Women immigrants, work, and families

About 10.3 million foreign-born women were counted in the 1990 census of he United States. Although they constituted 4 Percent of the total population and 53 Percent of immigrants, women immigrants and their issues have received little attention in the continuing national debate over immigration. Aside from the occasional attention paid to prominent immigrant women, such as Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini or the defecting daughters of foreign dictators, women immigrants rarely attract popular attention. The principal reason for this apparent neglect has been the assumption that women are "tied immigrants"--that is, they immigrate because of the opportunities offered to other, usually male, members of their families.

United States immigration policy implicitly incorporates the stereotype of the tied immigrant woman. When legislation has been addressed explicitly to female immigration, it usually assumes that their entry into the country is tied to the movements of men. For example, as part of the series of Chinese Exclusion Acts in the late nineteenth century, female Chinese were forbidden to immigrate to preclude the development of families by Chinese immigrant men. By contrast, the entry of war brides and fiancees after World War II was facilitated by specific legislation, even though some of the women immigrated from the then-proscribed Asian Triangle and would not otherwise have been allowed to enter the country. The family reunification provisions in the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act were touted as humanitarian gestures to allow wives, sisters, and mothers to join their families already residing in the United States.

Our image of the woman immigrant needs updating for three reasons: changes in sending countries, changes in labor-market patterns, and changes in family patterns. Policymakers are again reconsidering immigration policy, and it is important not to exclude considerations of women as immigrants.

Changes in Sending Countries

Conventional demographic wisdom confirmed the view of women as secondary migrants. Ravenstein's Laws of Migration, taught in most undergraduate population courses, included the generalization that men usually immigrated over long distances but women immigrated over shot distances. When the major immigration stream to the United States crossed the Atlantic Ocean, men dominated. Immigrant communities in the nineteenth century often had remarkably high ratios of men to women.

In the twentieth century, however, airplanes and rapid ships can cover long distances in a few days and with many fewer hazards. Moreover, distant Europe has been succeeded by neighboring Latin America as the major sending area to the United States, so that the distances that immigrants have to travel are often shorter. As recently as the 1950s, over two-thirds of immigrants came from Europe and the English-speaking countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, while fewer than 18 percent came from the Americas. By the decade of the 1980s, the Americas provided 47 percent of the immigrants, and Europe and the English-speaking countries only 13 percent.

Changes in transportation and in the sending countries made immigration easier both for women who accompanied family members and for women who migrated independently. Women immigrants entered the country in large numbers from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean Women currently form the majority of the immigrant stream from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Colombia.

Two contiguous countries have sent over a quarter of our current immigrants. Mexico is the largest single sending country, accounting for over 24 percent of male immigrants and 19 percent of female immigrants. Canada is the third largest sending country for women, accounting for over 4 percent of both women and men. A third country, the Philippines, although not contiguous, has a long history of political and economic relationships with the United States and is the second largest sending country, accounting for over 4 percent of immigrant men and 5 percent of immigrant women.

Ravenstein's Laws assumed that the principal motive for migration was economic. However, the twentieth century also has seen vast forced movements of populations seeking refuge from war, political oppression, or persecution based on race, religion, language, or ethnicity. Political migrations often include large numbers of women, frequently with their dependent children. "Push" factors that affect civilian populations, or persecutions that target specific ethnic groups, do not discriminate on the basis of gender or age, and so refugee flows tend to have women, the elderly, and children well represented among them. The Cuban population, for example, is 53 percent women, although the Vietnamese population is 56 percent men.

Changes in Labor Market Patterns

Immigrants "pulled" to migrate by better economic opportunities are often self-selected by such factors as youth, health, better education, and ambition. For many years, the generalization that young men would be the immigrants was correct, bur the expansion of women's schooling and job opportunities has made women eager to immigrate as well.

Although relatively little attention has been paid to women as independent entrants, some women have qualified for visas under the legislation enacting skilled worker preferences. Countries with relatively high levels of schooling and low wages have sent many women workers to the United States. The Philippines, Korea, and Taiwan are examples of countries with relatively young, female-dominant immigrant groups in the United States. The median age of Filipino immigrants in the United States is only twenty-six; for Korea and Taiwan it is thirty-three. That such women have not entered the country in larger numbers is the result in part of the paucity of skilled-worker visas relative to the number of family-reunification visas.

Women immigrants are a little less educated than male immigrants--11.1 mean years of schooling versus 11.5 years for men. Women immigrants from Asia had completed over thirteen years of school on average, and Mexican women had completed a little over seven years. Over three-quarters of immigrant women report that they speak English well, very well, or exclusively. These patterns of education and language fluency affected women's success in the American labor market.

