Women's Human Rights and Migration. Sital Kalantry
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research on sex ratios bears this out. When my coauthors compared the ratio of male to female children born to second-generation Asian Americans and Caucasian Americans in the American Community Survey from 2008 to 2012, we found no significant differences in the sex ratios for these two groups.
Certainly both first-generation and second-generation Indian immigrants share similarities with people living in India. They may celebrate the same religious holidays and share common values, foods, and traditions. The sex-selective abortion debate takes the comparison too far—it fails to see any distinctions between the two groups. Yet, people of Indian descent living in the United States clearly recognize these distinctions. Second-generation immigrants derogatorily refer to recent immigrants as “FOBs” or “fresh off the boat.” Indian Americans born in the United States are sometimes referred to as ABCDs or “American Born Confused Desis.” Desi derives from desh, which means nation or country, and a desi is a person from that country. It is used colloquially to mean someone from the homeland.48 These labels reflect Indian Americans’ own understanding of themselves as a diverse group.
A crude theory of assimilation would posit that the longer an immigrant has lived in another country, the less likely she is to share cultural characteristics with people from her country of origin.49 Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. Amish people retain their distinctive traditions and language even though they have lived in the United States for generations.50 They are able to do this because they remain geographically isolated, do not send their children to American public schools, and limit their interactions with contemporary society.51 While some Indian Americans live in predominately Indian American communities, they are not isolated in the same way as the Amish.
Adopting laws based on decontextualized knowledge is problematic not only because it means that a law is adopted without properly reflecting on whether it addresses a problem in the jurisdiction where it is adopted, but also because there are other potential negative consequences. Indeed, the bans will lead to the profiling of Asian American women who are seeking abortions. The bans will create access barriers to all women who in some states now have to answer a battery of questions in order to obtain an abortion. Finally, if ruled constitutional, the bans will open the door to a host of other “reason-based” pre-viability restrictions, which would further limit the right to choose even during the first trimester.
Legislative representative advocates voting for the ban might assume that a practice that is prevalent in the country of origin of the migrant will also be replicated among immigrants when they move to their new home. This is because they may think that the practice is ingrained in the culture of the immigrant, which culture they believe to be the same or similar to the culture of people living in the country of origin of the migrant. This view is incorrect because culture is not fixed—it changes over time. In addition, there is an overemphasis on culture in understanding the reasons for an immigrant’s behavior and an underemphasis on context, as I explain in the next section.
References to the situation in other countries may simply be a strategic move by anti-abortion advocates. Those arguments are used to justify their primary goal—placing restrictions on abortion. Yet their advocacy sways people who do not normally support their goals (e.g., pro-choice people). In fact, many pro-choice state legislators have voted for these bans—I discuss this in Chapter 3. I argue below that assumptions about the behavior of Asian Americans made by some pro-choice feminists rest on a mistaken view about culture.
Culture vs. Context in Understanding Immigrant Behavior
In migrant-receiving countries, the role of culture is often overemphasized in explaining the behavior and acts of immigrants and their progeny. If “son preference” is thought to be part of the culture of people living in Asia, then it will be assumed that it is a widespread sentiment among Asian Americans if mainstream communities believe that culture is fixed and unchanging and that it is what drives the behavior of immigrants. On the other hand, too little emphasis is given to context in shaping behavior.
There is no agreed-on definition of “culture” across disciplines. I use “culture” to mean not just customs, usages, traditions, or habit clusters, but a set of control mechanisms for the governing of behavior.52 When I refer to “context” I mean factors that are outside of a person that guide and shape behavior. While a particular behavior can be motivated largely by “culture,” it could also be shaped by the specific situation and norms that the person encounters. Along the lines of what Knop, Michaels, and Riles call the “post-essentialist critique” of culture, I accept the view that a person’s culture is not fixed; it is dynamic and may change in response to his or her surrounding context.53
Uma Narayan observes how many people in the United States define the behavior of people who live in India by their culture. She points out how the media and popular American views frame murders of married women in India as products of Indian culture (“dowry death”), while murders by abusive domestic partners in the United States are not framed in cultural terms.54 Narayan points out how a similar incident (the murder of a wife by her husband) when it emerges in a foreign country is painted as more heinous and attributed to culture whereas in the United States that murder would simply be seen as an isolated crime. Sex-selective abortion discourse in the United States goes further and paints an incident in the United States in the same way that it is perceived to occur in a foreign country.
Legal scholar Leti Volpp’s article published in 2000, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” further points out that not only is culture blamed for the behavior of immigrants, but the understanding of culture is fixed and unchanging. To illustrate her point, she compares the dominant American discourse about underage marriage between Caucasian Americans and Mexican Americans. In the context of Caucasian Americans, underage marriage is generally viewed as outside of the norm, whereas underage marriage among Mexican Americans is attributed to culture.
Volpp’s work explains why this disparate treatment occurs. First, Volpp explains that the dominant American paradigm assumes that immigrant culture is fixed while mainstream American culture is fluid:
We sometimes assume culture to be static and insular, a fixed property of groups rather than an entity constantly created through relationships. This assumption is made much more frequently for outsider communities such as communities of color. Culture, for communities of color, is transformed into what Paul Gilroy calls a “pseudo-biological property of communal life.” Under such a paradigm, culture for communities of color is a fixed, monolithic essence that directs the actions of community members. Racialized culture thus becomes an essence that is transmitted in an unchanging form from one generation to the next.
We can contrast this racialized culture to culture that is considered to be “hegemonic”—the culture established as the norm. Hegemonic culture is either experienced as invisible or is characterized by hybridity, fluidity, and complexity.55
Much of the discourse on sex-selective abortion among immigrant communities assumes that the culture of immigrants is fixed. It does not leave any room for the possibility that behavior changes with context as well as over time.
Second, practices of immigrants are assumed to be “rooted” in their culture while practices of Caucasian Americans are not. Volpp points out that “[t]hese visions of culture influence our perceptions of individual acts. For communities of color, a specific individual act is assumed to be the product of a group identity and further, is used to define the group.”56
Third, by grounding the practices of immigrants in their culture, the practices are framed as misogynistic and contrasted with the practices of Caucasian Americans. Volpp writes:
Even while voluntary or forced adolescent marriages occur within white American communities, we do not conceptualize these practices as cultural phenomena characterizing white America. Rather, this undesirable behavior is projected beyond U.S. borders and characterized as an abhorrent practice imported by immigrants that undermines enlightened Western norms. This projection allows the United States to maintain a self-image as a progressive state with a progressive culture—especially in the arena