration in The Gambia attempted to enforce this obligation by setting up a Muslim court presided over by a qadi or judge where women could seek judgments against husbands who had been absent for a long time—and were presumably derelict in their remittances.24 “Legitimate” export crops in nineteenth century West Africa also included peanuts from northern Nigeria and palm oil from southeastern Nigeria, both of which fueled the increased use of captives. Forced mobility associated with slavery affected women and children just as it did men. Mohammed Salau notes that in Kano, the largest city in Hausaland in today’s Nigeria, slaves continued to be imported after the imposition of colonial rule. They worked on plantations producing peanuts for export “during the ‘cash crop’ revolution.”25 Despite the higher percentage of male slaves held along the Islamic frontier, large numbers of female captives were among them.26 Similar examples of slave women and men being deployed for plantation production characterized the other regions of Africa. José C. Curto, for example, offers a compelling view of the overlap between the slave export trade and plantation production in the early nineteenth century in Angola as seen through the ordeal of an African woman slave trader who was very nearly sold into slavery herself.27 23 Kenneth Swindell, “Serawoolies, Tillibunkas and Strange Farmers: The Development of Migrant Groundnut Farming along the Gambia River, 1848–95”, Journal of African History 21 (1980): 101; Swindell, “Pre-Colonial and Labour Migration in West Africa”, 2–4, 8–9; James L.A. Webb, “Ecological and Economic Change along the Middle Reaches of the Gambia River, 1945–1985”, African Affairs 91 (1992): 549–50; Sharon Stanton Russell, Karen Jacobsen, and William Deane Stanley, International Migration and Development in SubSaharan Africa: Volume 1 (Washington, DC, 1990), 2, 17–18; Adrian Adams, Le long voyage des gens du fleuve (Paris, 1977). 24 Bala S.K. Saho, “Disappearing Husbands and Complaining Wives: Voices of Women from the Muslim Courts of Bathurst, 1905–1915”, paper presented at the annual meeting of the African Studies Association, Washington, D.C., 19 November 2011. 25 Mohammed Bahir Salau, “The Role of Slave Labor in Groundnut Production in Early Colonial Kano”, Journal of African History 51, no. 2 (2010): 165. 26 Salau, “The Role of Slave Labor in Groundnut Production”, 163. 27 José C. Curto, “José Manuel and Nbene in Benguela in the Late 1810s: Encounters with Enslavement”, in The Human Tradition in Modern Africa, ed. Dennis D. Cordell (Boulder, Col, 2012), 13–30. 



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In East Africa in the mid-nineteenth century, the Muslim slave trade and European demand for export crops overlapped, with plantations worked by slaves on offshore islands producing cloves for global consumption.28 The slave trade expanded markedly in the interior. Increased demand for ivory on the coast also pushed warlords in the interior to launch elephanthunting expeditions. Over time, trade routes and raiding reached farther into today’s western Tanzania and eastern Congo.29 Some slaves were sold and exported to the coast, while others were settled in raiding camps that became settlements. Other people fled to more secure towns emerging along the trade routes. Many people taken into slavery were women, some of whom were exported to the coast while others became slaves on plantations that sprouted along the trade routes. Sheryl McCurdy notes that women captured in the area of the great lakes were settled in and around Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika.30 In the Ujiji region, these migration streams melded later into those associated with the colonial railroad, again underscoring the links between so-called traditional migration associated with the slave trade and slavery and so-called modern migration associated with wage labour. Farther north in the Kenyan hinterland, groups of Mijikenda, who traded in ivory and agricultural goods between the interior and the coast in the nineteenth century began moving towards the coast following the abolition of slavery in 1907, where they squatted on former plantations and estates in the immediate hinterland.31 Zeleza writes that Mijikenda “squatter production was less geared to the reproductive imperatives of capitalism and more to those of the squatter household itself.”32

28 Frederick Cooper, Plantation Slavery on the East Coast of Africa (New Haven, 1977). 29 Edward Alpers, Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (Berkeley, Cal., 1975). 30 See Sheryl McCurdy, “Disease and Reproductive Health in Ujiji, Tanganyika: Colonial and Missionary Discourses regarding Islam and a ‘Dying Population’ ”, in The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge, ed. Karl Ittmann, Dennis D. Cordell, and Gregory H. Maddox (Athens, Ohio, 2010), 174–97; Marcia Wright offers dramatic biographies of several women taken into slavery in this region. See Strategies of Slaves and Women: Life Stories from East/Central Africa (New York, 1993). 31 Tiyambe Zeleza, “Labour, Coercion, and Migration in Early Colonial Kenya”, in Forced Labour & Migration, ed. Zegeye and Ishemo, 171–73; Frederick Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labour and Agriculture: Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890–1925 (New Haven, 1980). 32 Zeleza, “Labour, Coercion, and Migration in Early Colonial Kenya”, 173; Meredeth Turshen, “Reproducing Labor: Colonial Government Regulation of African Women’s Reproductive Lives,” in The Demographics of Empire, ed. Karl Ittmann, Dennis D. Cordell, and Gregory H. Maddox, 221–29.

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This ­reticence to engage in contract labour earned them the reputation of being backward by the early British colonial administration. Along with the expansion of the slave trade in Africa in the long nineteenth century, the Muslim slave trade continued—across the Sahara, through the Nile Valley and Red Sea, and from the East African coast into the Indian Ocean world. In many parts of Africa, the percentage of people in servitude was startlingly high. In the Western Sahel (today’s Senegal, Guinea, Mali, and Mauritania) French enumerations early in the colonial period suggested that slaves made up between one-third and one-half of local populations—clearly very high percentages despite limited and imperfect demographic data.33 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch suggests that overall one of two Africans was held in slavery in the nineteenth century.34 Finally, emancipation, whether in 1905 in the French colony of Soudan (today’s Mali), in 1907 in Kenya, in the 1830s in South Africa, in 1848 and a second time in 1857 in the Algerian Sahara, or even later elsewhere, often produced migration as many men, women and their households sought to return to their homelands or escape former masters.35 In Liberia, Mano migrants from the interior began moving toward the coast in the 1920s, where they worked on the early Firestone rubber plantations. Such mobility was further stimulated by the abolition of pawning, which freed many people in the 1930s.36 33 Martin A. Klein, “The Demography of Slavery in Western Sudan: The Late Nineteenth Century”, in African Population and Capitalism, ed. Cordell and Gregory, 50–61. 34 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, Africa and the Africans in the Nineteenth Century. 35 Martin Klein and Richard Roberts, “The Banamba Slave Exodus of 1905 and the Decline of Slavery in the Western Sudan”, Journal of African History 21 (1980): 375–94; Pamela Scully, Liberating the Family: Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823–1853 (Portsmouth NH, 1997); Dennis D. Cordell, “No Liberty, Not Much Equality, and Very Little Fraternity: The Mirage of Manumission in the Algerian Sahara in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”, Slavery and Abolition 19, no. 2 (1998): 38–56; Cordell, “The Delicate Balance of Force and Flight: The End of Slavery in Eastern Ubangi-Shari”, 150–71. 36 Labour migration from Liberia has a long history. Following the abolition of the slave trade, Liberian societies provided contract labourers for destinations as diverse as British Guiana, Panama (where they laboured on the Panama Canal), German Kamerun, and Fernando Po. In Fernando Po, Liberians worked on Spanish plantations in horrific conditions that eventually prompted inquiries by both the Liberian government and the League of Nations in the 1920s. Kru migrants also served on the ships of the British navy and on French and American vessels trading along the African coast. Typically, Kru sailors served abroad for a year or two and then returned to Liberia for a respite; many then signed up again to work on the high seas. See Elliott P. Skinner, “Labor Migration and National Development in Africa”, in African Migration and National Development, ed. Beverly Lindsay (University Park, Pa., 1985), 24–25; James C. Riddell, “Mano Labor Migration and Cash-Cropping”, Liberian Studies Journal 2 (1970): 167–69; Keith Hart, The Political Economy of West African Agriculture (Cambridge,



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Marriage Migration Migration related to marriage is another example of a form of traditional migration that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Africa, where the larger numbers of societies are patrilineal and virilocal, the moves of women to their husbands’ homesteads are a major form of mobility. Spanning the pre-colonial, colonial, and contemporary eras, these moves by women most certainly dwarfed male migration. Although many writers on “modern” migration in West Africa overlook it, marriage migration is perhaps the most important form of migration associated with social reproduction. The marriage transaction in many African societies is a social arrangement involving the reproduction of labour— directly through the transfer of a women’s labour power to her husband’s village, and indirectly through her capacity to have children and hence reproduce labour from one generation to another for her husband’s family. In patrilineal societies, children are “legally” part of their fathers’ families, though to be sure they retain social ties with their mothers’ relatives. Examples from today’s Burkina Faso (formerly Upper Volta) and Niger in West Africa illustrate the importance of marriage migration in two specific contexts. In Burkina Faso, a retrospective survey representative of the population in 1974–75 revealed that migration for family reasons—which for the most part meant migration associated with marriage—was the motive for over 95 percent of women’s moves in 1900–31, and over 80 percent in 1932–46, 1947–59, and 1960–73. At all destinations, most women worked as family labour. In rural Burkina Faso most worked as “unpaid family labor” over all four periods. In urban areas, though, somewhat smaller percentages were unpaid family workers; some were self-employed and others earned wages.37 As is apparent in the section on urbanization later in this chapter, moving to urban areas proved attractive to many women in all parts of sub-Saharan Africa because they could be somewhat more independent.

1982); Amos Sawyer, The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia (San Francisco, 1992), 216–22, 225–36. 37 Dennis D. Cordell, Joel W. Gregory, and Victor Piché, Hoe and Wage: A History of a Circular Migration System in West Africa (Boulder, Col., 1996), tables 5.5a–c, 259–62 and tables 5.6a–c, 263–66.

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Marriage migration often does not consist of a single move. In her study of Hausa society in Maradi, a town in today’s Niger, Barbara Cooper concludes that women are “perennial migrants”: In a sense, the inherited location of most Hausa women has for centuries been a state of perennial dislocation. Women’s life histories, today as in the past, are often geosocial maps of their marital careers, for with each new marriage a woman moves into an entirely new household, and that new locale largely defines the parameters of her social economic, and spiritual world. A girl moves from the home of her parent or guardian to her marital home at puberty, usually between thirteen and fifteen years old. She will remain in that home until she is divorced, widowed, or dies; the fragility of Hausa marriage generally ensures that she will be divorced at least once before she is too old to remarry. If she is divorced or widowed, she will return temporarily to her paternal or maternal kin while awaiting a new marriage, and once remarried she will move into her new husband’s home.38

As in the case of the migrant women slaves who worked on the peanut plantations around Kano mentioned by Salau above, only a few social science studies of labour migration in West Africa have explicitly interrogated the critical role of marriage in providing agricultural labour. Scholars once drew a line between “traditional” and “modern” migration in West Africa.39 Over the last several decades, historical research has demonstrated quite clearly that mobility associated with marriage and with slavery laid the foundation for migration systems associated with cash crop production. Moreover, marriage migration which took women to their husbands’ villages where they provided crucial agricultural labour, made possible new forms of coerced migration that emerged with European conquests and colonial rule. Forced Labour and Migration Following the Conference of Berlin in 1884–1885 which set the ground rules for the partition of Africa, European powers launched military expeditions and began drawing the borders which by 1910 had divided up subSaharan Africa among themselves with the exceptions of Ethiopia and Liberia. Despite the jingoism that accompanied imperial rivalry and initial 38 Barbara M. Cooper, Marriage in Maradi: Gender and Culture in a Hausa Society in Niger, 1900–1989 (Portsmouth, NH, 1997), 62–63. 39 See Samir Amin, “Introduction,” in Modern Migrations in Western Africa, ed. S. Amin, (Oxford, 1974), 4–124.



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outlays to finance military adventures, European governments were not keen to pay for empire. They required troops beyond the European personnel they could afford as well as infrastructure—roads, railroads, and ports, and administrative buildings, military posts, and eventually telegraph and telephone lines. They had to finance colonial administrations and police forces. They also needed to launch the economic enterprises that were to extract Africa’s real or imagined resources. In European eyes, African labour came to be identified as the key to meeting all of these needs and producing profit. The imposition of forced labour levies mobilized African workers directly, while the levying of head taxes or hut taxes to be paid in colonial currency indirectly pressured people to offer their labour. Numerous studies demonstrate that forced labour existed in all of the European colonies—from Ubangi-Shari to Gabon to Senegal in French colonial Africa, to the British and German colonies of West, East, and Southern Africa; to the Belgian and Portuguese possessions of West, West Central, and East Africa.40All of these demands contributed to migration and all had implications for the migration or non-migration of women. Again, colonial Burkina Faso offers one example. In French West Africa, labour recruitment initially consisted of requisitioning porters for convoys and workers who cleared trails and maintained wells.41 By 1903, the French colonial administration had imposed a regime of forced day work—the crudest means to capture African labour. Each village was required to supply a required number of persondays of labour each year without compensation. Early on, workers were to be deployed near their villages, but the maximum allowable distance gradually increased to 25–30 kilometres by 1919. A governor or lieutenant­governor could authorize the use of workers even further afield.42 For many, forced labour meant migration.

40 See Hilaire Babassana, Travail forcé, expropriation et formation du salariat en Afrique noire (Grenoble, 1978); A.T. Nzula, I.I. Potekhin, and A.Z. Zusmanovich, Forced Labour in Colonial Africa, trans. Hugh Jenkins (London, 1979); Zegeye and Ishemo, eds., Forced Labour & Migration; Babacar Fall, Le travail forcé en Afrique Occidentale française (1900– 1945) (Paris, 1993). 41 Cordell, Gregory, and Piché, Hoe and Wage, 62–63; René Mercier, Le travail obligatoire dans les colonies africaines (Paris, 1933), 38–39; Jean-Yves Marchal, Chronique d’un cercle de l’AOF: Ouahigouya (Haute-Volta), 1880–1941 (Paris, 1980), 6; Sidiki Coulibaly, “Colonialisme et migration en Haute Volta (1896–1946)”, in Démographie et sous-développement dans le Tiers-Monde, ed. Danielle Gauvreau, Joel W. Gregory, Marianne Kempeneers, and Victor Piché (Montréal, 1986), 73–110. 42 Raymond Gervais, “Population et politiques agricoles dans le Mosi, 1919–1940”, PhD dissertation, Université de Paris 7 Denis Diderot 1990, I, table I.

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While official policy only designated men for forced labour and administrative reports only record male workers, women were also recruited. In colonial Burkina Faso, for example, 7.6 percent of women interviewed in 1973–74 as part of a nationally representative sample reported that they migrated as forced labourers in three periods between 1900 and 1946. More surprising, 2.2 percent reported the same for 1947–59, after the official end of forced labour in 1946.43 These retrospective survey data are confirmed by oral traditions collected by Michèle Dacher among the Gouin people in 1970 and 1982–91: “although the texts [of colonial circulars] exclude women and children from it [forced labour], elderly Gouin frequently mention their presence on railroad and road worksites.”44 More focused research in colonial history might well illuminate the relationship between forced labour, male and female migration, and social reproduction of the household. For example, Tiyambe Zeleza found that in colonial Kenya in the early twentieth century “men were more likely to be commandeered to work far away from their homes on settler farms and for the government.” But women and children were also compelled to work as “communal labor” on public works projects nearer their homes.45 Each form of forced labour affected patterns of social reproduction. While some scholarship suggests that most of the men who migrated were unmarried, Zeleza objects that “even if it were true that the majority of wage seekers were unmarried men, however, that does not mean their withdrawal of labour from the peasant household was inconsequential. Husbands were not, after all, the only males whose work was important.”46 Further research will perhaps reveal how these forms of male, female, and even child migration affected households, even though Zeleza reminds us that “different regions and sectors of the colonial economy gave rise to different patterns of labour migration. Also, distinct types of households emerged. . . . Each household type required a specific set of practices to assure both household production and reproduction.”47 Military conscription was another form of forced migration ostensibly identified with men, but it, too, sometimes led women to migrate.

43 Cordell, Gregory, and Piché, Hoe and Wage, table 5.5a and table 5.5b, 260–61. 44 Michèle Dacher, Histoire du pays gouin et de ses environs (Paris and Ouagadougou, 1997), 138. 45 Zeleza, “Labour, Coercion, and migration in Early Colonial Kenya”, 163. 46 Ibid., 169. 47 Ibid., 170.



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Migration and Military Conscription The armies that conquered most of Africa for European powers were forces of African soldiers commanded by European officers. The Tirailleurs Sénégalais (Senegalese Sharpshooters) in French West Africa offer a useful case study, but similar forces were mounted by the other European colonial powers. Migration associated with military service would seem to be a quintessentially male affair, but the reality is more complicated. Because a portion of African military conscripts were usually destined for labour projects—at least in French and British colonial Africa—the distinction between forced labour and military service was sometimes blurred.48 In Senegal, Africans had served the French as soldiers, sailors, and policemen from their earliest presence in the seventeenth century. However, the founding of the Tirailleurs Sénégalais in 1857 by Governor Louis Faidherbe marked an increase in African participation in the French armed forces. Myron Echenberg identifies several phases in the history of African military service, each associated with mobility.49 Echenberg calls the first phase, from 1857 to 1905, the era of the “conquest army,” a mercenary body comprised of “slaves and others drawn from the lowest social ranks,” and a minority of African intermediaries of higher social standing. A 1907 letter from the lieutenant-governor of Guinea to the governorgeneral notes that African leaders sometimes supplied slaves as military recruits so that freemen could stay at home.50 The Tirailleur force grew during the second phase, from 1905 to 1919, which Echenberg dubs the years of the “occupation army.” The creation of the conquest army also led women to migrate. Already in the 1850s, sharpshooters stationed near St. Louis in Senegal lived with their wives and families. Women performed important services related to social reproduction, including food preparation and child care. Surprisingly, they even accompanied their husbands on campaigns. Women were described as the hardest working contingent: “they were to be seen collecting firewood, lighting fires, carrying water and meals to the men

48 On Kenya, for example, see Meshack Owino, “The Discourse of Overpopulation in Western Kenya and the Creation of the Pioneer Corps”, in The Demographics of Empire, ed. Ittmann, Cordell, and Maddox, 157–73. 49 Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1994 (Portsmouth NH, 1991), 5–6. 50 Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 18, 178 n58.

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on guard duty, and, of course, cooking.”51 Such measures continued into the early twentieth century, even when tirailleurs were dispatched farther afield. Between 1908 and 1912, for example, many of the 8,000 tirailleurs who participated in the French conquest of Morocco were accompanied by wives and dependents.52 The army went so far as to recreate a West African environment in Morocco for the tirailleurs, setting up “African villages” or “Negro villages” with households that even included children.53 In World War I, the army, citing cost, discontinued the official migration of spouses and family members. France conscripted 170,000 African recruits during the conflict which, not surprisingly, provoked widespread resistance and flight.54 Despite the ban on formally allowing wives to accompany the troops it seems likely that women continued to accompany military contingents in West Africa. Apart from forced labour and conscription, different levels of the colonial administration and private interests also sought African labour. Migration and Contract Labour for Infrastructure and Railroads Many public projects and private ventures in commercial agriculture required a more regular, longer-term supply of workers than those made available through either forced labour or military labour units. The distances to these kinds of work sites often exceeded the limits imposed by forced labour regulations. To meet these needs, colonial authorities turned to contract labour. In colonies across Africa, workers theoretically, and probably legally, exchanged their labour voluntarily for a wage. In fact, when faced with low wages and difficult working condition, many people accepted contracts only under duress. Citing again colonial Burkina Faso as an example, contract labourers helped build administrative centres such as the capital at Ouagadougou beginning in 1919. Contract labourers 51 Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 23. Although not identified as such at the time, such policies anticipated by several decades the “labor stabilization” strategies adopted by civilian colonial authorities and private employers in French West Africa and elsewhere. See John Higginson, A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise, and the African Mineworker, 1907–1951 (Madison, 1989). 52 Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 77–78. 53 Sarah Zimmerman, “Mesdames Tirailleurs and Indirect Clients: West African Women and the French Colonial Army, 1908–1918”, International Journal of African Historical Studies, 44, no. 2 (2011): 306. 54 Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, xvi, 5–6, 25, 45,



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built 6,000 kilometres of roads in 1925 alone—about one eighth of the entire road network in French West Africa!55 Roads were needed to collect and ship out cotton harvested after the imposition of forced cotton production in the 1920s.56 Such schemes occasioned substantial migration of men, but also women—as illustrated by the example of Gouin women noted above. A second form of public contract labour recruited workers for railroad building. In French West Africa, the first rail project was the Chemin de fer Thiès-Kayes built between Senegal and the colony of Soudan or today’s Mali. Between 1919 and 1924, the administration recruited nearly 25,000 workers in colonial Burkina Faso. For every ten men, one woman migrant went along—to do the cooking. If this percentage held for the five years after 1919, over two thousand women would have been among the railroad workers.57 Following completion of the line between the West African coast in Senegal and Soudan, the colonial administration launched another railroad from Abidjan, capital of the colony of Côte d’Ivoire on the West African coast, north to colonial Burkina Faso. The railroad arrived in Bouake, the centre of cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire in 1912; Bobo-Dioulasso in 1934; and in Ouagadougou, the capital of colonial Burkina Faso in 1954. Between 1921 and 1932, 61,000 migrant labourers from colonial Burkina Faso worked on the line. The railroad was nicknamed the “Chemin de fer Mossi,” probably referring to Mossiland, the homeland of the most numerous ethnic group in the colony. The name is also apt because the Mossi comprised half of the workers in the 1920s and probably a higher percentage in later decades. There is still another irony: Over the years, the railroad transported thousands of Mossi migrants to the cocoa plantations of Côte d’Ivoire. Governments and private enterprises also recruited men to build roads and railways in other parts of Africa. In French Equatorial Africa, for example, it is abundantly clear that the migration of men to work on building the Congo-Océan Railroad and opening the itinerary called the “Route de Tchad” from the Ubangi River north to the Shari River undermined the social reproduction of households among the Manza people. The forced relocation of entire households along the Route distanced them from their fields and sources of water, leading to the extinction or

55 Jean Suret-Canale, Afrique noire: L’ère coloniale (Paris, 1964), 161. 56 Cordell, Gregory, and Piché, Hoe and Wage, 69. 57 Gervais, “Population et politiques agricoles dans le Mosi”, II, 201–11 and table 2.

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flight of many households.58 Such tales are not rare in the colonial record, particularly when households facing such extractions of men and women were subject to additional demands for migration related to contract labour and cash crops. Migration, Wage Labour, and Cash Crop Production Apart from the forms of labour and migration considered up to now, European colonial administrations also formulated policies designed to recruit workers for private enterprises in addition to railroads. In the case of colonial Burkina Faso up to the 1920s, the private sector was largely restricted to commercial houses and missions and did not need much private contract labour. By the late 1920s, however, trading companies had opened more branches and needed more workers. In colonial Burkina these contract labour contingents mobilized as many as 3,000 men and women for a month’s work at low wages. Political reports recorded 1,400 contract labourers in the colony in 1924, followed by an increase to 7,000 workers in 1925, and 20,000 in 1926–28. The numbers dropped during the Great Depression in the 1930s.59 Private companies also recruited Burkinabè migrants for work in other colonies. Wages were again low and working conditions harsh so Africans were not eager to sign on. But private interests mobilized the support of colonial governors and lieutenant governors. They encouraged local administrations to pressure both men and women to sign labour contracts. Most contract labourers from colonial Burkina Faso migrated to Côte d’Ivoire where they worked for French forestry companies and plantation enterprises. Between 1920 and 1932, about 13,500 Burkinabè, or people from Burkina Faso, migrated each year.60 Despite support from colonial administrators, however, French plantation owners in Côte d’Ivoire could not compete with colonial Ghana, a neighboring British colony then called the Gold Coast. Moreover, 58 Dennis D. Cordell, “Extracting People from Precapitalist Production: French Equatorial Africa from the 1890s to the 1930s”, in African Population and Capitalism, ed. Cordell and Gregory, 137–52. 59 Gervais, “Population et politiques agricoles dans le Mosi”, II, 201, table 2; Gervais, “Creating Hunger: Labor and Agricultural Policies in Southern Mosi, 1919–1940”, in African Population and Capitalism, ed. Cordell and Gregory, 112. 60 Gervais, “Population et politiques agricoles dans le Mosi”, II, 201, table 2. Burkinabè refers to men and/or women from Burkina Faso. The same form is used both for singular and plural.



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migrants from colonial Burkina Faso and Mali who did go to Côte d’Ivoire preferred to work for African peasant producers rather than Europeans. Some migrants succeeded in acquiring land, in which case families sometimes followed.61 Nonetheless, in the 1920s southern Ghana was the major destination for migrants from the Sahel—today’s northern Ghana, colonial Mali, colonial Burkina Faso, and Niger. They went to the British colony to work on cocoa and coffee plantations, in mines, and on the construction crews that built ports and other installations. Although the British imposed forced labour in northern Ghana, they did not do so in the south, which made the region an attractive destination for migrants from the French colonies.62 Moreover, wages were higher. As for Côte d’Ivoire, pressured by ever-increasing fiscal demands, the number of migrants from colonial Mali and colonial Burkina Faso grew in the 1930s. But only after World War II did Côte d’Ivoire surpass colonial Ghana as the major destination—following the abolition of forced labour. Since that time the impact has been dramatic: The 1975 Ivoirian census recorded that immigrants made up over one-fifth of the population, while data from the 1980s estimated the proportion at 25 percent, the highest recorded for any country in Africa.63 In addition to migration across borders, however, people within coastal countries such as Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Côte d’Ivoire moved toward the coast in large numbers between the two World Wars.64 Evidence from colonial Burkina Faso between 1900 and 1975 illustrates how the presence of non-migrating women in societies and communities of origin influenced male migrant behavior in ways that differed from one ethnic group to another. When faced with the need for cash to pay head taxes, the highly centralized and hierarchical Mossi kingdoms in the French colony appear to have controlled migration much more than their neighboring, less centralized societies.65 Young Mossi men migrated south to work for wages on cocoa plantations in colonial Ghana, and increasingly to Côte d’Ivoire. Lengths of stays increased over 61 Daouda Gary-Tounkara, Migrants Soudanais/malien et conscience ivoirienne: Les étrangers en Côte d’Ivoire (1903–1980) (Paris, 2008), 79–80, 83–84, 89. 62 Roger G. Thomas, “Forced Labour in British West Africa: The Case of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, 1906–1927”, Journal of African History 14, no. 1 (1973): 79–103; Jean Rouch, Migrations au Ghana (Enquête 1953–1955) (Paris, 1960). 63 Russell, Jacobsen, and Stanley, International Migration and Development in Sub­Saharan Africa, Volume 1, 2, 9. 64 R. Mansell Prothero, “Migration Streams in the Sahel: An Overview”, paper presented at the International Conference on the Economic Development of Sahelian countries, Montréal, October 1977. 65 Cordell, Gregory, and Piché, Hoe and Wage, especially 231–86.

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time, but in four periods covering three-quarters of the twentieth century (1900–31, 1932–46, 1947–59, and 1960–73), at least 64 percent of Mossi men returned home after a year or less, and 80 percent returned by the end of two years. Early on, elder Mossi men began accompanying these young men to oversee their behavior and assure that they returned. When young Mossi migrants returned, they remitted part of their earnings to elder men whose families controlled the availability of young women for marriage. In contrast, men from neighboring, smaller-scale non-Mossi societies stayed about twice as long, returning after 1–2 or 3–4 years. Given that conditions at destination were the same for the Mossi and non-Mossi, it seems that the Mossi ability to exert control over young male migrants from villages of origin in the north explains the difference in lengths of stay. In contrast with both Mossi and non-Mossi men, women who migrated stayed much longer than men at their destinations, probably because they went to marry or to join their husbands. Given that not as many women as men migrated overall, these women probably joined the small minority of men who remained in Gold Coast or Côte d’Ivoire for a very long time.66 In the latter decades of the twentieth century, more women migrated from Burkina Faso to Côte d’Ivoire, and more women left in search of wage labour.67 More research on how the internal dynamics of Mossi and nonMossi households changed over time, both in colonial Burkina Faso and in the south, would clarify how male migration related to female migration or non-migration and social reproduction. Across the continent in western Kenya in East Africa, Jean Hay analyzed how the departure of men as labour migrants in the colonial era affected social reproduction in households in Kowe. Women were left with the task of providing for themselves and their children, meeting demands for increased agricultural production from the colonial administration, and even supplementing their husbands’ wages which were below subsistence. They had to take on more agricultural labour, but they also innovated by adopting crops such as maize, cassava, and groundnuts which 66 Cordell, Gregory, and Piché, Hoe and Wage, tables 3.7a, 135; 3.7b, 136; tables 4.7a, 202; 4.7b, 203; tables 5.8a–c, 270–72. Remembering that the data presented here were collected from returned migrants in Burkina Faso, the numbers of migrants who settled permanently in Gold Coast or Côte d’Ivoire are not included in the totals. 67 Piché, Victor, Lama Kabbandji, Dieudonné Ouédraogo, and Dennis D. Cordell, “From National to Multilateral Management of Migration: A Century of International Migration between Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire”, in Migration in the Service of African Development: Essays in Honour of Professor Aderanti Adepoju, ed. John Oucho (Ibadan, Nigeria, 2012), 61–112.



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were less labour intensive. They began to use new implements, and in the early 1930s, integrated trade and marketing into their activities. Writing in the 1970s, Hay concluded that “in the context of the steadily deteriorating economic conditions of the colonial and postcolonial periods, they [the women] have largely succeeded in maintaining both their agricultural production and their limited opportunities for capital accumulation.”68 To the west of Kenya in Uganda, cash crop production developed much later, in part because the colony lay farther from the coast and had not attracted European settlement. In their survey of the history of women in Uganda, Grace Kyomuhendo and Marjorie McIntosh write that the production of cotton for export began in the early twentieth century, sponsored by the Church Missionary Society, which had been influential in the initial British decision to conquer the region and create the colony of Uganda. The local elite of the Buganda kingdom, the most influential African society in the colony, supported the policy, and by 1932 over two million acres owned by Africans were planted in cotton. Women provided most of the field labour in cotton production while also raising food for their households. Another two million acres produced bananas. Tea and coffee cultivation began in the 1920s, again initiatives of local people. Uganda hence became part of the larger British colonial economy. Men left for short periods to work for wages in Kampala, Uganda’s capital and only urban area. But their numbers were limited. As late as 1952, there were only 250,000 wage earners in the entire colony, and they were virtually all men.69 Although Uganda was not subjected to schemes of colonial exploitation as intense as elsewhere in the continent, labour migration to cash crop producing areas grew in the latter decades of the colonial era. Again, migrants were largely men. Kyomuhendo and McIntosh report that “in 1951, for example, 12–27 percent of the adult male labourers in the Lugbara counties of the West Nile region were absent from their home area for at least part of the year, working for wages in [the region of ] Bunyoro or other parts of the country.”70 During their absence, women had to reshuffle and redouble their own patterns of work to support the household.

68 Margaret Jean Hay, “Luo Women and Economic Change during the Colonial Period”, in Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (Stanford, Cal., 1976), 109. 69 Grace Bantebya Kyomuhendo and Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Women, Work & Domestic Virtue in Uganda, 1900–2003 (Athens, Ohio, 2006), 49–51, 88. 70 Ibid., 89.

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Quite another pattern involved younger Alur men from northern Uganda who moved to work as tenant farmers in Buganda. At least some of them left to avoid what they perceived as unfair burdens at home. By the 1950s between a fourth and a fifth of Alur migrants relocated with their wives.71 Southall suggests that the men needed cash only for targeted needs, such as clothing, marriage payments, or taxes; they did not need a regular cash income. Instead, they relocated to escape payment obligations to chiefs or elders which, according to them, made it difficult to accumulate wealth. Moreover in Buganda in southern Uganda they could assume social positions denied them at home due to their relative youth. Hence, rather than contribute to the social reproduction of the household at home, they preferred to found their own households. If young women or wives accompanied them, they completely escaped the grip of their elder male relatives or chiefs.72 The migration of women with them reinforced forced the mobility and independence of younger men. In a quite different example from farther south among the Nyakyusa of southwestern Tanganyika (today’s Tanzania) in the 1950s, P.H. Gulliver recorded another migration strategy used by young men to get out from under the authority of male elders. Although locally produced coffee covered needs for cash, young men left to work for wages elsewhere in order to purchase their own cattle to pay bridewealth. In so doing they managed “to avoid waiting for one’s father’s and elder brother’s permission to use the family cattle.”73 Even though Nyakyusa women did not migrate in the 1950s, this example suggests that they were perhaps the most important factor in decisions of young men to migrate to become independent, return to marry, and found their own households. The examples in the preceding pages illustrate that the migration of men and the migration or non-migration of women related to wage labour and cash crop production in a great variety of ways, and all were linked to social reproduction. To be sure, colonial policies and the decisions of colonial capitalism about what crops to grow and where to grow them were crucial factors in African migration. Nonetheless, African men, women, and households displayed surprising agency in deciding how to deal with colonial demands—whether to migrate to produce cash crops 71 Ibid., 88–90. 72 J. Clyde Mitchell, “The Causes of Labour Migration”, in Forced Labour & Migration, ed. Zegeye and Ishemo, 37. 73 P.H. Gulliver, “Nyakusa labour migration”, Rhodes-Livingstone Journal 21 (1957): 58–59, cited by Mitchell, “The Causes of Labour Migration”, 39.



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for wages or to grow the crops locally for market or both. Turning now to migration and mining, it might seem likely that African men and women would have exercised much less autonomy because the levels of capital investment were much greater and the products more valuable. The following section, however, tells a more nuanced tale. Migration, Mining, and Peasant Food Production Southern Africa The most well-known migration system in sub-Saharan Africa is associated with the gold mines of South Africa. Gold was discovered in 1886 in the Witwatersrand mountains near today’s Johannesburg. By 1910, 100,000 men from all over southern Africa had come to work in the gold mines. Their numbers grew to 300,000 by 1940 and a half million by 1985.74 Contrary to scholars who analyze the network as predominantly a product of the logic of capitalist production, Cherryl Walker argues with nuance and complexity that it emerged from struggle between capitalist interests which hoped to create a proletarian work force, and local societies whose people had their own strategies for social reproduction. Labour migration affected local societies differently, sometimes for reasons related to gender.75 There are many examples of how local societies and their chiefs shaped migration in southern Africa in the nineteenth century. Among the Pedi in Transvaal in the northeast of today’s South Africa, young men began migrating as early as the 1840s, when parties of 200 strong men headed to work in Natal and the port city of Port Elizabeth. Basotho and Tswana chiefs also played key roles in determining flow of labour. Young men migrated with their age-regiments—age classes which included military duties.76 Early on in all three societies, chiefs and ruling lineages sent young men off to work with the aim of accumulating guns—to defend themselves against the Zulu, Swazi, and Afrikaners trekking into the interior. Among the Tonga, young men migrated first to acquire hoes and later 74 T. Dunbar Moodie with Vivienne Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men, Mines, and Migration (Berkeley, Cal., 1994), 1. 75 Cherryl Walker, “Gender and the development of the migrant system, c. 1850–1930: An overview”, in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (London, 1990), 170–71. 76 Peter Delius, “Migrant labour and the Pedi, 1840–80”, in Economy and Society in PreIndustrial South Africa, ed. Shula Marks and Anthony Atmore (London, 1980), 292–312.

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sterling, or colonial currency, which had become important components of bridewealth in the wake of the collapse of their cattle herds.77 The numbers of migrants grew dramatically with the discoveries of diamonds in the Orange Free State in the 1870s and gold a decade and a half later on the Witwatersrand near today’s Johannesburg in South Africa. For the reproduction of the household in all of these societies, women’s labour on the land was more important than migrant labour. With the rise of labour migration, people in some societies substituted corn for sorghum. Because growing corn did not require as much work this shift reduced the need for labour. Intercropping beans with pumpkins allowed land to be used more intensively. Walker suggests that “[b]ecause of the way in which the homestead economy operated, it was the young unmarried man who could most easily be released by the homestead—and he, therefore, who was the first to be drawn into wage labor.”78 By sending off young men, chiefs and elders acquired new goods while retaining control over women who anchored household production. Some societies initially resisted being pulled into the migrant labour system by producing goods for market. The Thlaping of Griqualand West, for example, traded for a short time in firewood and grain, while the South Sotho around the Caledon River exported wheat and cereals to the gold-bearing zones which were arid. The Mpondo first avoided labour migration, but when advances on wages were offered enabling the purchase of cattle, household heads decided that migration met their interests and relented.79 By end of century, the discovery of gold, a greatly increased demand for labour, and the victory of the British over the Afrikaners in the Boer War combined to stimulate migration. In the late nineteenth century, natural disasters, drought, rinderpest, and locust swarms further undermined the autonomy of rural societies. Following the imposition of a hut tax, households turned increasingly to migrant labour. Nonetheless, despite their efforts, neither the state nor private enterprise was able to control migration. As late as 1912, seventy percent of African workers arrived

77 Judy Kimble, “Labour migration in Basutoland, c. 1870–1885”, in Industrialisation and social change in South Africa: African class formation, culture, and consciousness, 1870–1930, ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (London, 1882), 119–41; Walker, “Gender and the development of the migrant labour system”, 173. Also see Isaac Shapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life: A Study of Conditions (London, 1947). 78 Walker, “Gender and the development of the migrant labour system”, 173. 79 Willliam Beinart, The Political Economy of Pondoland, 1860 to 1930 (Johannesburg, 1982); Walker, “Gender and the development of the migrant labour system”, 173–74.



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i­ ndependently at mining sites.80 Different societies confronted these more intensive demands in different ways. While fully half of the population of the Delagoa Bay region worked in South Africa by 1890, for example, only about ten percent of the Mpondo had followed suit by 1911, over twenty years later. Among the Shona peoples of Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) in the early twentieth century, women dominated the agricultural economy, producing both food crops for local consumption and products for sale to European mining companies. These sales brought in sufficient cash to enable Shona men to resist migrating to the mines. Elizabeth Schmidt notes that “the influx of African men into the wage labor force occurred only when the ‘effort-price’ of participation in the produce market had soared so high that peasant agriculture was no longer profitable and thus could not accommodate peasant cash requirements. Hence the female-dominated agricultural economy had to be severely weakened before African men would leave their village in search of employment.”81 The South African migration system was founded on a dual premise: men would migrate as wage labourers and women would remain behind in rural areas to work in the fields. This dichotomy served the mining interests because they calculated that they had to pay wages only sufficient to support the miner, since his wife and family theoretically supported themselves at home on the land. It also served the interests of rural chiefs and elders who retained their control over women and benefited from payments that young returning migrants made to them to get married. As Walker notes, the colonial state devised mechanisms aimed at keeping women down on the farm: requiring passes for travel, restricting access to transport, and reshaping definitions of “customary marriage” to enhance male power. Chiefs and elders also protected their interests. Among the Zulu, for example, the earlier practice of paying bridewealth over time was revised to become a payment made all at once, which allowed elders to keep young women longer. In urban areas, regulations targeted women for removal.82 Expanding cash needs and the decline of rural economies led men of all ages to migrate more often and stay longer. In turn, the out-migration of men undermined rural production. Abandoned by absent husbands, widowed, deprived of access to land, or pushed by poverty, larger numbers

80 Walker, “Gender and the development of the migrant labour system”, 175–77. 81 Elizabeth Schmidt, Peasants, Traders, and Wives, 3. 82 Ibid., 179–97.

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of women began to migrate. In some cases, women migrated earlier than might be suspected. As early as 1877, for example, 1 of 9 people in Kimberly in the diamond-producing region was a woman. Woman made their way to Johannesburg soon after the city was founded; in South Africa’s cities generally, rates of female urbanization surpassed those of men.83 While the complex of causes varied, Walker notes that the numbers of women migrants increased first from areas whose economies had been losing male migrants for the longest. Most of the beer brewers on the Rand were women who had come from Mozambique, Basutoland (today’s Lesotho) and the Orange Free State in South Africa, all areas that had been engaged in migrant labour from an early date.84 Nonetheless, the majority of women remained in rural areas in South Africa until the 1930s when they migrated to towns in much larger numbers. Beginning in the 1920s, colonial sociologists and anthropologists had noted evidence of stress within the patriarchal family and changes in relationships within households. They concluded that migrant labour undermined marriages, increased illegitimacy, and contributed to the decline of respect for elders. New forms of family also appeared, such as femalecentred households.85 Walker comes to the following conclusion about the impact of the male and female migrant labour system on women: While at first the growth of towns and the curtailment of the power of chiefs and homestead elders under colonial rule did open up possibilities of individual mobility and independence for women, any radical undermining of women’s subordinate status in African society was blocked by the subsequent intervention of the South African state, once the advantages of the migrant labour system to capital had become established. The cost to women for the relative autonomy they gained out of the disintegration of precolonial relationships was the loss of security, both material and social . . . No longer at the heart of production, African women were relegated to a more marginal position in society.86

But despite the seeming hegemony of the South African model, mining and migration evolved somewhat differently in Central Africa.

83 Ibid., 187–91; Charles Van Onselen, Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witswatersrand, Volume 1 (Johannesburg, 1982). 84 Walker, “Gender and the development of the migrant labour system”, 191. 85 Ibid., 175–77, 192–195. See Schapera, Migrant Labour and Tribal Life. 86 Walker, “Gender and the development of the migrant labour system”, 196.



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Central Africa The migration system on the Copperbelt in Central Africa was founded on the same dual premise as that in Southern Africa—migrant male miner and female farmer. In South Africa, colonial authorities, mining enterprises, and African chiefs and elders sought to stem the migration of women for a long time after the rural economy began to collapse—indeed the free legal migration of both women and men to urban areas had to wait until the fall of the apartheid regime in 1994. Already by the 1920s in the Belgian Congo (today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo), the circular migration of young men between copper mines and their rural homes was faltering due to over-exploitation—just as it would later in South Africa. John Higginson writes that a recession in 1921 brought economic crisis to the countryside in Katanga in the southeast, leading young men to abandon the countryside for the towns.87 Agricultural produce prices plummeted and survival was precarious. In addition, the League of Nations censured Belgian labour policies in 1926, so that by 1928 “motorized vehicles and rail lines . . . began to replace the recruiters’ columns and the several-weeks-long forced march to the work camps.”88 Despite efforts by the Belgian colonial administration to keep them out, women began moving to the African neighborhoods of towns associated with the copper mines. Some came alone, others were accompanied by their husbands, and still others were induced to migrate by the Union Minière du Haut Katanga (UMHK), the largest mining company, in an effort to stabilize its labour force. Although the UMHK and the colonial administration firmly believed that African families and children were creatures of the countryside and that African women in town could only be prostitutes, African family life did take root. Turning economic crisis to their advantage, mining enterprises adopted policies designed to support family life, stabilize the labour force, and compete more effectively for workers with copper mines in the neighboring British colonies of Northern and Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia and Zimbabwe, respectively). Once present in the mining towns, women did not leave, despite strikes and waves of unrest in 1931, 1936, 1941, and 1944.89

87 John Higginson, A Working Class in the Making: Belgian Colonial Labor Policy, Private Enterprise, and the African Mineworker, 1907–1951 (Madison, 1989), 70–71. 88 Higginson, A Working Class in the Making, 69. 89 Ibid., 73, 108, 210–11. Indeed by 1930, the UMHK even told migrants that the company would provide them with wives.

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Just to the south, mining companies on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia concluded by the early 1930s that it was also in their interest to welcome women “under company domain and on company property,” where they could help provide food and sustenance for workers on a dayto-day basis.90 Companies here were also concerned with stabilizing the workforce. They noticed that even when provided food, men did not have or take the time to prepare it properly and the diminished quality of their diets adversely affected their health and productivity. Despite the companies’ position favouring family reunification, the colonial state wished to keep women in rural areas to provide agricultural labour, please local male elites, induce migrants to return, and avoid the imagined horror of an “uprooted” peasantry. Given a shortage of labour in Central and Southern Africa in the 1930s, the copper mining companies in Northern Rhodesia strategized that allowing wives at worksites would attract male workers. Wages were higher in South Africa but women were not allowed in the mining towns or on worksites. In the Copperbelt, mining companies did not supply women migrants with food; rather, they provided plots for the women to grow their own crops. The Roan Antelope mine allocated 2,000 plots by 1935, and the Rhokana mine followed by 1941. The women often produced more food than they needed, selling their surpluses to the mining companies at prices lower than those charged by European farmers. In 1934, for example, they sold the company at Roan 600,000 pounds of vegetables for 1000 pounds. Some women were so successful on farms that they hired men to work for them who could not find other jobs. Women migrants also came to play important roles in the informal economy that supplied black mineworkers. These roles built on their “traditional” activities in rural areas such as brewing beer and gardening, but they changed with relocation to the municipal townships near the mines. Women who brewed beer and sold it in their houses could make more money than their husbands. The women came to occupy a position of strength. In 1935, when companies restricted beer sales to their own halls, the miners went on strike. The companies backed down and the women won. Women also launched other businesses. Some became fish traders, while others sold groceries or ran restaurants. They found their

90 George Chauncey, Jr., “The Locus of Reproduction: Women’s Labour in the Zambian Copperbelt, 1927–1953”, Journal of Southern African Studies 7, no. 2 (1981): 135. Unless otherwise footnoted, the next several paragraphs are based on this article (see 135–64).



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niche in marketplaces built by the companies where they sold and bought goods, and networked among themselves. Other, more successful women opened hotels or even operated bus services. The women also provided sexual and domestic services. George Chauncey cites a conversation with an informant who recalled that, “ ‘Some of them now are called prominent women,’ remembered the woman, ‘they started that way [as prostitutes, in this case]; we call them prominent business women.’ ”91 In the late 1930s the colonial state renewed its push for women to return to rural areas, partly due to pressure from African male elders. Chauncey writes that “The challenge to the elders’ power by the migration of men to the Copperbelt became much more serious when women began migrating in large numbers. Older men could still at least profit from agricultural production while their daughters were present, and the presence of young women allowed them to continue receiving money or labor from young men seeking to marry. When women migrated, however, older men lost not only their essential agricultural labor but also the fulcrum of power over young men.”92 The colonial government responded to these concerns of rural elders with a requirement that women have passes to leave. Women responded by forging passes or paying transport drivers to hide them or claim that they were their wives.93 Always with an eye to stabilizing the workforce, in the early 1940s, the mining companies pressured women to marry or establish permanent relationships with men. Women in the mining settlements fell into three groups: “permanent” wives married according to custom, temporary wives, and single women. Companies began requiring that single women at the worksites have passes but the rules were not very strictly enforced. Single women had fewer means of support but enjoyed greater control over their money. Permanent or customary wives could conduct their affairs more openly, brewing beer, growing food, and selling or shopping at company marketplaces. Many women became temporary wives of miners. Among this cohort were single women or women from rural areas whose husbands had abandoned them who then migrated to the Copperbelt. Again with an eye to rural African men, colonial authorities worried about marriages in town taking place without permission from rural relatives.

91 Chauncey, “Women’s Labour in the Zambian Copperbelt”, 153. 92 Ibid., 155–56. 93 Ibid., 159–60.

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The strategy of stabilizing the labour force by encouraging women to come to mining camps and towns also characterized the zinc mining industry in Northern Rhodesia. This case illustrates how local societies responded to the demand for workers, the workers’ needs for cash, and underscores the competition among colonial mining interests for labour.94 With the arrival of the railroad in this part of the colony in 1906, the earliest operations mined lead, followed by zinc and vanadium. African men came to work from nearby areas as well as farther away. At the railhead, the town of Broken Hill grew up settled by Europeans, Indians, and Africans. Later, the discovery of copper led to the extension of the railroad farther north. By the 1930s, the copper mines to the north and coal mines to the south competed fiercely with the zinc mines for labour. Because zinc did not command the prices fetched by coal or copper, the zinc mining companies had to offer additional incentives. And so they, too, encouraged African workers to bring their wives, offering each family a five acre plot of land for five years for raising crops, a house, social services, and rations. In 1939–40, Wilson noted that, “the population of the mine five-acre plots is 5,370—a figure which . . . includes many men not in mine employment, of the mine compound it is 3,170, and of the railway compound 1,000—a total of 9,540 Africans, men, women, and children. In industrial employment there are 3,875 men (mine 3,500, railway, 375).”95 Here as in the copper-producing areas, then, colonial mining enterprises had to figure into their calculations the costs of the social reproduction of the household—women and children as well as male labourers—even if some of the cost was “paid” in-kind. Mining and Migration Elsewhere The preceding analyses of the migrations of men and women to mines in southern Africa and in the Copperbelt illustrate how patterns of mobility in a variety of African rural societies were linked to social reproduction, gender relations, and relations between young men and their elders. In other parts of Africa, similar analyses may be possible. In the German colony of South West Africa (today’s Namibia), Richard Moorsom describes how rural men and women from Ovamboland in the north and from the neighboring Portuguese colony of Angola coped with the double demands 94 Godfrey Wilson, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia, Part I (Livingstone, Rhodesia, 1941). 95 Wilson, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization, 18, 23.



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of payments to local lineage heads and tribute to chiefs. In the German colony, a massive uprising against German rule in 1904–07 and the ensuing genocide killed 60 percent of the population. Subsequently, the colonial state and German enterprise sought to recruit Ovambo men from further north to come to the “Police Zone,” as the area of the revolt was designated, and to regions farther south. Despite the ruthless reputation of the German administration, large numbers of Ovambo migrants arrived in 1905–09. Moorsom demonstrates convincingly and with impressive detail that this response did not stem as much from colonial coercion as from “the specific trajectories of social transformation in the Ovambo social formation, particularly in incipient class antagonism.”96 Moorsom describes women in rural Ovamboland as the major producers of agricultural goods with only marginal power, but he notes in passing that “women as well as men fled to the south” from a famine in 1915.97 Based on what is known about mining in South and Central Africa there is probably a much more detailed story to be told here about the relationship between the migrations of men and women. In West Africa, too, there are stories to tell of men, women and mining. In Liberia in the 1940s and 1950s, mining concessions to foreign firms added new streams of circular labour migration to the earlier moves of men to work on Firestone rubber plantations.98 Migration continued and expanded in the late 1960s. Data are scarce, but a survey of all 52 heads of household in the village of Gbeibini in that decade revealed that they had made 155 trips to work on rubber plantations and in the mines. In neighboring Gipo, a representative sample of 50 household heads revealed 116 similar moves.99 Civil war in Liberia in the 1990s and the closing of the Firestone plantations have undoubtedly interrupted such flows. In Nigeria, British companies began mining tin on the Jos Plateau after 1906 and needed migrant labour. After an initial period of resistance, the elimination of competing African miners and government support for recruitment pushed people to go to the mines. Tin mining has been studied in some detail, but the links between the mobility of men on the one hand, and women who stayed behind or migrated later

96 Richard J.B. Moorsom, “The Formation of the Contract Labour System in Namibia, 1900–1926”, in Forced Labour & Migration, eds. Zebeye and Ishemo, 63. 97 Moorsom, “The Formation of the Contract Labour System”, 99. 98 Amos Sawyer, The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia (San Francisco, 1992), 248–62. 99 James C. Riddell, “Mano Labor Migration and Cash-Cropping”, Liberian Studies Journal 2 (1970): 167–69.

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have yet to be explored.100 The relationship between gender and migration to the coal mines of eastern Nigeria, the bauxite mines of Guinea, or the regions of small-scale gold mining in Ghana also remains to be studied.101 In South and Central Africa the migration of men and women to gold and copper producing areas first created and then stimulated the growth of cities. Beyond these regions, however, urbanization in sub-Saharan Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the product of the migrations of women and men, and their relationships with those they left behind. Migration and Urbanization Cities in Africa, as everywhere in the world, were produced by migration as well as the biological reproduction of urban populations. In 1800 they fell into three categories. The first group included urban centres that first appeared along the frontiers of the Islamic world in the medieval and early modern periods—from the Sahel or “coast” of the Sahara in West Africa to the similarly named Swahili coast reaching from Somalia south to Mozambique. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in West Africa, new cities also grew up as a result of Islamic revival movements. Founded in the early modern era as outposts of the Atlantic slave trade, the second group of cities stretched along the African coast from St. Louis in Senegal in the west around to Luanda in Angola. Farther south, Cape Town in South Africa, a supply station for Dutch ships to the East Indies, dates from the same era. Around the coast in southeast and east Africa, traders linked to the Atlantic trade competed with local Muslim elites for control over the older cities on the Swahili coast whence slaves were exported to the Muslim world and Indian Ocean basin. The third set of

100 Bill Freund, Capital and Labour in the Nigerian Tin Mines (London: Longman, 1981); Freund, “Labour Migration to the Northern Nigerian Tin Mines, 1903–1945”, Journal of African History 22, no. 1(1981): 73–84; J.H. Morrison, “Early Tin Production and Nigerian Labour on the Jos Plateau, 1906–1921”, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines 11 (1977): 205–16. 101 Bill Freund, The Making of Contemporary Africa: The Development of African Society since 1800, 2nd ed. (Boulder, Col., 1988); Bonnie K. Campbell, Les enjeux de la bauxite: la Guinée face aux multinationales de l’aluminium (Montréal, 1983); Mariama Awumbila and Dzodzi Tsikata, “Economic Liberalisation, Changing Resource Tenures and Gendered Livelihoods: A Study of Small-Scale Gold Mining and Mangrove Exploitation in Rural Ghana”, in Land Tenure, Gender, and Globalization: Research and Analysis from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, ed. Dzodzi Tsikata and Pamela Golah (Ottawa, 2010), 98–144.



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cities grew up in the interior of Africa, sometimes, as in the case of the Yoruba city states, as a result of internal dynamics. By 1800, they were in communication with the cities in the other two zones. As late as 1850, Andreas Eckert notes, the Yoruba city of Ibadan was more than twice as large as cities on the coast such as Lagos.102 Although many migrants who moved to urban centres were men, their numbers also included women. In the 1820s, when René Caillé visited Timbuktu in West Africa, he observed that traders including women as well as men supported over half of the population. Writing about Kano farther east, Bill Freund suggests that the very early officers of the market were probably women.103 Migrants to Kano and other cities in the Sahel included female and male slaves. Slave and free migrant men and women were also among the inhabitants of the religious capitals of the jihad states founded in the Sahel—cities such as Touba, and Medina in the west, or Sokoto in Hausaland in northern Nigeria.104 Finally, in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the early twentieth century, slaves of both sexes moved from these settlements and the plantations that surrounded them to new colonial centres in the Sahel or to the coastal hinterland.105 The migration of women to urban centres along the coast and the close hinterland preceded European conquest in the late nineteenth century. From Akan towns in the west in today’s Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, east to urban centres among the Yoruba and Igbo in today’s Nigeria, to still farther east to settlements among the Douala in today’s Cameroon, women traders have played important roles in public life at least since 1800 and 102 Cities in subSaharan Africa are not recent by any means. In West Africa, excavations at Jenne-jeno in the interior delta of the Niger in today’s Mali and at Igbo Ukwu deep in Nigeria’s forest region uncovered urban centres dating from the eighth and ninth centuries ad. In southeast Africa, the ruins at Great Zimbabwe also testify to early urban development. See Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, The History of African Cities South of the Sahara from the Origins to Colonization, trans. Mary Baker (Princeton, 2005); Susan Keech McIntosh, “The Holocene Prehistory of West Africa, 10,000–1,000 BP”, in Themes in West Africa’s History, ed. Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong (Athens, Ohio, 2006), 28, 30–31; Andreas ­Eckert, “Urbanization in Colonial and Post-Colonial West Africa”, in Themes in West Africa’s History, ed. Emmanuel Kwaku Akyeampong (Athens, Ohio, 2006), 209. 103 Elias N. Saad, Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 1983), 92; Bill Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge, 2007), 14. 104 Coquery-Vidrovitch, The History of African Cities, 117–26; Mervyn Hiskett, The Development of Islam in West Africa (London, 1984); Cheikh Guèye, Touba: La capital des mourides (Paris, 2002); Freund, The African City, 3, 32; David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (Cambridge, 2004), 139–96. 105 See, for example, Gary-Tounkara, Migrants soudanais/maliens et conscience ivoirienne, 29–93.

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probably well before. Moreover, in cities on the far West African coast in Gorée, St. Louis, and other towns in Senegal, women commercial intermediaries called signares born of European fathers and African mothers played major public roles in the early centuries of the slave trade; hence the Portuguese term which identified them.106 Far to the southeast in Luanda, capital of the early Portuguese colony of Angola, independent women trader/migrants also had a long history.107 In the later nineteenth century, the rise of new colonial cities led to the increased migration of women. Women often migrated as a result of the major burdens placed on them in the household. Apart from having children, they were the mainstays of the agricultural labour force. Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch refers to junior wives and slaves in the same breath, writing that “female slaves and young wives were dependent and exploited, and thus were among the first to seek out the opportunities of colonialism’s urban centers.”108 Citing records kept by a conscientious colonial administrator in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) between 1897 and 1903, Coquery-Vidrovitch notes that wives and children were often enslaved or hired out for their labour. Their only alternative was to flee to the small colonial centres in the area. Women migrated for many reasons, including avoiding marriage to an older man, following a partner of their choosing, or being able to choose their own husband. But the most common causes of flight were to escape “battering, pressure to accept a deceased husband’s brother against one’s will, slavery, or extreme exploitation.”109 Migrating to town to escape an unwanted marriage was common in other regions as well. In West Africa, Renée Pittin notes that young Hausa women in Katsina in northern Nigeria fled undesirable marriages. They enjoyed independence in town where some became kuruwai or courtesans.110

106 George E. Brooks, Jr., “The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal”, in Women in Africa, ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay (Stanford, Cal., 1976), 19–44. 107   See Curto, “José Manuel and Nbena in Benguela in the late 1810s”; Coquery-­Vidrovitch, The History of African Cities, 286–91. 108 Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women: A Modern History, trans. Beth Gillian Raps (Boulder, Col., 1997), 74. 109 See Marcia Wright, “Justice, Women, and the Social Order in Abercorn, Northeastern Rhodesia, 1897–1903”, in African Women and the Law: Historical Perspectives, ed. Jean Hay and Marcia Wright (Boston, 1982), 33–50, cited in Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women, 74. 110   Renée Pittin, “Houses of Women: A Focus on Alternative Lifestyles in Katsina City”, in Christine Oppong, Female and Male in West Africa (London, 1983), 291–302, cited in Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women, 75, 244.



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In town, women founded new households, sometimes through marriage or unions with men, sometimes independently, and sometimes with other women. Given that African men, missionaries, and European colonial officials all feared female autonomy, it is not surprising that colonial documents are resplendent with dire tales of how women who went to town fell into what they saw as the self-destructive practice of prostitution. Perhaps not surprisingly, colonial social science in the 1940s and 1950s echoed these dire tales. In fact, the provision of sexual services sometimes provided women in town with the means to found their own households, with or without men. Writing about domestic labour and prostitution in Nairobi in the first half of the twentieth century, Luise White describes the range of services—ranging from furtive sexual relations offered by streetwalkers to more settled sexual and domestic services offered in a room or a house.111 Women came together to raise children and even circumvented traditional inheritance practices to leave property to each other. White links the ability of migrant women in Nairobi to support themselves to the economic status of migrant men in the city: “When real incomes were high, women could sell a range of services: night-long visits, meals, bath water and companionship. Their profits were high. When real incomes were lower, such as during the depression of the early 1930s, demand for prostitutes’ services was less, and the range of saleable services decreased. . . . Their profits decreased.”112 The levels of women’s migration to towns varied widely across subSaharan Africa. Uganda is indicative of many areas where female migration and its acceptance came much later. In the early twentieth century, most urban migrants in Uganda were men who went to accumulate cash necessary for targeted needs and then returned home. Urbanization proceeded very gradually; indeed as late as 1959, only three percent of Uganda’s population of more than six and a half million lived in the capital of Kampala or the four other cities with more than ten thousand inhabitants. A few women moved to town between the two World Wars, while under the aegis of the missions the first group of western-educated Ugandan women became nurses and teachers.113 Nonetheless, the numbers of women migrants were few. Kyomuhendo and McIntosh suggest

111 Luise White, “Domestic Labor in a Colonial City: Prostitution in Nairobi, 1900–1952”, in Patriarchy and Class: African Women in the Home and the Workforce (Boulder, Col., 1988), 139–60; Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago, 1990). 112 White, “Domestic Labor in a Colonial City”, 156. 113 Kyomuhendo and McIntosh, Women, Work & Domestic Virtue, 13, 15, 51.

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that “because of its landlocked location and the limited presence of mineral resources, Uganda experienced few of the dislocations felt in coastal regions directly influenced by foreign trade or areas shaped by miningbased economies . . . . In all these respects, Ugandan women lived in a world that differed dramatically from the heavily urbanized areas of West Africa where local trade was generally dominated by women, from east coast trading centres like Zanzibar, and from the mining, plantation, and white settler regions of southern and southeastern Africa.”114 But in Uganda, as elsewhere, male interests felt that their control was threatened by the migration of women to town. Colonial officials feared that the migration of women would undermine reproduction, while African men were concerned that women would elude their supervision. In 1920, the Lukiiko or African governing body of the Buganda protectorate that was part of the British colony, enacted measures to discourage female migration, ostensibly “to curb the spread of venereal disease, combat the declining numbers of marriages and births, fight emigration from Buganda, and prevent the escape of wives from their husbands.”115 In 1936, the government ministers of Buganda, who were African, and missionary leaders joined forces to request that colonial officials bar young African women from living in parts of Kampala near the British neighborhood where they worked as prostitutes. While they all wanted men to migrate periodically to work for pay, they preferred that women stay at home supporting the household by growing cash crops and food. Nonetheless, more women migrated to towns in the 1940s and 1950s where they sold food or drink or worked in factories in Kampala and Jinja processing tobacco and making matches. After independence in 1962, this trend continued. In 1964, 41 percent of the 1,700 food vendors in Kampala were women.116 The growing acceptance of women in the public sphere and women migrants came to a halt under Idi Amin, in the second regime of Apolo Obote, and during the brief rule of Tito Okello between 1971 and 1986.117 Violence victimized women and brought dislocation to the countryside. Millions of people fled as unwilling migrants, and many women found themselves heading households: “Hundreds of thousands of women were . . . forced to generate some kind of income under the most difficult circumstances, either by producing and selling goods at home in the vil114 Ibid., 13. 115 Ibid., 78. 116 Ibid., 16, 77–78, 80, 88–90, 99–100, 124, 126. 117 Ibid., xi, 139, 146, 151, 159, 169–79.



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lages or by moving into Kampala or other towns in the hopes of finding better options.”118 Over the twentieth century, the dire predictions of African men and colonial authorities about women migrants and female migration did not come to pass. Writing about Leopoldville (today’s Kinshasa) shortly before independence in 1960, C. Comhaire-Sylvain and J. Comhaire reported that there were more women in the colonial capital and the sex ratio had become more balanced. Married women gave birth to about the same number of children in town as in rural areas—“an average number of children of 4.8 each for the Bakongo women, and from 3.30 to 3.76 for those of other tribal groups.”119 They noted that few women wanted to remain single. Finally, they observed that a smaller percentage of women were engaged in prostitution than had been supposed (600 out of 8,000 women), and judged that it was “less harmful than it is . . . in Western urban societies.”120 Such conclusions parallel the more recent findings of Coquery-Vidrovitch that women found ways to migrate to towns even in the regimented mining environment of South Africa, and that in many parts of the continent they found their way into service trades previously monopolized by male migrants. Although most colonial cities in subSaharan Africa did not achieve a balance between women and men in the colonial era, Coquery-Vidrovitch wrote in the early 1990s that “contrary to popular opinion, there are more women than men in many black African cities.”121 Over the last century, then, the migrations of women and men to Africa’s cities have increasingly converged and complemented each other as households and social reproduction also came to be located in cities. Conclusion Several conclusions emerge from this chapter on the migration and nonmigration of women and men in sub-Saharan Africa between about 1800 and 1975. First, of course, is the tremendous diversity in the social, political, and economic contexts of mobility. Colonies became integrated into larger colonial economies over a long time—with the French colony of 118  Ibid., 17. 119  C. Comhaire-Sylvain, and J. Comhaire, “Problems relating to Urbanization: Formation of African Urban Populations”, and “Discussion”, in Population in Africa, ed. Frank Lorimer and Mark Karp (Boston, 1960), 41–59. 120 Ibid., 43. 121  Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women, 76–80, and for the quotation, 81.

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Ubangi-Shari in Equatorial Africa and South Africa perhaps falling at the two extremes. Women in parts of Africa much closer together geographically also found themselves in very different circumstances. Whereas a quarter of all women in one region of Botswana worked outside their rural homelands in 1978, for example, women not very far away in the Transkei were trapped in rural poverty at the same time.122 Second, each region of sub-Saharan Africa and each colony included an enormous variety of African societies: large-scale and centralized states or small-scale and much less centralized village societies; settled, nomadic or even hunting and gathering societies; peoples with long histories of migration or those who were less connected to the larger world. Migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affected these societies in different ways. Third, understanding how the types of mobility reviewed in this chapter developed and the forms that they took requires analyses of how local societies and households sought to reproduce themselves from day-to-day and from one generation to the next. In describing his research on “domestic units” in Taita in southern Kenya in the 1950s, Alfred Harris pointed out that African societies sometimes engaged in such analysis quite consciously: “People make decisions about the distribution of the available man- or woman-power to be devoted to subsistence, cash crops, or labor. They are quite self-conscious about this. There must be an equitable division between these functions. It is impossible for people to withdraw from subsistence completely—at least in Taita, where I was.”123 This chapter makes a very important final point. The analysis of the history of migration, and relations between male and female mobility or nonmobility must not stop at the meso-level of the household, but reach into households to take into account relations between men and women, the young and the old, and other members of the domestic unit. This chapter illustrates that African men and women and their households were crucial

122 Barbara Brown, “Women, Migrant Labor, and Social Change in Botswana”, Working Paper No. 41, African Studies Center, Boston University, 1980; Robert Lucas, “The Distribution and Efficiency of Crop Production in Tribal Areas of Botswana”, Working Paper No. 20, African Studies Center, Boston University, 1978. These publications are summarized as a case study in Jane I. Guyer, “Women in the rural economy: contemporary variations”, in African Women South of the Sahara, ed. Margaret Jean Hay and Sharon Stichter (New York, 1984), 27–29. 123 This comment by Alfred Harris is included in “Discussion”, following S.D. Neumark, “Population Trends in Relation to Agriculture and Rural Society”, in Population in Africa, ed. Frank Lorimer and Mark Karp (Boston, 1960), 35.



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in determining how migration affected them. Sometimes they resisted the push to migrate and developed other strategies to meet their needs. Or they reshaped the forms taken by mobility. Commenting on an essay written by Tiyambe Zeleza on colonial Kenya, Zegeye and Ishemo make this point succinctly: “As a result of resistance against forced labour, squatter and migrant labour systems developed. These, Zeleza argues, cannot be reduced to the reproductive imperatives of capitalism. They may represent as much African resistance to capitalist work rhythms.”124 Stories of migration, then, are as much tales of the local as they are histories of the global.

124 Zegeye and Ishemo, “Introduction”, Forced Labour & Migration, 12.

Migrations in the Maghreb and Western Mediterranean* Kamel Kateb and Hassène Kassar This chapter discusses emigration and immigration in the countries of the Maghreb: Tunisia, Morocco, and especially Algeria since its colonization. It will also mention the role of Malta and Sicily as sending societies as well as Europe’s southern littoral both as region of departure and, later, of arrival. In a brief retrospective we will survey the multidirectional migrations from ancient times to the end of Ottoman rule. French colonization of Algeria from 1830 ended traditional patterns of migration and resulted in flight from colonial rule and massive immigration from Europe. The colonizer families’ need for the labour of those dispossessed of their land led to a legislative attack on mobility: flight from colonial rule and emigration was illegalized as in-migration to France would be after 1974. During World War One, France—la grande nation—needed the help of the colonies: Soldiers and workers were drafted from the Maghreb and had to leave their families behind. Through these involuntary migrations they “discovered” potential destinations for labour migration in the metropole. With independence in 1962, the large-scale European immigration to Algeria, 1830s to 1914, reversed and, in addition, a large-scale North African out-migration began. The oil price-shock in 1973–74 resulted in legal restrictions on immigration to France and the whole of Europe. Each of these major periods and moves showed distinctive demographic characteristics. Over the whole period the family and gender composition of migrants changed from families and tribes fleeing French rule to individual men and, later, women, taking urban jobs in the Maghreb’s cities and then in France. Retrospective: Immigrations to the Maghreb over the Centuries For many centuries, the Maghreb, as crossroads between the north and the south, was a space of human mixing and cultural exchange or fusion. It connected sub-Saharan Africa and Mediterranean Europe through * Translated and abridged from the French by Dirk Hoerder.

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long-distance commerce and human exchanges. The region—once settled by east-west migrations from the Nile Valley—experienced the arrival of the Romans from the Italian peninsula and the departure of Arabs for the Iberian Peninsula, the south of France, and Sicily in the eighth century. In all of these migrations, men and women were involved, communities and societies were built. When the Catholic rulers of Castille expelled the Jews—men, women, children—in 1492 and, later, the Muslims, many found refuge in the Maghreb’s cities. With Ottoman rule from the sixteenth century, soldiers and administrators arrived, often with families. Trading in sub-Saharan, Muslim, and Christian slaves—mainly men— added to the mix of peoples. This interaction changed in the early nineteenth century. Of the European powers, the British and the French ones penetrated into the Mediterranean spaces and impoverished Italian, Maltese, Sicilian, French and Spanish migrants arrived. Europeans of many cultural backgrounds lived in the Maghreb societies before French colonization. While no quantitative data are available, references are numerous. Those longest established were the descendants of manumitted slaves, adventurers, and especially merchants from Marseille and Genoa in the Regency of Tunis. They lived under protocols of coexistence or written “capitulations” with no need for passports or other papers. Few cared to register with their consulates, thus the British Consul in Naples could only estimate the number of subjects of the Crown in North Africa. In the eighteenth century, the ports of Goulette, Tanger, Algiers, and Oran, long the debarkation stations of invading Ottoman and Spanish forces, received considerable numbers of Sicilian, Sardinian, Maltese, and Spanish in fishing or construction. These families built their own “villages” and churches within the several coastal cities and lived according to their customs and traditions. In the first half of the nineteenth century, migrants from the densely populated islands of Malta and Sicily fled poverty and lack of jobs, during the nineteenth-century agrarian crises in the south of both the Italian and Iberian peninsulas impoverished Italians came to the coast of Tunis and eastern Algeria and Spanish to those of western Algeria and Morocco. The “free” migrations, self-decided under severe economic constraints, reflected political, economic, and societal crises, imperial penetrations and revolutions, military defeats, agricultural disasters like phylloxera, a pest that destroys vineyards. In the 1860s, when the misery in Sicily became even more acute, young men fleeing military conscription as well as local bandits fleeing the police came. All, men and women, took advantage of the opportunities that France’s colonization of



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North African spaces offered by the dispossession of the resident Maghrebian families and peoples.1 Involuntary Family Emigration from Algeria: Fleeing Colonization2 The emergence of the gendered migration space of the present is closely related to colonization. From the early nineteenth century, states and societies of the Mediterranean’s northern littoral imposed themselves on its southern coasts and ports and, subsequently on the Maghreb as a whole. French expeditionary forces arrived in 1830 and from 1840 Marshal Thomas Bugeaud began a systematic colonizing and subjugation of the interior of Algeria. Colonization of Algeria with its brutally disruptive implantation of a European-origin immigrant population, a “re-peopling,” initiated a sizable emigration movement of Algerians. In 1830, the process of substituting the resident population by a new immigrant one began with the expulsion from the city of Algiers of 10,000 “Turks”—the representatives and merchants of the Ottoman Empire, which still held suzerainty over the region, with their families. The French invaders embarked them and sent them off to Smyrna, Asia Minor. During the subsequent war of conquest from 1830 to 1847, many Algerians left (no exact figures available). At first, whole families and cultural-tribal groups—or parts of them—hostile to French occupation migrated or fled eastward. This anti-colonial out-migration to the Eastern Mediterranean involved families, often of means, as well as whole groups with their possessions. They could reinstall themselves at their destination. After victory, the French banished military leaders, their families, and whole groups of people labelled a “threat to public order” because they had resisted colonization. They had no chance of resettlement but were interned; the scholar and Emir Abd al-Kader (Abd al-Qādir) and his court in Château St. Amboise (Indre-et-Loire) for example, in Corsica, and the island Sainte 1   Jean Ganiage, Les origines du Protectorat français en Tunisie (Tunis, 1968), 15, 40–41, and Ganiage, La population européenne de Tunis au milieu du XIX siècle, étude démographique (Paris, 1960), 18. 2 Much of the subsequent text is based on original research in the Centre des archives d’outre-mèr (CAOM) in Aix en Provence: Gouvernement général de l’Algérie F80 442, Carton 9H100, rapport J. Mourlan 1886, Carton 10H90 rapport Luciani, Carton 9H99 and 9H100, Carton 9H98, Carton 9H102, Carton F80 1816, Carton 9H105.

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Marguerite (off the French Mediterranean coast). Later, those charged with being active in the “insurrection” of 1871 were interned on islands in the French Antilles and in New Caledonia (Melanesia). Most of the deportees could never return;3 those who after long delays were authorized to return were ordered to settle in places distant from their origins. They often decided to depart into exile. In addition, after each struggle against the colonizers, “insurrections” in the latter’s terminology, whole cultural-tribal groups emigrated to neighbouring Morocco or Tunisia.4 From the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War One, individuals or whole groups planned emigration from their colonizer-ruled homelands, but the French colonial administrators observed such movements closely. Destinations were the neighbouring societies and the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, especially Syria. The French discussed conditions of admission of the refugees with both the Tunisian and Ottoman governments and prohibited return of anyone who had been away from Algeria for more than three years. Emigration and flight were the direct consequences (1) of military operations (“insurrections” and their repression) and colonizer-imposed confiscations of land as well as forced contributions. (2) Others emigrated for religious-political reasons: In accordance with the prescription of the Quran they refused to live under non-Islamic authorities. (To prevent such loss of a productive population the French government had obtained fatwas5 from religious authorities in Cairo and Mecca permitting Algerian Muslims to live under French ruler). (3) Again others left because they refused to accept the change of life-styles due to the French colonizers’ unsettling socio-economic interference. (4) Finally, emigration accelerated intermittently whenever the colonizer authorities implemented new administrative practices to bring Algerian procedures into conformity with those in France. A sequence of low- and high-intensity emigration evolved: During “quiet” periods, the French authorities would usually grant the limited number of requests to emigrate. Periods of high emigration, for example to Syria in 1855, 1860, 1875, 1888, 1898, 1909–10, and 1912, led authorities to block the movements. The administrators saw the emigrations as 3 Art. 6 of a law of 30 May 1850 condemned the deported to forced labour for life. 4 In 1871, the five tribes of the Souamas, the Ouled Mahdi, the Ahl Rouffi, the Regaz, and the Ouled Sidi Abid left. André Noushi, Enquête sur le niveau de vie des populations rurales Constantinoises de la conquête jusqu’en 1919, essai d’histoire économique et sociale (Paris, 1961). 5 A fatwa, by Muslim scholars, is an interpretation of the Koran for contexts not foreseen in the text.



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indicating “hostility” to France’s presence and, in their view, benevolent goals. From time to time they investigated the reasons in the colony as a whole—as in the Warnier Report, 1899,6 and the Luciani Report, 1911—or on the level of prefectures or police districts (gendarmerie). These reports, while not permitting a quantitative assessment, together with the correspondence of the colonial administrators provide valuable insight into the causes and consequences of emigration.7 From the mid-1840s on, the colonizer authorities, with the support of the government in Paris, attempted to stop emigration of whole tribes by threatening massive punitive repression (par la crainte d’une répression efficace).8 In the case of the mass departures of 1855 and 1856 in the region from Constantine to Algiers and again in 1860, a limited number of permissions to emigrate were still granted. But when migrations assumed a disturbing collective character (caractère collectif inquiétant), the authorities feared being embarrassed internationally and were concerned about departure of “their” labourers. When, from the early 1850s, permits to depart were refused, people resorted to clandestine departures. Authorities made emigrants illegals by definition. General Chanzy, Governor General of Algeria, in a letter to the prefects, was open about the potential emigrants’ apprehensions: “They fear that they will lack land for their work, their pastures, their animals.” But he only saw subversion: encouragement “by certain characters of the Tolba group, by Marabouts, and by certain indigenous indigene chiefs,” whom he accused of religious fanaticism. Authorities were open about their and European settlers’ interests: At first, granting permission had been advantageous since it required “legal” cession of the respective family’s collective tribal lands. Later they recognized that the emigration “infection” assumed proportions that totally devalued the French administration.9 Thus the administrations vacillated. Since any emigrant group was deprived of its rights to the traditional land, emigration freed land for 6 Warnier, a deputy of the National Assembly, had been active in formulating the loi foncière of 1872 which, among other measures, had as goal the privatization in settler hands of Arab tribal lands. Kamel Kateb, Européens, «indigènes» et juifs en Algérie (1830– 1962) (Paris, 2001), 79–84. 7 Kamel Kateb, “La Gestion administrative de l’émigration algérienne vers les pays musulmans au lendemain de la conquête de l’Algérie (1830 à 1914)”, Population 2 (April 1997): 399–428. 8 Letter dated 17 April 1846, Gouverneur général to M. Poucher, CAOM: Aix en Provence: Gouvernement général de l’Algérie; Carton 9H98. 9 Letter dated 23 March 1873, CAOM: Aix en Provence: Gouvernement général de l’Algérie; Carton 9H100.

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c­ olonization and might be encouraged. As an act of mass political resistance, emigration had to be prevented. Furthermore, the arrival of the political emigrants in the Eastern Mediterranean embarrassed French diplomacy there. Then again, when departure seemed politically opportune, permissions were granted: In 1910–11 more than 500 “Kouloughli” families from Tlemcen were granted leave to depart. The Kouloughli, mixed families of Ottoman notables and Algerian women, were considered by definition as hostile to the French presence. However, in general, permits to depart came to be refused.10 The Commandement Supérieur des Forces de terre et de mer en Algérie, in 1860, summarized the situation to the Ministre de l’Algérie et des Colonies: It was absolutely necessary to avoid the impression, extremely damaging to the administration, that the spectacle of mass emigration would give. “It has to be prevented that these emigrants move off and in their mischievous hearts slander the name of France and misrepresent its generous intentions.” To the anti-French discourse expected difficulties in Algeria added themselves “At the same time, the emptied spaces result in insecurity, the communications may no longer be watched by trusted local officials in French pay [douars], the brigandage will grow, and given all these issues, colonization will no longer make progress.” Furthermore, Algerians were expected to work for the French: “On the practical level, the reduction of the indigenous population implies a reduction of labour which the settlers, the trade, and the industry need.” European colonizer immigrants did not do the work: “Isn’t the Arab in the present the real, and to be open, the only producer of grain?”11 Thus only allegedly troubling groups like the Kouloughli could depart, as a collective, Algerians were prevented from departure as involuntary labourers.

