Not without them: realising the sustainable development goals for women migrant workers

ABSTRACT

Drawing on multiple data sources, including key informant interviews, participant observation and archival study, this paper provides an analysis of the civil society’s role in foregrounding the agenda of women migrants in migration and development (M&D) fora, and reflects on its role in realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Yet, the dominant narrative within the state-led Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) tends to be a gender-blind migration for development approach, which emphasises national-level economic growth at the centre of migration processes, while negating the subjectivities of women migrants and neglecting their contributions to the global economy; this approach diverts attention to a narrow focus on macro-economic development through forms of financial remittances. Based on an examination of the GFMD as a site for gender mainstreaming M&D, we reflect on lessons learned as we look forward to achieving the SDGs. We argue that while the SDGs include some significant provisions for women in migration, only critical civil society advocacy and activism networked within grassroots organisations can address the structural changes necessary (such as a re-articulation of the care economy to value economic contributions of women’s reproductive work) to transform and improve the lived realities of women in migration and realise the SDGs in a manner that fosters their empowerment.     

Gender,migration and care deficits: what role for the sustainable development goals?

ABSTRACT

This article explores migration to higher income countries in light of collective commitments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and argues that domestic social protection and labour market policy will need to be modified to meet these commitments. We look primarily at women in care work, using a broad definition of care that includes home help, domestic work and health care. We argue that the failure to recognise and value unpaid care work has created a sustained labour demand for women migrant care workers in many of these labour-importing countries. Increasingly, immigrant women are being imported into host economies to care, often in informal settings, and frequently engaged by private households, without full access to social protection and labour rights. The consistent application of SDG goals 5 and 8 and their linking to existing labour rights norms and conventions could simultaneously address care deficits in home and host countries and protect the rights of care workers in labour-importing countries and ensure that migrant workers are able to claim these rights.     

International nurse migration from India and the Philippines: the challenge of meeting the sustainable development goals in training,orderly migration and healthcare worker retention

ABSTRACT

This paper examines nurse migration from India and the Philippines through the lens of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) 4.3 (access to training), 10.7 (orderly and responsible migration) and 3.c (retention of health workers). The international migration of health workers has increasingly featured on the agenda of global health agencies. Ameliorating the negative impact of international nurse emigration from low-income nations has been addressed by several western governments with the adoption of ethical recruitment guidelines, one element of an orderly migration framework. One of the challenges in creating such guidelines is to understand how the emigration of trained nurses influences health education and clinical training systems within nurse exporting nations such as India and the Philippines, and how these relate to various SDGs. This paper maps the connections between India’s and the Philippines’ increasing role in the provision of nurses for international markets and the SDGs related to training and migration governance and the retention of health workers. The paper calls for greater attention to the global structuring of migrant mobility in order to assess national abilities to meet SDG goals in these areas.     

Multilevelling EU external governance: the role of international organizations in the diffusion of EU migration policies

ABSTRACT

The thematic and geographical expansion of EU migration policies has gone along with an increasing mobilisation of pertinent international organisations such as the IOM and UNHCR. Combining insights from the external governance approach with IR debates on international institutional complexity, this article examines the dynamics behind this ‘multilevelling’ of EU external policies. Three strategies of institutional interplay are distinguished: counterweight, whereby international organisations act as independent complement or corrector to EU policy; subcontracting, referring to the outsourcing of EU project implementation to international organisations; and rule transmission, a process in which international organisations engage in transferring EU rules to third countries. Whereas greater organisational authority and autonomy have allowed the UNHCR to keep an independent voice as counterweight to EU action, both the UNHCR and IOM have become increasingly involved in the implementation of the EU's ‘global approach’ to migration via subcontracting and rule transmission. In sum, these processes shed a new light on the role of the EU within the international migration regime complex.     

The Global Forum on Migration and Development as a venue of state socialisation: a stepping stone for multi-level migration governance?

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) which has become one of the major global spaces for deliberations on migration but remains informal and non-binding. Drawing from literature on norm diffusion and state socialisation, it debates the role of the GFMD as a stepping stone for a more robust, multi-level and networked global migration governance by bringing together governments, global institutions, civil society and to a lesser degree the private sector. It is argued that the GFMD has the potential to socialise states in two ways that are conducive to establishing a multi-level global migration governance: First, states are exposed to discourses on migration as a truly global issue. The second way in which the GFMD process can socialise states is in the interaction with migrant civil society, thus potentially ‘blurring’ previously distant if not openly antagonistic relations. Since most states regard migration as one of their last ‘bastions of sovereignty’, the GFMD could provide a necessary first step as a trust-building measure. Providing participatory spaces and allowing agency for migrants and their organisations is not a mere optional feature but a crucial component for a truly multi-level and thus multi-stakeholder global migration governance.     

Sacred remittances: money,migration and the moral economy of development in a transnational African church

While remittances have come to play an important part in debates about migration and development, the link between religion, migration and transnational financial flows has yet to be understood in its full complexity. Drawing upon a multi-sited ethnography of a transnational African church, this article addresses this overlooked dimension of migrant transnationalism by analysing how religious donations converted into ‘sacred remittances’ produce a moral economy of religious life shaped by a politics of belongings at various scales. The article discusses the social meaning that diasporic actors attach to religious donations sent to the homeland (the Congo) and how this compares to the practice of sending remittances to family members. The article also argues that transnational circulation of sacralised money operates within a field of meanings and practices associated with moral expectations, entitlements and differentiated regimes of value. Sacred remittances, as ‘global money’, may generate a diversity of transnational linkages between donors and recipients but they remain embedded in landscapes of status and power.     

Breaking the silences,breaking the frames: a gendered diasporic analysis of sexual violence in the DRC

ABSTRACT

The role of diasporas in fuelling conflict has been extensively studied, with much less attention being paid to their role in peace-building. It is increasingly recognised that diasporas from conflict regions are contributing to the reconstruction of their countries of origin, acting as ‘peace-makers’ rather than ‘peace-wreckers’. Women and men migrants have also been found to engage differently towards their country of origin, but attention to women’s activism is still scarce. This article addresses the issue of political activism by Congolese women in the diaspora in both the UK and Belgium. Their activities are assessed analytically through the prism of ‘mechanisms of framing’, which shape the ways in which messages are conveyed during the mobilisation process. The paper discusses diagnostic, motivational and prognostic frames to address sexual and gender-based violence against Congolese women in the protracted conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Framing strategies vary among Congolese diaspora women’s groups depending on the national context in which they are embedded (Belgium and the UK) but a variety of narratives is also discerned which transcends and is shared among Congolese women beyond national borders.