Labor economists conventionally use ages twenty-five through sixty-four as the prime working ages. About 63 percent of the foreign-born women in this age group, as enumerated in the 1990 U.S. Census, participated in the paid labor force, compared with 70 percent of native-born women. Women's labor force participation rates vary by national origin, with women from Asian countries and from Cuba participating at much higher rates than women from Mexico. As with men, women who have been in the country longer are more likely to work for pay, with only 53 percent of the most recent immigrants at work. One reason for the relatively low labor force participation among Mexican women is probably their recent entrance to the U.S. labor market.

Labor force participation includes both employment and unemployment. Foreign-born workers, as newcomers to the labor market, have higher levels of unemployment than native-born workers. For foreign-born women in 1990, the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent, compared with 4.7 percent for native-born women.

Traditionally, immigrant women were employed in household service and in factory jobs. Although they are still well represented in these jobs, today immigrant women make a significant contribution to many industries and occupations. More than 30 percent of women physicians in the United States, to take one example, are foreign-born. Foreign-born women also make up a relatively large share of the women employed as registered nurses, seamstresses and similar skilled workers in the needle trades, and farm workers.

Changes in Family Patterns

Although the assumption that women immigrate only because of their families is incorrect, it also is unrealistic to overlook their family relationships. Nearly three-quarters of immigrant women are married or widowed, and they are less likely to be divorced, separated, or single than native-born women. Almost two-thirds of immigrant women are living in married-family households, with another 14 percent of immigrant women heading their own households.

Many observers have voiced concern about: the large numbers of women entering the United States from countries that traditionally have high fertility. The concern is that population growth, already spurred on by the immigrants themselves, will gain further momentum if they have larger families once here. This concern may be misplaced, for several reasons:

* First, most careful studies of immigrant women indicate that their fertility converges rapidly with that of native-born women. For example, in 1990 the mean number of children born to immigrant women over the age of forty-five, those who had completed their childbearing, was 2.8. In subsequent generations, the family sizes of their daughters and especially of their granddaughters resemble those of native-born women. This finding also is true of immigrant women in Canada.

* Second, fertility among the younger women of many countries has declined rapidly, and younger women are the most likely to immigrate. Among immigrant women who were aged fifteen to thirty in 1990, nearly 58 percent were still childless. Among women who had immigrated from Asian countries, over 70 percent were still childless.

* Third, immigration tends to select women who are better educated and more ambitious, and these characteristics also are often associated with lower fertility.

Because Mexico has been a high-fertility country and because Mexico is now the largest single sending country, the fertility of Mexican women immigrants has been of particular interest. Their fertility has been substantially higher than the fertility of other immigrants or of the native-born; of those who had completed their childbearing by 1990, the mean number of children was 4.6. But studies of Mexican immigrant women also indicate a convergence to American fertility norms over time, although this convergence still may be somewhat less pronounced than among other nationality groups.

Future Directions for Immigration Policy

Changes in immigration policy are inevitable as the United States enters the twenty-first century. Family reunification, the cornerstone of much recent immigration policy, is criticized for bringing less motivated and lower-skilled workers into the country, but this criticism has been leveled at including siblings, rather than immediate nuclear family members, in family reunification. Many critics of the current policy advocate a reduced number of visas for family reunification and increased numbers of visas made available on the basis of skills, ability to invest in the United States, and other economic criteria.

The effects of these proposed changes on the sex ratio of immigrants is difficult to predict. While the number of tied immigrants might be reduced, for the first time well-trained professional women from a number of countries also might have substantial access to visas. Such changes would tend to favor women from countries that already provide women with substantial access to educational and occupational credentials. Potential results of these changes would be relatively more women immigrants from Asia, Canada, and Europe; better educated women immigrants; and more women immigrants who are single and childless. The immigrant stream to the United States will continue to have substantial numbers of women, but the conditions under which they obtain visas will have a substantial effect on their demographic characteristics, countries of origin, and skill levels.

Teresa A. Sullivan is a professor of Sociology and Law, an associate dean of Graduate Studies, and a vice provost at The University at Texas-Austin. She co-authored the chapter on immigration in the forthcoming 1990 census monograph series and served on the National Research Council Panel on Immigration Statistics. This article was prepared with the research assistance of Grant Mallie and through the help of a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation.

Copyright National Forum: Phi Kappa Phi Journal Summer 1994
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