Abstract
The biographical interviews with migrant women across 11 EU countries illustrate how they cope with employment, integration and irregular immigration at the micro- and individual level. This chapter proposes a rethinking of the integration-related policies by locating the problem areas. Mechanisms for intervention and regulation of the informal labour markets have been severely curtailed by the neoliberal reforms since the 1980s. Therefore, immigration and labour policies are generating and reproducing vulnerable irregulars occupying marginal labour market positions; migrant women represent the core of the global precariat. Also, public debates on irregular work by migrants and particularly migrant women generally misrepresent the social realities as narrated by migrant workers themselves. The authors argue that any emancipation narrative or any reform proposal ought to take into account the coping practices of migrant women towards restrictive immigration and labour market policies
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Notes
- 1.
Campagna means countryside, permiso de soggiorno is residence permit, and determinado is time limited and fixed. She arrived from Peru on a tourist visa and started working irregularly in the agricultural sector and obtained a stay permit with the help of her first employer; she is currently working in a hotel in Italy.
- 2.
Conducted in the framework of FeMiPol research.
- 3.
Report on the World Social Situation 2007: The Employment Imperative, Summary, United Nations A/62/168, General Assembly Distr.: General, 30 July 2007, 07-44350, p. 5. The main purpose of the report was to provide a foundation for discussions and policy analysis of socio-economic issues at the intergovernmental level.
- 4.
This close connection between flexibilisation and informalisation in the labour market is shown in the case of Sweden (Cederberg and Anthias 2006c).
- 5.
OECD, 2010 cited by Standing (2011).
- 6.
- 7.
Zincone (2001: 28) cited in Campani et al. (2006).
- 8.
Although various rounds of ‘legalisation’ have contributed to draw many migrant women (and men), at least partially, out of ‘the informal’. since getting a legal residence/work permit required employer’s declaration and social security payments.
- 9.
Cited in Ayres and Barber (2006:25).
- 10.
See Dita Vogel (2009) Size and Development of Irregular Migration to the EU, Comparative Policy brief CLANDESTINO project. http://clandestino.eliamep.gr/comparative-policy-briefs/#more-1068.
- 11.
See Sitas (1989) ‘Ethekwini’. Tropical Scars. Johannesburg: Congress of South African Writers.
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Trimikliniotis, N., Fulias-Souroulla, M. (2013). Informalisation and Flexibilisation at Work: The Migrant Woman Precariat Speaks. In: Anthias, F., Kontos, M., Morokvasic-Müller, M. (eds) Paradoxes of Integration: Female Migrants in Europe. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4842-2_4
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