4.2 Non-communitarian immigrant women in the work market in spain

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Non-communitarian immigrant women in the work market in spain

Carlota Solé&Sònia Parella

What are the guidelines of labor insertion in Spain of thousands of women immigrants of Latin American origin, coming from Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe? In fact, according to authors like Hondagneu Sotelo (1994), the demand for the immigrant work force in the post-industrial economies differs with regards to gender, which results in an increase of hardworking immigrants' drafted to be employees in activities linked to social reproduction –principally as domestic service, not forgetting prostitution – in all the post-industrial societies. It refers to tasks that have always have been considered to be for women, but that today have become part of the global market, in the context of the “internationalization of reproduction.”

The causes and effects of the female migrant movements have their own entity, when a woman plays a social and economic role different to that of males, in the productive sphere as in the reproductive sphere, in the society of origin as much as in their destination. A reading of migrations regarding gender, allows concluding that female migration can no longer assume the fact that women follow their husbands in a passive form; rather, women often emigrate alone, for economic reasons, and follow different migratory patterns than men (Bus Ioé 1998; Gregory 1999). It is in this scenario that we must locate the presence of female migration in Spain. An identifying element of the new European migratory models is the increase of the female independent emigration, on the margin of the context of familiar regrouping (Ribas 2004). Data demonstrates that there exists a great diversification in the female migratory experiences, so that many of these women arrive to Europe and Spain becoming pioneers of the migratory process, attracted by the demand of domestic employees or, to a lesser extent, of sexual services (Morokvasic 1993). In some immigrant groups – mainly those coming from Latin American countries – the migratory patterns are mainly female and are who impel the migratory chains (Ribas 2004).