Migration Decision-Making Process: Dialectic Contradictions Experienced by Asylum-Seeking Women

ABSTRACT

Increasing numbers of migrants have fled human rights abuses, seeking refugee status. This study, involving semi-structured interviews with 12 African asylum-seeking women in Israel, explores their decision to leave home, journey to, and enter Israel without legal authorization. It further examines their retrospective view of leaving home amidst their experiences in Israel. Guided by a qualitative descriptive approach, the analysis reveals contradictory themes: autonomy/absence of autonomy in migration decision-making and positive/negative sentiments about life in Israel. We discuss these findings in relation to international migration determinant theories, relational dialectic theory, and research on communicative tensions experienced by refugees.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration decision making
• Gender
• Refugee narratives
• Relational dialectic theory

Introduction

The world is currently witnessing an increase in the movement of people from the Global South to the Global North, in search of better lives and opportunities. As of 2017, the estimated number of international migrants reached 258 million; of these, half live in developed countries (UNDESA, 2017). Of the migrants residing in developed countries, 52% are women (UNDESA, 2017). Increasing numbers of migrants who have fled human rights abuses seek recognition as refugees, but vague and overlapping labels (e.g. “temporary migrant workers”, “irregular migrants”, “asylum seekers”, “refugees”, “trafficked persons”) imposed by nation-states in an attempt to control migration flows, exclude them from lawful participation in international migration. Migrants who enter a country without the necessary authorization required under immigration regulations or who stay beyond the expiry of their visa are defined as “irregular” or “unauthorized migrants” (Castles 2000; IOM 2004). While irregular migration is difficult to track, existing indicators suggest that a significant portion of today’s migration is irregular (Migration Data Portal, 2018). The circumstances surrounding this movement (i.e., pre-, peri-, and post-migration) is most often characterized by highly precarious social, economic, cultural, and political conditions that are volatile, dangerous, and compromise the well being of migrants (ICOHRP 2010; IFRCRCS, n.d.).

This paper reports a qualitative naturalistic study exploring the factors that influenced the decision of African asylum-seeking women in Israel to leave home, journey to, and enter Israel without legal authorization. An inductive, descriptive analysis of in-depth interviews with the women, uncovered two communicative challenges that emerged in their narratives, which we found to be best understood and presented through the lens of relational dialectic theory.

Why Do Women Migrate?

Theoretical approaches to studying the determinants of international migration posit causal mechanisms for migration that operate at macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of analyses (Massey et al., 1993). Macro-level theories point to social, political, and economic processes that influence international migration (Bonfiglio, 2011; de Haas, 2011). Meso-level theories explore how migration networks and systems influence migration flows (Massey et al., 1993). Micro-level analyses focus on migrants as individuals possessing agency, capabilities, and aspirations to migrate (Bonfiglio, 2011).

Up until the 1970s, the dominant neo-classical theories and empirical research on the causes of international migration mostly emphasized economic explanations and essentially ignored women (e.g. Choi et al., 2018; Mahler & Pessar, 2006; Nobles & McKelvey, 2015). Women were assumed to “follow” men and, therefore, have a reactive rather than proactive role in migration (Kofman et al., 2000). While there is empirical evidence that supports the notion that some women migrate to accompany or reunite with their families, this hardly explains the near equal rate of female and male migration and the rapid increase in single female migrants today (Choi et al., 2018; Kofman et al., 2000; Mahler & Pessar, 2006).

Structural explanations that emerged in the mid-1970s provided new avenues, especially in the context of the recruitment of migrant women into manufacturing industries (Choi et al., 2018; Nobles & McKelvey, 2015; Pedraza, 1991). Nonetheless, the structural approach was criticized for “incorporating gender by adding a female variable to an existing framework, rather than giving gender relations a central explanatory role” (Grieco & Boyd, 1998, p. 5).

Feminist scholarship criticized the tradition of male bias, brought to light the predominance of women in migratory processes, and incorporated women into the research process (Kofman et al., 2000; Nobles & McKelvey, 2015; Pessar & Mahler, 2003). However, the trend at this time was to fit women into existing theoretical models created to understand male migration, rather than developing new conceptual models to explicate gender differences (Grieco & Boyd, 1998; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003; Nobles & McKelvey, 2015; Wright, 1995).

