After this excursion through different models of gendered mobility between
ENP countries and the EU, we now come back to our initial question.
What are the limits of ENP policies regarding female migration
across the eastern and southern Mediterranean? To date the ENP
framework does not seem to have taken significant steps to promote a
safe and autonomous migration specifically for women from the ENP to
the EU. The cases of Moroccan fruit pickers in Spain and Ukrainian domestic
workers in Poland show how women’s labour opportunities are
predominantly characterised by temporariness, difficult working conditions
and poor legal protection. There is a transnational hierarchy that
confines women to care and domestic work, or to the seasonal agricultural
sectors, which are all variably located across a continuum of illegality,
exploitation and invisibility. In both the countries of origin and
destination women suffer from economic and structural disadvantages.
Migrant women come into sight as transnational figures more suitable
to find work in flexible (agriculture) or gender-biased (domestic and
care) labour markets. At the same time, they are far from being prospective
full citizens in the countries of destination; on the contrary, they are
destined to short periods of stay, invisibility and to being on the margins
of social and civil entitlements. The type of circular migration they are
embedded in, moreover, allows for the welfare costs to be totally upheld
by the country of origin.
From the perspective of ENP frameworks and categorisations, migrant
women do not seem to fall into the category of the economically
rewarding working migrant “who sends remittances,” nor into that of
the entrepreneur who facilitates trade across the borders, nor finally into
that of the cultural mediators that spurs innovation amongst his/her
diaspora fellow members.
The case of Moldovans in Italy might be seen as the exception to this
overall view, but the specific connotation of the employment available to
these working women in the Italian home care sector (thus very isolated,
badly remunerated and socially stigmatised) prevents them from
becoming transformative social actors, either in the country of origin or
of destination. It is also a sector where migrant women cannot generally fulfil their aspirations by capitalising on their education and the work
experience they have accumulated in the country of origin, resulting in
their gradual deskilling. Domestic work, in general, comes into sight as a
significantly double-edged job opportunity for migrants, as far as it offers
employment on the fringes of an EU labour market, in a sector characterised
by lack of rights and by a scarce economic and social mobility.
- 1. Enhance mobility partnerships for permanent work (i.e. along the lines of the Moldova-Italy agreement, not the Morocco-Spain agreement) between all countries of the European Neighbourhood and the EU member states;
- 2. Avoid limitations to the employment of migrant women in which their family situation is used as a parameter for assessing their suitability for the work;
- 3. Promote the entrance of women in non-traditionally precarious and flexible labour sectors. This can be done, for example, by facilitating the recognition of their previous study and work careers in the countries of origin;
- 4. Facilitate labour employment for those who have arrived in Europe as family migrants and who also have an interest in being economically active, which can also favour their integration into the country more generally;
- 5. Finally, promote the active role of women as transnational actors between ENP countries and the European Union, by designing specific policy tools for gender mainstreaming in this field.
Such provisions would help the EU to meet its proclaimed interest in
enhancing gender equality in neighbouring countries. At present, the EU
is not always critical of the gender biases of migrants’ countries of
origin, but, rather, reproduces strong gender stratifications and inequalities
in its ENP approach to migration. To embrace the recommendations
above would help to overcome the current gender blindness in
ENP migration policies which seem to position migrant women along a
geographical and gendered hierarchy of care and domestic work, or low
paid and gendered and racially constructed seasonal agricultural work, which reifies their roles as “carers with extra work burdens” rather than
as workers. This could be a first step to dismantle the gendered (and racialised)
material and discursive devices that structure women’s mobility
across the eastern and southern Mediterranean.
http://www.iai.it/sites/default/files/iairp_22.pdf
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