10 Ordonnance du 18 avril 1846; Bulletin officiel Alger—Actes du gouvernement 1846 T6, no. 222, 82, and no. 224, 9; Archives du Gouverneur générale de l’Algérie (GGA): conseil général d’Oran: rapport sur l’exode de Tlemcen (série H15/3); CAOM: Aix en Provence: Gouvernement général de l’Algérie; Carton 9H98; Archives militaires château de Vincennes: Carton H236. 11   Letter dated 14 April 1860, CAOM Aix en Provence: Gouvernement général de l’Algérie; Carton 9H98. French text: “Il ne faut pas que ces émigrants aillent au loin le fiel dans le cœur maudire le nom de la France et calomnier ses intentions généreuses.” “En même temps, les vides qui se formeraient créeraient l’insécurité, les communications n’étant plus surveillées par des douars responsables, le brigandage augmenterait et, sous leur influence, la colonisation ne saurait enfin faire non plus des progrès.” “Sur le plan matériel, la diminution dans la population indigène c’est aussi la diminution des bras dont le colon, dont le commerce et l’industrie tirent parti.” “L’Arabe n’est-il pas en ce moment le véritable et pour ainsi dire le seul producteur de céréales.”



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Policies vacillated in many respects. On occasion the colonial administration funded return movements in hopes that returnees would discourage potential migrants from leaving. Following the Luciani Report of 1911, publication of the Algerian newspapers El Maaloumat and Thamarat El Founoun was prohibited, but the Report’s recommendation to establish Arab-language newspapers with views favourable to the colonizers was not acted upon. Furthermore, stopping migrants who had already left without permission and thus, from the French perspective, illegally and had sold their possessions was not feasible. Nor was it feasible to counter by colonizer fiat the Quran’s injunction that Muslims should live and die under Muslim rulers.12 To summarize: In the pre-colonial Maghreb, people of different customs, values, and religions had lived together. After 1830, the French administration instrumentalized a demographic policy that, if it could not replace the resident population by a new immigrant/ imported one, would at least counterbalance the quantitative weight of the subjected peoples. Faced with an emigration movement that would empty fertile lands, the administrators, however, prevented many of those, whose lands they coveted, from leaving. When made illegal, emigration continued as a clandestine movement. The effects of French colonization impacted on the receiving states, the Tunis Regency and the Ottoman Empire: How would these sans-papiers of the time be regularized and become legal subjects of the respective ruler? For those, who were considered culturally related (culturellement proche) an assimilation policy was conceptualized and implemented. Immigration to Algeria: Fleeing Poverty Elsewhere While many of the original residents of Algeria were forced or felt constrained to emigrate, in the regions of traditional, small migrations to Algeria, poverty, and in some cases political oppression, increased. From Sicily, young men fled to Tunisia to escape the draft. In Malta, once prosperous as commercial turntable and stopover for sailing vessels, British domination since the Napoleonic wars ended the lucrative corsair activities. The new steamships, often of British companies, diverted trade routes. Malta’s merchants and traders lost their role and many of the rural population felt 12 CAOM Aix en Provence: Gouvernement général de l’Algérie; Carton 9H98, 9H99, 9H100, 10H90 (rapport Luciani), Carton F80 42.

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condemned to “servitude.” Individuals and families followed traditional routes of migration, first to the coast of Tunisia and, westbound, on to Annabah in Algeria where a Maltese community had existed for long. Other emigrations from southern Europe were directed to the whole of the Maghreb. For the century from the 1830s to the 1930s, it is difficult to ascertain the numbers of Europeans in any of the Maghreb’s three countries. In Tunisia, about 8,000 seem to have resided in 1834; by 1856 some 12,000 were counted, three quarters of them in the city of Tunis. Most originated in neighbouring coastal regions and islands and often came by fishing boat. The majority were Maltese (7,000), now British subjects, and Sicilians (4,000). Others came from the tiny Pantellaris and Favigragna islands, from Sardinia and Corsica, from Naples and Marseille. French immigrants were few and in 1881, at the time of the establishment of a French Protectorate over the state, numbered only 700. All efforts of the French authorities notwithstanding, French residents came to surpass the number of Italians only in 1931. In 1910, some 40,400 French (including the numerous administrators) lived side by side with almost 108,000 Italians who, after Italian unification, included Sicilians and Sardinians, and 12,250 Maltese. Many of the Italians came as labour migrants to support by their remittances families at a “home” that did not feed them. The community included independent women and families, the registers listed 39,696 men and 23,747 women as well as 29,650 boys and 14,912 girls. All immigrant communities became multigenerational with the locally-born segment increasing fast.13 For Morocco, no statistics exist before the first colonial census in 1947. In Algeria the French administration encouraged European immigration from the beginning and from 1833 kept meticulous records of arrivals in contrast to its disregard for exact information about “Natives” as emigrants. In addition vital records registered births, deaths, marriages, and divorces by nationality. From 1836, censuses enumerated this part of the population every five years. In 1830, Europeans numbered a mere 7,850, 3,500 of them French. No real immigration policy was put in place until General Bugeaud’s army arrived for conquest of the interior in 1841.

13 Mahmoud Seklani, La population de la Tunisie (Paris, 1974), 21; Rapport fait au nom de la Commission du budget (Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, Protectorats), par E. Landin (Chambre des députés, 1902); R. Raqueni, “Italiens et français en Tunesie,” La Nouvelle Revue (avril 1912).



migrations in the maghreb and western mediterranean 225

A single decade later, in 1851, more than half of the 131,000 Europeans were French (66,050).14 Colonizing Immigration and Colonizer Policies Political intentions notwithstanding, immigrants from metropolitan France never came in masses sufficient to turn Algeria into a Frenchpopulated colony. Among European arrivals the Spanish, Italians, and Maltese always remained sizable groups. Deportations from France after the Revolution of 1848, the Coup d’état of 1851, and the defeat of the Commune in 1871, as well as the flight of people from Alsace-Lorraine after annexation by Prussian armies did not change the picture.15 The colonial administrations faced both the issue of sequestering land for immigrant settlement and the fact that most immigrants were “foreigners.” Land was confiscated from agriculturists in the Plain of Mitidja (south of Algiers), elsewhere from commonly held tribal lands, and, in the interior, from nomadic peoples’ pastures. The “foreignness” of the migrants in 1865 led the French Senate to promulgate a decree (senatus-consulte) that permitted naturalization, a measure subsequently expanded by the nationality law of 1889. Thus, over time, the “French” segment assumed an ever larger share of the total European presence, increasing from 38.6 percent in 1847 to 78.9 percent in 1926. Rates of growth varied depending on military presence and administration policies.16 Up until World War One, immigration accounted for an import part of the intercensal growth of the “European” population—in fact a settled “European-origin” population: 57 percent 1896–1901, 40 percent 1901–06, and 48.2 percent 1906–1911. But from 1906, natural population growth, births in the colony, became the principal growth factor while migration slowed. During World War One, however, the colony lost people, almost 11,000 from 1911 to 1916. The 1916 census listed 747,000 “Europeans” in Algeria: 480,000 born in Algeria, 113,000 born in France, and 154,000 born in other European countries. 14 Kateb, Européens, «indigènes» et juifs en Algérie, i, 28. 15 Danielle Laplaigne, “La colonisation de l’Algérie par les enfants assistés,” in sans famille à Paris (Paris, 1989), 119–136. 16 Philippe Conrad, Le Maghreb sous domination colonial (1830–1962), Clio—Le monde de Clio, 2003, http://www.clio.fr/, accessed 23 March 2007; Xavier Yacono, Histoire de l’Algérie depuis la Régence (Versailles, 1993). See also the contemporary account by Louis Baudicour, Histoire de la colonisation (Paris, 1860).

226

kamel kateb and hassène kassar Table 1. Growth of the non-Islamic population in Algeria, 1833–1954

Date of Municipal census population

Inter-census growth of the population In absolute numbers

1833 1836 1841 1846 1851 1856 1861 1866 1872 1876 1881 1886 1891 1896 1901 1906 1911 1916 1921 1926 1931 1936 1948 1954

7,812 14,561 37,374 95,321 131,283 159,292 192,746 217,990 245,117 344,749 412,435 464,820 530,924 578,480 633,850 680,263 752,043 779,654 791,370 833,354 881,584 946,013 922,272 984,031

Annual average (for 10,000)

Total

Natural

By Total ­migration

Natural

By ­migration

+6,749 +22,813 +57,947 +35,962 +28,009 +33,454 +25,244 +27,127 +65,058 +67,686 +52,385 +66,104 +47,556 +55,370 +46,413 +71,780 +27,611 +11,716 +41,989 +48,225 −23,741 +61,759

−355 −1,711 −3,688 −10,790 −3,873 +3,416 +12,282 −3,923 +7,547 +9,274 +14,398 +14,902 +18,909 +26,922 +27,418 +38,082 +38,415 −11,725 +38,041 +34,865 +40,323 +80,359 +63,940

+7,104 +2,800 +24,524 +3,134 +61,635 +3,101 +46,752 +755 +31,882 +427 +30,038 +420 +12,962 +262 +31,050 +207 +57,511 +582 +58,412 +393 +37,987 +254 +51,202 +284 +28,647 +179 +28,448 +191 +18,995 +146 +33,698 +211 −10,804 +73 +23,442 +30 +3,948 +106 +13,360 +116 +24,106 +146 −104,100 −20 −2,181 +112

−151 −235 −197 −226 −59 +43 +127 −30 +68 +54 +70 +64 +71 +93 +86 +112 +102 −30 +96 +84 +91 +68 +116

+3,031 +3,369 +3,298 +981 +486 +377 +135 +237 +514 +339 +184 +220 +108 +98 +60 +99 −29 +60 +10 +32 +55 −88 −4

Source: Service de statistique générale de l’Algérie: répertoire statistique des communes d’Algérie 1954. Note: The data do not give figures by sex.

The migrants to Algeria consisted of self-deciding men and women (immigration libre) and of others coming under government settlement projects (immigration officielle). Throughout the nineteenth century, the executive requested funds from the French parliament to support the colonization. Reasons given included both fears and hopes. Insecurities about “the French nation” involved apprehensions about the popular so-called “dangerous” classes, but also fears of demographic decline. Opportunities offered by colonization and empire were meant to ­encourage



migrations in the maghreb and western mediterranean 227

French ­couples’ rate of reproduction. The imperial projects included economic growth and expansions as well as a mission of civilization across the globe. Such arguments, favourably received among France’s political classes, did not always result in appropriations by parliament. Alain Lardiller called the French administration’s attitude to the (re-)peopling of the colonies “hesitant”: France’s task in Algeria was not pursued by the French in the name of France but “outside or on the side of it” (en dehors et à côté d’elle).17 The migrants from France originated mainly from the regions below a line from Bordeaux to Geneva with the majority coming from the Midi and Corsica. In Algeria, these French constituted the urban bourgeoisie, staffed the colonial administration, established wine growing and held a monopoly on it. Italians and Maltese settled mainly in the east and especially in coastal cities, the Spanish in the west. The Italians came mostly from Southern Italy and Sicily as part of the general mass emigration under the impact of the agricultural crises and structural poverty. Like their cousins in Tunisia, they were mainly engaged in fishing. In the 1840s, in the east and the centre, they dominated the coral fishing (owning 196 of 201 boats) and about half of the general fishery (accounting for 56 percent of the tonnage of fish landed). In addition, and like the Spanish in the west, they were the common labourers building infrastructures whether ports, roads, or railroads. The Maltese, who were concentrated in Bône and Phillippeville (73 percent), were mostly merchants. Together with migrants from Spanish Minorca (the so-called “Mahonnais”), who settled in the west, they dominated in the supply of the French army during the early years of colonization. But among them were also vegetable gardeners and day labourers.18 The Spanish, who could connect to a community of long standing in the city of Oran, formed the largest group after the French and were an important segment of the colonial population. They originated from Spain’s Mediterranean coastal regions, the provinces of Alicante and Valencia, from the Balearic Islands, Catalonia, Murcia and Almeria and thus their migration benefitted from the proximity to Algeria’s west, the region around Oran. It was fuelled by the political crises in the Peninsula and by economic crises, particularly in Andalusia in 1847–48, 1856–47,

17 Alain Lardiller, Le peuplement français en Algérie (Paris, 1992). 18 Augustin Bernard, L’Algérie (Paris, 1929); Gaston Loth, Le peuplement Italien en Algérie et en Tunisie (Paris, 1905).

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Table 2. Proportion of French and foreigners in the non-Islamic population of Algeria (per 1000) Year

French Jewish Foreign

1833 1836 1841 1845 1851 1856 1861 1866 1872 1876 1881 1886

140 171 301 406 434 514 508 485

685 546 325 164 138 117 127 135 587 550 560 563

175 283 374 430 428 369 365 380 413 450 440 437

Total

Year

1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000

1891 1896 1901 1906 1911 1921 1926 1931 1936 1948 1954

French, Foreign Jewish 594 634 656 756 749 761 789 832 866 951 949

406 366 344 244 251 239 211 168 134 49 51

Total 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000

Source: Statistique générale, répertoire statistique des communes, recensement 1954.

and 1868–69. In the first years, the migrants worked mainly as carters, in earthworks, and as agricultural labourers.19 In addition, Germans, Swiss, and Belgians came. The arrival of the few Germans began in 1832 when cheated emigrants for America were abandoned in the port of Le Havre. Their numbers, some 10,000 in 1855, declined to 4,000 in 1881. This small community inserted itself originally in the frame of settlements of migrants from Alsace-Lorraine. “Foreigners” accounted for over 40 percent of the European population from 1845 to 1851 and from 1872–1891. But after 1890 their share declined continuously. The Premise for Massive Emigration: The Destructuration of the Maghreb’s Rural World As has been noted, the implantation of a European population was based on the massive dispossession of resident Algerian peasant populations. To destructure and, perhaps, destroy the traditional economy, France used the force of laws which remodelled the customs and Islamic law that had guided the Maghrebian societies for centuries, and Algeria served as a laboratory for methods later to be applied to the neighbouring countries. 19 Victor Demontès, Le peuple algérien: essai de démographie algérienne (Alger, 1906), and Demontès, L’Algérie économique: la population algérienne, 2 vols. (Alger, 1929).



migrations in the maghreb and western mediterranean 229

According to Larbi Talha, policies pursued multiple courses, including detours. Legal “instruments,” often meaning assault weapons, had to be re-forged repeatedly. But all measures pursued one goal: to establish private property ownership and thereby freedom to alienate and sell land and to engage in trade.20 The administration’s strategy to occupy the most fertile lands and control the most important economic sectors by depriving tribes of their commonly held lands, peasant families of their fields, and craft families of their economic role reached extremes when a decree of the French Senate of 1863 disorganized 371 tribes which, holding the best lands, were economically and politically the most powerful. They lost 90 percent of their lands, as did another 224 tribes in 1887. This military-judicial destruction forced several of the dispossessed groups to take refuge in Tunisia and Morocco. In Tunisia, a French “protectorate” since 1881, a decree of 1896 considered all uncultivated land and pasturage not used for sheep raising as in the public domain, that is, as French. The colonizer introduction of capital had massive consequences for the lower classes and the pre-capitalist sectors of production, in particular in the rural worlds. The intended result was the forced establishment of a reservoir of cheap labour: People deprived of their means of subsistence had to migrate internally to the cities.21 Developments in Morocco (divided in 1912 into a French and a Spanish “protectorate”) and Tunisia followed the model of policies tried out in Algeria. In Tunisia the acquisition of land was less deadly but even more comprehensive. A whole battery of laws served to dispossess peasant families of their land, and immigrant (family) landholding more than quintupled from just over 175,000 ha to 930,000 ha in the most fertile regions. This destruction of traditional society, as in Algeria, forced the original population—individually or as family units—to migrate to the cities or to work for the settlers for miserable wages—far below those paid to Italians or Maltese. When whole tribes fled eastward to Libya, the French confiscated their vacated lands. In Gildas Simon’s words, in the sixty years of French colonization, the whole of social structures and everyday life were disrupted and thrown into chaos; no political, economic, or social sector

20 Larbi Talha, “La migration des travailleurs entre le Maghreb et l’Europe”, Revue française d’études politiques contemporaines 6 ( juin 1975): 65–89. 21   Larbi Talha, Le salariat immigré dans la crise: La main d’œuvre maghrébine en France (1921–1987) (Marseille, 1989), 39.

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remained untouched. The agro-pastoral way of living was eradicated.22 In Morocco, the colonizers attempted to learn from the mistakes in Algeria, especially those of General Bugeaud and his armies. The first ResidentGeneral, army General Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey, used a coordinated military and economic strategy to break resistance by the tribes and to dislocate the men, women, and children from their lands.23 The demographic consequences of the occupation or protectorateimposition in the three countries began with high mortality and flight. The imposition of capitalism followed the European model but with greater speed and violence and without establishment of new industrial sectors and thus of jobs for the displaced rurals. In agriculture, in particular, the supply of labouring men and women was always higher than the demand—a structural surplus. The military-judicial apparatus served to destroy the societal institutions, to appropriate their means of production, to introduce a free economy into social structures not meant for commodification and to transform the resident population into proletarians forced to work for wages. The new system, for the first time in the Maghreb’s history, led to a surplus population and thus created a reservoir for outmigration.24 In the interwar years, slums, bidonvilles, emerged around the big cities. World War One and Interwar Years Few Maghrebians, almost exclusively men, had migrated to Europe, especially to France, before World War One. Some 4,000–5,000 Algerians worked in the mines of the Pas de Calais and in the factories of Marseilles and Paris. In 1911, the newspaper Echo d’Oran published information indicating that French military authorities planned to use units recruited from Arabs in Algeria. As a result, another clandestine departure began. Young men left their families and fled to Morocco often with intention to continue to Syria, where the earlier refugee communities had settled. From the declaration of war in August 1914, France’s demand for manpower— menpower—skyrocketed. Europeans temporarily reversed their migration 22 Gildas Simon, L’espace des travailleurs tunisiens en France. Structures et fonctionnement d’un champ migratoire international (Poitiers, 1979), 29. 23 Talha, Le salariat immigré dans la crise, 35. 24 Carlo Benetti, L’accumulation dans les pays capitalistes sous développés (Paris, 1974); Rosa Luxemburg, L’accumulation du capital (Paris, 1967), 123; Bernard Ravenel, “L’insoutenable ‘Forteresse Europe’ ”, confluences méditerranée 5 (Fall 1992–93): 101–120.



migrations in the maghreb and western mediterranean

231

direction and the state forced North African workers to come to France. First, the French Parliament, on 15 July 1914, abolished the permit system, required of Algerian workers who wanted to enter France. At the end of the war in 1918, 78,500 factory workers had arrived and another 175,000 had been mobilized as support for the army frontlines: 3.1 percent of Algeria’s total population of the time had been shipped to France.25 The War Department established in 1916 a service spécial des travailleus coloniaux (special service for colonial workers) and the Labour Department a service de la main d’œuvre étrangère (service for foreign labour) with an elaborate structure of a central section, provincial bureaus, border posts, regional control systems, and missions abroad. For the involuntary migrants this implied “discovery” of a new space of migration, of job markets. Migration to France began as an unintended side-effect of the forced mobilization and demobilization: Post-war labour demand attracted single men or married men who left families behind. Few installed themselves permanently in France. At the same time, immigration to the Maghreb slowed in the interwar years and the share resident “foreigners” declined because many acquired French citizenship. In Tunisia, the French amounted to 91,500 in 1931—almost ten times as many as in the 1830s; the Maltese declined from 13,600 in 1931 through acculturation and naturalization. The same holds true for Italians, high birth rates notwithstanding. At the time of independence in 1956, of about 255,000 Europeans in the country, 180,500 were of French nationality, 66,900 were Italians. In Morocco the last general census (1947) counted 8.6 million inhabitants, including 325,000 of Jewish faith. Those belonging to the “ethnic categories” numbered a mere 325,000 (French: 266,100, Spanish: 28,100, Italians: 14,400, other “nationalities”: 16,400) or 3.8 percent of the total. And “French” included Français de statut musulman and Français musulmans d’Algérie.26 As yet, French citizenship for North Africans of Islamic faith was highly restrictive. “­Foreigners” increased when refugees from the Spanish Civil War (1936– 1939) arrived in Algeria—with the victory of the fascist forces some 20,000

25 Louis Chevallier, Robert Gessain, G. de Longevialle, and Jean Sulter, eds., Documents sur l’immigration (Paris, 1947); Catherine Withol De Wenden, Les immigrés et la politique. Cent-cinquante ans d’évolution (Paris, 1988), 30. 26 Annuaire statistique, 1949, 20, 23.

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kamel kateb and hassène kassar

Table 3. Proportion of immigrants and emigrants in the total population (in %) Maghreb

Algeria

Morocco

Tunisia

Immigr. Emigr. Immigr. Emigr. Immigr. Emigr. Immigr. Emigr. 1926 11.0 1936 8.9 1950–56 8.0 1960–62 1998–04 0.3

0.1 0.7 1.2 1.5 3.6

14.7 13.2 10.4 0.2

1.4 1.2 2.5 2.9 2.6

2.1 3.2 4.5 0.2

0.1 0.2 0.1 0.3 4.6

11.2 10.9 9.0 1.5a 0.8

0.0 0.0 0.1 0.6 3.5

Note: Proportion of “immigrants” calculated from the number of immigrants and their descendants, “emigrants” calculated from the number of those residing abroad as percentage of the total indigenous population. a = Census of 1966. Source: Figures calculated from the censuses of the countries of the Maghreb and France.

from March to June 1939. Coming clandestinely, the French authorities interned them in camps as “illegals.”27 In the interwar years the number of foreigners in the three countries of the Maghreb averaged 11 percent (1926) but remained low in Morocco. It declined in the 1930s, and from the 1950s, preceding decolonization, the direction of migrations reversed. Migration from Algeria to France, intended as temporary, remained limited in the 1920s. These trans-Mediterranean moves involved male heads of families and single men, who sent back money to ensure the economic survival of their families. They planned to return once the family economy had been secured. Still, communities of migrants emerged and could serve as anchor points to those migrating after decolonization. These, similar to the interwar years, at first, involved mainly men, then families in processes of family reunification as well as women migrating on their own. The reservoir for northbound labour migration to Europe were peasant families deprived of their land, men and women turned underpaid agricultural labourers for the colonizers, as well as the jobless or marginally employed in the cities’ bidonvilles. The external impetus was France’s forced mass recruitment of workers, repeated in World War Two: 78,000 Algerians, 35,000 Moroccans, and 18,000 Tunisians worked on the front, behind the lines, and in factories. Still, compared to free migrants, 27 Kamel Kateb, “Les immigrés Espagnols dans les camps en Algérie (1939–1941)”, Annales de démographie historique 1 (2007): 155–175.



migrations in the maghreb and western mediterranean 233

whether Italians, Poles, or Spanish,28 few—a mere 22,100 Algerians— remained in France after the war to be used for reconstruction. But the forced workers’ learned about transportation routes, ways of voyaging, and life in the metropolitan cities as well as about labour markets. The new self-willed migrants, at first almost exclusively men, became part of the regular French labour force. Thus, Algeria’s colonizers created, from a population able to nourish itself by violence of arms or laws, rural families without land and producers without means of production, a colonized labour for the colonizer-settlers, and proletarian migrants who became immigrants and, with ­permanent settlement, called for their wives and children.29 The Growth of Labour Migration After World War Two, Europe as a whole and France in particular, faced a shortage of manpower and to fill the depleted cohorts of dead of the two wars, France turned to its colonies. Thus, the state assumed an important role in recruiting labour and in developing an immigration policy. The French state, like the West German one, became the regulator of the labour market and of demographic structures. Immediately after liberation, French politicians, economists, and population planners agreed that a sizeable foreign immigration would be needed and the state’s economic plans included an immigration strategy. As early as 2 March 1945, General de Gaulle informed the Consultative Assembly that a great plan had been outlined “to introduce in the next years, methodologically and intelligently, good elements by immigration into the French people”.30 This was the first step in a program to restructure the labour markets and demography deeply disturbed through the two world wars. The policy made immigration from the colonies a core aspect of the rebuilding and development of the nation. First the statistics: Immigration varied by country of origin. The number of Moroccans and Tunisians, though increasing, remained low at first, while that of Algerians grew fast. Workers from the colony, considered

28 With the victory of the Fascist forces in Spain, Spanish refugees could no longer return and had to stay in France or find asylum elsewhere, for example in Mexico. 29 Ravenel, “L’insoutenable ‘Forteresse Europe’ ”. 30 Withol De Wenden, Les immigrés et la politique, 94; Jacqueline Costa-Lascoux, De l’immigré au citoyen (Paris, 1989), 13.

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Table 4. Population in France born in the Maghreb, censuses 1946–1962 Country of origin Algerians Moroccans Tunisians Total

1946

1954

1962

Number

%

Number

%

Number

%

22,114 16,458 1,916 40,488

1.3 0.9 0.1 2.3

211,675 10,734 4,800 227,209

12.0 0.6 0.3 12.9

350,484 33,320 26,559 410,363

16.2 1.5 1.2 18.9

Source: Institut nationale de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE).

French territory, were granted free entry (and exit). This permitted circulation between job and family. This “liberal” approach was due both to the high demand for workers in France and to the Algerians’ revolt of 8 May 1945. The colonial administration hoped that emigration would reduce the potential for further revolts among the increasing numbers of rural workers unemployed as a result of the mechanization of agriculture.31 For Morocco, the impact of demobilized soldiers in recruiting migrants and taking advantage of the labour markets of the metropole is well documented. At demobilization, many arranged to stay in France often having already been offered a job. Others, repatriated by the army, returned clandestinely. From this core group a community emerged. The number of Tunisians, about 5,000, remained low before independence since demobilized soldiers returned. The general level of education among Tunisians was high, many were mid-level employees; fewer of them were workers, and even these came with skills.32 Emigration grew massively once the three countries had achieved independence—1956 for Morocco and Tunisia, 1962 for Algeria. Within a single decade, this traditional immigration region became one of emigration. Emigration rates tripled (or, by other indices, even quadrupled). In the 1960s, somewhat later than in the case of Tunisians, the number of Moroccans grew considerably. For Algerians, 1946–54, the annual growth rate was 100 percent. But the war of liberation (1954–62) reduced growth rates: on average 8.2 percent 1954–62, about or just above 7 percent 1963–75. Again Moroccan and Tunisian rates show slower increases—226,000 Moroccans and 134,000 Tunisians living in France in 1974. Table 5 shows the proportion of migrants from the 31   Talha, Le salariat immigré dans la crise, 90. 32 Jeanne Singer-Kerel, Les actifs Maghrébins dans les recensements Français, in maghrébins en France, émigrés ou immigrés (Paris, 1983), 91.



migrations in the maghreb and western mediterranean 235 Table 5. Immigrants in Western Europe, 1970s

Spain Greece Italy Portugal Turkey Yugoslavia Algeria Morocco Tunisia Foreign population as % of the country’s total ­population % of Mediterraneanorigin migrants in the foreign population

West Germany

France

270,000 395,000 590,000 55,214 653,000 594,000 1,985 10,921 9,918 5.55

589,925 51,485 10,125 14,050 588,740 188,430 694,550 4,280 18,325 12,250 65,220 2,930 754,462 3,740 194,296 24,560 106,845 1,640 6.87 7.39

76

86

Belgium Switzerland

42

97,860 8,000 531,500 2,000 9,651 20,800 ? ? ? 15.7

Total 1,009,270 427,175 1,898,670 756,044 693,226 682,950 760,187 229,777 118,403 6.7

69

s­ outhern Mediterranean countries, that is, those of the Maghreb, in the total of migration to Western Europe at the time of the recruitment stop after the oil price crisis in 1973/74. In this short period, the gender composition of migrants and their relationship with the family in the locality of origin changed. The migrants of rural background, mostly illiterate and without skills, maintained strong connections to their family group. Their departure was part of family strategies to diversify income-generating resources assuring subsistence for those staying behind. All developments were seriously ruptured by the crisis engineered by the wholly American-owned Arab-American Oil Company in 1973, the subsequent economic slowdown, and the end of recruitment in 1974. Migrants hat to adjust their family strategies, families to adjust their migration strategy. France, which once had illegalized emigration from its colony Algeria, now illegalized immigration routes from the Maghreb. In the nineteenth-century emigrations, families had continued to depart, interference by the authorities notwithstanding, because of spiritual reasons and because of the unsupportable circumstance of life under colonial rule. In the case of post-colonial immigration, men and women continued

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to come because of their life-course projects and post-independence economic problems in their societies of birth. After the Official End of Immigration: From Labour to Family Settlement Migration Again the French government, like other European governments, pursued conflicting goals and priorities concerning migration.33 Migrant decisionmaking and migration routes were to be rigorously controlled to guarantee, on the one hand, a level of immigration sufficient to sustain economic growth and managed population increase and, on the other, to prevent unauthorized arrivals. Thirdly, within the territory of the nation a socialaction plan was to facilitate integration of those immigrant families who had settled. When the European Union (EU) as a whole opted for a “zero immigration” strategy, while individual member countries’ needs for inmigrants varied, migrants from the Maghreb and elsewhere reacted with a diversification of their strategies: First, depending on options offered, they selected more countries as destinations; second, they resorted to clandestine migration when entry documents could not be obtained. At the beginning, countries close to the Maghreb, like Spain and Italy, became destinations, then Belgium, the Netherlands, and West Germany. Intrafamilial goals and strategies also changed: From the 1980s, urban-origin rather than rural migrants came with better education for shorter or longer periods and because of individual life projects independent of families of birth. Such individualization did not exclude familial solidarities and could involve family-projects, usually nuclear rather than extended. The largest contingent of immigrants still came through legal entryways but under changed goals and projects. (1) Labour migration became family reunification migration and thus the share of women and of children increased. (2) More students came and, of these, many planned to stay after receiving their degree.34 (3) Men and women in specific profes-

33 Patrick Weil, La France et ses étrangers. L’aventure d’une politique de l’immigration de 1938 à nos jours (Paris, 1999). 34 Abdelkader Latrèche, “Les étudiants maghrébins en France dans les années quatrevingt-dix trajectoires et mobilisation familiale”, in Diplômés maghrébins d’ici et d’ailleurs. Trajectoires sociales et itinéraires migratoires, ed. Vincent Geisser (Paris, 2000), 245–284, and Latrèche, “Le devenir des diplômés maghrébins en France”, Migrations et société 13 (no. 74) (mars–avril 2001): 87–97, and Latrèche, “Les migrations étudiantes de par le monde”, Hommes & Migrations no. 1233 (2001): 13–27.



migrations in the maghreb and western mediterranean 237

sions, like doctors, came to fill shortages of supply of specialists in France. A fourth, supplementary way of entry, given political, societal, and religious problems in the societies of origins, involved applying for asylum. Finally, for those who could not avail themselves of any of these entryways, undocumented entry provided a problem-laden solution (Figure 1). Policy-goals notwithstanding, overall migration levels remained high: from 1990–2008, almost 2.3 million men, women, and children from countries of the Maghreb entered the countries of the EU legally or were legalized after irregular entry: 68.1 percent of them were Moroccans, 21.5 percent Algerians, and 10.4 percent Tunisians. Thus, the exclusion policies did not only not reduce in-migration but contributed to a spread of migrants over most countries of the EU. While the collection of data varied between states and agencies, the OECD statistics35 indicate that in 2005, 3.4 million people born in the Maghreb states resided abroad, 95.5 percent of them in the EU and of these two thirds in France. Emigration to North America (120,000 persons) began only in the last years of the twentieth century. Of the countries of the Maghreb, Mauritania (15,000 emigrants) and Libya (65,000 emigrants) are not considered emigration societies. Of the traditional three, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, Morocco 225000 200000 175000 150000 125000

Algérie Maroc Tunisie Maghreb

100000 75000 50000 25000 0 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008

Figure 1. Arrival of Maghrebians in the OECD countries

35 Data by the Consortium for Applied Research on International Migration (Carim) are lower, and those collected by the respective countries’ consulates higher since they include the children of immigrants born in the countries of destination. Philippe Fargues, ed., Migrations méditerranéennes: rapport 2005 (Florence, 2005), and Fargues, “L’émigration en Europe vue d’Afrique du Nord et du Moyen-Orient”, Revue Esprit (décembre 2003): 125–143.

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has the largest numbers of emigrants with 1.5 million, followed by ­Algeria with 1.3 million. Departures from Algeria seem to be declining though the severe economic and political crises of the 1990s at least temporarily propelled people to leave. Moroccans have selected the largest variety of destinations with small numbers heading for the countries of the Gulf of Hormuz and North America. The United States and Canada, in particular, are destinations for students who, after receiving their diploma, move in secondary migrations to better job markets. The majority still head for Europe, especially France, Spain, and Italy. According to Tunisian statistics, since the mass emigration of the 1980s and 1990s, almost 10 percent of the population resides abroad. Many left without papers but have been able to profit from regularizations in France and Italy. The total of 0.88 million included 0.17 million children and, among adults, the sex ratio amounted to roughly 100 men to 50 women.36 According to the OECD data (2005), France remains the preferred destination for migrants from the Maghreb (2.2 million), ­followed by Spain (0.3 million), Italy (0.24 million), the Netherlands (0.15 million), Belgium (0.14 million), and 17 other European countries.37 Viewed in a larger context, these migrations are part of the global movements resulting from the inequalities and imbalances between North and South. In addition, due to Europe’s closure of its air borders, the countries of the Maghreb are becoming the region of transit for sub-Saharan African transmigrants intending to reach Europe by crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean. Under agreements with the EU the countries of the Maghreb increasingly take charge of apprehending and returning the transmigrants. After the increased ratio of women and children among migrants due to family reunification strategies in the 1970s and 1980s, the situation at the turn of the twenty-first century is characterized in the migrant sending countries by improved educational systems combined with limited or dysfunctional labour markets. Thus, the characteristics of the reservoir of potential migrants differ from those of the pre-1974 period (illiterate males of rural origin with no qualifications). Potential and actual migrants are better educated, comprise men and women, and originate in urban contexts. To what degree the 1973–74 recruitment stop initiated changes in migrants’ strategies may be indicated by data 36 Répartition de la population Tunisienne résidante à l’étranger par grandes régions et par sexe. Ministère des Affaires Etrangères. Tunisie. 37 Répartition des migrants selon les pays de naissance et d’arrivée (OCDE, 2005), http://www.oecd.org/document/47/0,2340,fr_2649_33931_34841519_1_1_1_1,00.html.



migrations in the maghreb and western mediterranean 239

on family formation: in 1975, 75 percent of the Algerian men in France of the age cohort 30–40 were married, but only 24 percent lived in conjugal units. Seven years later, the percentages remained 75 percent married but more than twice as many, 52 percent, living in family units.38 It needs to be emphasized that family reunification could mean that men followed women—in general this migration was no longer one of individuals heading for jobs but one of wives, husbands, and children rejoining the earlier migrated family members. Among Maghrebians in France the gender ratio increased from 25 to 30 percent women in 1975 to around 40 percent in 1982. These findings hold true for all European countries of destination. As regards level of education, due to improved educational systems and generalized school attendance, men as well as women arrived with more years of schooling or even with college degrees. In the years before 1980, 11.2 percent of new immigrants came with a university degree; in 1998–99 the percentage had risen to 25.8 percent. This percentage is far higher than in the populations of origin: in Tunisia, of those over 15 years of age only 8.9 percent had achieved higher education (2004), in Algeria 6.2 percent (1998).39 Since the 1980s, a growing number of women migrate independently and pursue their own life projects both as regards studies or labour market options. Many had held jobs in their countries of origin. However, cultural reasons also play a role, especially the constraints still placed on young women imposed by law, traditional norms, and specific family Table 6. France’s population born in the Maghreb by sex 1946 1954 1962 1968 1975

Men

%

Women

%

Total

39,545 211,371 338,901 456,780 770,175

97.67 93.02 82.58 73.73 69.35

943 15,838 71,472 162,700 340,275

2.32 6.97 17.41 26.26 30.64

40,488 227,209 410,373 619.480 1,110,450

Source: Calculated from data in the General Census, France.

38 Pierre A. Audirac, “La cohabitation: un million de couples non mariés”, Économie et Statistique no. 185 (février 1986): 13–33. 39 Khachani, Mohamed, “La femme maghrébine immigrée dans l’espace économique des pays d’accueil: quelques repères”, www.iussp.org/Brazil2001/s20/S27_P08_Kachani.pdf.

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kamel kateb and hassène kassar Table 7. Immigrant population by level of education (OCDE) 2008

Level of Education

Algeria

Morocco

Tunisia Mauretania

College and Higher Secondary Primary No Data

16,4 55,4 27,8 0,4

13,8 61,3 22,8 2,0

15,9 55,5 27,8 0,8

Total OCDE

100,0

100,0

100,0

Libya

Total

18,3 60,8 20,2 0,7

23,9 44,2 30,3 1,6

14,9 57,9 25,6 1,2

100,0

100,0

100,0

Source: Calculated from OECD data.

demands as regards control over choice of marriage partner and over unmarried women’s sexuality. The population originating in the Maghreb societies, immigrants and their children, are becoming rooted in the countries of the European Union. Increasing numbers apply for citizenship or receive it by birth, as in France. In some countries this had been facilitated by acceptance of dual citizenship—thus acquisition of the new one no longer involves a formal renouncement of the pre-migration one. The life projects of men and women are framed by the society and country of residence. Within the EU, law and connections increase the options to circulate freely between countries. By becoming EU citizens they circumvent the fact that circulation of capital and goods is relatively free but that of citizens of developing countries is severely restrained. Decisions of migrant men and women as well as whole families together with legal changes have thus increased the options of circulation.

“Women Were Strong”: Gender and migration from the Eastern Mediterranean Akram Khater At the entrance to the Port of Beirut there stands a statue. In Arabic it is titled “The Lebanese [Male] Emigrant: from Lebanon to the World”.1 It was erected in 2003—with a duplicate unveiled earlier in Mexico and another one later in Australia—to commemorate the departure of hundreds of thousands of emigrants from the shores of Lebanon to the Americas, Africa and Australia. In frozen bronze the statue collapses these myriad stories and experiences—which span the 1870s through the 1960s—into an essentialized image of “The Emigrant” and creates a normative and simplistic narrative of the complex history of immigration from the Eastern Mediterranean.2 It depicts a lone peasant with a kashé (small sack) over his shoulder staring off over the Mediterranean with a majestic look and stance. Absent are the city and town folks, the families that invested their monies and dreams into this departure from the ordinary, and the doubts and failures that permeate these journeys. The statue’s label also superimposes a national identity (Lebanese) onto predominantly pre-national peregrinations from a wider region. Thus, it presumes as Lebanese the many who today would be called Palestinians and Syrians, and simplifies the struggle over multiple identities into a singular fait-accompli. But most strikingly, women are nowhere to be seen in this representation of emigration; the gendered statue of a male emigrant, textually and visually, enshrines a romanticized notion of the individual man facing the world alone. The story of emigration is, as can be expected, far more complex and certainly not all about men setting off alone into the distance. In this essay I would like—in necessarily summary terms—to present a ­different ­­history 1   Arabic is a gendered language. It also has a simple Spanish title which reads: “Statue of the Male Emigrant”. This statue, and its replicas, was erected by the Lebanese Club in Mexico City. 2 The Eastern Mediterranean, or Levant, refers to today’s Lebanon, Syria and Palestine/ Israel. While emigrants left from all these areas, the majority (60–80 percent) came from Mount Lebanon. They were known as Turcos in Latin America or more commonly as Syrians, which referred to the pre-WWI area and not the post-WWI nation-state.

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of emigration from the Eastern Mediterranean. I would like to complicate the simplistic yet predominant narrative of this historical movement of people between 1870 and the 1960s by looking at two frequently ignored aspects of this story.3 At the most basic level I will argue that the ranks of those of who left their villages and towns were replete with women— married and single—who travelled not simply for family reunification but just as often on their own initiative for similar reasons that compelled their male counterparts to leave the shores of the Mediterranean. Of equal importance is to look at this migration not nostalgically as the “heroic” ventures of individuals, but rather as a family investment whose story is as much about women working alongside their men, and quite often toiling by themselves. Finally, I will argue that the predominant narrative which minimizes women’s immigration in terms of numbers and causes, and makes them to be only wives, daughters and sisters residing within the confines of the home was a constructed one. It is a narrative that had little to do with the historical realities of early immigration and far more to do with the desire of second generation immigrants to enter the ranks of the “respectable” middle classes. “Emigration Fever”4 Immigration from the Levant predates the nineteenth century. For centuries before, people moved in groups small and large within the region to avoid taxes, because of economic downturns, to seek seasonal work or to escape religious persecution. However, the trans-Atlantic and transPacific migrations only began in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first wave lasted through the early 1930s.

3 Scholarship on Lebanese immigration has sought to include women in the narrative starting with Afif Tannous and his article “Social Change in an Arab Village”, American Sociological Review 6 (1941): 650–662; and including the work of Alixa Naff, Becoming American: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience (Carbondale, 1985); Evelyn Shakir, Bint Arab: Arab and Arab American Women in the United States (Westport, 1997); and Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender, and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920 (Berkeley, 2001). However, for the most part women have been nearly absent from all other writings about immigrants to South and Central America, and to sub-Saharan Africa. Similarly, studies on early Turkish migration have been very male-centred. More to the point, gender as an analytical category is rarely used in exploring these histories. 4 Fifty-Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, 1891, 225.



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There was not a singular reason for which Levantine men and women emigrated. Escaping a bad marriage, reuniting with family, fleeing real or perceived religious persecution were all reasons to leave home. But, in general, the great majority left seeking to make money and intended to return after a hiatus, and because legal and logistical changes permitted them to depart when residents of other provinces of the Ottoman Empire could not. As with other parts of the nineteenth century world, the Eastern Mediterranean (particularly Mount Lebanon) attracted European capitalists seeking markets for their manufactured goods and sources of raw material for their factories. In this instance it was silk that brought merchants from Marseilles and Lyons—through local intermediaries—to the villages that dotted the Mount Lebanon range. Higher prices offered for silk cocoons enticed local producers to sell to the newcomers as well as to increase their production. Typically—as the story usually goes at some point for incorporation into the world capitalist market—after a decade or so the prices started fluctuating. By the 1870s, they had definitely stagnated because of the entry of China and Japan into the market, especially as the latter was bent on industrializing through a massive production of higher quality silk. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and steamboat navigation contributed as well to the saturation of the silk market and to the fall in prices. Finally, the deathblow came from European-manufactured synthetic fibres that—starting in the 1880s—steadily undermined the silk market. For the villagers in Mount Lebanon this historical process had an intimate impact on their daily lives. After three decades of prosperity—in which they experienced a better standard of living that translated into, among other things, a doubling of the population—they saw themselves sliding back into poverty and dispossession of their land. This was effectively making them landless labourers rather than peasants. In an effort to counter this undesirable end, about one-tenth of the peasant population opted to send their daughters to work in silk factories. This family strategy for financial survival strained the gender “contract” to its breaking point.5 But, it did not completely solve the problem, ­particularly as the factories were under-funded and could not compete with the technological superiority of French and Italian silk factories. Thus, by the early 1890s the decision to emigrate appeared as the most financially viable alternative.

5 Akram Khater, “From ‘House’ to ‘Mistress of the House’: Gender and Class in 19th Century Lebanon”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996): 325–348.

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At the same time it was possible for large numbers of families—and individuals—to implement this decision because of Mount Lebanon’s unusual political status within the Ottoman Empire. After the 1860 civil war which wracked Mount Lebanon, European powers—bent on increasing their influence in the region—worked with some local elites to force the Ottoman government to provide Mount Lebanon with semiindependent status and secure greater personal freedom of movement for its inhabitants. The residents of Mt. Lebanon in turn used the two new elements to their advantage by circumventing intermittent Ottoman regulations against emigration.6 The presence of Western missionaries (particularly American Presbyterians) in the Eastern Mediterranean facilitated the imagining of America and allowed for the mental leap needed to depart from home and hearth. Additionally, the establishment of steamboat navigation from the late 1870s onwards greatly eased travel. Finally, World War One and the terrible famine, which killed nearly one-third of the population in Mount Lebanon alone, spurred another wave of immigration from the Levant after 1919 which lasted through the early 1930s. By 1930, all these factors combined had led to the cumulative departure of around 628,000 men and women from the Eastern Mediterranean. Almost 90 percent of them travelled to North or South America. The three largest communities came to reside in the United States (165,654), Brazil (162,178) and Argentina (148,270).7 Quantitatively, women made up a significant percentage of these early emigrants; a few examples will suffice to illustrate this point. From the earliest days of Levantine immigration to Mexico, women represented over one third of the community, and their share grew steadily over time. Thus, between 1878 and 1909 women made up 38.6 percent of the 2,277 immigrants to Mexico; for the period between 1941 and 1951, their numbers had grown to 41 percent of the population.8 For immigration to Brazil between 1908 and 1941, Clark Knowlton notes that the “Turco-Arabs have the highest ratio of all nationalities entering Brazil, 229.9 men to every 100 women . . . followed by the Syrians, 190.0, 6 Engin Akarli, “Ottoman Attitudes towards Lebanese Immigration, 1885–1910”, in The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Immigration, ed. Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, (London, 1992), 109–138. 7 These numbers were collated by Kohei Hashimoto from French consular censuses of Lebanese-Syrian populations across the world from 1919–1929 and 1930–1940. France was the Mandate Power over much of the Levant—with the exception of Palestine—and oversaw all the consular needs of the immigrant population. 8 Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far From Allah, So Close to Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico (Austin, 2007), 176.



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and the Lebanese, 168.2.”9 In other words, men made up 62 percent of the immigrants, while women constituted 38 percent. In Argentina, of the 3,508 Muslim immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean, 2697 were males and only 811 females.10 This low ratio (23 percent women immigrants) seems to have been a common pattern among Muslim immigrants.11 However, among the Christian immigrants to Argentina—who represented over two-thirds of the community—that ratio was nearly double reaching as high as 45 percent. Similarly in Australia, between 1911 and 1947, women regularly made up 42 to 48 percent of the immigrating population from the Levant. In the United States, during the peak years of “Syrian” immigration between 1899 and 1914, women constituted 32 percent of the immigrants.12 Numerically, then, women constituted a significant element of emigration from the Eastern Mediterranean accounting for around 200,000 of the estimated 628,000 immigrants. But the issue is not only about numbers. Rather, it also pertains to the reasons for women’s immigration as well as the role they played in the mahjar (land of immigration) once they arrived there. There is no doubt that one of the reasons for the departure of many single women to the mahjar was to marry, and for most married women it was to reunite with their husbands. The (tall) tales of riches to be had in “Amirka” first slowly (in the 1890s) and then rapidly (1900–1924) stripped villages of scores of men, single and married. Michael H. recounted one such letter that prompted him to emigrate to the US. In 1892 not many people were going to America. This family went to America and they wrote back. . .[to say that] they made $1000 [in three years]. . .When people of ʿAyn Arab saw that one man made . . . $1000, all of

   9 Clark Knowlton, “The Social and Spatial Mobility of the Syrian and Lebanese Community in São Paulo, Brazil”, in The Lebanese in the World, 296. 10 Gladys Jozami, “The Manifestation of Islam in Argentina”, The Americas 53, no. 1 (July 1996): 77. 11   For example, Kemal Karpat notes that of the 1,000 Druze immigrants to the US before 1920 there were only a dozen women, and of the total 8,000 Muslim immigrants only “about two dozen” were women. Kamal Karpat, “The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860–1914”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 17, no. 2 (May 1985): 180. John J. Grabowski notes the almost total absence of women among the 25,000 Anatolian Turkish immigrants who came to the US between 1890 and 1920. “Prospects and Challenges: The Study of Early Turkish Immigration to the United States”, Journal of American Ethnic History 25, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 85–100. 12 US Senate, Industrial Commission on Immigration, 1907–1910, Abstracts of Reports, vol. 1 (Washington, 1911), 95; Philip Kayal and Joseph Kayal, The Syrian-Lebanese in America, (New York, 1975), 70.

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akram khater ʿAyn Arab rushed to come to America . . . Like a gold rush we left ʿAyn Arab, there were 72 of us . . .13

Remittances sent back and new homes built were an added incentive. In the words of the US consul general, Ravndal, “. . . a village in the most remote parts of the Lebanon . . . has . . . at least 2 or 3 new houses with tiled roofs and . . . even whole villages have been thus constructed [with remittances from the US].”14 These blushings of wealth that could be seen from all over the village and from afar, attracted the attention and excited the imagination of those who had remained in the village still pondering how to secure their future as farmers. Consequently, the tens turned to hundreds, and by the turn of the twentieth century they were followed by thousands who left “Syria” every year. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, single women were having a difficult time finding a husband, and wives were left behind and alone to contend with a host of new social and financial problems. In both cases, the patriarchal contract was being broken. Some women left for the mahjar seeking to salvage this contract, while others found in this an opportunity to step outside the boundaries of their gender roles. According to the statistics available to us, the movement of unmarried women peaked around the turn of the century, when 38.6 percent of women above the age of 18 arriving in the United States were single.15 In Mexico, this same group made up 27.6 percent of the 2,554 women travelling there between 1878 and 1951.16 It would be quite facile to conclude that exploring prospects of marriage was the sole motivation behind these young women’s excursions. Yet, in addition to seeking better financial status and escaping village life, seeking marriage partners was definitely one of the main factors pulling the majority of women out of Mount Lebanon. Married women also had their reasons to leave the Mountain. Some wanted to escape an unhappy marriage, others sought a better financial status, and a few were after adventure, but most went looking for the “family”. Perhaps the most famous case of a woman leaving an abusive relationship is that of Kamila Jibran, the mother of Khalil

13 Smithsonian Institute, Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-c-c, interview with Mike H. and Ghandura H. and Nazira, Spring 1962. 14 US Consular Reports, 18, Consul General Gabriel Bie Ravndal, “Report on Emigration from the Levant”, September 12, 1903. 15 United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Immigration, Annual Report of the Commissioner General for the Fiscal Year 1918, 69. 16 Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far From Allah, 175.



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Jibran the famous Arab-American writer whose book The Prophet (1923) has more than two million copies in print and has been translated into 40 languages. Born in the northern village of Bsharé around 1855, Kamila first married Hanna ʿAbd al-Salaam Rahmé. Unfortunately, Rahmé died on a trip to Brazil he had undertaken alone to investigate the possibility of emigration. Later she married Khalil Sa‌ʾad Jibran by whom she had three children: Jibran (born 1883), Marianna (1894 or 1895) and Sultana (born 1886). By all accounts Khalil was a drunkard and a bully, and Kamila had long resented the poverty he led the family into through his behaviour. When he got into trouble with the Ottoman administration for extorting taxes from the peasants and grafting some of the collected fees into his own habits, Kamila decided to leave him. She took all her children and emigrated to the United States, travelling in steerage and arriving in June 1895.17 “My Mother Peddled” Some women legitimized emigrating and leaving their husbands behind in the Levant on the premise of wanting to work to improve their financial lot. “A woman who was strong and courageous would leave her husband, be absent about 3 to 4 years and come back with $300 or $400. Her family would open a new home and villagers would go and welcome her . . .”18 Da‌ʾad Fatuh was that kind of woman. In 1884, Da‌ʾad—who was a midwife—departed from her village of al-Munsif and left behind her husband to take care of a son and two-year old daughter. Upon disembarking in New Orleans, Da‌ʾad had a baby who she was forced to place in the care of the Sisters of Mercy—since she did not know anyone in the city—while she went out peddling. When she came back she was told that the infant had died. Devastated by this news, and confused since she never saw the grave, Da‌ʾad persisted in her pursuit to save enough money before going back to Lebanon. We do not know how much money Da‌ʾad saved, or if she built a new home, but what we do know is that after returning to Lebanon she convinced her son to leave for the US at the age of 15, and later went

17 Robin Waterfield, personal communication, October 7, 1997. 18 Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-c-5, interview with Nicola Shamiyyi, April 1965.

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back herself for another stint of peddling around Meridian, Mississippi.19 Najibé Younis was another adventurous soul who was not satisfied with staying poor in Lebanon when she “could gather a fortune” in the Americas. So, she too left her village and went even further West than Da‌ʾad, peddling in Billings, Montana. There she catered to prostitutes “who were the kindest women” and who bought from her the “nice” things she was selling, such as linens, lace, silk and other fabrics. Only after two years of peddling in Wyoming and Montana, when she had saved $3,000 in addition to the money she sent to her husband in Lebanon, did Najibé rejoin her husband in Lebanon in 1906.20 Other women, like Martha Cammel and Annie Tabsharani, were widowed and subsequently left for the US and Canada (respectively) to work and make a living and life for their children through peddling for years and then establishing their businesses.21 These glimpses do not fully capture the complexity of immigrant stories. In many cases, the story of women’s immigration is far too complex to reduce to linear processes and singular reasons. For instance, Katrina Sa‌ʾade’s thickly woven life-story stands in marked contrast to the flattened narrative offered by the statue at the entrance of the Port of Beirut.22 Born in Bethlehem, Palestine, in 1900, Katrina took her first migratory trip as a child of six to Kiev where her father had established a store selling “Holy Land” objects in 1882. By 1914 the family was back in Bethlehem penniless because of the war and the revolutionary tumult. Katrina was married to another Bethlehemite, Emilio Kabande, who had immigrated to Mexico and settled in San Pedro with his family in the late 1890s. Within two years of her marriage, Katrina lost her husband to a train accident and one of her two daughters to influenza. This tragedy compelled her to move to Long Beach, California, to live with her sister and brother-inlaw and to work to support herself and her surviving daughter. Five years later she met another immigrant from Palestine whom she married and together they moved between Mexico, Arizona and California opening various stores and working together as partners with Katrina providing 19   Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-c-1, interview with Abe Abraham, August 23, 1979. 20 Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-c-5, interview with Mrs. Tom Amelia C. Unes, 1980. 21   Sara Gualtieri, “Gendering the Chain Migration Thesis: Women and Syrian Transatlantic Migration, 1878–1924”, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004): 67–78. 22 All the details of the life of Katrina Sa‌ʾade are from Kathy Saade Kenny, Katrina en Cinco Mundos (Long Beach, 2010).



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the business acumen she inherited from her family and which her husband lacked. The Great Depression and her new father-in-law’s pleas took a very reluctant Katrina back to Palestine where her sense of independence, cultivated by years of immigration, quickly clashed with a domineering family and her inability to work. The tensions grew so strong that in 1936 she returned to California alone with the children and from that point forward established her own businesses and remained unmarried for the remainder of her life. In short, then, marriage and family reunification account for only some of the reasons for the emigration of women from the Eastern Mediterranean. A significant number of women travelled on their own initiative seeking to make a new life for themselves or to escape a previous one. Even more significantly, we simply cannot assume that marriage encompasses the whole experience of those women who did immigrate for that purpose. For, regardless of the reasons that compelled women to emigrate, nearly all of them ended up working with male relatives or independently. Numbers provide us with a glimpse of that. In New York, for example, we know that officially 38.1 percent of emigrant Lebanese women worked in either peddling or at a factory. Further south the numbers were smaller but not by much. Ignacio Klich estimated that in Argentina somewhere around one-fifth of the women worked alongside their husbands, and Charles Knowlton dismissed emigrant women’s work as minimal in Brazil by noting that only a quarter worked. In Mexico between 1878 and 1909, there were 718 women who were designated as homemakers, while 171 (or 19 percent) were registered as having one occupation or another ranging from cloth merchant to farming.23 In fact, it is quite certain that emigrant women worked at earning money in far larger numbers, albeit in ways oblique to the eyes of male observers. Based on interviews with emigrants in the US, Alixa Naff contends that anywhere between “75 and 80 percent of the women peddled during the pioneer years [1880s–1910].”24 Even women who never peddled, or who left that task, worked in other venues. Many helped in family stores, sewed items at home that were later sold by a male relative, and some even worked as servants in houses of rich emigrants. Informally, women took in boarders, cleaned and cooked and made certain of a modicum of order in a chaotic world and time. The sight of “Syrian” women working was so common in the US that in 1920

23 Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far From Allah, 173–174. 24 Naff, Becoming American, 178.

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Harry Chapman Ford wrote and produced a Broadway play titled “Anna Ascends” which takes as its subject a young immigrant, Anna Ayyoub, who goes from working as a waitress to a best-selling author. Two years later, Victor Fleming turned the play into a silent movie with Alice Brady and Nita Naldi.25 This affirmation of a persistent—and generally positive notion—of an ethnic identity stood in sharp contrast to Israel Zangwill’s far better remembered 1908 play The Melting Pot. Going back to the “tangible”, we find many testimonials to the long days and hard work that women put into making certain their families (in the mahjar or back home) survived. In the words of one descendent of emigrants, “Women weren’t afraid and were strong and even women up to 70 years of age peddled.”26 Budelia Malooley recounted how “Mother arrived and started to peddle in Spring Valley . . . must have been in her mid-teens at the time. She resumed peddling on her return to Spring Valley from Lebanon after my father died and I was born [about the first part of 1904]. She’d make $5 to $10/week. She’d have to send money back to Rachaya to support my sister and brother.”27 Women were drawn to peddling for several reasons. Primarily, and as noted above, most families would not have attained their financial goals without the work of women. But at other times women had no other option but to work as they were the sole or main “breadwinners”. For Sultana al-Khazin work was a necessity of survival for her and her children. Sultana travelled to Philadelphia in 1901 to join her husband. However, upon arrival she discovered, much to her dismay that he was living with another woman named Nazira. His plan was for all of them to live together in the same house as one family. Sultana was not quite so cavalier—to say the least—in her approach to marriage, so she packed up the three children and moved out on her own. Soon she was selling linens door to door.28 Some women lost their husbands not to infidelity but to death. They, equally, had to contend with raising a family on their own. Alice Assaley was widowed when she was only in her twenties. In order to raise her son and daughter without her husband or any other male relatives, Alice was left to fend for herself by working first as a janitor and later as a peddler in Springfield, Illinois.29 25 Harry Chapman Ford, “Why I wrote A Syrian Play”, Syrian World 2, no. 1 (July 1927): 33–40. 26 Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-c-5, interview with Mayme Faris, 1980. 27 Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-c-5, interview with Budelia Malooley, 1980. 28 Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-b, interview with Dorothy Lee Andrache (grand-daughter of Sultana), January 18, 1991. 29 Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-c-5.



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Louise Houghton remarked on another reason for women’s work while discussing the misguided attempts of American social workers to induce “Syrian” women to abandon peddling for more “honourable and lady-like” pursuits. Rhetorically she asked: “Why should she [emigrant] give up the open air, the broad sky, the song of the birds, the smile of flowers, the right to work and rest at her own pleasure to immure herself within four noisy walls and be subject to the strict regime of the clock?”30 Of course, one must take the pastoral bit about “song of birds” and “smile of flowers” with an immense grain of salt; life on the road was hardly this romantic. However, hidden amidst the flowery language is a good deal of common sense and truth. Peddling for some women was not only a necessity, but also an escape. For instance, Mayme Faris vividly remembers arguments between her father and mother about the latter’s peddling activities. My mother peddled when my father had the [supplier’s] store. It was a controversy between them; he didn’t like her to; he didn’t like her independence. She wanted more for them. She worked hard; two or three days after my sisters were born, she would be up washing and not long after that she’d take her stuff and peddle. Once my father got mad and destroyed her satchel—in front of the other peddlers and the women who lived around there too. No, she wasn’t disgraced . . . She stopped it for a while and when she felt they needed more money, she would go. But independence was a big thing in their lives.31

Sophia Mussallem was equally persistent and restless in seeking financial independence. Starting in 1885, when she first immigrated to the United States at the age of 14, she worked. From Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Greenbay and Watertown, then across to the Oklahoma Territory she peddled all the way to Muskogie. Throughout her expeditions she stashed away money for the dream of owning a store, which she finally accomplished in Muskogie.32 And Oscar Alwan’s mother made more money as a peddler than did his father. “She was a strong woman . . . She was never afraid, people [in upstate New York] loved her and waited for her to arrive. She knew how to deal with people, she was a good saleswoman.”33 Of the 300 or so women who arrived in North Carolina between 1890 and 1930, 30 Louise Seymour Houghton, “Syrians in the United States”, Survey 26 (part 2, 5 August 1911): 648. 31   Naff Arab-American Collection; Series 4-c-5, interview with Mayme Faris, 1980. 32 Naff Arab-American Collection; Series 4-c-5, interview with Eva Frenn, November 18, 1980. 33 Naff Arab-American Collection; Series 4-c-5, interview with Oscar Alwan, July 16, 1980.

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t­ wo-thirds either opened their own businesses or helped in the family store, and many were far more entrepreneurial than their husbands.34 Of course, not all enjoyed this “freedom”, which for some was a burden more than anything else. In Toronto, There was a girl from Rachaya who peddled and it was cold and the snow would come to her waist and she’d have to walk from door to door, street to street. It was very difficult in those days. One day she despaired. She took her suitcases and angrily threw them aside saying “ah, when will I be rid of you, you kashé. When?” A Lady nearby asked her “what’s the matter?” she answered nothing and sighed heavily. This lady turned out to be Arab—she asked the peddler in Arabic: ‘Are you an Arab?’ She answered: “yes”. The helpful lady said in Arabic, “If I find you a husband will you marry him?” The girl answered yes, find me one. I will marry anyone so I can finish with this kashé and from peddling. The lady found her a man and the girl married him and was happy with him.35

While sounding like a variation on the story of Cinderella, this tale embodies the frustrations some women must have felt with the hard life they encountered in the mahjar. Hauling 25 or 50 pound satchels on their backs mile after mile was exhausting; knocking on doors and struggling with hand gestures and broken English to make a sale was agonizing and humiliating at times. This was so because the context of labour had changed in the crossing of the Atlantic. While in the village most people worked and lived along similar lines, the same was not the case in the mahjar. There the gap between rich and poor was far more glaring, especially to immigrant women who knocked on middle class doors all day long. The suspicious or pitying looks they received only added mental burdens to their physical labour. In comparison to the elaborate entryways and wallpaper with which middle class homes came to be decorated, the tenement housing to which they returned every evening must have been ever more depressing. And, even if many of these women were strong it does not mean they did not tire of the daily routine of working all day only to come home and work half the night. It should be obvious by now, from all the “althoughs” and “whiles” that are sprinkled throughout the preceding paragraphs that the experience of immigrant women varied considerably. Their desire for work as well

34 These numbers are based on interviews the author carried out between August 2010 and May 2011 for an oral history project on the Lebanese in North Carolina. See http://lac .chass.ncsu.edu for details. 35 Naff Arab-American Collection, Series 4-c-1, interview with Skiyyé Samaha, 1962.



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as their need and reasons for employ were hardly uniform. But the fact that they all worked, at one time or another, outside the “house” is the common thread running through their varying experiences. Abandoning the “private” space of the house and sallying forth on a daily basis into the “public” world of city streets was a new experience for most of these women. In the United States, Brazil and Argentina it was made even more so by the fact that these spaces were being articulated—at various moments—into a gendered division of society even as they arrived at New York, São Paulo, or Buenos Aires. In the US, social workers and the burgeoning middle class did not expect women—the repository of morality in society—to work in the sullied world outside the door of the home.36 Thus, these women were not only transgressing their “imported” gender boundaries; they were also trampling—as it were—across the terrain of a middle class world rising all around them. Similarly, in Tucuman, Argentina the “turcos”—immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean— were critiqued for allowing women to peddle outside the house.37 In the mahjar women’s work—borne of economic necessity and individual desire—was implicitly and explicitly questioning both the “traditional” and the “modern” notion of women’s role in society. Equally, the crisscrossing between “private” and “public” spaces was wreaking havoc upon the lines that were being drawn between the two by emerging middle classes. Altogether, then, emigrant women were challenging the simplifying division of the world surrounding them, making the ideas of “modern” and “traditional” largely irrelevant. “Humiliating Things” But it was not only social reformers wanting to “nativize” the immigrants and nativists seeking to stem their flow by casting aspersions on their moral fibre and behaviour who critiqued and objected to women’s work. Some members of the community raised questions about this work. In an article that appeared in al-Huda—an Arabic newspaper published in New York—in 1903, Elias Nassif Elias, a regular and early contributor, 36 For excellent studies of the rise of the middle class in America see Mary Ryan’s Cradle of the Middle Class: the Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York, 1981) and Stuart M. Blumin’s The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York, 1989). 37 Estela Valverde, “Integration and Identity in Argentina: The Lebanese of Tucuman”, in Lebanese in the World, 328.

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contended that women’s work tarnished the honour of the “Syrians”. To make his point, Elias wrote of an experience he had while sitting in the lobby of the Central House hotel, in Bridgewater, Maine. “While talking with some men about various matters,” he wrote, “[we heard] a light knock on the door, so one of us got up to open it only to find a Syrian woman weighed down by her heavy load . . . and she sighed saying: I will sell to those men for the amount of 4 or 5 dollars and I do not care if they laughed at, or made fun of, me.”38 With the stage set, Elias proceeded to describe a scene in which the “American” men ask the “Syrian” woman to do various “humiliating things” (such as letting one of the men tie her shoes) that carried dishonourable overtones. Elias could not stand the situation anymore, so . . . he left without identifying himself as a compatriot of the woman. Without reflecting on the irony inherent in his lack of intervention in the “degrading” affair, Elias proceeded—in his ­composition—to reproach the “Syrians” for letting “their” women work. He scathingly asked, “Oh, you dear Syrians who claim honor . . . is it honorable to send your women to meander and encounter such insults?”39 As more of the immigrants made the move from itinerant peddling to a “respectable” settled life, such questions only became more persistent and the tone and intensity of opposition to women’s work grew more strident. The “concern” was not just about protecting an “honour” grounded in the “traditional” construct of patriarchy. Many of those objecting to women’s work saw it as a departure not only from village “norms”, but more importantly from the standards of the middle class in America, into whose ranks they were trying to gain entry. Using clinical terms, women’s work was identified as the “disease” that was “infecting” the communal body, and simultaneously destroying “traditional honour” and “modern morality”. In a singular turn of phrase, then, these authors collapsed women’s economic independence with sexual freedom, and termed both as detrimental. Part of the “cure” for these problems was to subjugate women to male authority and confine them to the “home”. This ­recommendation echoed the fears of the larger American middle class of sexuality and the restrictions which its members applied to confine female sexuality within the house.40 And like the Anglo-Saxon bourgeois ­moralists who 38 Nassif Elias, “Syrian Honor”, al-Huda, May 9, 1903, 2. 39 Ibid. 40 In the 1860s American writers on sexuality, such as Doctor R.T. Trall, placed control of the “passional expression of love” to the house and its control to the woman. And while admitting the possibility that women can experience sexual pleasure, he and other writers



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surrounded them, these authors sought then to universalize the “true” gender identity that derived from middle class history and sensibilities. In fact, other authors argued that the only way to avoid the “fall” of women into “ruin” is to mix with “middle classes of America” and not the lower classes “with whom we the Syrians mingle”.41 In the imagination of such immigrants, a woman’s place was clearly within a middle class house which included only the immediate family of husband, wife and children. This was to be a sanitized space where foul language and rough play would be banished and where order in every aspect of life (theoretically in any case) presided over chaos. One American reformer depicted this life in the following manner: The social and moral life of a smaller family where the father earns enough to support wife and children, and where the mother can devote her time to the care of them, and where neither she nor the children go out and help in the support of the family, is superior to that of a family with a large number of children where the wife and often the older children must slave.42

Within such an isolated environment, sexuality would once again be contained within the marital contract and bond. More specifically, women’s sexuality would be (again, at least, theoretically) controlled by the husband, who nonetheless would continue to have access to sex through his commutes into the “city” and public life from the privatized suburbs. The criticism levelled against women’s work was met with objections from more liberal elements within the Levantine immigrant community. These contrarian views did not advocate women’s work as inherently good, but rather as a necessary evil. Articles and editorials appearing in ArabAmerican newspapers sought to dispel concern over women’s labour by making statements to the extent that a woman’s honour, “like pure gold”, will not be tarnished by work. To emphasize that last point, al-Huda— the newspaper mentioned earlier—reminded its readers that women had worked in the silk factories of Mount Lebanon without any visible sideeffects; and that was long before they had arrived in “Amrika”.43 Speaking from an equally “modernist” and middle class perspective, these latter writers tended to emphasize that the fault lay not with the women but with their “lazy” or “incapacitated” husbands or fathers. Read, for example, either subordinated female sexual desire, or lust, “to the passive, loving faculties of feminine character or denied [it] entirely”. Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 105. 41   “Improving our Syrian race”, al-Huda, October 21, 1905, 3. 42 S. Adolphus Knoph, “The Smaller Family”, Survey 37 (1916): 161. 43 al-Huda, March 5, 1899, 15–17, and September 11, 1906, 3.

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the following rejoinder by Nasrallah Faris. Reacting to Nassif Elias’s story of the woman peddler in Bridgewater, Maine, Nasrallah wrote, “. . . we agree with the writer that women should not travel to sell if her husband is capable of properly taking care of her needs and the needs of her house, but if that woman had emigrated and left in the country a sick man . . . or one heavily indebted then is it not permissible for her to sell? Or if her husband is with her and he was sick, then who will take care of him, or if he was a gambling drunkard then how can she depend on him?”44 Afifa Karam, one of the earliest and most prolific women writers in the mahjar, took up the same theme in a later article. Addressing those writers who were maligning the “honour” of women peddlers, she wrote: “you ascribe licentiousness, depravity and immorality only to the [female] kashé sellers, but you are wrong because an immoral woman is not constrained from committing ugliness simply because she is living in palaces, or because she is imprisoned there.”45 Although women’s work is not completely dissociated from the risk of immorality and dishonour, the anxiety over unbridled sexuality is shifted away from class and more onto individual character and personality. Afifa Karam, for example, categorizes and evaluated “womanhood” by creating four mutually exclusive and idealized types of “woman”. In this construction, a woman—as an individual—is either “good”, “deceitful”, “working”, or “ignorant”. The “good” woman is the one who attends to her duties and helps her mother, and who later as a bride makes her husband happy and makes her house a paradise. “Working” women on the other hand are not—“God Forbid”—necessarily without morals, but they do exist in an environment that is filled “with dangers” which could compromise their honour. However, for Karam, the worst two kinds of women are the “ignorant” one who is “the disease of civilization and the curse of modernization”, and the “deceitful” woman who pretends to be “good” but is in reality a “snake that poisons the honey of life”.46 Superficial beauty, 44 Nasrallah Faris, “Men and Woman Were Created to Work”, al-Huda, June 11, 1903, 3. 45 Afifa Karam, al-Huda, July 14, 1903, 2. At the beginning of this article, Afifa Karam wrote, without the slightest hint of sarcasm, “I read above the article [of Yusuf al-Za‌ʾini titled ‘Women Qashé Sellers’] words from al-Huda asking educated men to respond and criticize without including educated women. But I ask from al-Huda to excuse this action of mine [writing in response]”, At the end of the article, the editor of al-Huda wrote: “We wish if more of educated women were like the writer of this article, not afraid to appear neither in a literary setting nor of the objections against them by foolish people . . .” Both comments were indications that the entry of women writers into this field was a fairly novel event. 46 al-Huda, April 8, 1900, 2.



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powdering the face, and wearing corsets to make thin waists were all considered frivolous affairs by Karam, whose purpose is simply to physically attract men and appeal to their “animal” instincts. In still another article, Ms. Karam chided men who, she argued, seduced innocent women and brought “dishonour” upon them by promising marriage only to take advantage of their bodies. Carnality, in her view, was the common and negative denominator in both of these instances (“deceitful” women and rapacious men), and it was directly responsible for the “sorry” state of the emigrant community. Thus, Afifa Karam still regarded sexuality outside marriage as a threat to family and community even if she saw its causes as men’s rapacious appetites and “ghoulishness”.47 To civilize these monsters and eradicate the implied sexual predatory behaviour of men—let loose by the absence or even collapse of communal boundaries—Karam also advocated the construction of an ideal middle class family. However, in this family, where the woman is respected, educated, and house-bound, the man has to contain his sexuality within the household by refraining from visiting coffeehouses, cinemas and houses of ill-repute.48 The house itself remains de-sexualized in the writings of these liberal emigrant thinkers, where every depiction of such abodes is full of marital bliss deriving from proper table manners, wholesome evenings of reading and needlework, and where the children are always in the presence of their parents. Any notion of physical tenderness let alone unbridled sexual pleasure is absent from these prosaic portraits. It was not only in the US that this new narrative of a middle class (or elite) woman was being constructed. In Mexico, toward the end of the 1930s, two new newspapers—Emir and Líbano—appeared and they were aimed at the socially climbing members of the immigrant community. One of the prominent aspects of these magazines were sections dedicated to women readers in which an idealized Lebanese-Mexican woman was defined through articles on fashion, manners, beauty and health, cooking and maintaining cultural traditions. Theresa Alfaro-Velcamp notes that the construction of a feminine ideal—distant from the peddling and other forms of labour that women had partaken of—was intimately linked to the creation of a respectable Lebanese identity for the immigrant community in Mexico.49 And while women were an integral part of the working

47 al-Huda, March 11, 1900, 3. 48 Afifa Karam, al-Huda, January 18, 1905, 2. 49 Alfaro-Velcamp, So Far From Allah, 143–144.

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immigrant community in Brazil, by the 1920s, the most successful firms— such as the Jafet, Abdalla and Salem factories—had become wholly male dominated. In 1952, at the re-establishment of the Syrian and Lebanese Chamber of Commerce in São Paulo, all the founders were male business owners.50 All this led the Brazilian author Alfredo Ellis Junior to write of the “syrio” as “a merchant . . .[who] is able to barter his own life”.51 Conclusion Eliding women from the narrative of Eastern Mediterranean immigration was, thus, part of the process of creating an ethnic bourgeoisie in the mahjar. To become accepted by the indigenous middle classes, and to be less ethnic and more white, especially in a place like the US, necessitated the creation of a narrative of respectability whereby women were literally and metaphorically contained within the confines of the home. Noting that women were not in any sense marginal to the immigration story is an important first step in enriching and complicating the overly simplistic narrative embodied by the statue at the Port of Beirut. For instance, mainstream histories claim that the first immigrant from the Eastern Mediterranean to the US was a man, Ibrahim Arbeeli, who arrived in New York in 1878. His claim of religious persecution as the cause for his immigration was a common trope that had little to do with the realities driving him and his compatriots to immigrate.52 Rather it was intended to elicit a sympathetic reception and admission into an American society replete with Orientalist notions that portrayed Islam and “Turks” (the term used for Muslims) as nefarious, violent, and repressive.53 In reality, that same

50 John Tofik Karam, Another Arabesques: Syrian-Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil. (Philadelphia, 2007), 28. 51   Emphasis is author’s. Quoted in Karam, Another Arabesques, 26. 52 For a more thorough discussion of the causes of immigration see Akram Khater, Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Middle Class in Lebanon, 1870–1920 (Berkeley, 2001). Also see “Becoming ‘Syrian’ in America: A Global Geography of Ethnicity and Nation”, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 14, nos. 2/3 (Fall/Winter 2005): 299–331. 53 Such Orientalist depictions of the Muslim “Other” as suspicious at best and certainly un-American were also peddled by anti-Mormon writers who sought to discredit the new American Christian sect by associating its founder, Joseph Smith, with the “false” prophet “Mahomet,” and its precepts with those of “Arabian” Islam. In August 1843, for example, in Carthage, Illinois, an anti-Mormon committee published a manifesto that would culminate in the assassination of Joseph Smith and the expulsion of Mormons from Illinois. The manifesto declared that Mormonism is a sect that stands against the moral precepts of God and Christianity even as it perpetuates “the most lawless and diabolical deeds”



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year “a young woman left an unsuccessfully arranged marriage in Zgharta and headed for Alabama where others from her village had settled. Within the year, she had moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, and started in the peddling trade. She soon saved enough money to buy a wagon, and at the time of her death in 1932, she was the successful owner of a dry-goods store, affectionately known as “Queen Mary” for her willingness to assist new immigrants.”54 Her reasons for departing neither fit into the trope of religious persecution, nor can they be contained in the narrative of male emigrants working hard to bring over their families. However, providing statistics and life stories which interject women into the narrative of immigration is not sufficient in and of itself. Rather, we must include gender as a historical lens refracting the tensions and challenges that immigration posed to patriarchal contracts, and the transformation it wrought not only in the lives of men and women who emigrated but in the society they left behind. By gender I mean the social relationships between men and women (as well within each group) that are historically constructed through cultural symbols, social institutions and economic transactions. Studying immigration through this prism allows us to see the decision to leave, not as the heroic venture of a single man, but as a familial decision that entails an investment of resources (including the dowries of women), and the re-negotiations of the role of those left behind, be they male or female. The distance and time spent apart further stretched these social relations almost to their breaking points (and beyond at times). It threw their contradictions into sharp relief: what is the real meaning of a man’s authority if he be far away from his family; if a woman is providing all the income from her work in the mahjar then should she be able to make decisions about its expenditure? In the mahjar, social relations had to be reconfigured to allow for women’s work beyond the space of the family and in the public sphere where it is potentially “shameful”. This, in turn, raised questions about sexuality, love, marriage, family, education, rearing of children, cooking and food and a host of other matters that shaped the identity of immigrants and their sense of community. Finally, these very same dynamics and questions were brought back as immigrants shuttled between the Eastern Mediterranean and the mahjar and as over 30 percent of them returned permanently

through the prophetic pretensions of a “latter-day would be Mahomet”. Richard Lyman Bushman, Rough Stone Rolling (New York, 2005), 510. 54 Gualtieri, “Gendering the Chain Migration Thesis”, 68.

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after years of working in the Americas, Australia or Africa. Unfortunately, to this date we have very few studies that have focused on the gender (or race and class for that matter) dimension of immigration from the Eastern Mediterranean. It is only when such studies are undertaken more comprehensively that we can actually move beyond the public narrative embodied by a bronze statue erected by elites intent on romanticizing their past and sweeping it clean from the messiness of history.

part four

the asias

Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940* Adam McKeown Histories of mass migrations are almost always comparative, whether explicitly or implicitly. For example, claims about the modernity of the transatlantic migrations of the nineteenth century and their embeddedness in the processes of industrialization, liberalization, globalization and improved communication technologies, try to establish a difference from earlier times and from other places such as Asia that did not undergo such massive transformation and are assumed not to have experienced so much mass mobility. Similarly, studies of Chinese emigration are suffused with assertions and counter-assertions about the distinctness and ‘Chineseness’ of those migrations, debating whether or not Chinese had a unique propensity to be sojourners, to be unwilling to migrate, to be attached to their homes, to have a bias against female migration, to form associations, to resist assimilation, to engage in business, or to establish resilient networks and personal relations (guanxi). And studies of almost any specific migrant flow are framed by assumptions and demonstrations of what is unique and generalizable about that flow. Unfortunately, however meticulous the original research, these comparative dimensions are often grounded in poor empirical knowledge and stereotypes. Claims about the uniqueness of Chinese migration often uncritically accept myths of the monodirectional European settler, who had weak ties to home, a weak associational life and was readily assimilated. Historians of European migrations will easily recognize the inaccuracy of these characterizations. Similarly, claims about the unique nature of the Atlantic migrants often rest on stereotypes of Chinese as mostly indentured, unaware of the world, unlikely to settle, and driven to move only by famine, overpopulation, coercion and European intervention. Even accounts that are critical of racist and orientalizing attitudes tend to replicate these kinds of characterizations. While some of these causes have been found to play roles in particular European migrations (such as the Irish potato famine) historians have largely downplayed them as * Reprinted by permission from Journal of Global History 5 (2010): 1–30. Slightly revised and abbreviated by the author.

