Maria Kontos

Paradoxes of integration : female migrants in Europe

Acknowledgments Introduction: Paradoxes of Integration Floya Anthias, Mirjana Morokvasic-Muller and Maria Kontos 1. Profiling Female Migrants in Europe: categories of difference Ron Ayres, Tamsin Barber, Floya Anthias and Maja Cederberg 2. Welfare Regimes, Labour Markets, Policies: the Experiences of Migrant Women Floya Anthias, Maja Cederberg, Tamsin Barber and Ron Ayres 3. Informalization and Flexibilization at work: The Migrant Women Precariat speak Nicos Trimikliniotis and Mihaela Fulias-Souroulla 4. Coping with Deskilling: Strategies of Migrant Women across European Societies Anna Vouyioukas and Maria Liapi 5. Civic Participation of Migrant Women: Employing Strategies of Active Citizenship Mojca Pajnik, and Veronika Bajt 6. Female Migrants and the Issue of Residence Rights Karolina Krzystek 7. Family Matters: Migrant Domestic and Care Work and the Issue of Recognition Christine Catarino, Maria Kontos and Kyoko Shinozaki 8. Blurred Lines: Policies and Experience of Migrant Women in Prostitution and Entertainment Christine Catarino and Mirjana Morokvasic-Muller 9. Trafficking and Womens Migration in a Global Context Giovanna Campani and Tiziana Chiappelli Notes on the Contributors Floya Anthias, Maja Cederberg, Tamsin Barber and Ron Ayres 3. Informalization and Flexibilization at work: The Migrant Women Precariat speak Nicos Trimikliniotis and Mihaela Fulias-Souroulla 4. Coping with Deskilling: Strategies of Migrant Women across European Societies Anna Vouyioukas and Maria Liapi 5. Civic Participation of Migrant Women: Employing Strategies of Active Citizenship Mojca Pajnik, and Veronika Bajt 6. Female Migrants and the Issue of Residence Rights Karolina Krzystek 7. Family Matters: Migrant Domestic and Care Work and the Issue of Recognition Christine Catarino, Maria Kontos and Kyoko Shinozaki 8. Blurred Lines: Policies and Experience of Migrant Women in Prostitution and Entertainment Christine Catarino and Mirjana Morokvasic-Muller 9. Trafficking and Womens Migration in a Global Context Giovanna Campani and Tiziana Chiappelli Notes on the Contributors

Introduction: Paradoxes of Integration

This book explores different facets of migrant women’s participation in the EU. It analyses the lives of new female migrants with a focus on the labour market, and domestic, care work and prostitution in particular, both in terms of regular and irregular status and using a biographical perspective. It draws on research in the frame of the FeMiPol project, conducted between 2006 and 2008 within the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission. This book provides a comparative analysis embracing 11 European countries from Northern (the UK, Germany, Sweden, France), Southern (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus) and Eastern Europe (Poland, Slovenia), that is, old and new immigration countries as well as old and new market economies. This book considers the interplay of migration and policies and women’s strategies in relation to these.

Family Matters: Migrant Domestic and Care Work and the Issue of Recognition

Over the past decade, studies on the issue of migrant domestic and care workers have proliferated: some have shown the regulative, institutional mechanisms, affecting this group of migrants, and others have concentrated on micro, subjective experiences of the migrants themselves. Rather than treating them in isolation from one another, this chapter aims to explore the interaction of these two levels, exploring different facets of social recognition attainment among migrant domestic and care workers in 11 European countries. The authors propose a concept of recognition, which attends to social relations in attaining recognition, whilst simultaneously incorporating a structural dimension such as policies/regulations, gendered, class, ethnic and racialized domination and stereotypes. The focus is on the family as the main locus in which this interaction is articulated. In particular, the analysis shows how tenaciously, and yet differently, the trope of the family permeates both policy and migrant women’s narratives in diverse European countries, cutting across different migration and care regimes, as well as across North-South, West-East regional differences. The authors explore the linkages between familialism (expressed in care policies) and migration regulations that generate the institutional facets of social recognition. They highlight migrant domestic workers’ and carers’ experience in their work and life and the ways in which this is linked to institutions generating or hindering social recognition.

Restrictive Integration Policies and the Construction of the Migrant as ‘Unwilling to Integrate’: The Case of Germany

Since the middle of the last decade, the notion of ‘migrants being unwilling to integrate’ (Integrationsunwillig) - and sometimes, in a more active form, of ‘migrants refusing to integrate’ (Integrationsverweigernd) - has increasingly come into focus in migration and integration debates in Germany. Pointing to the commitment of migrants to cultural val- ues that might be contradictory to values in the receiving society — for instance, gender equality — the ‘refusal of migrants to integrate’ notion is aimed mainly at Turkish and other Muslim populations. However, as will be demonstrated below, it actually embraces the whole migrant population. Despite the nebulosity of these notions, politicians have presented quantifications of the ‘unwillingness’ of migrants to integrate ranging from 40 per cent of the migrant population, as the president of the Committee for Home Affairs of the Federal Parliament maintained (Bosbach, 2009), and 10 to 15 per cent, according to the Minister of Interior De Maiziere (Bundesweites Integrationsprogramm, 2010). Oth- ers contradicted these statistics by pointing to the figure of 98 per cent of newcomer migrants attending integration courses, thus demonstrat- ing a willingness to integrate (Bade, 2010). In line with the spirit of the neo-liberal ideology that highlights the responsibility of the individual for her/his situation and fate, this assumption emerged and stabilized within the framework of a public discourse marked by hostility towards migrants, spreading moral panic and legitimizing a more restrictive and Controlling integration policy.

