4.2 Non-communitarian immigrant women in the work market in spain  (Page 17/18)

Conclusions

As a conclusion, immigrant women in Spain exemplify the present processes of feminization of the migratory flows and clarify the increasing demand of immigrant workers to carry out domestic tasks on an international scale. Their legal vulnerability and the labor situation that are occupied here, as cheap manual labor for tasks linked to social reproduction, shows the structural conditioners that are exposed and that they must kept in mind at the time of valuing the potential of integration in the Spanish society. 

It is the imbrications between genders, social class, and decisive ethnicity at the time of explaining the labor insertion of immigrant woman in the receiving society, and its unequal access to the resources and opportunities, in the context of asymmetrical power relations in which women are seen as an exploited subject. That way, as women, immigrant workers are held to the logic of patriarchate in their country of origin as in the receiving society. As immigrants coming from poor countries – from a working-class – they do not only face legal barriers of a migratory policy that directly discriminates for being a non-communitarian foreigner, and indirectly as far as gender; but also to the prejudices and stereotypes of a receiving society that sets them in very concrete labor niches; that is to say, the domestic service, prostitution, and those poorly qualified services (cleaning, catering, commerce, etc.), feminized for exactly that reason. An explosive cocktail that acts in a simultaneous and non-successive form, and that locates these women in a position of “social vulnerability” in relation to the rest of the groups; that is to say, in the lowest layers of the occupational structure, in those remunerated activities that are more emblematic because of the gender discrimination – rejected by the majority of native women for those reasons – and whose demand grows incessantly. This is how we attended a process of transference of the domestic and familiar work between women on an international scale. Many middle-class native women, who have had an education and have been incorporated in the work market since the 80’s, improve their labor position through “care-taking” and turning to “other” women coming from countries with less opportunities. Therefore, the internationalization of the reproductive work generates a triple system of subordination of the immigrant woman, on the basis of gender, to the ethnic group and the social class.

Really, it can be concluded that the reality of the feminine migration in Spain patents the active participation of woman in migratory processes; which radically breaks with the topic of passive female immigrant, who arrives at the receiving society following their spouses in the migratory project. Their social and economic contribution in the societies of origin as in the one of destination isn’t sufficiently recognized in scientific literature or in social imaginaries. Even though they have stated their labor concentration in activities linked to social reproduction, these workers should not be considered as mere passive victims of conditioners of structural character; their enterprising character and participative tradition and of solidarity turn them into women able of controlling their destiny. In any case, the migratory phenomenon in Spain is something recent in comparison with other countries, reason why the labor trajectories in the next years should be studied, in order to state if a tendency to normality takes place (in the sense of comparison of the labor opportunities to those of the feminine native population) or, if oppositely, the discrimination situations never change.