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important explanations of the broad scope of mass migration over the nineteenth century, preferring to emphasize the broader causes of industry, commercialization, massification, transportation and political liberalization. To continue to depict Chinese migration in the terms listed above is to understand Chinese migration as having existed in isolation from the forces that shaped European emigration and behaved according to categorically different impulses than Europeans.1 The search for similarities is another form of comparison, from which Asians are often excluded. This kind of comparison generally aims to create generalizations about the patterns and cycles of migration. It requires analyses that move back and forth between case studies and the understanding of broader patterns. This is very well developed for the transatlantic migrations, where case studies proliferate and the broad patterns are well known. On the Chinese side, however, our understanding of the broader patterns is still rudimentary. Most generalizations are projected from case studies only, and attempts to establish generalizations are often criticized for essentializing Chinese identities.2 This lack of knowledge creates a gap that allows generalizations developed in the Atlantic to be easily projected as understandings of migration as a whole. Claims that those generalizations are historically specific to the Atlantic are often then deflected with the argument that areas beyond the Atlantic did not yet have the conditions to produce the modern mass migrations that are the subject of these generalizations.3 A better understanding of the broad patterns of Chinese migration is necessary to begin the comparative work that will establish these migrations as part of the global wave of mass migration in the nineteenth century. This will help to overcome the East-West stereotypes and show how 1   On the historical genealogy of these depictions, see Sucheta Mazumdar, “Chinese and Indian Migration: A Prospectus for Comparative Research”, in Chinese and Indian Diasporas: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Wong Siu-lun (Hong Kong, 2004), 139–167. 2 Qualitative overviews of Chinese emigration include Philip Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, Md., 2008); Adam McKeown, “Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 194”, Journal of Asian Studies 58 (1999): 306–337, and “From Opium Farmer to Astronaut: A Global History of Diasporic Chinese Business”, Diaspora 9 (2000): 317–360; Qiu Liben, Cong shijie kan huaren [Looking at Chinese from a world perspective] (Hong Kong, 2000); Wang Gungwu, “Patterns of Chinese Migration in Historical Perspective”, in his China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore, 1991), 3–21. 3 For example, Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson, The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact (New York, 1998), make generalizations about the seven to eight decade lifespan of migrant flows and their positive effects on wage convergence based only on transatlantic migrations. Many of these generalizations do not hold for Asian migrations (and sometimes fit poorly even for migrations from north-western Europe).



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patterns of Asian migrations operated according to principles similar to those of the transatlantic migrations. It will also help to establish the differences—both between different Chinese flows and between Chinese and non-Chinese flows—and to avoid projecting patterns that were specific to the Atlantic as generalizations that are applicable to all migrations. This chapter begins by establishing some broad outlines of Chinese migration from 1850–1940, in terms of both broad trends and the comparisons of specific flows. It then compares those patterns with Chinese migration to Manchuria and some non-Chinese flows (mostly transatlantic due to the ready availability of data and the prominence of the Atlantic in existing research). Special attention is given to return and female migration, two quantifiable phenomena that can be linked to economic cycles, family structures and patterns of migration such as sojourning that are often thought to be unique to the Chinese. The main goal of this chapter is to establish the significance of Asian migration as part of the global wave of mass migration from the 1840s to 1930s. But some of the most interesting conclusions are methodological ones about the framing of comparative and global research. The first such conclusion is the importance of situating any comparison within historical time. Trends in return and female migration around the world grew more similar in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This convergence took place even as the destinations of migration diverged into segregated systems in the late nineteenth century; and on into the 1920s and 1930s when emigration rates also diverged and political boundaries increasingly segregated migration. Rather than only finding absolute differences and similarities between flows that are amenable to comparative explanations in terms of different cultures and local economic contexts, we also find patterns of migration converged and diverged in the context of common global forces. The second conclusion concerns the need to be aware of how similarities and variations emerge according to the scale of analysis. Commonalities across the world are most likely to appear at the level of large, aggregate comparisons. This is the scale at which specific variations are most likely to be subsumed under common global forces. The smaller the flows being compared, the more likely that significant differences will appear, generated by specific local and historical contingencies. History does happen as a result of local choices, often with effects that are at odds with global trends. But global trends also exist, and may have an important role in structuring possible local choices. Neither perspective is truer than the other.

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Both of these conclusions point towards a broader awareness that migrations must be understood in the context of global history. The work of analysis often proceeds best by breaking down and comparing. This is an important method of approach, but can all too often reify particular groups and project findings from one region or scale of analysis into larger generalizations about the nature of particular migrations, of migration in general, or of East versus West. This method must be augmented with attention to broader processes, how those processes changed over time, and how different contexts become visible at different levels of analysis. This includes an awareness not only of the similarities across the world, but also of the ways in which difference is produced. Overview of Chinese Migration About 20 million Chinese emigrated overseas from 1840 to 1940, of whom 90 percent went to Southeast Asia (see Table 1).4 In terms of overall numbers and density of emigration, Chinese migration was comparable to European overseas migration and very much a part of the global wave of mass migration from 1840 to 1940. Data to measure this migration is readily available from the south China ports of Xiamen, Shantou and Hainan 4 Major sources for quantitative calculations of Chinese migration in the tables, figures are the Hong Kong Harbourmaster reports from 1856 to 1939, generously provided to me by Elizabeth Sinn from her Hong Kong Research Grants Council funded project, “The Impact of Chinese Emigration on Hong Kong’s Economic Development, 1842–1941” [some of which can be found in “Emigration from Hong Kong before 1941: General Trends”, in Emigration from Hong Kong: Tendencies and Impacts, ed. Ronald Skeldon (Hong Kong, 1995), 11–34]; Chinese Maritime Customs Reports (Shanghai, 1869–1929) for Xiamen (1874–1928), Shantou (1869–1929) and Qiongzhou (1876–1929), with additional data found in Kaoru Sugihara, “Patterns of Chinese Emigration to Southeast Asia, 1869–1939”, in Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850–1949, vol. 1, ed. Kaoru Sugihara (Oxford, 2005), 246–56; and the Reports of the Singapore Protector of Chinese from 1881–1938, included in Straits Settlements, Annual Reports (Singapore, 1881–1939). Statistics for European migration are from Imre Ferenczi and Walter Willcox, eds., International Migrations, vol. 1, Statistics (New York, 1931) supplemented for the 1920s and 1930s when possible by B.R. Mitchell, ed., International Historical Statistics: Europe 1750–1993, 4th ed. (New York, 1998), 129–40. Return migration from the United States is from Susan B. Carter, et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States, vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2006), 547–548. The proportions of female migrants to the United States were provided to me by José C. Moya. Indian numbers are from Kingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (New York, 1951), 99–100. Statistics for Manchurian migration and the population of Hebei and Shandong are from Thomas Gottschang and Diana Lary, Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria (Ann Arbor, 2000). For more details on the sources and their limitations, see appendix to the original version of this article, Adam McKeown, “Chinese Emigration in Global Context, 1850–1940”, Journal of Global History 5 (2010): 95–124.



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after the 1870s, and from Hong Kong after the 1850s. This emigration data corresponds extremely well with Singapore immigration data after 1880, creating a strong foundation for comparison with other migrations. Thus, in addition to describing the overall scale of Chinese migration, this section also establishes the relative importance of the various emigration ports and Singapore in the overall patterns of Chinese migration, so as to create the context for later figures that focus on flows to and from Singapore and Hong Kong. Much nineteenth century migration followed the paths of merchant and labour circuits into Southeast Asia that had been forged over the previous three centuries or more. However, the most important nodes that channelled much of the massive increase in migration after the 1840s were relatively new. For example, Singapore was only founded in 1819, but in the century after 1840, at least 11 million (over 50 percent) of overseas migrants passed through that port during their journey, with many continuing on to Malaya, Penang, the Dutch Indies and, to a lesser extent, Burma, Siam and Borneo. Similarly the burst of migration in the 1850s from the Pearl River Delta region near the newly created port of Hong Kong to the gold fields of California and Australia and the plantations of Latin America and the Caribbean (although most of those destined for the latter left through Macao) probably caused a doubling the total number of emigrants compared to the 1840s (although it is hard to be precise because numbers of migrants to Southeast Asia before the 1870s are estimates). However, this burst was of relatively short-term significance. Over the next ninety years migration beyond Asia remained stagnant, blocked by anti-Chinese immigration laws and the decline of convenient transportation to Latin America after the end of indenture in 1874. Numbers to Southeast Asia, Table 1. Destinations of Overseas Chinese Migration, 1840–1940 Destination Straits Settlements, Malay Peninsula Dutch Indies Siam French Indochina Philippines Americas Australia, South Pacific, Burma, Indian Ocean, etc. TOTAL

Number (Millions) 6–7 4–5 3.5–4 2–4 0.75–1 1.5 0.75 ~19–22

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on the other hand, increased more than twenty-fold (See Figure 1). In the 1850s and 1860s, as many as 40 percent of all Chinese emigrants travelled beyond Asia. This declined to 25 percent in the 1870s and to 10 percent by the 1880s. For the next fifty years the proportion of emigrants who went beyond Asia rarely surpassed 6 percent for any year, except for a brief period from 1913 to 1924 when it returned to 9.5 percent. Total migration, on the other hand, increased steadily to a peak of 400,000 in 1912, then increasing—after a dip during World War One—to a new peak of nearly 700,000 in 1928, before being hit hard by the Great Depression. The great majority of emigrants left from four ports in southern China: Hong Kong, Xiamen (Amoy), Shantou (Swatow) and, to a lesser extent, Hainan Island and the Leizhou Peninsula across the straits from Hainan (see Map 1). Migrants through each port were associated with distinct dialect groups: Cantonese from Hong Kong, Teochiu from Shantou, and Hokkien from Xiamen. One other dialect group, the Hakkas, mostly lived inland from Shantou in the region around Meixian; most departed through Shantou, although some left through Xiamen and others who lived in the Pearl River Delta departed through Hong Kong. A smattering of migrants also departed from the northern ports of Fuzhou, Wenzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai, mostly to Japan and Europe or to work as seamen.5 Migrants 800 700 600

To Southeast Asia To Americas, Australia, Africa, etc.

Thousands

500 400 300 200 100 0 1851 1856 1861 1866 1871 1876 1881 1886 1891 1896 1901 1906 1911 1916 1921 1926 1931 1936

Figure 1. Annual overseas migration from South China, 1851–1939 5 Li Minghuan, “We Need Two Worlds”: Chinese Immigrant Associations in a Western Society (Amsterdam, 1999), 27–52.



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N

269 Ningbo

Anhui Zhejiang

Wenzhou

200 km

Jiangxi Hunan

Guangxi

Fujian

Fuzhou

Guangdong

Meixian

Guangzhou (Canton)

Xiamen (Amoy) Shantou (Swatow)

Taiwan

Quanzhou

Hong Kong Macao

South China Sea Hainan

Map 1. South China emigrant ports

from Shandong and Hebei provinces in the north also travelled abroad: 64,000 to the South African gold mines from 1904–07; 150,000 to Europe as labourers during World War One, and close to half a million into Siberia.6 The bulk of the first two flows were repatriated. The migrants to Siberia were part of a broader migration of over 30 million migrants who travelled from Hebei and Shandong to Manchuria. The reverberations of the great boom of Cantonese migration in the 1850s could still be felt in the early 1870s, when 50 percent of all emigrants still departed from Hong Kong. But the other ports recovered their significance in subsequent decades, hand in hand with the increasing proportion of migrants to Southeast Asia. By the 1880s, the bulk of ­emigration 6 Chen Ta, Chinese Migrations, with Special Reference to Labor Conditions (Washington, DC, 1923); Peter Richardson, Chinese Mine Labour in the Transvaal (London, 1982).

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was evenly divided between Hong Kong, Shantou and Xiamen, with Hainan growing to a 10 percent share by the 1890s (see Figure 2). Hong Kong began to recover its importance after the turn of the century, in the 1930s once again accounting for half of all emigrants. Some scholars have speculated that many migrants travelled to Hong Kong first before departing overseas. Migration data, however, suggests that migrants were much more likely to return via Hong Kong than to depart this way.7 Return rates for Hong Kong from the 1870s to 1920s ranged from 120 percent to 190 percent (calculated over 5-year periods), while return rates for other ports were generally below 50 percent, and sometimes as low as 2–4 percent for Shantou. Return rate calculated on the basis of the combined numbers of departing and return migrants from all ports stayed steady in the 70th percentile from the 1870s until the 1930s (see Table 2). This pattern of return migration through Hong Kong is further supported by the fact that as many as five times as many 100% 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

9 ‒3 35

‒3

4 19

9

19 30

‒2

4

19 25

‒2

19

14

Xiamen

19 20

19 15 ‒

9

Shantou

19 10 ‒

‒0

04

19 05

0‒

9

Hong Kong

19 0

‒9 95

94

18

0‒

89

18 9

5‒

84

18 8

0‒ 18 8

18

75

‒7

9

0%

Hainan

Note: Numbers for Xiamen 1929–30 and Hainan 1932–36 are estimates. Hainan customs reported negligible emigration until 1885.

Figure 2. Proportion of emigrants from Chinese ports, 1875–1939 7 On migration services in Hong Kong, see Elizabeth Sinn, “Emigration from Hong Kong before 1941: Organization and Impact”, in Emigration from Hong Kong, ed. Ronald Skeldon, 35–50; and Sinn, “Xin Xi Guxiang: A Study of Regional Associations as a bonding Mechanism in the Chinese Diaspora. The Hong Kong Experience”, Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 375–397.



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Table 2. Return rates for Chinese ports, 1861–1939 (%)

1861–65 1865–70 1871–75 1876–80 1881–85 1886–90 1891–95 1896–1900 1901–05 1906–10 1911–15 1916–20 1921–25 1926–30 1931–35 1936–39

Hong Kong

Xiamen

Shantou

66 127 121 119 109 144 172 171 189 166 139 119 100 78 178 62

68 70 73 47 45 37 30 42 50 72 75 157 74

14 3 3 2 15 18 36 4 38 57 68 111 56

Hainan

46 33 33 42 42 48 56 55 52

All Ports ­combined

75 66 78 71 75 74 75 76 73 77 75 156 62

coastal passengers travelled from Hong Kong to other south China ports than travelled from those ports to Hong Kong (with Shantou accounting for 60–70 percent of those voyages out from Hong Kong). The importance of Hong Kong as a node for return migration started to decline after 1912, suggesting that the banking, provision of consumer goods for returned migrants, and other services once provided by Hong Kong could now be more readily accommodated in other ports. At the same time, the importance of Hong Kong as an emigrant port grew after 1912, suggesting a proportional rise in Cantonese emigrants during that period. The reasons for this rise are unclear, but this growing predominance as an emigrant port in the later years of migration helps explain why Hong Kong and the Cantonese often dominate the historical memory of overseas migration. Indenture to Europeans under long-term labour contracts played a relatively small role in overall Chinese migration. Less than 4 percent (about 750,000) of Chinese migrants were directly indentured to Europeans. These included a quarter million to the Americas (mostly Cuba and Peru, with some to the British Caribbean, Central America and Surinam) from 1847 to 1874; over 300,000 to Sumatra and Bangka, most intensively in the 1870s and 1880s but continuing to the 1920s; and perhaps 200,000 to other locations, including Malaya, Australia, and islands in the Indian

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and Pacific Oceans.8 The overall role of coercion and the European plantation economy, however, is much more difficult to ascertain. A total of 844,910 newly arrived migrants signed labour contracts under the auspices of the Chinese Protectorate in Singapore from 1881 to 1915, amounting to 15 percent of all the immigrants to that city in those years. Many of these were destined for Sumatra. But the majority was contracted out to Chinese employers in Singapore and Malaya, under conditions that remain unclear. It is likely that many Chinese migrated under some form of debt or labour obligation, both formal and informal, to other Chinese merchants, recruiters, employers, or collectively operated mines and farms (gongsi), which may have entailed more or less coercion depending on the circumstances.9 The same was true for European migrants, many of whom openly signed contracts with employers in the Americas both before and after departure, and others of whom obtained employment through more informal and underground debt and personal obligations in places where contract migration was outlawed. In this sense, the organization of Chinese migration was little different from that of European—certainly not different enough to justify the juxtaposition of Chinese ‘coolies’ against ‘free’ Europeans.10 One of the most notable features of European attempts to recruit indentured Chinese was—with the exceptions of Peru, Cuba and ­Sumatra— their short duration and failure to achieve steady labour streams. European planters in Singapore and Malaya constantly complained of their inability to compete with Chinese recruiters and planters (although they usually formulated these complaints as attacks on the ‘evils’ of Chinese secret societies and corrupt innkeepers who took advantage of ignorant peasants and undermined free markets). Indeed, the Chinese Protectorate    8 Persia Crawford Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire (London, 1923); Chen Ta, Chinese Migrations; Robert Irick, Ch’ing Policy Toward the Coolie Trade 1847–1878 (Taipei, 1982); Arnold Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America (Bloomington, 2008); David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995).    9 Kuhn, Chinese among Others, 112–127; Carl Trocki, Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore, 1800–1910 (Ithaca, 1990); Wang Sing-wu, The Organization of Chinese Emigration, 1848–1888: With Special Reference to Chinese Emigration to Australia (San Francisco, 1978). 10 Scott Nelson, “After Slavery: Forced Drafts of Irish and Chinese Labor in the American Civil War, or the Search for Liquid Labor”, in Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, eds. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley, 2007), 150–165; Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, 2000); Robert Steinfeld, Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001).



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was as much a (failed) attempt to channel Chinese labour to local British planters as it was an attempt to protect the interests of migrants.11 But if formal indenture projects were of relatively little significance in the overall mobilization of Chinese migration, it was enormously significant in the production of diplomatic correspondence, sensationalistic journalism, investigative reports, popular images and historical memory of Chinese migrants. This documentation is, more than anything, responsible for the images of earthbound, immobile Chinese and victimized coolies who would not have migrated without the direct intervention and coercion of Europeans and their capital. Chinese Migration in Global and Comparative Perspective Whatever the role of direct European intervention into Chinese migration, there is no doubt that European capital and industrialization provided a context for the overall growth of Chinese migration as part of the global wave of mass migration in the nineteenth century. Migrants from China, Europe and India moved to the less-populated frontiers of the Americas, Southeast Asia and northern Asia, each of which received over 50 million migrants.12 All of these flows grew steadily over the nineteenth century and reached peaks in the 1910s and 20s. The entanglement of Chinese with these global trends is obvious in the mid-nineteenth century, when Chinese joined Europeans in the settlement of frontier gold fields and the construction of railroad lines in North America and Australia. With the rise of exclusionary laws in the 1880s, Chinese migration was increasingly restricted to Asia.13 However, it remained no less entangled in the global economic processes that generated migration. The tin mines and rubber 11   Adam McKeown, “The Social Life of Chinese Labor”, in Chinese Circulations: Capital, Commodities and Networks in Southeast Asia, eds. Eric Tagliacozzo and Wen-hsin Chen (Durham, 2011), 62–83; Anthony Reid, An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (Singapore, 2005), 194–225; Eunice Thio, “The Singapore Chinese Protectorate: Events and Conditions leading to Its Establishment, 1823–1877”, Journal of the South Seas Society 26 (1960): 40–80. 12 Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940”, Journal of World History 15 (2004): 155–189. 13 Adam McKeown, Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (New York, 2008); Aristide Zolberg, “Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migration: 1885–1925”, in Global History and Migrations, ed. Wang Gungwu (Boulder, 1997), 297–307, and “The Great Wall Against China: Responses to the First Immigration Crisis, 1885–1925”, in Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Jan and Leo Lucassen (Bern, 1999), 291–305.

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plantations of Malaya, rice fields of southern Vietnam and Thailand, the soy and wheat fields of Manchuria and the ever expanding Chinese marketing networks stretching from the Amazon to Siberia were as much a part of the expanding global economy as were the factories of Chicago, sheep ranches of Australia and coffee plantations of Brazil. Migrations around the world were linked through an ever-expanding global industrial economy, but they were each inserted into this economy in distinct ways. The linkage can be seen in the growing homogenization in overall patterns of outward, return and female mobility between Chinese and European migrations. Differences that once existed were increasingly overcome by the early twentieth century. This convergence took place even as the destinations of migrants grew increasingly segregated (see Figure 1) and the correspondence of migration to overall economic development began to diverge. Moreover, when we narrow our scope down to particular flows, the differences in particular migrant circuits grow more pronounced. It can be hard to specify the similarities and differences due to the difficulties of establishing similar units of analysis. But a series of varied comparisons can help to establish that variations were as common between different Chinese flows as they were between Chinese and European flows. From here, we can begin to distinguish between conditions that were specific to certain regions, such as Southeast Asia and the Atlantic, and between specific migrant circuits within those regions, each of which was produced through a unique historical nexus of broader forces. Global comparisons of emigration rates and the distance and costs of voyages address questions about the causes of mass migration. To what extent were high-density migration and the choice of destinations generated by factors such as improved transportation infrastructures, access to information, liberal migration controls, job opportunities, relative costs of migration compared to incomes at home or abroad, population density, urbanization, industrialization or the penetration of commercial economies? If overall migration rates and the expenses associated with migration in Asia were comparable to those in Europe and across the Atlantic, we would be compelled to question the importance of many of these factors. There is little doubt that the Atlantic was significantly advanced over Asia in terms of communication infrastructure, urbanization and industrialization. However, if Atlantic mobility was no higher than that in Asia then either this was not an important cause of mobility or else the expanding world economy also generated other causes for mobility in Asia.



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First, let us establish some of the similarities between Chinese and European emigration. At first glance, 20 million overseas Chinese may seem like a drop in the bucket compared to the many millions who departed much smaller countries like England, Germany, Italy, and Spain. But if we compare regions of similar size and population, the peak emigration rates (annual migrants per 1,000 population) were quite similar (See Table 3). Even during the peak European years of 1912–13 (which were not peak years for China), emigrants also left Guangdong and north China at rates of 9.5 migrants per thousand, not far behind the highest European rates. Emigration rates (emigrants per 1000 population) around the world also changed concurrently over time. For example, emigration rates from Guangdong Province, north China, Italy and Iberia all grew steadily until the 1890s, after which they increased more dramatically until World War One, and then again in the early 1920s (see Figure 3). The timing of shortterm fluctuations also corresponded remarkably well, rarely diverging by more than a year. Local variations to these common patterns included the relatively late start of mass migration to Manchuria, the decline of Iberian migration around the turn of the century (also apparent in the Portuguese numbers, so not entirely explainable by the effect of the Cuban revolution on Spanish emigration), and the decline of Italian migration in the 1920s with the erection of immigration barriers in the United States in 1924, and emigration barriers from Italy in 1927. With the coming of the Great Depression, Chinese migration, especially to Manchuria where Japanese Table 3. Some peak emigration rates Country Ireland Norway Italy (all destinations) Italy (transoceanic) Portugal Spain UK Guangdong Province Hebei and Shandong Provinces

Years 1845–55 1881–82 1905–07, 1912–13 1905–07, 1912–13 1912–13 1912–13 1847–50, 1912–13 1927–28 1927–29, 1939–42

Annual Emigrants per 1000 Population 22 14 21 13 14 12 10 15 16

Note: Numbers for Spain and Guangdong are only for overseas destinations, and numbers for Hebei and Shandong are only for Manchuria. Numbers for Ireland, Norway, Spain, Portugal and the UK are for all destinations, although European destinations amount to a small proportion in these cases.

276 25

Emigrants per 1000 pop.

20

adam mckeown Guangdong Hebei and Shandong Italy

15

Spain and Portugal

10

5

0 1872 1876 1880 1884 1888 1892 1896 1900 1904 1908 1912 1916 1920 1924 1928 1932 1936

Figure 3. Emigration rates from Guangdong, Hebei and Shandong, Italy and ­Iberia 1872–1939

continued to pump money into the local economy, weathered the tough times much better than European migration. The comparison of emigration rates brings up the question of the relevant units of comparison. The four flows in Figure 3 were chosen because they originated in areas of relatively similar size and population and all peaked in the early twentieth century. This helps to illustrate some broad similarities in disparate parts of the world. However, more detailed comparisons have to confront the problem of what exactly is being counted. For example, Figure 3 only counts migrants from Guangdong and not Fujian, in part because I could not find reliable population statistics for Fujian but mostly because only the southern third of the province was a significant emigrant region. Given the entire lack of sub-provincial population data, should I only calculate emigration rates in proportion to one third of the Fujianese population? This is only the most egregious example of the fact that emigration was always uneven. Within any nation, ­province, county or sub-county district, emigration rates and practices could vary greatly from region to region and village to village. Any of the larger units used in Figure 3 could have been sliced up into smaller regions, or amalgamated with other nations and provinces to generate very different rates. There is also the problem of who is being counted and what kinds of voyages. These are problems both in the collection and presentation of



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historical statistics and in the comparability of different kinds of travels within or across borders and of greatly varying distances. The Iberian statistics only count transoceanic emigrants, which usually made up over 90 percent of all emigrants. The Italian numbers include all migrants, both transoceanic and within Europe. I chose to use these numbers in part because I had access a longer time series than for the transoceanic numbers, and in part because the higher numbers made the chart a bit more legible. Had I plotted only the transatlantic Italians, the line would have been harder to distinguish from the other three, except that it was lower in the 1870s and early 1880s and had two exceptionally high peaks around 1906 and 1913. Neither the transatlantic nor the total Italian numbers, however, were directly comparable to the Chinese numbers in terms of distance and cost of voyage. The journeys from north China to Manchuria were relatively short voyages within a single nation, probably comparable to intra-European migrations in terms of expense but longer in terms of time because of the poorer infrastructure. The voyages of southern Chinese to Southeast Asia were longer than most intra-European voyages but shorter than the transatlantic voyages. And both emigrant regions also sent migrants to other parts of China, sometimes at distances longer and more costly than the journeys abroad and to Manchuria. I do not have a good estimate of rates for intra-Chinese voyages (although this should be possible by looking at Chinese customs reports for domestic passenger traffic) but I suspect they were higher than Iberian and lower than the Italian intra-European voyages. Rather than a problem, perhaps we can treat issues of units and scale as a methodological premise. The larger scales of comparison show the broad processes that have shaped developments over larger regions. As we move down in scale, we find specific historical conjunctions of these broader forces and local events that create increasingly divergent histories. With this increased variation, the choices of unit and grouping will become more critical. The history of one village may not at all look like the history of the neighbouring village, even though both are counted in the overall statistics that show that residents of Guangdong Province were much more likely to travel overseas than those from Zhejiang. This ­variation ultimately reaches the point of absolute and irreconcilable difference at the smallest scale of the choices of sister who decided to stay home and the sister who travelled 5000 miles. Both of these choices, however, and the economic and personal circumstances that resulted from these choices, were ultimately made possible by the broader forces that come into focus most clearly at the largest scales.

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Return rates (return migrants as a proportion of emigrants) are a good way to approach these variations of scale. Return rates are less hampered than outward rates with ambiguities in the units of comparison because they are generated by comparing outward and return streams within the same flow. Return rates rarely have the clear long-term trends of emigration rates, but the short-term cycles correspond very well to business cycles. When employment abroad is good, return rates are low; when employment prospects are poor, return rates are high. Average return rates over several decades are linked to specific conditions such as family structure, occupation, cost of voyage, and so on. But a comparison of return cycles can show the extent to which migrant streams were embedded in common economic forces that crossed the variations in average rates. A comparison of the return cycles of Chinese (from all destinations), Indian (from all destinations) and of European (from the United States) migrants shows a convergence from the 1870s to 1930s (see Figure 5). In the 1870s and 1880s, the return rates were very diverse. By the 1890s they began to converge, not only in their timing but, even more surprisingly, in their absolute proportions. The economic conditions shaping migration were converging around the world (although Manchurian migration, shown in Figure 6, corresponds much less well for reasons discussed below). When we compare these findings to those of Figure 1 (and to similar trends of concentration within Asia for Indian emigrants) we find that global migration became much more segregated in its destinations even as it became more integrated in terms of short-term cycles and their economic context. If we narrow this comparison to more specific flows, however, the similarities start to dissipate. Chinese return rates from Singapore, Manila and Bangkok show much less convergence than do the large global flows (see Figure 5). The return rates of Spaniards, Swedes, Chinese from Singapore and Chinese from Manchuria are even more disparate (see Figure 6). The migrant flows compared in Figure 6 are admittedly eclectic. To some degree, this is a limitation of readily available data. But almost any comparison at these smaller levels would be equally unimpressive in the amount of correspondence. However much the broad trends of migration were increasingly embedded in common global conditions, specific flows still had their own histories at specific nexuses of these conditions. The diverse trajectories shown in Figure 6 allow us to suggest what those specific histories might look like. For example, the spike in Spanish return rates at the turn of the century can probably be attributed to the Cuban revolution, although the



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200

279

Chinese from Abroad

180 160 140

Indians from Abroad Europeans from the United States

Percent

120 100 80 60 40 20 0 1870 1874 1878 1882 1886 1890 1894 1898 1902 1906 1910 1914 1918 1922 1926 1930 1934 1938

Figure 4. Return rates of emigrant flows, 1870–1938 300 Singapore

Manila

Bangkok

250

Percent

200 150 100 50 0 1877 1881 1885 1889 1893 1897 1901 1905 1909 1913 1917 1921 1925 1929 1933 1937

Figure 5. Chinese returns from Singapore, Manila and Bangkok

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300 250

To China from Singapore To Spain from Abroad

To North China from Manchuria To Sweden from Abroad

Percent

200 150 100 50 0 1881 1885 1889 1893 1897 1901 1905 1909 1913 1917 1921 1925 1929 1933 1937

Figure 6. Return rates of diverse migrant flows, 1881–1938

lack of response to the global economic crisis of 1907 (as is also the case for Manchuria) is less easy to explain. In Manchuria, the great fluctuations around 1895 were surly an effect of the Sino-Japanese War, and those around 1905 a result of the Russo-Japanese War and competition from South African recruiters in North China (although both of these fail to explain the huge spike of returns in 1901). After 1908 Manchurian cycles were in greater synchronization with the other flows shown in Figures 4 and 6, although usually at a one year lag and with less volatility. This correspondence weakens in the Great Depression, when the Japanese continued pumping money into Manchuria. Manchurian return rates did not spike nearly so much as other flows, and immigration reached new peaks in the late 1930s. Swedish return rates, in comparison, seem to be following an entirely different logic than the other three. The Swedes are an example of a large flow that has so far received little attention in this analysis, that of ­north-western Europeans. Migration from this area grew more dramatically than anywhere in the world in the 1840s and 1850s and peaked in the 1880s, generally with lower return rates and higher proportions of women than migrations in other places and times. However, north-west Europe was not immune from the trends of global history. Migration from that region also participated in the global burst after the 1890s, reaching a secondary peak in the early 1900s, often with more returns and less



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women than before (as was certainly the case for southern and eastern Europeans in comparison to north western Europeans). However, even then, this Swedish return migration followed a slightly different dynamic than other flows. The variations between different parts of Europe point towards broader regional differences between transatlantic migration and Chinese emigration abroad. Most of the origin regions of Chinese emigration in the 1930s were the same as those in the 1850s. Specific villages and counties may have shifted and mass migration from Hainan was relatively new after the 1880s, but the bulk of emigration still departed from the hinterlands of the three main emigration ports. In Europe, on the other hand, waves of migration swept dramatically across the continent from northwest to south eastern Europe from the 1840s to 1910s. Flows from specific regions could rise and fall dramatically in the space of five or ten years. These constantly shifting flows correlated with the spread of industrialization in Europe, and the convergence of wages between the Americas and northern Europe, which helped to reduce migrations from the north.14 In Asia, on the other hand, there is no evidence that wages ever converged between Southeast Asia and either China or India, despite the relocation of millions of labourers.15 Most migrants continued to travel from rural areas to rural areas, and occupations abroad also remained relatively stagnant without the transition from agriculture to industry, finance, and urban sectors seen in the Atlantic. Despite a gradual concentration over time into retail and middleman activities in Southeast Asia, the agricultural, mining, transportation and artisan jobs that occupied migrants in the 1850s still predominated in the 1920s.16 Transoceanic migration around the world may have been embedded in a common global economy, but each region was inserted into that economy differently. But perhaps the biggest difference between Chinese and European migration (or between European and all of the other important global

14 John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington, 1985); J.D. Gould, “European Inter-Continental Emigration: The Role of ‘Diffusion’ and ‘Feedback’ ”, European Journal of Economic History 9 (1980): 267–316; Hatton and Williamson, Age of Mass Migration; Jose C. Moya, “A Continent of Immigrants: Postcolonial Shifts in the Western Hemisphere”, Hispanic American Historical Review 86 (2006), 1–28; Walter Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington, 1992). 15 Hatton and Williamson, Global Migration, 146–147. 16 McKeown, “From Opium Farmer to Astronaut”; Anthony Reid, “South-East Asian Population History and the Colonial Impact”, in Asian Population History, ed. Ts’ui-jung Liu (Oxford, 2001), 55–59.

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migrations) is the long-term legacy over generations. About 11 million ­Chinese could be found outside of China in the early 1950s, and 27 million in the early 1980s.17 This was similar to the European-descended population of Canada alone (although growing more quickly than the Canadians). The total number of descendants of European migrants in the 1950s exceeded 250 million (while Indians amounted to only 4.6 million).18 Whatever the similarities in actual numbers and density of emigration, the genetic, political and social impact of European emigrants has dwarfed that of other migrants. Several factors have contributed to these legacies, including differences in environments, occupations and social structures at the destinations, rates of return and female migration, and the wealth and power of the Europeans’ home nations. As shown in the next section, Chinese and Indian women were much less likely to emigrate than Europeans. Chinese return rates also averaged over 70 percent. Although European return rates crept up to the 60 percent range by the early twentieth century, the higher rates of settlement in the early years of migration are much more significant in producing the generations of descendants that made up the ethnic legacy. A variety of factors may have produced these differences, including different family structures, greater willingness of Asians to marry native women, the cost of return voyages in both time and money, and the fact that most Asian migrants engaged in rural labour on tropical frontiers. Most Europeans migrated to temperate frontiers, where small farms and even the new cities of the Americas provided a much better context for raising a family than did tropical plantation and mine work. Rural and urban retailing in the tropics, on the other hand, did provide a good context for families, but this did not provide a steady source of employment for large numbers of Chinese until the early 20th century, after which numbers of female migrants did begin to rise. The exclusion of Chinese from the temperate frontiers was not mere coincidence, but a product of power. Nearly all Asian emigrants other than those to Manchuria moved either to tropical frontiers or to places with well established native or colonial states. European emigrants, on the other hand, almost always became the powerholders in the places that they 17 Dudley Poston, Jr. and Mei-Yu Yu, “The Distribution of the Overseas Chinese in the Contemporary World”, International Migration Review 24 (1990), 480–508; Qiu, Cong shijie kan Huaren. 18 Jose Moya and Adam McKeown, “Global Migration in the Long Twentieth Century”, in Essays on Twentieth Century History, ed. Michael Adas (Philadelphia, 2010), 24–25.



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settled, and displaced the bulk of the natives on the temperate frontiers. The erection of anti-Chinese laws and immigration barriers in the white settler nations around the world helped keep Chinese migration out of the temperate areas and restricted to the tropics. Moreover, the locally born children of Chinese migrants, whether born of Chinese or local spouses, often identified with the dominant societies and were counted as local Vietnamese or Thai. Europeans might become Americans, Argentinians or Australians, but their European still remained obvious. Manchuria supplies an example of how the long-term legacy of Chinese emigration looks different on a temperate frontier with substantial urbanization, where the natives were almost entirely displaced and where, despite interludes of Russian and Japanese intervention, Chinese ultimately maintained political control (not least because they overwhelmed the place with migrants). Nearly 50 million Chinese resided in Manchuria by 1953, over four and a half times the number that could be found abroad. On the other hand, both the United States and Manchuria started with populations of about 6 million in 1800 and received similar numbers of migrants over the next 140 years, yet this produced a much larger population of 134 million people of European descent in the United States by 1955. The differences must be explained by the facts that the mass migrations to Manchuria began later, average return rates were higher (about 65 percent) and female migration rates were low (10–15 percent, even into the 1930s).19 Any complete analysis of comparative global migration patterns and their relation to the world economy and regional differences would have to expand the scale of analysis to include the entwined processes of domestic migration, urbanization and military mobility. Merely looking at transoceanic migrations only addresses one particular dimension of global processes, because the oceans around the world were all relatively well-connected through European- and Japanese-dominated shipping, and frontier plantation zones were closely connected to the industrial core. Better knowledge of the densities and destinations of overland and domestic migrations, in areas where infrastructure and economies varied greatly, is necessary to better understand the causes of migration

19 On Manchurian migrations, see Gottschang and Lary, Swallows and Settlers; Robert H.G. Lee, The Manchurian Frontier in Ch’ing History (Cambridge, Mass., 1970); James Reardon-Anderson, Reluctant Pioneers: China’s Expansion Northward, 1644–1937 (Stanford, 2005).

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and to understand the varieties of integration and differentiation in the modern world. Migration of Chinese Women Chinese had one of the lowest rates of female emigration in the world. Only 16 percent of all migrants from Hong Kong from 1858 to 1939 were women, and annual rates were always lower than this until 1923 when the proportion of women began to increase rapidly (see Figure 7). This clearly distinguishes Chinese from the major European flows, most of which averaged around 35–40 percent women, although proportions of women from south eastern Europe were sometimes much lower (and scattered evidence suggest that the migration of women from India was also as low or lower than the Chinese). Like the cycles of return migration, however, proportions of female migration around the world converged over time. But this happened at a much later date than for return migration. It also happened at a time, after the First World War, when some of the other patterns of specific migration streams were growing increasingly divergent and subject to various forms migration control. As with the preceding analysis of return migration, a comparative analysis of female migration can help to identify the existence and timing of broad forces, regional and local peculiarities, and their interaction. 300000 250000

Men

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Figure 7. Male and female emigrants from Hong Kong, 1858–1939



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The structure of the Chinese family provides a possible explanation for the overall low rates of Chinese women. As in many parts of southern and eastern Europe, the ideal family in China was of multigenerational ­patriarchal stem family. The preservation of this lineage through time, with property and land intact, was often a higher priority that the coresidence of spouses and children. Young men were frequently sent to cities and abroad to make money that would ultimately be used for the benefit of maintaining the family, while women stayed at home to take care of the households, farms, children and old people. This strategy could continue for generations. When men did establish new families abroad they were often with second wives, both locally born and brought over from China. In contrast, north-western Europeans generally lived in small nuclear households. Women from this region were more likely to migrate as part of family relocation or as young single women looking for work.20 As with return rates, however, the picture becomes more complicated when we disaggregate the numbers into smaller streams, and when we look at changes over time. For example, the proportions of women migrating to Singapore from different ports in south China varied significantly. Women from Hong Kong arrived at over twice the rate of women from other ports (see Figure 8). Numbers of Hainanese women, on the other hand, were negligible until the 1920s. The proportion of Cantonese women to Singapore was still significantly lower than most European flows, remaining under 20 percent until the 1920s. There was indeed a general difference between Chinese and most Europeans that could plausibly be rooted in family structure. But appeals to the patriarchal stem family still cannot explain why the proportion of women should vary from flow to flow. The explanation of these varying rates does not lie in variations between the different dialect groups. Hakka women were sometimes thought to 20 Chen Ta, Emigrant Communities in South China (New York, 1940), 118–45; Donna Gabaccia, “Women of the Mass Migrations: From Minority to Majority, 1820–1930”, in European Migrants, Local and Global Perspectives, eds. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (Boston, 1996), 115–140; Sucheta Mazumdar, “What Happened to the Women? Chinese and Indian Male Migration to the United States in Global Perspective”, in Asian American and Pacific Islander Women; A Historical Anthology, eds. Shirley Hune and Gail Nomura (New York, 2003), 58–74; Adam McKeown, “Transnational Chinese Families and Chinese Exclusion, 1875–1943”, Journal of American Ethnic History 18 (1999): 73–110; Leslie Page Moch, “Connecting Migration and World History, 1840–1940: Chinese Family Systems and Gender”, International Review of Social History 52 (2007), 97–104; Pei Ying, “Huaqiao hunyin jiating xingtai chutan” [The Patterns of marriage and family of overseas Chinese] Huaqiao Huaren Lishi Yanjiu (Spring, 1994), 41–45.

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40 35 30

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Figure 8. Women as a proportion of Chinese migration to Singapore, 1887–1928

be more likely to migrate than other Chinese women, because of their unbound feet, greater participation in the household economy, reputation for hard work, migratory heritage within China, and relatively frequent conversion to Christianity.21 But most Hakkas to Singapore emigrated through Shantou, which had much lower rates of female emigration than Hong Kong. More to the point, the high rates of Cantonese women were specific to Singapore. Proportions of Cantonese women to other destinations were similar or even lower than those of non-Cantonese migrants to Singapore (see Figure 9). Thus, the explanation of variations in female migration has to be sought in specific migrant circuits. Rather than looking at conditions only in the region of origin or destination to explain differences in female migration, we have to look at the historical circumstances specific to each flow. This requires greater attention to the question of why Chinese women migrated (or not). Did they migrate for reasons similar to men, in search of work and high wages? Were they coerced into migrating? Or did they mostly migrate as wives, daughters and wives-to-be, to re-join or create families? The reasons varied from case to case, and also over time.

21 Nicole Constable, ed., Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad (Seattle, 1996); Luo Xianglin, Kejia yanjiu daolun [Research on Hakkas] (Taibei, 1981).



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For example, the high number of Cantonese women travelling to Singapore may be due to the silk weaving women of Shunde County. These women tended to remain single all of their lives, living together in allfemale communal homes and continuing to contribute economically to their natal families. Many migrated to Singapore for employment, sending money back home much like male sons did. Few are known to have migrated elsewhere.22 The negligible rates of Hainanese migration, on the other hand, may be due to the relative lateness of the establishment of that migration stream. This argument, however, implies that females emigrated largely for the sake of family cohabitation, not departing until men had established themselves well enough to support the migration of wives and daughters. But relatively high rates of female migration in the earlier years of migration to the Americas remind us that we must not take this explanation for granted. These high rates are a combination both of attempts to recruit women for plantations in Surinam and relatively high rates of female migration to San Francisco, many of whom may have 50 45

Singapore

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9 90 ‒9 4 18 95 ‒9 9 19 00 ‒0 4 19 05 ‒0 9 19 10 ‒1 4 19 15 ‒1 9 19 20 ‒2 4 19 25 ‒2 9 19 30 ‒3 4 19 35 ‒3 9

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Figure 9. Women as a proportion of migrants from Hong Kong to various ­destinations, 1860–1939

22 Janice Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860–1930 (Stanford, 1989); Marjorie Topley, “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung”, in Studies in Chinese Society, ed. Arthur Wolf (Stanford, 1978), 247–268.

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migrated to work as prostitutes. Prostitution in both California and Singapore seems to have declined after the 1870s. The reasons are unclear, but may have something to do with attempts by Chinese elites and American officials to limit their emigration from Hong Kong. The imposition of exclusionary laws in the United States and Australia also had an effect on rates of female migration, although not necessarily in the direction predicted by the common assumption that exclusionary laws stopped the immigration of women. In both cases, the proportion of women actually grew as exclusionary measures took hold. In the United States, the proportion of women rose from about 2 percent of all arrivals in 1881 (the year before exclusion) to 5 percent in the late 1880s, and 14 percent in 1889, the highest proportion of any year until the 1920s. This is because the exclusion laws were directed at excluding male labourers, and women could still migrate under the conditions under which many if not most had migrated in the 1870s, as spouses and daughters. A similar bump in female migration to Australia happened in 1905–09, after the establishment (1901) and strengthening (1905) of the dictation test to keep out Chinese. Over time, however, female migration returned to pre­exclusion rates or less. But even then, female migration to North America was never as low as that to Latin America. In this context, it is helpful to think of female migration in terms of the cost of migration. The more expensive the journey, the less likely that families would spend resources to send women abroad, whether as family members or wage earners. Exclusion laws made migration to North America and Australia very expensive. But the great distance made travel to the Caribbean and South America equally ­expensive.23 As is obvious from all these cases, the variations and possible explanations are numerous and complicated, fully justifying the production of specialized monographs on particular streams. But such monographs will always be richer if written with awareness of broader patterns and an eye towards helping to understand some of the larger puzzles of migration. In the case of female migration, one of the big puzzles is the broad similarities in trends over time. After some variation in the 1860s and 1870s, all of the Chinese flows in Figures 8 and 9 settled on relatively stable proportions of women for three to four decades, which then began to grow in the 1910s and 20s, and then boomed in the 1930s, reaching nearly

23 Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago and Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago, 2001).



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50 ­percent for Cantonese migrants to Singapore. Almost identical trends can be found for proportions of European women to the United States, although the slope for the 1920s and 1930s is not quite so steep because European women started with higher numbers and then topped out at about 50 or 60 percent (see Figure 10).24 As had happened with return rates after the 1890s, Chinese women migrated at rates more similar to Europeans after the 1920s. Did the Chinese family suddenly dissolve and lose its constraining effects on female migration in the 1920s and 1930s? There is little evidence that rural Chinese families changed fundamentally in this period, although footbinding was in rapid decline, while female education was on the rise. But the rise in female migration was global, transcending the effects of local changes in China. If the broad picture remains a puzzle, the overall trends can help us help us decide where to look for an explanation. For example, the Depression of the 1930s looks like an immediate candidate for understanding shifts in female migration, but more careful examination suggests that we have to look earlier. The Depression stifled male migration for employment, with the effects of making female migration appear proportionally larger and of suppressing the viability of migration as a means of supporting transnational stem families. This latter effect also helped increase the number of women, as families increasingly made choices to settle abroad or at home as smaller, nuclear units. This explanation, however, assumes that the bulk of female migration was for the purpose of family ­reunification. It falls short for at least three reasons: first, the global rise in female migration began in the 1910s and 20s, before the Depression; second, both male and female Chinese migration were booming again in the late 1930s; and third, Chinese women also returned to China at higher rates that were more similar to men after the 1920s. The depression surely had some effect on female migration. But these effects built on changes that had begun in the 1910s, changes that may well have had been grounded in the changing nature of female migration. Overall, women made up a lower proportion of migrants returning to Hong Kong than departing (see Figure 11). When they went abroad they were more likely to stay. This suggests that female migration was part of the process either of relocating families or establishing bi-nuclear

24 See also Katharine Donato, Joseph Alexander, Donna Gabaccia and Johanna Leinonen, “Variations in the Gender Composition of Immigrant Populations: How They Matter,” International Migration Review 45 (2011): 495–526.

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Ireland

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Italy

Russia

Hong Kong

France

Percent

50 40 30 20 10

18 20 18 ‒24 25 18 ‒29 30 18 ‒34 35 18 ‒39 40 18 ‒44 45 18 ‒49 50 18 ‒54 55 18 ‒59 60 18 ‒64 65 18 ‒69 70 18 ‒74 75 18 ‒79 80 18 ‒84 85 18 ‒89 90 18 ‒94 95 19 ‒99 00 19 ‒04 05 ‒ 19 09 10 19 ‒14 1 19 5‒19 20 19 ‒24 25 19 ‒29 30 19 ‒34 35 ‒3 9

0

Note: Rates for European countries are only to the United States. Rates for Hong Kong are to all destinations.

Figure 10. Women as a proportion of total migrants from Europe and Hong Kong, 1820–1939

households. But beginning in the 1910s, the proportion of women returning increasingly resembled the outbound proportion. This suggests that women increasingly migrated according to the same employment and business cycles as men, whether to work in family businesses or to find their own employment. The annual changes in female migration confirm this impression. Until the 1890s, annual numbers of female and male migrants rose and fell in much different directions and proportions. After 1900, female rates remained more volatile than male migration but were more likely to change in the same direction. In other words, women increasingly behaved like male migrants. This appears to have been true for female migrants around the world, regardless of family structure. But this argument remains a hypothesis until supported by specific research. Putting Migration in World History Chinese migration was part of the global wave of mass migration from the 1840s to 1930s. It cannot be neatly contained within categories of indenture, sojourning and response to famine and overpopulation. It was part of the same processes that shaped migration around the world. Starting from this assumption of commonality, we can better specify the differences between migrant flows and understand them as variations on



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45 40 35

Departing from Hong Kong Returning to Hong Kong

Percent

30 25 20 15 10 5

18 6 18 1 64 18 67 18 70 18 73 18 76 18 79 18 82 18 85 18 88 18 9 18 1 94 18 97 19 00 19 03 19 06 19 09 19 12 19 15 19 18 19 2 19 1 24 19 27 19 30 19 33 19 36 19 39

0

Figure 11. Women as a proportion of migrants to and from Hong Kong, 1861–1939

common processes. We can also learn when not to generalize the experiences of certain (usually transatlantic) migrants as typical of all modern ­migrations. We find that Chinese did differ from many other migrations in the low proportion of women, the lack of wage convergence, the relative stability of sending regions over long periods of time and a relatively low number of descendants compared to European migrants. When looked at as trends over time, however, cycles of Chinese return and female migration became increasingly similar to those of other migrants around the world, suggesting that even these differences were embedded in common global processes. At the same time, the destinations of Chinese were increasingly limited to Asia. The segregated regions of Asian migration were also areas with different rates of economic development than the Atlantic, where wages were stagnant, urbanization scarce, and migrant origins and occupations changed relatively little. Yet this economic divergence was embedded within a global economy that produced increasingly similar cycles of migration around the world. Variations increase as the scale of analysis grows smaller, both across and within larger flows. To some extent this is an artefact of different levels of generalization. For example, the observation that all migrants form associations that played important roles both in adaptation abroad and in maintaining connections to home is entirely compatible with the fact that the form, influence, activities, scope and intensity of such associations has

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varied from group to group and place to place.25 Yet the different scales can also draw attention to entirely different processes that are often not apparent in the comparison of specific case studies. This is especially true when we plot trends over time—such as the fact that, at the turn of the twentieth century, migrant associations grew increasingly politicized and focused on the creation of common “diasporic” and nationalist identities (or, the flip side, to take up explicitly assimilationist ideologies). The specific timings and forms of this awareness always varied, but few migrants groups escaped the pressures of a consolidating international system. By bringing global patterns into our understanding of migration history, we can better situate our case studies so as to understand the causes and effects of migration. Ultimately, a better understanding of global migration patterns will help to create better understanding of world history that do not project European models as global templates. If Chinese migration followed many of the same demographic trends as other migrations around the world, we must rethink causes of migration that were developed through the study of Atlantic migrations. Similarly, a better sense how some differences disappeared over time and others became more pronounced will produce insights not only into how the world is integrated over time, but also into how it came to be differentiated into East and West, rich and poor, developed and developing.

25 Jose C. Moya, “Immigrants and Associations: A Global and Historical Perspective”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 31 (2005): 833–864.

Japan, Labour Migration, and the Global Order of Difference Vera Mackie Introduction In this chapter, I will situate Japan in the global flows of labour migration. While the focus will largely be on migration patterns in recent decades, it will first be necessary to review earlier patterns of mobility which have had a role in shaping current routes and modes of migration. I use two concepts to frame my discussion: Foucault’s concept of “biopower” and an adaptation of Connell’s concept of the “global gender order”, which I will reframe as “the global order of difference”. Biopower refers to the ways in which governments manage populations as resources. Individuals are mobilized by the state as workers, as citizens, and as family members responsible for the reproduction of the population.1 The concept of biopower is more expansive than the Marxist concept of “labour power”, for it can include the state’s management of sexuality and reproduction as well as labour in the more narrow sense. It can also be distinguished from “human capital”—those skills and attributes which are meaningful to employers in the extraction of surplus value, and to individuals in shaping their working lives. Biopolitical management has traditionally been one of the tasks of national governments, but in the current age of economic globalization biopolitics also crosses national boundaries. Global corporations attempt to maximize profits through accessing cheaper labour power (“flexible bodies for flexible accumulation”);2 workers attempt to maximize their income through crossing national borders; and nation-states attempt to regulate these flows through border controls.3

1  Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1980), 138–145; Tony Schirato and Jen Webb, Understanding Globalization (London, 2003), 135. 2 Philip Hancock, Bill Hughes, Elizabeth Jagger, Kevin Paterson, Rachel Russell, Emmanuel Tulle-Winton, and Melissa Tyler, The Body, Culture and Society: An Introduction (Buckingham, 2000), 1. 3 Vera Mackie and Carolyn Stevens, “Globalisation and Body Politics”, Asian Studies Review 33, no. 3 (September 2009): 260.

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In twenty-first century Japan, border control interacts with demography, the labour market, and economic relationships with other countries in the region. Japan faces a rapidly aging population, until recently the highest life expectancy in the world, a birthrate well below replacement level, and a shrinking population. Smaller families find it difficult to provide primary care for the sick, the elderly and those with disabilities, and the welfare system is stretched to the limit. Japanese people are increasingly unwilling to undertake work regarded as “manual labour” or “unskilled labour”, so that biopower is increasingly linked to migration. I have referred to these processes elsewhere as “managing borders and managing bodies”.4 In this context, we also need to reconsider the concept of “labour” itself. Contemporary forms of labour migration to Japan include workers in sectors traditionally recognized as “productive labour”, such as manufacturing. Labour migrants are also, however, engaged in new forms of work for which the terminology is constantly evolving. They are increasingly engaged in work which does not involve the production of a tangible, physical commodity which can be exchanged. Or, to put it slightly differently, the commodity is the labour which produces mental, emotional or physical wellbeing. The most pressing need in contemporary Japan is for “caring labour”, forms of work which attend to the bodily needs of the aged and infirm.5 4 Vera Mackie, “Managing Borders and Managing Bodies in Contemporary Japan”, Journal of the Asia-Pacific Economy 15 no. 1 (February 2010): 71. Until 2012, Japan had the highest life expectancy rates in the world, but has recently been overtaken by Hong Kong, in the wake of Japan’s compound earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of 11 March 2011. 5 Writers from different theoretical frameworks refer variously to emotional labour, intimate labour, caring labour, affective labour, reproductive labour and immaterial labour. Reproductive labour, in Marxist terms, is all of the work which goes into the reproduction of labour power. The term is often ambiguous, however, referring variously to social reproduction, the reproduction of labour power, and biological reproduction. I prefer to reserve the term “reproductive labour” solely for biological reproduction. The term immaterial labour eloquently captures the shift from industrial to post-industrial capitalism, but does not capture the nuances of work which still often includes an element of embodiment. Emotional labour refers to such occupations as flight attendants or bartenders, who are expected to tend to the emotional wellbeing of their clients. This intersects with intimate labour, a broader category of work which involves face-to-face contact. I use the terms “caring labour”/“care work” for those occupations which literally involve tending to the bodily needs of others. “Care work” can include both bodily care and emotional care. Needless to say, there will often be a gap in perception between the providers and the receivers of such care. For a survey of the relevant terminology, see Vera Mackie, “Biopolitics and Border Crossing: Care Provision in Contemporary Japan”, unpublished paper presented at the Conference on Shifting Boundaries of Care Provision in Asia: Policy and Practice Changes, National University of Singapore (March 2011).

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 295 The concept of the “global gender order” captures the insight that gender relations are shaped by structures which transcend the level of the nation-state.6 This involves connections between different local gender orders and with gender orders which transcend the scale of any one nationstate. In order to understand labour migration patterns it is necessary to come to terms with gendered structures in both sending and receiving countries. Needless to say, gender also interacts with other dimensions of difference, including class, caste, ethnicity and racialized positioning. Furthermore, the migration experience has “important implications for class production and reproduction at both ends of the migration stream”.7 The global gender order and its intersections with other dimensions of difference will shape my discussion of patterns of labour migration centring on Japan. If we were to focus on socio-economic structures, we might call this “the global order of inequality”; if we were to focus on the cultural constructions of difference which accompany inequalities, then “the global order of difference” might be an appropriate label. Ultimately, the global order of difference is also connected with culture, emotion and affect, as particular attitudes become associated with members of groups whose occupations have been gendered, classed and ethnicized. Current forms of transnational mobility also, however, have a history. Before the invention of the term “globalization”, people moved around the globe as traders, colonizers, missionaries, soldiers and their followers, slaves, or workers of varying degrees of freedom.8 An understanding of historical patterns of mobility in East Asia can assist in understanding contemporary forms and routes of mobility. Japan Enters the Global Flow of Labour Migration Between the 1630s and the 1850s, Japan was closed to most outside contact due to fear of the encroachment of Christian missionaries and European imperialists. Limited trade was carried out with the mediation of Dutch traders. By the 1850s, such isolation was difficult to sustain, and unequal treaties were enforced by the US and major European powers. Japan then 6 Raewyn Connell, Gender in World Perspective (Cambridge, 2009), 127. 7 Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, Cristina Blanc-Szanton, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration”, Anthropological Quarterly 68, no. 1 (January 1995): 48–63. 8 Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in contact: World migrations in the second millennium (Durham, 2002), passim.

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embarked on a program of modernization and industrialization, initially based on the revenue from a land tax. As the tax put pressure on rural areas, this was one impetus for emigration. Gender also came into play as some young men emigrated to escape conscription, and young women emigrated as sex workers and as members of farming families. There were also small numbers of European and North American immigrant sojourners in Japan: diplomats, traders, missionaries, teachers, engineers, journalists and expert consultants. The first emigrants moved to Hawai‘i as early as 1868. There was a conjunction between rural poverty in Japan and the need for plantation labour in Hawai‘i.9 From this time, the concept of “dekasegi”, or labour migration, could apply to both internal and overseas migration.10 The Hawai‘ian government initially required that no more than 25 percent of immigrants be women; and those women who did come to Hawai‘i were generally wives or daughters of male immigrants. By the 1930s, however, the sex ratio was closer to parity, with 75,008 Japanese males and 64,623 Japanese females resident in Hawai‘i. An estimated 231,206 Japanese travelled to Hawai‘i between 1868 and 1929.11 The situation of these emigrants changed in 1898 when Hawai‘i (previously known as the Sandwich Islands) became a US protectorate and thus subject to US regulations on border control. Descendants of different waves of emigration from Japan are the basis of the Japanese-American community in present-day Hawai‘i. From the 1880s to 1894, the Japanese government itself was the major labour broker, until the Emigration Protection Ordinance recognized private labour brokers. Japanese emigrants also started to migrate to the West Coast of the USA and Canada from the 1880s, where they worked in agriculture, construction, or small businesses such as laundries. Until large numbers of women started to immigrate, paid domestic labour was often carried out by the men of the Japanese and Chinese communities, and the occupation was thus more strongly racialized than gendered. The “racial division of reproductive labour” took different forms in different parts of 9 Harumi Befu, “Globalization as Human Dispersal: From the Perspective of Japan”, in Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan, ed. Jerry Eades, Tom Gill and Harumi Befu (Melbourne, 2000), 21. 10 O’Brien and Fugita translate “dekasegi” as “sojourner”. The literal meaning is “to go somewhere in order to earn money,” and so could be used for both internal labour migration or overseas labour migration. David J. O’Brien and Stephen S. Fugita, The Japanese American Experience (Bloomington, 1991), 11. 11  Alan Takeo Moriyama, Imingaisha: Japanese Emigration Companies and Hawaii (Honolulu, 1985), xvii; 17.

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 297 the US, with domestic work being carried out by African Americans in the South, Mexicans in the Southwest, and Japanese and Chinese in Hawai‘i and on the West Coast.12 After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Japanese immigrants came to take the place of the Chinese, until they, too were excluded in the 1920s.13 Under the so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement”, the Japanese government only issued passports for family members of earlier migrants. This led to the practice of contracting a marriage from afar with a woman in the homeland who would then be able to enter the US (as a so-called “picture bride”). The possibility of marriage was restricted in other border control regimes which would not allow the entry of wives and families, or by laws which prevented marriage or sexual relations between members of different racial(ized) groups. The possibility of migration was also shaped by discourses of racialization as the Anglophone settler societies passed laws explicitly restricting immigration from Asia. The changing fortunes of Japanese and Chinese labour migrants illustrate the contradictions of state policies on biopower, and illustrate why it is necessary to consider labour migration alongside the regulation of marriage and reproduction. Labour migrants from Japan and China were seen as desirable while discourses of racialization made it seem “natural” that they could be exploited as cheap labour. These very same discourses of racialization, however, led to anxiety about the reproduction of these communities and anxiety about their mixing with the “white” majority population. These anxieties then led to the exclusion of Asian immigrants. A total of 244,334 Japanese emigrated to Latin America from the turn of the century to 1945. Their descendants form the present-day communities of people of Japanese descent (Nikkeijin) in such places as Brazil and Peru.14 It is largely these communities which sent workers to Japan from the 1980s to the 2010s under a special visa category for those with Japanese ancestry. Japanese emigrated to the colonies which would become the federated nation of Australia from the late nineteenth century. They worked as pearl divers, plantation workers and laundry workers. Restriction of immigration from Asian countries was an issue in each of the separate Australian 12 Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor”, Signs 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1992): 1–43. 13 O’Brien and Fugita, The Japanese American Experience, 12–16. 14 Befu, “Globalization as Human Dispersal”, 21.

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colonies, but Japanese workers were allowed to enter in specific industries. They were prohibited from bringing in family members, resulting in a largely male immigrant population from Japan, and hindering the formation of the kinds of Japanese communities found in Hawai‘i and the Americas. Some formed liaisons with indigenous women in Northern Australia, and a very small number of Japanese men married (white) Australian women.15 After Federation in 1901, one of the earliest acts of the new Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act, also known as the “White Australia Policy”. Nevertheless, some Japanese business people resided in Australia as sojourners up to the 1930s.16 Japanese residents (and indigenous partners and children) were interned in Australia during the Second World War. Some were “returned” to Japan at the end of the War. Japanese traders gradually set up shop in Korea, China and Southeast Asia. One of the first forms of emigration was of sex workers (known as “Karayuki-san”) and their procurers. The name “Karayuki-san” literally means “going to China” (Kara [China] + yuki [to go] + san [title]). These women often travelled on contracts of indenture, in the form of loans to their families which would take the women some years to work off, if at all. Many argue that much of the economic activity of Japanese traders in Southeast Asia was built on the profits extracted from the sexual labour of these women. Over 300,000 Japanese were working overseas in 1906, with an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 women engaged in prostitution.17 Such women were found throughout Southeast Asia, on the West coast of the USA, in Australia, and even as far afield as Madagascar. Some were able to return to Japan while others lived out their days overseas.18

15 Ailsa G. Thomson Zainu’ddin, “Rose Inagaki: ‘Is it a Crime to Marry a Foreigner?’ ”, in Double Time: Women in Victoria—150 Years, ed. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly, (Ringwood, 1985), 335–343; Yuriko Nagata, Unwanted Aliens: Japanese Internment in Australia (Santa Lucia, 1996), 29; 51–57. 16 Pam Oliver, “Japanese Immigrant Merchants and the Japanese Trading Company Network in Sydney, 1880s to 1941”, in Changing Histories: Australia and Japan, ed. Paul Jones and Pam Oliver, (Clayton, 2001), 1–25; Pam Oliver, “Japanese Relationships in White Australia: The Sydney Experience to 1941”, History Australia 4, no. 1 (2007): 1–20. 17 Yuriko Nagata, “The Japanese in Torres Strait”, in Navigating Boundaries: The Asian Diaspora in Torres Strait, ed. Anna Shnukal, Guy Ramsay and Yuriko Nagata (Canberra, 2004), 155. 18 D.C.S. Sissons, “Karayuki-san: Japanese Prostitutes in Australia 1877–1916”, Historical Studies 17, no. 68 (1977): 323–341 and 17, no. 69 (1977): 474–488; James Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore 1870–1940 (Oxford, 1993); Bill Mihalopoulos, “The Making of Prostitutes: The Karayuki-san”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 25, no. 1

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 299 From the earliest days of labour emigration from Japan there were gendered patterns, depending on the interaction between conditions in rural Japan, the labour markets of receiving countries, the border control regimes of receiving countries, and the interaction of class structures, gender orders and regimes of racialization. Intercolonial Mobilities The boundaries of the Japanese nation-state expanded from the 1870s—first with the incorporation of the northern territories of Ezo (present-day Hokkaidô) and the southern kingdom of Ryûkyû (present-day Okinawa). This was the impetus for the “internal” migration of Japanese settlers to these territories. Inter-colonial circuits of mobility would also develop.19 Taiwan was annexed in 1895 after Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95. Japanese travelled to Taiwan as colonial administrators and entrepreneurs. Taiwanese people also travelled to Japan as students and as workers. Their descendants form an important element of the present-day Chinese resident community in Japan. After victories in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, Japan gained control of the Liaotung [Liaodong] Peninsula and increasing influence on the Korean Peninsula. Korea was formally annexed in 1910. Japanese travelled to Korea as colonial administrators and entrepreneurs, while Koreans travelled to Japan as students and as workers.20 Their descendants form a major part of the present-day Korean resident community in Japan.21 After Germany’s defeat in the First World War, Japan gained control of former German territories in the Pacific. This is a lesserknown destination of Japanese emigrants, but in 1935 around 636,000 Japanese were living in Asia and Micronesia, compared to 373,000 in the Americas.22

(1993): 41–56; Mark Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque: The Living, the Dead and the Undead in Japan’s Imperialism, 1895–1945 (Durham, 2010), 57–81. 19 Itô, Ruri, “1920–1930nendai Okinawa ni okeru ‘Modan Gâru’ to iu Toi: Shokuminchiteki Kindai to Josei no Mobiriti o megutte”, Jendâ Kenkyû 9 (2006): 1–18; Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 481. 20 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 484; Michael Weiner, Race and Migration in Imperial Japan (London, 1994), passim. 21  David Chapman, Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity (London, 2007), passim. 22 Befu, “Globalization as Human Dispersal”, 22; Greg Dvorak, “From Islands to Atoll: Relating Reefs of History at Kwajalein”, in Indigenous Encounters: Reflections on Relations

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The puppet state of Manchukuo, established in 1932, was promoted as a destination for Japanese farming families. Other men and women travelled as bureaucrats, traders, teachers, workers on the South Manchurian Railroad, domestic workers, entertainers and sex workers. Manchukuo also became a destination for inter-colonial migration. Despite the promotion of mass migration of agricultural workers from Japan, however, those who migrated were largely “small traders and artisans, shopkeepers, and adventurous merchants”.23 Labour needs in Manchukuo were met by impoverished Chinese labourers. Workers from Japan’s colonies and peripheral territories moved between Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Okinawa and Manchukuo. To provide just one example, women from Okinawa might move to Taiwan as domestic workers for Japanese families there.24 The Japanese labour market needed workers in agriculture, factories and mines. As the war effort intensified in the 1930s and 1940s, colonial subjects were also included in national mobilization policies, and eventually were coerced into factory and mining labour and support roles for the military.25 In the gendered and ethnicized labour markets of Imperial Japan, Korean men were employed in mines and heavy industry, while Korean women were employed in textile factories, alongside Okinawan women. Thus, while textiles had originally been constructed as a gendered labour force, by the 1930s the textile labour force was also stratified according to ethnicity. These gendered and ethnicized forms of differentiation also facilitated the management and control of different segments of the labour force.26 Militarized Mobilities The Japanese army had an increasing presence on the Chinese mainland, starting with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 and the Russo-Japanese between People in the Pacific, ed. Katerina M. Teaiwa, Occasional Paper Series, no. 43, (Honolulu, 2007): 63–84. 23 Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, 481; Driscoll, Absolute Erotic, Absolute Grotesque, 227–262. 24 Befu, “Globalization as Human Dispersal”, 23–24; Itô, “1920–1930nendai Okinawa ni okeru ‘Modan Gâru’ to iu Toi”, 1–18; Hiroko Matsuda, “Colonial Modernity Across the Border: Yaeyama, the Ryûkyû Islands and Colonial Taiwan”, unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra (2006). 25 Erik Ropers, “Testimonies as Evidence in the History of Kyôsei Renkô”, Japanese Studies 30, no. 2 (September 2010): 263–282. 26 Elyssa Faison, Managing Women: Disciplining Labor in Modern Japan (Berkeley, 2007); Ken C. Kawashima, The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham, 2009).

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 301 War of 1904–05. By the 1940s, the Japanese army occupied territories in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, South Asia and China. In 1945, an estimated six million Japanese were based overseas as soldiers, colonists and entrepreneurs.27 Wherever the military travelled, entrepreneurs (from Japan and other countries) supported them with supplies, lodgings, restaurants, entertainment and sexual services. Journalists and other writers also followed the war effort. There were clearly gendered patterns as men moved as soldiers while women supported them as nurses. Colonial subjects were also mobilized—sometimes through enforced recruitment—to support the military in quasi-military roles or as labourers. In colonies and occupied territories, locals were mobilized in situ but also taken to other territories with the military. These labourers were known as rômusha, and there are still unsettled claims for compensation. Prisoners of war and internees were also mobilized as labour and travelled with the military. While male colonial subjects were mobilized in mines, factories and construction, female colonial subjects worked as domestic labour and factory labour. Female colonial subjects and women in occupied territories (and some Japanese women) were also coerced into work in military brothels (also known as military sexual slavery). These women were transported throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific alongside the military.28 It took years to repatriate the estimated six million Japanese who were overseas at the end of the Second World War. Some stayed behind and some were stranded. In subsequent decades there were occasional media waves of interest in “stragglers” (soldiers who had stayed behind after the surrender), and of orphans who came “back” to Japan as adults from China (often unable to speak Japanese).29 More than 1,000 soldiers are said to have remained in Indonesia and over 700 in Vietnam.30 Some descendants of Japanese fathers and Philippine mothers from the wartime period have recently petitioned the Japanese government to have their nationality recognized as Japanese.31

27 Befu, “Globalization as Human Dispersal”, 24. 28 Sonia Ryang, “Inscribed (Men’s) Bodies, Silent (Women’s) Words: Rethinking Colonial Displacement of Koreans in Japan”, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 30, no. 4 (1998): 3–15; Sarah Chunghee Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago, 2008). 29 Beatrice Trefalt, Japanese Army Stragglers and Memories of the War in Japan, 1950– 1975 (London, 2003). 30 Befu, “Globalization as Human Dispersal”, 24. 31  Dario Agnote, “Filipino Offspring of Japanese Men: Abandoned ‘Japinos’ Search for Fathers”, Japan Times (14 February 2008), , accessed 4 February 2009; Dario Agnote. “Japanese Descendants in

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At the end of the Second World War, there were Koreans and Taiwanese resident in Japan who had been deemed to be subjects of the Japanese emperor. With the Japanese surrender on 15 August 1945, the former colonies were liberated. By the end of the Allied Occupation in 1952, the Japanese government, with the complicity of the occupying forces, had decided to revoke the Japanese nationality of the former colonial subjects. The situation was particularly difficult for Koreans, due to the division of the peninsula and the Korean War. Those who chose an affiliation with the South could travel on South Korean passports; those who chose the North were effectively stateless and had to travel with special travel papers. Tens of thousands of Korean residents were repatriated to North Korea in a program which was supported by the Red Cross.32 Koreans who stayed in Japan were classified as special permanent residents. There has been constant movement between South Korea and Japan in the postSecond World War era. The different groups of Korean residents are often referred to as “oldcomers” and “newcomers”.33 Similarly, those of Chinese descent had to choose between Taiwan under the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek or the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China.34 The descendants of the pre-1945 Taiwanese communities form the basis of the contemporary Chinese resident community in Japan. However, the People’s Republic of China is now a source of students and trainees and there have been recurrent panics about undocumented immigration from China to Japan. Nevertheless, there has been a significant increase in the Chinese resident population in Japan, from 50,000 in 1980, to 606,889 in 2007.35 These figures do not include those of Chinese background who have undergone naturalization as Japanese.

Philippines Get Citizenship”, Japan Times (9 March 2009), , accessed 24 March 2009. 32 Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan: Foreigners and Frontier Control in the Postwar (Cambridge, 2010), 194–228; Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Exodus to North Korea: Shadows from Japan’s Cold War (Lanham, 2007), passim. 33 Chapman, Zainichi Korean Identity and Ethnicity. 34 Yukiko Koshiro, Transpacific Racisms and the US Occupation of Japan (New York, 1999); Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan, 196–97. 35 Hélène Le Bail, “Integration of Chinese Students into Japan’s Society and Labour Market”, in Migration and Integration—Japan in Comparative Perspective, ed. Gabriele Vogt and Glenda S. Roberts (Munich, 2011), 72.

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 303 Reconfiguring Migratory Flows There was some resumption of emigration to Latin America in the 1950s, but this was curtailed in the early 1970s.36 Japan is now largely a receiving country rather than a sending country, but there are numbers of Japanese overseas sojourners engaged in trading, in restaurants, or as teachers of the Japanese language, culture or martial arts. Young people travel as students or on working holidays (constructed as tourism, but also a form of labour migration).37 There are also “lifestyle migrants” and the elderly who retire to overseas destinations.38 By 1994, “699,895 Japanese citizens were living abroad on a long-term or permanent basis, an increase of 201 percent since 1969”. This figure does not, however, include those who gave up Japanese citizenship in order to become naturalized citizens of other countries.39 There are gendered patterns in emigration depending on occupation and destination. Some countries, such as Australia, have a skewed sex ratio among Japanese immigrants.40 In the latter decades of the twentieth century, the Japanese economy gradually shifted from agriculture and manufacturing to a largely postindustrial economy based on services, technology, knowledge, information and finance. In 2008, primary industry accounted for 4.2 percent of employment, secondary industry 26.4 percent and tertiary industry 68.2 percent. There has been a steady decline in the percentage of workers engaged in primary industry throughout the post-Second World War period. The number engaged in manufacturing has shown a decline in almost every year since 1993; and there has been a corresponding increase in the percentage of workers engaged in tertiary industry from 1980 to 36 Befu, “Globalization as Human Dispersal”, 25. 37 Kumiko Kawashima, “Japanese Working Holiday Makers in Australia and their Return to the Japanese Labour Market: Before and After”, Asian Studies Review 34, no. 3 (September 2010): 267–286. 38 Machiko Sato, Farewell to Nippon: Japanese Lifestyle Migrants in Australia (Melbourne, 2001); Tetsuo Mizukami, The Sojourner Community: Japanese Migration and Residency in Australia (Brill, 2007). 39 Befu, “Globalization as Human Dispersal”, 25. 40 This is often discussed in terms of “marriage migration”. However, the picture is rather more complex, as discussed in recent research by Mayuko Itoh who demonstrates that we must first look closely at the gendered patterns of mobility of those Japanese people who travel to Australia as working holiday-makers, students and sojourners, and then look at how this shapes the patterns of applications for “fiancé(e) visas” and permanent residence. See Mayuko Itoh, “Behind the Numbers: The Sex Ratio of Japanese Residents in Victoria”, unpublished paper presented at the conference on Japanese Communities in Transition: Australia 2010, Monash University, 13 March 2010.

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the present.41 Yoshio Sugimoto thus now refers to “cultural capitalism” in contemporary Japan.42 From the 1970s to the 1990s, manufacturers moved offshore in search of looser environmental controls, weaker labour unions, and cheaper labour power. Some sectors, involving sub-contracting and sub-sub-contracting to the large industrial conglomerates, did, however, stay onshore, and this work was variously undertaken by married women in part-time or casual positions, or rural labour on a seasonal basis. Small to medium enterprises which could not afford to move offshore started to employ immigrant labour, some of whom entered on tourist visas and overstayed. The construction industry also became reliant on (largely undocumented) immigrant labour in these years. The term dekasegi now expanded to include immigrant workers entering Japan. The savings to employers are not in wages, but rather by failing to provide the benefits and entitlements expected by regular workers.43 In the 1970s, concerns were raised about Japanese men who were travelling to Southeast Asia as tourists and purchasing the services of sex workers. By the 1980s, concern was rather about women from Southeast Asia who were travelling to Japan to work in a range of occupations in a continuum from entertainers to waitresses and hostesses to sex work, sometimes in unfree conditions. In order to understand these movements, it is necessary to understand conditions in the sending countries, and the conditions in Japan which produced the desire for the services of non-Japanese sex workers.44 In sending countries, we need to look at rural poverty, gendered labour markets, rural to urban migration—which

41 Statistics Bureau, Japan, Statistical Handbook of Japan (Tokyo, 2009), http://www.stat .go.jp/english/data/handbook/c12cont.htm, accessed 16 September 2009. 42 Yoshio Sugimoto, An Introduction to Japanese Society, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, 2010), 20–21; 88–123. 43 Keiko Yamanaka, “Nepalese labour migration to Japan: From global warriors to global workers”, Ethnic and Racial Studies 23, no. 1 (January 2000): 63; 87–88. 44 Vera Mackie, “Division of Labour”, in Modernization and Beyond: The Japanese Trajectory, ed. Gavan McCormack and Yoshio Sugimoto, (Cambridge, 1988), 218–32; Vera Mackie, “The International Division of Labour and Leisure”, in Tourism and the Less Developed Countries, ed. David Harrison, (London, 1992), 75–84; Vera Mackie, “Japayuki Cinderella Girl: Containing the Immigrant Other”, Japanese Studies 18, no. 1 (May 1998): 45–63; Vera Mackie, “The Metropolitan Gaze: Travellers, Bodies, Spaces”, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 4 (September 2000), , accessed 19 August 2010; Vera Mackie, “ ‘Asia’ in Everyday Life: Dealing with Difference in Contemporary Japan”, in Gender and Politics in the Asia Pacific: Agencies and Activisms, ed. Brenda Yeoh et al., (London, 2002), 181–204; Mackie, “Managing Borders and Managing Bodies”, 71–85.

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 305 easily becomes cross-border migration (or forced migration)—and the gap between economic conditions in Japan and other parts of Asia. In the 1980s, the proportion of male to female immigrant workers shifted. Once males were entering the country in similar numbers to females this began to be seen as a labour market issue rather than one of morality and policing.45 Male immigrant workers were seen in day labouring, construction and factory work. The sending countries shifted depending on border control regimes and visa agreements between Japan and the sending countries. There were gendered patterns with South Asia and West Asia largely sending male immigrants, the Philippines sending both men and women, and other Southeast Asian countries largely sending women. One response of the Japanese government to the need for labour was the trainee (kenshûsei) system. The demand for trainees peaked at over 100,000 in 2007 but has been dropping yearly since then. Concerns have been raised about trainees’ working conditions. A record high of thirty-four people involved in training programs died in fiscal 2008 from work-related accidents, traffic accidents, and brain and heart disorders. Advocates for the workers have attributed these deaths to overwork.46 The Japanese economy and labour market has shifted to a focus on tertiary industries—information, knowledge and services. Even under “cultural capitalism”, however, there is a need for various kinds of work devoted to the care of individuals’ bodily needs. While much of the discussion of immigrant labour in other parts of Asia has focused on domestic work, Japan is relatively distinctive in not importing large numbers of domestic workers.47 The explanation for these distinctive patterns of immigration lies in the connection between the gendered division of labour, the labour market and demography. In Singapore, for example, in middleclass families, both partners tend to stay in the full-time workforce in élite

45 Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan, 239. 46 “Foreign trainees at Japan firms growing rare”, Japan Times (2 February 2009), http:// search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20090202a3.html, accessed 1 June 2009; “Overwork blamed for record-high 34 foreign trainee deaths”, Japan Times (24 June 2009), , accessed 28 June 2009. 47 Nicola Piper, “Gender and Migration Policies in Southeast and East Asia: Legal Protection and Sociocultural Empowerment of Unskilled Migrant Women”, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 25, no. 2 (2004): 216–231; Jose C. Moya, “Domestic Service in a Global Perspective: Gender, Migration and Ethnic Niches”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (2007): 559–579; Joya Misra and Sabine N. Merz, “Neoliberalism, Globalization and the International Division of Care”, in The Wages of Empire, Neloliberal Policies, Repression and Women’s Poverty, ed. Amalia L. Cabezas, Ellen Reese and Marguerite Waller (Boulder, 2007), 9.

