Introduction: gender, development, and migrants in a global economy

Abstract

This issue of Gender & Development focuses on migrant women workers in a global economy, seeing their experiences through the lens of feminist analysis. We are making a conscious choice to adopt this framing – ‘migrants’, not ‘migration’ to emphasise the need to place human beings front and centre in today’s debates. In an earlier 1998 issue of the journal, on Migration, we noted there was a pressing need for development organisations to ‘respond effectively and coherently to the needs of the growing numbers of women and men who make their living using economic and social strategies that operate in different locations’ (Sweetman 1998, 2). Nearly a quarter of a century after that earlier journal issue on Migration, we believe the need to ‘humanise’ debates around migration to be ever more intense. Currently, the scale of global migration is huge. In 2018, there were an estimated 258 million international migrants (IOM 2018, 9). Of these, 124.8 million were women and there were 36.1 million children. 150.3 million people are categorised by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) as migrant workers, while a further 25.4 million were categorised by the IOM as registered refugees (ibid.). But it is important to note that while the numbers are on the rise – the total was about 173 million in 2000, and 102 million in 1980 the proportion of migrants in the global population is only slightly higher than in previous decades (ibid.). The fact that these statistics suggest the proportion of migrants in the global population is not rising dramatically may be surprising. This is a time of heightened concern about rates of movement across national borders, seen as spiralling out of control. Much rhetoric focuses on migrants in a depersonalised way, referring to the people who migrate to survive, or to find a better, in collective terms that denigrate them: as a ‘flood’, or a ‘swarm’ (Elgot and Taylor 2015), or emphasising ‘their’ difference from ‘us’, for example in race or religion. The movement of peoples across borders characterised as poor and desperate – is currently a huge political issue. This is not only the case in many wealthy countries of the world, but also in middle-income and low-income countries. As stated, this journal issue focuses on migrant workers. In anti-migrant rhetoric, or indeed in reality, the distinctions between different kinds of migrants are often arbitrary and artificial But there are moral hierarchies when discussing migrants. Terms used ‘migrants’, ‘economic migrants’, ‘refugees’, and ‘asylum seekers’ are frequently used