Migration = Empowerment

When discussing migration in class, a motivation for many migrants to leave their home country was the aspect of empowerment. Women have begun to leave their families in order to work, acting as the head of the family. Using the skills that they already know, often with many having high education levels, they leave to go to a host country to find jobs.

Women are more likely than men to send money home, and more of it, which helps their family and their home countries economy. They often will take their children with them, which ultimately will give them a better life too. When looking at these different host countries, women are often perceived to be less threatening than migrant men when looking at the fear of possible violence and taking jobs from citizens in the host country. Women are typically welcomed and helped in communities within their host countries.

When looking up migration and gender, I found this video “Feel How Gender Shapes Migration”:

The short video shows an interactive exhibition at Palais des Nations in Geneva about gender and migration, which asked those who viewed it to experience how gender influences different paths of migration. Those in the video can be seen discussing how the audience is able to put themselves into the shoes of those who have risked their lives and family in order to migrate.

Migration today is truly about going back and forth from your host country to back home. With women migrating, taking the role of head of the house and then coming home allows the empowerment she has received to be returned to her home country and spread to other women. Women who are then empowered may also decide to migrate to a host country for work causing a cycle of empowerment

Another aspect from the class that was covered in this video was the concept of a single story and how no two migrants are the same, coming from different genders, backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, religions, disabilities, ages and sexual identities.

This tweet from the Official account of the United Nations Migration Agency really ties together the connection between female migration and empowerment.

Empowering women, empowers humanity.

To achieve the Global Goals & leave no one behind, #TimeIsNow to speak up for gender equality & women’s rights! #IWD2018 pic.twitter.com/VUuBvSQQQg

— IOM - UN Migration (@UNmigration) March 4, 2018

With the large amounts of female migration, the need and want for equality and ensured rights have risen. Empowering women through migration will indeed empower humanity. We all need to work together to reach that.

-Hannah Moskowitz

"The world upside down": The influx of Spanish immigration to Morocco

As I was trying to find a topic to write my blog post about, I wrote "Spaniards' attitudes towards Moroccan immigrants" and discovered something interesting. As of recently, there has been an influx of Spanish citizens migrating to Morocco in search of work. The article is titled "'The world upside down': The Rise of Spanish Immigration to Morrocco". This immediately intrigued me since we have just recently read Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits which is, as we all know, about the opposite--Moroccan immigantion to Spain. As I clicked on the video that came along with the article I thought how is it possible that in such short of time circumstances has changed for these countries?

The two-minute video that coincides with the articles discusses the life of a recent migrant to Morocco from Spain. In it, Marcos Martinez Bacelo is a 36-year-old mechanic from Vigo, Spain who is a husband and father of two. Since the unemployment rate is at a staggering 26% in Spain from when this article was written in 2013, he decided to leave his family and migrant to find work.

The number of Spaniards registered as residents in Morocco have risen dramatically between 2003 and 2011. Additionally, the number of undocumented residents has risen over the past years.

Now, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits was written in 2005 and I find it interesting how only in a matter of 8 years, situations have totally flipped. In the article, it discusses how absolutely no one would have imagined that in Spain there would be an influx of emigration to Morocco. The standard quota was what we read in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. However, I wanted to find out if the lives of women migrants were any better or worse than the lives of Moroccan immigrants. I was not able to find any sources about the lives of Spanish women immigrating to Morocco but to take anecdotal evidence from the video, it can be said that these people are not leaving for refugee status. Rather, they are leaving due to rising unemployment. This, to me, is the biggest difference between the two time periods of immigration. While Moroccan immigration was necessary for finding work, political asylum, and refugee status, Spanish immigration is merely just for the necessity of seeking employment.

This difference could have a different impact on women than on the Moroccan women. One might see more men like Marcos Martinez Bacelo who are going to seek work to support their families. This differs than what we have seen from our readings--single or married women migrating to support their families or even a young single man immigrating to find work. I don't believe that we have seen nor read about fathers immigrating to support their families. I could be wrong on this subject, but it seems that because Spain is a wealthier country, there might be more immigration of fathers rather than mothers.

Here is the link to the article: https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2013/0321/The-world-upside-down-The-rise-of-Spanish-immigration-to-Morocco

Hannah Martin

Gender and The Environment

              For next weeks reading it covers how the environment impacts women in a different way than men. We have not discussed this in class yet, so if any of my ideas and points are incorrect, please correct me! There are several main points that I got from the reading. First, is that many people see women as ‘managers’ of the environment. After all, we do call it ‘Mother Nature’ and ‘Mother Earth’. Women are seen to be more concerned about environmental issues but tend to be less active on these issues. The article also talks about how the environment adds on to the long list of women’s caring roles which are often cheap, unappreciated, and unrewarded work. The main issues the article proposes for women is access to water and firewood, effects of natural disasters, and climate change. Access to natural resources is becoming a women’s problem.