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occupations, thus necessitating the employment of domestic labour.48 In Japan, by contrast, the “double-burden” of childrearing and paid work has often been handled by women leaving the full-time workforce in the years when their childrearing demands are heaviest, to return to the part-time workforce when children are older.49 The relatively flat income distribution in Japan also means that it is difficult to employ domestic help. With the aging of the population and the plummeting birthrate, the pressing need is for the care of the aged and infirm. Much of the discussion of these issues assumes a heterosexual nuclear family with a gendered division of labour where women have the primary responsibility for childcare, domestic labour and other forms of caring labour. However, a full discussion of this issue would start from the sexual division of labour and gendered ideologies in the home, and then situate this in the context of gendered, classed and ethnicized labour markets. Furthermore, there is a need for a shift from the discourse of “family” to the language of “householding”, for the need for caring labour can no longer be handled within the nuclear family.50 Because of the official prohibition on importing “unskilled” labour in Japan, it is illegal to import labour for the purpose of domestic work, although anecdotal evidence suggests that some families are finding ways to employ undocumented overseas domestic workers.51 Diplomatic personnel, however, may employ domestic workers or chauffeurs who speak English, and this allows them to employ overseas workers. While such workers have a legitimate visa status, their home-based work does not come under the purview of the Labour Standards Law (Rôdô Kijun Hô, 1947), which regulates the working conditions of regular workers in workplaces such as offices and factories.52 Many commentators see international marriage as a form of labour migration. The women who immigrate as wives of Japanese men often 48 Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 178–266. 49 Mari Osawa, “Koizumi’s ‘Robust Policy’: Governance, the Japanese Welfare Employment Regime and Comparative Gender Studies”, in Contested Governance in Japan: Sites and Issues, ed. Glenn D. Hook (London, 2005), 111–129. 50 Mike Douglass, “Global Householding and Japan: A Comparative Perspective on the Rise of a Multicultural Society”, in Migration and Integration, ed. Vogt and Roberts, 19. 51  Douglass, “Global Householding and Japan”, 25. 52 It has been noted in several other national contexts that domestic workers do not come under the purview of labour legislation. See Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 206–207; Piper, “Gender and Migration Policies in Southeast and East Asia”, 220; “Editorial: The Rights of Domestic Workers”, New York Times (16 June 2009).

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 307 provide domestic labour, sexual and reproductive labour, childcare and care of the sick and aged in their marital families, not to mention engaging in paid labour in their communities.53 Women who had originally entered as “tourists, entertainers, spouses/children of Japanese nationals, trainees or students” were, in effect, “recruited as caregivers and providers of emotional labor in Japan”.54 In a highly gendered labour market, women of the Nikkei (Japanese heritage) community, too, have been employed as tsukisoi-nin (workers who provide informal personal care for the sick or elderly, rather than medical or nursing care) and some have actually come to Japan for that purpose.55 Once again, there are gendered expectations in the discourse on marriage and caring. While immigration categories are rigid, individuals find ways of moving between these categories. Someone might initially enter on a tourist visa, but overstay to engage in various forms of undocumented paid labour. Or, someone may have originally entered as an entertainer (under an earlier visa regime), but enter into a relationship which transforms her into the “spouse of a Japanese national”, and thus be eligible to apply for permanent residency. Regardless of state attempts to regulate the entry of various categories of residents, individuals inevitably form relationships with Japanese nationals or with other immigrants once they enter the country. The offspring of these relationships have been the subject of recent controversies concerning nationality and residence category. It has been reported that “[o]ne in every 30 babies born in Japan has at least one foreign parent” and “about 6.5 percent of all marriages in Japan in 2006 were international”.56 Douglass notes that international marriage “brings foreigners into communities everywhere and creates intergenerational multicultural legacies”.57 The management of border control is thus intimately connected with the management of the labour market and biopolitical management more broadly. 53 Itô, Ruri, “ ‘Japayukisan’ Genshô Saikô—80nendai Nihon e no Ajia Josei Ryûnyû”, in Gaikokujin Rôdôsharon, ed. Iyotani Toshio and Kajita Takamichi (Tokyo, 1992); Mackie. “Japayuki Cinderella Girl”, 45–63; Maria-Rosario Piquero-Ballescas, “Global Householding and Care Networks: Filipino Women in Japan”, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 18, no. 1 (2009): 77–99. 54 Piquero-Ballescas, “Global Householding and Care Networks”, 78. 55 Takeyuki “Gaku” Tsuda, “Domesticating the Immigrant Other: Japanese Media Images of Nikkeijin Return Migrants”, Ethnology 42, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 294; 297. 56 David McNeill, Minoru Matsutani, Alex Martin, Setsuko Kamiya, Jun Hongo, “Lowering the Drawbridge on Fortress Japan: Citizenship, Nationality and the Rights of Children”, Japan Focus (2009), http://www.japanfocus.org/-Alex-Martin/3143, accessed 22 June 2009. 57 Douglass, “Global Householding and Japan”, 30.

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Much of the discussion of labour migration focuses on those non-élite workers engaged in occupations described as “difficult, dirty and dangerous” (kitsui, kitanai, kiken). These are occupations which are seen as undesirable by Japanese people, the majority of whom (until the recent financial crises) saw themselves as middle class. These undesirable occupations then come to be associated with particular ethnic groups, or, in other words, the occupations become ethnicized (and, of course, classed and gendered).58 Japan is also integrated into élite circuits of mobility. International workers who travel between global cities are also increasingly found in Japan, working in law, banking, finance, trading, engineering, science, academia, language teaching, journalism, editing, translating and interpreting. While Japan is a host to members of this élite workforce, there are also Japanese sojourners who travel overseas as representatives of Japanese trading, financial and construction companies, and of Japanese aid agencies, diplomatic missions and cultural organizations.59 There are different modes of mobility, with males over-represented as employees of trading companies, often travelling with their wives and children. There are also, however, single women who travel to such places as Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong to work.60 New Forms of Labour Sojourning In 1990, the Immigration Control Act (Shutsunyûkoku Oyobi Nanmin Nintei Kanri-hô [Nationality and Refugee Recognition Law]) was modified to allow descendants of Japanese emigrants to enter Japan for up to three years, in a long-term resident category with no restriction on engaging 58 There are also, of course, emotions attached to the representation of occupations which come to be associated with particular ethnicities. See, for example, the controversy around Tokyo Governor Ishihara Shintarô’s statements associating immigrant groups with criminality; see also my discussion of the use of romance narratives to depict relationships between Japan and the Philippines. Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan, 240; Mackie, “Japayuki Cinderella Girl”, 45–63. 59 Mitchell Sedgwick, “The Globalizations of Japanese Managers”, in Globalization and Social Change in Contemporary Japan, ed. Eades et al., 41–54. 60 Eiko Hasegawa, “Reconfiguring Boundaries: Japanese Expatriate Women in Shanghai”, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 15 (May 2007), , accessed 19 August 2010; Leng Leng Thang, Miho Goda, and Elizabeth MacLachlan, “Negotiating Work and Self: Experiences of Japanese Working Women in Singapore”, in Japanese Diasporas: Unsung Pasts, Conflicting Presents, and Uncertain Futures, ed. Nobuko Adachi (London, 2006), 236–253.

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 309 in employment. Those who enter under this visa category may also bring their family members into Japan, people who may have even less connection with Japanese society. The yearly admission of Brazilians of Japanese descent quadrupled from 19,000 in 1988 to 79,000 in 1990. By 1996, more than 200,000 Nikkeijin workers and their families had registered as residents in major manufacturing cities. By 2007, there were 317,000 Brazilians in Japan.61 In the 1990s, the temporary immigration of people of Japanese descent was seen as a more acceptable way of dealing with labour shortages than inviting “guest workers” with no apparent ties to the Japanese nation-state. Although the Japanese heritage of such immigrants was probably expected to cut down on problems generated by perceptions of difference, local communities soon found they had to deal with contact between groups with different social and cultural expectations, while schools needed to address the necessity of multilingual and multicultural education for the children of these families. The co-existence of the descendants of Japanese emigrants reinforces the primacy of Japanese lineage, but also has the potential to undermine the naturalized assumption that blood-line equates with cultural competence. This assumption is a feature of many national cultures, as pointed out by Barry Hindess, “[n]otions of descent (and the apparently more respectable surrogate notion of a distinctive national culture that cannot readily be acquired by persons who are not born into it) have always played an important part in the way citizenship has been understood within particular communities”.62 A labour ministry survey of companies in October 2008 found that there were some 486,400 foreign workers in Japan. Of these, 43.3 percent were Chinese, 20.4 percent Brazilians and 8.3 percent Filipinos. Such workers underpinned the production of cars and other exported products when the economy was good. Many small firms and agricultural enterprises also employed foreign trainees. However, the national unemployment rate peaked at 5.7 percent during 2009, and the automobile industry was hit

61  Yamanaka. “Nepalese labour migration to Japan”: 71; Takashi Oka, Prying Open the Door: Foreign Workers in Japan (Washington DC, 1994), 41–49; Ryûhei Hatsuse, “Governance, Asian Migrants and the role of Civil Society”, in Contested Governance in Japan, ed. Hook, 160; Sayuri Daimon, “Opening the door to foreigners: Expert warns Japan shuns the very immigrants it needs to thrive”, Japan Times (30 April 2009), http://search.japantimes .co.jp/mail/nn20090430f1.html, accessed 1 June. 62 Barry Hindess, “Citizens and People”, Australian Left Review (June 1992).

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particularly hard. This industry is concentrated in central Japan in Aichi prefecture, where an estimated 220,000 registered foreigners reside.63 In April 2009, the government offered financial assistance to unemployed immigrant workers of Japanese ancestry (and their families) who wished to leave the country. The government also allocated ¥1.08 billion for training, including Japanese-language lessons, for the workers of Japanese ancestry.64 Some local governments also started support programs for such workers, and petitioned the national government for emergency support.65 There were plans to train unemployed foreigners to work in nursing care, an attempt to implement change in what is a highly gendered and ethnicized labour market.66 As Yamanaka points out, “immigration policy has created a labour force rigidly stratified by such collective characteristics as legal status, ethnicity, nationality, gender and skill level”.67 Nearly two decades later we are seeing the failures in planning for the long-term needs of the Nikkei communities. If we compare the history of the use of immigrant labour of Japanese descent with current attempts to use short-term immigrant labour in the caring professions, the segmentation of the labour market according to ethnicity, nationality, gender and skill level is thrown into sharp relief. Regional Mobilities of Care Workers Japanese government insurance programs for the costs associated with the care of family members are an attempt to come to terms with the social requirements of a country where the aged comprise an everincreasing proportion of the population (Kaigo Hoken Hô/Law Concerning Insurance for Nursing Care, 1997, amended 2000). As a supplement to the care provided by family members, volunteers, paid carers and nursing professionals, the Japanese government is moving slowly on bringing in care workers from overseas. This is being managed by bilateral agreements with Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. These countries are 63 Yamanaka, “Nepalese labour migration to Japan”, 80; “Editorial: Support Needy Foreign Workers”, Japan Times (16 March 2009), http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/ ed20090316a2.html, accessed 3 June 2009. 64 “Axed Brazilians, Peruvians to be paid to leave Japan”, Japan Times (2 April 2009), http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20090402a1.html, accessed 3 June 2009. 65 “26 cities request emergency support for foreign workers”, Japan Times (18 December 2008), http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/nn20081218a7.html, accessed 1 June 2009. 66 “Editorial: Support Needy Foreign Workers”. 67 Yamanaka, “Nepalese labour migration to Japan”, 63.

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 311 significant as sending countries for labour migrants, with remittances as a major element of their economies. Indonesia and the Philippines are estimated to be in the top ten remittance-recipient economies (in dollar terms) in the Asia-Pacific region.68 One reason for the cautious progress of these programs is the necessity to negotiate with advocates for the nursing and caring professions within Japan: the Japanese Nursing Association and the Japan Association of Certified Care Workers. Although the agreements allow for a few thousand workers to enter the country over the next few years, it has been estimated that at least 50,000 workers would be needed to fill the current shortage in care labour.69 An economic partnership agreement between Japan and Indonesia was concluded in 2007, Japan and the Philippines in 2008, and more recently with Vietnam. For the first trainees who started work in Japan during 2009, there were reports of language problems and issues in adjusting to a different workplace environment. All of the care workers admitted so far work in hospitals and nursing facilities rather than in private care. They are expected to pass exams in three or four years in order to gain qualifications if they wish to stay on in Japan. They were provided with a six-month language course which allowed them to communicate in basic spoken Japanese, but much more specialized language training is necessary in order to tackle the national caregiver qualifying examinations, and there have been some modifications to the Japanese-language examinations to accommodate the immigrant trainees.70 Although the JPEPA agreement with the Philippines (replacing the Philippine-Japan Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation of 1973) was signed in September 2006, it took the Philippines Senate nearly two years to ratify it. There was opposition to JPEPA for, among other reasons, ‘its insensitive inclusion of human labor as a commodity for exchange’.71 Besides providing a framework for liberalizing trade and investment between the two countries and allowing small numbers of Filipino nurses and caregivers to work in Japan, the agreement also detailed other possible cooperative programs, including training courses for the regulation 68 Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific 2009: Addressing Triple Threats to Development (New York, 2009), 15. 69 Douglass, “Global Householding and Japan”, 25. 70 Maya Kaneko, “Indonesian caregivers working to adapt”, Japan Times (18 March 2009) accessed 3 June 2009. 71  Maria-Rosario Piquero-Ballescas, “Filipino Caregivers in Japan: The State, Agents, and Emerging Issues”, Kyûshû Daigaku Ajia Sôgô Seisaku Sentâ Kiyô, 3: 130.

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of and supervision of financial institutions, trade and investment cooperation, cooperation in the field of small and medium enterprises, technical cooperation in the field of science and communications technology and promotion of tourism. This suggests that trade benefits for Japan figured prominently in the rationale for the agreement. The nurses and caregivers are endorsed by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, and the Japan International Corporation of Welfare Services (JICWELS) is responsible for finding hospitals and health-care institutions in Japan willing to hire the qualified Filipino nurses.72 By mid-2012, few trainees had passed the qualifying examinations as nurses and carers. Forty-seven Indonesians and Filipinos passed the nursing examinations in February 2012, a pass rate of only 11.3 percent, but better than previous years. Thirty-six Indonesians and Filipinos passed the caregivers examination in January 2012, a pass rate of 37.9 percent.73 If these small numbers of successful examinees continue, then the majority of care workers who enter through these bilateral agreements will, in effect, be a rotating pool of short-term unskilled labour, each intake regularly replaced by a new group. Piquero-Ballescas reports that even before the finalization of the JPEPA agreement Filipino workers were already entering Japan in order to provide care work—some as undocumented workers and some under other visa categories. Non-profit organizations (NPOs) mediate the entry of such workers; and brokers who had hitherto facilitated the entry of entertainers or marriage migrants have shifted their attention to care workers.74 In the Philippines, more than 400 nursing schools are producing more nursing graduates than can be employed by hospitals and rest homes, with many graduates pinning their hopes on finding a job overseas. For those who have been educated in English, however, other countries, such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Britain may seem more accessible than Japan. The migration of nurses from the Philippines to

72 Piquero-Ballescas, “Global Householding and Care Networks: Filipino Women in Japan”: 78; Dario Agnote, “Filipino caregivers face hurdles”, Japan Times (20 December 2008) , accessed 1 June 2012; “ ‘Filipino caregivers coming this year”, Japan Times (13 January 2009) , accessed 1 June 2012. 73 “Foreign Pass Rate for National Nurse Exam Triples”, Japan Times (27 March 2012) , accessed 21 May 2012; “36 Foreign Caregivers Pass Qualification Exam”, Japan Times (29 March 2012) , accessed 21 May 2012. 74 Piquero-Ballescas, “Filipino Caregivers in Japan”: 130–135.

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 313 Anglophone countries is well-established.75 Doctors, nurses and care workers make strategic decisions based on remuneration and visa regimes, the possibility of transition to permanent residence in the future, and the possibility of facilitating the migration of family members. Concern has been expressed internationally about the exodus of medical professionals from developing countries to first world countries, prompting the World Health Organization to develop the Global Code on International Recruitment of Health Personnel.76 As wealthy first world countries seek personnel from around the world to care for the bodily needs of their citizens, third world countries increasingly suffer from a lack of medical professionals to meet the needs of their own populations. Some countries have strategically positioned themselves in the global labour market for health professionals: the Philippines in training nurses and care workers who will largely be emigrants; Thailand in positioning itself as a destination for “medical tourism”.77 What we have seen is a gradual process whereby care work has shifted from largely invisible work carried out by family members on an unpaid basis, to a combination of family-based care and assistance by volunteers. Gradual marketization has been facilitated by particular government policies such as the Carers’ Insurance Law. The market in caring labour is now, however, a transnational one, involving both documented and undocumented migrant labour. Each stage in this process builds on, reproduces and in some cases transforms constructions of gender, class and ethnicity. Moving care labour from a purely family matter to a service which can be provided on a paid basis results in the increased visibility of such work, but if this work is still carried out by a largely female workforce, then gendered assumptions about care work remain undisturbed. Class comes into play when we consider who purchases and who provides such services. Ethnicity is always in play. There may, for example, be assumptions about the “naturalness” of care work being carried out by Japanese nationals, as in some of the debates leading up to recent policy innovations. The question of ethnicity becomes more visible, however, when care workers 75 Barbara L. Brush and Julie Sochalski, “International Nurse Migration: Lessons from the Philippines”, Policy, Politics and Nursing Practice, 8, no. 1 (February 2007): 37–46; Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Manila, 2003). 76 Margaret Harris Cheng, “The Philippines’ health worker exodus”, The Lancet, 373 (10 January 2009): 111–112. 77 Andrea Whittaker, “Global Technologies and Transnational Reproduction in Thailand”, Asian Studies Review, 33, no. 3 (September 2009): 319–332.

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are of non-Japanese nationality or ethnicity. The globalization of care work is also reflected in the phenomenon of (relatively) wealthy retirees from Japan moving to Australia or parts of Southeast Asia where they can access a more pleasant environment, more spacious residences and, in the case of Southeast Asia, the services of care workers on a cheaper basis.78 Conclusions To trace the circuits of labour mobility in the Asia-Pacific region is also to map the patterns of economic inequality in the region. The mobilization of people as workers, citizens and members of reproductive families has hitherto mainly been considered within the frame of the nation-state, in some cases with reference to Foucault’s concept of “biopower”.79 Globalization, however, prompts us to consider questions of biopower on a regional and global scale, transcending the scale of the nation-state. The management of labour power, the management of populations and the management of care for the bodies of individuals also need to be considered in a transnational frame.80 Global corporations attempt to maximize profits through accessing cheaper labour power, while workers attempt to maximize their income through crossing national borders. Some governments try to find ways of providing care for the bodily needs of their populations, while other governments facilitate the movement of their people as sojourners and providers of remittances. Some who cross borders undertake occupations characterized as “dirty, difficult and dangerous”, while others cross borders to take care of the bodies of others in nursing, caregiving or domestic labour. Nation-states attempt to regulate these flows through border controls. National governments like Japan, however, struggle to manage a labour market which is stratified and segmented according to gender, class, caste, ethnicity and nationality. Indeed, this segmentation is in part attributable to the ad hoc decisions on recruiting labour power through specific bilateral agreements. If we track the patterns of labour mobility over a long period, we can also track the shifting dynamics of the “global gender order” (in 78 Xiang Biao and Mika Toyota, “Shifting Boundaries, Moving Borders: The Emerging Transnational ‘Retirement Industry’ and the Regionalization of Care in Asia”, unpublished paper presented at conference on “Shifting Boundaries of Care Provision in Asia: Policy and Practice Changes”, National University of Singapore, March 2011. 79 Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 138–45. 80 Mackie and Stevens, “Globalisation and Body Politics”, 269.

japan, labour migration, and the global order of difference 315 Connell’s terms). Or, we might call this the “global order of difference” (to adapt the phrase in order to consider not only gender, but also class, caste, ethnicity and racialized positioning). The patterns of labour mobility reflect the “gender order” and the “order of difference” of both sending countries and receiving countries.81 Indeed, these patterns of labour mobility also produce these “orders of difference”. When particular occupations come to be associated with immigrant labour, they are thereby gendered, classed, ethnicized and racialized.82 The management of borders and the management of labour, as we have seen, is a matter of the management of bodies. However, it is also likely to be a matter of the management of affect. Where immigrant labour is restricted, this is often naturalized by discourses of difference, with negative affect being associated with particular immigrant groups. The classic example would be the “White Australia Policy” in twentieth century Australia, which was not simply a bureaucratic method of controlling immigration, but was also associated with xenophobia and paranoia about perceptions of the threat of invasion from Asia. In Japan, discussion of labour migration has often been tainted by unfounded panics associating migrancy and criminality.83 In this context, I would like to suggest that the management of affect in a global frame needs to be the subject of future research.

81  Rochelle Ball, “Divergent development, racialised rights: Globalised labour markets and the trade of nurses—The case of the Philippines”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (2004): 121. 82 Itô, “ ‘Japayukisan’ Genshô Saikô”; Mackie, “Japayuki Cinderella Girl”, 45–63; Ball, “Divergent development, racialised rights”, 129; Bobby Benedicto, “Shared Spaces of Transnational Transit: Filipino Gay Tourists, Labour Migrants, and the Borders of Class Difference”, Asian Studies Review 33, no. 3 (September 2009): 289–301. 83 Morris-Suzuki, Borderline Japan, 240.

Shifting Geographies of Migration in Southeast Asia: Continuity and Change in Proletarian and Gendered Migrations Amarjit Kaur Asian labour migrations to Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries correlated with the growth of world trade, European territorial expansion in Asia, and the development of global commercial and trading networks. Imperial managerial structures also enmeshed colonial territories within Empire and facilitated an empire-wide sourcing of labour. Faster and more efficient shipping and colonial trade policies further enhanced trans-regional connections and generated migration. The labour migrations comprised mostly Chinese and Indian male migrants who were recruited for mining and plantation enterprises and public works construction in the colonies. Few Asian women migrated of their own accord, although sugar planters in Malaya hired a number of Indian women in the late nineteenth century. Indian women’s participation in the Malayan economy increased after the development of the rubber industry, largely due to the gendering of tasks on rubber plantations, the need for a settled proletariat and the activities of Indian nationalists. The Second World War and decolonization processes in Southeast Asia and the emergence of independent nation states afterward foreshadowed the ending of open immigration policies. In the 1950s, the United States emerged as the dominant economic power in a second wave of globalization, which was characterized by further integration of economic activities and labour markets. Then, as international migration expanded in the 1970s and 1980s, there was renewed interest in the economics of labour migration and the benefits of transnational labour movements. This also led to a shift from political rhetoric to political reality in considering international labour migration (ILM) as an integral component of broader socio-economic transformative processes. The new geography of migration in Southeast Asia is consistent with the rise of newly-industrializing economies, trade liberalization and the regulation of labour markets. In countries like Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, governments have promoted economic growth through neoliberal policies, including trade, financial and investment liberalization.

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All three have again become labour-destination states and rely on migrant workers for labour force growth. They have also appropriated segments of the working class from poorer countries in the region. They regulate migration through elaborate administrative frameworks and border controls while private labour brokers carry out recruitment and placement of migrant labour. Shifting labour market trends in the region have coincided with changing organization of labour processes and the gendering of labour migration. Male migrants are predominantly recruited for manufacturing, construction, plantation and agricultural work (especially in Malaysia and Thailand), while female migrants are recruited mainly for care-giving and domestic work. Large numbers of women in the three countries have also been absorbed into the public sector, clerical, teaching, and other related occupations. In the absence of affordable state-funded childcare and other services, governments have facilitated the recruitment of foreign domestic workers and caregivers mainly through labour accords to lighten local women’s “double” burden. Domestic workers form the most marginalized group of migrant workers since they are not regarded as formal sector workers and their employers regulate their working conditions. The transformed migration patterns in the region therefore underscore issues of the gender division of labour within households and the labour market and racialized hierarchies of foreign workers. This chapter on Proletarian and Gendered Labour Migrations in Southeast Asia investigates the complex exchanges and interconnections between colonizers and colonies and later independent nation states, and the construction of migration pathways in Asia. The development of International Labour Migration is discussed in two sections. The first section traces the incorporation of Southeast Asian states into the world trading system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the organization of proletarian migration regimes for colonial economies. During this period European colonizers instigated and organized labour migration, principally from India and China, for the production of tropical commodities against the backdrop of industrial capitalism, European industrialization and regional specialization. The second section explores the role of Southeast Asian governments (especially Malaysia and Singapore) in establishing immigration regimes to recruit foreign labour after the 1970s. The creation of new migration systems and migration corridors provides a framework for understanding global-Asian connections in the context of globalized productive sectors and the new gender order. Finally,



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the wider comparative perspective highlights the significant changes in labour mobilty and the growth of migrant networks in Southeast Asian economies. Colonialism, Commodities of Empire and Migration Southeast Asia had markedly low population growth relative to the size of its cultivable area and a much lower population density than China and South Asia prior to European expansion in the region.1 In the midnineteenth century, only the islands of Java and Bali and the North Vietnamese delta area (Tonkin) could be considered densely settled. Most of the population of Southeast Asia was also predominantly agricultural, and labour, rather than land, was the principal source of value in most states. The constant movement of people in the region also made Southeast Asia less politically stable and a more geographically fragmented region compared with China and India. From about the second half of the nineteenth century, the expansion of the international economy and the associated demand for tropical and mineral commodities resulted in the region’s greater integration into the new globalized system of production, trade and investment flows. Britain dominated this first wave of globalization, characterized by modern economic growth and the commodification of labour. The political map of Southeast Asia was redrawn by the European colonizers and the ensuing new geographical and administrative frameworks comprised six major realms—British Burma, British Malaya, French Indochina, Dutch Indonesia, Spanish (later American) Philippines and independent Thailand. All colonial states were mobilized for export production of foodstuffs, industrial crops, stimulants and mineral ores to boost the fiscal resources of the home countries. Globalization and the complex exchanges and interconnections with industrial processes in Europe, and commodities of Empire were thus an important dimension in the development of migration pathways and the building up of a viable “freer” labour supply in the region. Simultaneously, the increased exactions on peasants and new land

1 Anthony Reid, “Low Population Growth and Its Causes in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia”, in Norman G. Owen, Death and Disease in Southeast Asia: Explorations in Social, Medical and Demographic History (Singapore, 1987), 35.

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Source: Based on Amarjit Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia: Globalisation.The International Division of Labour and Labour Transformations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2004), 4.

Map 1. Southeast Asia

regulations in India had impoverished the peasantry and were a driver of labour migration from India. The European colonizers’ choice of commodities was determined either by initial advantage in the desired raw material or climatic conditions or previous food specialization (rice, for example). Some colonies in the larger Asian Empire became providers of labour power, hence positioning migration in the international division of labour. The new economic corridors created between colonies facilitated and enhanced regional specialization and labour mobility. British imperialism and the spread of capitalism in Asia also linked China and India more directly with Southeast Asia. The new economic corridors, extending from southern China and south India to Southeast Asia, facilitated labour market integration, resulting in mass proletarian migrations to Southeast Asia.



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These economic corridors also helped create a demand for migrant workers in the colonies. The British colonizers thus transformed mobility in the region through their open border policy and officially authorized opportunities for Chinese and Indian labour migrations. Prior to these events, the English East India Company had established settlements in Malaya and Sumatra for growing agricultural crops, and imported Indian slave and convict labour to cultivate the commodities. After British slave emancipation in 1834, and especially the provisions of the Indian Penal Code of 1860, the slave trade and slavery in India and Malaya ended.2 The Company and the European planters then relied on indentured labour obtained through labour intermediaries for their enterprises and public works development. After the demise of the Company (see below), Britain took over its possessions in the region. One of the first tasks of the Colonial Administration centred on securing fresh labour sources for the economic development of its new territory. Apart from the East India Company’s Straits Settlements ports, namely Singapore, Penang and Malacca (now colonies), Britain subsequently extended its hegemony to the Malay Peninsula and the Malay States. The Malay states were essentially governed as colonies, though regarded as ‘protectorates’, and remained nominally under their own rulers. Each of these administrative units’ earlier growth patterns was also transformed under colonial rule. Singapore became the leading port city in the region and the main commercial, financial and administrative capital of British Malaya. The earlier trading houses, shipping companies and banks took on new roles in the region consistent with the expanding trade in commodities. These political developments foreshadowed the creation of new migration pathways from India (and China) in the form of indentured contract labour arrangements. This new type of labour engagement is usually considered as marking the start of the modern system of (wage) contract labour in Southeast Asia.3 The new sources of labour supply mirrored earlier migration movements. Chinese enterprises had previously recruited workers from China, while European planters preferred to recruit Indian labour, based on their experiences with them in the Straights Settlements and elsewhere. Indian and Chinese mass migrations were thus interwoven with imperialism, social transformations and the new economic organizations of plantations, mines and markets. 2 I.M. Cumpston, Indians Overseas in British Territories, 1834–1854 (London, 1853), 85. 3 Amarjit Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia: Globalisation, The International Division of Labour and Labour Transformations (Basingstoke, 2004), chs. 3–4.

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The sub-imperial India Office and the British Malayan administration jointly planned and regulated South Indian labour’s employment in Malaya with the endorsement of the Colonial Office in London since the workers’ destination—the Malay states—were “protectorates”, not colonies. Thus three (British) colonial administrations regulated the contract labour regimes that enabled Indian migrants to finance their travel and passage costs. The construction of better domestic transportation systems in India, especially railroads, connected rural areas to cities and ports, facilitating internal migration and subsequent movement overseas. Improvements in long-distance shipping technology, the commercialization of passenger transportation, and trade policies further enhanced trans-regional connections and generated migration. The India Office or Indian Government’s new shipping regulations were centred on improving living conditions during the voyage overseas and reducing mortality rates. The Indian migrants comprised low-caste men, mainly from the Tanjore, Trichinopoly and North Arcot districts in south India. These districts were particularly vulnerable to drought, and famine and landlessness was widespread. The principal Indian labour movements were to Malaya, Burma and Thailand, while the port cities of Singapore and Penang functioned as important transit hubs.4 Although much has been written about European migration across the Atlantic during this period, the narrative of Asian migration to Southeast Asia is less well known. The numbers moving into Southeast Asia were quite large compared with European migration movements across the Atlantic to the United States. Huff and Giovanni5 have estimated that, between 1911 and 1929, gross migration into Burma, British Malaya and Thailand was over twice as high as gross migration into the United States. Moreover, although a high proportion of migrants returned to their countries, net inward migration amounted to around 1.55 million over these years. Maddison6 states that Southeast Asia experienced much faster population growth in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century compared with either China or India. European migrations were voluntary and largely free, while Chinese and Indian 4 Kernail Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya. Some Aspects of their Immigration and Settlement (Cambridge, 1969), 164. 5 Gregg Huff and Giovanni Caggiano, “Globalization and Labor Market Integration in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Asia”, Research in Economic History 25 (2007):255–317. 6 Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD Development Centre, 2003), 180–3.



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migrations took place under free and semi-free arrangements, some of which had elements of legality and illegality. Notwithstanding this, Chinese and Indian economic migrants travelled voluntarily to Burma, Malaya and other Southeast Asian states. In return for passage and guaranteed employment, they either verbally agreed to work, or signed contracts for specific service periods. While poverty, starvation and escape from poor economic conditions or other push factors were crucial in motivating migration flows, the colonizers also created a demand for labour, providing opportunities and the machinery for migration. Moreover, although some labour regimes relied on sanctions to enforce labour agreements, these had their limits, especially when demand for labour outstripped supply. The migrants were considered “semipermanent” workers who were expected to labour abroad for several years in the destination country. Although they were not expected to settle permanently in the colonies, the need for a settled work community, particularly on remote plantations in Malaya, meant that by the 1930s, many of the sojourners had settled in Malaya. Thus although the indenture contract labour system closely resembled “forced” servitude there were vital differences. Chinese and Indian economic migrants travelled voluntarily to Burma, Malaya and the other Southeast Asian states and signed contracts for specific service periods in return for passage and guaranteed employment. Second, despite cyclical migrations, many migrants established permanent settlements in the destination countries. Some women’s migration was originally associational but this changed when men and women were positioned differently within labour markets and it was much cheaper to hire women (see below). For example, in the rubber industry, workers engaged in mainly weeding tasks were paid lower wages than tappers, and thus women could be paid lower wages for “less” strenous work. Additionally, the India Office also played a key role in stipulating the inclusion of a fixed percentage of women in the labour hires. Similarly in the tin mining sector, panning (a recovery method for tin) was regarded as more suitable for women and facilitated Chinese women’s employment in the tin industry. Women’s livelihoods and entitlements were also considered secondary to those of men. Generally, the colonial authorities’ overarching goal of stabilizing the migrant labour force meant that, while wages might not be raised, additional family earnings were critical for establishing settled communities. This wage disparity was an important feature of gendered migration patterns. Chinese migrants, who have variously been described as “self-driven”, “self-organised” and “speculative”, went to a wide range of countries.

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Generally, the European colonizers and the Thai state placed no limits on Chinese migration, though there were a few residential restrictions, for example, in Java. The Chinese originated mostly from the coastal districts of Fujian Province, the Chaozhou speaking districts in north eastern Guangdong Province, and the Pearl River Delta counties in southern Guangdong. Their journeys took place through Chinese ports that had been annexed as colonies, for example, Hong Kong and Macau, and the Chinese treaty ports opened to British and other Western traders, following China’s defeat in Chinese-British trade conflicts known as the First and Second Opium Wars. According to McKeown,7 of the estimated 20 million Chinese migrants bound for Southeast Asia, only a small percentage migrated under indenture contracts. Indian migrants moved largely between two colonial establishments— India and Malaya—under the overall jurisdiction of the Colonial Office in London. Hence, Britain played an important role in developing an Indian migration pathway, policing migration processes and regulating employment and labour conditions in consultation with European employers. The British Malayan administration essentially regulated Indian labour migrations, while the task of labour recruitment was carried out by labour brokers or intermediaries. Migrant workers’ travel and passage costs were paid by the labour intermediaries (or employers as intermediaries) and the migrants were required to work for employers for a fixed period until they had cleared their debts. Rubber cultivation, in particular, necessitated recruitment of a large, cheap and “disciplined” workforce that had to be established and organized to work under pioneering conditions in Malaya. Low-caste Indian labour’s docility fitted well into the dependent relationship between management and employee. Indian migrant workers were also regarded as a cheaper workforce and thought to be less aggressive than Chinese. The historical trade and cultural networks between the two countries hence expanded to create an integrated labour market extending from Southern India to Southeast Asia. Trans-Asian Labour Migrations and Recruitment Systems There were two main types of labour migrations in Southeast Asia during the colonial period. The first comprised regulated labour movements 7 Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940”, Journal of World History, 15.2 (2008): 189.



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sponsored by colonial administrations, while the second consisted of largely unrestrained migration movements. Based on this typology, Indian labour migration to Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore) falls into the first category, while Indian migration to Burma and also Chinese migration to Southeast Asian states fall into the second category. Regulated labour migration generally took place between colonial territories under the same imperial administration. Thus the India Office and the Malayan administration jointly planned and administered migration programs for Indian labour recruitment in Malaya under the auspices of the Colonial Office in London. Both governments were responsible for regulating recruitment practices, financing of travel and transportation of workers to Malaya where the workers were connected to either plantations or public works departments. The British permitted some Indian labour migration to Sumatra (under Dutch rule) while the Dutch allowed Javanese migration to Malaya. Burma represents a special category because the state was placed under the India Office and considered part of British India. Thus Indian migration to Burma was within different provinces in British India and hence regarded as an internal movement. The Dutch and the French in the Netherlands Indies and Indochina, respectively, authorized movements of workers from overpopulated to underpopulated regions in their colonies.8 Malaya: Indian Labour Recruitment As noted above, during the period of (East India) Company rule, Indian workers had been recruited under indentured arrangements for the construction of public works development in the Straits Settlements. In a similar way, European merchants had recruited Indian labour for sugar plantations in Penang. There was a sizeable Indian community in the Straits Settlements associated with Indian shipping merchants, which served as a channel for the recruitment of Indian workers. This earlier indenture recruitment system had its antecedents in the organization of labour for the global sugar industry in places like Fiji, the British Caribbean and Queensland in Australia.9 After the collapse of the Company in 1858, the Straits Settlements came under the direct control of the British Government, and their constitutional separation from India in 1867 led to a ban on labour emigration 8 Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, chs. 3–4. 9 See Tinker, A New System of Slavery.

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to the Straits Settlements. Then, following requests by European planters, the ban was lifted in 1872 on the proviso that the Straits Settlements (colonial) government organize and regulate Indian labour emigration to Malaya. Indian emigration to these settlements was then permitted under a modified version of Act XIII of 1864. This Act also provided for a Protector of Immigrants; established rules for depots (reception centres); and stipulated the regulation or management of immigrant workers. Interestingly, the Act also stipulated a sex ratio of 25 women to every 100 men in all labour shipments, a ruling that was largely ignored by the Malayan Administration. The Straits Settlements government later compiled its own labour code in 1876—the Straits Settlements Ordinance No.1 (also known as the Indian Immigrants Protection Ordinance of 1876, or the Indian Act No.5 of 1877)—to regulate indentured labour migration to Malaya.10 The India Office designated the Magistrate at Negapattinam in south India, as Protector of Indian Labour. His main duty was to ensure that professional recruiters (including private brokers in the Straits Settlements and India, ship owners and merchants) did not engage in speculative recruitment and misrepresentation of employment and work conditions in Malaya. Prospective emigrants were also required to submit themselves to a medical examination by (Medical) Emigration Agents and were assessed on their motivations and ability to work in Malaya. This Ordinance also laid down the principal stipulations of the labour contract and labour conditions. The Indian government was also progressively persuaded to instigate new measures to encourage emigration to Malaya; upgrade recruitment regulations by terminating the monopoly of the Indian recruiting agents; and expedite emigration by establishing labour depots for receiving and processing Indian emigrants in south India. In 1884 new legislation, the Indian Immigration Ordinance, was approved in the Straits Settlements to replace the previous legislation. Under the terms of this legislation, the Indian indentured labourer was no longer required to sign a contract in India prior to his arrival in the Straits Settlements. Moreover, in 1887 the Straits Settlements and several Malay state governments agreed to provide a steamship subsidy to transport Indian labour emigrants to Malaya.11

10 R.N. Jackson, Immigrant Labour and the Development of Malaya 1786–1920 (Kuala Lumpur, 1961) ch. 5. 11  Jackson, Immigrant Labour and the Development of Malaya, 99–100.



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Indian labour migration was primarily organised using openly regulated recruitment methods. Two migration methods were used, the indenture system and the kangani system. Under the indenture system, Malayan planters used the services of one of the labour recruitment firms in Negapattinam or Madras, or sent agents to south India to recruit labourers directly. The agents advanced money to potential emigrants, the advance being conditional on the intending migrants signing a contract on arrival in the country. The men were then considered to be under indenture to their employer for a fixed period, varying from three to five years. The indenture period was reduced to three years after the 1904 Labour Ordinance came into force.12 After completing their contracts, the workers had a choice of being re-indentured for a further period or release from indenture, providing they had paid off the expenses incurred in their recruitment. Wages were fixed at the time of recruitment and were not negotiable. The employer was responsible for all recruitment costs; the expenses involved in the transportation of workers; and workers’ wages were calculated after deducting this expenditure.13 More importantly, workers were unfree and “bound” to employers who used sanctions to enforce labour contracts. Breaches of these contracts were regarded as criminal, not civil offences. Since most workers were impoverished, they were re-indentured for further periods.14 Some coffee planters also utilized their “trusted” workers as labour brokers to recruit Indian workers directly. This system, known as the kangani recruitment system or method, was mainly a personal or informal recruitment system and it later developed into the preferred recruitment method for rubber plantations. The word kangani means overseer or foreman in Tamil, and the kangani, typically a labourer already employed on the plantation, was entrusted to recruit workers from his village, thus introducing a chain migration outcome based on specific recruitment areas in south India. The kangani method became more popular when indentured labour was abolished in 1910 (final contracts ended in 1913). Most planters preferred this recruitment method because the costs were lower compared with the higher costs of the indenture method. The kangani also provided the vital connection between poverty stricken rural south India and the frontier regions of Malaya, and facilitated and promoted Indian 12 Tinker, A New System of Slavery, 179. 13 C. Kondapi, Indians Overseas, 1838–1949 (New Delhi, 1951), 8–29. 14 Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, ch. 4; David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (Cambridge, 1995).

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migration. This method enabled planters to avoid dependence on Indian recruiting agencies (which were regarded as responsible for restrictions in labour supply). Moreover, planters favoured this method since the prospect of workers absconding was reduced, especially since the kangani had a vested interest in ensuring that this did not occur.15 The Malayan Administration’s own labour requirements for public works development foreshadowed centralization of recruitment processes and an enlarged state role in labour recruitment. Hence, in 1907, the Malayan Administration established a centralized semi-official body known as the Indian Immigration Committee (IIC). The Committee was tasked with harmonizing recruitment procedures against the backdrop of rising demand for Indian labour for plantations and other jobs. In 1908, the IIC’s activities were supported with the creation of a Tamil Immigration Fund (the name was changed to Indian Immigration Fund in 1910) to provide free passages to labourers headed toward Malaya. All employers of Indian labour endorsed these actions and contributed a quarterly charge or levy towards the travel and related costs of free Indian immigrants bound for Malaya. Since men represented 70 percent of all kangani-assisted immigrants, the Malayan government reduced the assessments paid on women workers to improve the Indian sex ratio, consistent with the objectives of the Indian Immigration Fund.16 Subsequently, independent migration from India was also promoted under the auspices of the IIC. Recruitment of “voluntary” migrants was also cheaper than the kangani method since these voluntary immigrants and employers could steer clear of intermediaries. Additionally, the kangani’s hold over workers declined over time. Most prospective immigrants also preferred the “independent” method since they were able to avoid a compulsory medical examination and the mandatory quarantine period arranged for labourers. Kangani-assisted recruitment gave way to free wage labour recruitment in the 1930s. Thousands of Indian migrants arrived annually in Malaya under the two recruitment systems. Between 1844 and 1910, about 250,000 indentured labourers came to Malaya.17 The peak of kangani-assisted recruitment occurred in the 1910s, when about 50,000 to 80,000 Indian workers arrived per annum. During the period 1844–1938, kangani-assisted migration accounted for 62.2 percent of total Indian labour migration compared

15 Kaur, Wage Labour in Southeast Asia, ch. 4. 16 Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 97. 17 Ibid., 81.



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50000

40000 Indenture Kangani Voluntary

30000

20000

10000

0 1844

1855

1865

1875

1885

1895

1905

1915

1925

1935

1937

1938

Source: After Kernail Singh Sandhu, Indians in Malaya. Some Aspects of their Immigration and Settlement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Appendix 2, 306–9.

Figure 1. Malaya: Assisted and voluntary Indian immigration, 1844–1938 (numbers)

with 13.0 percent of indentured labour migration. Moreover, whereas in 1920, only 12 percent of Indian workers had not been recruited, this proportion had increased to over 91 percent by the 1930s.18 The changing recruitment patterns and the breakdown of Indian immigrants by recruitment system is shown in Figure 1. As noted previously, Indian immigration was essentially a movement of male labourers. In the late nineteenth century, a very small number of women had been employed on coffee plantations. Saw19 states that there may have been more than 7,200 Indian males per 1,000 Indian females in the late nineteenth century, and this was largely due to the indenture recruitment method. Married men were discouraged from emigrating because they could not afford to bring their families since wages were low; the norm of payment was a single person wage; working conditions were harsh; and accommodation was available for single men only. As stated earlier, Malaya was repeatedly exempted from implementing the gender ratio provision under the 1864 legislation (Act XIII) due to a dualism in 18 Virginia Thompson, Post-Mortem on Malaya (New York, 1943), 123. 19 Saw Swee Hock, The Population of Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore, 1988), 20–1.

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amarjit kaur Table 1. Malaya—FMS Estate Labour Force by Ethnicity, 1907–38

Year

Indians

Chinese

Javanese

Others

Total

Indians as % of workforce

1907 1911 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1938

 43 824 109 633 126 347 160 966 137 761 132 745 118 591 137 353

 5 348 31 460 27 446 40 866 37 879 30 860 29 950 28 925

 6 029 12 795  8 356  8 918  4 165  3 665  1 941  1 762

 2 872 12 127  8 592  5 808  4 549  2 411  2 658  2 892

 58 073 166 015 170 741 216 588 184 354 169 681 153 140 170 932

75.5 66.0 74.0 74.3 74.7 78.2 77.4 80.4

Source: Adapted from J. Norman Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy and Administration: A History of Labour in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya (Locust Valley: New York, J.J. Augustin for the Association for Asian Studies, 1960), 273.

supervision of Indian labour in Malaya. Essentially, the various Indian Emigration Acts prescribed Indian workers’ wages, working hours and conditions, and their living circumstances. However, the Malayan Labour Department (which was under the jurisdiction of the Controller of Labour in Kuala Lumpur) had the authority to modify some of the provisions of the Emigration Acts and compile its own labour codes.20 By the early 1920s Indian nationalists and social reformers had become more vocal in their demands for better labour protections for Indian workers overseas and the issue of continuing emigration of Indians to other British colonies. Thus, in 1922, when the Indian Emigration Act came into operation in India, the question arose as to whether Indian emigration to Malaya should continue after March 1923, when Malaya truly came under the Act’s stipulations. At this time, Indians comprised 74.3 percent of the Estate (plantation) labour force, a figure that had remained fairly constant since 1907, as shown in Table 1. Since the demand for Indian labour was still considerable, the imminent implementation of the Indian Emigration Act 1922 was vital for both future wage deliberations and an improvement in the Indian sex ratio. Consequently, in their negotiations on the terms under which future Indian emigration to Malaya would be allowed, the Indian government recommended, and the Malayan government agreed to, the principle of 20 Major G.St.J. Orde Browne, Labour Conditions in Ceylon, Mauritius and Malaya (Cmd. 6423) (London: HMSO, 1943).



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a standard wage (as opposed to a minimum wage). Simultaneously, an “improved” sex ratio on the plantations, in accordance with earlier Emigration Acts, was also approved. Rule 23 of the Indian Emigration Act (Act VII of 1922), stipulated that there should be at least one female emigrant for every 1.5 males assisted to immigrate as labourers to Malaya.21 It is conceivable that the inclusion of a standard wage may also have played a small role in improving the sex ratio on plantations, since planters could count on a continuing cheap labour supply as well as keeping their overall wage bills down. Unlike coffee cultivation, there was a distinct division of tasks in the rubber sector, namely, weeding tasks, tapping rubber and factory work. Essentially, this differentiation in tasks enabled planters to endorse wage discrimination on the basis of gender and youth. According to Parmer22 “the Indian immigration machinery was designed to keep wages from rising higher than the employers wished while the standard wage inquiries aimed to keep wages from falling lower than the government of India thought desirable.” In the final analysis, the specific political and economic relationships between the Colonial Office in London, the India Office and the British administration in Malaya were influential in shaping Indian male and female labour migrations and determining the sex ratio in the Indian community.23 As stated earlier, a striking feature of the kangani-assisted recruitment system was the emigration of families. Planters required an “established” labouring class and women and children’s emigration was encouraged through a reduction in the assessment payable for women workers. Moreover, the Tamil Immigration Fund increased the commission paid to the kangani for recruiting women workers as well as for married men accompanied by their families. In late 1908, employers of new adult labour recruits were paid an allowance of 7s each for males and 8s 2d each for females recruited through a kangani and 4s 8d per adult recruited under the sponsorship of the Tamil Immigration Fund.24 Subsequent amendments to the Labour Code further stipulated the provision of rooms for married couples as well as childcare and educational facilities on plantations. 21  Sandhu, Indians in Malaya, 98. 22 Norman Parmer, Colonial Labor Policy and Administration: A History of Labor in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya (New York, 1960), 256. 23 Virginia Thompson, Post-Mortem on Malaya, 62–5; Jackson, Immigrant Labour and the Development of Malaya, 62–9. 24 Voon Phin Keong, Western Rubber Planting Enterprise in Southeast Asia 1876–1921 (Kuala Lumpur, 1976), 244–5.

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Table 2. Malaya—Labour Employed in Commercial Crop Cultivation, 1911–57 (Number and percent) Year 1911* 1921 1931 1947** 1957**

Men

Women

Total

%

Total

%

 5 551 370 407 428 615 369 558 428 134

90.6 79.5 78.6 78.0 64.1

  471  95 801 116 547 174 294 239 313

 9.4 20.5 21.4 32.0 35.9

Notes: * Federated Malay States only ** Excludes Singapore Source: Compiled by author from Malaya: Census Reports, 1911–57.

Increased female recruitment and the migration of families are reflected in the census figures for 1901, 1911, 1921, 1931 and 1947. The proportion of Indian women in these census years for every 1,000 Indian men was: 171 in 1901; 308 in 1911; 406 in 1921; 482 in 1931 and 637 in 1947.25 Indian women had the highest participation rate in the commercial crop sector in the Malayan economy between 1911 and 1957, as shown in Table 2. Indian women were mostly employed in the plantation sector. These statistics also elucidate the increasing trend towards permanent settlement by Indians by the 1930s. With increased female migration, more children also arrived in Malaya, and by the 1920s women accounted for 30 percent of all arrivals from India. Many more children were also born in Malaya and raised locally, contributing to the transition towards permanent settlement, and the availability of a pool of workers. Hence, job possibilities for women on plantations and elsewhere, the provisions of the 1922 Emigration Act and the Emigration Rules 1923, and the establishment and reconstitution of families, led to greater permanent Indian settlement in Malaya. This development also coincided with the emergence of “freer” wage labour and the increased recruitment of women workers. Malaya: Chinese Migrant Labour and the Tin Industry Chinese merchants had a long history of trade connections in Southeast Asia and had obtained mineral or agricultural concessions from local

25 Selvakumaran Ramachandran, Indian Plantation Labour in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, 1994), 32.



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rulers in frontier zones prior to the establishment of British hegemony in Malaya. Their contacts and familiarity with conditions in Malaya enabled them to conduct their commerce without the intervention and assistance of the Malayan Administration. Thus, unlike Indian labour recruitment and employment, the Malayan establishment did not play a key role in either the recruitment or employment of Chinese labour immigrants. The development of large-scale tin mining in Malaya in the second half of the nineteenth century was mainly due to the existence of merchant capital in the Straits Settlements and the enterprise of certain Malay chiefs who invited the Chinese merchants to develop tin mining in their territories. These Straits Chinese merchants initially obtained Chinese labour from the Straits Settlements. When demand outstripped supply, the merchants turned to south China to recruit new migrants to work in the mines. The Chinese government did not support Chinese emigration until the late nineteenth century, making it difficult to utilize open, regulated recruitment arrangements. Consequently, the Chinese relied on kinship relations to recruit Chinese labour. This was supplemented by the credit-ticket (steerage) system. The Chinese labour recruitment method thus included a kinship-based migration network in China and the credit-ticket network in the destination country. The kinship-based migration network involved recruitercouriers who recruited migrants from their own villages/regions, and relatives or friends from the migrants’ hometown normally guaranteed the passage and travel expenses. The credit-ticket system, which the bulk of the migrants relied upon, necessitated the passage and travel expenses being paid by labour brokers, captains of junks or labour agencies. The system exemplified the coolie trade that supplied the bulk of Chinese labour migrants. This trade was controlled by both Chinese and foreign agencies, including British, American and Dutch firms in the Chinese treaty ports. Prior to 1876, there were at least six coolie agencies operating in the treaty ports that supplied coolies bound for Singapore. Three were Chinese-owned, two of which were based at Swatow in Guangdong Province while the third was based in Amoy in Fujian Province. Two also had branch offices in Singapore for receiving coolies.26 The labourers were held at receiving depots upon arrival at Singapore (the disembarkation port) until their prospective employers had paid the 26 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya, 1800–1911 (Singapore, 1986), 7; Carl Trocki Opium and Empire: Chinese Society in Colonial Singapore 1800–1910 (Ithaca, 1990), 11.

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Table 3. Estimated Population Outflows from China to selected Southeast Asian Countries, 1851–1925 (thousands) Year 1851–1875 1876–1900 1901–1925

Malaya

Indonesia

Philippines

350 360 125

250 320 300

45 20 n.a.

Note: n.a. = not available. Source: Adapted from Lynn Pan, ‘Patterns of Migration’ in Lynn Pan (General Ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Archipelago Press for the Chinese Heritage Centre, 2000), 62.

passage costs owed by them to either the labour brokers, junk captains or labour agencies. The immigrants then normally entered into verbal or written contracts for the repayment of their debt in the form of labour service. If no employer came forward to hire the labourer, he was often sold off to other employers in adjoining territories. Moreover, there were no conventions for regulating the migrants’ subsequent destiny or determining their working conditions. The influence of Chinese secret societies was pervasive and migrants continued to be controlled by secret society members who prevented them from escaping. When the labourers had repaid their debt (with interest), they were released from their obligations and were free to choose their next employer and place of employment.27 Estimates of Chinese migration outflows to selected Southeast Asian countries are provided in Table 3. As shown above, Malaya recorded high levels of Chinese immigration. Chinese migrant labour dominated in the tin mining industry in Malaya. The migrants were hired on three-year contracts; they were either single men or had left their wives and children behind in China. Hardly any women migrated of their own accord or as associational migrants. Tin mining was organized through the Chinese kongsi, which was a Chinese business cooperative that integrated the maintenance of social control and solidarity.28 The kongsi also functioned as a resilient organization in a frontier society, based on bonds of brotherhood and partnership in economic activity. The isolation of many tin mines from colonial towns, Malay settlements or ports meant that the kongsi had to provide a multiplicity of ancillary services required by workers and an institutional framework

27 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese; Trocki, Opium and Empire. 28 Trocki, Opium and Empire, 1.



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into which new workers were inducted. The kongsi thus offered a sense of security and identity; it depended on a variety of mechanisms, including a personal recruitment system, kinship links, and clan ties and provincial connections to manage workers. Membership of secret societies was often obligatory and the society offered protection and established its own laws and code of conduct.29 The Malayan administration had many misgivings about the creditticket system due to the increasing incidence of abuse suffered by workers, and gradually took measures to free up the Chinese labour market and regulate Chinese immigration. In 1877 the British enacted the Chinese Immigration Ordinance 1877, and established a Chinese Protectorate Offfice staffed by a Protector of Chinese. The Protector’s main duties included supervision of conditions on junks transporting migrants to Singapore and at the depots for receiving the migrants. Labour brokers/recruiters were also subsequently licensed and were required to register labour contacts with colonial labour officials.30 Essentially, the British formalized the existing indenture or bonded labour system among Chinese migrants. Nevertheless, most migrants chose not to sign formal contracts, though they remained bound to their recruiters until they had repaid their debts. Moreover, the recruitment system was neither revamped nor improved, despite a treaty signed between China and Great Britain in 1904. This treaty additionally permitted the British Government to recruit any number of Chinese workers for their colonies at an arranged cost.31 Nevertheless, by the 1890s Chinese secret societies had also been banned and the degree of control exerted by mine owners over workers was reduced. The power of the Kapitan Cina (community head) over workers was also weakened and the position was abolished in 1902. Furthermore, following the abolition of the indenture contract system for Indian labour in 1910, the indenture system was also formally abolished for the recruitment of Chinese labour in 1914. This act did away with the legislation for regulating Chinese migration, and Chinese were subsequently free to enter British territories unrestricted by legislation. This policy changed in subsequent decades when the British introduced border controls during worsening economic conditions in the country. Mining was customarily restricted to men, and women were not allowed in mines or in the proximity of mine shafts. Tin mining was a speculative 29 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese, 117–8. 30 Jackson, Immigrant Labour and the Development of Malaya, 72. 31  Li Dun Jen, British Malaya: An Economic Analysis (Kuala Lumpur, 1982), 137–40.

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undertaking and Chinese miners believed that women brought misfortune to mining ventures. The migration of Chinese women (from China) to Malaya increased when the Malayan administration established a new framework for border controls in the 1930s. During this period, and despite the earlier policy of unrestricted immigration, the Malayan Administration introduced restrictions on Chinese male immigration by implementing a quota system on new arrivals. This move coincided with depressed economic conditions globally and falling demand for rubber and tin. Unlike Indian plantation workers who could be, and were, repatriated to India, the British had no legal means at their disposal to repatriate the “alien” Chinese migrants to China. The British subsequently introduced restrictive immigration legislation to limit the entry of male foreign Chinese migrants, who were considered aliens. Nevertheless, the Colonial Administration did not impose any restrictions on the admission of Chinese women and children below 12 years of age. This exemption was rescinded in 1938 against the backdrop of worsening economic conditions in Malaya and globally. It is probable that this was done since the British did not want to cut off Chinese immigration completely and be confronted with labour shortages when economic conditions improved.32 Chinese women’s immigration was also linked to the colonial policy of improving the sex ratio in the Chinese community and ensuring the establishment of a stable mining labour force. As noted earlier, the Chinese sex ratio ranged from a 70:30 ratio at the beginning of the 1880s to a 75:25 ratio at the end of the 1920s. By 1938 it had risen to 43:57.33 Most Chinese women migrants worked as dulang washers or panners in mining areas. Their job was to concentrate the tin ore from tin tailings in large sluice boxes. Panning was a tin recovery method rather than a mining method as such, and the Malayan administration regulated this work by means of a pass or permit system. During the 1930s, and in the period immediately after the Second World War, this job was reserved solely for women and was intended to provide them with employment opportunities.34 Though not in the same league as the male miners’ economic contribution, dulang 32 Amarjit Kaur, “Labour Crossings in Southeast Asia: Linking Historical and Contemporary Labour Migration”, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 11, 1 (2009): 276–303. 33 Swee-Hock Saw, The Population of Peninsular Malaysia, 20–21, 34–36. 34 Amarjit Kaur, “Women Miners in Malaya: Gender, Race and the Tin-mining Industry, 1900–1950”, in Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt and M. Macintyre (eds), Women Miners in the AsiaPacific Region (London, 2006), 73–88.



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workers made an important input to the mining industry. Chinese women also contributed to improving the sex ratio in the Chinese community and the reproduction of the mining labour force. Women’s migration additionally facilitated the transition from sojourning to settlement for Chinese migrants and many larger mining areas evolved into townships. From the standpoint of overall colonial policy, a liberal immigration policy underscored the Malayan government’s migration goals and immigration remained largely unrestricted until the 1930s. Nevertheless, these restrictions never attained the importance they did until after Malaya achieved independence. In the case of the Indians, settlement was facilitated by the paternalistic policy of the India Office in collaboration with the Malayan administration. Where the Chinese were concerned, the transition from sojourning to settlement came about when the immigration of Chinese women to Malaya increased in the1930s, consistent with government policy of encouraging settlement and improving the sex ratio in the Chinese community. The resulting demographic change is reflected in the Malayan Census figures, for 1911 to 1947, as shown in Figure 2. 60 Malaysians

Chinese

Indians

Percent Populatuion

50 40 30 20 10 0

1911

1921

1931

1947

Notes: 1. ‘Malaysians’ include Malays and Indonesians 2. Indians include Pakistanis after 1947 3. The table excludes “other” races Source: Malaya: Census Reports 1911–1947.

Figure 2. Malaya: Ethnicity and population growth, 1911–47

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Thus, Malaya had become an immigrant nation by the 1940s and colonial immigration policies had also resulted in the creation of a pluralistic economy, demonstrating a tight correlation between ethnicity and economic role. According to Furnivall35 colonial rule resulted in the emergence of pluralistic societies in Southeast Asian states as well. The Malayan administration instigated commodity restriction schemes in the 1920s and 1930s due to depressed economic conditions, and also revised the State’s immigration policy. A growing national consciousness based on ethnicity and ancestry also became evident in Southeast Asia during this period. Subsequently, the fall of Southeast Asia to the Japanese in 1941–2 led to further transformations in the region. Japanese rule exacerbated ethnic sensitivities but at the same time emphasised unitary national identities. Thus, when the European colonizers returned, they found a completely changed environment in the region. Although the colonizers subsequently negotiated for nation states that would include all minority groups, most did not have the resources to implement their plans. The demand for indigenism that had been advanced during the Japanese Occupation period was followed by the implementation of tight border controls, and ethnic/ancestry logics became more pronounced in the region. Crucially, the era of colonial labour migrations associated with the global trade in commodities, was over. Transnational Work and the New Post-Colonial Geographies of Migration in Southeast Asia In the 1970s the international economy was transformed into an interdependent global system and trade became an integral component of the global production system itself. Simultaneously, global production chains distributed manufacturing processes where they could be undertaken most cheaply, signalling a strong correlation between trade and economic growth. Though not as moveable as capital, labour too became more mobile, both regionally and internationally. In Western Europe, governments organised guest worker programs to recruit workers from places like South Asia, Turkey, and Morocco in response to population decline and the ageing of the European population. Similarly, there were significant movements of labour from more populated countries such as the Philippines 35 J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge, 1948), 304–5.



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and Indonesia to Malaysia and Singapore from the 1970s. Importantly, labour migration became a structural feature of Southeast Asian economies, persisting beyond cyclical fluctuations in labour supply.36 Several writers, including Massey et al.,37 and Kritz and Zlotnik38 have emphasized the importance of viewing migration as an interdependent dynamic system, with its own web of interconnecting sub-systems for sending and destination countries, and established colonial links and networks for sustaining and increasing migration flows.39 Southeast Asia may thus be considered as forming one labour migration system within this framework. Two groups of states, based on their specific migration characteristics, that is, mainly emigration and mainly immigration, may be identified in this system. The Philippines, Cambodia, Burma, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia are in the first group while Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and Thailand are in the second. Additionally, two principal migration corridors—the archipelagic Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) corridor and the Mekong sub-regional corridor may also be identified. In the first corridor, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei are the major destination countries, recruiting workers principally from Indonesia and the Philippines. In the second, Thailand is the main destination for migrant workers from other Southeast Asian countries through which the Mekong River flows, namely, Burma, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. Concurrently, the organization of growth triangles or sub-regions in the regional grouping ASEAN, which were created specifically to facilitate trade, capital and labour movements, shaped three smaller sub-systems. These are: the Sijori Growth Triangle (a partnership arrangement between Singapore, Johor in Malaysia and the Riau Islands in Indonesia); the BruneiIndonesia-Malaysia-Philippines East ASEAN growth area (BIMP-EAGA); and the Northern ASEAN sub-region comprising Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.40 All these sub-regions point to the existence of distinct transit points rooted in geographical proximity and shared histories. Border zones 36 Prema-chandra Athukorala and Chris Manning, Structural Change and International Migration in East Asia (Melbourne, 1999). 37 D.S. Massey, J. Arango, G. Hugo, A. Kouaouci, A. Pellegrino and J.E. Taylor (1993) “Theories of International Migration: A Review and Appraisal”, Population and Development Review, 1 (1993): 431–466. 38 M.M. Kritz and Hania Zlotnik, “Global interactions: Migration systems, processes, and policies”, in M.M. Kritz, L.L. Lim and Hania Zlotnick (eds), International Migration Systems: A Global Approach (Oxford, 1992), 1–16. 39 See Amarjit Kaur, “Labour Crossings in Southeast Asia”. 40 Graziano Battistella and Maruja Asis (eds). Unauthorized Migration in Southeast Asia (Quezon City, 2003), 4–9.

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also became important channels in various cross-border economic corridors, belts and transnational agreements. Additionally, serial migration flows, whereby outflows of workers from one country are offset by complementary inflows from other source countries within the region, became routine movements. Migration has similarly become an important labour diversification strategy for the Philippines and Indonesia, and increasingly for Cambodia, Burma, Laos and Vietnam. These states depend on migrant workers’ remittances to fund development projects and poverty alleviation programs. In recent decades, the labour-sending states have also routinely posted labour officials at consular offices in labour-destination countries to offer protection to their nationals and minimize risks of migration. The dual trends of the New International Division of Labour and gendered labour markets also link spaces between the high- and middle-income and poorer countries in the region. Recruitment of women for domestic work and the global nursing care chains is an important dimension of these migration linkages. The new geography of migration in Southeast Asia is also consistent with neo-liberal globalization, capital’s shifting national and supranational boundaries, and offshore labour. Thus, cost-cutting measures by multinationals in the advanced economies have corresponded with the systematic relocation of labour-intensive factory production to middleand low-income countries in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. In turn, since affordable labour continues to be an essential factor in the manufacturing, agricultural and fisheries sectors in most middle-income Southeast Asian States, these States seek out to source this labour from elsewhere. Consequently, the fragmentation of production, work specialization, and new production structures and occupational categories depend heavily on migrant labour. This is principally because uneven economic growth between Southeast Asian (and Asian) states, accompanied by enhanced cooperation between them and the needs of capital, has provided conditions for the appropriation of segments of the working class from poorer states by wealthier states. Moreover, since the mainly working class migrants have a temporary status, destination states deny them citizenship rights to distinguish between foreign and local (national) workers.41 41 Kevin Hewison and Ken Young, “Introduction: globalization and migrant workers in Asia”, in K. Hewison and Ken Young, Transnational Migration and Work in Asia (London, 2006), 1–11.



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Table 4. Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines—Main Economic Indicators 2010 Key Indicator

Singapore Malaysia Thailand Indonesia Philippines

Population (millions) 2010

5.1

28.8

65.5

237.5

92.3

Level of unemployment (%) (2010) estimate

2.20

3.40

1.00

7.10

7.30

GDP per capita (USD) (2010) estimate

62 100

14 700

8 700

4 200

3 500

Human Poverty Index (HPI-1) rank (2007/8)

7

16

24

47

37

339.26

12.06

58.00

(–15.69)

14.58

. . .

7.5

9.80

18.20

34.00

per Capita Foreign Direct Investment (USD) % of Population below Poverty Line

Sources: Derived from CIA World Factbook (2011); UNDP (2009) Human Development Report; IOM (2010) Labour Migration from Indonesia; World Population statistics, available online: http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/population-by-country.htm.

As noted above, migrants have crossed borders to access more promising labour markets, and migration is largely driven by economic and demographic disparities in the region. A summary set of data on the main economic indicators in Southeast Asia that have an effect on migration is listed in Table 4. These indicators present insights on comparative population trends, unemployment levels, GDP per capita in the region, and inequalities between these countries. As shown in Table 4, Singapore and Malaysia have smaller populations compared to other major Southeast Asian countries. Simultaneously, the percentage of people who fall below the poverty line is much higher in Indonesia and the Philippines, the main labour-sending countries in the region. Additionally, the direction of major ILM flows in Southeast Asia/ Asia in recent decades correlate with income and wealth disparities, previous colonial connections, geographical proximity and socio-cultural ties, as shown in Map 2 below. The establishment of ASEAN has also determined and structured the principal migration corridors in the region. The great increase in women’s mobility has also resulted in a broadening of approaches to migration studies. A large percentage of women in the poorer labour-sending states have fewer economic and social

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Source: Adapted from Amarjit Kaur, “Order (and Disorder) at the Border: Mobility, International Labour Migration and Border Controls in Southeast Asia”, in Amarjit Kaur and Ian Metcalfe (eds), Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls in Asia (Basingstoke, 2006), 40.

Map 2. Labour Migration in Southeast Asia since 1980

opportunities compared with men and migrate mainly for economic reasons. These mostly lower-skilled women are recruited for work in gender-specific jobs and are predominantly domestic workers and caregivers. Since they work in private households, their working conditions are not overseen and they are denied labour protections. Despite this, women’s migration demonstrates the role of agency in labour mobility, since the explanation to women’s movement overseas lies with the household and not merely on the individual who migrates, reinforcing the view of migration as a social process. In 2010 women accounted for about 50 percent of the estimated 214 million international migrants, with 90 percent comprising economic migrants and their families.42 This correlates with the progressively increasing trend in Asian women’s participation rates in ILM that ranged from about 45 to 50.1 percent during the period 42 International Labour Organization, Executive Summary. International labour migration: A rights-based approach (2010).



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Table 5. Selected Asian Women’s Migrations in Labour Outflows, 2000–7 (Percent) Country

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

Indonesia Philippines Sri Lanka

68.3 23.8 40.2

. . . 72.0 40.3

76.5 72.8 39.5

. . . 72.5 39.2

87.5 74.3 38.4

68.5 72.2 37.3

. . . 59.9 35.7

. . . 47.8 . . .

Note: The figures for the Philippines refer to newly-hired workers for overseas deployment Source: Database on Asian migration maintained at ESCAP; Indonesia: IOM, ESCAP et al. 2008): Situation Report on International Migration in East and South-East Asia, Bangkok, cited in UNESCO, Key Trends And Challenges On International Migration And Development In Asia And The Pacific (UN/POP/EGM-MIG/2008) 26 January 2009, p. 8.

1960 to 2000.43 Women migrants from the Philippines and Indonesia also dominated recent migration flows as shown in Table 5. Lower-skilled women migrants also rely on networks and social capital since most do not have financial and educational capital. It is thus necessary to situate the experiences of male and female mobility in the dynamics of the new geographies of migration. Essentially, the entry of more women into the waged economy in the higher-income Southeast Asian countries, together with the commodification of domestic service work (housework, child and elderly care), has resulted in the transfer of these tasks to less well-off women from poorer countries in the region. This arrangement absolves the government from providing state-funded childcare and elderly care services. The rise in dual-career families and the construction of middle-class identity and status have also led to the practice of assigning the responsibility for hiring and supervising domestic service workers from the state to prospective employers. At first, the labour-sending states generally considered international migration as a matter of individual preference or right. In some countries, the government’s involvement typically concerned some supervision of labour recruitment agencies to regulate labour mobility. However, since migration was then promoted as a strategy to assist these states reduce unemployment levels and generate remittances from their diasporas and overseas migrant communities, it became necessary to establish protocols for the training, deployment and return of migrants workers upon completion of contracts. ILO officials, including Böhning, for example, therefore advocated formal bilateral labour agreements (BLA) between 43 Hania Zlotnik, “Global Dimensions of Female Migration”, Migration Information Source (2003), http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=109.

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countries as a means of protecting migrants abroad and ensuring labour protections.44 However, since BLA necessitated lengthy negotiations between sending and destination states and emphasized equality of rights of migrant workers vis-à-vis national workers, they were not very popular. Instead, memoranda of understanding (MOU) became the preferred instrument for regulating migration between countries, enshrining general principles of cooperation and obligations, but not specifying detailed obligations.45 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Human Rights Watch (HRW) also approved MOU for the governance of migrant women’s mobility in Southeast Asia. In 2004, for example, the Indonesian Government signed an MOU with Malaysia for the deployment of Indonesian male migrants in Malaysia, but excluded women workers. Following representation by HRW and other human rights defenders, both governments subsequently signed another MOU in 2006, this time dealing specifically with the recruitment of Indonesian domestic workers.46 Although the pay scale was revised upwards, the withholding of salary continued, employers retained the domestic workers’ passports, the issue of a minimum wage was not resolved, and employers were unwilling to grant a weekly day off to domestic workers.47 Moreover, following repeated calls by Indonesian human rights defenders for government intervention due to horrific abuse reports, the Indonesian government suspended recruitment of domestic workers for Malaysia in June 2009. Despite lengthy negotiations, this issue was only resolved on 30 May 2011 when a revised agreement was signed between the two countries for resumption of the trade in domestic workers. Recruitment of domestic workers was also extended to other countries but the situation has not changed. In 2011 the Cambodian government also suspended recruitment of Cambodian women for domestic work in Malaysia.48

44 W.R. Böhning, “Protection, International Norms and ILO Migrant Workers’ Standards”, (Kuala Lumpur 1999), 1 (typescript). 45 Manolo Abella, “Issues in Labor Migration in Southeast Asia”, 2007. Paper presented at the FES/MFA Regional Informal Workshop on Labor Migration in Southeast Asia: What Role for parliaments?” Manila, 22–23 September. 46 Amarjit Kaur, International Labour Migration in Southeast Asia. 47 Kaur, A. (2007) “International Labour Migration in Southeast Asia: Governance of Migration and Women Domestic Workers”, in Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 15, May 2007 published online at http://intersections.anu.edu .au/issue15/kaur.htm. 48 Human Rights Watch 2011 “They Deceived Us at Every Step:Abuse of Cambodian Domestic Workers Migrating to Malaysia” http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/10/31/cambodiamalaysia-domestic-workers-face-abuse accessed December 2011.



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The enhanced cooperation between states is consistent with another important feature of the new geography of migration—labour migration is extolled as an important diversification strategy for poorer nations since it supplies remittances to governments to fund economic growth and poverty alleviation programs. Consequently, the labour-sending state’s role in migration has grown, particularly in the Philippines and Indonesia (and increasingly in Cambodia, Burma, Laos and Vietnam), in contemporary migration movements, and especially in women’s mobility. These countries actively promote labour immigration; they have established specific institutions to regulate mobility and have implemented measures to protect their “investment”. They also post labour attachés in destination countries and provide shelters for abused workers at their embassies. They have thus transformed themselves into labour brokerage states that actively prepare, mobilize and regulate their citizens for work abroad. Labour Brokerage and the Philippines The Philippines represents a global model of a labour brokerage state in the context of this framework. In her study on the subject, Rodriguez cites the former Philippines President, Gloria Arroyo’s national development policy, to make this point: Not only am I the head of the state responsible for a nation of 80 million people. I’m also the CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of 8 million Filipinos who live and work abroad and generate billion of dollars a year in revenue for our country.49

A significant proportion of emigration from the Philippines, both within and outside Asia, comprises lower skilled labour migration. It is also a gendered migration, since most Filipinas work in “female” occupations, including domestic work and as entertainers, hotel and restaurant staff. Filipinos also dominate as seafarers and this group accounts for 25 percent of the world’s seafarers. In 1975, there were 12,501 land-based and 23,534 sea-based workers. By 2004, the figure for land-based workers had risen to 704,586, while sea-based workers numbered 229,002.50 In the early 1970s, amidst growing unemployment and social unrest, the then Philippines President, Ferdinand Marcos, declared martial law in the country and 49 Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export. How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World (Minneapolis, 2010), ix. 50 Maruja Asis, “The Philippines’ Culture of Migration”, Migration Information Source (2006), http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=364.

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formalized the export of labour. In 1974 the state also become the sole institution for the regulation and organization of the export of labour. The government established state agencies to manage this new industry, and the private sector was excluded from participation in the export of labour. Subsequently the government permitted private labour intermediaries to carry out recruitment, training and placement of Filipino migrant workers overseas while it provided overall regulation of the industry.51 The Philippine migration industry comprises a number of government agencies and private labour brokers/enterprises. The private enterprises include recruiters, travel agents, and remittance and travel insurance service providers. The government initially established an Overseas Employment Development Board, which was then merged with the National Seamen Board (then under the Ministry of Labor and Employment) to constitute the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA). The POEA expanded its responsibilities and subsequently became responsible for processing workers’ contracts and licensing, regulating and monitoring private recruitment agencies, while the state posted labour attachés at consulates overseas to provide assistance to migrants. A third organisation, the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), administers centres in locations where there are Filipino overseas foreign workers to provide relief and emergency repatriation services. Each migrant worker pays a fee of US$25 for the services.52 Historically, the Philippines’ former colonial ties with the United States underpinned the early migration movements of Filipinos to the United States. According to Anne Booth,53 the US regarded provision of English education as a “government” responsibility and ensured that a large part of the budget was devoted to education. By the 1930s, therefore, there was rapid expansion of primary, secondary and tertiary education and the Philippines had a large university sector. The Catholic Church also contributed to the expansion of educational facilities in the country. The government’s focus on public health and nursing education based on the US system attracted many women to this field, and after 1948 the US Exchange Visitor (training) Program offered opportunities for Filipino

51  Kristel Acacio, “Managing Labor Migration: Philippine State Policy and International Migration Flows, 1969–2000”, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 17, 2 (2008): 103–132. 52 Maruja Asis, “The Philippines’ Culture of Migration”. 53 Anne Booth, “The Economic Development of Southeast Asia in the Colonial Era: c 1870–1942”, History Compass, 6,1 (2008): 40.



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nurses to travel to the US to work. Catherine Choy54 also emphasizes that mostly Filipino nurses were attracted to the program, and thus the training programs and the labour recruitment industry jointly provided the stimulus for the establishment of the migration machinery. The rest is history. Nursing education geared to the American market expanded rapidly and Filipinos are required to register for the National Council of State Boards of Nursing’s NCLEX-RN examination. Between 2005 and 2010, 82,000 Filipinos (predominantly women, but also men) took the nursing examination.55 The United Kingdom has also become an important destination for Filipino nurses and these nurses work in Canada, Italy, Japan and Taiwan as well. Apart from the nurses who work in hospitals, trained Filipinos work as caregivers, mainly as nannies and home-based care workers. The expansion of private health-care agencies in Western democracies, consistent with ageing populations and state-assisted care for the elderly, underpins the global care chains that best illustrate the dynamics of care regimes. In Asia-Pacific, Filipinos work mainly in the Gulf Cooperation Countries, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. Labour migration from the Philippines therefore demonstrates the broad connections between the diversity of labour mobilities, state immigration policies and practices and gendered labour migration. Emigration for work is also regarded as an essential characteristic of the country’s “culture of migration”.56 But this culture of migration must also be understood in the broader context of continuing political instability and widespread corruption, which have slowed economic growth and made migration a means of survival for many Filipinos. Consequently, the country’s national development strategies and poverty reduction policies have concentrated on overseas remittances rather than job creation in the country. Significantly, while millions of Filipino migrant workers travel as authorized or documented migrant workers, a large number choose the illegal or irregular route to escape the grinding poverty at home. In July 2010, Migrante International (an alliance of overseas Filipino workers, families and advocates) urged the incoming President Benigno Aquino to “make good his

54 Catherine Choy, Empire of Care (Durham NC, 2003), 65. 55 Asian Journal, “Filipino Nurses seeking US jobs fell by 1/3 in first half ”, July 19, 2010. 56 Maruja Asis, “The Philippines’ Culture of Migration”.

