The following is a reprint of the lead article in the National Council for Research on Women's Issues Quarterly, volume 1, number 2, focused on immigrant women and girls. For more information, contact Lorraine Kenny, coordinating editor, National Council for Research on Women, 530 Broadway, 10th floor, New York, NY 10012. 212-274-0730; fax 212-274-0821; email kenny@is.nyu.edu

The Feminization of Immigration: Give us your tired, your hungry, your poor, no more

Among their election strategies, proponents of Californias "Save Our State" initiative deployed the image of a young, brown-skinned, pregnant, single mother from Mexico living illegally in the barrios of Los Angeles, sending her children to public schools, and making her way to the state-funded health clinic for free prenatal care. The approach worked. Californians passed the initiative, Proposition 187, by a three-to- two margin. Whites constituted 75 percent of the voting electorate, which cast its ballots in favor of cutting off social services like schooling and nonemergency medical care to undocumented immigrants and their children.1

Why was the idea of this immigrant woman and her children so effective in getting out the vote?

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration, contends that the recent anti-immigration campaign in California and in the nation at large scapegoats women because women are key players in settling and building communities. "The xenophobia of the early 80s focused on labor, while the more recent backlash against immigrants focuses on reproduction, or everything it takes to bring a new generation into the labor force," says Hondagneu-Sotelo.

Since the passage of the first immigration restrictions in the late-nineteenth century, immigration opponents in the US have blamed "unchecked" immigration for the countrys so-called overpopulation and the depletion of its social and natural resources. One such group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), played a significant role in promoting California's Proposition 187 and in fostering similar anti-immigrant forces in other states, including Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Founded in 1979, by former president of Zero Population Growth, John Tanton, FAIR is a national educational and lobbying network "concerned with the adverse effects of out-of-control immigration." The group believes that immigration causes overpopulation, which in turn encroaches on the countrys fragile coastal wetlands and consumes its prime farmlands. Likewise, immigration fuels unemployment, depresses wages, and overburdens the USs "sophisticated social safety net."2 With a membership of over 50,000, FAIR is living proof that "invasion rhetoric" sells.

Who overpopulates a nation more than an influx of young, nonwhite women? Or so the argument goes.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 ostensibly sought to limit immigration in the name of safeguarding jobs for US-born laborers by penalizing employers who hire undocumented workers. However, efforts by a strong agricultural lobby saw to it that their sector of the workforce, the mostly male Mexican and Central American seasonal employees, could now apply for permanent resident status under a Special Agricultural Workers provision. As a result of what amounted to IRCAs gender-biased amnesty program, more Mexican women and their children began to cross the border without legal authorization.3 Some came to join their newly legalized husbands and fathers and some to fill the growing demand for female workers in the hidden service economy.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) calculates that between 1980 and 1990, the total population of unauthorized immigrants in the US hovered at 2.6 million, and following the 1986 IRCA amnesty program, the number of unauthorized immigrants in California decreased. As such, an INS report concludes, "Population size is not the primary reason for the greater concern about unauthorized immigrants...in California in 1994."4

Likewise, it is not true that immigrants drain more than they contribute to the economy. Recent Urban Institute studies show that immigrants pay significantly more in taxes than they cost in services: when all is said and done, they generate a $25 to $30 billion annual net surplus.5 Similarly, immigrants create more jobs than they take. And as factory workers, housekeepers, and home-based child-care and health-care providers, immigrants fill low-wage, no-benefits jobs that the native population doesnt want, while providing needed services that substantially contribute to middle-class quality of life. Researchers also project that as baby boomers come of age and start to cash in on their entitlements, employed young-adult immigrants will ultimately keep the Social Security system solvent.6

So whats really going on? Why all the public outcry over immigration, and why are women bearing the brunt of the attacks?

"The easiest thing for a politician to do is blame immigrant women and children because they dont vote," says Wendy Walker, author of the forthcoming The Other Side of the Asian American Academic Success Story. Walker suggests that singling out women in the anti-immigration/social services debate masks the real problem: the graying of America. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, DC reports that in 1993, nearly two-thirds of the federal Medicaid budget underwrote the costs of providing health care to the elderly. In 1994, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that cutting off Medicaid to immigrants would only save the federal government two billion dollars in a budget that nears 100 billion. In light of these numbers and the fact that the elderly represent a solid and consistent voting bloc, targeting immigrant women and children is politically expedient.