Integrative, meso-level theories in the 1980s and 1990s viewed households, families, and social networks as harmonious, rational, and coherent decision-making units, thus, further neglecting the gendered factors and processes within those units that potentially prevent or promote international migration (Grieco & Boyd, 1998; King, 2012; Mahler & Pessar, 2006). Studies conducted in the 1990s, of Mexican and Puerto Rican migrant women (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Nobles & McKelvey, 2015), challenged the assumption that women simply follow men, as well as the notion of harmonious households, and demonstrated how the social construction of gender reflects structural factors and influences migration decisions (Grieco & Boyd, 1998; Kofman et al., 2000; Nobles & McKelvey, 2015). However, there has still been little concerted effort to incorporate gender into theories of migration determinants (Boucher, 2016; Grieco & Boyd, 1998).

Rationale and Research Question

Existing research on decision-making processes of asylum seekers is largely European and therefore does not adequately account for the particularities of other geographic and cultural contexts (McAuliffe, 2017). Further, this area of research has been largely limited to “choice of destination,” partly due to the assumption that asylum seekers are forced to migrate and therefore lack agency (McAuliffe, 2017). Yet, some scholars have argued that asylum seekers exert a considerable amount of agency in the decision to leave home (Castles, 2004; de Haas, 2011). Despite the increasing numbers of female migrants worldwide, the significance of gender in understanding migration determinants has only been partially explored (Kofman et al., 2000).

The perspective of individuals who migrate without legal authorization in order to seek refuge is a valuable tool in understanding the multiplicity of factors that give rise to unauthorized migration. The relative disregard to gender in migration theories and studies could explain a prevalent disregard of gender in social and political policy formation. As gender is a central aspect of social reality, it must be incorporated into every level of analysis if we are to provide a comprehensive understanding of international migration (Kofman et al., 2000). We are not aware of research that explores the migration decision-making process of African asylum-seeking women who clandestinely migrate to Israel. International research on the gendered aspects that shape women’s migratory processes is also limited. Therefore, the aim of this study was to add to current understanding by focusing on the migration decision-making process of African asylum-seeking women who live in Israel and to extend knowledge on the economic, political, social, cultural, and personal aspects involved in women’s migratory decision-making processes. Asylum seekers are migrants who are seeking admission into a country as “refugees” and are awaiting a decision on their application for refugee status (IOM 2004). Since Israel does not have a formal refugee status determination procedure, all migrants who seek asylum are considered “unauthorized migrants”. Hence, we refer to the women in this study as “asylum seekers”, not as a legal category in Israel but based on their motivations for migrating. The research question was: “What are the gendered personal and contextual factors that surrounded the decision of African women to leave home, journey to, and enter into Israel without legal authorization?”

Method

This qualitative descriptive study was influenced by a feminist standpoint epistemology. A focus on the decision-making processes of African asylum-seeking women is consistent with the feminist standpoint approach, which attempts to identify research problems within the daily reality of marginalized groups (Swigonski, 1993). In line with this approach, the researchers emphasized reflexivity and research ethics throughout the research process (Harding, 1993; Hesse-Biber, 2007; Naples, 2007). The three authors are Jewish, Israeli women who self-identify as feminists. The first author led the research under the close supervision of the third author. Throughout several years preceding the study, the first author was involved in various initiatives to support the African asylum-seeking community in Tel Aviv.

In qualitative descriptive studies, data collection is typically directed towards discovering the who, what or where of events (Sandelowski, 2000). The aim of data analysis and the presentation of findings is to accurately convey events and the meaning participants attribute to those events (Sandelowski, 2000). The use of inductive constant comparative methods of data analysis facilitated a conceptualization of the emergent categories and themes within the events described by participants, rather than using a-priori theoretical framework (Sandelowski, 2000).

The Israeli Context

A vast majority of the African asylum seekers who have entered Israel since the late 1990s are nationals of Sudan and Eritrea. Up until mid-2012, the vast majority of Israel’s southern border with Egypt was open, enabling unauthorized entry (Paz, 2011). The circumstances that provoked Sudanese and Eritreans to flee home differ significantly, though they share the desire to seek protection from violent and repressive regimes (Araia, 2013; Paz, 2011). Measures to halt popular sea routes to Europe played a pivotal role in re-directing the flow of African migrants to Israel (Hamood, 2006). Additional pull factors for African migration to Israel included Israel’s democratic governance, being the wealthiest country in the region, and facing constant labour shortages since the inception of Israel (Humphris, 2013).