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[election] promise” to halt “forced” migration and generate employment opportunities in the country.57 Apart from the expanded role of the state, therefore, there are major issues relating to the new geography of migration and migration patterns. These include an escalation in irregular/undocumented migration and the expansion of private recruitment agencies that handle domestic worker recruitment. These problems are best observed through the lens of destination states. For this reason too, Malaysia and Singapore present excellent examples of regulated cross-border labour migration, irregular (undocumented) migration, and the role of private recruitment agencies in facilitating migration. Malaysia and Singapore as Labour Destination States Malaysia’s and Singapore’s immigration policies are comparable in some respects, but there are major differences as well, demonstrating how satisfactorily these policies correlate with broader economic and social policy frameworks. Both countries regard guest worker programs as a temporary phenomenon and assume that guest workers will return home on completion of contracts. They regulate immigration through elaborate administrative frameworks and stringent border management policies, while labour brokers carry out recruitment, transportation and placement of migrant workers. Singapore relies on free market mechanisms to recruit foreign labour while Malaysia depends on labour accords or MOU with laboursending states. Both countries’ policies enable them to maintain their global competitiveness in the short term and carry out industrial upgrading in the longer term. Singapore is more successful than Malaysia in this regard. They also decide on the sectors where migrant labour is needed in consultation with employers and regulate immigration through a system of work permits and right of entry visas. Singapore has adopted a proactive stategy for professionals and highly skilled migrants and encourages these migrants to take up permanent residence in the country. Concurrently, it has imposed stringent regulations for the recruitment of lowerskilled workers. Increasingly too, both governments have imposed quotas on recruitment of lower-skilled workers to make enterprises employ local labour and upgrade their operations. Despite this, the demand for domestic workers and caregivers has expanded and forms a major component of contemporary labour flows. 57 See, for example, Daily Inquirer, July 26, 2010.



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Singapore: In 1965 Singapore switched to export-oriented industrialization to attract foreign investment after its expulsion from the Malaysian Federation. Since it was essentially cut-off from its wider Malaysian labour market, the government approved the recruitment of migrant workers (initially from Malaysia) to alleviate the upward pressure on wages. It also endorsed a policy of openness to foreign technology and investment and kept wage bills low through a liberal immigration policy until 1979. Subsequently, the government endorsed a broadening of the country’s economic base, resulting in changes in immigration policy. The new policy aimed at attracting professionals and highly skilled workers; phasing out reliance on lower-skilled workers; and encouraging the participation of women in the productive sectors. Singapore’s immigration policy may be described as an explicit (and transparent) scheme for the selection and admittance of foreign workers, against the backdrop of the state’s longer-term goals of industrial-upgrading and technological change. The government utilizes three legislative instruments to regulate the employment and management of foreign workers: the Immigration Act, the Employment of Foreign Workers’ Act (under which is subsumed the Employment Agencies Act), and the Penal Code. The Immigration Act criminalizes the employment of foreign labour without a work permit. The Act also includes guidelines for law enforcement agencies to handle immigration violations (employment without a work permit) and stipulates procedures for legal action against both employers of undocumented workers and the workers themselves. The Employment of Foreign Workers’ Act manages the employment of migrant workers using a range of visas and employment passes, the work permit system and foreign levy scheme. This Act also ensures that employment agencies do not charge job seekers more than the amount stipulated, while the Penal Code includes penalties for non-payment of wages and acts of physical abuse on workers.58 The foreign labour policy is based on the categorization of differentiated work permits or passes for foreign workers recruited under the Employment Pass program and the various tiers correlate with workers’ skills classification and related qualifying salary levels. The scheme for professionals and highly skilled migrants includes the promise of permanent residency, eligibility for dependent’s pass, subsidized healthcare, provision 58 Amarjit Kaur, “Order (and Disorder) at the Border: Mobility, International Labour Migration and Border Controls in Southeast Asia”, in Kaur and Metcalfe, (eds), Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls, (Basingstoke, 2006), 23–51.

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Table 6. Singapore: Employment Pass Framework and R Pass (Work Permit) Information Pass Type

Eligibility

P1

Qualifying monthly salary > S$8,000 Professional, Managerial, Executive, Specialist jobs

P2

Qualifying monthly salary >S$4,500 Professional, Managerial, Executive, Specialist jobs and recognized qualifications

Q1

Qualifying monthly salary > S$3,000 (for young graduates) and in possession of approved degrees, professional qualifications or specialist skills

R pass

For low-skilled or semi-skilled foreigners on Work Permits with a qualifying monthly salary of < S$1,800 Occupational classification: construction, manufacturing, shipbuilding and ship repair industries service sector (domestic work and healthcare, retail and hotel)

Note: The State also introduced a Personalised Employment Pass in 2007 for eligible applicants who had earned at least S$30,000 in the year prior to the application and held a P Pass for two years or a Q pass for 5 years. Source: Singapore, Ministry of Manpower, http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passesvisas/Pages/default.aspx

for dependents’ education, and housing incentive. Migrant workers in this category are predominantly recruited from Malaysia, the United States, Australia, Britain and East Asia (especially Japan and South Korea), China and India.59 For the services sector (excluding domestic work and healthcare), employers may only recruit workers from Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. Details of the Employment Pass Scheme are listed in Table 6. As observed earlier, Singapore relies on private labour brokers or employment agencies to recruit foreign workers. Brokers must be registered; they are required to be “sufficiently” familiar with the state’s employment legislation; and hold a Certificate in Employment Agencies qualification. The Ministry of Manpower is authorized to license recruitment and placement agents that provide brokerage services to employers 59 Brenda Yeoh, “Singapore: Hungry for Foreign Workers at All Skill Levels”, Migration Information Source (2007); Aris Chan (2011) Hired on Sufferance, China’s Migrant Workers in Singapore (China Labour Bulletin); Singapore, Ministry of Manpower, http://www.mom .gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-visas/Pages/default.aspx.



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under the Employment Agencies Act. Employment Agencies that handle recruitment and placement of foreign domestic workers are also required to have state accreditation. The government also prefers to rely on market mechanisms for establishing wage rates and recruitment fees. There were more than 1,200 employment agencies in Singapore at the end of 2004, of which about 800 were involved with placement of semi-skilled and lower skilled migrant workers.60 In 2010, foreign workers comprised 34.7 percent of the State’s workforce, compared to 28.1 percent in 2000.61 In 2006 there were also 600 labour agencies in the state handling domestic worker recruitment. Moreover, according to newspaper reports, the number of work permit holders in Singapore in December 2009 totalled 856,000 workers, representing on average, an annual increase of approximately 92,000 new lower wage labour hires over a period of three years.62 Crucially, this increase has put a strain on providing housing for the workers who are not wanted by Singaporeans.63 Singapore has also stipulated the obligations and responsibilities of the three key stakeholders accountable for labour recruitment, namely, employers, labour brokers and foreign workers, and developed a regulatory framework to ensure that each stakeholder carries out its specific responsibility. Employment agents in Singapore not only recruit workers for specific employers, in some instances, they also manage the workers. This is mainly because all employers of lower-skilled and semi-skilled workers are required to post a bond of S$5,000 with the State, which “compels” employers to repatriate the workers upon completion of contracts. Furthermore, errant employers risk the possibility of being barred from hiring foreign workers in the future. The state thus utilizes stringent regulations to ensure that guest workers continue to remain temporary workers. Internal enforcement strategies and stepped-up surveillance of Singapore’s borders have additionally improved Singapore’s ability to monitor employment levels of guest workers by deterring workers from overstaying and preventing the entry of unauthorized or irregular workers. The government has also mandated the provision of dormitory housing by employers 60 Ng Cher Pong, “Management of Foreign Workers in Singapore: Regulation of Employment Agents”, in Christine Kuptsch (ed.), Merchants of Labour (Geneva, 2006), 103. 61  Brenda Yeoh and Weiqiang Li, “Rapid Growth in Singapore’s immigrant Population Brings Policy Challenges”, Migration Information Source, April 2012. 62 The Straits Times, “Employers want more foreign workers”, December 9, 2009; The Straits Times, “Foreign worker levy to increase over 3 years”, February 23, 2010. 63 Theonlinecitizen, “Overreaction? Or under-reaction on issues that matter?”, April 27, 2010.

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for workers, while some workers are housed in steel shipping containers. Generally, workers do not have freedom of movement in the city-state, apart from Sundays. Singapore also depends on periodic amnesties to encourage existing visa over stayers to turn themselves in to the authorities for repatriation. These repatriation programs are based on legislation passed in 1989 and stipulate prison sentences of up to three months and physical punishment (judicial caning) for offenders. Initially, judicial caning was imposed only on the foreign offenders who overstayed or on undocumented migrants. This regulation was subsequently extended to employers who employed and housed more than five undocumented workers. The government also relies upon the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority for surveillance of state borders, and collaborates with the Police and the Ministry of Manpower as well. The State has introduced new technology, such as the i-Faces biometric system, to boost its screening efforts.64 Singapore has also approved the establishment of a new type of employment intermediary, that is, the repatriation company, to repatriate “surplus to requirement” lawful workers (still under contract) whose services are no longer required by employers. Employers therefore not only have a pathway for dismissing workers under contract but also for ensuring their immediate departure from the state (and getting back the S$5000 bond posted with the state) without incurring a penalty. There are two major repatriation companies and about six smaller companies whose main job is to legally repatriate semi-skilled and lower skilled workers on behalf of firms that no longer require their services. The repatriation companies forcibly confine workers at their office premises until the paperwork is finalized for their “legal expulsion” from Singapore and they are sent off to their home countries. The repatriation companies’ charges include a payment of S$250 per worker plus a S$50 per night accommodation fee.65 This inequitable treatment that is sanctioned specifically for lower-skilled workers mirrors the state’s discriminatory employment regulations for this category of workers. It is also instructive of the tacit approval of this mode of expulsion by the government and the compact between state and capital. The gendering of tasks has also formalized gender-based wage discrimination in the country. Singapore’s main labour legislation applies to both skilled and lower-skilled migrant workers, but domestic workers are excluded from coverage by labour laws and they do not have formal work agreements or specified minimum work standards. Domestic work64 Singapore Immigration and Checkpoints Authority, http://app.ica.gov.sg/index.asp. 65 The Straits Times, “Holding area in a room in an office-when things go wrong”, January 31, 2009; Transient Workers Count Too and HOME, “Justice Delayed, Justice Denied”.



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ers are recruited solely through agencies for domestic worker recruitment and employers have to apply for their work permits, which are valid for 24 months. Although Singapore’s Employment Act stipulates a maximum work limit of 44 hours per week, this ruling excludes domestic workers since their “private” workplace is not considered a “traditional industrial” workplace and they also do not have specified working hours. Consequently, they have much weaker protections compared to other migrant workers and are liable for deportation if they become pregnant. They are also not allowed to marry Singaporean citizens. On average there are about 200,000 domestic workers, with one in every six households employing a domestic worker.66 Originally, they were not eligible for a weekly day off, but in March 2012 the government legislated a day off for them. Following this, the bond payable for domestic workers was also waived.67 This legislation received almost universal coverage—in the United Kingdom, USA, Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere. Domestic workers’ contracts also stipulate that a domestic worker is required to remain on the premises of her employer (unless on authorized duties or a day’s leave). According to an activist from the NGO Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME), domestic workers are the poorest migrant workers in Singapore since they are paid the lowest wages and have limited legal protections and the worst employment conditions. Malaysia: Malaysia is a major employer of foreign labour in Southeast Asia. Lower-skilled and semi-skilled migrant workers from the region and Asia have been filling labour shortages and shaping the country’s labour market since the 1980s. The politics of race and electoral cycles play an important role in official discourses on foreign worker recruitment and the ethnicity and selection of lower-skilled migrant workers. The government has also organized diverse strategies to attract highly skilled and lower-skilled migrant workers and reduce illegal employment in the country. Access to legal employment channels through labour accords with labour sending countries have been simplified and are premised on guest worker programs. These programs are typically short-term; they include a range of restrictions to regulate the movement of migrant workers; and most exclude explicit reference to labour protections. Malaysia 66 Jakarta Post, August 12, 2010; Amarjit Kaur, “Labour Migration in Southeast Asia: Migration Policies, Labour Exploitation and Regulation”, Journal of Asia Pacific Economy, 15.1, (February 2010): 6–19; Human Rights Watch (2012) World Report 2011: Singapore. 67 See for example, The Telegraph, “Singapore’s foreign maids get a day off ”, March 8, 2012.

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also struggles with high levels of unauthorized migration and has endorsed both voluntary and coercive repatriation programs.68 The present immigration policy in the country has its origins in the new immigration policies introduced after Malaysia attained independence in 1957. Essentially, these policies were intended to restrain Chinese and Indian immigration. The Immigration Act 1959 resulted in the tightening of entry rules for non-resident spouses and children of Malayan Chinese and Indians (who had lived abroad for a continuous period of five years after December 1954), under the reunification of families clause. Following this, the government brought in the Employment Restriction Act 1968, which made admittance to the labour market for non-citizens conditional on the possession of work permits. The work permit system also ensured that only skilled non-citizens would be allowed entry into the country. Nevertheless, Indonesian labour migration (particularly from Java and Sumatra) was allowed to continue on a spontaneous basis and gradually became a permanent feature in Malaysian society. Indonesians were initially not regarded as aliens, due to historical and cultural links and ethnic and religious affinity between the two countries. Indonesians were also useful for bolstering the electoral power base of the indigenous Malays vis-à-vis Chinese and Indians. They utilized informal entry channels, building on their pre-Second World War social networks and connections with Indonesian communities in the country.69 Subsequently, following the racial riots of 1969, the government approved a new development strategy, the New Economic Policy, to improve the country’s economic prospects and competitiveness. The state also took the lead in driving economic growth and embraced a labour-intensive manufacturing strategy which was consistent with the New International Division of Labour and Japan’s rise as a regional economic power. Simultaneously, public infrastructure and land development projects were also instigated against the backdrop of a sustained fertility decline, restrictive immigration policies and a declining and stabilizing workforce. Moreover, since foreign direct investment and cheap labour were required to support the industrialization program, the government concentrated on reducing 68 Amarjit Kaur “Labour migration trends and policy challenges in Southeast Asia”. 69 Amarjit Kaur, “Indonesian Migrant Labour in Malaysia: From preferred migrants to ‘last to be hired’ workers”, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, 39, 2 (2005): 3–30; Azizah Kassim, “Security and Social Implications of Cross-National Migration in Malaysia”, in Mohamed Jawhar Hassan, ed., Pacifying the Pacific: Confronting the Challenges (Kuala Lumpur, 2005), 259–288.



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labour costs and maximizing profits under the pretext of filling labour shortages in poorly paid sectors. The government’s liberal approach to economic migration during this period meant that at first employers and government agencies were “permitted” to recruit workers from neighbouring Indonesia and Thailand to meet their labour demands. The employers utilized the services of private labour brokers, who relied on their social networks or illegal labour syndicates, to recruit workers for their enterprises. Subsequently, Indonesians in the thousands landed to take up jobs in the plantation, construction and domestic work sectors. This approach and the absence of a comprehensive foreign labour policy and migration architecture resulted in the clandestine entry of large numbers of irregular Indonesian migrants to fill labour market gaps. According to Jones,70 citing Indonesian Ministry of Manpower records, estimates of irregular Indonesian migrant workers employed in Malaysia ranged from 200,000 to 700,000 in the early 1980s. A foreign workforce was also intended to undermine the influence of the Malaysian trade unions and control Indians and Chinese. Like Singapore, Malaysia categorizes foreign workers into two groups: highly skilled and lower-skilled workers, according to the workers’ expertise and salary levels. Highly skilled workers or expatriates comprise those who earn more than RM2,500 a month and are employed in higher managerial and executive positions and technical work. These workers are admitted under an employment pass scheme and are allowed to bring their spouses and families to Malaysia. The Committee for Expatriate Workers, which administers the expatriate recruitment policy, includes government representatives from nine Government Ministries and authorization for recruitment may originate from a variety of state agencies. The highly skilled workers and professionals are allowed to stay in Malaysia for a maximum ten-year period. Lower-skilled or foreign contract workers, who earn below RM2,500 a month, are issued temporary work visas or permits by the Immigration Department. This category of workers comprises mainly semi-skilled workers and lower-skilled workers, including domestic workers. The work permit system permits migrant workers to reside and work temporarily in the country for the duration of the work contract. Foreign workers (excepting domestic workers) qualify for “protection and benefits” provided under various Malaysian labour 70 Sidney Jones, 2000. Making Money Off Migrants. The Indonesian Exodus to Malaysia (Asia 2000 Ltd. and Center for Asia-Pacific Transformation Studies, University of Wollongong, Australia), 15.

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laws. The government has periodically revised contract terms and most workers are presently issued one-year permits which may be renewed annually for a maximum of three years. This was subsequently raised to five years. The number of permits granted to employers is determined on the basis of several criteria: type of industry; export/non-export orientation; paid-up capital; sales value and the ratio of local to foreign workers. Like Singapore, a dependency ceiling, which is defined as the maximum share of foreign workers permitted in a firm’s total employment, is thus implicit in the service legislation governing migrant labour employment in Malaysia. These ceilings are higher for sectors where lower-skilled workers are employed, as listed in the criteria for employment in selected sectors in Table 7. The recruitment of women domestic workers in Malaysian households correlates with the gendering of the labour market. Migrant women workers generally have greater opportunities for legal employment avenues in private homes and symbolize the new gendered migration linkages in the region. Their recruitment has also coincided with Malaysian women’s greater economic participation in the productive sectors; Malaysia’s gender-selective immigration policies; and expansion of gender-specific employment niches. These developments also point to the self-sustaining characteristic of this migration stream, and the emergence of particular female migrant linkages between groups of countries. Malaysia’s immigration policy, which has been characterized as chaotic, parallels the country’s racist policies. Originally, the government allowed Malaysian labour brokers to recruit workers through private labour intermediaries from countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, China, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, Pakistan and Burma and the migrant workers were then processed for service under Malaysian immigration regulations. Recruitment dealings were not strictly monitored, resulting in an expansion in irregular migration. The government then organized mass expulsion exercises, followed by regularization programs for undocumented migrants. Malaysia later instituted a centralized recruitment policy, but this action did not stop irregular migration. Subsequently, the government approved a recruitment policy based on intergovernmental accords, which enabled it to cast its net even wider to incorporate a range of Asian labour-sending states as labour providers.71 This policy further 71 Vijayakumari Kanapathy, “Migrant Workers in Malaysia: An Overview”, Country paper prepared for the Workshop on an East Asian Cooperation Framework for Migrant Labour, Kuala Lumpur, 6–7 December 2006.



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Table 7. Malaysia: Criteria for Employment of Foreign Workers in selected sectors Manufacturing Sector 1. Export-Oriented Companies Eligibility Criteria: – Minimum export Value: RM50 million *Eligibility ratio of local workers vis-a vis foreign workers 1:3 2. Non-Export Oriented Companies Eligibility Criteria: – Minimum paid-up capital: RM 100,000 – Sales value RM 2 million *Eligibility ratio of local workers vis-à-vis foreign workers 1:1 3. Company in the Electrical and Electronic Sectors Eligibility Criteria: None – Ratio of local workers to foreign workers is 1:2, irrespective of whether the company is designated “export-oriented” or “non export-oriented’ Plantation Sector Eligibility: Owner of plantation or lessee Type of cultivation or nursery: oil palm, rubber, cocoa, teak and other species of forest Approval criteria—depends on two factors: land area and number of existing workers (local and foreign) For example: For every 8 hectares of oil palm: 1 foreign worker For every 4 hectares of rubber: 1 foreign worker Construction Sector For construction workers < 50 – Employer needs to get approval from the Construction Labour Exchange Centre For construction workers > 50 – Employer needs to get approval from Ministry of Home Affairs Note: A foreign worker is initially allowed to work for three years only and the worker’s application may be extended on a year-to-year basis until the fifth year. Further extensions are allowed only upon application to relevant certifying authorities after the fifth year, and on the worker’s status being upgraded to that of a skilled worker. This classification also promotes circular migration. Source: Adapted from Haji Shamsuddin Barden, (2006) “Terms and Conditions of Employment (Foreign Workers)/Unionism”. (Typescript)

confirms the shifting ethnic-based recruitment policy for particular sectors as shown in Table 8. Then, in 1995 Malaysia established a new unit, namely, a Special Task Force on Foreign Labour as the only state agency tasked with recruitment of foreign labour (excepting domestic workers and shop assistants). This task force was set up as a “one-stop agency” to handle both the recruitment and processing of migrant workers and clearly fixed the state’s

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Table 8. Malaysia—Country of Origin of Foreign Workers Approved for Recruitment in Designated Sectors, 2008 Sector Construction Manufacturing Plantation/ Agriculture Service – Restaurant

Country Philippines (men), Indonesia, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Burma, Nepal, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh Philippines (men), Indonesia (female), Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Burma, Nepal, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh Philippines (men), Indonesia, India, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Laos, Burma, Nepal, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Bangladesh

All source countries for general worker posts (except India - cooks only). Restaurants in major towns in Peninsular Malaysia – Laundry All source countries except India – Cleaning/Sanitation All source countries except India – Caddy All source countries except India – Resort Islands All source countries except India – Welfare Homes All source countries except India – Cargo All source countries except India – High Tension Cable India only Domestic Workers Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Cambodia India, Nepal, Vietnam, Laos Foreign Nurses Albania, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Pakistan, Indonesia, Burma Sources: Malaysian Immigration Department; V. Kanapathy, 2006, ‘Migrant Workers in Malaysia: An Overview’, Country paper prepared for the Workshop on an East Asian Cooperation Framework for Migrant Labour, Kuala Lumpur, 6-7 December http://www.isis.org .my/files/pubs/papers/VK_MIGRATION-NEAT_6Dec06.

position as the sole institution authorized to import foreign labour. The government also considered this unit as a tool to address exploitation of migrant workers by private labour brokers. Kanapathy regards this shift as an “explicit ” policy on labour importation, and “an interim solution to meet excess demand for lower skilled labour.”72 Malaysia also expanded the Immigration Department’s responsibilities to correlate with the shift in foreign labour policy, identify appropriate

72 See Amarjit Kaur, “International Migration and Governance in Malaysia: Policy and Performance”, UNEAC Asia Papers, No. 22 (2008).



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Table 9. Malaysia—Migrant Workers by Citizenship and Sector, November 2007 Nationality Domestic Construction Manufacturing Services Plantation Agriculture Workers Indonesia 296,984 Bangladesh 17 Nepal 30 Burma 30 India 99 Vietnam 10 Philippines 10,397 Thailand 417 Pakistan 1 Cambodia 6,825 Others 893 Total 315,703

210,838 49,289 4,624 15,111 7,577 5,220 1,686 1,105 4,387 176 2,508 302,440

206,898 151,376 178,714 79,425 30,803 106,686 2,856 790 3,296 2,404 2,857 766,105

40,116 267,615 26,069 24,552 28,764 2,810 20,617 1,483 60,750 23,298 2,826 90 2,765 5,038 15,216 63 1,829 816 231 201 3,174 369 202,357 356,335

102,629 15,016 8,171 6,556 21,631 623 2,581 555 5,080 86 248 163,176

Total 1,155,080 266,319 223,113 123,222 144,158 115,464 25,323 18,056 15,409 9,923 10,049 2,106,116

Source: Malaysia, Department of Immigration, cited in Suaram, Malaysia Human Rights Report 2008 (Petaling Jaya, Suaram Kommunikasi, 2008), 155.

labour-source countries and determine the eligibility of employment sectors wanting foreign workers. The department was further delegated to provide advice on the duration of labour contracts and details of levies on foreign workers. Hence, a foreign labour recruitment policy, based solely on an offshore recruitment scheme, was implemented to replace the onsite recruitment of undocumented and irregular (Indonesian) labour that had been in operation since the 1970s. Additionally, labour agencies were banned from recruiting foreign workers, with the exception of domestic workers. Domestic workers were seen as a special case, since they are not covered by Malaysia’s employment regulations. Private labour brokers were thus allowed to continue with recruitment of domestic workers. The government also signed MOU with a number of labour sending states, principally to diversify the foreign lower-skilled workforce in the country. The diverse origin of migrant workers in various economic sectors in Malaysia in 2010 is shown in Table 9. Malaysia is highly dependent on foreign investment for its economic strategy. Rather than becoming a market for capital, it is seen as a source of cheap labour, producing labour-intensive goods for the global economy. The government’s policy of maintaining the country’s exportcompetitiveness based on cheap foreign labour has resulted in Malaysia being caught in the middle-income trap. Concurrently, its racist policies have meant that it has not advanced economic restructuring, nor made serious attempts to raise the productivity of the workforce. Thus, against the backdrop of declining investment flows, the government has resorted

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to encouraging investment in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that require fewer than 50 workers and smaller investment totals. It is also clear that most Chinese entrepreneurs have gone for small and medium enterprises because these firms (that are not incorporated) are “below the size” threshold at which Malaysia’s Industrial Coordination Act’s employment quota (a prerequisite of 30 percent reserved for Malays) would apply.73 Therefore, after 2005/6, the government has endorsed a “newer” model of labour brokerage or outsourcing arrangements for firms employing fewer than 50 workers. Under previous sub-contracting arrangements, firms had been allowed to supply workers to plantations and other enterprises and also manage matters such as accommodation, transportation, insurance and the like. The government had approved the arrangement primarily to allow employers to shift some of their responsibilities concerning workers to a third party, the labour sub-contractor, who often organised seasonal labour gangs as well. However, the employer retained overall responsibility over the workers. Under the new arrangements, the outsourcing agents have become “contractors” of labour. Workers are recruited by counterpart labour brokers in sending states and thus have to pay for the privilege of recruitment to both sets of brokers. They have very few protections and no formal contracts specifying their employment, remuneration and working conditions. These enterprises offer lower wages and also have less attractive labour conditions and fewer enterprise accountability concerns. The Malaysian government has justified its decision to allow outsourcing firms on the grounds that the labour hire firms are able to avoid middlemen who demand “exorbitant” recruiter fees. Within two years, 277 labour outsourcing firms were established to recruit workers (especially from Bangladesh) for the SMEs and the workers are responsible for all their recruitment and transportation costs and the recruiting agent’s charges for the privilege of working in Malaysia. These workers have no right to enter into negotiations regarding working conditions and labour rights. Additionally the Home Ministry charges each worker MYR$1,500 to validate the contract, but this contract is not given to the worker. Moreover, though these firms are legally obliged to provide jobs for the labour recruits, they move the workers about in order to get the best bargain for themselves, denying them fair wages and other entitlements.74 73 Hal Hill, “Malaysian economic development: looking backward and forward”, in Malaysia’s Development Challenges Graduating from the Middle, in Hal Hill, Tham Siew Yean and Ragayah Haji Mat Zin (eds) (Abingdon, 2010), 1–42. 74 Tenaganita, Fact Finding Report: Outsourcing in Labor or Trafficking in Migrant Labor? (Tenaganita, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, 2007) (Typescript).



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The management of domestic workers is a separate labour issue in Malaysia and has to be examined in the context of the changing division of labour, dual-income families, migrant women’s work in private households, and the government’s exclusion of the “private sphere” from outside scrutiny. Domestic worker employment is also linked to a “sponsorship-immigration” rule arrangement. Domestic workers provide both flexibility and affordability (they are paid comparatively lower wages) and since they are employed in the private home, are considered informal workers by the government. A Malaysian employer wanting to hire a domestic worker has to liaise with a certified Malaysian domestic worker recruitment agency. The agency then initiates a search order with a counterpart agency in the sending country and may offer a selection of applicants to the client. After selection, the prospective employer has to pay for all training, visa and travel costs up front and hence both the Indonesian and Malaysian governments have allowed Indonesian brokers (Indonesia is the main provider) and Malaysian domestic worker agencies to handle all aspects of their immigration. In 2004 the Malaysian government’s lack of duty of care toward domestic workers was taken up by Human Rights Watch, resulting in the publication of a Report titled Help Wanted: Abuses Against Female Migrant Domestic Workers in Indonesia and Malaysia.75 This report was critical of both the Indonesian and Malaysian governments for not including labour protections for Indonesian domestic workers in the MOU. Subsequently, in 2005, the Malaysian government instituted a number of changes to provide certain safeguards for domestic workers. These included a wage raise, new rules for payment commencing from the first month of their service, and allowing them to change employers. The minimum recruitment age of domestic workers was also raised to 25 years.76 Subsequently, in May 2006, Malaysia and Indonesia signed an MOU setting out a standard contract for Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia. Although the pay scale was revised upwards, the withholding of salary continued, the domestic workers’ passports continued to be withheld by employers, the issue of a wage increase was not resolved and employers have not been willing to grant a weekly day off to their workers. In June 2009, the Indonesian government banned the recruitment of Indonesian domestic workers following a series of horrific abuse scandals, and the 75 Human Rights Watch, Help Wanted: Abuses against Migrant Female Domestic Workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, 2004, Vol. 16, 9 (C). 76 Amarjit Kaur, International Labour Migration in Southeast Asia.

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situation remained unresolved for a number of months. Despite lengthy negotiations, this issue was only resolved in May 2011 when a revised agreement was signed between the two countries for the recruitment of Indonesian domestic workers. The domestic workers have since returned to Malaysia, they are allowed to retain their passports and their pay has increased. They are also allowed a day off.77 Malaysia also considers undocumented migrants as a threat to the state’s security, and the roundups and expulsion, followed by regularization of foreign workers’ exercises have continued. These exercises are conducted under commando-like conditions and have been ongoing since the late 1980s. More than 70 percent of the undocumented workers are from Indonesia, and Malaysia’s chaotic immigration policy reform continues. As recently as July 2011, the government launched a new plan of action, codenamed “6P”. This program comprises six fundamental measures to tackle irregular migrants: registration, legalisation, amnesty, supervision, enforcement and deportation. The exercise was also intended to provide accurate figures on the number of migrant workers in the country (estimated at about two million) and register/regularize undocumented workers (believed to number two million). Furthermore, the operation was used to determine migrant workers’ employment in the five permitted sectors only, plantation, construction, manufacturing, agriculture and services. The registration procedure enabled the state to verify workers’ particulars and record them on the government’s biometric system to enable “better control over foreign labour.”78 Additionally, the state enlisted the services of a non-state actor, Ikatan Relawan Rakyat Malaysia (RELA) or Peoples’ Voluntary Corps, in its campaign or “war” against irregular migrants (including refugees and asylum seekers). RELA had been formed in 1972 to assist, maintain and safeguard peace and security in the country and undertake community projects. Volunteers were given training and were “expected to act against virtually all types of anti-government activity”, and promote government objectives.79 The state subsequently allowed RELA personnel to be armed and their new duties include instructions to “stop, search and demand documents, arrest without a warrant, and enter houses or premises believed 77 Migration News, January 2010, Volume 17. No 1 Southeast Asia (available online); The Star Online, “No more multi-tasking for Indonesian maids”, March 15, 2010. 78 The Star, “6 P programme starts on July 11”, June 23, 2011; The Star, “Crackdown on illegal immigrants to begin on 1 January [2012]”, June 25, 2011. 79 John Funston, Malay Politics in Malaysia, (Kuala Lumpur, 1980).



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to house irregular migrants.” Thus, RELA was transformed into a valuable state ally in Malaysia’s war against irregular migrants. RELA personnel also carry out judicial caning of undocumented migrants.80 RELA’s work in this operation was suspended during the latest exercise Thus, instead of utilizing the services of public law enforcement officials, the government continues to criminalize migrant workers and deny them natural justice. Malaysia has also established immigrant detention centres for irregular migrants, including those who become “undocumented” when they flee from abusive employers. There are currently 16 dedicated detention centres in Malaysia (11 in Peninsular Malaysia, 2 in Sarawak and 3 in Sabah) for irregular migrants. As Ramachelvam81 has stated, foreign workers comprise 33 percent of the prison population, despite the fact that they commit only two percent of the crimes. The vast majority of them are incarcerated on immigration-related offences. Since immigration violations are considered civil matters, these workers may be imprisoned without any rights and any guarantee of a speedy trial. In March 2010, Amnesty International, in its study of migrant workers’ human rights violations in Malaysia (Peninsular Malaysia) under its Demand Dignity Campaign, published a highly critical report on migrant workers’ situation. The report, Trapped: The Exploitation of Migrant Workers in Malaysia, affirms that while individual recruitment agents perpetrate labour trafficking, the government of Malaysia facilitates this abuse due to its “loose regulation of agents, abusive labour laws and policies and the practice of allowing employers to confiscate their workers’ passports” which allows trafficking of foreign workers to flourish.82 The Borderless World and the State The colonial state had a premier role in the regulation of migrant labour recruited under contract labour arrangements before the Second World War. Labour intermediaries also played a significant role in labour recruitment. Nevertheless, spontaneous and speculative migration was also 80 Suaram (Suara Rakyat Malaysia), 2006, Malaysia Human Rights Report 2005 Civil and Political Rights (Petaling Jaya, 2006), 120–1. 81  M. Ramachelvam, “A Rights Based Policy Framework and Plan of Action”. Paper presented at the Malaysian Bar Council Conference on Developing a Comprehensive Policy Framework for Migrant Labour, 18–19 February, Kuala Lumpur, 2008 (typescript). 82 Amnesty International, Trapped: The Exploitation of Migrant Workers in Malaysia Amnesty International March 2010 Index: ASA February 28, 2010.

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a defining feature of labour mobility. Additionally, since the colonizers needed to establish a stable labour force, labour migration resulted in these workers’ permanent settlement in colonial territories and the emergence of pluralistic societies. The fact that labour migrations predominantly took place within the wider colonial empire facilitated this process. By comparison, the post-colonial geography of migration comprises transnational labour migrations that are both regional and global and are unmistakably south-north or south-south migrations. Guest worker programs dominate migration flows and governments are deeply involved in regulating migration through immigration policies and border control systems. Destination states have adopted restrictive immigration policies and politicians have exploited public concerns about immigration for political gain. An entire migration industry and machinery has also been assembled by most states that correlate with the commercialization of migration processes. Despite efforts to reduce their dependence on foreign labour, Malaysia and Singapore continue to rely on immigrant labour. Domestic workers are a case in point and a fundamental dimension of this new globalized migration is that women’s work has been incorporated into the global domestic order, resulting in the gendering of migration. State strategies to monitor and control large-scale migrant labour flows have also resulted in varying manifestations of associational activity and political mobilization by, and in the name of, migrant labourers in Southeast Asia.

Migration into Thailand: Change and Continuity from a Gender Perspective Patcharawalai Wongboonsin Introduction Thailand, previously known as Siam, lies in the heart of Southeast Asia. This paper investigates the diverse migratory flows into Thailand since the pre-modern period while tracking shifting gendered patterns of migration. The chapter shows that migratory movements into the Thai state in the earlier period were male-dominated, and included both free and coerced flows. The migrant workers’ main occupations in the first period were consistent with the three main “male”-dominated job categories: manual labour, trade and court/regal services. The majority of the female migrants went as dependents, rather than as primary breadwinners. The situation changed in the twentieth century with women migrating as primary migrants; a distinct pattern of women engaging in the sex trade also became obvious. Since the second half of the twentieth century, both male and female migrant workers have been employed in an expanded range of activities. Male migrant workers are largely employed in manual jobs, including construction, manufacturing, and in the agricultural and fishery sectors. Women migrant workers’ occupations currently include labourintensive manufacturing production (textiles, garments), and agricultural and fishery-related processing activities. Apart from sex work, migrant women are also concentrated in domestic work activities like their counterparts in other Southeast Asian states. This chapter is divided into four parts. After the introduction, various migratory flows are investigated followed by a review of the occupations engaged in by migrants and a conclusion. Flows of Migration Migration into Thailand can be divided into three phases according to the state’s approach towards immigration. The first phase, prior to 1910, embodied a receptive and encouraging approach. The second phase began in 1910 when a strong Thai nationalistic policy was instituted, resulting in

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a control-oriented approach to immigration. The third phase started in the mid-twentieth century, when a migration management approach was adopted. Phase I: The Pre-1910 Approach This first phase of migration can be further divided into two periods: the pre-Ratanakosin period of the fourteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, and the foundation of Ratanakosin in 1782. According to Wongboonsin,1 based on archival anecdotes and reports scattered throughout the territory, there were at least 25 flows of migrants from 15 different countries of origin, nearby and beyond, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. These flows exhibited different forms, patterns, characteristics, contributing factors and different places of destination across the Thai kingdom. The migration flows started in the thirteenth century with male caravan traders and merchants from what is now modern China, followed by those from Persia and India, who became settled in this area by the fifteenth century. Despite the lessening of the practice of waging wars to seize people, male and female, from neighbouring states by the start of the seventeenth century, massive migration continued. This was particularly evident among ethnic minorities—male and female Mon, Islamic Cham, Lao Song, Laoty or Lao Vien, and Christian Vietnamese—fleeing political and/or ideological conflicts back home. Immigrants from other states, which now constitute modern Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and England, were also identified. Among the immigrants those from China, Persia and India were the most numerous. Female migration was relatively small, limited to dependent migration and conflict-driven population displacement. While the push factors varied from case to case, the pull factors were attributable to the fact that this area had become prosperous and a vibrant trading centre of Asia; Thai kings welcomed their presence and granted migrants permission to settle, as well as freedom of worship and economic activities. Chains of migration and networks of migrants contributed to migratory flows thereafter.

1 See Patcharawalai Wongboonsin, History of Migration into Thailand (Bangkok, 2010).



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From 1782, when the Chakri Dynasty founded Ratanakosin with Bangkok as the capital city to the end of King Rama’s reign in 1910, there was a shift in both the geography and magnitude of migration; there were a lower number of flows (at least 16), but each with a large magnitude, from Asian states now called China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia.2 This period recorded organized flows of indentured male migrant workers, besides male sojourning merchants, their partners and employees to overseas ports and cities, who then decided to settle in Siam. These migrants were mainly from China, followed by South Asia. As in the previous period, the Chinese flow was relatively large. Some migrants were from Yunnan while many others were from southern Chinese ports. The former were mainly Yunnanese Muslim caravan traders, called Chin Ho in Thai. According to Wang,3 they travelled back and forth between Yunnan, Burma, Laos, and northern Siam, while a few settled in northern Siam during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those from the South China ports, on the other hand, were mainly job-seekers in search of a better life. As noted by McKeown4 (2010), they were part of the global wave of mass migration following the paths of Chinese merchant and labour flows into Southeast Asia. According to Bowring5 these Chinese were brought to Siam as indentured migrant workers on a yearly basis every northeast monsoon, and were confined to men. As McKeown (2010)6 maintains, in terms of the role of the Chinese patriarchal stem family in explaining Chinese emigration in a global context from 1850 to 1940, and besides the gender-specific demand for physical manual labour in Siam, a study by Jiemin7 also suggests that this Chinese family structure explained the gender-specific pattern of mass migration from China into Siam for wealth accumulation and remittance purposes. This was in addition to the gendered politics of the Chinese local state which restricted female emigration for fear of losing entire families. This was so

2 See Wongboonsin, History of Migration into Thailand. 3 See Wang Gungwu, “Patterns of Chinese Migration in Historical Perspective,” in Wang Gungwu, ed., China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore, 1991), 3–21. 4 See Adam McKeown, “Chinese emigration in global context, 1850–1940”, Journal of Global History 5 (2010): 1–30. 5 See John Bowring, The Kingdom and the People of Siam (London, 1857). 6 McKeown, “Chinese emigration in global context”. 7 Bao Jiemin, “The Gendered Biopolitics of Marriage and Immigration: A Study of Pre1949 Chinese Immigrants in Thailand”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34. 1 (2003): 127–151.

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500,000 Cambodians (8%)

50,000 Peguans (1%)

50,000 Kareens, Xongs, Lawa, Ka (1%)

1,000,000 Malays (17%)

1,900,000 Siamese Proper (the Thai race) (31%)

1,000,000 Laos (17%) 1,500,000 Chinese (25%)

Source: Adapted from John Bowring, 1857. The Kingdom and the People of Siam (London: John W. Parker, 1857), p. 81.

Figure 1. Population in Siam during the 1880s

despite central rulers enacting legislation prohibiting overseas emigration, and was the case from the fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries. According to Figure 1, of the estimated 6,000,000 inhabitants in Siam during the 1880s, the local people accounted only for 31 percent. Given the estimated 1,500,000 migratory Chinese in Siam, of whom 20,000 were in Bangkok, they were the biggest group of non-locals there, followed by Malays and Laotian.8 There were also some Peguans, who had been in part of the Mon or Pegu territory, such mountainous races as Kareens, Xongs, Lawa and Ka, some of whom had been captured in war and were in a slavery-like state in the capital city and other provinces of Siam.9 8 The magnitude of the Chinese immigrants in Siam varies from one source to another. According to Skinner (1957), there were around 434,000 migratory Chinese in Siam in 1880, an increase from 228,000, accounting for 4.8 percent of the 4,750,000 total inhabitants in 1825. Despite such varying magnitude, most sources of information share the notion of an increasing trend of Chinese immigration into Siam until the post-World War Two period. This was so in spite of anti-Chinese sentiment in the twentieth century. See William G. Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (New York, 1957); William G. Skinner, “Chinese Assimilation and Thai Politics,” The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 2 (February 1957): 237–250. 9 Bowring, The Kingdom and the People of Siam, 81–92.



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The Bangkok Census of 1909 suggests that the number of foreign immigrants was far greater than that of the locals emigrating from the territory, while contributing to a socio-demographic transition of Siam towards a multicultural society with an increasing population growth rate. Interethnic marriage between foreign immigrants and locals was an assimilation strategy commonly adopted by the immigrants. This was particularly evident for the Chinese immigrants as well as their descendants who were born in Siam.10 It led to a rapid rate of assimilation into the indigenous society, and its economy and political power structures.11, 12 Besides migration chains and networks, the following contributed to the increasing flows of organized, economic-oriented mass migration in the latter period of Phase I: 1) There were long-established diplomatic and commercial relations between China and Siam. In the eighteenth century, trade relations with China were encouraged by the growing demand for rice there, and to a lesser extent in the Malay world to the south.13 This was followed by the expansion of diplomatic relations and large-scale maritime trade with Western colonial powers. 2) The contribution of the Bowring Treaty of 1855 with England, and several similar treaties with other Western countries, which opened up trade and resulted in increased labour demand.14 3) Siam suffered serious shortages of labour due to a long history of wars. Besides those from neighbouring states, a considerable number of Chinese from South China ports were granted permission to migrate into the kingdom and worked as labourers in rapidly growing urban areas, especially Bangkok towards the end of this period.15 4) The role of Chinese secret organizations: besides providing welfare, training, insurance, and protection of their industrial/business interests in accordance with a ritual brotherhood approach, they also 10 This was the case until 1910 when there were large numbers of female immigrants, wives and others, who settled permanently in Siam. See Sompop Manarungsan, Economic Development of Thailand, 1850–1950, Response to the Challenge of the World Economy (Bangkok 1989), 33. 11  Manarungsan, Economic Development of Thailand. 12 Skinner, “Chinese Assimilation and Thai Politics”. 13 Christopher John Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit, History of Thailand (New York, 2005). 14 The notion is reflected in some previous studies. See, for example: Baker and Phongpaichit, History of Thailand; Manarungsan, Economic Development of Thailand. 15 Wongboonsin, History of Migration into Thailand.

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functioned as labour recruitment agencies.16, 17 According to Baffie,18 those who refused to join usually found difficulties in finding a job. Phase II: Migration Control In 1910, Siam under King Rama VI shifted its approach to a nationalistic policy while there was also a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment. In 1911, Naturalization Law 130 was enacted to grant Siamese nationality to aliens who complied with the conditions specified therein. The 1913 Nationality Act provided that any child born to a Thai parent, either in Siam or abroad, was a Thai citizen subject to Thai law; everyone born in Siam, regardless of parentage, was a Thai. This resulted in a controlled approach to immigration which was mainly geared towards migratory Chinese, and was instituted due to popular fears that Chinese immigration threatened to overwhelm the indigenous people. In 1914 Chinese immigration was set at a quota of 10,000 annually.19 In 1951, the 1950 Immigration Act was launched, authorizing the Ministry of Interior to set a limit of 200 new immigrants into Thailand from any country per year.20 One may note that anti-Chinese sentiment did not affect Chinese immigration into Siam until World War Two. As shown in Figure 2, the number of Chinese immigrants increased dramatically from around 260,000 in 1919 to 524,000 in 1937, spurred by a large-scale flow of female Chinese for family reunion and job seeking purposes. This migration was mainly influenced by worsening social instability, famine and civil wars in southern Chinese coastal provinces, and was facilitated by an improved transportation system and the earlier-mentioned Chinese secret organizations. The pulling factors included the large number of Chinese male migrant workers, from merchants and business operators to rickshaw coolies. Such unprecedented large flows of migratory Chinese were on-going until 1947, when the total number of Chinese immigrants, both male and female, dropped to 476,000 in 1947. This was also partly due to the presence of

16  Jiemin, “The Gendered Biopolitics of Marriage and Immigration”. 17  Piyanart Bunnag, “The Chinese Community in Bangkok during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Asian Review 17 (2004): 25–38. 18  Jean Baffie, The Chinese Triads in Southeast Asia: From a ‘Total Social Phenomenon’ to a Trans-national Criminal Organization? (Marseille, 2005). 19  Liu Hong, ed., The Chinese Overseas (London and New York, 2006). 20 The name of kingdom was changed to Thailand in 1939.



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600,000 500,000 Number

400,000

Total Chinese Male Chinese Female Chinese

300,000

200,000 100,000 0

1919

1929

Year

1937

1947

Source: Adapted from Bao Jiemin, “The Gendered Biopolitics of Marriage and Immigration: A Study of Pre-1949 Chinese Immigrants in Thailand.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2003): 127–151.

Figure 2. Migratory Chinese in Siam by Sex, 1919–1947

the Japanese in Siam during World War Two and the stagnant economy in Thailand.21, 22 Such a shifting gender-specific pattern of mass migration once again resulted in socio-demographic transformation, particularly in terms of a decline in inter-ethnic marriage between the Chinese migrants and the local Siamese, and social assimilation in Siam.23, 24 The 1947 and 1960 censuses reflect the fact that migration did not then function as an important factor contributing to the growth rate of population in Siam. The 1950 Immigration Act also provides a similar explanation. One may also note that flows of conflict-driven border crossing flows into Thailand were still taking place. Among these were civilian Yunnanese Muslims (Ho) and non-Muslims (Han) who suffered oppression and torture at the hands of the Communist Party both before and after 1949. They crossed the border to seek refuge in Northern Thailand, while some went further towards Southern Thailand in 1950. Again, in 1961 many Yunnanese Muslims (Ho) and non-Muslims (Han) were driven out of China into Thailand (via Myanmar) following the defeat of Kuomintang (KMT) forces.25

21  Jiemin, “The Gendered Biopolitics of Marriage and Immigration”. 22 Manarungsan, Economic Development of Thailand. 23 Jiemin, “The Gendered Biopolitics of Marriage and Immigration”. 24 Liu Hong, ed., The Chinese Overseas. 25 Gungwu, ed., China and the Chinese Overseas.

372

patcharawalai wongboonsin Phase III: Migration Management

From 1975 to the 1980s, Thailand was one of the main sanctuaries harbouring a large-scale displacement of people, both male and female, from neighbouring countries due to a new series of political conflicts. These included ethnic minorities from Myanmar, Lao, Khmer, Tai Dam, Tai Nung, Hmong, as well as those from Vietnam and Pakistan. Until October 1977, migrants were allowed to stay in the Thai territory based on the assumption that they would later repatriate, voluntarily return to their home country or resettle to a third country. By 2002, there were around 112,000 such displaced persons categorized as persons of concern to UNHCR, with the ratio of males to females being 52:48. They were housed in fifteen camps and four detention centres, mostly along the borders and at ports on the Gulf of Thailand.26 While movement out of the camp/ centre was prohibited, repatriation, resettlement and voluntary returns have been enforced. Except for those fleeing active fighting, new arrivals as refugees are not allowed.27 Given such a restrictive policy, new arrivals of such displaced persons hesitate to register for formal migration purposes, but rather turn to the clandestine labour market at the low-skilled level. They are considered illegal according to the 1979 Immigration Act, which prohibits their performance of physical “labour,” while the 1978 Working of Aliens Act requires a migrant worker to obtain a work permit. Together with those from other developing countries nearby, unauthorized migrant workers have allegedly outnumbered authorized foreign workers.28 Estimates of clandestine migrants have varied from source to source and year to year: in 1993 a widely-cited estimate was 200,000 compared to the Immigration Bureau’s 1994 estimate of 525,480 clandestine migrants. Of the latter, the biggest group were from Burma (334,124), 26 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “Thailand”, in 2002 UNHCR Statistical Yearbook (Geneva, 2004). 27 Explanations included a growing refugee burden, population pressures, land shortages, potential economic friction between Thai and refugees, the need for international financial and technical support for Thailand’s relief program, and the notion that the flows were more and more economically than politically motivated. This was the case while Thailand was growing rapidly in the mid-1980s. See Perter I. Rose, “Long night’s journey into day the odyssey of Indochinese refugees”, Society 22, no. 3 (1985): 75–79; Hazel J. Lang, Fear and Sanctuary: Burmese Refugees in Thailand (New York, 2002). 28 See Patcharawalai Wongboonsin, “The State and Labour Migration Policies in Thailand”, in Amarjit Kaur and Ian Metcalfe, eds., Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls in Asia (Hampshire, 2006), 73–248.



migration into thailand

373

followed by China (100,000) and South Asian countries (81,357). Those from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam were relatively small in number. About 5,000 Bangladeshi unauthorized immigrants were believed to be hiding in Thai forests with plans to look for jobs in Malaysia.29 According to a survey conducted in 1996, there were a total of 426,391 clandestine migrants from Myanmar followed by the 372,120 hill tribes (non-Thai), 100,000 Chinese from mainland China, 50,000 South Asians, 25,745 Indochinese and 1,500 Nepalese.30 A widely-cited estimate in 2002 was 1,222,143 clandestine migrants, which increased to 1,512,587 in 2004.31 According to Section 12 of the 1978 Working of Aliens Act, work opportunities may be possible for foreign nationals having entered the territory in violation of the immigration law, and those in the process of being deported from the kingdom. Cabinet resolutions are relied upon to allow clandestine migrants from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia to register to work in specified sectors and provinces for a limited time.32 These applications have increased in volume over time, particularly in the central, north western, southern, and eastern regions, as shown in Figure 3. Previous research shares a common notion that disparities in economic and employment opportunities, income inequality and demographic differences between the origin and destination countries provide an explanation for job-seeking migration from neighbouring countries.33, 34, 35 This study further maintains that the following factors also have contributed to on-going migration: the Thai policy of non-intervention in the domestic politics of other sovereign nations; the goods and labour markets becoming more integrated; the reduction of transportation costs brought about by infrastructural development; the role of recruiters and recruitment agencies in bringing workers into Thailand and, in some cases giving them .

29 Xinhua News, “Misguided Bangladeshis pour into Thailand”, 4 June (1995). 30 Sumalee Pitayanon, “Migration of Labor into Thailand”, Chulalongkorn Journal of Economics 13, no. 2 (2001): 142–188. 31  Wongboonsin, “The State and Labour Migration Policies in Thailand”. 32 The measures started in 1992 with those arriving from Myanmar in nine Thai border provinces, as shown in the 1992 Cabinet Order to Solve the Problem of Undocumented Migrant Labour from Myanmar. See Government of Thailand, Pramuan Mati kanaratamontree pee 2501 tung pajuban [Compendium of Cabinet Orders 1958–Present] (Bangkok, 2010). 33 Nipon Phuaphongsakorn, Thai Migrant Workers in Foreign Countries: Causes, Impacts, Problems and Politics (Bangkok, 1982). 34 Vachariya Thosanguan and Yongyuth Chalamwong, International Migration and Its Transformation in the Industrialization Process of Thailand (Bangkok, 1991). 35 Amara Pongsapich, International Migrant Workers in Asia: The Case of Thailand (Bangkok, 1994).

374

patcharawalai wongboonsin

300,000 250,000

Number

200,000 150,000

2002 2009

100,000

North-East

Phang Nga

Su rat Thani

Phuket

Ranong

Songkhla

Nong Khai

Mukdahan

Khon Kaen

Tak

Chiang Rai

Rayong

Chiang Mai

North

NaKhon Ratchasima

Central

Chonburi

Ratchaburi

Kanchanaburi

Samut Sakhon

Samut Prakarn

0

Bangkok

50,000

South

Province

Source: Adapted from Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2545 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2002] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2003); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2546 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2003] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2004); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2547 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2004] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2005); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2548 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2005] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2006); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2549 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2006] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2007); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpijarana anuyat kantumngan kong kontangdaw sumngugngan borihan rangngantangdaw prajum pee 2550 [Report of The Result of Decision Permitting Foreign Workers to Work, Office of Foreign Workers Administration in 2007] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2008); Ministry of Labour, Ponkanpijarana anuyat kantumngan kong kontangdaw sumngugngan borihan rangngantangdaw prajum pee 2551 [Result of Decision Permitting Foreign Workers to Work, Office of Foreign Workers Administration in 2008] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2009); Ministry of Labour, Komoon kongtangdaw teedairup anuyattumngan tuarajanajuk prajum pee 2552 [Data on Foreign Workers Who Obtained Work Permit in 2009] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2010); Ministry of Labour, Kanborihanjudkan kantumngankong kontangdaw nai pratettai sarup pee 2553 [Administration of Foreign Workers Employment in Thailand in Summary for 2010] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2011).

Figure 3. Magnitude of Registered Migrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia, 2002 and 2009



migration into thailand

80 70

70.5

69.3

66.6 57.4

60

56.3

50 40 30 20

375

42.6 29.5

30.7

33.4

1998

1999

2000

43.7

54.5 45.5

55.3

44.7

10 0

2001

2002

2003

2004

Male Female Source: Adapted from Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2541 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 1998] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 1999); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2542 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 1999] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2000); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2543 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2000] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2001); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2544 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2001] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2002); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2545 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2002] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2003); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2546 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2003] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2004); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2547 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2004] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2005).

Figure 4. Registered Migrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, by Sex, 1988–2004

jobs; the path beaten by previous migrants; and the influence of migration networks.36 Figure 4 shows an increasing proportion of female migrant workers from 29.5 to 44.7 percent of all the registered migrants from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia in the years 1998–2004. 36 The case of Myanmar people of Shan ethnicity serves as an example here for those with long-term relationships and social networks with Thailand. They are known as Thai Yai (Great Thai) in Thailand and are a small but significant Thai-speaking ethnic group in northern Thailand. In northern Thailand, the Shan have a strong presence in Chiang Rai, Lampang, Mae Sariang and Chiang Mai. The town of Mae Hong Son in Thailand was originally founded by Shan settlers around 1830. See Tobias Wendl and Michael Rosler, “Introduction: Frontiers and Borderlands: The Rise and Relevance of an Anthropological Research Genre”, in Michael Rosler and Tobias Wend, eds. Frontiers and Borderlands: Anthropological Perspectives (Frankfurt, 1999), 2.

376

patcharawalai wongboonsin Phase I: The Pre-1910 Approach

In this period foreign nationals were able to improve their socio-economic status in Siam. By 1910, immigrants worked in the following occupations: as court officials and envoys; merchants/entrepreneurs;37 compradors;38 and labourers.39 Most of the economic activities engaged in by immigrants and their descendants contributed to Siam’s competitiveness in international trade as well as the modernization of society. Manarungsan (1989) maintains that Siam turned from a practically self-sufficient economy to high export growth from 1850 to 1910, particularly in regard to the export of rice and other commercial crops. Phase II: Migration Control Despite anti-Chinese sentiment, export-oriented business was still largely in Chinese hands, resulting in large-scaled migration of volunteer and contract labour from China, both male and female. They were primarily engaged in low-skilled jobs. Besides female Chinese migration for familyreunion purposes, cases of female Chinese being trafficked into sexual exploitation also occurred. The latter were lured by recruiters into Chinese licensed brothels, which operated with the support of Chinese secret societies, to serve Chinese bachelor immigrants. This was particularly the case until the 1930s, when anti-Chinese sentiment was exacerbated by 37 Shipping, ship-building, wholesale and retail businesses, factories, plantations, the sugar industry, tin mines, rice mills, sawmills, banks, pawn shops and bazaars. This was particularly the case from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. 38 To introduce and provide supplies of goods from overseas, particularly from the West, for the local market while purchasing locally produced goods for delivery to markets abroad. This was particularly the case of migratory Chinese and Indians, who later were able to accumulate enough wealth to run their own large businesses. See Bunnag, “The Chinese Community in Bangkok during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century”, Asian Review 17 (2004): 25–38; Inthira Sahee, “The Network of Indian Textile Merchants in Thai Society”, Asian Review 17 (2004), 39–58. 39 From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century an increase in general paid labour occurred. By the mid-nineteenth century, besides rickshaw coolies and general paid labour, active business (including the opium monopoly, bazaars, and farms) was in the hand of the Chinese. Initially the Chinese coolies were engaged in shipping and the ship-building industry, and the pepper and sugar industry, before they shifted to tin mines, rice mills and sawmills. They were part of the export-oriented businesses controlled by Chinese merchants. In the nineteenth century, some Chinese coolies also worked in the public works for the modern city of Bangkok. See Bowring, The Kingdom and the People of Siam; Panee Bualek, The Emergence and the Way of Life of the Wage Laborer Class in Thailand from the End of Eighteenth to Nineteenth Century (Bangkok, 2000).



migration into thailand

377

economic stagnation and a decrease in foreign trade (as an impact of the Great Depression). Siam recorded a sharp decline from 137 Chinese brothels in 1929 to 63 in 1936.40, 41 Phase III: Migration Management The 1979 Immigration Act does not prohibit employment-oriented migrants, except those who take employment as labourers in violation of Ministerial Regulations.42 All foreign nationals can engage in activities allowed by law, particularly the 1978 Working of Aliens Act, which was succeeded by the 2008 Working of Aliens Act to limit the number of foreigners (other than skilled workers or experts) working in Thailand. These laws manifest concerns for national security, the occupation opportunities of Thais, and the need for a foreign workforce to contribute to the development of the country. Authorized workers in Thailand are mostly skilled and business-oriented migrants from East Asia and the West engaging in administrative, managerial and professional jobs. Clandestine migrants are mainly unskilled workers from neighbouring countries.43 They are expected to outnumber authorized migrants. The first sector in Thailand to employ clandestine migrant workers was the fishery and fishery-related sector (seafood processing, frozen seafood, dry seafood, etc.). Cabinet resolutions during 1996 and 2000 allowed clandestine migrants from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia to engage in specified labouring jobs and domestic work. The type of labouring jobs varied from one cabinet resolution to another until 2001, when there was a shift to “any” type of work in labouring jobs. Domestic work remains a distinct category to allow clandestine migrants from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia to register and to apply for a work permit. Figure 5 identifies the major economic activities engaged by male and female registered migrant workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia in 1992. It suggests that most of the sectors therein were male dominated, 40 Jiemin, “The Gendered Biopolitics of Marriage and Immigration”, 132–139. 41  Manarungsan, Economic Development of Thailand, 187–190. 42 Section 12 of the 1979 Immigration Act stipulates that aliens “having entered into the Kingdom to take occupation as a labourer or to take employment by using physical without skills training or to work in violation of the Ministerial Regulations” are excluded from entering the Kingdom. See Government of Thailand, Immigration Act of 1979 (Bangkok, 1979). 43 Wongboonsin, “The State and Labour Migration Policies in Thailand”.

378

patcharawalai wongboonsin

100

91.2

90 80 70

73.8 74.2 71

72.8

72.2

60 50

44.1

26.2

29

27.8

25.8

0

13.5

8.8

M F General labour

M F Fishery & Related Myanmar

67.5 64.1 65.8

27.2

20 10

78.1 71.2

56.4 48.5 51.5 48.5 51.5 43.6

55.9

40 30

86.5 90.6 83.7

F M Factory

28.8

9.4 16.3

M F Domestic Workers Laos

35.9 32.5 34.2

21.9

M F Farming

M F Plantation

Cambodia

Source: Adapted from Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2535 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 1992] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 1993).

Figure 5. Major Economic Activities Engaged by Registered Migrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, by Sex, 1992

except the domestic workers category, where the share of female migrant workers was 87.1 percent. In the factory category, which constituted the second largest share of female migrant workers, it was 48.6 percent. This is followed by plantation, fisheries and fishery-related, factory, and farming sectors, respectively. Figure 6 shows the proportion of male and female registered migrant workers from three neighbouring countries in labouring jobs and domestic work from 2007 to 2009. It indicates that despite labouring jobs continuing to be male dominated, the participation by female migrant workers increased during 2007 and 2008, with a small drop in 2009. Meanwhile, domestic work—which is normally perceived as “women’s work”—is female dominated. There is some male participation in this sector, albeit at comparatively low levels. Punpuing44 maintains that the high demand for domestic work and its ambiguous definition partly explain the trend. On-going flows of clandestine migrants have been observed, some of whom engaged in illicit work including the commercial sex trade, along 44 Sureeporn Punpuing, Female Migration in Thailand: A Study of Migrant Domestic Workers (Nakhon Pathom, 2006).



migration into thailand Labouring Jobs

120 100

Domestic Workers 97

9.51

96.1

81.9

80

80

379

81.7

60 40 20

20 0

3.9

M

10.1

4.3

2007

F

M

2008

F

10.3

3

M

2009

F

Source: Adapted from Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpatibutngan prajum pee ngobpraman 2549 [Report of The Result of Administration for Fiscal Year 2006] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2007); Ministry of Labour, Rainganpon kanpijarana anuyat kantumngan kong kontangdaw sumngugngan borihan rangngantangdaw prajum pee 2550 [Report of The Result of Decision Permitting Foreign Workers to Work, Office of Foreign Workers Administration in 2007] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2008); Ministry of Labour, Ponkanpijarana anuyat kantumngan kong kontangdaw sumngugngan borihan rangngantangdaw prajum pee 2551 [Result of Decision Permitting Foreign Workers to Work, Office of Foreign Workers Administration in 2008] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2009); Ministry of Labour, Komoon kongtangdaw teedairup anuyattumngan tuarajanajuk prajum pee 2552 [Data on Foreign Workers Who Obtained Work Permit in 2009] (Bangkok: Office of Foreign Workers Administration, 2010).

Figure 6. Labouring Jobs and Domestic Work Engaged by Registered Migrant Workers from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia, by Sex, 2007–2009

with a continuing trend of human trafficking since the late 1980s. Previous studies45, 46, 47, 48, 49 and media reports50 demonstrate a continuing trend of trafficking women and girls from neighbouring countries in South-

45 Kritaya Archavanitkul, The Passage of Women in Neighbouring Countries into the Sex Trade in Thailand (Nakhon Pathom, 1997). 46 Worakak Mahatthanobol, Chinese Prostitution in Thailand: A Case Study of Young Girls from Yunnan (Bangkok, 1996). 47 Patcharawalai Wongboonsin, Human Security and Transnational Migration: The Case in Thailand, Policy and Governance Working Paper Series 16. (Tokyo, 2004). 48 Patcharawalai Wongboonsin, “A Comparative Analysis of Multi-Site, Multi-Sector Studies of HIV Vulnerabilities of Migrant Children in Thailand”, in Patcharawalai Wongboonsin, ed., HIV Vulnerabilities of Migrant Children in Thailand (CD Rom version) (Bangkok, 2008), 83–158. 49 Patcharawalai Wongboonsin, ed., Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation into Southern Thailand (Bangkok, 2009). 50 Aphaluck Bhatiasevi, “Influx of Burmese sex workers via Mae Sai”, Bangkok Post, June 2, 1997.

380

patcharawalai wongboonsin

east Asia and Yunnan, China, besides those from hill tribes in Northern Thailand, into several parts of Thailand, including the southernmost provinces, to serve male migrant workers and tourists. According to Baffie,51 such flows from China were attributable to the return of secret organizations from the early 1980s. Conclusion This chapter maintains that voluntary and forced migration into Thailand has been part of the history of the nation. The flows have mainly originated from four parts of the world: from Europe; from West and South Asia; from Southeast Asia; and from East Asia. They can be divided into three phases according to the State’s approach towards migration. The first and receptive phase of migration lasted several centuries until 1910. It started with voluntary migration of overland sojourners from China who settled in Northern Thailand long before migrants from Persia, and India, who had settled in this area by the fifteenth century. Subsequent migration flows included forced migration of war captives and ethnic minorities fleeing political and/or ideological conflicts in neighbouring states who sought refuge in the kingdom. Economic-oriented voluntary migration from Japan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Portugal, Spain, France, the Netherlands and England was also identified. Among immigrants, those from China, Persia and India were the most numerous. Female migration was relatively small, and limited primarily to dependent migration and conflict-driven population displacement until the late eighteenth century. The migrant workers’ main occupations in the first period were consistent with the three main “male”-dominated job categories: manual labour, trade and court/regal services. The majority of the female migrants were dependents rather than primary breadwinners. Despite the long history of migration, the nineteenth century set the stage for a new phase of mass migration in response to the demand for labour. The number of immigrants was far greater than emigration of indigenous people from Siam, while inter-ethnic marriage with the indigenous people was a common practice among immigrants. This spurred a socio-demographic transition of Siam towards a multicultural society

51  Baffie, The Chinese Triads in Southeast Asia: From a ‘Total Social Phenomenon’ to a Trans-national Criminal Organization?, 2.



migration into thailand

381

with an increasing rate of population growth. As in the earlier phase, most immigrants came from mainland China. The early twentieth century marked a shift towards a more nationalistic policy in which anti-Chinese sentiment prevailed. Nonetheless, the number of Chinese immigrants dramatically increased in this period, including a large-scale immigration of female Chinese for the purpose of family reunion and job seeking. A number of female migrants were lured by recruiters into brothels which served bachelor immigrant communities. The large number of Chinese male migrant workers who had previously immigrated to Siam was a contributing factor in encouraging female Chinese migration. This shifting, gender-specific pattern of mass migration once again resulted in socio-demographic transformation in Siam. However, migration during that particular period did not function as an important factor contributing to the Siamese population growth rate as it had earlier. This can be explained by a decline in inter-ethnic marriage between Chinese migrants and the indigenous people. The third phase of migration from the mid twentieth century saw Thailand transformed into a sanctuary for displaced persons, male and female, from neighbouring countries fleeing a series of major political conflicts in Asia. Displaced persons from neighbouring countries were permitted to enter and stay within restricted areas until their repatriation, voluntary return or resettlement in a third country. A number of such displaced persons opted instead to join clandestine migrant workers engaged in the low-skilled sectors of the labour market. More recently, clandestine migrants from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia have been allowed to register to carry out specified labouring and domestic work for limited periods of time. Despite the labouring sector continuing to be male dominated, the participation by female migrant workers in this sector has increased. In spite of domestic work being dominated by women, there is also some male participation, albeit at a relatively low proportion due to high industry demand and its ambiguous definition. On-going clandestine migrant flows have occurred, some women being employed in the commercial sex trade; a continuing trend of the trafficking of women and girls from neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia and Southern China has also been evident.

PART FIVE

CASE STUDIES: SOUTHEAST ASIAN DOMESTIC AND CAREWORKER MIGRATIONS

Indonesian Domestic Workers Overseas: Their Position and Protection in the Global Labour Market Muhamad Nadratuzzaman Hosen and Aswatini Raharto Introduction International labour migration is an interesting topic for economic historians because the problems of international labour migration are related to socio-economic and political change in many sending and/or receiving countries. Labour migration within countries (internal migration) as well as between countries (international migration) is not a new phenomenon in Indonesia. Spontaneous as well as arranged labour migration has occurred since the Dutch colonial and Japanese occupation of Indonesia. After Indonesia gained independence in 1945, labour migration continued, either as spontaneous or government regulated movements. The Indonesian government began to regulate the movement of Indonesian labour overseas in 1970, following the Ministry of Manpower Regulation No. 4, 1970 both for domestic and overseas labour recruitment. Overseas Indonesian labour migration is characterized by the movement of labour for employment in the plantation, forestry and construction, and service sectors, as housemaids, and shopkeepers. The current principal destinations of these labour flows are to countries experiencing significant labour shortages, notably several Middle Eastern countries, Malaysia and Singapore. Since the 1980s, the number of Indonesians who have become workers in foreign countries has increased substantially.1 They have mostly worked in the informal sector. It was estimated that by 2007, 78 percent of

1 Graeme Hugo, “Women on the Move: Changing Patterns of Population Movement of Women in Indonesia”, in S. Chant, ed., Gender and Migration in Developing Countries (London, 1992), 174–96; Aswatini Raharto, “Migrasi tenaga kerja international di Indonesia: Pengalaman masa lalu, tantangan masa depan [International labour migration in Indonesia: Past experience, future challenge]”, in The International Workshop on Reconstructing the Historical Tradition of Twentieth Century Indonesian Labour (Denpasar, Bali, 2001); Ernst Spaan, “Taikongs and Calos: The Role of Middlemen and Brokers in Javanese International Migration”, International Migration Review 28.1 (1994): 93–133.

386

muhamad nadratuzzaman hosen and aswatini raharto

Indonesian migrant workers overseas worked in the informal sector.2 The involvement of Indonesian women in international labour migration in earlier periods was neglected by scholars and other writers due to female migration being considered essentially passive (primarily accompanying parents or husbands). However, during the last decade the number of female international labour migrants from Indonesia increased substantially. This movement officially has been dominated by the outflow of those who are employed as domestic workers in Saudi Arabia.3 It was estimated that by 2009, about 6 million Indonesian migrant overseas worked as domestic workers, of 100 million domestic workers in the world.4 Globalization increases people’s access to global labour market information that leads to an increase in transnational movements of people in search of better employment and better living standards. In this global labour market, Indonesia is known as an important labour exporting country and the migrants originate from a number of provinces in the country. The majority of migrant workers from Indonesia are employed in the informal sector, mainly in the domestic services sector.5 The involvement of Indonesian women as domestic workers has attracted considerable controversy.6 Economic gain does not stop these female workers being exposed to considerable risks of exploitation and discrimination because of their limited knowledge of workers’ rights and obligations, and also on the basis of race, class and gender. Until recently, the Indonesian Government provided limited legal instruments to protect Indonesian migrant worker overseas. The Government in 2004 passed Law No. 39 on

2 Erman Suparno, “Kebijakan dan Strategi Penempatan Tenaga Kerja Indonesia di Luar Negeri”, PT Barkahayu Safarindo, accessed May 3, 2010, http://barkahayu.com/2009/02/ kebijakan-dan-strategi-penempatan-tenaga-kerja-indonesia-di-luar-negeri.html. 3 Georg Cremer, “Deployment of Indonesian Migrants in the Middle East: Present Situation and Prospects”, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 24.3 (1988): 73–86; Aswatini Raharto, “Socio-demographic aspects of international labour migration from Indonesia”, in C.M. Firdausy, ed., Movement of people within and from the East and Southeast Asian countries: trends, causes, and consequences (Indonesian Institute of Sciences) (Jakarta, 1996), 105–30. 4 JAKERLA PRT (Jaringan Kerja Layak Pekerja Rumah Tangga). 2009. Pernyataan Bersama JAKERLA PRT. http://buruhmigranberdaulat.blogspot.com/2009/08/pernyataanbersama-jakerla-prt. 5 Aswatini Raharto, “Indonesia Labor Migration: Issues and Challenges”, International Journal on Multicultural Societies 9.2 (2007): 219–35. 6 Graeme Hugo, “Women on the Move”, 174–96; Graeme Hugo, “Indonesia labour migration to Malaysia: trends and policy implication”, South Asian Journal of Social Science 22.1 (1995): 5–9.

0

Indian Ocean

Medan

Andaman Sea

South China Sea

VIETNAM

JAKARTA Denpasar

Java

Java Sea Sumbawa

Makassar

Timor Sea

Banda Sea

Arafura Sea

AUSTRALIA

Philippine sea

PAPUA NEW GUINEA

New Guinea

Irian Jaya

North Pacific Ocean

indonesian domestic workers overseas

Map 1. Indonesia

Celebes sea

PHILIPPINES

Celebes Sulawesi

Mataram Lombok Sumba

Bali

Kalimantan

Borneo

BRUNEI

M A LAYS IA

Sumatra

Gulf of Thailand

387

388

muhamad nadratuzzaman hosen and aswatini raharto

the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Workers Overseas, and ratified the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Their Families (ICMW) in 2012 (Law No. 6). Review of Indonesian International Labour Migration The Pre-Independence Period 1. Slave Trading Slave trading emerged in two specific areas in Indonesia, namely Bali (the island of Bali) and the port of Makassar in Sulawesi, which were the main slave suppliers to Batavia (now Jakarta) and other VOC (the Dutch East India Company) possessions in the Indian Ocean during the seventeenth century. At that time, the entire Indonesian archipelago functioned as a potential slave market with the exception of Java.7 It can be seen in Table 1 that Bali, Makassar and Buton were the main sources of slaves imported to Batavia on Asian Ships, with about 78 percent of slaves imported in the period 1663–82 coming from these three areas. The data also showed that Makassar was one of the primary slave trading stations in the archipelago which became increasingly focused upon the trade to Batavia. Table 1. Slave Imports into Batavia on Asian Ships (and annual averages), 1663–82 Year 1663–68 1669–72 1673–82

Bali

Makassar

564 (94) 461 (115) 1327 (133) 2352

8 (1) 2828 (707) 1250 (125) 4086

Buton 154 (26) 705 (176) 325 (33) 1184

Total imports 1053 (178) 4691 (1173) 4065 (407) 9809

Note: Figures in brackets show the average number of slaves imported to Batavia each year. Source: Daghregister Casteel Batavia in Rik van Welie, “Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World”, in Gert Oostindie, ed. Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage (Leiden, KITVL, 2008), 155–260.

7 Rik van Welie, “Patterns of Slave Trading and Slavery in the Dutch Colonial World”, in Gert Oostindie, ed. Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage (Leiden, 2008), 155–260.



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The surviving records of the harbour masters at Fort Rotterdam allow for a better understanding of the volume and operations of the Makassar slave trade in the eighteenth century. From 1766 to 1769, 400 slaves from Makassar were taken to Batavia, and the number of slaves transported to Batavia rose to 550 between 1774 and 1777.8 In the second half of the eighteenth century, between 200 and 300 of the slaves imported into Batavia were intended for service in the Company’s workforce, while the greater majority were sold to private merchants and residents.9 During the 1720s, slaves who entered Makassar were predominantly from Sumba (32 percent), Sumbawa (18 percent), and Ende (17 percent); furthermore in the 1780s slaves were drawn from Ende (42 percent), Bugis (20 percent) and Buton (16 percent). Sulawesian maritimers had been predominant in this trade, but their role was gradually taken over by primarily Makassar-based Malay traders (50 percent), together with Chinese (18 percent) and Company subjects (17 percent). In the 1780s, slave trading in Bali, which was quite different to Makassar, was exceptional in nature due to the unique history of Hinduism on the island. Traditional customs may have ensured that “the position of women in Balinese society was one of potential slavery.” According to many historians, Bali began exporting a sizeable stream of slaves (from 100,000 to 150,000 people) to Batavia from the mid-seventeenth until the early nineteenth centuries.10 Furthermore, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the great majority of slaves were sent via Chinese middlemen in the ports of Kuta and Buleleng to the Batavia market. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, slaves from Bali were also illegally transported by French ships to the sugar plantations of Mauritius and Bourbon (500–600 annually); between 1827 and 1831 the Dutch also shipped over a thousand slaves from Bali to serve as soldiers in the wars on Java. At the end of 1837 the Dutch government at Batavia sent 400 female slaves from Bali to nutmeg plantations at Banda.11 The position of women in Balinese society was one of potential slavery due to traditional customs. At that time, Chinese male residents in Batavia controlled the purchase of slaves from Bali, transporting them to

8 Gerrit J. Knaap and Heather Sutherland, Monsoon Traders: Ships, Skippers and Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Makassar (Leiden, 2004). 9 van Welie, “Patterns of Slave Trading”, 155–260. 10 Henk Schulte Nordholt, The Spell of Power: A History of Balinese Politics (Leiden, 1996). 11 van Welie, “Patterns of Slave Trading”, 155–260.

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Batavia, and selling them to mainly Chinese and Dutch free-burghers. The female slave of Bali became something of an exotic fixture in the Southeast Asian imagination.12 Meanwhile, it was observed that Chinese domination of the Balinese slave trade and the role of the Chinese in the import-export trade in slaves from Makassar, alongside that of other Asian traders, was strongly stimulated by, and directed towards, the expanding Dutch empire in Indonesia.13 Furthermore, it can be noted that the phenomenon of the slave trade from Bali confirmed the fact that these slaves ultimately ended up within the Dutch colonial era and became a part of colonial history in Indonesia. Labour Migration Spontaneous labour migration from Indonesia to Singapore and Malaysia has occurred since the eighteenth century, mainly by ethnic groups from Java (Javanese, Madurese and Baweanese), Bali (Balinese) and Sulawesi or Celebes (Makasarese and Buginese).14 The number of migrants to Singapore and Malaysia increased continuously and, by the end of the nineteenth century, the Javanese were dominant among Indonesian labour migrants in Singapore. They mainly worked as small farmers and labourers in development projects and plantations. Migrants to Malaysia also consisted of traders from Sumatera (Minangkabau) and Buginese, while Javanese contract coolies worked in plantations and small farms. From 1911, Johor and Selangor were the main destinations for Indonesian labour to Malaysia, assisted by Arabic, Indian and Javanese traders as well as some pilgrimage agents who had already settled in Singapore.15 During the Dutch colonial period the government regulated the movement of Indonesian labour under contract coolie recruitment programmes. Thousands of Javanese coolies were sent to plantation areas newly opened by the Dutch colonial government in Sumatra and Kalimantan (Borneo) 12 Alfons van der Kraan, “Bali: Slavery and Slave Trade”, in Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, bondage and dependency in Southeast Asia (St Lucia, Queensland, Australia, 1983), 315–40. 13 van Welie, “Patterns of Slave Trading”, 155–260. 14 Spaan, “Taikongs and Calos”, 93–133; Tania Li, Malays in Singapore Culture, Economy and Ideology (Singapore, 1989); Jacob Vredenbregt, “Bawean Migration”, Bijdragen tot de Taal, Land-en Volkenkunde, 120 (1964): 109–139. 15 Jan Breman, Menjinakkan Sang Kuli. Politik Kolonial pada Awal Abad ke-20 [Koelies, Planters en Koloniale Politiek, Het Arbeidsregime op de Grootlanbouw Wondernemingen aan Sumatra’s Oostkust in Het begin van de Twintigste eeuw], 3rd ed. (Jakarta, 1997).



