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Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign temporary IT workers to build, deliver, and support their products. However, even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend national barriers, their transnational employees face significant migration and visa constraints. In this revealing ethnography, Amy Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles to navigate career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move between South Asia and the United States.Through in-depth interviews, Bhatt explores the complex factors that shape IT transmigration and settlement, looking at Indian cultural norms, kinship obligations, friendship networks, gendered and racialized discrimination in the workplace, and inflexible and unstable visa regimes that create worker vulnerability. In particular, Bhatt highlights women's experiences as workers and dependent spouses who move as part of temporary worker programs. Many of the women interviewed were professional peers to their husbands in India but found themselves “housewives” stateside, unable to secure employment because of visa restrictions. Through her focus on the unpaid and feminized placemaking and caregiving labor these women provide, Bhatt shows how women's labor within the household is vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system of IT itself.

In recent years, interest in the large group of skilled immigrants coming from India to the United States has soared. However, this immigration is seen as being overwhelmingly male. Female migrants are depicted either as family migrants following in the path chosen by men, or as victims of desperation, forced into the migrant path due to economic exigencies.This book investigates the work trajectories and related assimilation experiences of independent Indian women who have chosen their own migratory pathways in the United States. The links between individual experiences and the macro trends of women, work, immigration and feminism are explored. The authors use historical records, previously unpublished gender disaggregate immigration data, and interviews with Indian women who have migrated to the US in every decade since the 1960s to demonstrate that independent migration among Indian women has a long and substantial history. Their status as skilled independent migrants can represent a relatively privileged and empowered choice. However, their working lives intersect with the gender constraints of labor markets in both India and the US. Vijaya and Biswas argue that their experiences of being relatively empowered, yet pushing against gender constraints in two different environments, can provide a unique perspective to the immigrant assimilation narrative and comparative gender dynamics in the global political economy.Casting light on a hidden, but steady, stream within the large group of skilled immigrants to the United States from India, this book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of political economy, anthropology, and sociology, including migration, race, class, ethnic and gender studies, as well as Asian studies.

The book that “has helped to make transnational analyses of reproductive labor central to our understanding of race and gender in the twenty-first century” (Angela Y. Davis, author of Freedom Is a Constant Struggle). Illegal. Unamerican. Disposable. In a nation with an unprecedented history of immigration, the prevailing image of those who cross our borders in search of equal opportunity is that of a drain. Grace Chang's vital account of immigrant women—who work as nannies, domestic workers, janitors, nursing aides, and homecare workers—proves just the opposite: the women who perform our least desirable jobs are the most crucial to our economy and society. Disposable Domestics highlights the unrewarded work immigrant women perform as caregivers, cleaners, and servers and shows how these women are actively resisting the exploitation they face.“As timely and relevant now as it was when it was first written... reveals a long history of collusion between the U.S. government, the IMF and World Bank, corporations, and private employers to create and maintain a super-exploited, low-wage, female labor force of caregivers and cleaners.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe“Grace Chang's nuanced analysis of our immigration policy and the devastating consequences of global capitalism captures the experiences of poor immigrant women of color. Disposable Domestics reveals how these women, servicing the economy as domestics, nannies, maids, and janitors, are vilified by politicians and the media.” —Mary Romero, author of The Maid's Daughter“Refusing to segregate people, places, or processes, Disposable Domestics reorganizes our capacity to think powerfully about the world in which the struggle for social justice is too often imperiled by certain kinds of partiality.” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Change Everything

Two women, virtual strangers, sit hand-in-hand across a narrow table, both intent on the same thing-achieving the perfect manicure. Encounters like this occur thousands of times across the United States in nail salons increasingly owned and operated by Asian immigrants. This study looks closely for the first time at these intimate encounters, focusing on New York City, where such nail salons have become ubiquitous. Drawing from rich and compelling interviews, Miliann Kang takes us inside the nail industry, asking such questions as: Why have nail salons become so popular? Why do so many Asian women, and Korean women in particular, provide these services? Kang discovers multiple motivations for the manicure-from the pampering of white middle class women to the artistic self-expression of working class African American women to the mass consumption of body-related services. Contrary to notions of beauty service establishments as spaces for building community among women, The Managed Hand finds that while tentative and fragile solidarities can emerge across the manicure table, they generally give way to even more powerful divisions of race, class, and immigration.

Taking as her subjects migrant Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles, transnational migrant families in the Philippines, and Filipina migrant entertainers in Tokyo, Parreñas documents the social, cultural, and political pressures that maintain women's domesticity in migration, as well as the ways migrant women and their children negotiate these adversities.Parreñas examines the underlying constructions of gender in neoliberal state regimes, export-oriented economies such as that of the Philippines, protective migration laws, and the actions and decisions of migrant Filipino women in maintaining families and communities, raising questions about gender relations, the status of women in globalization, and the meanings of greater consumptive power that migration garners for women. The Force of Domesticity starkly illustrates how the operation of globalization enforces notions of women's domesticity and creates contradictory messages about women's place in society, simultaneously pushing women inside and outside the home.

Read examines the labor force activity of Arab-American women, a group whose work experiences provide an exception to accepted theories. The employment rates of Arab immigrant women rank among the lowest of any immigrant group, while the rates of native-born Arab-American women resemble those of U.S.-born white women. These differences cannot be explained by Arab-American women's human capital characteristics or family resources, but are due to traditional cultural norms that prioritize women's family obligations over their economic activity and to ethnic and religious social networks that encourage the maintenance of traditional gender roles. Read's findings challenge assumptions about variations in ethnic women's labor force participation. Arab cultural values play an important role in determining the position of women of Arab descent in American society.

Data from the Current Population Survey were used in a unique analysis of migration and economic adaptation in a nationally representative sample of Asian and Hispanic immigrant women. The study describes migration patterns and compares the labor market adaptation experiences of women who migrated with their families and women who migrated independently. The book also examines the systematic differences in migration patterns by country of origin and how these differences relate to labor market performance The findings highlight the considerable impact of immigration policy on the economic adaptation of immigration women. Wives who migrated before their husbands were more likely to be in the labor force, especially when compared to wives migrating after their husbands. In contrast, wives who migrated with their husbands were not likely to participate in the labor force. Interestingly, Asian immigrant wives, were more likely to migrate while married than were Hispanic immigrant wives. Asian wives who migrated after their husbands, earned substantially lower wages than their respective ethnic counterparts (Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University, 1995; revised with new preface and index)