Class Comforts

Ironically, immigrant women increasingly care for our aging population as well as our children through informal, private-sector employment. While recent US Department of Labor statistics show a shrinking pool of domestic workers--942,000 in 1983 to 755,000 in 1991--they also show a rise in the number of women working. In 1991, nearly two-thirds of all women age 16 and over were in the labor force; in 1992, more than 16 million mothers with pre-school children worked full time.7 Such figures beg the question: Who is home cleaning the house, making the meals, and taking care of the kids?

The "Nannygate" scandal of 1993--set off when a congressional committee discovered that Clintons first nominee for attorney general, Zo=EB Baird, had hired two illegal Peruvian immigrants to work in her home-- vividly answered the question. The International Labour Office estimates that more than 350,000 illegal immigrant women work as domestics in the current US market.8 Though these women are ultimately statistically invisible, the effects of their labor are more than apparent in the lives of professional families throughout the US.

Among legal immigrants, women significantly outnumbered their male compatriots in 1993 for the first time since the early 1980s. A study by the Rand Corporation attributes this demographic shift to the fact that women can easily find jobs in the unregulated private sector.9 Like their illegal sisters, documented women domestics remain hidden from government statisticians because many of their employers pay them under the table and do not pay Social Security taxes on their wages.

What is known about the last decade paints a polarized picture of the US economy. The Women's Bureau of the US Department of Labor documents that though womens overall earnings grew faster than mens, the number of women living in poverty skyrocketed and the disparity between white and black workers of either gender also grew. "Whats true in todays economy is a greater inequality of income among women. Anytime you create a situation where rich women can buy poor womens labor, you create divisions among women," cautions economist Nancy Folbre.

The Center for Immigrants Rights (CIR) in New York City is one of several organizations around the country that advocates for immigrant household workers through its Workers' Rights Project. "This is a worldwide women's issue, for household workers are increasingly immigrant women from the Caribbean, from Eastern Europe, Central America, and the Philippines. For these women work, any kind of work in the developed world, still means a step up from the limited opportunities at home," argues Ursula Levelt, director of education at CIR.10 Through a joint project with NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, Nannies, Caretakers, Housekeepers: You Have Rights!, CIR distributes information to immigrant women and their employers about domestic-workers' rights under US immigration and labor laws.

The global picture

As Levelt suggests, womens immigration experiences in the US are part of a complex global story that has been in the making for some time. The international debt crisis; trade agreements; foreign assistance programs; the end of the cold war; civil, ethnic, and religious strife; government-sponsored human rights violations; famine; AIDS and other infectious diseases; floods, earthquakes, and massive fires; industrial disasters; overpopulation; and economic inflations, recessions, and embargoes have all set the stage for an unprecedented number of people to leave their homes in pursuit of safety, economic stability, and cultural freedoms. The Womens Commission for Refugee Women and Children reports that in 1993, 80 percent of the worlds 44 million refugees were women and their dependent children either displaced within their own countries or compelled by dire living conditions to migrate across international borders.11

A statement issued by the 1994 American Assembly on World Migration and US Policy, Threatened Peoples, Threatened Borders, notes that during the cold war, US migration policy intended to stabilize "friendly" governments like El Salvador and destabilize "unfriendly" ones, like Cuba.12 Recent US military interventions in Haiti, along with the Clinton administrations struggle to rescue Mexicos plummeting currency and its failed attempts to leverage peace treaties and work with UN forces in the former Yugoslavia underscore the degree to which the US still bears considerable responsibility for fostering or disrupting global stability in the post-cold war era.

