Gender, Migration, and Transnational Families: A Book Review
This paper reviews Rhacel Salazar Parreñas's Children of Global Migration (2005), focusing on three intersecting themes: gender roles, neoliberal economic policy, and immigration policy as they shape the migration decisions of Filipino women. The review examines how rigid patriarchal gender norms in the Philippines create a "care drain," compelling mothers to leave their children to perform domestic labor abroad while husbands hire lower-status women to maintain the household at home. It also considers how neoliberal policies create both opportunities and precarity for migrant caregivers, and how immigration policies in sending and receiving countries facilitate transnational family arrangements. The review concludes with constructive critiques, noting the book's relative inattention to transnational family success stories and wealthier migration patterns.
- Overview and Central Themes: Introduction to Parreñas's main arguments on gender and migration
- Neoliberal Economic Policies and Female Migration: How neoliberalism shapes migrant caregiving opportunities and risks
- Gender Roles and Family Dynamics: Rigid gender norms and their effects on transnational families
- Immigration Policy and Transnational Arrangements: Sending and receiving country policies enabling temporary migration
- Critical Assessment and Conclusion: Strengths, gaps, and overall evaluation of the book
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What makes this paper effective
- The review organizes its analysis thematically rather than chapter-by-chapter, giving the critique intellectual coherence and demonstrating genuine engagement with the book's arguments.
- The writer uses specific, concrete examples — such as the asymmetry between how migrant fathers and migrant mothers are perceived — to illustrate abstract arguments about gender and power.
- The critical section introduces a secondary source (Das Gupta, 2015) to identify a gap in Parreñas's scope, showing awareness of scholarly conversation beyond a single text.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper models evaluative synthesis: rather than simply summarizing each chapter, the writer identifies the book's three organizing tensions (gender, economics, immigration policy), assesses how well each is developed, and notes where the analysis could be extended. This technique — praise followed by constructive limitation — is characteristic of strong academic book reviews at the undergraduate level.
Structure breakdown
The review opens with a contextualizing overview of the book's central contribution, then devotes one section each to neoliberal policy, gender dynamics, and immigration policy. A final evaluative paragraph offers balanced criticism while affirming the book's overall value. Each section builds on the last, keeping gender as the throughline across economic and policy discussions.
Overview and Central Themes
Most readers of Children of Global Migration will be familiar with the main themes of Parreñas's (2005) book. However, Parreñas offers unique insight into the intersection of gender and economic policy as well as gender and immigration policies. Population migration is not a new issue by any means, but the patterns of global migration continue to change as labor markets change. The situation with Philippine domestic workers is unique because many women leave their own children to take care of an employer's children, while their husbands hire women from a lower socioeconomic rank to perform the gendered duties of housekeeping and childrearing. Gender roles are strict and immutable enough in the Philippines to prevent most men from simply assuming household or childrearing duties, even if the family could save money by doing so.
When the mother is working abroad taking care of the employer's children, her relationship with her own children back in the Philippines often suffers. Unlike male labor, female labor is devalued and deemed unworthy of respect. If a father leaves his family for temporary work abroad, he is celebrated for his contributions to the family; when the mother does the same, she is shamed for leaving her children to care for another's. This complex array of issues positions gender as a pivotal factor in migration.
Neoliberal Economic Policies and Female Migration
Parreñas discusses the impact of neoliberal global economic policies on the migration decisions of women in poor and underdeveloped countries. These neoliberal policies effectively transformed the global labor market, making it easier and more attractive for workers of all social classes to find positions in receiving countries. Parreñas focuses on Philippine women in the caregiving sector, including domestic work and healthcare. The domestic care sector often operates in a grey market, which presents its own set of challenges: a migrant laborer in this sphere may not enjoy the same legal or financial protections she would have in the more formal caregiving or healthcare sectors.
Moreover, neoliberal policies are by definition fluid and responsive to market forces rather than grounded in values, principles, or ethics. Should market demand for female caregivers decline, workers would find themselves in a precarious situation and likely be forced to return home. At the same time, caregivers can turn neoliberal economic structures to their advantage by sending home remittances — which is typically the primary goal of the type of migrant labor Parreñas examines.
Gender Roles and Family Dynamics
Gender roles define which positions a person will occupy at home and, to a lesser degree, in the receiving country. Parreñas highlights the rigid gender hierarchies in the Philippines and recognizes that these roles are largely immutable — which is why fathers do not take over household or childcare duties when their wives work abroad. Household chores and childcare are construed as women's work; men risk losing social status if they perform these tasks. These are also unpaid roles within the home, which makes it all the more ironic that families must then pay someone else to perform them. It is equally ironic that Philippine mothers abroad are paid significantly more to perform the same household and childcare tasks in receiving countries, where caregiving commands a market wage.
Caregiving is, in this sense, a deeply gendered role, and Parreñas's analysis could readily be extended to other poor or underdeveloped countries with patriarchal institutions. Gender also shapes how children perceive their parents' work, which in turn affects social ties and family relationships. When women return to the Philippines after working abroad, they are often greeted coldly or with suspicion, as some young children may interpret their mother's absence as abandonment — a presumption that is difficult to correct precisely because women's work is so systematically undervalued. The mother struggles to explain that she worked abroad specifically to provide her children with financial security, yet the stigma surrounding her departure persists.
References
Das Gupta, T. (2015). Gulf husbands and Canadian wives: Transnationalism from below among South Asians — a classed, gendered, and racialized phenomenon. In Engendering transnational voices: Studies in family, work, and identity.
Parreñas, R. S. (2005). Children of global migration: Transnational families and gendered woes. Stanford University Press.
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