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In 2009, Lucha, a Mexican woman who had migrated to Chicago and worked at a candy factory described her work as ‘A slow assassination of your soul’. Her experience in the United States was transformative. The power she previously had as a community activist and college student in Mexico was eroded. Lucha's experience exemplifies a shift in her identity and how that changing identity fashioned the character of her economic activities. Race, ethnicity, and gender shift and change meaning through migration (Gilmartin, 2008, p. 1840) and shape ‘migrant women's multiple relations in the process of migration’ (Parreñas, 2009, p. 11). We are interested in the struggles, realities and contestations of immigrant women. We want to better understand how migrant women negotiate the dynamic intersections of race, gender and citizenship identities in new places in order to survive, prosper and exert influence in new places and economic environments. Based on indepth interviews with immigrant women in Chicago, Illinois, United States and in the Barcelona area of Spain, we demonstrate that issues of race, gender and citizenship influenced the kinds of jobs they obtained and the working conditions they experienced, as well as their ability to become accepted members of the community. In this chapter, we want to respond to the call made by Parreñas (2009) to contribute to the gender and migration literature by analysing structural gender inequalities beyond differences between men and women, and focusing on how gender inequalities are constructed as they intersect with other inequalities based on race and citizenship. The women we interviewed endured humiliation based on their intersecting identities at work; some questioned their belonging in their new countries while at the same time feeling that they did not belong in their home country, as other authors such as Parreñas (2001) have found. The challenge for planners and policymakers is to understand the intricacies of multiple identities across places and scales. Hearing their complex stories of work and perceptions of belonging in their country of origin and new country can help academics who are training future planners and professionals build more inclusive planning and policy theory and practice.

Meng-Hsuan Chou starts the anthology with Chapter 2, ‘EU Mobility Partnerships and Gender: Origin and Implications’. Here she shows how current EU regulations regarding migration came to be formed they way they are and how this development was motivated. She not only explores the circumstances under which European Union (EU) mobility partnerships were established, but also examines the effects in terms of migration flows. She raises the question of how the migration policies of the receiving states gender migratory flows, and also wonder whether instrument formulations are intentional or unintentional. While previous research has mostly examined these issues from the perspective of national migration policies, Chou finds that a supranational viewpoint still is missing, a gap in the literature she here aims to fill in. The EU migration instruments known as the ‘mobility partnerships’ are established by participating EU member states and certain third-world countries with the aim of facilitating circular migration. Chou approaches her questions through empirical analysis of three different data sets: (1) existing studies on the migration-development nexus, European migration policy co-operation and EU mobility partnerships; (2) publicly available reports and official EU documents and (3) position papers circulated amongst national delegates who prepared for, and defended their domestic positions at, the Tampere European Council summit. She suggests that the European governments rarely had ‘gender balance’ as priority when it came to border control. However, by definition and design, EU policies are meant to affect migratory flows. To discern how, it is necessary to look more closely at what happens in practice when member states implement the measures (e.g. from the EU level to the national/bilateral level).

Nicky Busch has Ph.D. from the University of London. She is currently researching the in-home care and domestic sectors in the United Kingdom.