Servants of Globalization

"Last year for the first time 50% of all migrants in the world were women. In some places – for example, in Europe – we have more than that. We have 51% of migrants who are women. Women are a very powerful and important part of migration today, which has been overlooked in migration studies. It’s important to look at this trend of feminisation of migration. This is the term that is used. This is a very good book to understand the role of women. It’s also good for looking at the role they play in globalisation, the position they have in this post-industrial era, in which we have more and more demand on a female labour force by the middle-class families in global cities. Women in the rich world have more rights, they work more. They are not housewives anymore. They don’t have time. And men don’t have time either, to cook and clean. So who does these jobs? – women from Asia. [Filipinas] are working in more than 130 countries – the largest female labour migration – from LA to Dubai. What is important in relation to the gender aspect is that usually they leave their own family. They leave their own kids to come to Rome or Los Angeles or Dubai to cook for other people’s kids, to take care of other people’s kids, when at the same time their own kids miss their own mothers. It’s a very tragic thing. Transnational families are increasing. Kids and husbands are back at home, and these female labourers work in other places sending back money. In the Philippines these women are recognised by the state as national heroes, because they go abroad and send money back home. You have cases of trafficking, sexual abuses, but we have also a change in demand. We don’t need a cheap labour force for factories anymore. We are not in the Europe of the 1960s. We don’t need that kind of labour force. We need people who can cook for us, clean for us, and take care of our kids. The demand from factories is decreasing, and the demand for labour in the service sector is increasing. This maybe answers your question about the difference between male and female. Among migrants to Italy, men work in the agricultural industry. But female immigrants to Italy usually work as babysitters or as housekeepers. Usually in migrant studies people make a distinction between voluntary migration and forced migration. Forced migration is when there is no agency, there is no choice. And one extreme case of forced migration is slavery. But if we disregard slavery, even in the harshest situations, people make a choice. People make a choice to migrate or not. For me this kind of distinction is not very clear, what we mean by force, what we mean by choice. If I am jobless and I’m offered a job in another part of Sweden, but my family is here, do I have a choice? Or think about all these computer engineers in American companies who are sent to different parts of the world. If they don’t go to Tokyo, or don’t want to go to New Delhi, they lose their job. Is there any choice there? Nobody put a gun to their head and said, “You have to go”. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Notions of choice and force are not as clear as we think they are. All the choices are formed by age, class, resources, gender, sexuality. It depends on how much money I have, my network, what kind of education I have, if I’m a man or woman, etc. We are talking about “refugeeness”. We created a model of a refugee which became the model for the refugee. We imagine the refugee or the undocumented migrant in a particular way, as a particular sort of human being. Have you ever seen any picture of a refugee who is well-dressed and happy? No. We always see them in misery. Refugees are identified with misery and problems. We look at them in mass as victims, voiceless, faceless, without agency, without history, without background, without choice, so it affects how we treat them and restricts their ability to integrate and to make a new life in the new country."