As of 2018, roughly 33,000 African asylum seekers reside in Israel (Population and Migration Authority, Policy Planning Division, 2019); of these, about 7,000 are women (Assaf-Aid Organization for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Israel, 2019). African asylum seekers are one of the most marginalized social groups in Israel. Israeli authorities regard them as “infiltrators”, in association with the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law (Yaron et al., 2013). In addition to imprisonment, asylum seekers face draconic policies aimed at encouraging those residing in Israel to leave (Human Rights Watch 2008; Paz, 2011; Yaron et al., 2013). African asylum-seeking women in Israel experience additional gender-related exploitative, dangerous, volatile, and insecure conditions that threaten their wellbeing (Gebreyesus et al., 2018).

Participants

The participants were 12 African migrant women who entered Israel without legal authorization and lived, at the time of the study, in Tel Aviv. Sample characteristics are detailed in Table 1.

Table 1. Sample characteristics (N = 12).

Variable		n	Variable		n
Legal status:	No legal status: Provisional visa (no right to work):	3 9	Age:	Range: 23–70 years (M = 32.41, SD = 12.72)
Work status:	Employed illegally: Unemployed:	6 6	Children:	Participants with children: Number of children: M = 1.8	10
Marital Status:	Married: (spouse in Israel-2,spouse in other country-3) Widowed: Single:	5 1 6
Nationality:	Eritrean: Sudanese: Ethiopian: Nigerian:	7 2 2 1	Ethnic groups:	Amhara: Igbo: Oromo: Tigre: Tigrinya:	2 2 1 1 6
Time away from origin country:	15–216 months (M = 59.83, SD = 53.86)		Time in Israel:	12–72 months (M = 45.33, SD = 22.87)
Education:	No formal education: Some primary school: Completed primary school: Completed secondary school: Completed Bachelor’s degree:				1 2 6 2 1

Participant Recruitment Procedures

Participants were recruited with the help of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and through snowball sampling. Overall, 20 women were approached with a request to participate in the study, 13 consented, and all but one were interviewed. Four NGOs that work with asylum seekers in Tel Aviv were asked to connect the researchers to potential participants. Three of these NGOs located a total of five women and secured their consent to be contacted by the researchers regarding participation. Four of these women agreed to participate and one declined for unknown reasons. Twelve shelter residents received a brief description of the purpose and procedures of the study, of which seven agreed to participate and five refused. One of the consenting women could not be reached and was not interviewed. Of the women who refused, one said it was too difficult to talk about the migration hardships she faced, one explained an interview would never change the situation in Israel, and three provided no explanation. Four other women were recruited through snowball sampling by a participant and an interpreter, of which two were interviewed and two declined participation for unknown reasons.

Data Collection

The first author conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with the participants from February 2013 through June 2013. All interviews were conducted in a private location of the participant’s choice and in English. The use of interpreters and translator-transcribers was required in interviews with 10 of the women who preferred to speak in their native language (Tigrinya or Amharic). A consent form was provided and read out loud to the women in English or their native language, detailing the procedures, risks and benefits of participation, and assurance of confidentiality. The interpreter signed an assurance of confidentiality in the presence of the interviewee. Participants were offered monetary compensation for costs associated with time missed from work, babysitting, or transportation, but all declined. The interviews, on average, lasted two hours, were audiotaped and transcribed verbatim. Translator-transcribers also signed an assurance of confidentiality before commencing transcriptions of audio recordings. We offered participants a copy of the audiotape, a written transcript, and the research findings. None expressed interest in receiving these materials.

The interpreters (three female and one male) were identified through NGOs or personal contacts and offered monetary compensation for their work. Three interpreters are Eritrean asylum seekers and one is an Israeli born in Ethiopia. They were fluent in English and either Tigrinya or Amharic and had experience interpreting for NGOs, journalists, and Israeli authorities. The translator-transcribers (three female and two male) were recruited through personal contacts or online social networking websites and offered monetary compensation for their work. Four are Eritrean and one is Ethiopian; four resided in the United States and one resided in Canada. They were fluent in English and either Tigrinya or Amharic.

Eleven semi-structured interviews were guided by a version of the interview protocol designed for women who intended to migrate; the interview of one participant was guided by a version designed for women who were physically forced by another party to migrate. After signing an informed consent form and to establish rapport, the interviews commenced with a brief description of the interviewer’s personal migratory experience and what she hoped to learn in the study. This was followed by a general question (i.e., can you tell me about yourself?) aiming to identify whether women were physically forced to migrate to Israel or if Israel was eventually their intended destination country. In the former case, the interview centered on questions relating to pre-migration circumstances, migration experiences, and retrospective thought on leaving home. The interviews of the other 11 women continued with a general question about how they decided to migrate. Following Lincoln and Guba (1985), the initial general questions of the naturalistic interviews, allowed the respondents to ease into the interview in a relaxed atmosphere while at the same time provided valuable information about how they construe the general context of their story. Then follow-up questions became more specific and explored the gendered personal and external factors that influenced their decision to migrate, their preparatory procedures, and their retrospective outlook. Any demographic information that was not addressed during the interview was collected at the end. Debriefing (Zimmerman & Watts, 2003) was carried out following each interview.

