The informal economy comprises of work activities that involve a small number of workers, irregular work hours, income that is paid in cash and even, unregulated by the law. The gender binary is the classification of gender into distinct notions of feminine and masculine. Both the concepts of the informal economy and the gender binary is significant in the case of my research paper because employer exploitation is made possible due to the loopholes in the binary-infused immigration policies that limits the employment of immigrant women and imposes a hierarchal structure onto them. The research questions I plan on investigating are: How did the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) affect the lives of immigrant women in the informal economy of the United States? How did immigration policies like the IRCA fail to address (and to a certain extent, result in) the oppression of immigrant women in the informal economy?
Therefore, in an effort to target these research questions, I will be analyzing two fundamental principles of the IRCA through the published work of anthropologist Leo R. Chavez and Associate Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies Estevan T. Flores in “In Defense of the Alien.” The IRCA was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on November 6, 1986. The IRCA has two major components: foremost, “undocumented immigrants, in order to be eligible for the legalization program, must have entered the U.S. prior to January 1, 1982 and second, “undocumented workers employed after November 6, 1986 (the date the IRCA became law) must be able to prove to their employer that they are eligible to work.” This law favors employers, in a way, as they do not face penalties if their immigrant employees were hired before N...
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...xes. This comparison with male immigrants helps to illustrate my point that employer exploitation works at a different degree with immigrant women, as Prokhovnik points out that “men cope in an ad hoc way” to the pressures of work when compared to women who have to deal with additional labor, which include mental or emotional labor. However, since the focus of my paper will be to address the conflicts faced by immigrant women, discussions surrounding their male counterparts will only be regarded as counterarguments. In addition, a discussion worthy of mention in my research paper is simply the relationship between the biological differences between men and women and the distribution of immigrant men and women in their respective informal economies, with the former typically involved in manual or hard labor while the latter in labor that is less physically-demanding.
Since the Industrial Revolution in the United States of America, working conditions for women and minorities have not been given equal pay or top positions in the work place. Women being degraded by the men in charge, and minorities constantly at odds with one another so they will not form a Union. Such things keep those with low-status in the job in line, and not feel they are equal to the ones in charge. People from other countries are in search for a better life elsewhere, and take the risk of going to the United States illegally to seek out the American Dream. The articles Working at Bazooms by Meika Loe and At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die by Charlie LeDuff deal with the working conditions for women and minorities. Workers in both articles have to deal with having terrible working conditions, harassment in the workplace, low-status within the job, and the constant fear of job loss.
The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), had several contributions to solve the problem of immigration in United States, beside the substantial contributions to legalize over 3 million foreign nationals. First, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), strongly supported a comprehensive immigration legislation that benefited a group of illegal immigrants, who had been continuously in United States over four year period under a special agricultural workers program, a group of Cubans national who fled their country after the Cuban revolution of 1959. Also, the foreign immigrants that had arrived prior to January 1, 1972, and the group of Haitians that for diverse situations arrived to the United State shores. Critics of IRCA sustain that even with this considerable legalization of illegal alien, the program failed to deter the illegal immigration into the country that instead of decreased, the foreign nationals living illegally in America increased over 4 million in the period of 1986 to 1990 In which the reform of the U.S. legal immigration system under IRCA demonstrated that immigration...
Waldinger, Roger David, and Michael Ira Lichter. How the Other Half Works : Immigration and the Social Organization of Labor. University of California Press, 2003. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). EBSCO. Web. 10 Oct. 2011.
Out of the 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the United States, 8 million of them are currently working. Employers in America who want inexpensive workers, hire illegal immigrants and pay them under the table. Since the system does not have an efficient way of identifying and penalizing these employers, this has been an ongoing dilemma. As a result, the American economy suffers because illegal immigrants are not paying taxes like the rest of the legal citizens. Americans who are citizens consequently have difficulties finding jobs because employers would rather pay under the table so they can make higher profits. In my perspective, the employers are at fault here if they knowingly hire workers who are not eligible to work here. However, if the employer did not know about an immigrant’s illegal status than the immigrant is at fault for cheating the system. These are just some of the current issues related to illegal immigration t...
Mae Ngais’s Impossible Subjects embraces the history of our modern term “illegal alien” by exploring the history behind immigration policy. The legal and social history explains the progression of the term, “illegal alien’s” throughout American life in the early 1900s and the 2000s. Ngai focuses on the era after the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924 and the reform of quotas by the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 to the bracero programs and so on. Impossible Subjects already accepts that white privilege has already expanded in the early 1900s of American history, and she modifies her concentration on immigrants not accepted as the typical ‘white’ American but not yet of African descent either. Throughout Impossible Subjects the book is written in topological order with a chronological order of events within each section. Ngai writes this way in order to better convey her thesis about tracing the origins of the "illegal alien" in American law and society, and explain why and how illegal immigration became one the fundamental problems in U.S. immigration policy. In the below excerpt, Ngai perfectly embodies the intent of her book.