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as well as the Dutch colony of Surinam. The Dutch government also sent contract coolies from Java to some colonies under British and French rule.16 Furthermore, during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, forced labour (romusha) was used in railway and other construction projects in Thailand and Burma.17 The Japanese government recruited romusha labourers from South Sulawesi and East Flores to Sabah for the purpose of cutting and carrying wood and building bunkers for military purposes. This labour flow from East Flores to Sabah continued after World War Two.18 One important flow of labour migrants under the contract coolie recruitment program was from Java to East Sumatera (Deli), commencing circa 1880–1900, to provide labour at tobacco plantations.19 These were mainly male workers and recruitment of Javanese labour was undertaken due to the uncertainty of a labour supply from China due to some protections required by Chinese Government for the protection of Chinese labourers working as contract coolies in Delhi. Compared to Chinese coolies, Javanese coolies accepted lower wages increasing plantation profits. Female involvement in this migration flow from Java was small, comprising predominantly passive migration or women accompanying male household heads. However, the Dutch later allowed the recruitment of Javanese women to work in new coffee plantations. According to the Regulation on Contract Coolies (koelie-ordonanntie), women were allowed to perform some light tasks in plantations. By 1930, women constituted about 30 percent of total Javanese contract coolies in East Sumatera. They were paid very low wages, not sufficient to fulfil even their daily food needs, and they were not paid if there was no work to do. They were also exposed to more exploitation and oppression from plantation staff than male coolies.20

16 Aswi Warman Adam, “Pengiriman Buruh Migran Jawa ke Vietnam Tahun 1900– an”, in Sejarah Pemikiran, Rekonstruksi, Persepsi. Media Komunikasi Profesi Masyarakat Sejarawan Indonesia, 5 Juli 1994, 1–6. 17 Graeme Hugo, Population Mobility in West Java, (Yogyakarta, 1978). 18 Aswatini Raharto, H. Romdiat, G. Hugo, and S. Bandiyono, “Migrasi dan Pembangunan Di kawasan Timur Indonesia: Isu Ketenagekerjaan [Migration and Development in Eastern Indonesia: Labour issue]”. (Cooperation between Pusat Penelitian Kependudukan dan Ketenegakerjaan—Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia (PPT-LIPI), Australian National University (ANU) and Australian Agency for International Development) (Jakarta, 1999). 19 Breman, Menjinakkan Sang Kuli; Graeme Hugo, “Population Movement in Indonesia During the Colonial Period”, in Fox et al., eds., Indonesia: The Making of Culture, (Canberra Research School of Pacific Studies) (Canberra, 1998), 65–70. 20 Breman, Menjinakkan Sang Kuli.

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Male plantation assistants were not allowed to marry so they recruited Javanese women (from among the contract coolies) or Japanese women as housekeepers. However, often these women combined domestic work and sexual services for their employer. European plantation staffs were given priority to choose female Javanese contract coolies to become their housekeepers. The Javanese “complete’ housekeepers were referred to as nyai. This arrangement was structured into company labour policies, and Javanese nyai retained their original coolie labour contracts for the duration of their sexual and domestic service.21 The Post-Independence Period 1. 1945–1970s In the period 1945–1970s, Indonesian workers mainly migrated to South East Asian countries in spontaneous migratory forms, without the involvement of the Indonesian government. There were two possibilities for Indonesian migrants. If they had relatives or friends who already lived in the destination country, a form of chain migration was encouraged by the familiarity of the initial immigrants with cultural and economic aspects of life. Secondly, other migrants had saved enough money to cover transportation and accommodation costs. For spontaneous Indonesian migrants, Malaysia had been the primary destination since 1945. The Malaysian Population Census of 1947 recorded 309,150 Indonesians, the majority from Java, as well as migrants from Kalimantan (Banjarese), Sumatra (Minangkabau and Batak) and Sulawesi (Bugis). These census data do not contain clear information about when these people arrived in Malaysia or, for example, whether they were romusha, contract coolies or spontaneous migrants.22 However, spontaneous migratory flows existed long before contract coolie migration. After Malaysia achieved independence, a large wave of worker migrants arrived from Southeast Asia, including Indonesia in the1970s, when Malaysia needed additional labour in the plantation, construction and domestic worker sectors. At the time, there was no regulation of migrant labour flows

21 Breman, Menjinakkan Sang Kuli.; Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, The Nyai in Colonial Deli: A Case of Supposed Mediation in Women and Mediation in Indonesia (Leiden, 1992); Ann Laura Stoler, A.L., Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, California, 2002). 22 Tungku Shamsul Bahrin, “The Pattern of Indonesia Migrants in the Middle and Settlement in Malaya”, The Journal of Asian Studies 5.2 (1967): 233–57.



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Table 2. Indonesian Migrant Workers Deployed Overseas, 1969–99 Period

1969–74 1974–79 1979–84 1984–89 1989–94 1994–99

Number of labour migrants 5,624 17,042 96,410 292,262 652,272 1,461,236

Target of Saudi Arabia Malaysia and Other Indonesian (%) Singapore Countries Government (%) (%) No target No target 100,000 225,000 500,000 1,250,000

zero zero 62 77 60 38

zero zero 17 16 32 46

100 100 21 7 8 16

Source: Graeme Hugo, 2000. Establishing the information needs of Indonesian international labour migrants: Background and Methodology (Paper presented at Seminar on Information Needs and Indonesian Migrant Workers, PPT-LIPI in collaboration with ILO). (Jakarta, 2000).

apart from foreign worker expertise. Many of the unskilled immigrants who worked in the plantation, construction and domestic sectors were illegal workers, most arriving from Indonesia and Thailand. Subsequently, the Malaysian government took steps to control flows of illegal workers by imposing regulations and restricting points of entry in the early 1980s. Meanwhile, the Indonesian government also imposed regulations pertaining to labour migrants in 1977. In 1979, when Indonesia experienced high rates of unemployment, the Indonesian government encouraged workers to migrate and seek work overseas. As shown in Table 2, the number of Indonesian labour migrants deployed overseas increased substantially in 30 years, from 1969 to 1999. Official data show that a large number of Indonesian workers migrated to the Netherlands between 1969 and 1974. The Dutch government requested nurses to work in the healthcare sector, but this program did not operate continuously for several reasons. During the same period many Indonesian labourers also worked in USA and Canada, these migratory flows being organized by private companies. 2. 1970–2000 At the beginning of 1979, a large number of Indonesian migrant workers from South Sulawesi and East Nusa Tenggara were employed in Sabah on palm oil and cocoa plantations. They entered Sabah through the Nunukan sub-district, which is in the Bulungan District of East Kalimantan. By 1996, the Nunukan Immigration office recorded that 36,000 Indonesian migrant workers were employed in Sabah. Of these, 67 percent were male, while

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33 percent were women who were mainly employed as domestic workers and cooks. They originated mainly from South Sulawesi, East and West Nusa Tenggara, East Java, Eastern Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi and East Kalimantan.23 After 1970, both legal and illegal migrant worker flows are evident. The simple explanation for legal migration was that these workers went to foreign countries following government regulations and they had appropriate documentation. Between 1979 and 1984, large numbers of Indonesian migrant workers went to Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Singapore. Saudi Arabia was the preferred destination for migrants, then Malaysia and Singapore. Compared to Asian nations such as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, which had been sending migrant workers since the 1970s, Indonesia was quite late to respond to the Middle Eastern labour market demand. However, after 1980, Indonesian migrant workers filled important jobs in this market. In 1984, in response to the influx of undocumented foreign workers, the Malaysian government signed the Medan Pact with the Indonesian government to regulate foreign labour through official channels. This important labour supply agreement permitted the Malaysian plantations and the Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) to recruit immigrant workers from Indonesia. Many Indonesian workers had preferred the illegal route to Malaysia since the legal route involved paperwork, visits to the embassy and other red tape which was more costly and timeconsuming. In 1986, the Malaysian government placed a total ban on the employment of foreign domestic workers and estate workers, but this was short lived due to the labour shortages in these sectors. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Malaysian Government also extended an amnesty to many undocumented migrant workers, including 300,000 Indonesian migrant workers already employed in Malaysia, by providing them with work permits. This indicated that the Malaysian government was not serious about stopping illegal immigration, especially as the Malaysian government made little effort to stop large numbers of Indonesian immigrants crossing the border into Malaysia before the Asian economic and financial crisis in 1997–98. Meanwhile, the Indonesian government temporarily stopped sending domestic migrant workers to Saudi Arabia after an Indonesian worker was

23 Muhamad Nadratuzzaman Hosen, “Governance of Indonesian Labour and Migration to Malaysia: An Overview”, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 39.2 (2005): 31–44.



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Table 3. Indonesian Migrant Workers Employed Overseas, 1994–2000 Year 1994–95 1995–96 1996–97 1997–98 1998–99 1999–2000

Number of migrant workers

Saudi Arabia (%)

Malaysia & Singapore (%)

Countries (%)

Change (%)

176,187 120,896 517,269 235,275 411,609 435,219

57 40 26 56 44 26

33 39 64 30 42 50

11 21 10 14 14 24

10 –31 328 –55 75 6

Source: Adapted from Graeme Hugo, 2000. Establishing the information needs of Indonesian international labour migrants: Background and Methodology (Paper presented at Seminar on Information Needs and Indonesian Migrant Workers, PPT-LIPI in collaboration with ILO). (Jakarta, 2000).

executed there in 1997. Since then the proportion of Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia and Singapore has increased compared to Saudi Arabia (see Table 3). Note that the data used in Tables 2 and 3 were collected by government and do not accurately estimate the numbers of Indonesian migrant workers already working in some countries. Government data typically do not include undocumented workers. In this context, the numbers of illegal migrant workers in Malaysia and Singapore were bigger than in Saudi Arabia due to the long distance from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia. However, there were still some Indonesian illegal migrant workers in Saudi Arabia. 3. Migrant Domestic Workers In 2002, 73 percent of the 155,000 registered foreign domestic workers in Malaysia were Indonesian; around 90 percent of Indonesian migrant workers in Saudi Arabia were also domestic workers. Domestic workers formed the largest sector of Indonesian migrant workers to some countries. For Malaysian families, Indonesian domestic workers were preferred to workers from the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam because most Indonesian domestic workers shared the same religion and ethnicity. As the following quote suggests, perceptions of domestic workers were mixed: After a long day at work, the last thing you want to worry about is dinner and the pile of laundry that’s been sitting there all week. Having someone help you with household and childcare can be a real sanity preserver, but having heard many horror stories about maids who are lazy, cannot communicate, or even run away leaving toddlers alone at home, you are understandably cautious hiring a foreign domestic worker. However, keep

396

muhamad nadratuzzaman hosen and aswatini raharto in mind many young women are honestly just looking to earn a better living for their families. Coming to a foreign country can be frightening and traumatic, and they too hope for a good employer-employee relationship.24

The sexualisation of foreign domestic workers was an important issue from the 1970s in Malaysia, where rhetoric relating to Indonesian domestic workers was generally positive, but not so for Filipino domestic workers. In fact, rhetoric encompassing both Indonesian and Filipino domestic workers was negative in the 1990s because foreign domestic workers were often represented as women who had the potential to engage in prostitution and spread infectious diseases. As a result of the media’s focus on the sexuality of foreign workers, many Malaysian women also perceive maids to be home-wreckers who preyed on “innocent” Malaysian husbands. Chin has pointed out that the reason she conducted research into domestic work in Malaysia was because she witnessed the abusive treatment of her neighbour’s maid by the employers.25 The maid was chained to the backdoor to prevent her eating the employers’ food while they went out. Moreover, Chin documented how maids working in Malaysia are often treated with very little respect and are subjected to employer violence and sexual abuse. In 1996, the Malaysian government signed an agreement with the Indonesian and Philippine governments on the hiring of maids in Malaysia. Demand for domestic workers increased in Malaysia as middle-class women came to rely on foreign maids to care for their children and perform household tasks. Female domestic workers effectively enabled middle-class women to become consumers and producers in the economic development of contemporary Malaysia.26 In Singapore too, employment laws relating to work hours, rest days and minimum wages do not cover domestic workers. The flexible nature of domestic work is one reason for its exclusion from labour laws.27 Domestic worker abuse can be seen as a structural problem in that deficiencies in local laws and the absence of international legal arrangements between sender and receiver countries are an important reason 24 Vicki D. Crinis, “The Devil You Know: Malaysian Perceptions of Foreign Workers”, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 39.2 (2005): 91–111. 25 Christine B.N. Chin, In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian Modernity Project (New York, 1998). 26 Crinis, “The Devil You Know,” 91–111. 27 Kelly Fu, “The Gendering of Domestic Worker Abuse in Singapore”, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 39.2 (2005): 113–28; Amarjit Kaur, “International Labour Migration in Southeast Asia: Governance of Migration and Women Domestic Workers”, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, Issue 15, May 2007, online.



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for the presence of abuse and ill treatment. Structural inadequacies and the feminization of domestic work mean that domestic workers are easily exploited. For example, they work an average 15 hours per day without a day off. This kind of ill-treatment is technically not an abuse under the law, meaning there is no legal recourse. The condition of domestic workers is exacerbated if they become isolated in employers’ homes; in these circumstances it is difficult to obtain help if abuse should occur. In many cases, domestic workers are only able to seek help when they leave the employer’s home.28 Migration Processes and Problems There are two main channels for Indonesians seeking employment abroad.29 First, the potential migrant can directly contact a labour recruitment company (known as Perusahaan Jasa Tenaga Kerja Indonesia or PJTKI). Second, the potential migrant may go through a recruiter who has ties with the PJTKI. The middlemen play a very significant role in the recruitment of labour migrants because they recruit in remote areas. The importance of recruiters is illustrated by LIPI’s finding that about 70 percent of potential migrants make initial contact with middlemen in order to get information regarding administrative requirements and processes, places of registration for overseas employment, migration costs and job opportunities overseas, while 43 percent of them subsequently used middlemen services.30 Furthermore, Hosen states that several different levels of middlemen exist, reflecting their wide sphere of influence in the recruitment process.31 Their main areas of operation are between the migrants’ place of origin in rural areas and recruiting companies in the cities that are officially licensed to send migrant workers overseas. The preparation and departure process is extremely important for prospective migrant workers. Before Indonesian migrant workers depart for their destination country there are several steps that have to be taken:

28 LIPI (Indonesian Institute of Sciences), Executive Report: Providing Material for Development of Information to be Made Available to Potential International Labour Migrants from Indonesia (The Centre for Population and Manpower Studies, Indonesian Institute of Sciences PPT-LIPI in Collaboration with the International Labour Organisation—ILO) (Jakarta, 2000). 29 Hosen, “Governance of Indonesian Labour”, 31–44. 30 LIPI. 31  Hosen, “Governance of Indonesian Labour”, 31–44.

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first, migrants need to know information related to administrative matters, travel costs, the travel process, the job description, their agreed wage and the work conditions in their destination country; second, they require information concerning total costs before departure; third, they require training before departure; fourth, they require mastery of the language they will use in their destination country; and fifth, they need to undertake a health check. The role of middlemen and the negotiation of various regulations mean that transaction costs can become quite high. However, as long as the expected income in the country of destination subsumes transaction, travel and administrative expenses, a desire to undertake domestic work overseas will remain.32 A study33 was conducted interviewing 146 migrant workers who returned to Indonesia; 88 percent had worked as domestic workers (housemaids). A large number of returned migrants from Saudi Arabia who had worked as domestic workers had been the only domestic worker in the employer’s house. They had to serve all family members and often the household consisted of extended family or more than one family. In one case, a servant worked for an employer who had four wives and all the wives and their children lived in the house; this worker had to serve all four families. It was rare, moreover, for family members to help servants conduct household work. Domestic workers often found themselves undertaking more than one job at the same time (for example, cooking while minding children). Normally, housemaids worked very long hours: typically, they began work at six o’clock in the morning and did not cease working until late at night. These extended hours are partly necessitated by cultural norms as Saudi Arabian families usually have their dinner late at night. However, most employers did not comply with work agreements that specified eight hour working days. In one case a domestic worker complained to her employer about the long working hours she was forced to endure and was told that she had to do all the work of the household because the employer had “bought” her at an expensive “price”.34 Information collected from many sources regarding domestic migrant workers in Saudi Arabia showed that prestige and enhanced social status is attributed to families that can afford to hire foreign servants. This is why many families employ domestic workers from countries including Indonesia; however, in some cases families are not able to pay their

32 LIPI. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid.



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domestic employee every month. In some cases families appear to believe that an initial payment to procure domestic labour equates to the purchase of the servant as a quasi-slave, who has no access to a regular salary or rights. Hence, it is not surprising to find that many migrant domestic workers who returned to Indonesia did not receive the full amount of their salary. However, some returned migrants from Saudi Arabia admitted that they were treated well by their employers, while others were treated as slaves.35 During their time overseas, social isolation was a problem for most Indonesian domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. Most returned migrants in the survey stated that they did not have any relationships with people apart from the employer’s family. They spent almost all their time inside the house, without any social contact with people outside the home. The study of Pusat Penelitian Kependudukan dan Ketenagakerjaan—Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia’s (PPT-LIPI) also found that domestic servants were often the objects of employer anger, especially among the wives of the households. Domestic workers were also often subject to sexual harassment, indeed rape, by male employers or other adult male family members. Therefore, they often had to be very cautious when at home with just adult male family members, and sometimes would avoid them to reduce the chance of sexual harassment. PPT-LIPI’s findings were echoed in the experiences of Indonesian domestic migrant workers in Malaysia, where newspapers reports detailed foreign workers being abused, cheated, not being paid wages, threatened with arrest, or being treated like slaves. However, demand for domestic migrant workers from Indonesia is still high for several reasons: • Malaysian women often have employment outside of the household and require domestic assistance • Companies seek migrant workers due to their low wages compared to Malaysian workers • Indonesian migrant workers are preferred by Malaysians because of their common religion and Malay ethnicity. Similarly to Malaysia, in Singapore demand for Indonesian domestic workers is still high for several reasons: • Demand for domestic workers for childcare and housework purposes 35 Ibid.

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• The lack of minimum wages for domestic migrant workers under Singaporean law (meaning that many families can afford to hire a domestic worker rather than place children in more expensive childcare) • Domestic workers are needed to look after elderly and disabled people. As can be seen in Table 4, the numbers of Indonesian migrant workers increased almost yearly due to high demand. Table 4. Indonesia: Indonesian Workers deployed overseas by destination country, 2001–2007 Destination Countries

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

Asia Brunei Darussalam Singapore Hong Kong Taiwan Malaysia South Korea Thailand Sri Lanka Macau

34,295 23,929 38,119 110,490 3,391 6 9 na

Total

216,012 237,880 109,622 160,885 297,177 309,495 238,713

Middle East and Africa Saudi Arabia United Arab Emirates Kuwait Bahrain Qatar Jordan Others Total Japan/Europe/ USA Others* Grand Total

5,773

8,502

1,146

6,503

4,978

7,431

4,321

16,071 6,103 9,131 25,087 28,545 20,431 3,509 14,183 12,143 19,211 35,992 1,930 969 48,576 40,923 152,680 89,439 127,175 201,887 207,426 4,273 7,495 2,924 4,506 5,959 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 na na na na na

23,613 21,282 35,222 151,998 2,175 0 0 na

103,235 213,603 169,038 196,342 150 202 268 202 16,715 11,027 7,779 1,475 7,237 5,622 22,190 19,578 3,343 16,418 12,268 15,989 1,558 666 88 0 1,029 916 180 62 379 1,233 226 68 609 1,346 495 1

16,842 21 1,002 2,081 1,216

22,630 18,610 639 1,465 7,546 7,302 10,352 10,256 4,962 5,121

121,180 241,961 183,770 219,699 336,521 336,521 249,047 1,800

552

302

106

114

532

910

na na na na na na 137 338,992 480,393 293,694 380,690 474,310 646,548 488,807

Note: * Others consist of those sent to Oman, Tunisia, and Turkey, etc. Source: Adapted from Aris Ananta (2007), “Estimating the Value of the Business of Sending Low-skilled Workers Abroad: An Indonesian Case” Available online at http://iussp2009 .princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=91804.





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Table 4 also shows that numbers of Indonesian migrant worker went to Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Kuwait during 2001 to 2007. Efforts to Protect Domestic Workers There is currently no bilateral agreement on the protection of Indonesian migrant labour, especially for Indonesian domestic workers, between the Indonesian government and governments of the majority of destination countries. In March 2010, Indonesia and Malaysia almost signed one such instrument after many issues were agreed upon apart from the issue of minimum wages. Similarly, Singapore’s government does not want to impose minimum wages for domestic migrant workers, preferring free market mechanisms for this portion of the labour force. The Jakarta Post reported that under a draft Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), Indonesian migrant workers would be given one day off a week; would be permitted to retain their passports; and that a joint taskforce and placement fee would be established. The Indonesian Minister of Manpower, Muhaimin, noted that in the past the passports of migrant workers were held by employers and they were given no holidays. This passport issue is important because employers who hold passports have been accused of subjecting migrant workers to abuse and violence. Human rights activists recommend that the Indonesian government, should, in order to curtail all forms of violence against domestic migrant workers: • Abolish or reform immigration-sponsorship policies so that domestic workers’ visas are no longer tied to their employers; • Develop protocols and train law enforcement officials on how to respond to domestic workers’ complaints appropriately, and how to investigate and collect evidence in such cases; • Prosecute perpetrators of psychological, physical, and sexual violence; • Expedite criminal cases involving migrant domestic workers, who must often wait for a resolution for several months or years while confined in a shelter, and ensure they have legal permission to work during the interim period; • Create and widely disseminate contacts for confidential, fully staffed and toll-free hotlines to receive reports of abuses against domestic workers;

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muhamad nadratuzzaman hosen and aswatini raharto

• Create comprehensive referral and support services, including health care, counselling, shelter, consular services, and legal aid. The thrust of these recommendations is to ensure that domestic migrant workers are not fully controlled by employers, and to provide opportunities for domestic migrant workers to communicate to public and government officials responsible for labour protection. Indonesia’s lawmakers are still discussing draft laws pertaining to domestic worker protection. Presently in Indonesia, domestic work is defined as part of the informal sector as there is no educational requirement for working as a domestic worker. One of the implications of this situation is that minimum salary or wage provisions do not exist. Many non-government organizations have proposed to Indonesian members of parliament that domestic workers should have minimum salary protection, and there should be other reforms dealing with the problems of domestic workers. Another critical issue in the draft legislation is the regulation of minimum age requirements, as around 35 percent of domestic workers in Indonesia are under 15 years old. The draft also proposes regulating working hours, domestic workers’ rights and protections, employee supply agencies, and encouraging the resolution of disputes between domestic workers and employers. It is important that this draft becomes enacted prior to any further agreements with foreign governments upon the protection of Indonesian domestic migrant workers. However, the draft is still being considered by parliament ten months after its introduction. If passed, the protective legislation will become a reference for the Indonesian government’s policies relating to migrant workers in the domestic sector. On the other hand, the Indonesian government has yet to ratify the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention protecting rights of migrant workers and their families, and has no relevant bilateral agreements with any of the labourreceiving countries. ILO has two legally binding instruments relating to labour migrants: Convention No. 97 of 1949, concerning Migration for Employment, and Convention No. 143 of 1975, concerning Migration in Abusive Conditions and the Promotion of Equality of Opportunity and Treatment of Migrant Workers.36 Meanwhile, the United Nations adopted the International

36 Aswatini Raharto, “Indonesia Labor Migration: Issues and Challenges”, International Journal on Multicultural Societies 9.2 (2007): 219–35.



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Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families (ICRMW) in New York on 18 December 1990, the Convention coming into force on July 1, 2003. The Indonesian Government is not ready to face the consequences of providing the same protection to expatriates working in Indonesia while unemployment is high. Previous attempts to protect Indonesian labour migrants have also been subject to debate. For example, Law No. 39, on the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Workers Overseas was passed in October 2004, and attracted considerable controversy because it arguably burdened migrant workers rather than protected their rights. Up to now there has been no new policy to protect migrant workers domestically or overseas; rather, the Indonesian government has attempted to establish strong bilateral relationships with governments of receiving countries to minimize problems such as sexual harassment, unpaid wages and excessive work hours. Conclusion The role of women as migrant domestic workers is enshrined in Indonesian history. During the colonial period, when many Javanese women were recruited as contract coolies, they also worked as domestic workers, and lacked protection due to lack of regulation regarding the protection of domestic workers. Currently, Indonesia does not have any legislation relating to domestic work. This lack of legislation puts domestic migrant workers in a weak position and prone to violation and abuse from their employer. The protection of domestic migrant workers is a difficult political issue and, in the absence of active efforts by the Indonesian government to protect Indonesian migrant workers overseas, the host countries tend not to act. The problems of domestic migrant workers from Indonesia are also human rights issues in the context of multi-dimensional economic, social, political and religious factors.

From Amah-chieh to Indonesian Maids: A Comparative Study in the Context of Malaysia, circa 1930s–1990s Ooi Keat Gin Introduction Since the late 1920s and early 1930s Chinese Cantonese domestic servants or amah-chieh were employed in upper-class Chinese households in urban colonial British Malaya undertaking an assortment of tasks including laundry and ironing, kitchen helper, caring for babies and young children, and caregiver to the infirm and the elderly.1 In their habit of a white blouse over black pants, they were exemplary domestic workers who served wealthy Chinese families and European households. Following Merdeka (independence) in 1957, the service of the amah-chieh continued into the late 1970s. By then their numbers had dwindled as there were few fresh arrivals in the postcolonial period. The phenomenon of Indonesian maids working in upper middle-class Chinese households emerged in urban Malaysia from the late 1980s, and in the 1990s also in Malay and Indian residences.2 For more than two decades, Indonesian women dominated the domestic service sector of urban Malaysia. But owing to a spectrum of problems relating to abuse, minimum wage and working conditions, Jakarta imposed a freeze on maids to Malaysia from June 2009. This chapter draws parallels and differences between amah-chieh and Indonesian maids. Female immigrant labour to Malaya/Malaysia from the 1930s to the 1990s is examined focusing on the causal factors for female

1 Amah, from the Portuguese ama meaning “nurse” in South, Southeast and East Asia, denotes a nursemaid or maidservant. The suffix -chieh meaning “elder sister” is used as a form of respect. However, the term amah-chieh, upon which this chapter focuses, refers to female unmarried Chinese Cantonese migrant domestic servants who arrived in colonial Malaya in the 1930s and served through to the early 1970s when many retired or passed away. By the 1950s, other working-class women of different ethnicity (Malay, local born Chinese, Indian) also entered paid domestic work as casual day workers, and were also referred to by the generic amah. Unless stated, amah is used throughout this study to denote amah-chieh. 2 “Indonesian maids” denote female domestic workers brought in from Indonesia as short-term contract guest workers who were denied permanent residence upon completion of their contract. “Maids” and “servants” are used interchangeably in this chapter.

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transnational migration-for-employment, the nature of recruitment and immigration, and the principal players in the female labour trade. The nature of employment and job descriptions are addressed. The salient characteristics of amah-chieh and maid, and the relations between employer and amah-chieh/maid are analyzed to unravel the phenomenon of exploitation and abuse. Female Transnational Migration for Employment Housework is described as unskilled labour at best, and invisible work at worst. Since the 1990s, however, female transnational migration-foremployment, initially of women from the Philippines and followed by others (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, etc.), has been the subject of scholarly research. The 1990s witnessed a “greater feminization of Asian labour migration” that included women migrating to work as domestic workers.3 Since the mid-1990s, for example, there has been close gender parity among migrant workers from the Philippines.4 But even more significant, during the first half of the 1990s, the out-migration of Indonesian females outpaced their male counterparts.5 Female Immigrant Labour to Colonial Malaya and Postcolonial Malaysia Push-Pull Factors of Migration-for-Employment Traditionally the Chinese male was the family’s breadwinner whereas the female played a supporting role in raising the young, caring for the old, and maintaining the household (cooking, cleaning, etc.). During adverse circumstances where emigration abroad to seek employment could enable

3 Lim Lin Lean and Nana Oishi, “International Labour Migration of Asian Women: Distinctive Characteristics and Policy Concerns”, Asian Women in Migration, special issue Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 5, 1 (1996): 85–116. 4 Vivienne Wee and Amy Sim, “Transnational Networks in Female Labour Migration”, in International Migration in Southeast Asia, ed. Aris Ananta and Evi Nurvidya Arifin (Singapore, 2004), 166–98. 5 Graeme Hugo, “International Labor Migration and the Family: Some Observations from Indonesia”, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 4, 2–4 (1995): 274–301.



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the sustenance of the family, the male members—husband, father, son, and/or brother—would go forth. Since the fifteenth century or earlier Chinese male emigration to territories in Southeast Asia was not uncommon and there were pockets of Chinese communities in the region, albeit predominantly male. Chinese emigration, mainly from the south-eastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, had occurred in small numbers and under difficult conditions from the mid-seventeenth century as the imperial Ching (Manchu) government (1644–1911) forbade it on pain of death.6 But from the 1840s increasing political instability and economic dislocation forced thousands to leave for survival.7 The confluence of overpopulation, natural calamities and the ineptitude and impotence of the imperial Ching government to alleviate dire conditions forced many Chinese to leave their ancestral villages to seek a livelihood abroad. Moreover, the opening of China following the Treaty of Nanking (1842) and the increasing demand for Chinese coolie labour concomitant with the abolition of the slave trade in 1834 added to the incentives to emigrate. Official sanction from Beijing of Chinese emigration only came in 1893. Southeast Asia was a major destination for the Chinese coolie traffic— the supply of cheap and plentiful unskilled labour to mining and commercial agricultural industries. The British Straits Settlements (Penang, Melaka and Singapore) became entry points for the west coast peninsular Malay states of Perak, Selangor, Sungai Ujong (later Negeri Sembilan), where emigrant Chinese sought employment, mainly as labourers, in the tin mines, gambier and sugar-cane plantations, and tapioca and pepper farms.8 In territories where there were communities of unattached male Chinese workers, Chinese women and young girls were brought in for prostitution purposes. The disparate sex ratio among the Chinese in British Malaya persisted until the late 1920s and made the trafficking of women and children for the sex trade a lucrative undertaking.9 Besides prostitution, there were others who were inducted into domestic service as mui tsai (lit. “little younger sister”), a euphemism for a household 6 Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, 2nd ed. (London, 1965), 24–30. 7 Yen Ching-hwang, A Social History of the Chinese in Singapore and Malaya 1800–1911 (Singapore, 1986), 1–8. 8 P.C. Campbell, Chinese Coolie Emigration to Countries within the British Empire (London, 1923), 5. 9 Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, 174–80; Yen, A Social History of the Chinese, 248–58; Lai Ah Eng, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes: A Preliminary Investigation into the Work of Chinese Women in Colonial Malaya (Singapore, 1986), 16–17.

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servant. Traditionally the institution of the mui tsai was a means of a family sending a pre-pubescent daughter to serve in the household of a family of a higher socioeconomic standing as a means to repay a favour such as a loan or material assistance whereby the child posed as both collateral (her presence) and repayment of the loan by instalment (her labour).10 However, under the guise of the mui tsai institution, Chinese families in Hong Kong and urban Malaya through unscrupulous go-betweens obtained young girls primarily for domestic servitude whereby they were exploited and subject to physical and sexual abuse. Under a similar mui tsai guise, brokers sold young girls to brothels. Owing to the trafficking of women and children for immoral (prostitution) and exploitative purposes (mui tsai), the imperial Ching government “took great precautions to prevent women being taken overseas” but gradually relented towards the end of the nineteenth century in line with the official sanction of emigration. But for women on Hainan Island, the ban was extended until the 1920s.11 Until the promulgation of the Chinese Immigration Ordinance Restriction (1877) in the Straits Settlements, the colonial government in British Malaya was nonchalant towards immigration, allowing free and unrestricted entry. Under the provision of the ordinance a Chinese Protectorate was established to oversee the overall welfare of immigrants who arrived as indentured labour.12 Owing to adverse public opinion towards indentured labour, it was banned in 1914. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the situation on the Chinese mainland became increasingly critical—rebellions, famines, poverty, and political instability—and forced even women to emigrate. Meanwhile, Chinese who had transited as sojourners to Southeast Asia arranged for their wives and children to join them in Malaya. These women (wives and daughters) worked in the tin industry (dulang washing), and rubber estates (tappers). Unattached women (Hakka and Samsui) emigrated to work in the exclusively female occupation as dulang washers, while others worked as unskilled workers in plantation agriculture (mainly rubber). Their numbers can be discerned from the number of dulang passes or licences issued by the colonial government: 8,278 (1909),

10 Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes, 45–55. 11  Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, 1967), 254. 12 R.N. Jackson, Immigrant Labour and the Development of Malaya, 1786–1920 (Kuala Lumpur, 1961), 72.



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12,867 (1920), 11,809 (1936).13 Chinese women’s share of the tin industry workforce increased steadily: 4.5 percent (7,353) in 1911, 11.5 percent (9,613) in 1921, 11.1 percent (10,174) in 1931, 20.0 percent (8,159) in 1947, and 12.2 percent (9,473) in 1957.14 On average, female workers received daily wages of 30 to 40 cents, half of what their male counterparts were paid, namely, an average rate of 75 cents per day.15 In the rubber industry, Chinese women numbered 5,267 (5 percent) of the total female workforce in 1921, increasing to 13,715 (9 percent) in 1931 and 45,738 (25.5 percent) in 1947.16 Although the majority of Chinese females originated as family-linked labour, there were “single women living in groups in all-female kongsi houses in the late 1930s.”17 The rubber industry also possessed a sex differential on wages. In the mid-1940s, while male field workers earned 80 to 90 cents per day, their female counterparts received 65 to 80 cents.18 However, Chinese female workers fared better than non-Chinese workers, male or female.19 From the late 1920s and 1930s there was an increasing entry of Chinese female immigrants into Malaya evident from the reduction in the sex ratio (Table 1 below) and consequent of two developments. Firstly, the British colonial authorities enacted the Immigration Restriction Ordinance (1928) in the Straits Settlements to regulate the inflow of immigrants particularly from China if the influx “threatened unemployment, caused economic distress”.20 It also aimed at excluding undesirable elements (criminals, subversives, etc.). Secondly, the Depression (1929–31) activated the ordinance that not only repatriated but also imposed an embargo on Chinese male arrivals. Beginning in August 1930, a monthly arrival figure of 6,016 was reduced to 1,000 in the last five months of 1932.21 Chinese females and children below 12 years of age were exempted. 13 Jackson, Immigrant Labour, 146; Siew Nim-chee, Labour and Tin Mining in Malaya (Ithaca, NY, 1953), 406. 14 Amarjit Kaur, “Women at Work in Malaysia”, in Women and Employment in Malaysia, ed. Hing Ai Yun and Rokiah Talib, special issue Jurnal Manusia dan Masyarakat, (Kuala Lumpur, 1986), 5. 15 Wong Lin Ken, The Malayan Tin Industry to 1914 (Tucson, AZ, 1965), 75–6, 99, 175, 206; Kaur, “Women at Work in Malaysia” 5. 16 M.V. Del Tufo, A Report on the 1947 Census of Population (London, 1949), 113. 17 Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes, 69. 18 C. Gamba, The National Union of Plantation Workers: A History of the Plantation Workers of Malaya, 1946–1958 (Singapore, 1962), 12. 19 Lai, Peasants, Proletarians and Prostitutes, 71–2. 20 Norman Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy and Administration: A History of Labour in the Rubber Plantation Industry in Malaya, 1910–1941 (New York, 1960), 92. 21 Saw Swee-Hock, The Population of Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore, 1988), 15.

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ooi keat gin Table 1. Sex Ratio of Chinese Immigrants in Malaya, 1881–1938 (Males per 1,000 Females)

Year

Sex Ratio

Year

Sex Ratio

Year

Sex Ratio

Year

Sex Ratio

1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894

27,773 37,131 26,469 29,326 32,093 29,657 25,775 23,618 30,308 21,475 17,236 18,017 19,840 19,715

1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908

16,630 17,113 12,299 12,919 17,537 15,062 13,180 14,006 13,298 12,480 9,254 10,518 10,551 6,908

1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922

9,166 9,847 8,744 7,728 7,611 18,148 6,338 7,143 7,407 4,630 2,994 3,543 4,309 4,787

1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938

4,595 4,157 4,761 4,665 3,908 3,538 4,428 3,562 2,941 2,166 1,651 1,753 2,117 1,401 1,054 429

Source: After Saw Swee-Hock, The Population of Peninsular Malaysia (Singapore, 1988), 21.

“There can be little doubt,” it was pointed out, “that in some cases the old custom of the husband emigrating and sending money back to China for the support of his wife and family was reversed—the wife emigrating to earn money for the husband and family in China”.22 Also, “ticket brokers at the China ports . . . refused to sell quota tickets unless three or four nonquota ones [female passengers] were bought by the ticket agencies and lodging houses for each quota ticket purchased”.23 Then, in January 1933, the Aliens Ordinance came into effect that targeted the Chinese as “aliens”, non-British subjects.24 Chinese female immigrants were again exempted as the colonial government was keen “to encourage the immigration of women in order to improve the sex ratio.”25 It was only from May 1938 that a monthly quota of 500 Chinese women was allowed access, marking the first restriction on their entry into Malaya. The increasing migration of Chinese women to colonial Malaya in the 1930s owed to the dire situation on the Chinese mainland leading to 22 W.L. Blythe, “Historical Sketch of Chinese Labour in Malaya”, Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 20, 1 ( June 1947): 103. 23 Ibid. 24 Parmer, Colonial Labour Policy and Administration, 93. 25 Saw, The Population of Peninsular Malaysia, 16.



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the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the Asia Pacific War (1941–45) that posed very little choice but out-migration to seek employment abroad as a means to help sustain the family in the home village.26 The bulk of Chinese females who arrived then at Penang and Singapore comprised unattached, young women of whom the majority found employment as domestic servants (amah-chieh) in upper-class Chinese households and European residences in urban colonial Malaya. A sizeable number of amah-chiehs originated from the Pearl River delta, one of China’s major silk-producing regions.27 Young, unmarried women were favoured as silk reelers, attaining an apex number of 136,860 in 1928.28 But the Depression adversely impacted upon the silk industry where hundreds of thousands of female workers lost their jobs.29 Many of these unemployed women migrated to Malaya for work. Indonesian women began entering the low-wage foreign migrant labour market as domestic servants/maids in the early 1980s when they filled the labour vacuum that occurred when Bangladesh and Pakistan, who had supplied Arab states with low-wage foreign female domestic workers, imposed a ban in response to a public outcry over the exploitation and abuse of maids by foreign employers. By the late 1980s, Indonesian women comprised 87 percent of a total of 48,837 Indonesian migrant workers serving in West Asia; 80 percent of these women worked as domestic servants in affluent households.30 Unlike the upheavals in China that saw the out-migration of Chinese females to colonial Malaya, Indonesia of the 1980s and 1990s, in contrast, was booming: “The end of the oil boom in the early and mid-1980s . . . forced [President Suharto] to reshape the economy in deregulated, liberalized, and export-oriented ways that led, in turn, to a new surge of economic growth.”31

26 Jonathan M. Spence, The Search for Modern China (London, 1990), 425. 27 Marjorie Topley, “Marriage Resistance in Rural Kwangtung”, Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford, CA, 1975), 67–88. 28 J. Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860–1930 (Standford, CA, 1989), 148, 161. 29 Rubie S. Watson, “Girls’ Houses and Working Women: Expressive Culture in the Pearl River Delta, 1900–41”, in Women and Chinese Patriarchy. Submission, Servitude and Escape, ed. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers (London and New Jersey, 1994), 33. 30 George Cremer, “Deployment of Indonesian Migrants to the Middle East: Present Situation and Prospects”, Bulletin for Indonesian Economic Studies, 24, 3 (1988): 75. 31   R.E. Elson, “Suharto (1921–): The Shrewd Puppeteer”, Southeast Asia: A Historical Encyclopedia from Angkor Wat to East Timor, ed. Ooi Keat Gin (Santa Barbara, CA, 2004), III, 1261.

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What then were “the historical-structural forces” at work among Indonesian females that created the conditions to seek employment in Malaysia? Interestingly, poverty was not the primary or main determinant.32 While single Indonesian women cited pecuniary reasons and the pursuit of a more “comfortable life,” their married sisters’ decision to leave was often due to marital issues (viz. uncaring spouses, unemployed husbands, deserting partners) and they “had no alternative but to migrate in order to escape shame, humiliation, and poverty.”33 Colonial Malaya had, since the early twentieth century, been riding on an economic wave of prosperity. Tin and rubber brought forth the Western entrepreneur and Chinese towkay (entrepreneurs, proprietors of businesses). Mainly British with a sprinkling of Europeans, owners of mines and estates, technical and managerial staff (engineers, managers) and their families lived rich lifestyles in opulent residences. An army of servants served and maintained the palatial bungalows and affluent lifestyles. Chinese towkay who founded fortunes in tin and/or rubber “kept up with the Joneses”, enjoying similarly grandiose lifestyles and homes. The resplendent ang moh lau (lit. house of the red-haired Westerners) demanded a large number of domestic workers for upkeep and to serve resident members of the extended family that numbered up to 15 to 20 adults and a host of young children and babies. Despite the Depression many affluent households continued to maintain their luxurious lifestyles. Between 1934 and 1938, the peak period of Chinese female arrivals, some 190,000 entered Malaya serving as domestic servants, construction workers, dulang washers, and rubber tappers.34 Malaysia in the 1980s and 1990s embarked on a rapid export-oriented industrializing programme to propel the economy to double-digit annual growth figures and ultimately attain developed nation status. As the increasingly expanding industrial sector absorbed the Malaysian workforce, both male and female, there was a vacuum created in the performance of household chores and child care. By the 1970s the generation of amah-chieh had retired or died without replacement. With the growth 32 Amarjit Kaur, “International Labour Migration in Southeast Asia: Governance of Migration and Women Domestic Workers”, Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, 15 (May 2007): paras. 1–64. http://65.55.72.23/att/GetAttachment .aspx?file=57b1d76d-a10a-4560-b00b-e8d8107b4f0 Accessed 27 September 2010. 33 Christine B.N. Chin, In Service and Servitude. Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian “Modernity” Project (New York, 1998), 119. 34 Blythe, “Historical Sketch”, 103; Sharon Lee, “Female Immigrants and Labour in Colonial Malaya 1860–1947”, International Migration Review, 23, 2 (1990), 316.



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of the middle class, and the upper sector of this group commanding the purchasing power to hire help for domestic work, there was an increasing demand for domestic servants.35 The Nature of Recruitment: Kongsi pang and DOMs Chinese women, the majority from Guangdong, and to a lesser extent Fujian, who had decided to emigrate, sought the services of a sui haak (lit. “water guest”), a labour broker or go-between for individuals going abroad, who undertook the purchase of tickets and travel arrangements (travel documentation, transit lodgings, etc.) for the overseas journey by ship. Traditionally the sui haak catered to male emigrants, but in the 1930s also took on female clients. He worked in cohort with shipping ticket agents, ship captains, and lodging houses at the departure ports (mainly Hong Kong via Guangzhou, but also Xiamen and others). Unlike the often penniless males who had their tickets paid in advance by agents or ship captains at embarkation ports which the coolies repaid with their labour as an indentured worker, female emigrants of the 1930s paid in full for their tickets. I got in touch with a sui haak from my village and came over with him and chi mui [“sworn sister”] from my village. I paid him [Malayan dollar] $10. We went from Canton [Guangzhou] to Hong Kong first and from there to Singapore. The fare was about $30. This included food and the journey took four to five days.36

When the women landed at Penang or Singapore they would “first register with a kongsi pang or lodging house . . . often managed by a female coolie head who would provide new arrivals with food and lodging for a fee.”37 The normal channel of securing employment for the amah-chieh was through recommendation of another amah-chieh, often from the same kongsi pang. Word-of-mouth was the conduit between a prospective employer and an amah-chieh (employee). Usually the mistress of a household would express her intention of hiring to her senior amahchieh (where there were several amah-chiehs in her employ). The latter

35 Chin, In Service and Servitude, 111. 36 Quoted in Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants. The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East (Singapore, 1988), 83. 37 Ooi Keat Gin, “Domestic Servants Par Excellence: The Black & White Amahs of Malaya and Singapore with special reference to Penang”, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, 65, 2 (December 1992): 74.

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understandably would give first priority to fellow chi mui of her kongsi pang, failing which from another kongsi pang. A prospective candidate would visit the household and be introduced to the mistress by the senior amah-chieh. The mistress and the candidate would discuss duties and responsibilities, wages, rest days, expectations and requirements in the presence of the senior amah-chieh as witness, and also to be aware of the newcomer’s duties as she would work and report directly to the senior amah-chieh. Alternatively, “it was not uncommon for employers to come directly to the kongsi pang to search for domestic help. In fact the kongsi pang acted as an employment agency facilitating new arrivals with the opportunity to meet their prospective employers.”38 In contrast, the flow of Indonesian women into Malaysia in the 1980s and 1990s was closely monitored by various parties with vested interests. The privately owned commercial domestic employment agencies or DOMs were the main players who undertook all the crucial services: recruitment, training, employment, travel, loans (expenses including travel tickets), work contracts, remittance remuneration, and repatriation.39 The migrant woman worker had little control over her life as DOMs and employers took over her decision-making, physical movements, and, without undue exaggeration, her day-to-day existence. Repatriation upon conclusion of her contract was also typically arranged by employers/ DOMS: purchase of flight tickets, travel documents, travel to the airport or sea port and so forth. Furthermore, Indonesian female workers suffered from inhumane treatment and abuses by labour recruiters in pre-departure “training camps” for extended periods, from weeks to months. According to Indonesian authorities “domestic workers . . . [had to] complete a training course before the Indonesian government will grant them permission to work overseas.”40 But the real reason was simply because “Most Indonesian labour recruiters . . . have no ready overseas jobs for the workers they recruit . . . [and in fact] are holding labour stock to be released only when they are able to find buyers for it.”41

38 Ibid. 39 Wee and Sim, “Transnational Networks”, 169. 40 Human Rights Watch (HRW), “Help Wanted: Abuses against Female Migrant Domestic Workers in Indonesia and Malaysia”, 21 July 2004, 25. http://www.hrw.org/en/ reports/2004/07/21/help-wanted Accessed 1 November 2010. 41 Wee and Sim, “Transnational Networks”, 180.



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Specialized Amah-chieh and All-Rounder Indonesian Maids Wealthy Chinese households and European residences in colonial Malaya had an army of amah-chiehs undertaking all departments of domestic work: laundry, kitchen helper-dishwasher and waiting at tables, taking care of babies and young children, caregivers to the infirm and elderly, and general housekeeping (sweeping, cleaning, dusting, polishing, etc.). Besides amah-chiehs, the domestic staff included male professional Hainanese (Hylam) chefs, Tamil gardeners, and Malay chauffeurs. Typically, three or four generations were housed in most well-to-do Chinese household presided over by a patriarch or matriarch. Similarly, European households—of colonial administrators, traders, staffs of agency houses, banks, and commercial establishments—mirrored the wealthy Chinese household, but on a smaller scale, typically comprising a man (Tuan/Sir), his wife (Mem/Madam) and one or two young children. Two or three amah-chiehs would suffice for all domestic chores, a Hainanese cook, a Malay chauffeur, and a Tamil gardener completed the household staff ensemble. Amah-chiehs were well known to be “baby sitters par excellence”42 (Ooi 1992, 65). For each baby, affluent households—Chinese and European— assigned a single amah-chieh who devoted her full attention to the care of the infant, a round-the-clock task. Generally all amah-chiehs (and other household staff ) resided in the servants’ quarters. They had their meals separately, often in the kitchen, and hung their laundry separately. There was a clear-cut gulf between employer and his family members and the hired help; both parties knew their place and status and neither overstepped their respective boundaries. The typical “black and white” habit of amah-chiehs was attributed to the strict regimentation of European, particularly British employers who “liked their servants to look neat and to have a recognizable uniform—to be identifiably ‘servants’ ”, reminiscent of Edwardian or Victorian times.43 Indonesian maids were spared the stigmatization of a regimented uniform for a “servant”. T-shirts and long pants were typically worn by maids for reasons of economy and practicality. The latter were particularly imperative because unlike the specialization of amah-chieh, Indonesian maids were expected to perform all household tasks: “to carry out the normal housekeeping duties such as washing, cleaning, babysitting, 42 Ooi, “Domestic Servants Par Excellence”, 65. 43 Gaw, Superior Servants, 105.

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etc., and for no other purpose”.44 This “etc.” was equivalent to the work contract phrase “any other work as instructed by the employer from time to time”—a catch-phrase that included anything from washing cars to gardening.”45 The most contentious issue regarding Indonesian maids was the unstipulated working hours. While it was typically a full day job—five or six o’clock in the morning to eleven o’clock in the evening—for most amah-chiehs, Indonesian maids also followed a similar regime with a notable exception. While amah-chiehs worked in specialized domains demarcated accordingly, Indonesian maids were all-purpose servants. Unlike the cohort of amah-chiehs serving upper-class households, each middle-class household typically would employ a single live-in maid to undertake all tasks—from babysitting to cleaning storm drains. Maids who were required to sleep with new-born babies and attend to diaper change and periodic feedings had a 24-hour, taxing job. Endless hours aside, Indonesian maids were often denied rest days. Amah-chiehs were allowed free time—on the first and fifteenth of the Chinese lunar calendar—when they could be seen at Chinese temples, often with their chi mui, performing their religious obligations. Similarly, Filipina maids had Sunday free to attend mass and spend the day with friends (other maids). Indonesian maids, however, were not allowed such liberties. Remuneration for amah-chiehs was often set by the “sisterhood,” an amount mutually agreed among them to ensure that no individual amahchieh was exploited. The scale of wages was dependent on whether the employer was a Chinese family or European household, and the nature of the duties. Generally Europeans were more generous than local employers as Table 2 indicates. Often Chinese households included three daily meals whereas European employers expected their amah-chiehs to provide for themselves owing to disparate dietary requirements. In comparison, contemporary daily-paid rubber estate male workers received on average $90 to $100 per month (Table 3). Hence, the wages of amah-chiehs were not poor when compared to plantation workers.

44 Chin, In Service and Servitude, 114–15. 45 Caridad Tharan, “Filipina Maids in Malaysia”, Trade in Domestic Helpers. Causes, Mechanisms and Consequences (Kuala Lumpur, 1989), 280.



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Table 2. Average remuneration of amahs, c. 1950s Nature of Work

European Employer (in Malayan/Singapore dollar per month)

Local Employer

$150 $130 $110

$110 $90 $80

Cook Baby Amah Household Amah (General) £1 = M$8.50 USD 1 = M$3.00

Source: After Kenneth Gaw, Superior Servants. The Legendary Cantonese Amahs of the Far East (Singapore, 1988), p. 103.

Table 3. Average Remuneration of Rubber Plantation Workers, c. 1950s Nature of Work

Weeder Tapper USD 1 = M$ 3.00

Daily Wages (in Malayan/Singapore dollars per month) $3.25 $3.65

Convert to Monthly

$97.50 $109.50

Source: After The 1962 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership—Biography of Palayil Pathazapurayil Narayanan http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyNarayananPal.htm. Accessed  8 January 2011

Advantages of European employers included a fixed working schedule, comparatively higher wages, more comfortable accommodation, specific duties, fixed rest days, and overall less demanding responsibilities. However, “You’d have to bring your pots and pans along to do your own cooking. . . . [including] rice, oil, etc. . . . Also, I didn’t understand their language. I didn’t like working for them in spite of higher salaries.”46 Furthermore, European employers tended to emphasize their superiority, unsurprising in the context of colonial Malaya. An ex-amah-chieh complained that European employers “did not like it when their servants answered them back instead of keeping quiet.”47 Despite the amah-chiehs being household servants, owing to deference of age, Chinese employers respectfully addressed them with the suffix “-chieh” (elder sister), namely, Ah Ho-chieh,

46 Quoted in Gaw, Superior Servants, 105. 47 Quoted in Chin, In Service and Servitude, 78.

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Elder Sister Ho. But such deference was absent in European households; each amah-chieh answered to her name, simply as Ho. The employerservant gulf was starkly demonstrated in European households in the mandatory “black and white” attire, a conspicuous symbol of servitude and subordination. Amah-chiehs who preferred employment in Chinese households chose wealthy families where specialization of labour was the norm. Often quoted complaints relating to Chinese employers, particularly those from smaller households, typically included unattractive salary increments, irregular working hours and demanding and fastidious mistresses. Indonesian maids had little choice over salaries or employers as both were decided by the DOMs. Unlike Filipina maids who had an organization such as the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) to demand a minimum basic salary, fixed rest days, et cetera, the Indonesian government had yet to present such demands and Indonesian maids were at the mercy of DOMs. In the mid-1990s “DOM representatives insisted that Indonesian women’s salary of RM 300–330 per month be determined by the ‘market’.”48 Others cited monthly figures between RM350 and RM400.49 DOMs decided upon the employer for an Indonesian woman domestic worker by furnishing a list of candidates for selection. A potential employer selected an employee from the list and paid the DOMs between RM 2,300 and RM 3,900 to secure an Indonesian maid.50 Indonesian maids enjoyed full board and lodging from their middleclass employer. Typically, each household would employ a maid who was expected to be an all-rounder, “not entitled to any rest days nor is there a limit to their working days. Most of them work 16–18 hours per day.”51 Employer-Employee Relations It is commonplace to hear of complaints of Indonesian maids being “slow”, “lazy”, “stupid”, “good for nothing,” “gatai” (sex-hungry), or “heow” (sexually provocative). Ironically employers also believed that their maid had “outsmarted” them, that they (employers) had been “taken advantage of,” felt “cheated,” and/or “short-changed” for what they had paid for.

48 Ibid., 116. 49 Kaur, “International Labour Migration in Southeast Asia”. 50 Chin, In Service and Servitude, 115. 51 Kaur, “International Labour Migration in Southeast Asia”.



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Although the term “employer” theoretically refers in most households to a husband-and-wife (the couple) who contracted the services of a livein maid, it was (and still is) the norm that the wife (mistress of the house, female employer) has full rein over domestic issues and full control and responsibility in relation to the maid. To avoid any untoward situations, most wives would go to the extent of disallowing any direct interaction between their husband and the maid. Since most maids were young, unattached women it was understandable that the female employer, more often much older, felt insecure and viewed the maid as a sexual threat to her, vis-à-vis her husband. Owing to the unlegislated employer-maid relations, there was literally no restraint on the part of the employer in relation to the treatment of maids. Moreover, immigration authority measures to prevent “maids from running away from employers or employers dismissing maids at their whim” imposed the forfeiture of DOM and employers’ deposits of bond money—a requirement by Malaysian law—in the event of Indonesian maids being apprehended by police for immoral and illegal activities such as prostitution.52 Likewise, the annual levy paid by the employer (sometimes by the maid) would be forfeited if the normal two-year contract was prematurely terminated. Such measures invariably contributed to employers instituting a close surveillance over the activities of their Indonesian maid to the extent of curtailing their physical movement (not beyond the confines of the house) and social interaction (not with people beyond the household members). In short, Indonesian maids were subjected to a strait-jacket treatment including no-rest-days (physical confinement), harsh reprimand for intransigencies (verbal, emotional), and close surveillance (depriving privacy). In contrast amah-chieh-employer relations were often reported to be of a positive nature. Unlike the two-year contract of Indonesian maids, although subject to extension, the average time an amah-chieh served a household was “about ten to fifteen years; however, it was not unusual for an amah to remain with a single family until she retired at the age of about sixty-five.”53 Advantages of this extended service included a long bonding and familiarity, mutual understanding, close affinity to the extent of recognition and acceptance as an “honorary member” of the family.

52  New Straits Times, January 6, 1993. 53 Ooi, “Domestic Servants Par Excellence”, 75–6.

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Besides performing physical labour (domestic duties), an amah-chieh also performed what was called “emotional” labour.54 Typically “not only was an amah-chieh a surrogate mother to her employers’ children, but also . . . she became a surrogate mother to her female employee” as well.55 Such close affinity was almost unknown in the context of Indonesian maids, and it was rare for them to be accepted as a “member” of the family. Amah-chiehs were well-known to impact a great influence on the household and all its members. “Discipline and the Chinese tenets of filial piety,” most amah-chieh “emphasized in their care of the young.”56 But some amah-chiehs were notoriously “harsh, even fierce in character, and often dominated and controlled the household with a stern hand” to the extent that some employers “were even known to fear their amahs and [would] go all out not to displease” them.57 “Not all amahs were the models that they were made out to be,” recalled a Chinese woman growing up in Penang. “Some were tyrants in the household in which they resided. We had one in our household of five servants.”58 Indonesian maids more often were cast in negative light in terms of their impact on their employer’s household. Apart from influences of a sexual nature on household male members, her impact on children and young adults was often perceived to be adverse. The majority of Indonesian maids possessed basic or elementary schooling. Consequently the perceived “assistance” and “influence” of Indonesian maids on the young were discouraged. Furthermore, the negative labels that were attached to them—“slow,” “lazy,” “stupid,” “good for nothing”—were unwelcome traits in youngsters. Mothers (female employers) warned their adolescent daughters not to imitate the purported characteristics of gatai and heow of Indonesian maids. “Safety Net” Vis-à-vis “Suffering Alone in Silence” The “tenure” of amah-chiehs’ domestic service from the 1930s to the early 1970s in Malaya/Malaysia was unlegislated, meaning legally the rights of amah-chiehs relating to salary, nature of work, rest days, insurance, et cetera

54 Mary Romero, M.A.I.D. in the USA (New York, 1992), 106. 55 Chin, In Service and Servitude, 76. 56 Ooi, “Domestic Servants Par Excellence”, 76. 57 Ibid. 58 Quoted in Gaw, Superior Servants, 160.



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were non-existent. Nonetheless, they handled the aforesaid “rights” in their own unique way. She [the female employer] accused me of breaking the antique vase. I told her that I didn’t do it but she accused me all the same. So, I packed my clothes and went back to the fong chai [lit. small room; apartment]. It broke my heart to leave the children. They clung to my trousers and pleaded with me not to leave. Tears flowed down my face as I walked out of the main gate. I told my sisters [fellow amahs] about her and they helped me look for another employer. After a few days, she [female employer] came to the fong chai and apologized to me.59

The above-mentioned incident occurred in the 1960s regarding an amah named Ah Ling-chieh whose behaviour was not the exception but the norm among amah-chiehs who stood up to their employers, demonstrated their independence and self-confidence, and who were not easily cowed by unreasonable employers. They had the full support of their chi mui who literally were their socioeconomic “safety net”, whereby they collectively supported her financially in the interim and sought employment for her. Although amah-chiehs were “well aware of their ‘lowly’ position or status as servants . . . they expected employers to treat them with respect: e.g. to address amahs politely and to trust the women’s judgment in performing various household tasks.”60 Moreover, Amah networks established rules and boundaries of employer-employee relations that mitigated physical and sexual abuse. Employers who verbally mistreated their domestic workers were quickly maligned throughout the networks, which could and did jeopardize employers’ future ability to hire amahs. . . . amah networks acted as safety nets since they provided social, financial, and emotional support for their members. . . . the networks were well-developed self-help institutions. . . .61

Indonesian maids existing in similar unlegislated employer-maid relations had scant alternatives to turn to apart from solitary suffering in silence. The workplace abuses of Indonesian maids employed in Malaysia has been documented, in particular by Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based non-governmental organization, in its report (21 July 2004), namely, “Hours of Work, Rest Days, and Workload”, “Forced Confinement and Restricted Communication”, “Unpaid Wages”, “Restrictions on

59 Quoted in Chin, In Service and Servitude, 75. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 75–6.

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Religious Freedom”, “Physical Abuse, Neglect, and Mistreatment”, “Sexual Abuse and Harassment”, and “Trafficking into Forced Labour”.62 In an interview with HRW an Indonesian maid revealed the sexual harassment she faced. The [employer’s] sons would always touch me, they would call me a pig. Whenever the elder son saw me he touched me all over my body. While I was sleeping, the employer’s son came into the room. He wanted to have sex with me. I yelled. The lady employer was angry with me. The next day she gave me a ticket to Indonesia.63

Indonesian maids, despite “their ‘lowly’ position or status as servants,” strongly felt that they still had the right to demand respect from their employers. But from the middle-class employers’ perspective the fact that they provided their live-in Indonesian maid full board and lodging and monthly wages meant that they had the “moral right” to dictate the latter’s every move without any demarcation over public (work, duties) and private (the maid’s personal life, privacy) domains. The absence of concrete legislation from the Malaysian government meant that employers had full and absolute rein over their charge. Furthermore, the Indonesian government had little interest in protecting the welfare and human rights of their migrant workers (of both sexes) in labour-receiving countries in West Asia or Southeast Asia. Consequently, Indonesian migrant workers were at the mercy of the host countries. In Malaysia, Indonesian maids neither had recourse to report incidences of ill-treatment and abuse to the Malaysian authorities and/ or the Indonesian embassy/consulate, nor expect any “cavalry” to arrive to save them. Moreover, in most cases maids were restricted in practically all their physical activities and were under the watchful eyes of their employer (including children); hence there was little avenue for a maid to communicate her “cry for help” beyond the household. Indonesian maids, unlike amah-chiehs, had no “safety net” to fall back upon or chi mui for temporary sustenance, assistance and emotional support. Many Indonesian maids felt that they were being treated as hamba (a slave) by their employers. Even perceived shared ethnic and religious similarities between Indonesian maids and Malaysian Malay Muslim middle-class employers did not dissuade the latter from mistreating the former. 62  HRW, “Help Wanted”, 26–37. 63  Ibid., 35.



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We [Malays and Indonesians] are one nation/race [bangsa] of peoples. I never thought that they’d mistreat me the way they did. Yes, the Chinese [employers] are bad, but not as bad [as Malay employers].64

DOMs too contributed in the abuse of Indonesian maids by employers. To DOMs Indonesian maids were “commodities” transacted for profit. Motivated to ensure minimal problems and maximum profits, DOMS presented to employers a picture of Indonesian maids as “children”, who needed close supervision, and “untrustworthy foreigners.” Armed with this “authoritative” information from DOMs, employers took precautionary measures to ensure that these “untrustworthy child-like foreigners” did not commit any untoward acts. Such attitudes totally dehumanized Indonesian maids and led to abuse by overzealous employers. In highlighting and sensationalizing incidences of runaway maids, their detention by the authorities for involvement in vice activities, and other unsavoury comments of female migrant workers, the mass media in Malaysia further perpetuated and accentuated the “untrustworthy childlike foreigners”-image of Indonesian maids. “The local [Malaysian] population has had limited or non-interaction with the Indonesians,” Azizah Kassim comments, “and thus press coverage of the Indonesian immigrant issue was seminal in setting the tone of public opinion and shaping individual responses and reactions to the Indonesians.”65 Consequently, not unlike the action taken by Bangladesh and Pakistan in the 1980s, Indonesia in the mid-2000s responded to public outcry over maid abuse by Malaysian employers by imposing a one-year freeze on supply from June 2009. As of March 2011, this suspension remained intact. “Blame Game Won’t Solve Maids Issue” The above sub-title is borrowed from columnist Mergawati Zulfikar’s commentary piece relating to the Malaysia-Indonesia negotiations to produce a mutually beneficial Memorandum of Understanding. There are various perspectives from parties with vested interests relating to the contentious Indonesian maids issue in Malaysia.66 When all parties strived to protect their respective vested interests and DOMS were concerned with profits 64 Quoted in Chin, In Service and Servitude, 151. 65 Azizah Kassim, “The Unwelcome Guests: Indonesian Immigrants and Malaysian Public Responses”, Southeast Asian Studies, 25, 2 (1987): 271. 66 Star July 19, 2010.

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and governments were concerned to protect their citizens, it was not surprising that a Memorandum of Understanding “not just to protect maids but also to recognize the rights of their employer” has yet to materialize.67 Jakarta demanded that Indonesian maids be paid a minimum monthly salary of RM 800, have one day off per week, and be allowed to keep their passports. Malaysia’s Human Resource Minister, Datuk Dr S. Subramaniam, explained that “It is difficult to implement as Malaysia does not have a minimum wage structure. . . . [and] wages should be based on market forces. . . . [that was] our policy then and [is] now.”68 Kuala Lumpur emphasized “a fair price to bring in the maid, a guarantee that the maids will not run away and that they are given adequate training to do housework.”69 DOMs on both sides of the straits were profiteering at the expense of both Indonesian maids and Malaysian employers. “Each employer,” according to Zulfikar, “has to fork out between RM 7,000 and RM 8,000”, whereas in reality, “Based on Malaysian calculations the figure should be slashed by half.”70 In countering complaints by Indonesia of maid abuse, Alwi Bavutty, president of the Malaysian Association of Foreign Maid Agencies (PAPA) cited the tough stance including the death sentence meted out by Malaysian authorities who “have been serious in punishing those at fault from the beginning, whether the abusers were employers or maids.”71 Nonetheless, both Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur were equally taken to task by HRW. Indonesia and Malaysia have failed to protect Indonesian domestic workers and have excluded them from standard protections guaranteed to other workers. Indonesia lacks an adequate system for monitoring labour recruitment agencies or training centres. Malaysia’s employment laws do not extend equal protection to domestic workers, leaving their work hours, payment of overtime wages, rest days, and compensation for workplace injuries unregulated. The Malaysian government leaves the resolution of most workplace abuse cases to profit-motivated labour suppliers [DOMs], who are often accused of committing abuses themselves.72

67 Ibid. 68 Quoted in the Star August 8, 2010. 69 Star July 19, 2010. 70 Ibid. 71 Quoted in the Star July 21, 2010. 72   HRW, “Help Wanted”, 4.



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Furthermore, Indonesia and Malaysia should commit to negotiating a bilateral agreement on domestic workers that contains a standard contract with provisions on their hours of work, rest days, and pay; systems for monitoring training centres and places of employment; and plans on cooperation to provide services to survivors of abuse. This agreement should also protect domestic workers’ rights to freedom of movement and freedom of association.73 Concluding Remarks Apart from undertaking domestic work as live-in servants in Malaya/ Malaysia households, Cantonese domestic servants (amah-chieh) and Indonesian maids shared some common characteristics. Both were economic migrants. While amah-chiehs financially facilitated their in-migration to Malaya and had minimal financial ties with labour brokers (sui haak), maids were tightly controlled physically and financially by DOMS on either side of the straits. Amah-chiehs relied on their sisterhood (chi mui) network and kongsi pang for employment and also as a “safety net” in times of need. Maids had little support from DOMs or from fellow maids. While the majority of amah-chiehs stayed for decades with a single household, maids were bonded by two-year contracts that in certain cases were renewed. The close rapport between amah-chieh and employer that was built over the years gradually transformed the former into a “member” of the family/household. Maids rarely were accorded such status; instead they were more susceptible to ill-treatment and abuse by employers, and the close surveillance forced them to suffer in solitary silence. Amah-chiehs belonged to a bygone era and have long left the scene. Indonesian maids are increasingly in demand consequent on the expanding middle class and female participation in the workforce. It is therefore imperative that Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta arrive at a mutually beneficial understanding and agreement on the maid issue.

73 Ibid., 7.

Women Migrant Workers and Visibility in Malaysia: The Role of Media in Society Kiranjit Kaur Introduction In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chinese and Indian migrant labour played a key role in the economic development of Southeast Asia. The migrant workers worked in the tin mines and rubber plantations to produce mineral and agricultural commodities for the international market. These workers, who were mainly men, endured harsh working conditions and were regarded as expendable commodities. Their poor working conditions were often reported in newspapers in China and India and, increasingly, in local newspapers in the colonies. By and large, migrant workers were invisible and had no voice. Migration to the region, which had virtually ceased by the 1940s resumed in the 1970s. The new migrations are no longer between British colonies but between independent nation states, and regional Southeast Asian labour migration dominates migration streams. Moreover, women now comprise a large percentage of the labour flows, and work in gender-specific roles, predominantly as domestic workers. They enjoy few labour protections and their situation has captured media attention both in the destination and source countries, as well as internationally. Malaysia is a major destination country for Indonesian migrant workers (including domestic workers) and increased media reporting of the abuse suffered by both Indonesian men and women migrants, and denial of their labour rights in Malaysia, has captured worldwide attention. International and national non-governmental organisations have also been campaigning on their behalf in the last two decades. In 2009, the Indonesian government banned Indonesian women’s migration to Malaysia. Additionally, Indonesian media reports of the abuses have also contributed to deteriorating relations between the two countries. The Malaysian media in turn have reacted by highlighting the problems faced by Malaysian employers with regard to migrant workers and criticized the role of labour brokers, or intermediaries, in the sending countries for aggravating the situation. Generally, migrant women workers have little visibility

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in the mainstream media. When observations are expressed on migrant workers, the mainstream media in the host country focus on issues of migrants’ unreliability, dishonest behaviour, and other negative images of them, while the mainstream media in the country of origin focus on discrimination issues and employer abuse. The migrant workers are not given a voice in the host country’s media. Usually, workers do not have access to the Internet, and although some have mobile phones to contact their families, a number of them are not allowed to own mobile phones. This chapter explores how the Malaysian media frames arguments and attitudes with reference to foreign domestic workers and serves its agendasetting role by providing (or not providing) the information required to address societal problems and issues relating to migrant domestic workers in the country. In doing so it provides new insights into the problems faced by these domestic workers. Two leading English-language newspapers in Malaysia were analyzed to summarize the newspapers’ ideological values and attitudes. The primary analysis of the data used framing as the main means to categorize issues relating to migrant domestic workers, whose responsibility it was to address the issue, the supporting arguments, and who is the implicit audience. Setting the Scene The international movement of large numbers of migrant workers and the various social, political and economic issues about their employment and stay in host countries: human rights, employment legislation, health, et cetera are an increasing concern of most governments. These concerns, particularly in the case of unskilled workers, often lead to difficult and fragile negotiations between host and labour-sending countries. This is particularly the case where the countries concerned have had a problematic history, as is the case of Malaysia and Indonesia. Indonesian migrants, who were hired as indentured workers, comprised the third largest migrant labour group after the Chinese and the Indians in the first half of the twentieth century. Additionally, prior to Malaysia’s independence in 1957, Indonesian labour migration was less restricted because of the similarity in religion (Islam), culture and (Malay) ethnicity. Indonesians were also able to assimilate more easily than the other Asians, whether as farmers or workers, especially in Sabah, which shares a border with Kalimantan. A large number also became settlers in Malaysia and married local women. In the second half of the century, the Malaysian



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government turned to Indonesia for labour force growth, and implemented formal recruitment policies and government-to-government agreements to recruit largely unskilled Indonesians for employment on plantations, in the construction sector and as domestic workers. History of Foreign Labour Recruitment In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the British Malayan administration facilitated the recruitment of large numbers of Chinese and Indian migrant workers for employment in mining and agricultural enterprises. These Indian and Chinese circular and temporary migrations were an important policy tool of the British since Malaya had a very small population. The migrants could easily be repatriated during economic downturns when they were no longer required. Most migrants were predominantly young, unskilled adult males who emigrated as individuals and worked under contract labour systems.1 The British also adopted a diversified recruitment policy to ensure workers were not easily assimilated or readily accepted by the local inhabitants, a policy that is not dissimilar to the current practice in Malaysia. There was some provision of limited protections for migrant workers and balanced/proportionate numbers were seen as the solution to safeguard against potential social and political conflict.2 In recent times, the Malaysian authorities have also diversified the supply of migrant workers by recruiting workers from the Philippines, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and other countries, mainly to balance the size of the Indonesian workforce. This has also ensured a stable supply of workers, especially in the case of domestic workers, since Indonesia recently banned recruitment of Indonesian domestic workers by Malaysians. Women migrant workers’ recruitment in Malaya/Malaysia is not recent. During the colonial period, while some women came mainly as associational migrants, a small percentage of South Indian women migrated for work as indentured workers in sugar plantations in the late nineteenth century and their numbers grew in the first half of the twentieth century.3

1 Amarjit Kaur, International Migration in Malaysia and Singapore since the 1880s: State Policies, Migration Trends and Governance of Migration (Armidale, 2006). 2 Amarjit Kaur, “Malaysia”, in The Encyclopedia of the Indian Diaspora, ed. Brij V. Lal (Singapore, 2006), 156–167. 3 Sinnappah Arasaratnam, Indians in Malaysia and Singapore (London, 1970); Amarjit Kaur Women Workers in Industrializing Asia: Costed, Not Valued (Basingstoke, 2004).

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The number of Indian women rose in the 1930s, as did the number of Chinese women. Since the last quarter of the twentieth century, there has been a growing demand for women migrant workers from Southeast Asian countries as well as from South Asia for employment in the domestic service sector. These women are also good remittance senders and their remittances to their home countries have been applauded by the World Bank as an essential source for the development of their communities. The Philippines and Indonesia also regard these women as national heroes. Migrant workers make up between 20 to 25 percent of the labour force in Malaysia.4 There were approximately 2.1 million documented male and female migrant workers in 2008.5 It is also estimated that there are an additional million or more undocumented migrants. In 2010, a Malaysian politician stated that for every documented foreign worker there was an undocumented foreign worker.6 Malaysia has two basic approaches in managing labour migration. First, it has signed Memoranda of Agreement (MOU) with labour sending countries for the recruitment of migrant workers. Second, it has set up a Cabinet Committee on Migrant Workers, which regulates the recruitment and employment conditions of migrant workers. Indonesian women also comprise the largest percentage of domestic workers in Malaysia. Malaysia has also received bad publicity regarding the issue of mistreatment of Indonesian domestic workers. In 2004, Human Rights Watch published a report on the poor treatment of Indonesian domestic workers in Malaysia.7 Subsequently, the government took measures to ensure protection for Indonesian domestic workers. The reason for the great increase in domestic workers is explained by the gendering of the migrant workforce. In the 1980s, Malaysia became a newly industrializing country when it was incorporated into the global economy as a producer of labour-intensive manufacturing goods. Women became the preferred labour force in the new factories and their move into the formal labour force, both in the factories, public sector and other occupations was followed by the recruitment of poorer Indonesian domestic workers to carry out their household and care-giving tasks. The 4 Kaur, International Migration in Malaysia and Singapore. 5 Presentation by the Immigration Department of Malaysia at the Bar Council Conference on “Developing a Comprehensive Policy Framework for Migrant Labour”, 18–19 February 2008, Crystal Crown Hotel, Petaling Jaya. 6 New Straits Times, July 17, 2010. Also see table 1. 7 Human Rights Watch, Help Wanted: Abuses against Migrant Female Domestic Workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, Vol. 16, 9 (C) (July 2004) 1–99. http://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/ malaysia accessed 24 July 2005.



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domestic workers are also poorly paid and public discussion about them unfortunately focuses on either social values or the lack of morality of the domestic workers. Most domestic workers are also seen as victims in the bigger migration picture. Migrant Domestic Workers in Malaysia Malaysia is a democratic industrializing nation with a multi-ethnic and multi-religious population of about 29 million. Women have played a substantial role in the evolution of the country over the past four decades from its agrarian past to a knowledge-based economy. Regrettably, however, their changing position in society is still not fully reflected in the images of women in the mainstream mass media, including images of the migrant women workers in Malaysia. The approximately 315,703 female migrant domestic workers in Malaysia are mostly from Indonesia, Cambodia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and India; they are often referred to as maids. They are defined as domestic servants under the Employment Act, 1955, and consequently do not enjoy the benefits and rights enshrined in the Employment Act and in other labour laws like the Industrial Relations Act or the Trade Union Act. The only right accorded to female migrant domestic workers is the right to claim wages through the Labour Court. Migrant workers are provided with temporary work permits giving them a marginal status; they are subject to policies and procedures that do not necessarily protect or empower them. Due to the lack of legal protection and recognition, some of the migrant domestic workers encounter physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Numerous violations, as reported in the media, include wrongful and excessive deduction of wages, deprivation of proper food and safe living conditions, not being paid wages, not being given a day off, and being forced to work long hours—sometimes seven days a week, for 16–18 hours a day. Workers are confined to the workplace where their passports are held. Some domestic workers are made to do two jobs, including working at the employer’s business workplace. Often errant employers ensure that migrant workers remain isolated and are dependent on them by cutting off communications even with their own families.8

8 A joint submission on Malaysia by members of the Migration Working Group (MWG) and the Northern Network for Migrants and Refugees ( Jaringan Utara Migrasi dan Pelarian, JUMP) for the 4th Session of the Universal Periodic Review, February 2009.

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This form of institutionalized exploitation of domestic workers has been on-going for the last three decades. Although there have been recent discussions where the government is trying to address some of these abuses (like making it a right for the workers to retain their own passports and have a day off from work in the week), there continues to be a general lack of rights and protections within the domestic work sector. The status quo tends to encourage servitude and debt bondage. Malaysia passed the Anti-trafficking in Persons Act in 2007, which began to be enforced in February 2008. However, critics argue that it has yet to fully address the whole dimension of recruitment, placement and employment of domestic workers as a form of trafficking in labour. The United States government’s status report on Trafficking in Persons has included domestic work performed by migrant labour as servitude and a form of bonded labour. Malaysia was relegated to Tier-3 status in the US State Department Report in 2007, based on its survey of efforts worldwide to combat trafficking in people. However, following concerted positive efforts by relevant Malaysian authorities, this status was upgraded to Tier 2 in early 2010.9 Foreign or migrant workers contribute to the nation’s economy by performing the “dirty, dangerous and difficult (3Ds)” jobs that the locals do not want to do anymore. In addition, the ethnicity and social class of foreign workers is more pronounced now and there is a grading of migrant workers based on their nationality. This could be a result of the way the labour markets are characterized by wage discrimination among construction, restaurant, plantation, or domestic work. Also, Memoranda of Understanding have been signed with the respective source countries. Each MOU guarantees different pay rates based on the type of work and the country of origin of the worker. For example, maids from the Philippines are paid more compared to those from Indonesia, and this probably adds to such a perception of discrimination. However, the overt and covert hostility to migrants by governments and some segments of the population in the destination countries of the workers, as well as a lack of or slow action to resolve problems the foreign workers face, is a concern of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and source countries.10 Organized recruitment of the foreign worker through bilateral labour agreements pertaining to lesser-skilled labour migration has helped

9 Star, June 15, 2010. 10 Kaur, International Migration in Malaysia and Singapore.



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to overcome some of the main problems as there are regulations to be followed, failing which employers face punishment. The Memorandum of Understanding used by government authorities to negotiate and agree on entry terms and work conditions, for example, with the Philippines and Indonesia, helps to alleviate some of these potential problems with the employers as well. In addition, the increased media reporting in 2009 and 2010—in both Malaysia and Indonesia—on the violent abuses and denial of labour rights of migrant domestic workers, coupled with regional campaigning, led many Indonesian women to spurn Malaysia as a preferred destination country. Intense negative reporting in the Indonesian press about these abuses further contributed to the existing “cool” relations that have existed between the two countries for the past four decades. The Malaysian media’s retaliation emphasizing the problems employers face with migrant workers and agents in the sending countries (especially Indonesia, which supplies the largest number of domestic workers to Malaysia) also appears to have aggravated this situation. Increased activism by non-governmental organisations and the use of citizen and social media, including blogs, online news portals and Twitter, moreover, have also contributed to greater coverage and publicity, and created greater awareness of related problems and issues. The “more state controlled” Malaysian mainstream media, unable to stay out of the debate in order to retain their audiences, also gave considerable coverage to migrant domestic workers at the height of the emotional outbreak on the subject. Framing of Migrant Workers in the Malaysian Media Having to serve a linguistically diverse public, Malaysia has a well-developed electronic and print media. In addition, most of the traditional mainstream media are affiliated to “associates” or parties of the ruling government, who have investments in the media. The media generally rely on state official sources for more serious stories, especially those related to policies and regulations. Coverage of issues is more often in the format of hard news reporting and seldom investigative in nature. The various legislation and controls on media, including the Printing Presses and Publications Act, 1948, which legislates the print media through annual licensing and the Communications and Multimedia Act, 1998, which governs commercial electronic media, also impact on the mostly “conservative” approach used in the coverage of issues in the Malaysian media.

