This book shines a light on the issues of governance, rights and the injustices that are meted out to an ever growing and vulnerable sector of the global migrant community – women. Whilst much of the current literature continues to focus on the issues of remittances and brain drain, there has been very little that examines concerns regarding governance and rights for female workers. This is especially true of the case of women who are particularly vulnerable and have been subject to sexual abuse. Such an omission is pressing given the fact that, as of 2009, only 42 countries have signed the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrants and Members of their Families. The authors thus demonstrate that migrants moving within the Global South are at a greater risk of being subject to social injustices on account of less developed welfare systems.

This book endeavours to take the conceptualisation of the relationship between transnational remittance exchanges and gender to a new level. Thus, inevitably, it provides a number of case studies of relationships between gender and remittances from around the world, highlighting different processes and practises. Thereby the authors seek to understand the impact of remittances on gender and gender relations, both at the sending as well as at the receiving end. For each case study authors ask how remittances affect gender identities and relationships but also vice versa. By itself this already adds a wealth of insights to a field that is remarkably understudied despite a volume of studies on gender and the feminization of migration in developing contexts. Chapters take an open, explorative approach to the relationship between gender and remittance behaviour with the aid of case studies focusing on transnational flows between migrants and countries of origin. With the wide variety of cases this book is able to provide conceptual insights to better understand how remittances affect gender identity, roles and relations (at both the receiving and sending end) and give specific attention to the roles of various actors directly and indirectly involved in remittance sending in current collectively organized remittance schemes from around the world.

In 2006, the United Nations reported on the “feminization” of migration, noting that the number of female migrants had doubled over the last five decades. Likewise, global awareness of issues like human trafficking and the exploitation of immigrant domestic workers has increased attention to the gender makeup of migrants. But are women really more likely to migrate today than they were in earlier times? In Gender and International Migration, sociologist and demographer Katharine Donato and historian Donna Gabaccia evaluate the historical evidence to show that women have been a significant part of migration flows for centuries. The first scholarly analysis of gender and migration over the centuries, Gender and International Migration demonstrates that variation in the gender composition of migration reflect not only the movements of women relative to men, but larger shifts in immigration policies and gender relations in the changing global economy. While most research has focused on women migrants after 1960, Donato and Gabaccia begin their analysis with the fifteenth century, when European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade led to large-scale forced migration, including the transport of prisoners and indentured servants to the Americas and Australia from Africa and Europe. Contrary to the popular conception that most of these migrants were male, the authors show that a significant portion were women. The gender composition of migrants was driven by regional labor markets and local beliefs of the sending countries. For example, while coastal ports of western Africa traded mostly male slaves to Europeans, most slaves exiting east Africa for the Middle East were women due to this region’s demand for female reproductive labor. Donato and Gabaccia show how the changing immigration policies of receiving countries affect the gender composition of global migration. Nineteenth-century immigration restrictions based on race, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, limited male labor migration. But as these policies were replaced by regulated migration based on categories such as employment and marriage, the balance of men and women became more equal – both in large immigrant-receiving nations such as the United States, Canada, and Israel, and in nations with small immigrant populations such as South Africa, the Philippines, and Argentina. The gender composition of today’s migrants reflects a much stronger demand for female labor than in the past. The authors conclude that gender imbalance in migration is most likely to occur when coercive systems of labor recruitment exist, whether in the slave trade of the early modern era or in recent guest-worker programs. Using methods and insights from history, gender studies, demography, and other social sciences, Gender and International Migration shows that feminization is better characterized as a gradual and ongoing shift toward gender balance in migrant populations worldwide. This groundbreaking demographic and historical analysis provides an important foundation for future migration research.

This book provides a nuanced, complex, comparative analysis of adolescent girls’ migration and mobility in the Global South. The stories and the narratives of migrant girls collected in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Sudan guide the readers in drawing the contours of their lives on the move, a complex, fluid scenario of choices, constraints, setbacks, risks, aspirations and experiences in which internal or international migration plays a pivotal role. The main argument of the book is that migration of adolescent girls intersects with other important transitions in their lives, such as those related to education, work, marriage and childbearing, and that this affects their transition into adulthood in various ways. While migration is sometimes negative, it can also offer girls new and better opportunities with positive implications for their future lives. The book explores also how concepts of adolescence and adulthood for girls are being transformed in the context of migration.

This volume makes the case for the fair treatment of female migrant workers from the global South who are employed in wealthy liberal democracies as care workers, domestic workers, home health workers, and farm workers. An international panel of contributors provide analyses of the ethical, political, and legal harms suffered by female migrant workers, based on empirical data and case studies, along with original and sophisticated analyses of the complex of systemic, structural factors responsible for the harms experienced by women migrant workers. The book also proposes realistic and original solutions to the problem of the unjust treatment of women migrant workers, such as social security systems that are transnational and tailored to meet the particular needs of different groups of international migrant workers.

This new, fully updated edition of Global Migration provides students with a thorough and grounded understanding of multiple dimensions of migration, including labour markets, citizenship, border control, integration and identity. Written by two geographers, the book incorporates insights from across the social sciences and is accessible to students in many disciplines. Providing a useful and timely introduction to migration, the textbook addresses migration in a holistic way and equips students with the tools they need to participate in contemporary debates about migration in sending and destination contexts. It conveys to students that the causes and effects of migration are geographically specific and contingent upon class, race, gender and other markers of social difference. Rather than identifying simple solutions to migration ‘problems’, the book encourages students to think about unauthorized migration, asylum, refugee resettlement, labour migration, and other forms of mobility (and immobility) from different vantage points. Global Migration serves as the go-to book for teaching advanced undergraduate and master’s-level students about the complexities of migration across nation-state borders.