Albeit the politics of immigration target cultures of the highest population at a given time, these laws and politics can often affect immigrants of other cultures in a different way virtually having an inversion positive result. The lives of the immigrant Latina women seeking opportunity and education in California compared to the immigrant Iranian women seeking liberation from traditional oppressive life of Iran proves an impeccable example of this. The politics on the immigration of Latina women have i...
The Fair Labor Standards Act The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was passed by Congress on June 25th, 1938. The main objective of the act was to eliminate “labor conditions detrimental to the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, efficiency and well-being of workers,”[1] who engaged directly or indirectly in interstate commerce, including those involved in production of goods bound for such commerce. A major provision of the act established a maximum work week and minimum wage. Initially, the minimum wage was $0.25 per hour, along with a maximum workweek of 44 hours for the first year, 42 for the second year and 40 thereafter. Minimum wages of $0.25 per hour were established for the first year, $0.30 for the second year, and $0.40 over a period of the next six years.
Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben G. Rumbaut. Immigrant America: A Portrait. N.p.: University of California Press, 2006.
Weaver, R. D. (2009). A New Era for Legal Immigrants?: Rethinking Title IV of The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Journal of Policy Practice , 54-68.
The following three issues concerning illegal immigrants have received attention. One issue relates to the belief that illegal immigrants are taking our jobs and not paying taxes. A second issue is the belief that they are a threat to our country’s security. A third issue relates to the unfairness of allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the country without legalizing their status. First, let us consider the concern that illegal immigrants are taking our jobs and not paying taxes. It is fair to say that, for the most part, the illegal immigrants are working in jobs that our countrymen prefer not to have. If our workers are willing to accept the job, they are unwilling to work for the wages that employers are prepared to pay. In our society, people are accustomed to unions driving up the wage rate or our government subsidizing our lifestyle. That is, we have come to expect higher wages and, only out of desperation, will we take many of the jobs that th...
Samuelson, Robert J. The Hard Truth of Immigration. 2005. Elements of Argument: A Text and Reader. By Annette T. Rottenberg and Donna Haisty. Winchell. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2009. 704-06. Print.
We have created the land of free. Nonetheless, there have been a number of Immigration Acts in the United States. The first one was the Naturalization act of 1790. Then the immigration act of 1965 passed, and immigration restrictions applied to Mexican Immigrants for the first time. Nearly 30 years later in 1986, the immigration Reform and Control Act was, created which granted amnesty to immigrants that had lived in the United States before 1982. Nevertheless, this later act made it a crime for employers to hire undocumented immigrant workers. In order to create a successful Immigration Reform Policy, the government has to consider several socioeconomic areas including border control, worker programs, education, and the economy. “All the elements of this problem must be addressed together” (Bush 2006)
Paul Kalapodas 8 Dec. 1999 Acknowledgements Laton, Edward. The Famine Ships: The Irish Exodus to America. 1st ed. New York: Henry Hold 1997. Cozic, Charles P. Illegal Immigration: Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego, CA. Greenhaven Press 1997. Docket # 16778/2-12, Box 1211, U.S. National Archives Norton. Katzman. Escott. Chudacoff. Paterson. Tuttle. A People & A Nation: A History of the United States. 4th ed. Houghton Mifflin Press: Boston, MA 1994. Heisler, Martin O. From Foreign Workers to Settlers? Transnational Migration and the Emergence of the New Minorities. Sage Publications: Beverly Hills, CA c1986. Simon, Rita James. Immigration and American Public Policy. American Academy of Political and Social Science. Sage Publications: Beverly Hills, CA 1986. Hutchinson, Edward Prince. The New Immigration/ Special Editor: Hutchinson, Edward P. American Academy of Political and Social Science: Philadelphia 1966.
Females are targeted more than males due to their vulnerability, position as being lower than men, and the sexual preferences of society. Many cultures view woman as a possession used for sex and they do not have sexual rights to her own body. “Exploitative employers prefer to use trafficked women—traditionally seen as submissive, cheap, and pliable—for simple and repetitive tasks in agriculture, food processing, labor-intensive manufacturing, and domestic servitude” (US Department of State).
...d women’s biological purpose has provided men a source of comparative advantage in work. It is, therefore, natural for most companies to think that women cannot be as capable as men in terms of assuming strenuous or challenging positions because women, by default, become less participative and more vulnerable when they start to have family and children. Apparently, this situation has led to various gender discriminations in the labor market.