Recent transnational migration literature does not sufficiently explore women's role in the development of transnational communities. By analyzing 30 interviews with Puerto Rican migrant and return migrant women, the author shows that women, through subsistence production, play a significant role in the social construction of transnational communities. By using a transnational perspective and placing migrant women's subsistence work and its contradictory nature at the center of her analysis, the author challenges studies that assume that maintaining ties to homelands leads to (...) freedom for all family members, moves away from home/host binary frame works of immigrant women's experiences that locate greater gender oppression in home countries and more freedom in host societies, and explores women's complex perceptions of home. (shrink)

This article examines whether recent immigrant women in the Israeli labor market are at a “double disadvantage”—first as immigrants and second as women—and whether and to what extent such disadvantages differ across ethnic and geocultural groups. Data were obtained from the last available population census. The analysis focuses on gender differences in employment opportunities among men and women who immigrated to Israel between 1979 and 1983. Data reveal that the double disadvantage of immigrant women is evident with regard to both (...) labor force participation and occupational attainment. Immigrant women are less likely than immigrant men to join the Israeli labor market, and they face much greater occupational loss. Data also reveal an interaction effect between gender and ethnicity. Immigrant women from the less developed countries in Asia and Africa constitute the most disadvantaged group. This group of women appears to be at a “triple disadvantage.”. (shrink)

This article examines the configuration of domestic service within local milieus under globalization. Using Taiwan as a case study, the author argues that the state continues to have an impact even in this age of global interdependence. The management of foreign domestics within employers’ households is not only important for labor control but also central to the state’s administration over alien subjects. The case of Taiwan calls attention to the necessity of bringing the state back into the analysis of gender (...) and carework. (shrink)