Secondary data was further collected from interpreters, translator-transcribers, and the first author. Data from interpreters and translator-transcribers included: a survey on their background and personal migratory experience, reflective discussions following each interview or transcription of an interview, and cultural discussions and fact-checking throughout the research process. Data from the first author included field notes and a reflective journal.

Data Analysis

This research is a qualitative descriptive study employing constant comparative methods of data analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). Thematic data analysis of the translated and transcribed interview texts and the secondary data was conducted by the lead author, and discussed with the third author, until deemed to be sufficiently grounded, contextualized, clear, and coherent. Data analysis followed the stages suggested by Strauss and Corbin (1990). The memoing of the data was followed by labelling of issues and phenomena, to break down and conceptualize the data. This process was carried out following each interview, and its products were reviewed before successive interviews to allow further probing of emergent categories. The process continued by grouping similar and related themes into categories. These primary categories were examined for similarities and differences and sorted into analytic and thematic categories through selective coding. Finally, the constant comparative method was used to identify the main conceptual themes that served as an organizing framework for the results.

Standards of quality, also referred to as trustworthiness (i.e. credibility, transferability, confirmability and dependability), were maintained during the research process (Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Marrow, 2005). Credibility (Marrow, 2005) was promoted by creating a pleasant atmosphere during the interview, allowing participants to express themselves openly and freely; by ensuring as an accurate and complete understanding of the participants’ texts as possible through the help of the interpreters and translator-transcribers; and by subjecting the interview texts to a systematic analysis while preserving the interviewees’ point of view. The findings’ transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) was supported by a detailed description of the methodology and by thick descriptions of the participants’ points of view in the context of their lives. Confirmability (Marrow, 2005) was established in this research by an ongoing focused attention to reflexivity. This included: (1) a written reflexivity statement provided by the first author prior to data collection, which outlined personal experiences, assumptions, and aspirations as they relate to the research initiative; (2) a reflective journal that highlighted personal feelings, ideas, or interpretations that arose for the first author throughout the research process; (3) reflexive discussions between the two authors throughout the research process; and (4) reflective statements from interpreters and translator-transcribers written directly following each interview or directly following the transcription of each interview. Dependability (Marrow, 2005) was established by keeping an audit trail (Lincoln & Guba, 1985), which included a complete collection of raw data, data reduction and analysis products, data reconstruction and synthesis products, and process notes.

The collection of secondary data, including the first author’s reflective journal and reflective statements collected from interpreters and translator-transcribers, supported “sustained and critical reflexivity” (Hesse-Biber, 2007) and helped the research team explore their personal and cultural locations in order to reduce any biases. Secondary data further improved the trustworthiness of the findings related to linguistic and cultural validity (Squires, 2009).

Research Ethics

The study was approved by the IRB of the Bob Shapell School of Social Work at Tel Aviv University. We were aware of the potential inclusion of emotionally taxing stories within the interviews, especially experiences of violence and trauma in home countries, en route to Israel, and in Israel. Hence, we identified accessible and reliable agencies and professionals in Tel Aviv that provide professional counselling services to asylum seekers, and we coordinated the availability of a staff member immediately following the scheduled interview and up to a week after the interview. The interviewer also offered participants to accompany them to such meetings if they wished. Further, participants were provided with information on all available counselling and support services in Tel Aviv and were approached one week after the interview to inquire about their emotional state. All the names presented in this study are pseudonyms.

Results

We conceptualized the findings in a dialectic fashion, following the pattern that characterized much of the participants’ narratives. We found that the participants often answered questions, and described their experiences and perceptions, in contradictory or opposing ways. In any formal context, when interviewees do not provide definitive answers and offer two versions of an experience in the same interview, interviewers tend to prejudge those answers as half-truths or even lies. Indeed, Amaka, a Nigerian participant, noted such a reaction when she described her interview with officials of the Israeli Ministry of Interior: “So, they interview me. I told them everything I can […] those that I can remember. But they didn’t believe my story. Yeah, they say that we Africans lie a lot.”

