This article focuses on Honduran immigrants in Alexandria, Virginia USA and their family members in Nacaome, Valle, Honduras. It traces the transfer of remittances from migrants to their families at home, in 20 transnational families. It focuses on six issues: gendered motives for migration, reproductive labour across borders, gender inequalities in the US labour market, intricate intra-familial power negotiations, the empowerment of women and new forms of dependence. It concludes by constructing a ‘counter-narrative’ of migration, based on women's experiences, and considering the implications of this for development policies and programmes that seek to mobilise remittances for development.

Statelessness has been described as the result of unintentional gaps between citizenship policies excluding individuals who move, form relationships and reproduce across international borders. But what if the rise in statelessness is not a technicality, but a strategy of slippery statecraft meant to design the citizenry a given state is willing to protect? This paper places statelessness within the context of neoliberal globalisation and international migration and provides a critical global governance view of contemporary causes of statelessness, key actors working on it and their framing of the issue within global governance frameworks. I argue that the dominant framing of statelessness as a technical issue obviates the politics behind statelessness as slippery statecraft, leading proposed solutions to fall short. Critical research may help advocates make the case for inclusion, appealing to broader state interests and networks, without abandoning attendant human rights obligations.

The 2010 earthquake and cholera outbreak in Haiti have given a push to women’s migration to the Dominican Republic, and risk of being trafficked. Employing a feminist ethnographic approach, this case study examines the experiences of Haitian women and girls in the Dominican border town of Comendador, Elías Piña, to understand the choices and calculated risks they take in order to “get through.” The authors situate trafficking within a spectrum of violence against women along a border marked by radically asymmetrical power relations, and call for coordinated social interventions beyond law enforcement that guarantee effective protection in the cross-border context.

Gender discrimination as a risk factor for statelessness has been understood as direct discrimination whereby legal frameworks prohibit mothers from conferring their nationality. This article discusses research findings from the Dominican Republic where indirect gender discrimination, evident in documentation and birth registration practices applicable to Haitian migrants and descendants, is causing matrilineal transmission of statelessness. Restricting access to citizenship has become a form of migration control, just as the creation of temporary, ad hoc status forms allows the state to sidestep responsibilities for migrant incorporation. If the links between gender and statelessness are not only legal, but also historical, structural, and procedural, then disrupting this cycle requires more than legal reform. For advocacy campaigns, such as UNHCR's #IBelong Campaign and the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, to be successful, they must adopt a broader interpretation of the relationship between gender and statelessness, based on CEDAW's substantive conception of gender equality.

Crossing the Dominican–Haitian border in greater numbers than previously, Haitian women and girls, many of whom have been forcibly displaced by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, make multiple decisions about where to go and whom to trust. Thus they are in contact with informal scouts and other agents, while seeking employment as vendors in the frontier market, domestic workers in private homes, and sex workers in brothels in the Dominican Republic. This article argues that trafficking is but one problem along a spectrum of violence and human rights violations facing these women, requiring coordinated social interventions beyond law enforcement.

Migrant women's organizations, UN Women, and civil society advocacy networks have mobilized to call for greater gender-responsiveness in migration governance. The development of the Global Compacts on Migration and Refugees presented an important opportunity to continue enhancing the international framework for protecting the rights of women and men on the move. This article asks: How has gender been understood/invoked during proceedings leading up to their adoption? In what ways is it incorporated in the resulting compacts and their operationalization? What are the gains and missed opportunities for gender-responsiveness? Drawing on data gathered through participant observation in the global compact on migration preparatory meetings and member state negotiations in Geneva and New York, and policy analysis of the drafts of both compacts, this paper aims to determine the extent to which the compacts, and the plans to operationalize them, serve to widen or close the gender gap.

Babies born ‘out of place’ to migrant mothers pose a challenge to states seeking to restrict access to migration and citizenship. In places as diverse as Texas, Tel Aviv, and Santo Domingo, policymakers have been modifying administrative requirements to limit access to birth certificates for babies born to migrant women with temporary or irregular status as a measure aimed at discouraging their permanent settlement. This raises concerns regarding the gendered ways in which women can be controlled via their reproductive lives when childbirth is made a juncture of migration enforcement, and children’s right to an identity and a nationality violated as a result. Rights advocates are pushing back against this practice using existing human rights frameworks. This article provides an overview of what birth registration as a bordering practice looks like so that scholars, policymakers, and practitioners around the world can recognise and resist it. It focuses on the case of the Dominican Republic’s denial of birth certificates for people of Haitian descent, and an action-research project aiming to facilitate access to the Dominican civil registry for children of mixed couples (migrant mother and Dominican father). It concludes by highlighting the implications for the babies born ‘in between’ – who are at risk of statelessness and other rights violations – and pointing to international frameworks for upholding children’s right to a nationality.

Identity documentation (ID) is now recognised as a development concern, especially since the adoption of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 16.9 on legal identity for all, including birth registration. However, achieving universal birth registration is not a straightforward task in contexts of human mobility. Where questions of belonging are unsettled, documentation may be issued to some and denied to others on discriminatory grounds. This chapter identifies four obstacles to birth registration for migrant women’s children which directly prevent the realisation of SDG 16.9: gender gaps in women’s independent access to ID; migration enforcement in the process of birth registration; access to reproductive healthcare; and linkage of birth registration with social welfare entitlements. If access to documentation for migrants and birth certificates for their children is not addressed, this directly hinders not only the achievement of legal identity for all, but also states’ capacity to measure achievement of all the SDGs.