From Anglo Settlers to Caribbean Domestics: The Multiple Routes to Reconstituting Immigrant Families in Canada

The concept of family economies and the inclusion of non-measurable emotional and spiritual factors in migration studies permit a more complex approach to the field than does an emphasis on geographic change, assimilation and wage differentials. A comprehensive conceptualization includes human agency—in the frame of human and social capital—and individual interests within family and friendship networks. Men and women make decisions in the context of family economies, which combine the income-generating capacities of all members with the whole of the reproductive needs—for example, care of dependants—and consumption patterns, so as to achieve the best possible results according to “traditional norms” for the family and its standing in the community. The phrase traditional norms is, of course, a catch-all one that includes gender hierarchies and socially-mandated gender roles, with older men holding the power. It also includes generational hierarchies in which parents decide the (limited) schooling, home or wage work, and the partnerships of their children. Allocation of resources depends on the respective stage of the family cycle as well as on the stages in individual life-courses. The allocation of time, labour power and skills of all members must be negotiated in terms of benefits for each: maximization of income or of leisure, child/elderly-care and out-work, education or wage-work for children, traditional networking and individualist separation from the community. Again, “benefits for each” are decided upon in power hierarchies in which fathers’ and husbands’ distinct interests usually take priority.