Entry 6

For the focus of this entry, I decided to touch on the obstacles undocumented Mexican women face while living in the United States. While citizens have access to many benefits like healthcare, immigrant people are banned for at least 5 years before they can access it, it’s obviously impossible to someone undocumented that cannot prove that they are living in the US since they basically don’t exist in the system. Approximately 5.2 million undocumented women live in the US, and none of them can even think about having healthcare sometime in their future. Equality Archive talks about how this limitation leads to an increased likelihood of experiencing domestic violence and sexual assault. 

Of course, these women don’t have permission to work in this country which leads them to find jobs that often underpays them and exploits them because they don’t have any type of social service that can protect them because they are not citizens. As Equality Archive states, “Many immigrant women face compounded intersectional hardships due to the interplay of their undocumented status with other facets of their lives, such as gender, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, or race.” On top of being undocumented, their gender cuts down the job opportunities since most undocumented Mexican men can do heavy work but women are often not considered for those positions, their level of English also plays a role during job hunting becase communication wouldn’t exist between an employer and them. Employers could also not hire them because they look “Mexican” and could attract attention to them and the place where they work. 

Most of the time if not always, Mexican women have to accept the job without complaining about the mistreatment and exploitation because there’s no laws protecting them and by speaking up against those problems, they’d be revealing their immigration status, and I believe Equality Archives said it best, “undocumented women may feel they have to make a difficult choice between pursuing justice or staying safe.” They could face a worse path if they try to raise their voice. 

I feel like being an undocumented Mexican women in the United States means finding obstacles in basically every part of their journey. There’s sexual violence, abuse, exploitation, no protection at all, and living in fear that everything you work for can be taken from you at any time. I cannot talk about a specific issue for this research because all of them matter and all of them are part of these women’s lives, ignoring one problem means erasing a part of what they endured and how much pain it caused them. That’s one of the reasons I believe that we have to have an intersectional approach to any problem since it’s the only way we can see the full picture and understand better what’s going on in every situation. 

REFERENCES

Undocumented Women. Equality Archive. 2022. https://equalityarchive.com/issues/undocumented-women/ 

The Employment and Earnings of Immigrant Women. Immigrant Women. 2022. https://statusofwomendata.org/immigrant-women/