While anti-immigrant actions and speech are facing a serious pushback, the face of immigration continues to be read as male. Immigrant women are rarely mentioned or discussed, except in the context of being breeders, bearers of anchor babies, victims, dangerous, deceptive. Immigrant women aren’t painted in the full colors of their lives as mothers and activists, artists.

Earlier this week New America Media (NAM) released the results of a poll of 1,102 immigrant women. And while the information isn’t surprising, as they reflect what immigrant women have been saying for years about their lives, pero there are those who get hung up on numbers. So what do the numbers say?

82% of Latin American women found discrimination against immigrants
to be a major problem for their family, compared to 17% for women from
African or Arab countries, and only 13% for those from China. Still, 90% of
the Latin American women said they want to become US citizens.
40% of immigrant women from Latin America and significant
percentages from other regions do not have health insurance. A clear
majority of women immigrants without health insurance are unaware of public
health programs that could help their children receive medical assistance.

The poll also found that immigrant women felt discrimination in the United States, especially immigrants from Latin America. Along the same thread, immigrant women were concerned about immigration raids and their possible impact on the family.

Pero is the image of immigrant women presented in the poll really three dimensional or does it play up old stereotypes?

I was excited to read the NAM poll on immigrant women pero as I read, I was left uneasy with the language framing of the role of immigrant women. I was beginning to feel, that while yes the stats were useful, the way the stats were being interpreted played into the role of immigrant mujer as idealized sacrificial mother.

The poll’s executive summary is titled Immigrant Women : Stewards of the 21st Century Family. Steward as caretaker, especially in the realm of domestic matters like housecleaning and child care. The report frames women’s migration in relation to their male counterparts. According the the executive summary, women crossing the borders is seen as happening alongside their male partner and/or as preserving the integrity of the family unit.

“When women come to America, they come as wives and mothers,” (p. 3).

Yes, family is important to women. However, this heteronormative definition of womanhood, tied to roles as wives or mothers, serves to the erase other immigrant experiences and actually degrades other immigrant women experiences and the experiences of other women in general.

“Women immigrants reveal that they came to America not in search of streets
paved with gold – making money was surprisingly low on their list of
priorities – but because they saw the US as a place to build better futures
for their children, and to make permanent homes for their families,” Ms.
Close said. “At a time when more than one-third of US families are
single-parent households, 90 percent of women immigrants are raising
children in intact marriages.”

Where are the numbers for immigrant women seeking asylum because of domestic violence and rape and how asylum seekers are put into detention, with their families at centers like T. Don Hutto? Not even a year ago, another study looked at the way thousands of children who migrated to the U.S. alone were treated and it paints a not so rosy picture. And what of lesbian immigrant women and trans immigrant women? In presenting “intact” heterosexual families as “model” immigrants aren’t we erasing and silencing all those that fall outside that?

It is refreshing to see a poll that centers immigrant women and their experiences. However, we cannot let the constant desire for scientific statistics to tell the stories of our lives repeat stereotypes of martyr mamis and lock ourselves into a conservative definition of what “family” is and what family success is. In doing so we further push to the margins the lives of women who not fit into these neat and acceptable definitions.