Feminist and Migrant Networking in a Globalising World Migration, Gender and Globalisation

Abstract

Globalisation promotes the movement of people, but migration is also a basic process of globalisation. In the last decades women’s and men’s migration was largely motivated by the pull of global or transnational labour markets. For example, while Turkish and Korean men migrated to Germany in the 1960s and 1970s to work in car factories or mines, Turkish women migrants worked in the electronics industries or as domestic workers, and Korean women migrated as trained nurses. Migrants are also forced out of their countries by environmental degradation, which, for example, increases the stress for women to provide food and water, or by the numerous wars and conflicts, which are increasing in the shadow of the new global world order. Whereas older people, women and children tend to stay in the refugee camps close to conflict areas, younger men and women search for opportunities for global migration. Political and gender repression by dictatorships, military regimes and some fundamentalist patriarchal rulers, have also led to increasing numbers of refugees. Finally we have the global intellectuals, scientists, business people, writers, artists or filmmakers who simultaneously live in Bombay and New York or Moscow and Berlin. Migrants take the initiative to realise their wishes and visions of their future. They are actors (not victims) — often moving in difficult environments — and therefore we want to focus on their agency in this article.KeywordsSocial MovementMigrant WorkerInternational Labour OrganisationMigrant WomanGlobalising WorldThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.