Halal New York: Gendered Emotional Labor, Sibling Capital, and Second-Generation Incorporation

• In Event: International Migration Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 21. Second generation

Abstract

How do second-generation American Muslim women achieve professional success within racialized and gendered labor markets that systematically marginalize them? Despite high educational attainment, American Muslim women—particularly those with visible religious identities—experience uneven incorporation and persistent workplace exclusion. Existing theories of immigrant incorporation explain divergent outcomes through parental resources and contexts of reception but insufficiently account for how gendered emotional labor within families produces unequal mobility trajectories—even among siblings raised in the same household.
Drawing on 50 in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in New York City between 2021 and 2024, this paper advances a feminist, relational theory of immigrant incorporation. I introduce Sibling Capital to explain how elder daughters disproportionately assume responsibility as institutional pathfinders, cultural brokers, and emotional anchors for younger siblings. Often navigating educational and professional institutions without parental guidance, eldest daughters absorb familial pressure, negotiate gendered expectations, and convert their hard-won experiential knowledge into mobility-producing resources for those who follow.
While sibling capital forms the core mechanism of horizontal mobility production, it is unevenly distributed within sibling cohorts, with eldest daughters bearing heightened exposure to institutional risk, moral accountability, and familial obligation. In this way, mobility is internally stratified within immigrant households: younger siblings inherit structured advantages produced through the emotionally demanding labor of those who came first.
By centering sibling hierarchies and gendered kin labor, this study extends segmented assimilation theory beyond vertical parent–child transmission and foregrounds affect, care, and intrafamilial stratification as mechanisms of incorporation. It contributes to gender and migration scholarship by demonstrating how mobility is produced through unevenly distributed emotional labor within immigrant families, reshaping how we theorize success among the children of immigrants.

Author

• Serra Kocak, SUNY Binghamton