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Immigrant Women in today’s United States: Historical Perspective

Today’s immigrants are best compared to the immigrants who entered the United States between 1830 and 1930. While some historians treat this century-long migration as a single movement of Europeans, most insist it encompassed two distinctive migrations. The first, from 1830 to 1890, transplanted families from northern and western Europe and British Canada to farming districts in the interior or “frontier” districts of a rapidly expanding United States. The second was a movement, mainly of men, from Europe’s southern and eastern peripheries, Asia, and Mexico, along with families from French Canada. This movement began in the 1830s but intensified with the rapid growth, construction and operation of the country’s urban industries and agribusiness after 1880. Historians once termed these the “old” and the “new” immigrants; now we more often call them “settlers” and “labor migrants.”

Comparisons of either group to today’s immigrants are somewhat problematic. Although there were refugees in both groups of earlier immigrants, they were not officially recognized as such, making it difficult to differentiate politically and economically motivated migrants as we can today. Today’s migrations resemble the “old,” “settler” migrations in their gender balance and rates of naturalization. In their work, distribution, and cultural distance from mainstream Americans, however, they more closely resemble the “new,” “labor” migrations.

The past and present were separated by a period of more than thirty years (1930-1965) of very low immigration. Immigration declined during these years as new public policies imposed sharp numerical restrictions through racial exclusions of Asians and small, discriminatory national quotas for southern and eastern Europeans. The decline also reflected the sudden and unexpected reversal of a half-century of globalization by such phenomena as depression, decolonization, and war (two “hot” wars and one “cold” war). It was during these three decades that gender ratios among immigrants became more balanced, in part because of provisions for family reunification within otherwise restrictive laws.

“Today’s” immigrants began entering the United States under a law passed in 1965 to complement domestic civil rights legislation. Two thirds of today’s immigrant women are from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East; a minority are from Europe. While many are low-level wage earners, housewives or girls, a large minority are well- educated, prosperous and cosmopolitan women from the elites of their decolonized homelands. Immigrants also enter a transformed country.

The United States has lost manufacturing jobs to other parts of the world and has revised its policies to eliminate officially sanctioned racism. It remains internally conflicted, however, over the balance between toleration of cultural diversity and expectations of national solidarity. New communication and transportation technologies may also make it easier than in the past to maintain transnational ties, although these were already

an important element of immigrant life in 1900.

“Today’s” immigrants began entering the United States under a law passed in 1965 to complement domestic civil rights legislation. Two thirds of today’s immigrant women are from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Middle East; a minority are from Europe. While many are low-level wage earners, housewives or girls, a large minority are well-educated, prosperous and cosmopolitan women from the elites of their decolonized homelands. Immigrants also enter a transformed country. The United States has lost manufacturing jobs to other parts of the world and has revised its policies to eliminate officially sanctioned racism. It remains internally conflicted, however, over the balance between toleration of cultural diversity and expectations of national solidarity. New communication and transportation technologies may also make it easier than in the past to maintain transnational ties, although these were already an important element of immigrant life in 1900.

Contemporary Female Immigration to the United States

Before about 1880, there were no obvious “experts” who studied immigrant women, or who claimed much expertise on their lives or problems. Thus the years around the turn of the century remain the best for comparing immigrant women, their problems, and the experts who study them with their present counterparts. Nevertheless, many contemporary feminists and specialists on immigrant women, much like the experts of 1900, continue to see the special advantages of woman-centered analyses. Who could deny that the migration, adjustment to life in the United States, incorporation, assimilation and cultural changes of immigrant women differ in critical ways from those of men? This basic assumption shares much with the woman-centered approach that would have dominated a conference held a century ago.

The presence of immigrant women at current literature reflects more than our era’s preference for cultural pluralism and diversity. It also reflects the fact that among today’s immigrant women, a sizeable minority are either women who arrived in the United States as exceptionally well-educated and English-speaking professionals or who remained in the United States after professional training in this country as foreign students.

However, the issues of domesticity, education for domesticity, and concerns about immigrant women’s sexuality, fertility, and morality had much greater salience for the experts of 1900 than they do in 2002. The researchers  in 1900 were also far more concerned with the problems of girls of the second generation. Have the changing roles of American women, and especially their increased commitment to wage-earning and professional development, on the one hand, and a more open female sexuality on the other, changed the relations of experts and immigrant women clients? Might our own desires to “empower” immigrant women not also reflect a peculiarly American insistence upon female emancipation, however defined, as a necessary consequence of women’s immigration to the United States?