The biographical embeddedness of women’s self-employment. Motivations, strategies and policies

Within the framework of the project, a biographical approach to analyzing and evaluating the impact of policies supporting self-employment initiatives was developed. Thus far, evaluative research on self-employment policies has assessed the effectiveness of such policies by investigating the extent to which they encourage the foundation of new businesses and the viability of the enterprises thereby created (Meager 1993, Schmid et al. 1996, Wie\ner 2001, Hinz et al. 1999). The methods traditionally employed tend to be quantitatively oriented and focus largely on individual instruments and programs. The biographical approach to evaluating selfemployment policies attempts to broaden this perspective. This evaluation methodology is target-oriented (Schmid et al. 1996), analyzing the cumulative effects of self-employment and other policies affecting specific social groups. This approach recognizes that labor market behavior does not exist in isolation and that a systematic evaluation needs to consider the mechanisms and process structures that govern labor market behavior. In other words, in order to develop a theory of the impact of policy on these biographical processes, the self-coordinated, self-governed process of becoming self-employed has to be analyzed. In this context, we regard entrepreneurship as a phenomenon embedded not only in social relations and networks (Portes/Sessenbrenner 1993, Granovetter 1995), and in legal and economic contexts (Kloostermann/Rath 2001, 2003) but in biographical processes, as well. The move towards self-employment is thought of as a process that is interrelated with other biographical processes, extending far back in an individual’s biography and touching upon many aspects of identity and the development of the self (Kupferberg 1998a).

The method of biographical policy evaluation

Our project focused on the evaluation of the success or failure of self-employment projects of women and minorities in relation to social citizenship policies. Earlier comparative research on self-employment in EU member states focused on the effects of labour market policies (Meager 1993) but neglected to take account of the effect of active social policies towards self-employment. The question we posed was whether these new instruments could offer participants the opportunity to mobilize and activate their own innovative human resources or whether they would again produce unstable working conditions and not secure long-term success for the self-employed.

Self-employment, autonomy and empowerment against patriarchal family structures

In biographical interviews with self-employed women and would-be female entrepreneurs in the Southern European countries Italy and Greece, a dominant construct became visible whereby the project of establishing self-employment was strongly interwoven with a struggle against patriarchal family structures. However, considerable differences arise on this issue in comparing interviews with women living in the metropolitan region of Athens and interviews with women living in the semi-rural region of Calabria.

Zur Produktion sozialer Ungleichheit in der Migrationsgesellschaft: Integrationsdiskurs im Kontext von Interaktion und Biographie

Soziale Ungleichheit wird meistens aus einer Makroperspektive, namlich als Strukturdimension des Sozialen untersucht. Die Ebene der Herstellung sozialer Ungleichheit als auch die Ebene der Erfahrung und Verarbeitung sozialer Ungleichheit in der Alltagsinteraktion sind bislang unterbelichtet geblieben. Soziale Ungleichheit wird in diesem Kapitel unter einer Handlungsperspektive betrachtet und diskutiert; insbesondere ist im Fokus die Frage der diskursiven Herstellung sozialer Ungleichheit. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass im intersubjektiven Interaktionskontext soziale Ungleichheit zwischen ethnischen Gruppen durch den Bezug auf offentliche Diskurse hergestellt wird. Am Beispiel des neueren offentlichen Integrationsdiskurses, der sich durch das Buch von Thilo Sarrazin (2010) „Deutschland schafft sich ab“ zugespitzt hat, wird der Herstellungsprozess sozialer Ungleichheit analysiert. Anhand der biographischen Narration eines griechischen Arbeitnehmers der zweiten Generation wird analysiert, wie dieser neuere Integrationsdiskurs die Herstellung von Ungleichheit in der Interaktion durch das „Doing Difference“ von InteraktionspartnerInnen ermoglicht und Prozesse des „Undoing Difference“ in der Interaktion und in der biographischen Perspektive in Gang setzt.

Socio-economic contexts of self-employment

To understand the self-employment activities of women and minorities in Europe we have to take context variables into consideration. Economic activity and unemployment reveal that, for both groups, considerable barriers make entering the labor market difficult. Women are hindered from entering the labor market by specific gender role constructions; in particular care and motherhood (actual or anticipated and normatively expected as an institutional pattern of the life course) confine them to the domestic sphere. In recent decades, a trend has developed whereby a market increase in the proportion of women remaining in the labor market after becoming mothers can be confirmed, however, national differences still persist. In France and the Nordic countries there is a high and continuous rate of female labor market participation throughout the life cycle, In the UK and in Germany, motherhood precipitates a labor market exit and subsequent re-entry, in many cases on a part-time basis.

Arenas of policy making

The key informant interviews aimed at gathering additional information about the relevant policies at hand in national contexts. The key informants are themselves strategic actors in the field and their views and attitudes are not necessarily objective or close to the truth. Experts’ interviews are thus understood as both adding presumably „objective“ data to our contextual knowledge, which includes previously assembled statistical and other data, as well as providing „contested knowledge“, where the expert knowledge of the key informants has to be weighed against the life experiences of the self-employed.