Issues in research on women, international migration and labor

APMJ – Chronicling 25 years of migration in Asia and the Pacific

When the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal was launched in 1992, it was the only journal in the region devoted exclusively to the study of migration. At that time, temporary labor migration from and within the region was already significant and it has continued to grow in volume, and national migration policies have evolved to cope with it. International migration has also received increasing attention from the United Nations and several targets of the Sustainable Development Goals explicitly refer to it. APMJ has chronicled most of these changes and emphasized such themes as migration and macro-level development, the human rights of migrants, women in migration, the social impacts of migration, national policy-making, multiculturalism and transnationalism.

As migration research has been strengthened in universities and institutes within Asia, coverage by countries has shifted from articles about the region as a whole and Australia to a preponderance of articles concerning East Asia, especially China, Japan and the Republic of Korea, and a similar shift has been observed in the origin of the lead authors. Because the Journal largely reflects the research being conducted in Asia and the Pacific, gaps in coverage relate to migration from South Asia and to the Middle East, the Central Asian migration system, forced migration, the role of private recruitment agencies and methodological approaches to migration research.

Gendering Skilled Migratory Streams: Implications for Conceptualizations of Migration

The dominant paradigm in studies of international migration has largely neglected the significance of skilled women in migratory streams. Much recent analysis of international migration has been overly influenced by conceptualizations developed in the context of the migration of women who engage in unskilled labor, or of ungendered but implicitly androcentric theorizations of skilled migration, whether arising from a modernization thesis or globalization thesis. In this paper I explore the legacies of such theorizations and the ways in which the presence of skilled women can challenge these conceptualizations. This paper suggests the need to rethink the household-labor market-immigration nexus in the light of issues of social stratification which a focus on skilled women migrants raises.

Mapping Gender and Migration in Sociological Scholarship: Is It Segregation or Integration?

A review of the sociological research about gender and migration shows the substantial ways in which gender fundamentally organizes the social relations and structures influencing the causes and consequences of migration. Yet, although a significant sociological research has emerged on gender and migration in the last three decades, studies are not evenly distributed across the discipline. In this article, we map the recent intellectual history of gender and migration in the field of sociology and then systematically assess the extent to which studies on engendering migration have appeared in four widely read journals of sociology (American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Demography, and Social Forces). We follow with a discussion of these studies, and in our conclusions, we consider how future gender and migration scholarship in sociology might evolve more equitably.

The globalisation of the nursing workforce: barriers confronting overseas qualified nurses in Australia

Recent decades have coincided with the rapid globalisation of the nursing profession. Within Australia there has been rising dependence on overseas qualified nurses (OQNs) to compensate for chronic nurse shortages related to the continued exodus of Australian nurses overseas and to emerging opportunities in other professions. Between 1983/4 and 1994/5, 30 544 OQNs entered Australia on either a permanent or temporary basis, counter-balancing the departure overseas of 23 613 locally trained and 6519 migrant nurses (producing a net gain of just 412 nurses in all). The period 1995/6--1999/2000 saw an additional 11 757 permanent or long-term OQN arrivals, with nursing currently ranked third target profession in Australia's skill migration program, in the context of continuing attrition among local nurses. This pattern of reliance on OQNs is a phenomenon simultaneously occurring in the UK, the US, Canada and the Middle East --- the globalisation of nursing reflecting not merely Western demand but the growing agency and participation of women in skilled migration, their desire for improved quality of life, enhanced professional opportunity and remuneration, family reunion and adventure.