Today’s strategies for change are fundamentally different from those of the past and reflect the very different, and more restrictive, immigration policies that have characterized the United States since the 1920s. Experts in 1900 would have been interested in legal solutions to immigrant women’s problems, but their focus was on creating a welfare state and securing legislation to protect women already residing safely within the United States. The zeitgeist of 21^st century in contrast, are more concerned with legal issues for women at the point of entry. A session on refugees, asylum and detention would have had no counterpart in 1900, when these were not yet recognized legal categories; similarly, there would have been no focus on law and policy related to entry and access to legal residency status rather than on the legal issues faced by immigrants once they are living in this country.

Today’s greater concern with laws governing entry reflects the fundamental reorientation of U.S. immigration policies toward restriction that began in the 1880s, intensified in the 1920s, and survived reform and revision of immigration policy in 1965. For immigrant women and men today the largest challenge of their lives, by far, is the work and money it requires to become an immigrant, rather than the older and more familiar problems of living as an alien immigrant in the United States.

Female immigration has become an increasingly prominent feature of contemporary immigration. Since 1993, the share of women as a proportion of total immigration has varied from 53 percent to 55 percent, which is much higher than in the past. Table 1 shows the steadily increasing share of female immigrants admitted to the United States in 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2000. By 2000, close to 60 percent of immigrants from Mexico, China, the Philippines and Vietnam were female. As in the past, female immigrants today are more likely to be married than are male immigrants. What is different, however, is that today’s female migrants are more diverse in type, including not only family-sponsor migrants but also independent labor migrants, refugees and asylees, as well as undocumented migrants.

The socioeconomic characteristics of immigrant women are also diverse. As in the past, many immigrant women arrived in the United States through the family reunification program, and their education and skills are generally lower than those of their male counterparts. However, today’s immigration includes a significant number of highly skilled, employer-sponsored female immigrant workers.

Studies suggest that  immigrant women from Mexico are on average young and have high fertility rates and low levels of education. They are less likely to be in the labor force or in unskilled, labor-intensive occupations than those from Jamaica, the Philippines, India and China. Those from Jamaica tend to be educated but are less likely to attain college degrees. Immigrant women from the Philippines and India have exceptionally high levels of education and are concentrated in professional and technical occupations. Those from China are more bifurcated in their levels of education and occupational status, with 44 percent having no high school education but nearly 40 percent having at least some college education.

Immigrant women are highly concentrated in certain occupations. Female immigrants from Jamaica and the Philippines are disproportionately nurses and medical professionals, while those from India are disproportionately engineers and scientists and those from Mexico and Central America work disproportionately in domestic work or menial factory jobs.

IMPLICATIONS FOR IMMIGRANT SETTLEMENT AND ADAPTATION

International female migration is no longer invisible in the contemporary world. Patterns of female immigration to the United States since the 1970s necessarily impact our understanding of immigrant settlement and adaptation.

First, the increased number of women in migrant influx points to a trend toward permanent settlement. Unlike traditional male labor migration, in which the sojourning pattern was typical, the arrival of women, who are more likely to stay permanently, has a significant impact on family formation, child rearing, and community building.

Second, as gendered migration reshapes settlement, it also redefines gender roles and family relations. Many immigrant women participate actively in the labor market, and their work role and economic contribution to household or family life are not just secondary but essential for survival or mobility. This change may be viewed as a liberating experience for women but may also create tension and new issues in gender relations. Many immigrant women find themselves caught up in conflicting obligations as they struggle to function simultaneously as wage workers, wives, and daughters while negotiating patriarchy and the gendered hierarchy in their new homeland.

Third, many immigrant women lack connections to social support networks and institutions in the mainstream society due to the constraints, such as poor English proficiency, unfamiliarity with the host society, and social isolation, to which all immigrants are subject. They are nonetheless primarily responsible for managing household affairs, raising children, and rebuilding social networks in addition to earning wages. Issues related to health care, child care, and the care of the elderly, as well as childbearing and prenatal care, have become particularly urgent.

Fourth, like their male counterparts, immigrant women have maintained close links to their countries of origins. Once settled in the United States, many of them have to support their families back in their home countries by sending remittances on a regular basis, thus thinning the limited resources available for settlement and mobility. They themselves may also become future sponsors for migrating family members, creating a key link in the chain of family migration.

In sum, female immigration in the twenty-first century is expected to increase steadily over time. As migrant women become increasingly visible in the workplace, in the community, and on the home front, they will shape the processes of settlement and mobility for years to come.