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The Indonesian media, in comparison, is more liberal and less subject to state influence. Consequently, where the Malaysian mainstream media may tone down an inflammatory story that is likely to negatively affect bilateral relations between states, as in the case of Malaysian-Indonesian relations, the Indonesian media face no such inhibition. Several studies have focused on the persuasion role that the mass media play through their “agenda-setting power,” where the amount of coverage devoted to a particular issue can influence the importance the audience, or readers and viewers, attach to it.11 There is a general opinion that the media is not just a commodity but a process that facilitates democratization and creates cultures. As in other cases studies of minorities, there is a dearth of studies on the role of media in influencing opinions about migrant workers—documented or undocumented. One such study—a survey of the economic and non-economic (with a particular emphasis on the role played by the media) determinants of public opinion on illegal immigration carried out in 2006 in the United States found that in addition to standard labour market and welfare state considerations, media exposure was significantly correlated with public opinion on illegal immigration.12 The present article examines how the media form themes around the female migrant domestic workers and how media serve their agendasetting role by providing (or not providing) the information required to address societal problems and issues relating to migrant domestic workers in Malaysia. Ideas from cognitive science suggest that framing of news stories by the media can affect the attitudes of their audiences about a subject or segments of society. Media messages, organised and delivered through frames, have the capacity to order reality as perceived by the reader or viewer. Tankard, J. et al. defined a media frame as the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration.13 Accepting frames as constructions of a culture’s central belief system, the news media do not remain passive carriers of messages and stories; 11 Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw, “The Agenda-setting Function of Mass Media”, Public Opinion Quarterly 36 (1972): 176–187. 12 Giovanni Facchini, Anna Maria Mayda, and Riccardo Puglisi, “Illegal Immigration and Media Exposure: Evidence on Individual Attitudes”, Development Studies Working Papers, no. 285 (2009). 13 Craig A. Hayden, “Power in Media Frames: Thinking about Strategic Framing and Media System Dependency and the Events of September 11, 2001”, Global Media Journal 2, no.3 (Fall 2003).



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they determine what is important through selection, emphasis, and presentation. Gitlin argued that media frames are persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis and exclusion, by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse.14 In addition, Entman defines media framing as a process of selecting some aspect of a perceived reality and making it more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as “to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or recommendation.”15 Media frames suggest collective opinions of the society as well as provide “guideposts” to influence and implement policies.16 The way in which information is portrayed through media channels—providing diverse perspectives from different groups—contributes to public debate. However, there are the questions of how these frames are being constructed, by whom (the media or parties influencing the media), why, and with what effect. There can be constraints to the agenda for public debate, and therefore the attitudes formed about a subject, if there is a limitation of perspectives in media frames. Doing a frame analysis could suggest expected media effects of the news reports. How the story is told could structure how we view and understand the subject. Thus, interpretations of these frames by society about the domestic migrant workers could have an impact on the acceptance of the latter in a society. A qualitative frame analysis of reports in the two best established and most widely read English mainstream dailies in Malaysia in 2009 and 2010, the Star and the New Straits Times, was done to identify the common rhetoric used to frame and address the issue of domestic migrant workers. Media Coverage on Issues Related to Migrant Workers Colonial presses created favourable or negative stereotyping of migrants from India and thereby influenced perceptions, based on the type of migration stream, of the specific regions (ethnicity) in India where workers were recruited from, and the gender of the worker. The Singapore Free Press, for example, campaigned to end the recruitment of the Indian convict workers (migration stream type) by portraying them as the “dregs of

14 Ibid. 15 Robert Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm”, Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51. 16 Hayden, “Power in Media Frames”.

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the population”. Negative media images included “downtrodden coolies” as well as the “not respectable woman worker” who left for a place far from her home.17 Stories about migrant workers run in the colonial press of the early to mid-twentieth century also focused on issues similar to what is carried in today’s mainstream press. Benefits due to migrant workers, images of rowdy and criminal behaviour of the migrant workers, health issues, like malaria, were all concerns then and now. A review of the Straits Times, a highly popularly read English daily of the time, for a month in January 1930 revealed some of the following stories on migrant workers (a selected sample). The Straits Times reported these incidences under headlines of for example, “Coolies assault manager” (21 January 1930); “Gruesome find on rubber estate: Chinese found strangled and bound” with a report accusing a fellow Chinese migrant worker of the crime (24 January 1930); “Coolies pay cut: Alleged violation of labour code” (29 January 1930); “Crushed to death: terrible accident at Brick Factory” with a story on a Chinese worker who fell and was crushed between two cog wheels; the incident received a verdict of “death by misadventure” (29 January 1930); and “A haven for poor Indians, New immigration depot: Removing a blot from Singapore life” with a story on improvements to overcrowded and ill-staffed facilities housing new recruits from India waiting to be processed by immigration authorities (30 January 1930). Perceptions about migrant workers framed by the media through the stereotypes used in their coverage about these issues seem to have continued from the colonial times to post-independent Malaysia. Most news stories about the migrant workers depicted them in negative frames then, as is the continued practice today. A previous content analysis of various Malaysian newspapers by this author showed that news reports then focused on the following issues about male and female migrant workers:18 • Overcrowded facilities—the migrant workers working in especially the construction sector, live cramped together in “kongsi” or shared style

17 Marina Carter, “Indians and the Colonial Diaspora”, in Rising India and Indian Communities in East Asia, ed. K. Kesavapani, A. Mani, and P. Ramasamy (Singapore, 2008), 12–26. 18 Kiranjit Kaur, “Images of Migrant Workers in Malaysian Newspapers”, Paper presented at the workshop on “Current Issues and Problems of Trans-national Migration in Malaysia: A Multi-disciplinary Perspective” at IKMAS, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, November 14, 2007.



•

•

• •

•

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accommodation, which is often temporary wooden long houses with few and questionable amenities. Breaches of basic standards of hygiene—the water supply in these kongsis is questionable, and the location of the accommodation is sometimes on-site, which may pose danger to the workers. The sanitation facilities in these areas can be questionable. Female domestic workers are also not always given proper rooms to sleep in. Sometimes they sleep on a mat in the kitchen. Diet and health care—seldom do employers arrange for the supply of workers’ meals and since payment to workers is sometimes irregular, workers have to skimp on their meals and survive on non-nutritious meals such as instant noodles, like Maggie Mee. Often medical treatment is self-administered by the workers. Taking out medical insurance for male and female migrant workers is not a norm, although government authorities are in the process of making this compulsory for employers in several sectors, including for domestic workers.19 Ill-treatment and punishment—stories of domestic workers seeking assistance from neighbours or attempting suicide because of abuse by their employers also sometimes appear in the press. Immigration depots failing to meet international standards and lack of effective redress for the workers—there have been on-going discussions on this between NGOs and the government, with the former seeking stricter legislation and stronger enforcement of existing legislation upon employers and greater protection for the workers. Female domestic workers—the feminization of migrant labour is an important factor. In the last three decades, female workers migrated independently for work purposes to Malaysia and other host countries in large numbers. There are approximately 320,000 domestic helpers in the country.20 Malaysian agencies recruit about 60,000 Indonesian domestic workers annually. Indonesians make up about 90 percent of the domestic workers. In fact, the large number of domestic helpers and abuses faced by as well as committed by these domestic helpers led the Government to conduct a study on the impact of foreign maids on families.21 Unlike the situation of the male counterpart, little has been

19 Malaysiakini, May 25, 2007, in Kiranjit Kaur, “Images of Migrant Workers in Malaysian Newspapers”. 20 Star Online, July, 2 2007, in Kiranjit Kaur, “Images of Migrant Workers in Malaysian Newspapers”. 21 Ibid.

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done to strengthen legislation to protect the female migrant workers who primarily work in the domestic sphere. • Abandonment of workers at point of entry—newly recruited workers, who have paid for permits to work in Malaysia, were sometimes left abandoned upon arrival at the airport holding rooms for days by their prospective employers, with no arrangements made for food and other amenities. The airport authorities instead have had to make arrangements for their care while waiting for the employers to pick up their workers.22 • RELA members or People’s Volunteer Corps23—in their efforts to roundup undocumented workers, whose numbers have grown over the years, the authorities recruited and deployed RELA members, who were civilians with little training, to conduct raids and arrest undocumented migrant workers, or workers without legitimate papers. This led to an outcry by NGOs who discovered that some RELA members abused their powers and were also untrained to do the job asked of them. There was a public outcry to disband RELA after stories about their abuses were carried in the newspapers. Instead the authorities promised to provide training and guidelines and continued to use these bands to help them with their work. In addition, there were reports that senior immigration officers were under investigation by the anti-corruption agency for irregularities in the issuing of work pass extensions for migrant workers.24 These reports contributed to the perception of the abuse in the system of recruitment of the migrant workers and the inadequate protection given to them. There was a call by several authorities and groups for reducing the number of male and female migrant workers, including domestic workers by 2009.25 The plan was to cut the workforce to 1.8 million by 2009 and to 1.5 million by 2015, which would still leave a substantially sized foreign workforce in the country, albeit with controls upon growth. However, in 2010 recruitment

22 New Straits Times, October 26, 2007a, in Kiranjit Kaur, “Images of Migrant Workers in Malaysian Newspapers”. 23 RELA members are made up of residents in specific residential areas who assist to maintain peace and stability in that area. 24 New Straits Times, July 12, 2008; and in Star, July 12, 2008, in Kiranjit Kaur, “Images of Migrant Workers in Malaysian Newspapers”. 25  Sunday Star, January 20, 2008; and in New Straits Times, August 7, 2008, in Kiranjit Kaur, “Images of Migrant Workers in Malaysian Newspapers”.



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70 60 50 40 30 20 10

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Figure 1. Issues associated with migrant workers in Malaysian newspapers, 1 June– 15 July 2007

had to be reviewed by the different sectors, as there was still a demand for the workers in manufacturing. These main issues that appeared in the print media are summarized in Figure 1. Although the relevant authorities have made several attempts to regulate absorption of migrants into the labour force, the issues discussed in earlier research continue to persist and need to be addressed to ensure the protection of migrant workers and their employers. The then minister-in-charge, Dr Fong Chan Onn, was quoted in the New Straits Times as saying that “there is a need to correct the negative image that working conditions in Malaysia are deplorable for foreign workers.”26 The large migrant workforce in the country and the numerous issues associated with them are of concern to the Malaysian public and the government authorities. As pointed out by Amarjit Kaur,27 Malaysia has become the largest labour-importing country of migrant workers in Southeast Asia. There have been continuous efforts made by NGOs, especially

26 New Straits Times, October 26, 2007, in Kiranjit Kaur, “Images of Migrant Workers in Malaysian Newspapers”. 27 Amarjit Kaur, “Migration Matters in the Asia-Pacific Region: Immigration Frameworks, Knowledge Workers and National Policies”, in UNESCO International Journal of Multicultural Societies (IJMS), special issue (2007).

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Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Voice of the Malaysian People) or SUARAM28 and Tenaganita,29 as well as relevant government agencies, to address issues related to the working conditions of migrant workers that have been covered by the Malaysian press. The news coverage in the Malaysian and international press continues to add to public concern that along with the benefits of foreign labour exist the negative aspects of their presence in the country, including inadequate legislation on the recruitment and management of migrant workers. News Frames of Migrant Domestic Workers A more recent qualitative analysis of news frames in the selected two dailies, New Straits Times and the Star in 2009 and 2010, suggests that the issues regarding the documented and undocumented migrant workers generally have remained the same as those identified in the 2007 study by this author. In addition, tensions between Malaysia and Indonesia were exaggerated by the media in both countries as a result of reports on the abuses faced by these migrant workers. The Indonesian domestic worker, in particular, attracted considerable controversy—so much so there was a freeze placed by Indonesia on sending maids to Malaysia. The inadequate labour legislation to protect domestic workers exposes them to considerable risks of exploitation and discrimination. News media in both Indonesia and Malaysia have had a field day reporting on this. The Indonesian media condemned particularly the abuse of their female domestic workers by Malaysian employers, while the Malaysian media tried to take the middle path in reporting the abuse by and of these workers with balancing reports on government efforts to control employment procedures and better manage migrant workers. This section focuses on an examination of news frames in Malaysian newspapers identified for Indonesian female domestic workers. Broadly, the news frames include: (1) the female domestic worker or maid, and 28 This is a non-governmental human rights organization. SUARAM published a report on Undocumented Migrants and Refugees in Malaysia: Raids, Detention and Discrimination, no. 489/2 (Kuala Lumpur, 2008). 29 An NGO that undertakes research, advocacy and action to prevent, solve and address grave abuses towards migrants and refugees. Tenaganita published a paper on “Servant or Worker?”, in the Report on National Consultation on Foreign Domestic Workers in Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, 2002).



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her work ethics; (2) Criminal activities and health problems of the maid; (3) The employer’s treatment of the maid; (4) rogue recruitment agencies; (5) government guidelines, policies and legislation; (6) MalaysiaIndonesia bilateral relations; and (7) Malaysians’ perceptions of migrant workers, including maids. Table 1 provides a list of selected headlines of stories related to the Indonesian and other domestic migrant workers that were examined for their frames and that appeared in the New Straits Times and the Star between January 2009 and July 2010. Table 1. Newspaper article headlines from the New Straits Times and the Star newspapers pertaining to stories on migrant domestic workers in Malaysia, January 2009 to July 2010 (selected) Headline of news story Indonesia to seek RM800 salary for maids RM800 wages for maids way too high Community-based childcare the answer Trafficked women too afraid to tell the truth Alien nation Maid found beaten, tied and starved Abused Indonesian maid dies of injuries Home Ministry action to fight maid abuse Indonesians protest against death of maid On the right track to solve our maid woes Friendly visits’ to check on maids’ welfare Employers cry foul over plan for house-to-house maid checks Abuser caught on video CCTV recording shows 54 of 146 maids at embassy sent home Cops nab 173 for human trafficking this year Maid caught on CCTV abusing baby boy

Newspaper

Publication date

New Straits Times

5 September 2009

New Sunday Times

6 September 2009

New Sunday Times

13 September 2009

New Straits Times

27 September 2009

Star New Straits Times

19 October 2009 21 October 2009

New Straits Times

27 October 2009

New Straits Times

28 October 2009

New Straits Times

29 October 2009

New Straits Times

16 November 2009

Sunday Star

21 November 2009

Sunday Star

21 November 2009

New Straits Times

28 November 2009

New Straits Times

3 December 2009

Star

31 December 2009

Star

1 January 2010

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Table 1 (cont.) Headline of news story Merry maids Merge to be strong, maid groups urged Action against employers who abuse work permits Teen maid admits to theft Muntik said her employer did it Maid gets 15 years for killing boss New charge for underage maid Hiring of Indonesian maids to resume soon Talk to bring in maids from Mindanao Dept to probe into reports on sex slaves Allow refugees to take up jobs 13 foreign women held in karaoke raid Better ties with maids On course to resolution of maid issues Maid course Only kin allowed for maid course Why maids don’t measure up Interim deal on Indonesian maids in 6 weeks Mother guilty of maid abuse Under radar’ maids Maid deal soon Allow employers to hold maids’ passports Jakarta looks into lifting ban Bosses say they’re the victims Woman jailed 8 years for abusing maid Public invited to give on maid issue in Papa survey We need to clean up policies maids Special passes for maids of rich foreign tourists

Newspaper

Publication date

Star Star

4 January 2010 4 January 2010

Star

6 January 2010

Star New Straits Times New Straits Times

14 January 2010 20 January 2010 20 January 2010

New Straits Times New Straits Times

28 January 2010 1 February 2010

Sunday Star

7 February 2010

New Straits Times

10 February 2010

New Straits Times New Sunday Times

10 February 2010 21 February 2010

New Straits Times New Straits Times

22 February 2010 22 February 2010

New Straits Times Star Sunday Star New Straits Times

22 February 2010 24 February 2010 28 March 2010 5 May 2010

New Straits Times Star Star New Straits Times

15 May 2010 17 May 2010 19 May 2010 19 May 2010

Star New Straits Times New Straits Times

20 May 2010 20 May 2010 21 May 2010

Star

22 May 2010

New Straits Times

22 May 2010

New Straits Times

27 May 2010



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Table 1 (cont.) Headline of news story Jakarta may lift maid ban soon Jailed-teen maid who murdered her boss Maid on why she dumped baby Protecting workers No decision on amnesty for illegal aliens Justice for maid 55 ways to security Tearful reunion as runaway maids return Eight Filipino women rescued from nightclub

Newspaper

Publication date

New Straits Times Star

21 June 2010 26 June 2010

New Straits Times New Straits Times New Straits Times

3 July 2010 10 July 2010 17 July 2010

New Straits Times New Straits Times New Straits Times

20 July 2010 21 July 2010 23 July 2010

Sunday Star

27 July 2010

Source: Collated by Kiranjit Kaur.

The following were common news frames about issues related to the domestic worker that appeared in the newspapers. • The female domestic worker, or maid, and her work ethics There was a mix of news stories on reports by the employers about both the ability of the maid to work hard as well as the “lazy and untrained” Indonesian maid. Some maids were portrayed as being rough with their charges, especially the young, old and feeble. Headlines ran with stories such as, “Abuser caught on video: CCTV recording shows Indonesian maid beating the toddler.”30 • Criminal activities and health problems of the maid Stories about crimes committed by maids also appeared to be given some prominence. These, though newsworthy and important, could have been better counter balanced with more stories about contributions by maids in general to avoid a common negative perception of the Indonesian maid. Some of these negative reports featured, for example, the Indonesian maid who dumped her own newly born baby,31 or the runaway maids, thieving maids, and/or maids with health problems. 30 “Abuser caught on video: CCTV recording shows Indonesian maid beating the toddler”, in Star, November 28, 2009. 31  New Straits Times, July 3, 2010. See table 1.

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• The employer’s treatment of the maid There was mixed treatment in the press about the employers of maids with reports of those who abused the maids by making them work in multiple places, providing poor living conditions, overworking them by making them work long hours, and not paying them wages. However, there were counterbalancing reports or letters published in the media from employers on their providing maids with education and training as well as treating them as a member of the family. The report on how an employer beat, tied, and starved his Indonesian maid, named Mantik, until she died received much coverage in both the Malaysian and Indonesian media, and was one of the catalysts to the mounting tensions between the two countries leading to protests outside the Malaysian embassy in Jakarta.32 The death sentence imposed by Malaysian courts on the former employer of the deceased maid eased some of the tension in Indonesia. • Rogue recruitment agencies The few stories reported about recruitment agencies were generally negative. The frames carried reports about how they cheated the workers by promising them certain jobs but forced them to work in jobs other than what was promised to them in their respective countries.33 They also cheated employers by not providing them with workers who measured up. • Government guidelines, policies and legislation on foreign workers Reports on government involvement with migrant workers have generally covered efforts by the relevant authorities—like the immigration department and police—to manage and control the workers. Reports have also focused on the state’s efforts to reduce the recruitment of migrant workers, and stem the entry of illegal immigrants and those who overstay. The government formed a high level special cabinet committee on foreign workers followed by a task force headed by the human resources minister himself (Foreign Workers Management Laboratory Initiative) to manage what is seen to be a serious problem. This was a result of the intense negative publicity in the Indonesian media upon the poor treatment of their workers in Malaysia, and which had raised tensions between the people of both countries.34 32 New Straits Times, October 27, 2009. See table 1. 33 New Straits Times, July 26, 2010. 34 New Straits Times, March 30, 2010.



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Generally, tighter legislation on employers was instituted to monitor the foreign workers they bring in. Respect, protection and punishment under the respective country’s laws are prioritized.35 There were also frames on the intense negotiation involved between the two countries to resolve the payment structure of the maids. In addition, a course called “Seminar and Dialogue for Foreign Maids” was to be made compulsory for employers and representatives from recruitment agencies. These are some of the steps taken by the government to show their efforts to improve the employer-maid working relationship.36 Guidelines were also prepared by the police to look into reports on physical and sexual abuse, as well as for “missing” maids. The general framing of legislation issues revolve around the increased efforts to curb problems related to the migrant female workers, especially those from Indonesia.37 • Malaysia-Indonesia bilateral relations The extensive negative media publicity given to the poor treatment of the Indonesian migrant workers in Malaysia by the Indonesian media raised tension in the bilateral relations between the two states.38 Though the respective governments denied any decline in bilateral relations, the media and people took matters into their own hands and reduced the cordial relations between the people of the two nations. The Malaysian media reported on the negative stories carried in the Indonesian press, as well attacks by some Indonesians on Malaysian students studying in Indonesian universities. The Malaysian media generally played down these stories in their reports; however, they were available on the internet, online news portals and blogs. Frames of positive reports on mending relationships were used by the press when covering visits made by both state leaders to each other’s country, as well as bilateral discussions by other leading politicians on agreements to resolve labour related issues regarding wages, protection and benefits for the Indonesian domestic and other migrant workers.

35 New Straits Times, November 16, 2009. See table 1. 36 Star, February 22, 2010. See table 1. 37 New Straits Times, February 22, 2010. See table 1. 38 New Straits Times, November 16, 2009. See table 1.

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• Malaysians’ perceptions of migrant workers, including maids News reports and letters to the editor in the Malaysian media indicated a declining sympathetic attitude to migrant workers as they criticized the problem of illegal migration of workers, who were seen to be taking away jobs from locals by being willing to work for lower wages, contributing to an increased crime rate in the country, and threatening the culture, health (by bringing diseases) and general welfare of the locals. In addition, the migrant domestic worker was blamed for stealing husbands or children of employers through romantic entanglements.39 They were also presented in news reports to be involved in violent crimes like the murder of their employers or family members, poisoning the employers, or kidnapping the employer’s children. Reports involving statistics on crime rates in the country often include and emphasize those committed by migrant workers.40 Nevertheless, Malaysian media reports generally included stories about the victimization and abuse by and of the Malaysian employer and the foreign employee. The style of reporting that is inclined towards mistrust and scepticism pertaining to media disparagement of the migrant worker, however, has aggravated some of these tensions. Moreover, the importance of frames lies not just in the stories that are told but also the stories that are not told and thus visibility is denied to the group. Lack of media analysis on more substantive issues such as low wages, the personal freedom of the migrant domestic workers, as well as the slave-like conditions in some cases of migrant workers, have not helped the situation. The persistent trend of an increasing need for migrant workers and the issue of the migration of mostly illegal Indonesian labour to Malaysia continue to be a source of friction in Malaysia-Indonesia relations. Protests by Indonesian media, the public, and a few Indonesian politicians in response to Malaysian laws against illegal foreign workers have led to increased tensions, threatening to plunge bilateral relations into a downward spiral of animosity once again. Tensions have also been somewhat exaggerated by the media and certain politicians in Malaysia on the increasing problem of illegal Indonesian migrant workers.

39 Sunday Star, July 27, 2010. See table 1. 40 Star, October 19, 2009. See table 1.



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Conclusions The construction of images in the media needs to focus on strategic framing of issues that could have a more positive bearing on bilateral relations. In the case of Malaysia, senior news editors met with their Indonesian counterparts in an attempt to reduce inflammatory reporting on issues that could have consequences for bilateral relations. The Malaysian Press Institute, comprising senior members from the mainstream print media, arranged these dialogues with their counterparts in the Indonesian media. The mainstream media continues to be a force to be reckoned with in our lives despite the rising popularity of the online and social media. It continues to have positive and negative influence on how society reacts to different groups of people (such as migrant workers, whether documented or undocumented) through the framing of news for societal consumption. Koesoemawiria illustrates how ethnic or community media in countries such as Thailand and Hong Kong provide migrant workers with visibility and a voice.41 However, in Malaysia there is heavy dependency on the mainstream media to provide similar visibility due to the lack of ethnic and community media. Malaysia depends heavily on migrant labour, which plays a crucial role in the country’s rapid economic growth. Migrant workers, irrespective of their job levels or status, need to be protected by labour laws. The government recognizes this and has developed and is revising relevant policies and guidelines but more needs to be done to monitor conditions and ensure they are adhered to by employers, agents, and all concerned parties. The media, in recognizing the processes of globalization and the contributions of migrant workers to the development of the nation’s economy, need to use more ethical approaches in framing news stories. Generally, migrant workers are regularly presented in the media, through their representation in relation to crime issues, as a threat to the security of Malaysian residents. While the newspaper stories reviewed here are not unduly critical of domestic migrant workers, there is still a need for them to highlight the plight of the workers and give them a voice. The media frames the average person’s perception about the migrant worker. Sensitized media can play

41 Edith Koesoemawiria, “Indonesian Diaspora and Minority Media: Mirroring Me Daily”, in Media on the Move—Part 2: Media and Minorities and Diversity (2008). http:// www.cameco.org/files/mediaonthemove-koesoemawiria, retrieved July 1, 2010.

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their agenda-setting role to promote public understanding and respect for migrant workers in Malaysia. The media also need to play a more active role in highlighting the problems of the underpaid and more vulnerable migrant labour by framing their stories and using images appropriately in order to influence appropriate action by relevant agencies, and lessen the abuse of these workers. By being more sensitive about the news frames used in the reporting on the domestic migrant workers, the media can contribute towards reducing tensions between countries and thus promote better bilateral ties.

PART SIX

ADJUSTING FAMILY LIFE/GLOBALIZING CAREWORK AND HOUSEHOLDING

Rethinking the “Left-Behind” in Chinese Migrations: A Case of Liberating Wives in 1950s South China* Shelly Chan Introduction Historical scholarship on Chinese migrations has commonly focused on those who moved, rather than those who stayed. Studying Chinese overseas, scholars have emphasized their contributions to host societies and ties with the homeland, and delineated patterns of sojourning and settlement over time (Wang 1981, Wickberg 1982, Yen 1986, Pan 1990, Chan 1990). Overall, these studies have tended to treat migrants as the central actors and rarely engaged the experiences of family members living in China. The homeland has appeared to be a recipient of change brought by emigration or otherwise largely static. Since men formed the majority of Chinese migrants from the nineteenth century until the second half of the twentieth century, the habitual focus on movement has also privileged male experiences for initiating change and struggle. Women living in the home villages have been marginalized as the “left behind,” seemingly passive and immobile.1 Studies on female migrants, such as those who were students and workers, have provided an important corrective to the skewed focus on men (Topley 1975, Ye 2001, Kaur 2006). Nonetheless, it remains essential to ask: how would migration look from the position of resident women who inhabited the transnational circuits no less than emigrant men? By better integrating the histories of those who went away and others who stayed behind, how would it change our understanding of Chinese migrations?

* This essay results from my dissertation research that had been funded by the University of California Pacific Rim Research Program and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I am grateful to the editors for their helpful comments, as well as Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig for their constant support while I was formulating earlier versions of the work. 1 For exceptions, see Yuen-Fong Woon, The Excluded Wife (Montreal, 1998) and Madeline Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, 2000).

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Drawing on Chinese government archives, this chapter seeks to answer these questions by examining how “wives of the overseas Chinese” in the emigrant south, officially known as qiaofu, became state targets of liberation in the 1950s. Shortly after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, one of the immediate agendas of the new Communist regime was to abolish what it considered as the “feudal” patriarchal family system that had been victimizing women. The result was the 1950 Marriage Law, under which not only could marriages be dissolved through divorce, husband and wife were stipulated as “companions living together,” a basic unit of labour to build socialism. This redefinition of marriage posed a problem particularly to south China, where one-fifth of the population in Guangdong province alone—about 6.4 million people—belonged to a transnational household.2 Convinced that all qiaofu were oppressed, adulterous and dependent on remittances—see below for a detailed discussion—the Party initially encouraged them to divorce their husbands abroad. But by the mid-1950s, overwhelmed by the repercussions of upset husbands on overseas Chinese support and remittances, the Party-state ironically reversed its position by reconfiguring itself as the guardian of transnational marriages. By stressing the place of the left-behind in Chinese migration studies, I am not arguing for a Sino-centric framework that supplants localized and diverse studies of Chinese overseas. Rather, I propose to explore how the homeland actively shaped transnational experiences in the context of changing national and global phenomena.3 Given that migrant men were frequently away for years or even decades and remittances could fluctuate, the flexible and steady labour of qiaofu was crucial to the survival of a transnational household. However, as the Communist Party-state propagated new visions of marriage and family in the 1950s, the transnational household headed by qiaofu hardly conformed to the ideals of the socialist subject and union that laboured and produced locally. Suppressing the

2 Transnational households comprised over 7 million “overseas Chinese” (huaqiao) living abroad and an additional 6.4 million “overseas Chinese family dependents” (qiaojuan) and “returned overseas Chinese” (guiqiao) domestically. See Yi Meihou, “Guangdongsheng gedi qiaolian gongzuo gaikuang”, in Zhonghua quanguo guiguo huaqiao lianhe hui chengli dahui tekan (October 1956), 50; Glen D. Peterson, “Socialist China and the Huaqiao: The Transition to Socialism in the Overseas Chinese Areas of Rural Guangdong, 1949–1956”, Modern China 14, no. 3, 311. 3 Adam McKeown has argued cogently for a global approach to migration studies. See McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900– 1936 (Chicago, 2001), 4–24.



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transnational family, nonetheless, risked alienating men living overseas. The figure of the qiaofu thus embodied the ambivalence between migrant practices and socialist constructions in the 1950s. Like their Chinese counterparts in Southeast Asia and North America whom political agitators charged as inassimilable and potentially disloyal in those societies, the left-behind women in China were demanded to reform themselves for the nation.4 Official Images of the Left-behind Wife (Qiaofu) In February 1953, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Committee of Guangdong Province ordered investigations into marriages in emigrant counties in which women were left behind. Here is one case reported by local officials in Dinghai county: Pan Lüsu, 30 years old. Her social background is street hawker. Her husband has been [overseas] for more than ten years. She longed for her husband so much that she became mentally ill. She killed her daughter by pushing her into the river and drowning her. Later, she engaged in adultery and gave birth to a girl . . . Every day when she ate her meal, she always placed a portrait of her husband on the dining table, talked to his image, and offered it food. However, the masses said that her husband had already married another woman in [Southeast Asia].5

This dramatic account about Pan Lüsu—long separation from husband, mental illness, killing of her own child, adultery, childbirth out of wedlock, overseas bigamy of husband—exemplified all that the Communists found cruel and problematic about “overseas Chinese marriages.” To the Party, transnational marriages were not only oppressive of women like other forms of traditional marriage, the separation of couples caused women to become virtual widows, adulterous and dependent on their husbands abroad. Party cadres promoting the 1950 Marriage Law declared that qiaofu should be free to pursue happiness through ending loveless marriages with absent men. Besides, under Chapter 3 of the new law, husband and wife were to be “companions living together,” “bound to live in 4 For an example of the political charges against Chinese overseas in the 1950s, see Robert S. Elegant, The Dragon’s Seed: Peking and the Overseas Chinese (New York, 1959). For analysis, Charles Coppel, Indonesian Chinese in Crisis (Kuala Lumpur, 1983) and Daniel Chirot and Anthony Reid, eds, Essential Outsiders: Chinese and Jews in the Modern Transformation of Southeast Asia and Central Europe (Seattle and London, 1997). 5 Guangdong Provincial Archives (hereafter GDPA), 237-1-3 (1953).

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harmony, to engage in productive work, to care for their children, and to strive jointly for the welfare of the family and for the building up of the new society.”6 Harmonious and productive families were thus the primary goal of marriage. Nonetheless, the transnational family was configured differently to compensate for the separation of family members. Marriage functioned as an aggressive strategy of the left-behind, oftentimes a mother, to bond with an emigrant son. Filial obligations demanded that a son marry a woman of his parents’ choice to continue the family line and incorporate the productive labour of a young daughter-in-law. Although he might have been absent for years or have formed a secondary family abroad, the wife arranged by his parents and progeny (adopted or natural) existed as his primary household, allowing the ancestral family to claim financial support. In return for supporting his ancestral family, the son was entitled to the benefits of retirement and property inheritance in the home village, even if his return was permanently deferred. His principal wife also enjoyed a higher formal status than that of any secondary wives living with her husband overseas. Seen in this light, the resident wife of an emigrant man was not so much “left behind” or “alone” as having been actively recruited by his family members to ensure the continuity of the patriline. Imagining a universally victimized figure of qiaofu, the 1950 Marriage Law did not address any of the complex gender and generational dynamics in the transnational family described above. Rather, Party cadres determined to eradicate “feudal” practices assumed that qiaofu awaited rescue. Taken together, the 1953 investigations, in which the experience of Pan Lüsu was documented, portrayed qiaofu with three dominant images, all of which emphasized the distinctive backwardness of transnational marriages. The Oppressed Qiaofu The prolonged separation between husband and wife was the most studied and criticized aspect of transnational marriages in the 1953 reports, which suggested that couples often did not see each other for years or even decades. Emphasizing the effects of separation on the wives at home, the 6 M.J. Meijer, Marriage Law and Policy in the Chinese People’s Republic (Hong Kong, 1971), 77–78. See also Meijer, 300–301, Appendix VIII, “The Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China”, Chapter III. Rights and Duties of Husband and Wife.



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reports uniformly portrayed qiaofu as sad and abandoned figures. Attracting the most attention were the “wives longing for their men,” women who became married to men after their departure and hence never knew their husbands. Although their actual number was small or otherwise unspecified, these “longing wives” provided powerful evidence that transnational marriages were a distinctly unreasonable type of union. Seeing qiaofu as oppressed, officials were also dismayed that some acquiesced to a life of widowhood: Wen Zheng, 33 years old, was married at 18 years old. Her husband went to Thailand 15 years ago and never returned. Now he is dead. Wen wants to remain as a widow. In her family, there have already been three generations of widows—she herself, her mother-in-law, and her mother-in-law’s mother-in-law. It was because all of their husbands went overseas, forcing them to endure living widowhood [when their husbands lived overseas] and dead widowhood [after their husbands died].7

This account of three successive generations of women married to absent and dead men evoked images of woeful widows from a pre-modern era, implying that transnational marriage was backward. Rendering widowhood, voluntary or not, as cruel and wasteful, investigators told that transnational marriage left older qiaofu regretful of their vanished youth and younger qiaofu unaccompanied and neglected. The Adulterous Qiaofu The second dominant image of qiaofu had to do with adultery. Officials found that because qiaofu and their overseas husbands did not live and labour together as promoted under the Marriage Law, there were little prospects for them to develop “affection” for each other. The result was a common problem of “incorrect love affairs” driven by unfulfilling marriages, referring to female adultery. One case was reported by officials: Xu [?] mei, 30 years old. Her husband Chen Mingzhao . . . works in Thailand as a labourer. Xu gave birth to three children . . . In June 1952, Xu had sexual relations with “poor peasant” Chen Sixing (24 years old) and is now eight months pregnant. She was very distressed and wanted to kill herself. But she did not want to abandon her children and also feared getting punished for the crime. So she wrote to a female comrade to confess. Now the comrade

7 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953).

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Terrified of humiliation and punishment over their affairs, qiaofu in examples of adultery appeared as hapless figures. To the officials, the more problematic cases involved women who had secret affairs but continued to spend their husbands’ money or even share it with their lovers, attracting village gossip. One of these cases was recorded vividly in the reports: Overseas Chinese Labourer Fang Menxin, sixty-some years old, married a wife surnamed Huang. She is 38 years old. After getting married, Fang went to Canada and Huang often had sexual relations with other men. She had abortions six to seven times. After Liberation, she fell in love with hired labourer Fang [?] and became pregnant again. She was going to have an abortion and was criticized by her neighbours. She gave birth to a baby this year. But Fang [her husband] has kept sending her money. Her neighbours asked if Huang has decided who to marry. She said, “I agree to marry both. I want money from the one overseas. I want the company of the one here.”9

Because qiaofu like Huang desired both a comfortable life and a love life, officials wrote that they were indecisive about leaving their present marriages. Nevertheless, these cases also suggest that some qiaofu were far from passive victims who possessed little desires and much less means to fulfil them. Adulterous husbands, who had affairs and families overseas, were rarely discussed. It is obvious that the state could not do anything about these husbands, since they were not in residence. The Dependent Qiaofu Mildly critical of adulterous qiaofu, cadres were nevertheless highly contemptuous of their perceived economic dependence and avoidance of physical labour. Assuming that qiaofu were completely reliant on their husbands overseas for support, cadres pointed out that some qiaofu suffered greatly when remittances fell short or stopped: Zheng Zhihua’s husband lives in Malaya. They have a son and a daughter. The son died last year. The daughter is only nine years old. The husband used to send remittances home every year. But since May last year, [Zheng Zhihua] has not received a letter or remittance. It has been causing great hardship to the livelihood of mother and daughter.10

8 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953). 9 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953). 10 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953).



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Zheng and women like her suffered bad consequences, cadres pointed out, because they had been unaccustomed to productive labour. Many others feared that divorce would bring about a permanent loss of economic support, so most were unable to make a clean break with their husbands, said the cadres. Having just decided to end their marriages, some women wanted their divorces nullified after receiving new funds from their husbands abroad. In the villages of Bao’an County, when some women expressed hope that their husbands would take them abroad, this attitude was immediately criticized by the cadres as a sign of “desiring an easy and comfortable life.”11 This suggests that seeking a family reunion abroad was politically unacceptable and regarded simply as “avoiding labour.” The Role of Qiaofu in the Transnational Household The portrayals of qiaofu as oppressed, adulterous and dependent suggest that Party cadres were critical of the transnational family for maintaining spousal separation and female sloth. In fact, a closer examination of the 1953 reports suggests that qiaofu performed a wide range of functions in the household, making divorce a complex negotiation for the woman and families involved. In households where remittances were meagre or non-existent, qiaofu were commonly the ones working for income inside or outside the home. As the official data collected from eight overseas Chinese localities suggest, women who reported few or no remittances from abroad ranged from 6 to 33 percent, averaging a significant 18 percent of all interviewed.12 In one township in Dinghai County, cadres reported that “besides relying on remittance as income, [resident families of overseas Chinese] also worked as tile makers and did other sideline activities.” They even said, “The standard of living in an overseas Chinese household was usually higher than that of others” because qiaofu could often bring in extra income.13 Scattered throughout in the reports, but largely unexamined, these pieces of information suggest that qiaofu played a far more substantial role in the family than that acknowledged by the investigators. 11  GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953). 12 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953). Although scholarship focusing on the prewar period stresses the high collective volume of remittances to China (Hicks 1993), local records in 1950s Guangdong suggest the role of local economic activities among transnational families and that not every family enjoyed a stable income from remittances at all times. 13 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953).

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The range of functions performed by qiaofu could be further gleaned from the cases that officials used to illustrate general apathy to the Marriage Law. In these cases, women managed family investments and properties, worked in factories, did sewing at home, cared for young children, or were supported by other family members. Some cases of adultery also pointed to the fact that women participated in market activities, ran businesses, and hired farming labour for the household. To compensate for the absence of their husbands, qiaofu brought in male labour to work the farm land or worked for income outside the home, both of which brought them into direct contact with other men.14 The important role of qiaofu in labour and production thus illustrated challenges to the dominant portrayal that emigrant men provided the sole income and labour in the household while resident wives indulged in leisure and comfort. Although it was unusual, the mother-in-law could sometimes be an ally of the qiaofu who committed adultery, because her valued role in production found favour with the mother-in-law: Fu Guiying, 30 years old (married at 18). Her husband has been overseas for 8 years. Last year, she and a youth Yang Qingshan (22 years old) had an incorrect love affair. She later became pregnant and had an abortion during the eighth month of the pregnancy. Her husband overseas heard about it and wrote home last year saying that he did not want her anymore and told her to go back to her mother’s house. That youth [with whom she had an affair] also did not want her. But her labour production was very good. Her mother-in-law was very fond of her . . . Right now, she is still living in her husband’s house.15

This unusual arrangement suggested that older qiaofu sometimes wielded a great deal of power in the transnational household because of the absence of men. Despite her son’s protest of Fu Guiying’s alleged sexual immorality, the mother-in-law let Fu Guiying stay in the house because she liked her and needed her contribution to production. Besides being already supported by their own labour power and that of daughters-in-law, some women did not desire any change to their marriages because a divorce could bring other forms of instability to their lives. Some feared that they would lose their current rights to land and abode. Others sought to improve their lives by focusing their energies on raising their young children and earning a living, instead of trying to fix

14 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953). 15 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953).



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their marriages. Given that all divorcees were expected to remarry and pick a local husband, some women decided that their age and marital backgrounds narrowed the prospects of finding a desirable marriage partner, making divorce less than appealing.16 All these examples suggest that the decision whether to pursue a divorce was a complex negotiation for many women in the transnational family. Far from simply being immobilized by feudal oppression, qiaofu were motivated by active considerations about their current lives. They were also expected to shoulder a greater amount of work and responsibility to compensate for the absence of men and shortfall of remittances, the latter situation a more common one than officials had recognized. Conflicts Provoked by the Marriage Law Campaign Although the investigators treated qiaofu as uniformly reluctant to get divorced, many wound up taking advantage of the Marriage Law, causing the state to identify a different problem. By 1955, transnational families accounted for over 20 percent of all marriage disputes in Guangdong province, a figure roughly proportional to the population of transnational households. Over 90 percent of these divorces were brought by qiaofu against their husbands overseas.17 This rate was consistent with the fact that women were the vast majority of plaintiffs in divorce cases throughout the nation. But such a rate was also one of the highest, compared to 75 percent in Shanghai, 77 percent in thirty-two cities and thirty four counties across China, and 92 per cent in Shanxi province (Johnson 1985: 118). These unexpected developments caused serious conflicts in Guangdong. Some mothers-in-law desperately tried to stop the departure of their daughters-in-law by threatening to kill themselves. Others formed groups to badmouth divorce-seekers as immoral people who would come to no good end. Overseas Chinese men were also upset about the divorces. Interestingly, their resentment was often directed at the officials. In one township of Dinghai County, some husbands sent angry letters from abroad demanding to know if their wives had been “three togethered,” charging that the socialist slogan for Party cadres and the masses to “eat together, live together, labour together” was a pretext for sleeping together, causing overseas men to be cuckolded. To guard their own 16 GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953). 17 GDPA, 250-1-8 (1957).

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interests, some men began to send less money home, which then upset their wives. Consequently, these wives became resentful of any woman who had affairs or sought divorce, and were often involved in isolating and verbally attacking them.18 Party officials did not have a unified approach to these disputes. Some believed that qiaofu should consider remarrying local men or help bring their overseas husbands home. Other officials tried to persuade qiaofu to drop their petitions for divorce altogether. These officials explained to qiaofu that their overseas husbands were historical victims driven out of China by feudal landlords, then the Nationalist rule in the 1920s and 1930s, and also Japanese invasion of China from 1937 to 1945. Here, it was not qiaofu, but overseas Chinese men whose experiences of oppression should be heard. As the PRC had been fighting the Korean War against the United States in 1950–53, some officials began to educate qiaofu who wanted a divorce because their remittances had stopped, that their resentment toward their husbands had been misdirected. Instead, the true culprit was American imperialism. Pointing out that American imperialism was destined to meet its doom, officials told qiaofu that, “The day when the world returns to the people, the husbands will come back.”19 Calling on the women then to be diligent and patient until the end of the anti-imperialist struggle, officials aligned their marital happiness with national interests, an approach that would become the official line by the mid-1950s. Preserving the Transnational Family, 1955–1957 By the mid-1950s, widespread discontent about the new right of qiaofu to divorce their overseas husbands had forced the PRC state to control what became increasingly seen as a runaway problem in emigrant south China. In particular, state officials grew concerned about the “excessive use” of the Marriage Law by qiaofu.20 This shift was indicative of a broader reinterpretation of the Marriage Law by the state as a medium for family harmony, a development happening nationally. In the case of transnationally connected south China, the Party-state was not simply aiming to

18  GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953). 19  GDPA, 237-1-3 (1953). 20 GDPA, 250-1-8 (1957).



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build family harmony, but also became quite concerned that it could lose the support and remittances of displeased overseas Chinese men. From the beginning of the PRC in 1949, the Communist government targeted overseas Chinese in numerous overseas broadcasts of propaganda in order to compete with the Nationalist government that had fled to Taiwan but still threatened to retake the mainland. Following the late Qing and Nationalist governments before them, the Communists tried to incorporate overseas Chinese as essential and loyal members of the nation and project the image of a strong and protective motherland of Chinese abroad (Godley 1981, Kuhn 2008, Peterson 2011). During the Korean War (1950–1953), the Party’s appeal for overseas Chinese allegiances was accompanied by fear that overseas Chinese who maintained substantial ties with communities in south China could collaborate with the enemies, such as a Western power or the Nationalist government in Taiwan.21 Therefore, the Party-state regarded the support of overseas Chinese as crucial to political stability. After the completion of the land reform in 1953, the PRC state also viewed overseas Chinese remittances as an important target of mobilization because of their potential role in restoring local order and funding national production. The international situation during and after the Korean War, which brought the trade embargo of the U.S. and full onset of the Cold War, also made the PRC increasingly isolated economically. Remittances provided a key source of foreign exchange in Hong Kong or American dollars, which the government could then use to pay for imports to invest in agriculture and industrialization. Therefore, apart from implementing the Marriage Law to abolish the feudal patriarchal family, the competing agenda of raising national production by the mid-1950s had forced the government to move toward strengthening the bond with the overseas Chinese. One of the important channels was through preserving, not attacking, transnational marriages. Reforming Court Proceedings Given the political and economic ramifications of qiaofu divorces, state officials began to emphasize a new concern for the neglected needs of 21 For example, He Xiangning, “Yi jiu wu ling nian xinnian dui huaqiao de guanbo ci,” January 1, 1950. For other overseas broadcasts, See He Xiangning, Shuang qing wenji, vol. 2 (Beijing, 1985).

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overseas Chinese men. The first set of central guidelines came in 1954, which laid out the basic principle that any court ruling about overseas Chinese marriage and family must “take care of the overseas Chinese, as well as take care as appropriate of the demands of [qiaofu].”22 In an official handbook that provided information on government policies to overseas Chinese in 1956, the principle was changed to “First take care of the overseas Chinese. Then take care as appropriate of the demands of [qiaofu]. Strive to maintain the marriage and family of overseas Chinese.”23 Under this new set of guidelines, the “care” of overseas Chinese received preferential treatment over that of qiaofu. The legal leverage of qiaofu, who had been the centre of attention in the 1953 reports, was drastically reduced. This could be seen through measures initiated by the Higher People’s Court of Guangdong Province. In 1957, it issued a new set of guidelines emphasizing mediation, persuasion and education in the adjudication of overseas Chinese marital disputes. These directives were sent to the lower courts, which the Higher Court severely criticized for being “sloppy” and “irresponsible” for neglecting the legal rights of overseas Chinese and overemphasizing those of the qiaofu. According to the Higher Court, some lower courts rarely bothered to consult the concerned overseas Chinese husband in the proceedings, causing some to know about the divorce only after it was granted. Furthermore, some courts failed to keep detailed records of trial minutes or issue formal notices of adjudication. Periods for the submission of written defences and appeals varied wildly. Because the qiaofu was the only party in attendance, some judges conducted divorce trials behind closed doors without a jury. To make things worse, court correspondence mailed to overseas Chinese frequently appeared in illegible handwriting and on poor quality paper, for which official stamps and appeal information were frequently missing, words badly chosen, and tone condemnatory toward the overseas Chinese recipient. All these inappropriate occurrences “affected the correctness and solemnity of the adjudication,” it was suggested in a report by the Guangdong People’s Higher Court in 1957, “making it extremely easy to provoke overseas Chinese discontent and enemy attacks.”24

22 GDPA, 250-1-8 (1957). 23 Beijing guiguo huaqiao lianyihui ed., Guanyu qiaowu zhengce ji qita ruogan wenti de dafu (May 1956). 24 GDPA, 250-1-8 (1957).



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The new guidelines strived to uphold the basic principle that “whenever possible the marriages and families of overseas Chinese should be maintained as the material foundation of the bond between overseas Chinese and the ancestral nation.” There were two objectives. First, there were efforts to standardize divorce proceedings related to overseas Chinese marriages. The local court was instructed to conduct a thorough investigation upon receiving a petition and decide whether the plaintiff had a legitimate reason to file a divorce. If not, the petition should be dismissed. If there was a legitimate reason, the court should contact the overseas Chinese defendant and ask his opinion. A reply from the overseas Chinese must be received or a year must have had elapsed before the court should proceed with the trial.25 In other words, it would take longer for qiaofu to get a divorce. Second, the new guidelines sought to tighten the rules of adjudication. In cases where the scarcity or lack of remittances was the cause of dispute, the court should persuade the qiaofu experiencing financial difficulties to stay in the marriage. If the overseas Chinese agreed to send more remittances, the court should then dismiss the divorce petition of the qiaofu. Alternatively, it could contact related government departments to offer financial aid to the qiaofu in need.26 In other words, it became harder for a qiaofu to get divorced simply because her husband had not been sending any or enough remittances to support her. As for cases of bigamy and adultery, if the overseas Chinese who was sued for divorce because of bigamy said that he would leave the other wife, the court should then persuade the qiaofu to withdraw the petition. In cases of overseas Chinese who sued for divorce because qiaofu committed adultery, the court should go ahead and approve it. However, if the qiaofu applied for divorce because of her adultery, the court should deny the application.27 In other words, women were to accept bigamous husbands who were willing to correct themselves. But women who wanted to leave a marriage after committing adultery might not be able to do so, unless their husbands agreed. This double standard became official policy, which was especially ironic for a state that had professed to promote free choice in marriage and gender equality.

25 GDPA, 250-1-8 (1957). 26 GDPA, 250-1-8 (1957). 27 GDPA, 250-1-8 (1957).

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As for property settlements, a qiaofu was entitled to property that she possessed prior to marriage, received from the land reform, or obtained through labouring in the overseas Chinese family. All other property belonging to the overseas Chinese, including his house, should be allocated back to the overseas Chinese. However, it was unclear how the assessment of the contribution of a qiaofu to the family income was worked out in reality. Some court cases suggest that assumptions that overseas Chinese men were the sole and primary income earners of the household, while qiaofu did not do any work contributing to wealth, would sometimes work to the disadvantage of qiaofu. In some cases, they were persuaded to drop their claims for property and accept a reduced amount of alimony. As for child custody, if the overseas Chinese insisted on raising children resulted from the marriage and such an arrangement “would not cause any harm to the children,” the court would persuade qiaofu to transfer them to the care of the domestic kin of the overseas Chinese. This meant that the ties of overseas Chinese men to their offspring in China were preserved at the expense of qiaofu. What did all these changes mean in reality? Officials in Wenchang County reported one case involving Li Yue’e, who ran away from home and applied for divorce. Her husband, Wang Jingbin, had been living in Southeast Asia for nineteen years and rarely sent any letters and remittances home. The relationship between Li and her mother-in-law was poor. The court then made several attempts to “educate her about family values, spousal relations and the pros and cons [of staying in or leaving the marriage].” Consequently, “her basic attitude improved,” but “family unity was still poor and Li was still anxious.” To resolve the conflict completely, officials said that the court helped her conduct a family meeting, during which “everyone brought up the issues, analysed them, and distinguished between right and wrong.” Later, officials wrote to Wang to say that his wife had returned home to work eagerly after receiving education from the court. Relations between mother-in-law and daughter-inlaw improved. But the economic situation at home was still difficult, so officials asked Wang to send some money to help support the family. After receiving the letter, Wang sent home four consecutive remittances in two months. Because of that, Li came to the court to express her gratitude.28

28 GDPA, 250-1-8 (1957).



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In this example that officials called a success, they appeared as the guardian of transnational marriages, providing marriage counselling and reminding overseas Chinese of their obligations to the family. Their accounts describe the restoration of harmony to the family, removing the conflicts that had been harming production for the building of socialism. This reflected the new official position that as long as the overseas Chinese fulfilled the traditional duty of supporting the family in the home village, there was little reason that their wives should need a divorce. Conclusion Although Party cadres implementing the Marriage Law in 1953 first portrayed qiaofu as oppressed figures, the Party-state soon withdrew its commitment to liberating them from transnational marriages. The desire for overseas Chinese support for the new Chinese state, as well as the focus on building productive families to raise national production, eventually caused marriage reform to backfire. It led state officials to downplay conflicts between qiaofu and overseas Chinese that they had helped instigate at the beginning. The sources used in this essay do not tell us how local courts administered the central directives and how individual qiaofu responded to the new restrictions. However, the sources do suggest how the Party-state viewed transnational families in the mid-1950s. In attempting to balance conflicting objectives, the Party-state ultimately aligned with the patriarchal family that it had attempted to abolish, echoing its traditional demands for duty from emigrant sons and resident wives. It even went on to demand that all transnational marriages must be kept intact in the interest of the nation. In the end, as many nation-building goals in the 1950s relied on family stability, the Party-state chose to keep transnational families together, even when it meant that the attack on the oppression of women had to be toned down. Finally, the conflicts discussed in this essay suggest an important point about the history of Chinese migrations. It is that the unexpected changes facing the left-behind were central to transnational experiences in the 1950s. Far from being immobile and passive, qiaofu adapted creatively to the challenges of male absence and aggressively pursued welfare of the self and household, defying expectations under the conjugal family model. They did so in a changing political environment of the 1950s, during which they concretized the promise and threat of transnational practices to the

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new socialist order. “Mobile” in practice and meaning despite a fixed location, the left-behind was a key site to examine the ambivalences about migration provoked by conflicting state agendas. Their stories offer us a more complete picture of transnational lives in the 1950s.

Marriage Migration: Love in Brokered Marriages in Contemporary Japan* Tomoko Nakamatsu Introduction The question of marriage migration has attracted considerable interest in recent years.1 Studies point to an intricate link between gender, globalization, and an individual’s mobility. The increased mobility of women in the global economy exposes the ways in which they have been configured around paid or unpaid, reproductive work. Domestic work and care work are characteristic examples of the contemporary gendered migration. Marriage migration adds to this list. Studies reveal complex relationships between marriage and migration, and between marriage migration and labour or other processes of migration. Globalization influences how one meets or desires a potential spouse, creating multiple ways where romance, marriage, and migration intersect. Such intersections, as Constable argues, are shaped and limited by local and global gendered power relations, compounded with cultural, social, historical, political, and economic factors.2 Marriage migration is a process that opens up, changes, or limits life opportunities of individuals who undertake it. It can influence those receiving a migrant spouse and those left behind; it may also

* Part of this article is reprinted with permission from, “No Love, No Happy Ending?: The Place of Romantic Love in the Marriage Business and Brokered Cross-Cultural Marriages”, in Elli K. Heikkilä and Brenda S.A. Yeoh eds., International Marriages in the Time of Globalization (New York, 2011), 19–33, Copyright © 2011 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. 1 See, for example, Nicola Piper and Mina Roces, eds., Wife or Worker?: Asian Women and Migration (Lanham, 2003); Nicole Constable, ed., Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia (Philadelphia, 2005); Barbara Waldis and Reginald Byron, eds., Migration and Marriage: Heterogamy and Homogamy in a Changing World (Berlin, 2006); Rajni Palriwala and Patricia Uberoi, eds., Marriage, Migration and Gender (New Delhi, 2008); Hong-Zen Wang and Hsin-Huang M. Hsiao, eds., Cross-Border Marriages with Asian Characteristic (Taipei, 2009); Wen-Shan Yang and Melody Chia-Wen Lu, eds., Asian Cross-border Marriage Migration: Demographic Patterns and Social Issues (Amsterdam, 2010). 2 Nicole Constable, “Introduction: Cross-Border Marriages, Gendered Mobility, and Global Hypergamy”, in Nicole Constable, ed., Cross-Border Marriages, 3–10.

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have consequences for local gender norms, practices, and expectations surrounding marriage and the family. The most recognizable term for marriage migrants is “mail-order brides”, which encapsulates the perception of marriage migration in the 1980s and onward: instant marriages of Asian, often Filipina, women to men in Western nations such as Australia or the United States. The common public view in the host societies is that such marriage migrants are docile yet calculating3—in line with the existing stereotypes of Asian women current in society such as in the United States4—and that their western husbands are socially inadequate.5 While the catchy term exposes the element of commercialization in marriage by correspondence, it reinforces an economic reductionist view that at times conflates the marriage business with trafficking in women, and positions the migrant women as trafficked victims.6 This oversimplification denies any room for the possibility that the women’s socioeconomic backgrounds or marriage migration experiences are diverse, and makes it difficult to develop an understanding of the multifaceted effects of globalization on gender. The flow of marriage migration within Asia has gained momentum over the last twenty or thirty years. Overwhelmingly, women migrate, from China, Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia to the more affluent South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. The general direction of the flow is similar to that of labour migration, and the two are often interlinked: labour migration may facilitate marriages; and tightening or easing of regulations on labour migration may increase or decrease marriage migration. Multiple issues have been identified in the area of marriage migration: unfavourable situations in the host country, socio-economic status, paid work opportunities, legal citizenship, racism, marital or familial issues, divorce, and cases of domestic violence. Studies have also found various ways in which migrant women express or draw human agency from various sources in negotiating personal and social spaces such as networking at their destination, and the effects of their marriage migration on the families they leave behind.7 3 Fadzilah M. Cooke, “Australian-Filipino Marriages in the 1980s: The Myth and the Reality”, Research Paper No.37, Centre for the Study of Australian-Asian Relations, Griffith University, 1986, 2–3. 4 Nicole Constable, Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and “Mail-Order” Marriages (Berkeley, 2003), 13. 5 Cooke, “Australian-Filipino Marriages”, 3. 6 Constable, Romance on a Global Stage, 63–90. 7 See for example: Danièle Bélanger and Tran Giang Linh, “The Impact of Transnational Migration on Gender and Marriage in Sending Communities of Vietnam”, Current Sociology



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The growing transnational marriage business has had an impact on the increase in intra-Asian marriages. It explicitly reveals the way in which the globalized business capitalizes on changing local demographics, gender relations, and regional economic stratifications. The commodification of marriage, or its packaging with migration, although problematic, has an appeal to women and men. How can we better articulate women’s marriage-migration experiences in brokered marriages? This chapter attempts to locate the place of love in the marriage business and in transnational marriages, focusing on Japan. It first looks at mediated marriages in the wider context of marriage migration, then discusses how romantic love works to provide context in the marketing of international marriages in Japan. The final section traces how love, or its absence, is narrated by female migrants when they recount their marriage and migration experiences. The chapter makes the point that romantic love matters in brokered marriage: its potential is central to the rhetoric of selling introduction services, and, more importantly, it affects women migrants when they attempt to define their transnational marriage migration experiences and rebuild personal, familial, and social identities in Japan. The question of love may be of secondary or no importance to marriage migrants in different positions. Attention to the place of love in brokered cross-border marriages, however, helps to articulate the nexus of gender, mobility, the economy, and human agency. Marriage Migration and the Transnational Marriage Business in Asia The concept of marriage migration encompasses any transnational migration resulting from an intra- or inter-ethnic marriage. War has facilitated marriage migration, as in the case of Korean or Japanese women marrying American or Australian servicemen. Labour has been a contributing factor for some Filipinas, who have become domestic or care workers in Canada8 or entertainers in bars in Japan.9 As Piper and Roces note, a dichotomy along the line of labour or marriage migration does not work 59 (2011), 59–77, accessed August 5, 2011, doi: 10.1177/0011392110385970; Tomoko Nakamatsu, “Complex Power and Diverse Responses: Transnational Marriage Migration and Women’s Agency”, in Lyn Parker, ed., The Agency of Women in Asia (Singapore, 2005), 158–81. 8 Deirdre McKey, “Filipinas in Canada—De-skilling as a Push Toward Marriage”, in Piper and Roces, eds., Wife or Worker?, 25–7. 9 Nobue Suzuki, “Inside the Home: Power and Negotiation in Filipina-Japanese Marriages”, Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33 (2004): 484.

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in articulating the process of migration as the two are often interlinked.10 As marriages may take place between foreign workers and local men, marriage migrants subsequently enter the local labour force. The prospect of both employment and marriage may be inseparably linked in women’s decisions to move. However, transitions from worker to wife are limited by social, cultural, and political factors: Lu reports that cases of female foreign domestic workers marrying local men is rare in Taiwan, as the men cannot conceive of a maid as a desirable wife;11 and state intervention is evident in Singapore where unskilled labour migrants are prohibited from marrying Singaporean citizens or permanent residents while working in the country.12 Marriages through introduction, whether by brokers or relatives, whether via correspondence or technology (i.e. Internet) have contributed to the numbers of marriage migration.13 In the past twenty or thirty years, the matchmaking business has intensified in Asia alongside regional economic integrations, taking advantage of differing economic powers in

10 Nicola Piper and Mina Roces, “Introduction: Marriage and Migration in an Age of Globalization”, in Piper and Roces eds., Wife or Worker?, 1–2. Men too become marriage migrants, as illustrated by the story of a Bangladeshi man whose residential status changed from a tourist to a student, an over-stayer, and then to a spouse of a Japanese national. See Sam Shahed and Chie Sekiguchi, Zairy tokubetsu Kyoka: Ajiakei Gaikokujin to no Ōbāsutei Kokusai Kekkon [Special permission for residence: international marriage with an Asian over-stayer] (Tokyo, 1992), 44. 11  Melody Chia-wen Lu, “Commercially Arranged Marriage Migration: Case Studies of Cross-border Marriages in Taiwan”, in Palriwala and Uberoi, eds., Marriage, Migration and Gender, 131. 12 Noor Abdul Rahman, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Shirlena Huang, “ ‘Dignity Overdue’: Transnational Domestic Workers in Singapore”, in Shirlena Huang, Brenda S.A. Yeoh, and Noor Abdul Rahman eds., Asian Women as Transnational Domestic Workers (Singapore, 2005), 238. 13 History shows cases of mediated marriage migration: Japanese, Korean, and Chinese women in the early twentieth century migrated to the United States for family reunification without having met their husbands (Hye-Kyung Lee, “Cross-Border Marriages between Korean Men and Migrant Women and Their Marital Satisfaction”, in Wang and Hsiao, eds., Cross-Border Marriages with Asian Characteristics, 62); and Japan’s “brides for continent”, a scheme to arrange marriages for Japanese women with Japanese farmer settlers in what was then Manchuria, utilized marriage in the systematic expansion of its colonial power (Isamu Imagawa, Gendai Kekkon Kō: Kokusaku Kekkon kara Kokusai Kekkon e [On marriage today: from marriage for national strategy to international marriage] [Tokyo, 1990], 73–116). Although this chapter discusses women’s marriage migration, today’s kin marriages between Pakistan and Britain involve Pakistani national husbands migrating to Britain. This poses an interesting question on the nexus between masculinity and marriage migration (Katharine Charsley, “Vulnerable Brides and Transnational Ghar Damads: Gender, Risk, and ‘Adjustment’ among Pakistani Marriage Migrants to Britain”, in Palriwala and Uberoi, eds., Marriage, Migration and Gender, 269–81).



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the region and changing local gender orders. Demographic trends show emerging patterns of international marriage (hereafter IM) in East and South East Asia. Jones and Shen estimate that in 2005, IM as a proportion of all marriages was 32 percent in Taiwan, 17 percent in Singapore, 14 percent in South Korea, 5 percent in Japan, 4 percent in the Philippines, 3 percent in Vietnam and 0.1 percent in China.14 A good proportion of these marriages involved a foreign spouse of the same ethnic group: this accounted for 22 percent in Taiwan, 10 percent in Singapore and 7 percent in South Korea. In Hong Kong, marriages between a Hong Kong man and Mainland woman rose more than 11 times between 1995 and 2005.15 In Taiwan, the 2003 figures show that 92 per cent of IM were between a Taiwanese husband and foreign wife. Two thirds of the women were from China; Vietnamese women made up much of the remainder.16 In South Korea, IM increased from 600 to 31,180 between 1990 and 2005.17 Women make up 90 percent of foreign spouses on the alien register in that period, including ethnic Koreans of Chinese nationality (40.2 percent) followed by Chinese national Han-Chinese (21.4 percent) and Vietnamese (13.9 percent).18 In Japan, while the scale is much smaller than in these countries, numbers of marriages between a Japanese husband and foreign wife have increased around eight times between 1980 and 2006. 19 In 2006, female spouses were predominantly of Chinese nationality, followed by Filipina, and Korean nationals. Evidence suggests that Chinese nationals include ethnic Koreans from China. Mediated marriages contribute to these general patterns. In the course of globalizing marriage introductions, locally available and familiar forms of arranged marriage or introduction are modified and globalized by marriage agents. In Taiwan, the cultural practices of determining bride money

14 Gavin Jones and Hsiu-hua Shen, “International Marriage in East and Southeast Asia: Trends and Research Emphases”, Citizenship Studies 12 (2008), 13, accessed August 5, 2011, doi:10.1080/13621020701794091. 15 Zhongdong (John) Ma, Ge Lin, and Frank Zhang, “Examining Cross-border Marriage in Hong Kong: 1998–2005”, in Yang and Lu, eds., Asian Cross-border Marriage Migration, 87. 16 Jones and Shen, “International Marriage”, 10. 17 Lee, “Cross-Border Marriages”, 64. 18 Ibid., 68. 19 “Heisei 8–nen Jinkōdōtai (kakutei sū) no Gaikyō” [Overview of the 1996 vital statistics (final figures)], Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, accessed August 5, 2011, http:// www1.mhlw.go.jp/houdou/0910/h1013-1e.html#HYO2; “Heisei 18–nendo “Kon’in ni kansuru Tōkei” no Gaikyō [Overview of the 2006 marital statistics], Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, accessed August 5, 2011, http://www.mhlw.go.jp/toukei/saikin/hw/jinkou/ tokusyu/konin06/index.html.

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and dowry, traditionally negotiated by families with the assistance of a matchmaker, are now standardized by marriage agents.20 In Japan, internationally operating agencies adapt the matchmaking practice known as miai that is used by the domestic introduction industry and operate within the existing network of domestic marriage agencies.21 Intermediaries form complex transnational business networks. In Japan, the emergence of the IM business is linked to business expansion by small-scale players to other regions in Asia, particularly in industries such as tourism, entertainment, trade in products, education, and food.22 Taiwan’s large-scale capital investment in Vietnam started in the early 1990s with the involvement of small- and medium-sized firms, and coincided with the rise of the marriage business between the two countries.23 Although the international matchmaking business is banned in the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and Taiwan, the multiple, haphazard networks of intermediaries can circumvent such control. The business is legal in Japan, and it is common for Japanese marriage agencies to stress that their overseas connections are not commercial brokers, and are therefore safe and reliable.24 Government policies can play a role in shaping or legitimizing the marriage business. In South Korea, the establishment of diplomatic ties with China in 1992 opened a gate to the outflow of ethnic Koreans from China to Korea in the early 1990s. In 1999, the Korean government repealed a special business permit requirement that had been imposed on marriage agencies; subsequently, the volume of matchmaking activities and diversification in the nationalities of brides increased.25 In both South Korea26 and Japan,27 rural local governments became involved in marriage arrangements for their male residents. For Japanese rural policy makers, addressing depopulation was a vote-winning strategy, tapping into an existing paternalistic view that regarded matchmaking for the unmarried as social welfare; this was extended to transnational marriage 20 Lu, “Commercially Arranged”, 140–42. 21  Tomoko Nakamatsu, “Global and Local Logics: Japan’s Matchmaking Industry and Marriage Agencies”, in Wang and Hsiao, eds., Cross-Border Marriages, 193. 22 Nakamatsu, “Global and Local Logics”, 198–200. 23 Hong-Zen Wang and Hus-Ming Chang, “The Commodification of International Marriages: Cross-Border Marriage Business in Taiwan and Viet Nam”, in Wang and Hsiao, eds., Cross-Border Marriages, 213–15. 24 Nakamatsu, “Global and Local Logics”, 203. 25 Lee, “Cross-Border Marriages”, 66. 26 Ibid., 64. 27 Nakamatsu, “Global and Local Logics”, 196.



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arrangements without much consideration for the impact it might have on the migrating women or the receiving families.28 State immigration policies also affected the course of the marriage business. The Japanese policy of increasing numbers of overseas students provided opportunities for marriage agencies to have Chinese female students as clients. In South Korea, restrictions on labour migration contributed to cases of Korean-Chinese women with certain economic resources faking their marriages with South Korean men.29 The Korean government has increasingly strengthened sanctions against fraudulent agencies’ activities, which Kim warns has caused a serious problem for women migrants: they lose their grounds for residency if the agent they used is found guilty of illegal conduct; if these women have denounced their Chinese nationality, they become stateless.30 While the term “mail-order bride” reveals the way the West interprets “instant marriages”, much sensationalized voyeuristic media coverage of “Asian women” in Japan has played an equally harmful role in victimizing foreign wives.31 In Taiwan, the public outcry over the marriage industry, which linked it to trafficking in women, led to a ban on matchmaking activities in 2007.32 Brokers are under greater scrutiny in the three main receiving countries now than they were twenty years ago. Transnational matchmaking has an impact on the sending country. Bèlanger and Tran estimate that roughly 110,000 Vietnamese women have married Taiwanese men and about 25,000 have married Korean men over the past decade.33 They argue that in the province where most of these women originated, their emigration, and the remittances they send back, have raised their status at home and consequently the status of young women in general; although these women’s bargaining power is often undermined in the host country.34

28 Ibid., 195. 29 Hyun Mee Kim, “What are ‘Fake’ and ‘Real’ Marriages?: The Experiences of KoreanChinese Marriage Migrants in Contemporary Korea”, in Elli K. Heikkilä and Brenda S.A. Yeoh, eds., International Marriages in the Time of Globalization (New York, 2011), 2–3. 30 Kim, “What are ‘Fake’ ”, 5; 12–6. 31  Tomoko Nakamatsu, “Faces of ‘Asian Brides’: Gender, Race, and Class in the Representations of Immigrant Women in Japan”, Women’s Studies International Forum 28 (2005), 411–14. 32 Hong-Zen Wang and Hsin-Huang M. Hsiao, “Gender, Family, and State in East Asian Cross-Border Marriages”, in Wang and Hsiao, eds., Cross-Border Marriages, 8. 33 Bélanger and Tran, “The Impact of Transnational Migration”, 60. 34 Ibid., 73–4.

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Trends in the marriage business, and by implication in marriage migration in East and South East Asia, confirm that the migration flow is highly gendered and interwoven with the economic order. In some cases, state policies and proximity of ethnicity influenced the patterns of the flow. A growing level of “demographic integration”35 in the region is gendered, and this may create a “global marital and reproductive chain”36 within Asia as an effect of gender relations in the region: men’s continuing pressure or desire to marry, and women’s willingness to take the risks of marriage and migration. Representations of Romantic Love in Brokered Marriages in Japan Mediated cross-border marriage transgresses the normative mode of marriage in many contemporary societies. A common understanding situates it in the economic domain, sometimes linking it to trafficking in women. Public discourse in Japan has been largely silent about affection or love in such marriages: idioms of the political economy have dominated the discourse. The focus, on one hand, has been on poverty: of the women, of their families, and of their Third World nations; and on the other, on rural problems such as the backward gender relations.37 These portrayals accentuate the traditional notion of “arranged”, evoking images of obligation, calculation, and collective decision—where there is no place for love. History reveals that marriage by introduction became normalized in Japan during the modernization period, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This shift coincided with a ban on premarital sexual interaction by the government, and also with a differentiation in wealth among farmers, brought about by the lifting of restrictions on the sale of agricultural land.38 Around the late 1960s, romantic love as an element in finding a marriage partner became popular. This coincided with the intensification of capitalism, the weakening of the agricultural sector, 35 Hiroshi Kojima, “Family Formation Behaviors of Couples in International Marriages: A Comparative Analysis of Japan and Taiwan”, in Wang and Hsiao, eds., Cross-Border Marriages, 109. 36 Bèlanger and Tran, “The Impact of Transnational Migration”, 74. 37 Nakamatsu, “Faces of ‘Asian Brides’ ”, 411–14. 38 Chizuko Ueno, “ ‘Ren’ai Kekkon’ no Tanjō [The birth of romantic love marriage]”, in Tokyo Daigaku Kōkai Kōza 60: Kekkon [Tokyo university public lecture 60: Marriage] (Tokyo, 1995), 67–8.



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and the rise of individualism. Its popularity was firmly established by the late 1980s.39 One outcome of the normalization of marriage based on romantic love was that it encouraged the growth of a new type of marriage introduction business: the promotion of romantic encounters. Large-scale computerized introduction businesses boomed in the 1970s and 1980s, while small agencies began forming industry associations; both offered “meetings” with the prospect of nurturing romantic love. “Introduction” and “romantic love” were increasingly conflated in marriage agencies’ discourses of happy marriage, but, here, love was defined by the compatibility of ramified preferences largely described by the language of the political economy. This conflation is not limited to the field of matchmaking; for example, Ogura writes about the calculation, concealed during a chance meeting, which young people today employ when falling in love with a view to marriage.40 Romance is an attractive component of mate selection in the market economy, where distinctions between romantic love and introduction, love and the economy, and the private and the public are increasingly blurring. Such conflation is not extended to public views of transnational brokered marriages, although marriage agents exploit it in their rhetoric to sell matchmaking. Romantic love provides context in the marketing of international marriages. Advertisements that depict the bride in a white wedding dress and the groom in a suit cutting into a wedding cake, or the groom enfolding his wife, convey the image of romantic moments. “Love story” is the label one agency uses to describe its collection of such wedding photos of Chinese brides and Japanese grooms.41 This agency advertises its services: “Finding a person you love, understanding that person and then going through life together—that we believe is most important”.42 Other agencies’ advertisements promise, “earnest international romance”,43 or “everyone can realize the legend of romance and happiness”.44

39 Yasuko Minoura, “Kekkon—Hikaku Bunka Kō [Marriage: cross-cultural reflections]”, in Tokyo Daigaku Kōkai Kōza 60: Kekkon [Tokyo university public lecture 60: Marriage] (Tokyo, 1995), 33–4. 40 Chikako Ogura, Kekkon no Jōken [The terms of marriage], (Tokyo, 2003), 27–9. 41   Kokusai Kekkon 113th Aobadō Website, accessed May 20, 2008, http://www.aova.net. 42 Ibid. 43 Buraidaru Infomēshon PINOY Website, accessed May 20, 2008, http://www.pinoy-jo .com.index.html. 44 Chūgoku Kokusai Kekkon Densetsu Website, accessed May 20, 2008, http://www .den-setsu.com/towa.html.

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Autonomous personal choice is an important ingredient for romance. Some agencies offer web-miai (introductions), where the clients are able to see and talk to each other with the help of an interpreter and computer technology before going overseas for a miai-tour, or trip for introductions. This option gives the impression that matchmaking services are similar to non-brokered Internet dating, where a face-to-face meeting usually occurs only with the mutual agreement of both parties. In marketing rhetoric, the process of introduction is made to resemble love marriages, a mixture of choice and of spontaneously falling in love. The employment of romance allows a place for human agency by offering individuals, at least discursively, the power to make choices in mediated marriages. Yet romance in this discursive construction does not solely mean free and unrestrained. The context of romance coexists with pragmatic wording such as “secure”. Security is a response to the bad reputation of the brokering industry in general, for failing to arrange a meeting with the person of preference, ensure the arrival of a bride, or prevent the disappearance of a bride soon after her arrival. The agencies claim the “quality” of prospective brides. The quality here is not only the truthfulness of the agencies’ claims about the women’s backgrounds, but also upon the female clients’ commitment to marriage. The image of security is enhanced by a detailed enumeration of charges for various services, part of the attempt to re-position the image of an industry that has come under scrutiny since the introduction of a regulation in 2004 prescribing a written contract, a cooling-off period, and a cap on withdrawal fees for both domestic and international agencies.45 In some instances, romantic representation is accompanied by overt marketplace expressions such as “a price cut” in an introduction tour.46 References to transactional aspects work to translate international romance-marriage into reality, making it look achievable. If romantic love is embedded in the rhetoric of selling international marriages, the main visible theme is happiness and a happy home. The link between marriage and happiness is paramount in the international marriage business. The message is clear: marriage equals happiness and non-marriage means misery. Agencies’ advertisements stress their high 45 “Zōkasuru ‘Kekkon Aite Shōkai Sābisu’ no Toraburu—Chūto Kaiyaku ga Dekiru­ yōninatte mo Kaiyakuryō ni wa Fuman” [Claims against the marriage introduction services on increase: midterm cancellation now possible but with dissatisfactory fees], National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan, accessed June 1, 2008, http://www.kokusen.go.jp/news/ data/n-20041203_1.html. 46 Buraidaru Infomēshon PINOY Website, accessed May 20, 2008, http://www.pinoy-jp .com/index.html.



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success rates and argue that men’s needs for marriage and happiness are satisfiable: “International marriage is not difficult. But you need our support to seize a happy married life”.47 One agency brochure tickles men’s desire for contentment and subtly provokes their vulnerability in being single: “A meeting. A sparkling meeting with a lovely partner—the happiest moment in your life that will make your dream come true. A joyful happy home created by the two. Grab happiness with your own hands. Seize a chance for a wonderful meeting, and depart to a bright tomorrow”.48 It is not uncommon for agents to start their businesses after they themselves marry foreign-born wives. The matchmaking business requires small capital if overseas connections are available. One agent’s website tells of the happiness he has found since marrying a Chinese woman; he says that he set up the company because he wants others to be happy like him.49 Narratives such as these kindle a desire for marriage happiness and a happy home, and highlight the apparent shortcomings of single life. International marriage is projected as a way out of incompleteness to happiness. The business at large targets males with some disadvantages in the field of domestic marriage. Advertisements are often directed at men in their 40s and above, farmers, and those who live with their parents. Disabled people are also a target of some companies.50 Marriage equates familial contentment, according to the advertisements, offering the socially disadvantaged male a full-fledged manhood with ordinary happiness where he, like other men, can be a husband and a father. While the ideology and reality of the transnational marriage business is more oppressive to women than men, it is essential to recognize the male vulnerabilities that agents exploit. Marriage is entwined with the idea of happiness in the wider society, and the same message echoes here but in a stronger voice, in the absence of firm, visible, romantic love. With romance as context, a happy home as the main theme, and security as the foundation, the matchmaking industry anchors its rhetoric of introductions in both the economic and the romantic realms.

47 Nagoyadō Website, accessed May 20, 2008, http://web.ole.net/china. 48 I.C.A. Kokusai Kōryūkai brochure, n.d. 49 Chūgoku Kokusai Kekkon Densetsu. 50 Buraidaru Infomēshon PINOY.

