The place of "out-of-place' women

This essay deals with the double-political and economic-exclusion which immigrant women suffer, on the one hand as "out-of-place people' and, on the other, as mostly poor women. The first part offers an analysis of the circumstances in which the growing hostility towards and the rejection of non-Community immigrants are rationalised. Those politicians and mass media who are hostile to non-Community immigration insist on the threat which this Southern "invasion' represents for "national' cultural identity and resources, and attribute migration to the "demographic boom' in the countries of origin. Those women who migrate are, subjected to a second discriminatory "culturalisation'. The article demonstrates that in the Western world they find themselves confined to narrow, traditionally female socio-economic space as a result of being poor immigrants and, on top of this, women. These women suffer discrimination as undesirable foreigners and as women. -from English summary