The Gendered Impacts of Migration and Welfare Regimes: Migrant Women Workers in Turkey

Abstract

To understand the gender implications of migration regimes in different receiving countries of the developed world, an analysis of deep economic, political and social transformations related to neoliberal globalization is inevitable. Economic restructuring, resulting in the transfer of labor-intensive manufacturing industries to peripheral countries, reduced the need for manual workers, of whom migrant workers were an important component in the second half of the twentieth century. Still, demand for migrant workers continues in the expanding service sector, in agriculture and construction sectors and to a lesser extent in manufacturing industries. However, governments of developed countries, not recognizing this demand, increase restrictions on labor immigration, especially for unskilled workers, thereby forcing people from peripheral countries to search for irregular ways to migrate. These irregular migratory flows usually take place under dangerous circumstances and critical social scientists of the South point to the growing uneven economic development and increasing poverty in peripheral countries leaving people unable to conduct simple livelihood activities in their own settlements (Delgado Wise et al. 2013; Delgado Wise 2018). The consequences of irregular migration have been an increased differentiation in the labor force on the basis of gender, class, age, migration status and ethnicity/race, pushing migrant workers and members of minorities into insecure and vulnerable forms of employment (Castles and Miller 1998; Castles et al. 2012). Migrants form a large share of the precariat emerging in developed countries and women constitute an important sub-group (Standing 2011; Trimikliniotis and Fulias-Sourroulla 2013). The feminization of migration, identified as one of the general tendencies of migration in the new century (Castles and Miller 1998: 9), necessitates a closer look at the changes occurring in the welfare regimes of receiving countries.