The Social Networks of Haitian Immigrants Employed in the Long-term Care Industry in Metropolitan Philadelphia: Complex Intersections of Race, Nationality, Class, and Gender

Abstract

This study explains the labor market outcomes of foreign-born Haitian women and men employed in the long-term care industry in Philadelphia, PA. The study is a feminist geographic analysis of their social networks related to migration and employment. This analysis is significant for two reasons. First it provides a more nuanced understanding of the linkages between the geography of networks, migration, and labor market outcomes than currently exists. Furthermore by exploring how people’s multiple social identities shape the geography of social networks, migration, and labor market outcomes, the study integrates geographic and intersectional analyses and brings feminist geography to the center of contemporary feminist debates. I engaged in an inductive qualitative research study consisting of interviews and participation observation fieldwork. I conducted in-depth interviews with 18 women and 12 men currently working in the long-term care industry, along the nursing occupational hierarchy. These interviews focused on explicating the relationships among the geography of place-based social networks, the dynamic and complex intersections of multiple social identities, and occupational mobility. Interviews examined the nature, spatial extent and significance of the social network connections that shaped their labor market, educational, and migratory histories, as well as their current daily activities. I interviewed six key informants from Haitian community groups and immigrant nonprofit organizations to gain additional information about the Haitian community in Philadelphia and the role of social network composition and use. I also interviewed seven key informants affiliated with nurse training and job placement organizations to gain more information about the trends in this field. Finally, I conducted participant observation fieldwork at three nursing program recruitment information sessions. This research is a timely intervention that brings together the academic literature of feminist geographic inquiry about urban labor markets, feminist geographic inquiry about migration, migration studies, and the feminist theory of intersectionality. The scholarship of each of these has developed along parallel but separate trajectories. By bringing them in conversation with one another, this research makes important contributions to a number of important theoretical and empirical debates within each of them. The project advanced migration studies by documenting the multiscalar geography of social networks and how the complex intersections of race, class, nationality and gender shape network composition. Furthermore the research linked co-ethnic social networks to occupational mobility within the long-term care industry. This study advanced feminist theory by integrating a Black Feminist approach to intersectionality with geographic concepts of mobility, space and place to develop a new methodological tool, the Social Relations Chart. This provides a new way to examine intersectionality in practice. Finally, this study advanced feminist geographic inquiry by documenting the complex intersections and operation of the power hierarchies of race, nationality, class and gender in the workplace in a manner not previously documented in the urban labor market literature. In sum, this research brings these bodies of scholarship together and extends collective knowledge about the mechanisms by which mobility, power, place and space are shaped by multiscalar social relations.