Tokenizing and Articulating Protection of Women in Migration Law: Strategies of Exclusion in Contemporary Europe and the Nineteenth-Century USA

Abstract

This article investigates continuities in migration law-making that claims to aim at protecting women but in effect is a tokenist strategy excluding non-Western female migrants. It shows that despite developments in the legal recognition of women’s equality, present restrictions on family reunification in Western Europe, illustrated through the EU and Danish migration laws, echo law-making in the late 19th-century US, exemplified in the process of adopting the Page Act, which also introduced stricter rules for female migrants under the stated objective of protecting women. Using the social theory of articulation, the article demonstrates how legislators continuously articulate and rearticulate the wellbeing of migrant women to legitimize discriminatory migration rules regardless of how highly women’s rights are respected in law and society. The article contributes to previous feminist scholarship in migration law by showing the continuity and intentionality of the articulative practices in law-making directed at migrant women.