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Pramila Jayapal makes a compelling case for the inherent sexism of the debate on immigration with very real consequences for immigrant women. There are a lot of undocumented women working as well and their concerns are just as important. She calls for crafting immigration legislation that explicitly centers the needs of women, something with which I hope we can all agree.
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That’s mostly pretty good, though I had a few questions. For example, Jayapal says,
Since the majority of principal visa holders are men, it follows that two-thirds of dependent visa holders are women. Immigrant women in the dependent visa category are not allowed to work, even though they have the same level of attainment of bachelor’s degrees as native-born women and bring skills with them. (This is discussing the fact that while spouses of H1-B visas may come with the visa holder, they may not work if they do.)
The part I wasn’t clear of was the claim that immigrant women who come on a dependent visa “have the same level of attainment of bachelor’s degrees as native born women”. Nothing was cited for that, and I’d be slightly surprised if it’s true. But, even if it’s not true, I don’t think there’s a very good reason for not allowing the spouses of H1-B visa holders to work. (I’d probably say the same about spouses of student visa holders, who also have very limited work opportunities.) This wouldn’t be that radical. Even countries that have over-all worse temporary labor migration programs than the US, such as the UK, allow spouses to work. She doesn’t mention, though, that there are some labor migration programs that tend to strongly favor women, such as special programs for nurses. (Canada has a special “live-in care-giver program, but it’s criticized in many ways, despite being pretty generous in several ways.)
I was also a bit unsure about the parts relating to family-based immigration. The strongest part of that is that the per-country caps are unfair- that one is from India or Mexico shouldn’t make it harder to get a visa. But, it’s not obvious to me that the very broad form of family-based immigration followed by the US is required by justice- in most countries, being the relative of the equivalent of an LPR gets you no immigration benefits, and very few countries give benefits to siblings or to married children (and through them, grandchildren) as the US does. (Not even that many give benefits to parents, one of the most favored groups in US immigration law.) Perhaps we should be even more generous with these benefits, but it’s not obvious to me that this is an area that should be open for democratic decision-making, especially as it’s perfectly possible to live a completely good life while not living near one’s married adult children or siblings.
The part I wasn’t clear of was the claim that immigrant women who come on a dependent visa “have the same level of attainment of bachelor’s degrees as native born women”. Nothing was cited for that, and I’d be slightly surprised if it’s true.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all. There are several influential factors:
1.) H1Bs are disproprotionately coming from countries where many women, especially those married to well-educated men, *do* have the oppotunity to obtain an education.
2) Immigrants tend to be younger than the US population overall, and degree attainment is generally higher among young people. In addition, women live longer than men, exacerbating that effect. So that group of “native-born women” in my state, for example, includes a whole lot of over-65 women, many of whom do not even have a high school degree, much less college.
There’s also a series of papers by Paul Harrington and Neeta Fogg of Drexel University, dealing with what they call the “mal-employment” of immigrants with college degrees. The dataset they are using (National Survey of College Graduates) does not have a super in-depth explanation of immigration status of respondents, but it’s fairly plausible that a number of the Indian women especially that they are looking at is un/under employed because they’re here without work authorization and thus not able to find work legally.
Yes, I guess it’s possible if you compare spouses of H1-Bs to all women in the US, but I’d assumed the comparison was with similarly women from the US, which would be the ones you’d want to compare to for employment comparisons, I’d think. There it seems much less likely to me, though I’m not sure, and not data is cited.
The work I’ve seen on mal-employment of immigrants has focused on those with work authorization, since again, that’s the most obvious group to consider, and it’s certainly a problem, but at least in most of the work I’ve seen, it’s a different problem from the (stupid) issue of not letting spouses of those on (most) temporary labor visas work.
Personally, I believe it’s a great idea: yes, send us more women, hold your men!
However: “crafting immigration legislation that explicitly centers the needs of women” – in order to avoid sexism? This is priceless, in its doublethink purity. If this is not the greatest example of “simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct”, I don’t know what is.
You’re absolutely correct – you dont know what is
OK, so we do this. That means we need to cut the number of H-1Bs, student visas, etc., because now we need to project a larger number of working immigrants per visa.
Or we just issue more visas.
Right- one of the perverse aspects of the immigration debates (only one! There are so many) is the silly idea that visas are finite resources, so if we give more to one category, we must cut others. It’s not even as if the numbers were the result of some careful study or plan.