US domestic and foreign policies play an instrumental role in setting international populations in motion--a fact largely missing from current state and federal immigration debates. "We have chosen to not view ourselves as part of the international situation," says Wendy Walker. Such blind spots make it easier to scapegoat certain groups of people rather than address the larger national and global policy issues.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Given that the world has undergone major political and social shifts since the US last recast its immigration policies in 1986 and 1990, it is not surprising that the nation is currently embroiled in a battle over whom to welcome and how to welcome them. The legacy of US immigration policy is deeply entrenched in racial, ethnic, class, and gender battles. Starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, immigration legislation ebbed and flowed around national-origins quotas and prohibitions, until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act made it illegal to base INS policy on nationality, race, or ancestry. As current anti-immigrant forces increasingly hold pregnant immigrant women and their children responsible for the nation's woes, it becomes clear that race, ethnicity, class, and gender still motivate the discussion. Congressional leaders underscore this connection in their strident calls for cutting welfare benefits to immigrant and low-income women of color.

Organizations throughout the country are starting to forge links between immigrant populations and US- born communities of color. For example, the Filipina Career Awareness Program in Union City, CA partners immigrant with US-born Filipina girls to strengthen the leadership, academic, and social skills of girls in both groups. (See IQ, Girls Report.) The new Workers Center Movement unifies immigrant and nonimmigrant workers around labor and community concerns. "The Workers' Center model functions across racial, ethnic, and regional differences. It allows for diversity," explains JoAnn Lum of the Chinese Workers Association in New York City's Chinatown. (See IQ, Working Trends.) Leni Marin of the Family Violence Prevention Fund in San Francisco reports that the battered immigrant womens provision made it into the 1994 Violence Against Womens Act because immigrant-rights and anti-domestic violence advocates worked together. (See IQ, Policy in Action I.) And, in the wake of the passage of Proposition 187, immigrant advocacy organizations and progressive social service groups in California are shoring up their joint opposition to welfare reform proposals currently making their way through Congress. (See IQ, Special Report.)

These and other programs underscore the fact that the immigration debate is as much about community issues and values as it is about the economy, legislation, and the INS. As Pierrette Hondagneu- Sotelo asserts, "Political and economic transformations may set the stage for migration, but they do not write the script."13 How factory-owners and professional families treat the immigrant women they employ affects the day-to-day lives of individual women workers as well as public perceptions of immigrants and immigration. Likewise, understanding how the national discussion positions immigrant women as the literal and figurative bearers of culture makes it clear that the current anti-immigration fervor is not just about demographics and labor markets; it is about how we see ourselves as a nation at home and abroad.

1B. Drummond Ayres Jr., "Californians Pass Measure on Aliens; Courts Bar It," New York Times, Thursday, November 10, 1994: B7.

2.Federation for American Immigration Reform, "Are You Concerned About Immigration? You Should Be." Brochure.

3.Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of=

Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 26.

4.Robert Warren, "Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States, by Country of Origin and State of Residence: October 1992." Immigration and Naturalization Services, Statistics Division, April 29, 1994. Photocopy, 23, 21.

5."A Sourcebook for the Immigration Debate," Urban Institute Policy and Research Report volume 24, number 2 (Summer 1994): 21.

6.David E. Hayes-Bautista, Werner O. Schink, and Jorge Chapa, The Burden of Support: Young Latinos in an Aging Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).

7.US Department of Labor, Womens Bureau, 1993 Handbook on Women Workers: Trends & Issues (Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, 1994), 19, 1.

8.Peter Stalker, The Work of Strangers: A Survey of International Labour Migration (Geneva, Switzerland: International Labour Office, 1994), 149.

9.Frank D. Bean, Barry Edmonston, Jeffrey S. Passel, Undocumented Migration to the United States: IRCA and the Experience of the 1980s (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1990).

10.Ursula Levelt, "Household Work: The Oldest Sweatshop," Women & Philanthropy News volume 17, number 3 (Fall/Winter 1994): S4.

11.Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children, Annual Report 1993, 2. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in the 1970s there were approximately 2.7 million refugees worldwide, and in the 1980s, 8.2 million. Sima Wali, "Developing Gender-Based Program and Donor Policies as if Refugee and Displaced Women Mattered," (Washington, DC: Refugee Women in Development, 1994). Photocopy. 1.

12.Threatened Peoples, Threatened Borders: World Migration and US Policy. Final report of the 86th American Assembly, (November 10-13, 1994), 8.

13.Hondagneu-Sotelo, 187.