Yet, our analysis of the interviews suggests that these seeming “lies” represent the participants’ perceptions of their experiences. We chose to acknowledge and further explore what we defined as “dialectic tensions”, in order to achieve a deeper understanding of the women’s accounts. We identified two major dialectic themes in the participants’ stories about their pre-migration decision-making process, preparatory procedures for their journey, and retrospective outlook on their migration decision: autonomy/absence of autonomy in migration decision-making and positive/negative sentiments in connection with life in Israel.

Tensions of Autonomy/Absence of Autonomy

The most equivocal tension expressed by all participants was autonomy/absence of autonomy in migration decision-making. Although each of the women seemed to elicit a degree of autonomy in the initial decision to migrate, most also described circumstances (i.e., pre-migratory, during, and after migration) that inherently undermined their autonomy. Thus, their narratives contained simultaneous expressions of agency and of personal and contextual factors that undermined their agency. Correspondingly, the women felt that the decision to migrate was not really theirs, or expressed ambivalence regarding the extent to which it was their own choice.

Pre-Migration Decision-Making Processes

The tension around the question of autonomy was expressed when women described the overarching contextual reasons for migrating. These often centered on fleeing circumstances of immediate life-threat (i.e., guerrilla warfare and government persecution) or dire vulnerability factors related to government abuse of power and oppression (i.e., verbal, physical, and sexual abuse by government officials, kidnappings, arbitrary arrests, extra-judicial murders, forced labour, and restrictions on movement, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion), and gender inequalities. For example, we asked Amaka, a single 33-year-old Nigerian woman, how she decided to migrate. She described how her family scattered on the day her village was attacked by the militant Islamist group Boko Haram. She hid alone in a latrine behind her house for several hours until she was rescued by a Christian aid organization. The organization provided her with clothing, a passport, and a plane ticket to Israel. When asked whether the organization forced her to leave Nigeria, she responded by saying, “no.” When asked how she felt about the idea of leaving, she explained:

Yeah, I was not happy in a way because I am not looking for my family. Yeah but I just accept it. I settled it because I don’t want to live in our village again. Yeah, because there’s too much violence. Almost every month it’s just crisis […] Muslims they are, they are majority. They are killing, raping Christian girls or women all the time, so it’s too much.

The contextual circumstances Amaka described, which undermined her autonomy, are in tension with the agency she conveyed in making the decision to leave. This tension is reflected also in her mixed sentiments regarding the decision—’I was not happy,’ but “I just accept it.”

Madihah, a 30-year-old Eritrean interviewee, experienced similar tensions though she was not fleeing immediate life-threatening circumstances. She introduced herself by saying:

I’m one of the people who suffered because of the situation in Eritrea […] the government they took my father to prison […] and after ten years they gave a letter, which was saying he’s dead […] this was when I was seven and […] I grew up with only my mom […] I studied in university […] I worked […] part of my military service as a teacher for three years and during three years, no payment, it’s for free, nobody gets any money from the government or from the institution where he or she is working. So, it’s very difficult to live in Eritrea […] because of this I made a decision that I have to leave the country. I don’t want to spend all my life serving in the army, for nothing. So, in December 2008 I left […] illegally, we’re not allowed to have a passport.

Madihah quintessentially expressed the coexistence of both agency and lack of agency in one sentence, “because of this I made a decision that I have to leave the country.” In this way, she described a dialectic situation of simultaneously having the will and feeling forced to leave.

Similar tensions were present in the women’s descriptions of the events surrounding their decision to migrate. Fiyori was a 26-year-old Eritrean mother of two. Her husband fled Eritrea to Sudan to escape forced and indefinite military service, without telling her. She introduced herself in the interview by saying,

I had my first son in Eritrea […] After I had him, I came to Sudan to his father. I went there when he told me to come. We had a fight because, by the time I came to him, he had a new wife.

As the interview progressed and follow-up questions were posited, a new context emerged. Fiyori explained that once her husband made it to Sudan, he did not communicate with her. It was not until she decided to follow her husband that they spoke by telephone: “I told him I was going to come to him. He wasn’t willing, but I had such frustration that I left on my own.”

Fiyori first described a decision that was ostensibly based on her husband’s command but later clarified she made the decision on her own, and even despite her husband’s disapproval. Although Fiyori further articulated migratory motivations to follow her husband related to government abuse of power and oppression, as well as gendered cultural and financial pressures, these do not fully account for the contradictions in her description of events – initially, “he told me to come” and later, “I told him I was going to come.”