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In my study, love in marriage was found to matter to many women whose marriages were brokered and who, in some cases, paid fees for the arrangement.51 Available discourses on the notion of marriage influenced the women’s expectations of an ideal marital life that included love and material comfort. Intimate feelings towards the husband, which promised emotional fulfillment, were part of “a better life” they hoped to attain in their marriage migration. When this ideal marriage became unachievable, marrying without love and/or having a loveless marriage confronted many of the women. The questions I posed in my interviews did not include an enquiry into whether or not the respondent loved her husband; but the subject of love was brought up in the course of the discussions, which indicates both its relevance to the individuals and the power that the discourse of romantic love had on these women. The nature of each mediated marriage surfaced when the women expressed unhappiness with their relationships with their husbands. For instance, Il-Mi, a 32-year-old South Korean, summarized her dissatisfaction: “I don’t feel enjoyment because I came here without loving him.” Her unhappiness stemmed from her initial frustration over economic matters, especially the handling of her husband’s salary by his mother. In the predominantly agricultural region where II-Mi lived, a young couple commonly hands over part or all of their income to their cohabiting parents, who manage the household and farming budget. This pooling of financial resources was a very foreign custom for Il-Mi and some other migrant women in the same situation, who felt their autonomy undermined. IlMi’s solution was to get paid work and refuse to hand over her earnings to her mother-in-law. The gulf over financial resource allocation hampered her relationship with her husband, deeply affecting her sense of satisfaction with her daily life on the whole. Material concerns were not an issue for San-Min, also a South Korean. San-Min, aged 26, lived in a small regional town with her husband and two small children. San-Min managed all the household matters including finances, and was a stay-home mother at the time of the interview. She recognized her husband’s efforts at understanding her needs and his help with domestic work such as changing nappies and cooking meals. Yet she

51 The interviews were carried out with 45 women in a regional Yamagata prefecture and in Greater Tokyo, in 1995 and 1996.



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was unhappy: “I feel regret for not marrying with love. Why did I marry a person I don’t love?” San-Min continued to feel a gap between her and her husband, in social background, her urban and his rural upbringing, age, mentality, exposure to the world, and ethnicity. On one occasion, while San-Min, her two Korean friends, and I chatted over drinks, her husband cooked dinner for us. I commented she was lucky to have such a helpful husband. To that she spat out that she did not value it much, but rather wanted “someone who talks sense”. Her friend called out to San-Min’s husband in the kitchen, “Do you have anything you want to do in the future?” The husband replied, “My dream? To build a house, have a wife and bring up children.” His response, reminiscent of the “sweet home” portrayal by marriage agencies, was met with a deep silence by the women for whom these were no longer dreams but dreary realities of marriage, daily lives filled with routine housework and caring work. San-Min, a bright, motivated young woman, struggled for satisfying conversations with her husband and yearned for stimulation beyond her housewife role and life in a rural town. Why then did these women choose brokered marriages? Looking back on her decision to marry, Il-Mi remarked laughing that she was “foolish”; and as for San-Min: “I wasn’t thinking properly.” Il-Mi had not been serious about getting married to a Japanese, but went to an arranged meeting “just to see the face (of a candidate)”, at the invitation of an agent. Like many other women, she felt “selected” by the intermediary and her prospective husband;52 such female fantasies as “being chosen” in the gender-unequal field of marriage play a role in the practice of marriage migration. The women had also felt dissatisfied with their lives in their countries of origin for one reason or another, and hoped marriage would offer a way out or, as San-Min put it, “adventure”. The image of a different life, conceived as the life of a middle-class wife in equal relationship with the husband in an affluent country, appealed to most women: financial comfort; free time to enjoy themselves; the chance to pursue a career or further studies; a caring Japanese husband less domineering than a compatriot husband might be: romantic love provides the subtext to such dreams. Once married, dissatisfaction with the spouse can occur in anyone. However, each of these women blamed her present unsatisfactory relationship with her husband

52 For more details see Tomoko Nakamatsu, “International marriage through introduction agencies: social and legal realities of ‘Asian’ wives of Japanese men”, in Piper and Roces, eds., Wife or Worker?, 186–88.

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on marrying without love. This reveals that love underpinned their notion of success in marriage and migration. Unlike San-Min and Il-Mi, however, a majority of the women felt that their relationship with their husbands was improving, as exemplified by the comment of a Filipina who had been married for eight years: “Our marriage was by introduction so our relationship naturally deepened over time.” Contentment with their husbands was nonetheless a different matter to love. Mutual love apparently did not develop for many, and its continued lack clouded their marriage and migration experiences. For instance, 29-year-old Meilin, who had worked as an accountant in China, lived with her public servant husband and two children in their comfortably large apartment on the outskirts of Tokyo. After mentioning she had got along with her husband over the three years of their marriage, she said, “I can’t say I love him.” Later she explained her point without being prompted: “It is much better to marry someone you know well, like your classmate.” Meilin’s analogy to “a classmate” highlights the challenge of marrying a foreign stranger, and the sense of dislocation that international brokered marriage brings about. The narrative of Wha-Sook further elaborates the complexity of marital relationships and love. Wha-Sook, aged 42, had been married for ten years and had two children. Before her marriage she had owned a clothing shop and held a sales position in the music industry in Seoul. She assessed her marital life in a city near Tokyo as reasonably satisfying. When asked about marital satisfaction, she chose to respond from an economic point of view: their house, savings, and her husband’s satisfactory income from his carpentry that enabled her to stay at home. Describing her husband as “a guardian” because of their seven-year age difference, and appreciating his tolerance toward her, she added, “I still don’t love him, though.” She might have not expected to love him; nonetheless, the lack of love in her marriage constantly reminded her of her “instant” marriage. Both Wha-Sook and Meilin appeared to have settled well in Japan. WhaSook was a naturalized citizen and Meilin had applied for citizenship at the time of the interviews. Both women had sisters who had also married Japanese men through introduction. Both were relatively happy with their material comfort and with their husbands. Both, however, revealed that love was unattainable in their marriage, and that this confronted them with a deep sense of solitude at not fully belonging with their husbands and their host country. The economic and the romantic, the two pillars of marriage, were not equally supporting the women.



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The discursive power of an ideal marriage for love pervades society, and the women who married through introduction knew their marriages were, in their own words, a “gamble”, “instant”, and “weird”. They brought both dreams and calculation to their marriage migration. Many women adapted relatively quickly to the daily aspects of marital life in a foreign country, but nurturing love in the marriage posed a more difficult hurdle and the realities of their marital lives were, in this sense, confronting. In contrast to the stories of the women I have so far discussed, the example of 38-year-old Young-Joo stands out because she recounted a satisfying intimate relationship with her company employee husband. Young-Joo, a college graduate, had worked as a textile designer in South Korea before her marriage. The couple had been married for eight years, had two children and lived in a neat house which they owned, near Tokyo. Young-Joo, who enjoyed playing the piano and baking bread, said she liked talking to her husband who, seven years older, was “like a counsellor”, to the extent that she could even discuss things with him which she could not tell her sisters. When she expressed her wish to improve her language skills and study visual arts in university, her husband helped her to enroll in a local night secondary school. Young-Joo showed dissatisfaction with her responsibility for caring for her bedridden father-in-law in the daytime, finding the old man’s impatience unbearable in the busy morning. On the effects of her naturalization, she commented that when her elder child entered primary school she thought it was no longer necessary to mention her Korean background to other parents, as she had been naturalized; revealing it might lead to bullying of her child by other students. This caused a problem for her as she felt she must speak like a Japanese and make no mistakes in public such as at parents’ gatherings. Her stories imply a structural inequality of gender and race in contemporary Japan. A social force for assimilation has likely affected her performance in public, and the conventional gender division of labour must have restricted her from pursuing other interests. However, in her subjective perceptions, the episode after naturalization was narrated in the context of her integration into the host society. On the matter of elderly care, she neither blamed her husband for the situation nor judged it unfair, but expressed it as a burden shared by her husband and herself. YoungJoo said that she would recommend marriage by introduction to others; in fact she had introduced a Japanese man to a friend, although no marriage took place. In her elegantly decorated suburban house, Young-Joo

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found material comfort, a family, a considerate husband, and some form of self-expression. In addition to these, her narrative suggests that mutual affection and possibly love were attainable in cross-cultural marriage by introduction. Young-Joo’s example, while revealing, was uncommon among the women interviewed. For a majority, love remained desired and its absence influenced their perceptions of their marriage migration experiences, though to different degrees. If we dismiss the place of love in brokered marriages, our understanding of the effects of gendered marriage migration will be partial, for its omission fails to shed light on an important nuance which prevails in the daily realities of marriage and migration. The women married without romance. Love was relevant to their marriages only as potential. Therefore, when they reflected on their marriage and migration experiences, material and other interests came to the fore as yardsticks. The realities of marital life brought unexpected outcomes for many, and lack of love became a reminder of the brokered nature of their marriages, in a society that is saturated with the ideal linkage of romance, marriage, a family, and happiness, yet tolerates marriage by introduction. Conclusion Contemporary mediated marriages and resultant marriage migration in East and South East Asia reveal the ways in which a tradition is commercialized, and marriage is globalized, as commodities, along the line of the economic order. State policies and proximity of ethnicity influenced the flow of marriage migration in some cases. If mobility favours women, affluence promotes men’s stability in East Asia. This study of Japan demonstrates that marriage agencies commodify the potential of romantic love in advertisements for men, and that love and affection were of significance when the women I interviewed attempted to define their transnational marriage and migration experiences. Material and emotional fulfilment are interwoven in their notion of a successful marriage, and love is one of its criteria. The language of strategies, whether economic, political or self-interested, fall short of articulating the sense of alienation some of the women in this study recounted. If brokered marriages are a “gamble”, then the gamblers are the women (and men) who participate. Marriage in this sense is a transformative process that allows an avenue for the expression of human agency that might not have been possible



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in a woman’s country of origin. For many, however, mutual love remains beyond the reach of their determination, their agency. The experience of marriage migration may well be different in other countries of Asia as it will be situated in differing social, familial and personal positions. The question of love is, however, worth exploring, as it will advance our understanding of gendered migration in our globalized world.

Migration and Transformation: The Gendering of International Migration from the Philippines in the Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries Rochelle Ball Introduction Historically, Filipinos have been a mobile people. Lazo et al. note that since the time of Spanish colonization, Filipinos have moved within the borders of the country, to another province or island in the search for better opportunities.1 The search for improvement of lifestyle through higher wages paid by foreign employers in the twentieth century has witnessed the continuation and accelerated growth of international migration from the Philippines. As a result of this development, international labour migration has been an important feature of the Philippines since the turn of the century and of the Philippines economy since 1974, with the dollar earnings from labour export in 1984 equalling that of the export manufacturing sector2 and today constituting its largest export income earning industry. The use of foreign labour is, at its most general level, generated by the requirements of capitalist accumulation. Sassen-Koob argues that the formation of labour supply has been an integral part of the progressive articulation of the capitalist world economy. The diversity of labour required “reflects the different historical modalities of the international division of labour both over time in the process of the articulation of the world economy and at different parts of the world economy.”3 The characteristics of the labour supply and the terms under which that labour is supplied reflects a sending nation’s role in the world economy, the strength of its political ties and dependencies, and the degree of economic necessity to find employment for its nationals abroad. 1 Lucy Lazo, Virginia Teodosio, and Patricia Sto. Tomas, “Contract Migration Policies in the Philippines”, Working Paper International Migration for Employment, the International Labour Organization, (Geneva, 1982), 11. 2 Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), Annual Report, Ministry of Labor and Employment, Republic of the Philippines, (Manila, 1984), 3. 3 Saskia Sassen-Koob, “Immigrant and minority workers in the organization of the labor process”, The Journal of Ethnic Studies, 82, (1980): 1–34.

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This chapter traces the history of twentieth century Philippine labour migration. During this century, and particularly since the early 1970s, international labour migration as a mechanism of globalization, has transformed Philippine polity and society. The following discussion first examines the historical migratory antecedents to the contemporary period through identifying major phases and characteristics of twentieth century migration. Against this backdrop this chapter then provides an overview of the explosive growth of international contract labour migration from the Philippines, and its increasing reliance on women’s labour to become the “model” labour-exporting nation. Within this broader gendered labour migration context, the discussion highlights how this dynamic has impacted within the Philippines itself, and the historical and contemporary significance of this transformative process. The History of Twentieth Century Labour Migration from the Philippines: Key Features From the beginning of the twentieth century Philippine labour emigration was a movement of labour paralleling and in part facilitating the economic and political success of advanced colonial powers such as the USA. From the turn of the twentieth century, when American colonial rule began in the Philippines, until at least the late 1960s, migration from the Philippines largely followed US colonial economic, political and military interests. There have been four significant, and overlapping, phases and characteristics in international migration from the Philippines in the twentieth century. Early Ilocano Migration to the USA The first main twentieth century phase and form of labour emigration can be traced to the early 1900s when Filipino farmers, mainly from the Ilocos region, emigrated permanently and semi-permanently to work as plantation labourers in the pineapple and sugar islands of Hawaii and Guam, and as fruit pickers to the American West Coast.4 In so doing, Filipino workers constituted a reliable source of cheap foreign labour for the plantations in 4 Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, “An evaluation of the Philippines overseas employment promotion policy”, in Anthony Paganoni ed., Migration from the Philippines, (New Manila, Quezon City, 1984).



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both colonies, which at that stage were experiencing severe labour shortages. In the case of Hawaii this was mainly attributed to the susceptibility of indigenous Hawaiians to diseases introduced by foreigners, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 18855 and a gentlemen’s agreement between USA and Japan.6 The influx of Filipinos into the USA was so rapid and successful that 20,000 Filipinos were in Hawaii by 1923. By the late 1930s the USA had become the primary market for Filipino labour, with Filipinos constituting 70 percent of Hawaii’s plantation labour as well as a significant proportion of California’s grape, apple and orange picking population. Prior to the beginning of World War Two, records showed that about 70,000 Filipinos were scattered throughout the USA particularly in the cities of the west coast such as San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles; of these 7,000 resided in Chicago and at least 4,000 in New York.7 This first period of labour migration from the Philippines witnessed the growth of organized recruitment of Filipino labour by the private sector. In the face of a shortage of Japanese field and mill hands, the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association (HSPA) recruited workers directly from the Ilocos region in Northern Luzon. The mass outmigration of young and illiterate male Ilocanos that ensued was facilitated by deteriorating conditions in resource poor Ilocos and the historical predisposition of Ilocanos to migrate intranationally. However, the significance of this migration lies in a combination of factors. Firstly, it was induced by a pre-existing demand for cheap, docile and vulnerable labour, which was only incidentally related to labour supply conditions in Ilocos. Secondly, this labour need was achieved by highly organized regionally-based recruitment. Thirdly, the characteristics of the labour recruited and employed in the plantations were constrained by demand external to Ilocos and particular to American plantations, and these constraints limited the range of people who actually emigrated.

5 It is important to note that in this context the long overlooked Page Act (1875) excluded (or restricted) Chinese women first. Usually, 1882 is then cited as the beginning of restriction. 6 Patricia Sto. Tomas, “Overseas employment in the Philippines: policies and programs”, in Anthony Paganoni ed. Migration from the Philippines, (New Manila, Quezon City, 1984): 1. 7 Lazo, Teodosio and Sto. Tomas, “Contract Migration Policies”.

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rochelle ball Post Second World War Labour Migration

The second major phase of labour emigration occurred after the Second World War. During the 1950s and 1960s, the destinations of Filipinos working abroad shifted from the USA and Hawaii to neighbouring Asian countries: American strongholds such as Guam, Okinawa and Wake Island; and later to Korea and Vietnam during both wars. This locational shift was also accompanied by significant changes in the characteristics of emigrant labour, which partly paralleled important shifts in the character of the global economy. In this period, labour migration became temporary rather than permanent or semi-permanent as was the case before the war, reflecting changes in the demand for labour. Temporary or contract migration is defined as the migration of workers who leave on contractual employment for a specific destination with a time period set in advance.8 Demand for imported labour shifted from immobile production sites such as plantations which operated on a long term basis, to other productive spheres which were relatively mobile, such as construction projects, operated on a temporary and job specific rather than production specific basis, and were increasingly geographically varied often requiring a more occupationally diverse labour force. Not surprisingly labour emigration in this period partly involved Filipino entrepreneurs, both skilled and unskilled labour, rather than simply unskilled plantation labour. In the 1950s, Filipinos who worked in nearby Asian countries were employed in diverse occupations. For example, 25,000 Filipino workers were employed in North Borneo to develop plantations and the timber industry.9 To North Borneo also, Filipinos migrated on their own initiative as barbers, entertainers and contract workers. This action prompted the Philippine government to enter into a bilateral agreement with the United Kingdom, providing employment for 25,000 Filipino workers for a period of five years.10 In the 1960s a large number of Filipino loggers and construction personnel were employed in Kalimantan. In addition, during this period, entertainment groups were required in a number of Japanese

58.

8 Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, “The Philippines overseas employment promotion policy”,

9 Charles Stahl, “International Labour Migration and the ASEAN Economies”, International Migration for Employment, Working Paper, International Labor Organization, (Geneva, 1984). 10 Lazo, Teodosio and Sto. Tomas, International Migration for Employment.



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cities, Hong Kong and other neighbouring capitals of South East Asia, and, again Filipinos went abroad.11 At the same time Filipino business interests and labour became involved with US government military and commercial interests, reflecting the Philippines’ former colonial status and political allegiance. Filipino construction companies and labour participated in post-war construction and rehabilitation often on a subcontract basis with US firms and gained valuable experience in international construction work and operations. With the Vietnam War, construction workers were recruited to help construct US military installations in Vietnam and Thailand, and to rebuild the economy of Guam after a devastating typhoon.12 These factors, combined with the declaration of war in both Korea and Vietnam, served to institutionalize Filipino participation in many US defence and war-related civilian projects.13 The involvement of Filipino companies with American business interests was significant for a number of reasons. Firstly, the skills and experience acquired by Filipino construction contractors and workers that operated internationally during this period undoubtedly held them in good stead for promoting Filipino entry into expanding international construction opportunities in the Middle East during the 1970s and early 1980s. Secondly, it was in the mid to late 1960s that contract migration became a significant development for the Philippines, witnessing the penetration of Filipino labour into an expanding international labour market. This was achieved for the first time through Filipino corporate involvement with American military and business interests. Many construction workers were consequently recruited to work in American military bases in Vietnam and Thailand; Filipino logging companies brought construction personnel into their concessions in Kalimantan14 and Filipino construction companies began subcontracting their labour to American firms. Therefore, during the 1960s, international and national business interests played a central role in developing contracted Filipino labour as an international commodity. The role of Filipino labour in the international division of labour was to see its rapid expansion in the 1970s, through both exportoriented industrialization strategies of development, and the rapid growth of overseas employment as an export income generating industry. 11 Abrera-Mangahas, “The Philippines overseas employment promotion policy”, 58. 12 Ibid., 58. 13 Sto. Tomas, “Overseas employment in the Philippines”. 14 Abrera-Mangahas, “The Philippines overseas employment promotion policy”, 58.

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rochelle ball The Brain Drain

The third significant post war Filipino labour emigration was the brain drain of professional Filipinos, particularly medical workers seeking to work semi-permanently or permanently in the United States. The Immigration Act of 1965 relaxed restrictions on race and country of origin and placed greater emphasis on skill. The reduction in US immigration controls by historic national origin quotas had a pronounced effect not only on the number of Filipino emigrants to the USA, but also on the orientation of educated Filipinos to emigration. A Philippine brain drain survey conducted by Bello, Lynch and Makil for the 1948–63 period sampled 1,500 graduates of Philippine colleges from 1948 to 1963 whose courses were liberal arts, education, law, engineering and commerce.15 They found that of all Filipinos who graduated from Philippine colleges, about 7 percent eventually took up permanent residence abroad. Of those who studied abroad after college, a maximum of 40 percent eventually graduated. Of those who studied abroad, females tended to emigrate more than men, while for those who did not study abroad, men tended to emigrate more than women.16 Gupta17 compared the outflow of Filipino professional workers in 1970 with the total stock of professionals at that time. In spite of severe limitations of the data, Gupta found that 3 to 4 percent of engineers and different categories of health and medical workers emigrated. In terms of graduates in these fields in 1968–69, the percentage of outflow in 1970 amounted to 29 percent for engineers and 50 percent for medical workers. The largest outflow occurred among physicians and surgeons (62 percent), dentists (95 percent), pharmacists (70 percent), dieticians and nutritionists (87 percent), and veterinarians (68 percent).18 From 1964 to 1973 there occurred a shift in the major nations supplying nurses to the USA from European to developing Asian nations. While changes in volume of nurse emigration are difficult to assess, there was an enormous increase in nurse migration from Asia, from 150 in 1960 to nearly 6,000 in 1972. Thus, by 1973, Mejia et al. estimated that nearly two-thirds of

15 Walden Bello, Frank Lynch and Perla Makil, “Brain drain in the Philippines”, in Modernization: Its Impact in the Philippines IV, eds. Walden Bello and Arnel de Guzman II (Manila, 1969). 16 Alejandro Herrin, “Population and development research in the Philippines: a survey”, in Survey of Philippine Development Research II, (Manila, 1982). 17 Mona Gupta, “Outflow of high-level manpower from the Philippines”, International Migration Review, 107 (1973): 167–91. 18 Herrin, “Population and development research in the Philippines”, 336.



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foreign nurses licensing in the USA came from Asia. The largest increases in countries acting as main suppliers of nurses were from the Philippines, the Republic of Korea and Thailand. The biggest decreases were in the number of nurses from Canada, followed by the United Kingdom, German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany.19 An early study of international physician and nurse migration by Mejia et al., placed the Philippines as by far the most significant donor nation for nurses in 1967. On average, over a period of four years (1967 to 1971) some 2,400 Philippine nurses registered in foreign countries each year. This number is equivalent to 8.5 percent of the number on the register in the Philippines in 1967 and 16 percent of the 15,359 nurses estimated by the physician and nurse manpower survey to be actively engaged in the Philippines in 1971. Mejia et al. also estimated that 13,500 nurses had left the country, equivalent to 88 percent of domestic active stock. In a further attempt to measure the numbers of Filipino nurses working abroad, Mejia et al. examined the numbers of nurses licensing in the USA on Exchange Visitor Visas. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Filipino nurses licensing in the USA made up a sizable proportion of all foreign nurses licensing there; in 1972 they were nearly half the total. While the equivalent ratios in Canada were falling, Philippine nurses nevertheless accounted for 23 percent of all registrations by foreigners in 1971 and 12 percent in 1972. During this period the sum of those registering in Canada and the USA was, for many years, higher than the number of new licenses issued to nurses in the Philippines.20 One measure of the significance of the brain drain by the Philippine government in this era is indicated by the attempts made by it to minimize the problem of manpower outflow, especially among doctors, nurses, scientists and exchange scholars. For example, the government instituted a bilateral agreement with the US government requiring that the Exchange Visitor Program be amended so that specialists in skill deficit areas in the Philippines would not get an extension of their visa after having been a foreign resident in the USA for two years. Under the Balik (returning) Scientists program, the government required rural internships for doctors and nurses before they were allowed to go abroad for further studies or employment.21 These initiatives indicate that the brain drain of Filipino 19 Alfonso Mejia, Helena Pizurki and Erica Royston, Physician and Nurse Migration: Analysis and Policy Implications (Geneva, 1979) 20 Ibid., 354 21 Herrin, “Population and development research in the Philippines”.

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professionals to the USA placed stress on the quality and availability of professional services in the Philippines, and was an issue of national concern by the end of the 1970s. Clearly, the Philippines had substantial experience in the supply of medical (particularly nurse) manpower to North America, mainly the USA, in the post war period. However, the relatively unorganized international supply of medical workers as permanent residents in the 1960s was to be expanded in volume, by level of organization, and by destination, on a contract basis in the 1970s and 1980s. The Role of Women: Internal Migration Much of the migration literature emphasizes that it is the young, particularly single male workers, who are the most likely to migrate for employment, as they are less tied to their community.22 However, the experience of the Philippines and Schrover’s essay in this volume contests this view. One of the distinctive features of internal migration differentials and propensities in the Philippines is the large number of females involved in migration, even ahead of the development of international temporary labour migration in the post OPEC oil crisis period. Among the Asian countries, the Philippines stands out as having the highest level of female participation in migration to urban areas.23 Pernia argues that in the Philippines “women have a higher propensity to migrate than men”24 and outnumber men in long distance rural-urban migration.25 For example, between 1975–1980, data on inter-provincial, particularly rural-urban migration in the Philippines revealed more females than males left their provinces and became migrants. Of the total number of internal migrants over this period 54 percent were women and 46 percent were men.26 One of the most striking characteristics of urban migrants collectively is the

22 See, for example, Nanct B. Graves and Theodore D. Graves, “Adaptive strategies in urban migration”, Annual Review of Anthropology, 3 (1974): 117–151; and John Connell, Biplab Dasgupta, Roy Laishley and Michael Lipton, Migration from Rural Areas: The Evidence from Village Studies (Delhi, 1976). 23 Siew Ean Khoo, Peter Smith and James Fawcett, “Migration of women to cities: the Asian situation in comparative perspective”, International Migration Review, 18(4) (1984): 1247–1263. 24 Ernest Pernia, “Effects of internal migration on rural areas”, Philippine Labor Review, 2(3) (1977), 83–94. 25 Khoo, Smith, and Fawcett, “Migration of women to cities: the Asian situation”. 26 Philippine National Census and Statistics Office, Philippine Yearbook, (Manila, 1987) 117.



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prevalence of single economically active females under the age of 30, and females predominate in migration streams especially among young migrants aged 15–19 to metropolitan areas, whereas male migrants tend to be somewhat older.27 The internal migration of women tends to be focused on Manila, and other major urban centres. The more urban the destination, the more likely the migrant is to be female.28 Among women who migrated between 1965 and 1970, 58 percent had urban destinations, compared to 49 percent of the men.29 Of those who were 15 to 19 years old in 1970 more than two out of three urban migrants were female, and the percentage of females was even higher among metropolitan migrants. For example, the National Capital Region (NCR) absorbed the highest number of in-migrants (33 percent), and had more female (60 percent) than male (33 percent) in-migrants. Next to the NCR were those regions closest to Manila: the Southern Tagalog Region and Central Luzon receive 15.9 percent and 8.9 percent of all internal migrants.30 Female-dominant migration streams are found in all the cities of Luzon, including Manila, and in Visayan and Mindanao cities.31 The contemporary pattern is not a traditional one in Philippine society.32 By the 1960s migration patterns became increasingly diverse, but continued to be dominated by the young. However, for the first time migration became dominated by younger single women aged between 15 and 19.33 Three factors affect rural-urban migration of Filipino women: female participation in agriculture, the increased availability of economic opportunities for women in the cities, and flexible cultural attitudes towards the social and economic roles of women.34 In the Philippines, the growth of employment opportunities for women in the cities has resulted in greater participation of women in rural-to-urban migration, as most women migrate specifically to find employment.35

27 Khoo, Smith, and Fawcett, “Migration of women to cities: the Asian situation”. 28 Elizabeth Eviota and Peter Smith, “The migration of women in the Philippines”, in Women in the Cities of Asia, eds. James Fawcett, Siew Ean Khoo and Peter Smith, (Boulder: 1984). 29 Eviota and Smith, “The migration of women in the Philippines”, 8. 30 Philippine National Census and Statistics Office, Philippine Yearbook, 117. 31 Ibid., p. 173. 32 Eviota and Smith, “The migration of women in the Philippines”, 165. 33 Ibid., 165. 34 Khoo, Smith, and Fawcett, “Migration of women to cities: the Asian situation”. 35 Ibid.

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With increased literacy there has been a transformation of the economic role of women in Philippine society. The government’s emphasis on universal education has made it possible for females to move into sectors of the society that were not accessible to them in the traditional milieu.36 At the turn of the twentieth century, most occupations were filled by men, whereas more recently women have come to participate in or even dominate some occupational categories. Professional positions for both sexes were very limited at the turn of the century. Men were widely distributed in the various professional occupations, but nursing and teaching were the only professional occupations having anything near proportionate representation by women. In the ensuing decades women began to find their way into other professional occupations, but they continued to be concentrated in teaching and nursing. Only one professional female out of five in 1970 was not in one or other of these fields, and professions other than these two had a combined sex ratio of about three men to every woman.37 The increased prevalence of women in internal migratory movements indicates that women have adopted more overtly important economic and income generating roles in Philippine households than they have in the past, and this trend has expanded significantly in the growth of the temporary international labour migration export industry that began in the 1970s. The Contemporary Period and the Rise of Temporary International Labor Migration The Philippines is one of the major contemporary countries of migration—perhaps even the largest migrant nation—with Filipino migrants found in more than 181 countries. Since the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, the Philippines has been a labour exporting nation that has supplied workers to labour-deficit and/or capital-rich nations. While the export of labour was promoted by the Philippine state as a temporary measure, it has both persisted and greatly expanded over the past thirty-five years.

36 Mercedes Concepcion and Peter Smith, (1977) “The demographic situation in the Philippines: an assessment in 1977”, Papers of the East West Population Institute, no. 44. 37 Eviota and Smith, “The migration of women in the Philippines”, 178.



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Exactly how many Filipinos are working abroad is unclear.38 As of 2009, the Commission on Overseas Filipinos and the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) estimated that more than 8.5 million Filipinos live abroad out of a total (2009) national population of 92 million. Of these, the majority (4.06 million) are permanent migrants, followed by 3.9 million temporary overseas contract workers, and over 658,000 undocumented migrants (such as overstaying tourists working illegally).39 The growth of the overseas employment industry has been remarkable. Contemporary labour export has wrought massive changes on Philippine economy and society. Since the OPEC oil crisis of 1973, the dramatic growth of international labour demand required for the massive infrastructural development that occurred in the Middle East, catalyzed the Philippine government’s labour export program. Since that time the Middle East has been the major Filipino labour importing region, although its relative dominance has varied substantially. For example, throughout the 1990s, the Middle East imported approximately 280,000 to 300,000 workers per year, and by 2009 the numbers of Filipino workers deployed to that region had more than doubled (670,000). Since the late 1980s, the first and second tier newly industrialising nations increasingly experienced serious labour shortages due to their high economic growth rates. East and Southeast Asia, particularly Japan, the tiger economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and more recently Brunei and Malaysia, became an increasingly significant labour importing region to the extent that this region rivalled the Middle East as the premier labour importing region in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In fact, in the years 1998, 1999 and 2000, the Asian region exceeded the Middle East as the major labour importing region, although by 2001, 2002 and 2003 the Middle East had edged past Asia once again. Since that time, labour demand in the Middle East has grown steadily and, by 2009, this region imported 70 percent of the total Philippine labour export of 1,092,162 workers, with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar constituting the three major labour importing countries (taking respectively

38 Rochelle Ball, “Trading labour: socio-economic and political impacts and dynamics of labour export from the philippines, 1973–2004”, in Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls in Asia, eds. Amarjit Kaur and Ian Metcalfe (New York, 2006). 39 Commission on Filipinos Overseas http://www.cfo.gov.ph/images/stories/pdf/ stock2009.pdf, (2009).

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291,400; 196,800; and 89,000 workers).40 Of these, newly hired workers displayed significant proportions in all three countries: Saudi Arabia, 39 percent; United Arab Emirates, 68 percent; and Qatar, 30 percent.41 Economic Dimensions The economic effects of the labour export industry, in terms of worker remittances on the macro economy of the Philippines, has been widely acknowledged and analyzed.42 Above all, it is migration’s tremendous hard currency earning capacity that has won it the active support of the state.43 The combination of a state policy promoting labour export, the country’s economic decline, and a burgeoning international demand for a range of labour services, has inevitably had an effect on individuals and households in terms of their career decisions, labour market participation and survival strategies.44 It is the women and men who send remittances back to their families in the Philippines who are, collectively, the premier foreign exchange earners for the Philippines. The “national” economy of the Philippines has become increasingly dependent on the hard currency remittances of these migrants. Central Bank of the Philippines data reveal that in 2010, US$18.8 billion was remitted through formal channels and constituted 14 percent of GDP. The Philippines is now the world’s fourth biggest recipient of remittances behind India, China and Mexico.45 Aside from the volume of capital, the importance of remittances to the Philippines are also 40 http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/2009_OFWpercent20Statistics.pdf. 41 For a detailed breakdown by country, skill and sex see the POEA website: http:// www.poea.gov.ph/stats/Skills/Country_skill_Sex/Deployment_percent20per_percent20Country, percent20Skil_percent20and_percent20Sex_percent202009.pdf. 42 See, for example: Rochelle Ball, “The role of the state in the globalization of labour markets: the case of the Philippines”, Environment and Planning A, 29, (1997) 1603–1628; Rochelle Ball and Nicola Piper, “Trading labour-trading rights: the regional dynamics of rights recognition for migrant workers in the Asia-Pacific”, in Transnational Migration and Work in Asia, eds. K. Hewison and K. Young, (New York, 2006); James Tyner, Made in the Philippines: Gendered Discourses and the Making of Migrants (New York, 2004). 43 See, for example: Rochelle Ball, “Nation building or dissolution: The globalization of nursing—the case of the Philippines,” Pilipinas, 27, (1996): 67–92; Ball, “The role of the state in the globalization of labour markets”; Nicola Piper and Rochelle Ball, “The globalisation of Asian migrant labour: the Philippine-Japan connection”, The Journal of Contemporary Asia, 31(4) (2001): 533–554; Ball and Piper, “Trading labour-trading rights”. 44 Rochelle Ball, “The individual and global processes: labour migration decision-making and Filipino nurses”, Pilipinas, 34, (Spring 2000): 63–92. 45 Commission on Filipinos Overseas http://www.cfo.gov.ph/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=504:statement-on-overseas-filipinos-remittance-for-development& catid=1:news&Itemid=56, (2011)



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highlighted by the following macro-economic financial flow statistics: in 2007 remittances accounted for 557 percent of foreign direct investment; 2569 percent of official development assistance; and in 2008 accounted for 38 percent of merchandise exports and 183 percent of commercial service exports.46 Skill Composition The skill composition of labour exports reflects the changing labour requirements of the principal employment markets for Filipino labour and the strong international labour marketing mechanisms of the Philippine State.47 Several features of the skill composition of Filipino workers employed abroad are notable. One of the most outstanding historical trends is the rapid growth of demand for construction and transport labour in the early to late 1970s, and the gradual shift from the construction to service and professional sectors after that time. The OPEC oil price hike in the early 1970s created an unprecedented need for construction workers to meet the demand created by extensive infrastructural development in the Gulf States, particularly in Saudi Arabia. By the early 1980s labour demand in the Middle East began to broaden to include production and construction workers as well as demand for professional and service workers. The proportion of professional workers increased from 10 percent to 21 percent of total Filipino workers in the Middle East, and the proportion of service workers rose from 12 percent to 25 percent between 1983 and 1986. In contrast, the proportion of construction workers declined from 72 percent to 47 percent. The proportion of workers involved in the service industry rose even more dramatically in Asia than in the Middle East (from 40 percent to 60 percent), to become the major area of employment for Filipinos outside the Middle East in the 1980s. In the early to mid-1980s employment as “entertainers” has also increased in relative importance (from 29 percent to 35 percent), making it the second most important employment sector for Filipinos in Asia. It is important to note here the problematic nature of the term “entertainers”, which was used both commonly and

46 World Bank, “Remittances Profile: Philippines”. Formal Remittances Inflows. Source: Remittances data, Development Prospects Group, World Bank, 2010 www.migrationinformation.org/datahub/remittances/Philippines.pdf, (2010) (accessed April 2011). 47 Rochelle Ball “Trading labour: Socio-economic and political impacts”.

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within the Philippine bureaucracy to denote a range of occupations which cover prostitution, forced prostitution and a range of performing arts. By the early 1990s, the skill categorization of overseas workers no longer treated entertainers by a separate classification. Rather, the entertainer category was treated under the “professional and technical skill” classification. This classification obscures what is really happening in overseas labour markets, as nurses are also a major occupational group within this professional category—it is impossible to know exactly what proportions of professionals are entertainers, nurses, or other occupations. However, it is well known within the Philippine government that numbers of entertainers working overseas constitute the majority of professional workers—although there is a sense that calling these workers “professionals” obscures both the vulnerability of their occupations and the variety of entertainment practices that constitutes their employment. From POEA statistics available on newly hired workers from 1992 until 2002, three major skill categories dominate over 93 percent of worker export from the Philippines: professional and technical workers; service workers; and production workers. By 2009, 91.5 percent of newly hired workers were in these three occupational categories indicating remarkable consistency in international labour demand (Table 1). Although the relative balance between these three groupings has varied over this period, what is striking about these three categories is just how highly gendered each of these skill categories is with the first two groupings being largely women, and the third category being primarily men. The increased demand for service and professional workers has been accompanied by a dramatic rise in the participation of women in the international employment industry. Philippine Patterns of Gendered Migration International temporary labour migration is highly gendered, and this is very much the case from the Philippines. The key motivator for people to work in globalized labour markets under largely marginalized circumstances in countries outside their citizenship is the drive for greater income to support the survival of their families, and the hope of a better future for their children. For over two decades now, labour export from the Philippines has been dominated by women. Barber comments that international migration from the Philippines is not a new component of its history, but the exporting of women workers is: “At the end of the twentieth century,



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Table 1. Number of deployed land-based Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) by major occupational category, new hires* 2003–2009 Major Occupational Group

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

Total

241,511

281,762

284,285

308,122

306,383

338,266

331,752

Professional, Medical, Technical and Related Workers Administrative and Managerial Workers Clerical Workers Sales Workers Agricultural Workers Production Workers Others

78,956

94,147

63,941

41,258

43,225

49,649

47,886

387

565

490

817

1,139

1,516

1,290

3,965 2,490 413

5,323 3,950 632

5,538 4,261 350

7,912 5,517 807

13,662 7,942 952

18,101 11,525 1,354

15,403 8,348 1,349

61,352

63,719

74,802

103,584

121,715

132,295

117,609

9,927

3

996

3,906

10,613

494

1,645

Note: * Combined total number of deployed OFWs—new hires with occupational disaggregation covers at least 95 percent of the total deployed land-based new hires. This table summarizes major destination countries for Filipino workers by region. For a comprehensive list of all countries employing Filipino workers refer to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration website for these data: http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/statistics.html. Source: POEA (2009), Table 11 http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/2009_OFW percent20Statistics.pdf.

Philippine gendered labour migration and its diaspora have become the primary means for servicing Philippine indebtedness.”48 The economic and social roles of Filipino women have undergone significant transformation in the twentieth century, and this is reflected in changing migratory patterns of women. By the mid-1980s a combination of several key factors increased the global demand and employment of Filipino women. Briefly, these key factors were: escalating economic decline in the Philippines; a rise in labour demand in the international service sector in both Asia and the Middle East; fluctuating levels of (male) labour demand in the Middle East construction sector; and aggressive global

48 Pauline Gardiner Barber, “Agency in Philippine women’s labour migration and provisional diaspora”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 23(4), (2000): 399.

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labour marketing campaigns by the Philippine state.49 Thus, within a relatively short period the gender structure of the global Philippine migrant labour force was remarkably transformed. In the early 1980s, men comprised the majority of land-based Filipino labour migrants. By the early 1990s, the gender balance had shifted towards women; throughout the 1990s between fifty and sixty percent of labour deployment from the Philippines was dominated by women. From the beginning of the next decade until 2005, the gender balance became even more dramatically skewed with between 70 and 74 percent of labour deployment dominated by Filipino women. By 2006 and 2007, however the gender balance had decreased somewhat with respectively 60 percent and 48 percent of women obtaining overseas employment in those years. While it remains to be seen whether these two latter years are anomalies or become a reversal of a significant long-term trend, it is clear that women have dominated labour export from the Philippines between 1993 and 2006.50 Nurses Since the 1960s, the Philippines has played a central role in filling the global demand for nurses. The development of a sophisticated system of nurse export from the Philippines has been facilitated both by government international temporary labour export policy and targeted government international marketing of Filipino nurses.51 The Philippine Nurses Association estimated that in the early 1990s, almost two-thirds (61 percent) of the total number of trained nurses (which was 174,202 in 1990)52 were employed outside the Philippines. Manzano estimates that in recent years over 70 percent of the 7,000 Filipino nurses who graduate leave for overseas employment annually.53 This figure, combined with nurses employed in the Philippines, amounts to a yearly estimated supply of 15,000 nurses per annum to more than 30 countries. This outflow, which is more than double the average number of graduates from 49 Rochelle Ball, “The role of the state in the globalization of labour markets”. 50 Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), Annual Report (Manila, 2008). 51 Ball, “Nation building or dissolution: The globalization of nursing”; Ball, “The role of the state in the globalization of labour markets”. 52 Erlinda Ortin, “The remuneration of nursing personnel in the Philippines”, in The Remuneration of Nursing Personnel: An International Perspective (Geneva, 1994), 190. 53 George Manzano, “Quantitative dimensions: professional manpower demand, supply and migration trends”, (Preliminary Draft), Philippines Country Report, (Manila, 2005).



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nursing schools, constitutes a substantial brain drain.54 In a promotional statement, a major Philippine nurse recruiter writes: “Filipino nurses can be found everywhere around the world—in the big cities of United States and England, in urban centers of Europe and Asia, in the far corners of Africa and South America, in remote desert clinics in the Middle East, in offshore rigs on the China Sea.”55 The overwhelmingly dominant country of destination for nurses in 2009 was Saudi Arabia, which accounted for 74 percent of the 13,470 nurses who obtained overseas employment in that year. The top destinations of Filipino nurses are: Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, Kuwait, the United States, Ireland, and Singapore. Singapore is the only ASEAN nation that is a primary destination of Filipino nurses.56 Employment for Filipino nurses in both the US and the Middle East means the occupying of marginalized and racialized positions in the labour markets of both major nurse-importing regions. The labour migration of nurses to the Middle East is structured according to a racialized hierarchy of labour, seniority and employment conditions: Americans and Europeans: Senior hospital administrative, senior technical and supervisory positions, for example, hospital administrators, doctors, head nurses. Filipinos and Egyptians: Middle status positions, for example, registered nurses and technical staff not in senior positions. Sri Lankans, Pakistanis: Low ranking positions—that is, unskilled jobs, for example, orderly and janitorial positions.57 Nurses, like other contract workers, are recruited and paid according to an international hierarchy of jobs and conditions of employment; more powerful and skilled positions are more readily available to workers from developed nations. The conditions of employment and the extent of

54 Luz Baguiro, “Emigration of nurses hurts Philippines’ health services”, Straits Times, September 7, 2002, 1. 55 http://www.abbapersonel.com/nurses.html, 2011. 56 Rochelle Ball, “Globalised labour markets and trade of nurses- the case of the Philippines: some implications for international regulatory governance”, in A Global Health System? The International Migration of Health Workers, ed. John Connell (London, 2008) 30–46; George Manzano, “Quantitative dimensions”, 12. 57 Rochelle Ball, “The process of international contract labour migration from the Philippines: The case of Filipino nurses”, (Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, 2008), 196.

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personal freedom vary by nationality, and by the relative wealth of sending nations. Nations which have the highest GNP per capita also have nationals who are employed under the best conditions in the Middle East. In other words, in order to attract workers from nations with high GNP per capita, better relative conditions of employment need to be offered than are necessary to attract workers from poorer nations. Obviously the degree to which Filipino nurses employed in both nations have recourse to legal and institutionalized workplace practices to voice their concerns varies enormously between Saudi Arabia and the United States. In the case of the Middle East, there are few mechanisms for nurses to lodge workplace abuse complaints, unless through the Philippine Embassy, which has little power to negotiate with employers on their behalf. The great “success” of the Philippines as an exporter of nurses has created a crisis in the delivery of health care in the Philippines. The international migration of nurses from the Philippines amounts to a massive loss not only in human capital: the Philippines is bearing the cost of training health professionals without fully utilizing them for local benefit (aside from the enormous revenues raised through remittances). It is the most junior and often the least well qualified nurses that remain in the health care system and by extension, the nurses who have migrated to work overseas are the best educated and most experienced, and include many nurse educators, and the vast majority of these nurses have no intention of returning to nursing as a profession after working overseas.58 Service Sector Workers While male workers still typically dominate in the construction and shipping industries, Filipino women are employed in all tiers of service sector employment ranging from entertainment and prostitution, domestic service to nursing in Southeast Asian, North American, European and Middle Eastern labour markets. Most Philippine women who are employed in these sectors are overeducated for the forms of employment that they take on overseas, resulting in both a brain drain and a significant de-skilling and loss of human capital from Philippine domestic labour markets.59

58 Ball, “Nation building or dissolution”; Rochelle Ball, “The individual and global processes: labour migration decision-making and Filipino nurses,” Pilipinas, 34, (Spring 2000): 63–92. 59 Ball “Nation building or dissolution”; Rochelle Ball, “Divergent development, racialised rights: globalised labour markets and the trade of nurses—the case of the Philippines”, Women’s Studies International Forum, 27 (2004): 119–33.



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Table 2. Number of deployed land-based Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) by top occupational category and sex, new hires* 2009 World Region All Occupational Category 1. Household Service Workers 2. Nurses Professional 3. Waiters, Bartenders and Related Workers 4. Charworkers, Cleaners and Related Workers 5. Wiremen Electrical 6. Caregivers and Caretakers 7. Labourers/Helpers General 8. Plumbers and Pipe Fitters 9. Welders and Flame-Cutters 10. Housekeeping and Related Service Workers

Male

Female

Both Sexes

156,454

175,298

331,752

1,888 1,599 4,978 2,140

69,669 11,866 6,999 7,916

71,557 13,465 11,977 10,056

9,709 507 7,105 7,702 5,870 908

43 8,721 994 20 40 4,219

9,752 9,228 8,099 7,722 5,910 5,127

Note: * Combined total number of deployed OFWs—new hires with occupational disaggregation covers at least 95 percent of the total deployed land-based new hires. POEA (2009) Table 12, http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/2009_OFW percent20Statistics.pdf. This table summarizes major destination countries for Filipino workers by region. For a comprehensive list of all countries employing Filipino workers refer to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration website for these data: http://www.poea.gov.ph/html/ statistics.html.

Women are generally employed in the highly vulnerable occupations of domestic servants and entertainers in geographically specific locations. Table 2 details the number of newly hired land-based overseas Filipino workers by the top occupations by gender for 2009. This table indicates that Philippine labour migration is highly gendered by destination60 and the nature of these destinations and the intersection of occupation and gender have a large bearing on worker abuse/wellbeing. Several occupational categories are dominated by women: household service workers; nurses; charworkers and cleaners; caregivers; and housekeepers. The major destinations for domestic helpers are mainly in Asia and the Middle East, 97 percent of whom are women. In 2009, three countries were the key destinations: Hong Kong (35 percent), Kuwait (20 percent) and United Arab Emirates (15 percent). Other important countries of employment for domestic helpers were Saudi Arabia and Qatar at approximately ten percent of the market of the 71,560 Filipino workers who obtained domestic 60 The detailed information for destination is available at http://www.poea.gov.ph/ html/statistics.html.

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service employment in 2009. Since 2003, Taiwan has been the key caregiver importing country, followed by Canada and Israel. The number of caregivers has decreased by more than 50 percent between 2003 and 2009, with just over 9,200 workers obtaining this form of employment in 2009. Both domestic servants and entertainers are employed under circumstances where they are highly vulnerable to a wide range of abuse. Both sets of workers are generally employed in private spaces (people’s homes) or in small-scale public spaces (e.g. nightclubs), which in the latter instance may well be controlled by organized crime syndicates such as the Japanese Yakuza. While there are approximately 140,000 mainly female workers in Japan on temporary work contracts (Table 1), there are over 36,000 workers who are illegal residents there (Table 1). Both domestic servants and entertainers have little opportunity to protest against unfair or abusive work practices, and even more so the case for those who are resident illegally. In contrast, many male Filipino workers are employed in large scale public workplaces such as construction sites, where solidarity among workers against abusive work practices is more likely to occur, although this definitely is not intended to imply that abuse does not occur. Despite the many problems of sexual and other forms of abuse suffered by Filipinas as service workers, the Philippines has had long term reliance on the export of women for its labour export program. Accompanying the significant increases in the numbers of Filipino women working internationally are increases in the level of abuse of workers. Table 3 reveals the major forms of human rights and labour abuses experienced by domestic helpers by four major groupings: legal, economic, physical, and social abuse and difficulties. Some areas of legal and economic difficulty pertain to illegalities in the recruitment process prior to migration such as deceptive contractual arrangements and excessive recruitment charges. However, most of the abuses of domestic workers occur once employed overseas. These abuses are derived usually from both the employment environment of the worker as well as from the socio-legal culture of employment. Common forms of work-place abuse include: confiscation of passport; non-payment or cutting of wages; excessive hours of work, including no day-off; sexual harassment and abuse; verbal abuse and racial denigration; and substandard accommodation such as no personal living space or bed. Examples of the later broad issues include lack of protective labour legislation for temporary workers and lack of avenues for redress of grievances. Many migrant workers are victims of trafficking and abuses, and this is particularly so for women. In some cases, they may be legitimately recruited, but end up as prostitutes, entertainers



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Table 3. Adverse conditions confronting Asian service sector employed female temporary migrants Legal Deceptive contractual arrangements: § Contract substitution § Infringement of contracts § Lack of protective labour legislation § Lack of avenue for redress of grievances § Confiscation of passport § Marginalized position re labour and human rights Economic Exploitation in relation to: § Recruitment charges § Wages paid § Wages withheld § Excessive work hours § No day off § Deception in relation to:  Ø Presented economic benefits  Ø Hidden charges for workers to cover Physical Marginal legal protection against a range of abuses such as: § Physical abuse § Sexual abuse § Substandard accommodation e.g. no bed, private space Social Social deprivation: § Social marginalization or isolation § Deprivation of family life § Deprivation of religious freedom § Verbal/psychological abuse and harassment Source: Rochelle Ball (2006) “Trading labour: Socio-economic and political impacts and dynamics of labour export from the philippines, 1973–2004”, in Amarjit Kaur and Ian Metcalfe, (eds) Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls in Asia, (Basingstoke, 2006), 115–138; David Cox (1997), “The vulnerability of Asian women migrant workers to a lack of protection and to violence”, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, vol. 6 no. 1: 59–75.

or bonded labourers. Indeed, even among legally recruited workers, the employment experience of many temporary migrants displays a key characteristic of labour trafficking where deception around the terms and conditions of employment is tragically so very common that human trafficking is the third largest source of profits for organized crime next to guns and drugs.61 61 David Cox, “The vulnerability of Asian women migrant workers to a lack of protection and to violence”, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, vol. 6 (1997), no. 1: 59–75; Ball, “Trading Labour: Socio-economic and Political Impacts and Dynamics of Labour Export”.

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While the economic benefits of labour export are applauded and given as the raison d’etre for state sponsored and promoted labour export, the transformative social aspects and costs of labour migration from the Philippines and how this intersects with its highly gendered nature should not be underestimated. In response to the burgeoning global demand for flexible workers, different family formations have emerged in major labour supplying countries such as the Philippines. As well expressed by Tyner “researchers now speak of seasonal orphans, solo parents, flexible citizens, and shadow households.”62 Parreñas has conducted extensive research in the Philippines on the effect of the migration of mothers, fathers and both parents on children and to a lesser extent, extended families.63 The social impacts of international labour migration are strongly related to whether it is the mother or father of children who have migrated. Parreñas found that migration engenders enormous change in a family, particularly in countries such as the Philippines where international labour migration is a dominant feature of its social and economic landscape. It is estimated that approximately 27 percent of the youth population has grown up physically apart from a migrant mother, father or both.64 Most migrant workers serve more than a typical two-year contract, and many have multiple contracts that result in parents being absent from their families for many years. Once families become engaged in the international labour market and the need for multiple contracts (to sustain, for example, on-going education costs), this “roundabout” is extremely difficult to disengage from. Parreñas found in her sample of 69 young adults that in the last decade very few spent time in a complete household unit. The standard length of separation with fathers was 13.8 years (with 74 weeks total time in the Philippines during this period). Mothers were on average away for 11.4 years, with only an average of 24 weeks spent with their children during this total time spent working overseas.65

62 James Tyner, The Philippines: Mobilities, Identities, Globalization, (New York, 2009), 149. 63 See, for example, Rhacel Parreñas, “The care crisis in the Philippines: children and transnational families in the new global economy,” in Global Woman, eds. B. Ehrenreich and A. Hochschild, (New York, 2003) 39–54; Rhacel Parreñas, Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes, (Stanford, CA, 2005a); Rhacel Parreñas, “Long distance intimacy: class, gender and intergenerational relations between mothers and children in Filipino transnational families”, Global Networks, 5(4), (2005b): 317–336. 64 Parreñas, “Long distance intimacy: class, gender and intergenerational relations”, 65 Ibid.



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The reconfiguring of family structures is clearly most pronounced when it is the mother who is working overseas. Generally, women migrants place enormous importance on, and undergo great duress and effort to maintain their nurturing and household management roles while working overseas. This also has implications for the gender division of labour where women’s traditional roles and responsibilities become transnationalized through international labour migration.66 The transnationalization of women’s reproductive and productive household roles thereby results in a major intensification and broadening of women’s household responsibilities. Importantly, Parreñas found that rarely does the international migration of a mother result in a significant broadening of household reproductive responsibilities of fathers that remain behind.67 Migrants, particularly mothers, adopt many mechanisms to maintain intimacy and define their familial roles with their children back home, including regular phone calls, texting, emails68 and specifically directing and controlling remittance expenditure.69 The absence of mothers, by contrast to that of fathers, resulted in strong extended female family involvement in the rearing of children and running of households. As a result of the absence of mothers, migrant households learn to cope by virtue of necessity, and hence the negative consequences for children may have been downplayed. Almost universally the absence of a mother rather than father through migration was regarded by children as the most difficult emotional gap to breach70 and is resented by children.71 Given a choice, children would rather not grow up under transnational household arrangements.72 However, being a child of an international labour migrant is socio-economically advantageous as 66 Rhacel Parreñas, “Transnational fathering: gendered conflicts, distant disciplining and emotional gaps”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34(7), (2008): 1057–1072. 67 Parreñas, “Long distance intimacy: class, gender and intergenerational relations”. 68 Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela, eds., The Transnational Family: New European Frontiers and Global Networks, (Oxford, 2002). 69 Parreñas, “Long distance intimacy: class, gender and intergenerational relations”. 70 The following authors provide deep analysis of this: John Bryant, Children of International Migrants in Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines: A Review of Evidence and Policies, Innocenti Working Paper No. 2005-05, (Florence, 2005) UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre. http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/iwp2005_05.pdf; Scalabrini Migration Center (SMC) Hearts Apart: Migration in the Eyes of Filipino Children, (Manila, 2004); Parreñas, “Long distance intimacy: class, gender and intergenerational relations”. 71 Parreñas, “The care crisis in the Philippines”; Simon Turner, “Studying the tensions of transnational engagement: from the nuclear family to the world-wide web”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34(7), (2008): 1049–1056. 72 Parreñas “Transnational fathering”, 1057–1072.

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it is an effective way to alleviate poverty.73 While children of migrants versus non-migrants were more likely to go to private schools, research findings vary on the educational outcomes for children from these two groups. For example, one study by the Scalabrini Migration Centre found that within each school, children of migrants received slightly better marks on average than children of non-migrants.74 Another study cited by Bryant in 1996 found that children of migrants and non-migrants received essentially the same marks.75 The implications of the involvement of women in international labour migration is therefore very complex, and perhaps needs to be thought through, understood and researched in culturally contingent ways, rather than treated and regarded in universally positive terms. Much remains to be learned about the lives of children and spouses of international labour migrants and how families and indeed social relations are being reconfigured through international temporary labour mobility, the globalization of labour markets and development possibilities. Clearly, there is much more to learn about the effect of the migration of parents on children. This will become an increasingly important issue for further research, as international labour mobility as a mechanism for development and achieving Millennium Developments Goals grows in prominence. Conclusion Due to its long history of colonization, the Philippines has had strong economic and trade links with politically and economically powerful nations. Historically, the trading patterns of the Philippines have been closely related to those of the colonizing nations, and with regions in the world that have been undergoing expansion in their economies. During the twentieth century, the growth of international migration for employment from the Philippines has had two defining characteristics. In the first instance, these migrations have been closely associated with American economic and political interests. Secondly, Filipinos have demonstrated an increasing tendency to migrate internationally, most often in search of an improved quality of life and these migration patterns have echoed the rise of economically powerful nations. 73 Bryant, Children of International Migrants. 74 SMC, Hearts Apart: Migration in the Eyes of Filipino Children. 75 Bryant, Children of International Migrants.



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The growth of large-scale contract labour migration has occurred in the economic and political context of economic decline, and the associated decrease in the quality of life for the majority of Filipinos, dictatorship, and eventually revolution. The growth in international demand for foreign workers and the subsequent promotion of organized contract labour migration provided a short term solution to balance of payments problems for the Marcos government, and has become an established feature of the economic and social landscape of the contemporary Philippines. For many Filipinos, the chance to work abroad has provided an opportunity to offset increasing costs of living, and declining wages, as well as perhaps create a more secure financial future for themselves and their families. Within this broad context, the economic and social roles of women have undergone significant transformation in the twentieth century, and this is reflected in changing migratory patterns of women, and the breadth of vulnerability associated with this. One factor that is notable is the increased presence and, indeed, dominance of women in internal, particularly long distance rural-urban migration for employment, and the extension of this to the extent that Filipino women have played a dominant role in globalized temporary labour migration. This has resulted in the enormously transformed reproductive and productive roles of women in Philippine households in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This transformation of women’s lives is highly complex. In the contemporary period it is closely associated with increased levels of economic independence; growing incidence of women’s human and labour rights vulnerabilities as international labour migrants; and as a related issue, the emergent fragmentation of Filipino families and social structure.

Notes on Contributors Rochelle Ball is an adjunct associate professor in the School of Business, Economics and Public Policy, at the University of New England, and National Policy Director for the Primary Industries Skill Council of South Australia (PISC). As an academic and consultant she has written extensively on the policy implications of international labour migration. In recent years her research and policy has focussed on economic, social and political impacts of labour migration; gendered migration and the labour migration of nurses; and the labour rights of migrant workers, as Asia has expanded to include the Pacific. Shelly Chan is assistant professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California-Santa Cruz in 2009 and taught in the Department of Pacific and Asian Studies at the University of Victoria. She is writing a transnational history of modern China that focuses on nationalist imaginations of diaspora across the twentieth century. Dennis D. Cordell is professor of history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and previously taught demography at the Université de Montréal. He recently edited and contributed to The Human Tradition in Modern Africa (2012), a collection of biographies of “everyday” Africans who lived between the 1810s and the present. He authored Dar al-Kuti: The Last Years of the Transsaharan Slave Trade (1984), coauthored Hoe and Wage: A Social History of a Circular Migration System in West Africa (1996/1998) with Victor Piché and the late Joel W. Gregory, and, more recently, The Demographics of Empire: The Colonial Order and the Creation of Knowledge (2010) with Karl Ittmann and Gregory Maddox. Earlier he coedited African Population and Capitalism: Historical Perspectives (1987/1994) with Joel W. Gregory. Mike Douglass is professor, Asia Research Institute—Asian Urbanisms Cluster and Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from UCLA and has taught at the Institute of Social Studies (Netherlands) and at the School of Development

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Studies, University of East Anglia (U.K.) as well as at Stanford University and UCLA. He is the U.S. Editor of the International Development Planning Review and has collaborated in research and planning projects throughout Asia and has been a consultant for international development agencies as well as national and local governments. Christiane Harzig was associate professor of migration history at Arizona State University. She has published on women’s migration in the Atlantic World (Peasant Maids—City Women, 1997) and on politics of admission in Canada, Sweden, and the Netherlands (Einwanderung und Politik, 2004). She initiated a study of global caregiver migrations. She has been a Diefenbaker Fellow of the Canada Council in the academic year 2004–05. Dirk Hoerder, retired from Arizona State University and Universität Bremen, also taught at York University, Duke University, Université de Paris 8—Saint Denis, and the University of Toronto. His areas of interest include worldwide migrations, borderland interactions, and sociology of acculturation: Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (2002), he coedited The Historical Practice of Diversity: Transcultural Interactions from the Early Modern Mediterranean to the Postcolonial World (2003), and wrote “To Know Our Many Selves”: From the Study of Canada to Canadian Studies (2010). Muhamad Nadratuzzaman Hosen lectures at the State Islamic University of Syahid, Jakarta, and at Yarsi University in Jakarta. He has worked as a Head of Environmental Technology and Biodiversity at the Indonesian Ministry of Research and Technology and from 2005–2009 was a Director for Communication Centre of Shariah Economics (PKES). From 2006–2009 he was also a Director for the Assessment Institute for Foods, Drugs and Cosmetics (LPPOM), MUI. Recently he was a Dean of the Faculty of Economics at YARSI University in Jakarta. He has published 11 books including Profiles and Economic Performance of Dairy Co-operatives in Indonesia (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009). He gives seminars internationally about halal products and Islamic Economics and was a President of World Halal Council from 2006 to 2009. Presently he is a treasurer for the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI) as well as the Council of the Shariah Board of MUI.



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Hassène Kassar is a demographer at the Faculté des Sciences Humaines et Sociales, Université de Tunis. He specializes in migration and population development in the Mediterranean region, esp. women’s mobility, undocumented migration, migratory spaces, and the connections between development and migration. His publications include “Femmes et migration, Prémices de l’émergence de nouvelles formes: Premiers résultats de l’enquête réalisée auprès des étudiantes de la FSHST,” in Regards sur les migrations tunisiennes (Agadir: Édition Sud Contact, 2009), 111–30; “Les régions côtières: têtes de ponts de la migration clandestine,” in Migration clandestine africaine en Europe: un espoir pour les uns, un problème pour les autres (Paris: Harmattan, 2010), 81–102; “Les changements sociodémographiques et les nouvelles tendances de la migration internationale en Tunisie,” in Revue Tunisienne des Sciences Sociales (CERES) 46, no. 138 (2009), 161–97; and Genre et disparité régionale, Middle East and North Africa Sustainable Development Group (MNSSD), World Bank. Kamel Kateb is a demographer at the Institut National d’Études Démographiques (INED), Paris, France. He works with the research units “Migrations internationales et minorités” and “Identité et territoire des populations.” In particular he studies the history of the populations of the Maghreb countries, the education systems, and the migrations between the Maghreb and Europe. Among his publications are Européens, “indigènes” et juifs en Algérie, 1830–1962 (2001), Fin du mariage traditionnel en Algérie? (1876–1998), Une exigence d’égalité des sexes (2001), and École, population et société en Algérie (2005). Amarjit Kaur is professor of economic history at the University of New England, Australia. She is a board member of the International Social History Association (ISHA) and the Malaysia and Singapore Society of Australia. Her research focuses on international labour migration and forced migration in Southeast Asia and issues of governance, inequality and labour rights; Indian diaspora; and social determinants of health. Her books include Wage Labour in Southeast Asia since 1840: Globalisation, the International Division of Labour and Labour Transformations (2004), Women Workers in Industrialising Asia: Costed, not Valued (Ed) (2004) and Mobility, Labour Migration and Border Controls in Asia (2006, co-edited with Ian Metcalfe). She has also edited six special Journal issues on migration.

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Kiranjit Kaur is an associate professor at the Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia. She has written and presented papers on the role of media in society and its treatment of migrant workers in Malaysia. Her other areas of research are in public relations, media ethics, and women and the media. Gijs Kessler is senior research fellow and Head of Collection Development Russia and Eastern Europe at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He completed his M.A. from the Free University of Amsterdam and received his Ph.D. from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. He is founding member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Studies in History, Economy and Society, Moscow, Russia. His main research interests include social, economic and labour history of Russia and the Soviet Union, comparative labour and migration history, world history, family history. He lives and works in Moscow. Akram Khater is professor of history at North Carolina State University, Director of Middle East Studies Program and Director of the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies. His books include Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Making of a Lebanese Middle Class, 1861–1921 (2001), A History of the Middle East: A Sourcebook for the History of the Middle East and North Africa (2004), and Embracing the Divine: Gender, Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East, 1720–1798 (2011). Currently he is producing a PBS documentary on the history of the Lebanese immigrant community in North Carolina. Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, professor of Latin American history at the University of Kansas, focuses on the history of the family, women, migration, childhood, citizenship and the economy as well as the interaction of race, class, and gender. She is author of Household Economy and Urban Development: Sao Paulo 1765 to 1836 (1986). Her recent publications include “The House, the Street, Global Society: Latin American Families and Childhood in the 21st Century” in Journal of Social History (2005), “La construcción del nacionalismo y la ciudadanía brasileña en un Estado multirracial” [The Construction of Brazilian Nationalism and Citizenship in a MultiRacial Polity], in Verena Stolcke and Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, eds., Identidades ambivalentes en América Latina (siglos XVI–XXI) (2008). Vera Mackie is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Wollongong. Her major publications include Gurōbaruka to Jendā Hyōshō [Globalisation and Representations



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of Gender], Tokyo: Ochanomizu Shobō, 2003; Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; Relationships: Australia and Japan, 1870s–1950s, Melbourne: History Monographs and RMIT Publishing, 2001, co-edited with Paul Jones; Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2000, co-edited with Anne Marie Hilsdon, Martha Macintyre and Maila Stivens; and Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; and articles in such journals as Asian Studies Review, Australian Feminist Studies, Continuum, East Asian History, Hecate, Humanities Research, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Intersections, Japanese Studies, Journal of the Asia-Pacific Economy, New Left Review, Performance Paradigm and Women’s Studies International Forum. Adam McKeown teaches history at Columbia University, New York, where he offers courses on the histories of globalization, world migration and drugs, and is the co-coordinator of the Ph.D. track in International and Global History. He wrote Melancholy Order: Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders (2008), and Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (2001). He is now working on the history of globalization since 1760. Tomoko Nakamatsu is assistant professor, Discipline of Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her main research interests cover migration, gender, the family and marriage. She is currently looking at the implications of Japan’s multicultural policy at the local level. Her future research plans to explore the linguistic dimension of intermarriage and migration, with a focus on Japanese migrants in Australia. Her recent publications include a chapter in International Marriages in the Time of Globalization (Heikkil and Yeoh, eds., 2011), and ‘Conventional practice, courageous plan’: women and the gendered site of death rituals in Japan, Journal of Gender Studies 18:1 (2009). Ooi Keat Gin is professor of history and coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Research Unit (APRU) at the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia. He specializes in the socio-economic history of insular Southeast Asia in particular of Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Kalimantan Indonesia. His recent publications are The Japanese Occupation of Borneo, 1941–1945 (Routledge, 2011), and Historical Dictionary of Malaysia (Scarecrow, 2009). He guest edited ‘Themes for Thought on Southeast Asia’, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies, 11, 1 (June 2009). He is series editor of the APRU-USM

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Asia Pacific Studies Publications Series (AAPSPS) and serves as the editor of the International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (IJAPS) (www.usm.my/ ijaps/). Aswatini Raharto is a researcher at the Research Centre for Population, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (PPK-LIPI), and also the Deputy Chairman for Social Sciences and Humanities at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, Jakarta. She has been involved with, and coordinated various research projects on population mobility including international labour migration, migration of people in Indonesian border areas and forced migration in conflict areas in Indonesia. She received her Ph.D. in demography from the Australian National University. Marlou Schrover is professor of migration history and social differences at Leiden University. She is currently leading a (NWO vici) project on post-war migration to the Netherlands. Publications include Illegal Migration and Gender in a Global and Historical Perspective, with Joanne van der Leun, Leo Lucassen and Chris Quispel (2008); an overview over 450 years of Dutch emigration and immigration, Komen en Gaan. Immigratie en Emigratie in Nederland vanaf 1550, with Herman Obdeijn (2008); and a volume on Gender, Migration and the Public Sphere 1850–2005, with Eileen Janes Yeo (2010). More recently she has published on the problematization of migration issues, such as “Problematisation and particularisation: the Bertha Hertogh story,” Tijdschrift door Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis / The Low Countries Journal of Social and Economic History 8.2 (2011), 3–31. Patcharawalai Wongboonsin is the Director of Human Development & Migration Studies Centre, faculty member of the College of Population Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Demography, and a member of the editorial board of several other international journals in the ASEAN region. Besides an Asian Erasmus Professor at Kyoto University, Japan, and providing consultancy to Ministries of labor, education, public health, commerce, foreign affairs, professional authorities, and international organizations, she has also served as Vice President of the East Asian Economic Cooperation Council.

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INDEX Africa African 6, 187, 205 North and sub-Saharan Africa 10 sub-Saharan Africa 175 agency 154 individual life projects 154 aggregate studies 89 all household tasks 415 amah-chieh 14 anti-Chinese 370 anti-Chinese laws 283 Arab World 64 armed struggles 58 army of amah-chiehs 415 arranged 474 Asia 3, 7, 20, 28, 70, 77, 79 Asian 1, 492 n. 23 East Asia 66 Japan 72 Korea 72 Singapore 74 Taiwan 72 Asian migration/s 11, 265 Atlantic World 9 bigamy and adultery 463 bilateral agreement 401 bilateral labour agreements 343 biopolitical 293 biopower 293, 314 Black Atlantic 45 bound and free labour 46 bound labourers 38 Britain 156 broad patterns 264 brokered marriages 469 Cabinet Committee on Migrant Workers  430 Cantonese domestic servants. See amah-chieh caretakers 75 cash crop production 198 centralized and hierarchical 195 centre for schooling and higher education 75 certificate-skill connection 25 child circulation 95–96

child labour 97 child migrants 95 China 15 PRC 460 Chinese 3, 11 Chinese and non-Chinese flows 265 Chinese emigration 263 Chinese entrepreneurs 20 Chinese family 285 Chinese flows 265 Chinese kongsi 334 Chinese merchants 332 Chinese migrants 323 Chinese migrations 15 Chinese patriarchal stem family 367 Chinese women 413 cities in Africa 208 class 2 middle class 253 underclass 6 coercion 272 coercive labour forms 98 collectivization of agriculture 140 colonial history 190 colonial policy 337 colonial state 363 colonization 28 colonizer authorities 221 colonizer powers 12 colour 47 commercial domestic employment agencies 414 Communist government 461 complaints 418 concern 254 Conference of Berlin 188 conflict-driven border crossing 371 conjugal unions 22 contract labour 192 control-oriented 366 coolie recruitment program 391 Copperbelt in Central Africa 203 crossroads 217 decolonization 317 dekasegi 304 demobilized soldiers 234 demographic regime 180

564 demographic shifts 60 demographic transition 70 developed-developing world comparison 55 different family formations 506 differentiated approaches 32 discrimination 14 displaced persons 166 displacement of people 372 diversification strategy 345 domestic helpers 75 domestic hierarchy 86 domestic servants 85 domestic service/s 86, 386 domestic unit 175 domestic worker abuse 396 domestic workers 151 dominant race 88 Eastern Mediterranean 10 economic development 427 economic partnership 311 elderly 76 élite circuits of mobility 308 emigration of women 28 emigration rates 275 empirical knowledge 263 English and the Dutch East India Companies 21 entrepreneurial 252 ethnicity 313 ethnicized 26 Europe 130 European Union 112 Sicily 227 European residences 415 European societies 9 Europeans 1 Europe-South America-West Africa expansion 21 exclusionary laws 288 exploitation 14 export of jobs 20 families 8 family systems 10, 133 female domestic workers 151 female employment 89 female labour participation 100 female migrants 90 female migration 288 Femina migrans 151 feminization 104, 127 feminization of migration 20, 103

index Filipinos 485 Finnish immigrant women 64 first period of labour migration 487 flow of marriage migration 468 forced slave migration system 44 foreign domestic workers 395 foreigners 231 former Soviet republics 150 free and unfree labour 46 free migrations 22 gender 2, 175 feminization 1 gendered 1 global gender order 12 “problematization” of women 10 sex ratios 2 shifting gendered patterns of migration 13 women migrants 6 gender boundaries 253 gender orders 295 gender regimes 28 gender relations 44 gendered sexuality 254 gendered character of purchasing power  64 gendered division of labour in agriculture 177 gendered division of society 253 gendered migration 219 gendered perspective 138, 146 gendering of international migration 15 German-language regions 155 global competitiveness 348 global gender order 295 global householding 66, 71 global 69 global industrial economy 274 global movements 238 global power relations 42 global wave of mass migration 290 globalization 20 gold mines of South Africa 199 head taxes 195 highly skewed social structure 9 historical scholarship 451 history/ies 180, 486 homeland 451–452 homogenization 274 honourable and lady-like 251 “hostility” to France 221

household/s 8, 10, 65, 71, 79, 196 global householding 66 householding 79 household fluidity 96 household formation 149 household servant 408 housing 142 human mobility 43 human rights and labour abuses 504 human trafficking 379 illegalized emigration 235 illegalized immigration 235 Ilocos region 486 in their sphere 31 Indenture 271 indentured servitude 22 independent nation states 427 Indian 3 Indian migrants 324 Indian Ocean migrations 53 Indonesian domestic worker 440 Indonesian labour migration 13 Indonesian women 405 informal sector 386 instant marriages 468 institutionalized exploitation 432 insurance programs 310 interdisciplinary 7 internal dynamics 175 “internal” migration 299 internal migrants 492 international adoption 73 international brokered marriages 15 international economy 338 International Labour Migration 318, 485 international marriage 471 international migration 105 flow 108 levels 105 statistical level 114 statistics 106 trends 105 inter-regional systems 49 intra-/transcontinental 62 involuntary contract labour 22 Japan 12, 293, 301 n. 29, 311 n. 71, 312 Japanese army 300 kangani 327 kinship-based 333 kongsi pang. See londging house

index

565

labour forced 1 free 1 mui tsai 408 labour broker 413 labour brokerage state 345 labour circuits 267 labour migration 1, 6 labour recruitment company 397 labour standards 6 labour-sending states 343 land of immigration 245 Latin America 85–86 Brazil 98 Latin American 6 Mexico 95 n. 33 literacy 494 local gender orders 295 lodging house 413 love in marriage 478 love story 475 lower-skilled 355 ‘lowly’ position or status as servants  422 macro-regional level 57 Maghreb 217 Algeria 217, 219 Morocco 217, 229 Tunisia 217, 229 mahjar. See land of immigration mail-order brides 468 mainstream research 66 make money 243 Malaysia 353 male children 73 male migrant workers 365 manpower outflow 491 market response 170 marriage and family reunification 249 marriage migration 15, 467, 469 marriage pattern 137 material culture 48 media reports 14 media frame analysis 435 frames 447 Indonesian media 427 Malaysian media 427 Malaysian media frames 428 media attention 427 mixed treatment 444 negative media publicity 445 mediated marriages 469

566 Memoranda of Agreement 430 metropolitan France 225 middle class 101 Middle East 495 middlemen 397 migrant/s agents of development 5 anti-immigrant 3 anti-immigration 3 “associational” migrants 4 Chinese 317 Indian 317 labour migrants 3 migrants’ strategies 8 migrant workers 428, 441 permanent immigrants 4 migrants and their families 2 migrants’ strategies 64 migrants’ trajectories 42 migrating women 33 migration history 133 migration management 366 migration patterns 146 migration rate 134 migration regions 55 migration related to marriage 187 migration system 35 five major systems 44 proletarian mass migration 50 migration 175 female migration 284 labour migrations 317 migratory flows 365 military service 191 military-judicial apparatus 230 military-judicial destruction 229 mobility 141–142 modernity 263 more state controlled 433 mui tsai. See household servant national identity 241 nation-state 23 nativize 253 new economic corridors 320 new international division of labour 12 new world domestic order 12 new life 249 newcomers from Europe 51 newly industrialising nations 495 nineteenth-century transatlantic migrations 49 North America 152 Canada 159

index Hawai‘i 296 United States 108 n. 25 North America-bound migrations 154 North American Finnish socialists 165 North Atlantic World 57 nurses 491, 500 OPEC oil price hike 497 openly regulated recruitment methods  327 otherness 40, 91 otherness as cultural resource 39 others 153 outsourcing firms 360 overseas Chinese marriages 453 patria potestas. See power of the patriarch patriarchal household 87 patron-client relations 9 peasant in-migration 135 peddling 248 perennial migrants 188 period 1800 175 1930s Depression 52 1970s 5, 12 1980s 5, 13 late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries 12 nineteenth century 44 “permanent” wives 205 Philippines 15 place-space 4 plantation belt 45 plantation economies 22 plantation production 182 plural societies 55 policy regimes 80 population decline 70 power of the patriarch 93 power relationships 6 pre-colonial Maghreb 223 problematization of migration 125 pro-immigration policy 99 proletarian mass migrations 159 property settlements 464 qiaofu 452 race 2, 99 racial policies 10 racialization 162 racializers 47 racism 1

Ravenstein’s “laws” 110 receiving country 303 receptive and encouraging 365 recruiter 397 region of destination and period 54 regulated labour movements 324 remittances 77, 246, 496 repatriation company 352 reproductive work 26 retirement migration 79 retirement villas 78 return cycles 278 return rates 278 romantic love 475 rules of adjudication 463 rural outmigration 146 rural ties 135 Rural-urban migrants 85 Russia 133, 141 second major phase 488 second wave of globalization 317 secure 476 self-selection 30 self-willed migrations 56 sending country 303 sending societies 217 Malta 217 Sicily 217 sending society 153 Servant Project 157 service migrations 62 sexism 1 Singapore 349 single women 205 skill composition 497 skilled/skilled or unskilled 25, 355 skills classification 349 slave 180 slave labour 87 slave trade 27 slave trading 388 snakeheads 64 social attitudes 80 social isolation 399 social organization 177 social reproduction 175 South African migration system 201 South and Central Africa 208 South West Africa 206 Southeast Asia 12, 317, 353, 367 Singapore 103 Vietnamese 78 Soviet system 149

index

567

spontaneous labour migration 390 statistics 233 stereotypes 263, 436 stranger farmers 183 structural arrangements 153 sub-Saharan Africa 175 sub-Saharan African societies 27 sui haak. See labour broker surrogate motherhood 74 Swedish maids 163 sweet home 479 system of land tenure 137 temporary wives 205 territorial changes 139 Thai nationalistic policy 365 the Chinese 53 the Emigrant 241 the global order of difference 295 the global order of inequality 295 third significant phase 490 three phases 365 tiger economies 495 time- and culture-sensitive 161 transatlantic migrations 10 Transcultural Societal Studies 19, 37 transcultural 8 transculturalism 37 transculturation 37 translocal 19, 36 transnational 8, 19, 24, 36 transnational family 454 transnational migrants 20 transnationalism 23 transregional 19 trends 81 unauthorized migrant workers. See clandestine migrants undocumented foreign workers 394 undocumented migrants 362 units and scale 277 units of comparison 276 universally victimized 454 unlegislated 420 unlegislated employer-maid relations 419 unrestrained migration movements 325 unstipulated working hours 416 urban families 141 urban transition 72 urbanization 92 victimization 39 victimization paradigm 39

568

index

wage labour 198 waged domestic service 160 wealthy Chinese households 415 West Africa 207 White Atlantic 45 Whiteness 169 wives of the overseas Chinese. See qiaofu woman deceitful 256 good 256

ignorant 256 working 256 women “of colour” 168 women migrant workers 365 women’s immigration 245 women’s mobility 341 word-of-mouth 413 young women 152 zero immigration 236