Asian women migrating to New York in greater numbers
In 2006, Meekankshi Thirukode, who was then 23, made the trip from her native Chennai in southern India to New York City. She arrived on a student visa to get her master’s degree in art criticism and connoisseurship. She wanted to write about art and believed that New York provided more opportunities than India. Indeed, after completing her degree, she was hired by an art gallery in Chelsea.
“It can be very hierarchical in terms of getting your foothold in places,” she said of working in the art industry in India. “Credibility and being validated by someone with authority in your field is valued whereas in the U.S, if you work hard and are enthusiastic, people give you that chance. It sounds cliché but it’s true,” she said with a laugh.
The number of Asian women coming to New York has been increasing steadily since 1990, and in 2009, approximately 12,000 more women than men came from Asian countries to New York. Experts believe that there is a wide range of reasons for this shift, including political unrest, economic instability and social injustices in their home countries.
Additionally, economic conditions in the United States are propelling female immigration: the aging American population is increasing demand for elder care workers and occupations in the health industry, which tend to be filled by migrant women, and more students are headed to the U.S. to study on student visas. The recession has also affected industries such as finance and construction, which generally employ men.
The recession, however, is also affecting immigrants, even females. Thirukode was laid off from the art gallery in December and has since been looking for work. During her time in New York, she met and married her husband and has been able to continue living in the city on a dependent visa.
In 2009, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there were nearly 153,000 more foreign-born women in New York than men. From Latin America, only Central American men outnumbered women immigrants in New York in 2009.
The greatest difference between the number of men and women from a particular ethnic background rests within the Caribbean community. There are approximately 145,000 more women of Caribbean background in New York than men. The Census also tracks when this migration occurred. The majority of Caribbean women, about 86,000, entered New York before 1990.
The same holds true of European and South American women who arrived in the U.S. in larger numbers before 1990. Since then, the numbers of women from these three geographical locations have decreased.
Asian women, on the other hand, have increased in number since 1990. In 2009, 50.9 percent of all Asian immigrants to New York were women. However, there are geographical differences in the numbers of men and women coming from Asia: the difference between men and women from southeast Asia was the highest, with women accounting for 54.3 percent of south Asians entering New York; south central Asians bucked the trend, with men making up 53.3 percent of immigrants from that region to New York in 2009.
Sania Samad moved from Lahore, Pakistan to Iowa City, Iowa in 2005 after marrying her husband, who is an American citizen. Three years later, she moved to New York. A designer and textile artist by profession, Samad moved at age 32. For the first six months of her time in the U.S., Samad was on a dependent visa and wasn’t allowed to work or leave the country.
“The feeling was, at least in my heart, that I’m stuck here,” she said. “Deep down, I have this feeling that I’m very alone and I have to manage it all by myself. It wasn’t ever like that in Pakistan,” Samad said.
Samad is working from home part-time as a jewelry designer and devoting most of her time to raising her two children, ages four and six. She misses her family and talks to them everyday. Samad, who is now a permanent resident of the U.S, had hoped to go back to Pakistan. She fears that may not happen soon, however, due to the political situation in that country.
Twenty-three-year-old Madison Shimoda, however, is wondering if she’ll be able to stay in the United States past May. Shimoda came to the U.S. on a student visa in 2007 from Tokyo, Japan. She studied at Claremont McKenna College in southern California and graduated in May.
“The reason why I wanted to continue my education in the U.S. was because I was enamored by American culture,” Shimoda said. “Japan is a very homogenous community,” she said. “There isn’t room for people to do things outside of the status quo.”
Shimoda mentioned that within Japanese society there is a lot of pressure for young women to get married.
Nabila Khan, co-founder of the Coney Island Avenue Project, an immigration advocacy agency that serves mainly south Asian immigrants, says that conditions for women in their home countries can be factors that push them to immigrate. Khan, herself an immigrant from Pakistan, said that political unrest most specifically in Pakistan, economic instability and social injustices are contributing factors to emigration out of that area.
She noted that Pakistani women face social attitudes that look down upon women working outside of the home and pursuing higher education. Although that is not a blanket statement of all Pakistanis, it is an aspect that affects many women who decide to leave Pakistan.
“There’s a concept of the U.S. that they will have a voice and they’ll be heard,” said Khan, explaining that she was mostly referring to the working class, which faces its own economic dilemmas due to Pakistan’s economic instability.
Generally speaking, experts believe that the increase in migration of Asian women can be partly attributed to the recent economic conditions.
“Nationwide, there is a trend of increasing female migration, particularly from east Asian, some south Asian and Caribbean women,” said Aaron Terrazas, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. “It has a lot to do with industries where they work. A lot of these women work in nursing and elder care.”
Terrazas noted that the recession severely impacted industries that tended to attract men, such as construction and finance. Those shrinking industries have inherently increased the numbers of women in the labor force. Additionally, the aging population in the U.S. means that there is more need within service-related industries, such as social services and health care. Many migrant women fill these jobs. Terrazas is careful to note that migration cannot be simplified based on employment alone.
“People move because they think their life prospects will be better elsewhere; they are typically aware of costs and tradeoffs although it is impossible to account for the full range of individual costs and benefits prior to moving,” Terrazas said in an email.
“Employment-based immigration is not a large part, but an avenue [of entering the U.S.]” Terrazas said. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics reported that in 2009, of all female migrants obtaining legal permanent resident status, only 11.2 percent of cases were based on employment. And that number is for the entire country, not just the state of New York. The most common reason for obtaining legalized status was being an immediate relative of a U.S. citizen. There has also been an increase in the number of students obtaining visas to study in the United States. However, due to the economic recession, there aren’t many companies that are able to offer these graduates employment with a visa sponsorship. Terrazas noted that in the cases where graduates cannot find employment, many choose other destinations such as Canada.
With factors such as the recession and population numbers changing, it is difficult to say definitively if women will continue coming in increasing numbers from Asia, Terrazas said. He further noted that within employment, there is also a shift on the national level.
“In some industries, we are seeing natives enter, for example, in food services,” Terrazas said. This could be a result of the recession and a lack of jobs in other industries. The effect of all of these factors on migration of women to New York remains unknown.
Thirukode, who’s been searching for a job in the art industry since December, says that it’s hard when you are searching for a job and a sponsorship. “I’d love to have a stable job or some way so I can stay here on a permanent basis so that I have the freedom to move around and do the work that I want to do.” Shimoda, who is searching for a job in fashion journalism, feels the same way: “I would have really liked to work at Vogue,” she said. “They offered me a position but I couldn’t take it because they don’t sponsor international people. That was the most disappointing thing, when your dream job is so close and you can’t take it.”