Fiyori, like other married interviewees, described a context of migration decision-making that was predicated on their husband, in a way that seemed like an attempt to save face. It seems that for many Eritrean women, and especially married women, to admit making an autonomous decision, conflicts with gendered, cultural norms. Aatifa, one of the female Eritrean translator-transcribers, explained: “If the women you interviewed are [from the] Tigrinya ethnic group [and] from [a] rural place, then there might be some pressure on them to give the image of being a good wife.” Tesfay, another female Eritrean translator-transcriber, concurred and further added: “even if they made the decision themselves, they might present it as if it’s the husband’s rather than theirs.”

Tensions regarding the extent of women’s autonomy in choosing to migrate were also shaped by gender inequalities that pervaded life in the home or intermediate countries. For instance, Jalene noted the impact of forced marriage on her migration decisions. First, she described how she fled Ethiopia at the age of 17 under circumstances of immediate life threat, as her family faced government persecution for their ethnic and political affiliation with the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). Jalene’s father and mother were arrested, her brothers disappeared during a protest, and her sister fled the country. As her story unfolded, she explained she was living with an aunt, who could not afford to support her any further and began attempts to arrange a marriage for her. When a group of OLF members informed Jalene that their lives were at risk and asked if she wanted to flee with them to Sudan, Jalene wrote a letter to her mother and immediately fled the country. She recited the contents of the letter: “I, sadly, I don’t want to get married. Life is difficult, and I heard that they are looking for us, so I am leaving. If there’s god, he will help us meet again.”

Autonomy During the Migration Process

Understanding the intricacies of women’s autonomy and agency in the decision to migrate was further illuminated by their description of the challenges they faced after acting on their initial decision to leave their home country. The most conspicuous were women’s descriptions of their inability to reverse their decision and return home mid-journey, due to the coercive aspects involved in utilizing human trafficking networks for clandestine migration.

Eleven of the women relied on human traffickers to get to Israel. All described how they willingly embarked on the initial journey with traffickers but were either kidnapped, sold, or transferred to other traffickers along the way, rerouted to a Bedouin camp in the Sinai, and held captive for ransom before being taken to the Egypt-Israel border. Captivity involved the following life-threatening circumstances, for the women and their children: use of weapons (“They took us there and we saw people with covered mouths and with pistols”); dangerous treks on foot (“we walked for twelve hours […] on thorns, in the rain and ditches, in darkness […] we were also hiding from the falling bullets”); overcrowded travel conditions (“We were squished in one truck, one on top of the other. You lay down and they tie you, one person to another”); physical confinement (“They just chained them and they close them in one room”); rape and torture (“He took one Ethiopian lady and I have no idea what he has done to her but when he brought her back, she was like a dead body. She was dead. She was unconscious”); verbal life-threats (“They told [my family, over the phone] that they were going to sell my kidney and my children’s”); hunger and thirst (“We couldn’t tolerate the hunger, we were thirsty; we had no water, no food […] people started falling down because everyone was weak”); death (“There were people who died, men and women […] In Sinai we stayed for one month and two men and a lady died again”).

Some women overtly stated they had no option but to follow the traffickers’ command. For example, Madihah, who travelled with traffickers from Sudan to Israel, explained:

Like we can’t say “I will go back to Sudan”, “I don’t [want] to go on this way”, nobody accepts [this], they will kill you. So, you have to pray your god, “please take me out of this situation.” You don’t care about Israel, or sometimes you prefer, where can I get Egyptian soldiers to get me and send me back somewhere else, you prefer save, to save your life, not to die.

Women’s autonomy seemed to be further compromised by systematic rape at the hands of human smugglers. However, related to women’s attempt to save face and maintain a culturally “good” image in the interview as described above, the women’s references to violence and sexual abuse, surfaced within descriptions of the experiences of women they knew or travelled with rather than their own. Only one out of the nine women who spoke about systematic rape described her own experience.

Once women were released from captivity, they were driven to the Egypt-Israel border and ordered to trek across the border on foot. Their agency was further ravaged by Egypt’s “shoot-to-stop” policy, which put them amid indiscriminate gunfire. The overall lack of autonomy women described while relying on human trafficking networks in order to migrate, coupled with the horrendous circumstances of physical and psychological abuse and their death-defying dash across the Israeli border, seem to have played a central role in their retrospective outlook of general autonomy in migratory decision-making. Additionally, their views on their migration decision-making processes seemed to be shaped in the context of limited agency and mixed sentiments they experienced in Israel at the time of the interview.

