Abstract
Even though gendered perspectives on migration have become increasingly central to the sociological study of migration as a whole, this increasingly prominent area of study has seldom focused on the migration decisions of privileged families. Astrid Eich-Kromm’s book fills a gap in our knowledge of gendered issues of migration in the United States by examining the migration trajectories of white European families in the context of transnational companies' demand for highly skilled work. Drawing from interviews with husbands and wives from 38 German families, her study emphasizes the motivations and struggles of “tied” migrants, wives who arrive in the United States with spousal visas that do not give them permission to work in a professional capacity outside the home. For gender scholars, the centrality of women’s decisions to the movements of the family as a whole may not come as a surprise, even though the mainstream migration literature has been slow to integrate the implications of this important finding. Still, the particular struggles of German women as they experience and interpret their migration trajectories adds depth and nuance to our understanding of gender, race, and nation in the context of migration, providing us insight into the constraints that even highly privileged migrants face on arrival to the United States.
The first few chapters of German Professionals in the United States highlight the remarkable variety of choices that German families encounter when considering the migration decision. As women consider the decision for themselves and their families alongside their husbands, they must take into account the sacrifice their own careers must suffer (at least in the short run) as well as childbirth and/or the educational trajectories of their children. Rather than being simply an economic decision, timing plays a critical role in the decision to move to the United States. Eich-Krohm shows that both men and women also cite cultural curiosity as an important motivation for migration. Highly skilled migrants see a move to the United States as an opportunity for a more cosmopolitan cultural experience, an interest that goes far beyond economic incentives, which are often relatively modest between two wealthy, industrialized countries.
But the privilege that affords that diversity of options becomes more complicated once they relocate. Eich-Krohm shows in subsequent chapters that many facets of American life unpleasantly surprise families when they arrive. While the H1-B-holding husbands enjoy significant professional satisfaction in their new careers in the United States, their wives struggle to set up the family home, integrate their children into an unfamiliar school system, and network with other families. These challenges occur at the same time that women who had established careers in Germany suddenly find themselves bereft of a professional identity. These multiple material, cultural, and psychological challenges, combined with lack of English proficiency and suburban location in which children must be highly supervised in comparison to Germany, means that these otherwise privileged women often experience intense isolation when they arrive in the United States. The author shows that how women navigate these challenges ends up influencing the long-term migration decision of their families, with some choosing to settle in the United States permanently, while others return to Germany.
One of the most interesting details explored in this book is the ambivalence with which women regard other German immigrants once in the United States. Although many women interviewed relied upon other German families to help them integrate into American society and longed for life back home when they first arrived, some of these same women preferred not to deepen connections with other German immigrants. Rather, many of the women interviewed favored connections with (white, upper middle class) American families instead, self-consciously seeking cultural integration rather than belonging to a German immigrant subculture. The active pursuit of integration into the American mainstream at the potential expense of belonging to one’s own national community in the United States seems to mark an important departure from other current observations of immigrant culture in the United States, and reflects the racial and class privilege that German professional families enjoy. Still, Eich-Krohm shows that these cultural choices come with conflicting feelings.
The author mentions the privileges enjoyed by these migrants, but this study might have been framed in a way that reflects more prominently how German professionals offer a counterexample to the prevailing literature on cultural assimilation in the United States, which focuses on racial minorities. Eich-Krohm’s nuanced account of gendered constraint and isolation in the face of racial and class privilege has the potential to make a significant contribution to our understanding of the gendered dimensions of assimilation across stratified sending countries.