Immigration and Women

The popular debate around contemporary U.S. immigration tends to conjure images of men waiting on the side of the road for construction jobs, working in kitchens or delis, driving taxis, and sending money to their wives and families in their home countries, while women are often left out of these pictures. Immigration and Womenis a national portrait of immigrant women who live in the United States today, featuring the voices of these women as they describe their contributions to work, culture, and activism.Through an examination of U.S. Census data and interviews with women across nationalities, we hear the poignant, humorous, hopeful, and defiant words of these women as they describe the often confusing terrain where they are starting new lives, creating architecture firms, building urban high-rises, caring for children, cleaning offices, producing creative works, and organizing for social change. Highlighting the gendered quality of the immigration process, Immigration and Womeninterrogates how human agency and societal structures interact within the intersecting social locations of gender and migration. The authors recommend changes for public policy to address the constraints these women face, insisting that new policy must be attentive To The diverse profile of today's immigrating woman.

Susan C. Pearce is Assistant Professor of Sociology at East Carolina University and coeditor of Reformulations: Markets, Policy, and Identities in Central and Eastern Europe and Mosaics of Change: The First Decade of Life in the New Eastern Europe. Elizabeth J. Clifford is Associate Professor of Sociology at Towson University, where she is also Director of American Studies and Coordinator of the Baltimore Immigration Summit. Reena Tandon is Sessional Lecturer in South Asian Studies at the University of Toronto and Coordinator of Service Learning at Ryerson University, Toronto, and the author of Contemporary Hindi in Australia.