Tensions of Positive/Negative Sentiments in Connection with Life in Israel

Overall, the interviewees’ outlook on their life in Israel was mixed. They expressed gratitude for living in Israel (i.e., relative security, access to humanitarian aid organizations, and employment opportunities), while concurrently described the drawbacks and challenges (i.e., limited government support and protection, security issues associated with illegal employment, dependence on humanitarian assistance, and threatening changes in their intimate relationships). For example, Arsema said: “I am happy that I left Eritrea. Above all, I am taking care of myself.” Yet, she simultaneously noted the drawbacks and challenges and added: “It was only because my condition in Sudan was bad after I left my country that I decided to come to Israel […] in this country, I am just living for the sake of living itself. […] Because I escaped from death and all, I don’t complain to god.”

In debating whether their arrival to Israel improved their security, women discussed the impact of lack of status and governmental support on their lives. When Arsema was further asked how she sees her life in Israel compared to Eritrea she responded:

It’s a little bit difficult, what can I say? […] One’s home country is always the best, only when talking about liking, but if [the children’s] father was present, I would like it here […] because it’s hard to be with three kids here in this country, it’s very difficult, livelihood, everything […]we don’t have our rights. Human right is not respected. We are not settled yet. That is, our life is still. We are not legal.

All of the women presented a lack of status and protection as a major challenge for their life in Israel. They connected it to sentiments of limbo and powerlessness, heighten racism and discrimination within Israeli society and extreme economic vulnerability. The lack of formal status pushed women into perilously unregulated sectors of the Israeli labour market and situations of dependence on community members or humanitarian aid organizations for housing and/or material support. Whereas women expressed immense gratitude for any offer of employment and/or support, they simultaneously noted related drawbacks. For example, when we asked Abrihet about her pre-migratory preconceptions of life in Israel, she responded:

I didn’t find anything like what I expected […] My children don’t have [health] insurance; god is their insurance. What is this, I make 3,000 shekel (Israeli currency) [monthly] and what can I do […] It’s not like what I expected, it is very difficult but if you struggle yourself, you can raise your children, that’s at least good.

Like Abrihet, who struggled to make ends meet with a salary far below minimum wage, all the interviewees described being entrenched in the most precarious working conditions. For example, Birikti, who lived in a shelter for refugee women and frequently commented on the positive aspects of living in Israel, said:

Sometime back […] my boss called me a whore, in our culture a whore is a bad word to use and I was so mad [starts to cry] and I was going to go and talk to him but when I looked at him, I decided to stop because he can attack me in any way because I am not a citizen, I am a foreigner. The reason that I said immigration is not good is because everywhere you go you get something worse, not better.

The lack of status and protection afforded to the women, not only heightened their vulnerability in the public sphere but also within the domestic sphere. Many described a change for the worse in their intimate relationships, which they attributed to moving to Israel. The economic pressures pushed women into the labour market, thereby causing fissures in the traditional family structure. Women described their inability to preserve the culturally prescribed role of family caretaker while working arduous and demanding jobs. For example, Negisti frequently commented on the positive aspects of life in Israel including the ability to help support her family financially, but also complained:

When you get home, like your culture you have to do house chores and husbands, like in our culture, when a man gets home from work, he would sit but he doesn’t help you at home. It’s difficult to ask him come and help with this […] And the men even if you ask them gently, they wouldn’t accept the idea at all. They would say, “where is the lady? Is this the new culture of the country that you’re in?” Therefore, it turned into an argument and friction.

The lack of social services available to women, coupled with their social and economic marginalization, created a context of dependence on partners, which heightened women’s vulnerability to abusive behaviours. Several women described circumstances of physical abuse in which one was left hospitalized and others expressed fear for their lives. Moreover, the presence of children exacerbated women’s dependence, both financially and culturally, and further limited their ability to leave threatening relationships.

