Examining Gender, Class and Legal Status in International Migration: Senegalese Women’s Migration to Europe, 1974-2008

• In Event: 510 - Section on Race, Gender and Class Paper Session. Intersectional Approaches to Understanding Migration, Legal Status and Transnationalism

Abstract

This paper explores the role of gender, class and network-derived social capital in authorized and unauthorized migration of Senegalese women to Europe from 1974 to 2008. It considers several theoretical questions: how gender, class and legal status intersect; the viability of the female ‘trailing spouse’ model; whether migration is best considered an individual or family strategy; and how social capital theory (specifically the strength of tie hypothesis) relates to authorized and unauthorized migrations. We employ event history analysis to explore recent data – the Migration between Africa and Europe – Senegal (2008) – and run competing risks models to examine the relative risks of authorized and unauthorized migration, relative to staying in Senegal. Given our interest in how gender and social class intersect, we use education as a proxy for social class and run separate models for lower-educated and higher-educated Senegalese women. We find that Senegalese women’s authorized migration to Europe is strongly and positively selective in terms of social class and life course. For Senegalese women, authorized migration is a family or household-driven strategy, largely fueled by spouses at destination, but also marked by social privilege. At the same time, Senegalese women’s unauthorized migration to Europe is more heterogeneous, individualistic and strongly driven by religious and personal networks. Examining the intersection of social class, gender and legal status is particularly important: traditional gender and marriage hierarchies particularly restrict the options of lower-educated women, while higher-educated women opt for unauthorized migration when they are excluded from the labor market.

Author

• Mao-Mei Liu, Brown University