              The first outside resource I would like to bring in is this YouTube clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jM524nIzQdQ . This is a short 7-minute clip that covers ecofeminism is a few different aspects. The first thing they mentioned that I found interesting is that the environment is a new intersection for women. Environmental exploitation and gender oppression overlap each other to create this intersectionality. This is essentially what ecofeminism is all about. Capitalist patriarchy is a term that is also mentioned in this video which is not something that was immediately brought to my attention. Capitalist society gives the patriarchal society control over means of production and the end result. Nature as resources and women as workers serve as a mean to an end, which is profit. This type of system reinforces the hierarchy that exists in our society. I found this video to nicely sum up what our reading was about for next week and highly recommend watching it!

              https://www.unenvironment.org/explore-topics/sustainable-development-goals/why-do-sustainable-development-goals-matter/goal-5 This is the next website I would like to talk about. This is the United Nations Environmental Program website which has so many resources on it. It talks about gender and what they are doing to try and fix issues that surround the environment. “Enhancing property rights and access to land and natural resources to women can contribute to reduce gender inequalities, improve their livelihood options and poverty status.” In the YouTube video it talks about how women have to walk about 6 hours a day to find water and firewood. If we can give women access to natural resources, this would help reduce the labor involved in this. I think that we take for granted our natural resources. For now, they are plentiful. However, we know that if we keep going the way that we are, they will soon be non-existent to an extent. I think that we need to put the focus back into saving our natural resources but also giving women access to what they need to survive. No one should benefit off women’s labor, except the women themselves.

Lumos

In class we discussed the dangers that people who migrate face and people who are internally displacement. One of these dangers, although not the most common, was trafficking, which is a huge focus on NGOs (so much of one that it loses focus on some of the real issues migrants face). Also, before this discussion in class we have discussed some of the effects of poverty on women and families. This reminded me of an organization (I am unsure if they are a charity or NGO) called Lumos. They deal with children who have been placed into orphanages even if they have loving families. Here is there website explaining who they are and what their goals are:

https://www.wearelumos.org/who-we-are/

From what they state in their website, children are often thrown into orphanages when they have families who happen to be struggling. Instead of helping the families, they just take their children away and place them into institutions. By 2050 their goal is to have no more children institutionalized but rather just have social services that aid these families. If we look at the “What We Do” page we can see exactly what they do:

https://www.wearelumos.org/what-we-do/

 Here we can see that since 2009 over 31,000 children have been saved from going into harmful institutions and kept with their families instead thanks to Lumos. I found out about this group from J.K. Rowling. It does make me wonder if there are hierarchies and what their ‘lower’ workers have to say about it because of “Playing With Fire’s” critique on their own NGO. As an education major, I do love how they empower children and have them as the main goal in their mind. In order to fully understand the issue, let’s look to where they explain it properly:

https://www.wearelumos.org/what-we-do/the-problem/

 The first box when you scroll down states that an estimated of 8 million children live in orphanages and other institutions around the world and how research shows that this impacts them negatively in their development. The real problem is that many of these children have loving families but just happened to be born in the wrong place and wrong time. For an intersectional viewpoint that this organization takes, they have a focus on children who have disabilities. Due to the costs of healthcare that can be associated with certain disabilities, families often give these children up to orphanages. Not because they do not love them, but because they realize that they cannot pay for the care that the children need and love them so much that they give them up to someone who can. Lumos thinks that is wrong, and that those families need support instead of giving up their child. They also specify the difference between an orphanage and a high-quality residential care facility. I love the idea of this organization, but I also would love to see a book like “Playing With Fire” about it just to see if it really is all that it is cracked up to be.

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Gender Migration and Transnational Families

This week in class we have been discussing the topic migration. Some things we have covered has been basic information on migration, flow of gender migration, why people migrate, and forced migration/ refugees. All of the discussions in class have opened my eyes to the reality of the world that we live in. The assigned reading Tuesday October 9^th Gender and International Migration: Globalization, Development, and Governance was a very informative read. I knew basic information and migration and factors that make people migrate.

I learned more about how women are more likely to be temporary and do less skilled work. They are more likely to do informal work because majority of these jobs are done by undocumented people and the skilled work is kept for the men. I learned how gender plays a huge roles in the flow of migration and why people migrate and how each gender has different pull and push factos that influence them. One thing that I found informational from the Globalization, Development, and Governance article was that there is a rise of transnational families, including transnational mothering, and the effects on children who are part of these transnational ties.

I was curious to find out more about transnational families and transnational mothering and I came across the article, Transnational Mothering: A Source of Gender Conflicts in the Family from the University’s library. This article looks at the migration from the Philippines and emergence of transnational mothering. Majority of the Filipino migrant workers have been women, which forces reconstitution of gender relations in the family. Children of migrant mothers and fathers, migrants themselves, and other family members were interviewed to get perspectives and experiences from people living within a transnational family and mothers gender roles. The role of women in the family has changed, and many men are thought of as incompetent caregivers to their children because it is supposed to be the “mother’s role”. This article talks about controverseries such as: whether mothers should be allowed to migrate without their children, feelings of abandonment from children, and many more. I found this very interesting because it talks about how mothers were sending majority of their finances back home, forcing the men to cook, clean, and care for the children. This brought to light how females working can drastically change the gender dynamics in a home as discussed in class.

https://heinonline-org.proxy.library.ohio.edu/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/nclr88&div=55&?&collection=journals