To sum, the participants referred to a multiplicity of personal and external factors involved in their migratory decision-making process, many of which related to being a woman. They were dissatisfied with their situation in home countries and intermediate countries, as manifested in their overarching contextual reasons for migrating, including gendered familial and cultural pressures and inequalities. The participants’ prior knowledge about the journey and life abroad and their access to human smuggling networks or organizations, further influenced their decision to migrate and the mechanisms used to migrate. It seems the participants decided to move, first and foremost, in search of safety and security, while assuming migration would offer them the mechanism to improve their life with regards to government support and protection, employment and educational opportunities, and greater freedoms. Yet, their stories are not as clear as to the extent of autonomy they had and practiced in the migration decision-making processes. This dialectic tension seemed to be related and potentially influenced by their mixed sentiments regarding the outcome of their migration process. Whereas the women expressed gratitude for the relative safety they experienced within Israeli borders, for securing employment or receiving assistance, and for greater freedoms outside of the domestic sphere, they simultaneously shared feelings of insecurity and frustrations related to their situation in Israel. While most women no longer feared for their lives and the lives of their children in the same capacity as they once did, they described extreme vulnerability to exploitation and abuse in both private and public spheres. These vulnerabilities seemed to be tied to the tenuous legal status of asylum seekers in Israel and its impact on both economic survival and intimate relationships.

Discussion

This study proposed to explore African asylum-seeking women’s decision to leave home, journey to, and enter into Israel without legal authorization. The analysis revealed two central dialectic themes in the participants’ migration stories related to autonomy in the decision-making processes before and during their journey and the sentiments associated with their life in Israel. These dialectic tensions underscore the multiplicity of factors that are involved in their decision to leave home and journey to Israel and in their current perspective on their migration journey.

The findings empirically support Castles’ (Castles, 2003, 2004) description of an “asylum-migration nexus”. That is, many forced migrants have multiple reasons for migrating, making it impossible to separate economic and human rights motivations. As de Haas (2011) suggested, while the conventional ways of classifying migrants (e.g. irregular migrant, migrant worker, refugee) and migration (voluntary vs. forced) may be useful for administrative procedures, they fall short of capturing the nature of migration as a social process.

Further, the findings correspond with the view of migration-related decision making as a “flow” rather than singular “event” (Griffiths et al., 2013), that should be understood as a “transformative and on-going actualization of potential against a horizon of undecidability in which past, present and future fold together in complex ways” (McCormack & Schwanen, 2011, p. 2801).

Existing theories provide a contextualization of the factors that influenced the migratory decision-making process of the participants in this study, within macro- and meso-level structures and processes. As suggested by the neoclassical economic theory (Harris & Todaro, 1970; Lewis, 1954; Todaro, 1976) and the dual labour market theory (Piore, 1979), economic and labour motives influenced the migratory decision-making process of most of the participants of this study. Economic hardships at home and in intermediate countries, together with preconceptions regarding better economic opportunities abroad, motivated many of the participants to immigrate. Yet, like others have found (McAuliffe, 2017; Oisha, 2002), economic necessity did not seem to be the sole or even principal motivation of the participants to migrate. On the contrary, peril and vulnerability that defined their life at home and intermediate countries, lead them to a hasty and precipitous decision to migrate, with little economic deliberation, planning, or preparation.

While the participants described being constrained by macro-level and structural factors, they still seemed to exert a considerable amount of agency. As de Haas (2011) argues, ultimately, “causality” runs through people’s agency and any convincing macro-model should be underpinned by a credible micro-behavioural link. Kofman et al. (2000) argued that the role of agency is particularly vital for a gendered account of migration, as all too often women are assumed to simply “follow” men.

Akin to the new economics of labour migration theory (Stark & Bloom, 1985), the family and household influenced the migratory decision-making process of most of the participants. However, contrary to the theory’s underlying assumption (King, 2012), the intra-household relationships described were far from harmonious nor lead to unanimous decisions. Moreover, many of the participants described migration decision-making without consulting with or notifying family members. These findings support the need to consider household conflicts in general, and patriarchal power relations in particular, as factors influencing women’s migration decision-making process (Abreu, 2012).

Social networks, seen as a form of social capital by the migrant network theory (Massey et al., 1993; Morawska, 2007), also played a significant role in the women’s migration decision-making processes. Participants described receiving support from their social as well as institutional networks throughout the migration process, such as information, assistance, facilitated accommodation and employment, clandestine transport and human smuggling across international borders, and emotional support.

Overall, the findings are in line with the cumulative causation theory of migration decision-making, suggesting migration alters the social context within which subsequent migration decisions are made, which give rise to additional migration (Massey et al., 1993). The findings call attention to multiple factors that influence migration decision making and help contextualize them within broader social processes that sustain migration. Further, the findings demonstrate the need to integrate several theoretical perspectives in order to capture the multiplicity of factors that influence migration decision making.

The Dialectic Nature of Participants’ Narratives

The dialectic nature of the interviewees’ narratives may have been impacted by the dialectic nature of their experiences of migration and life in Israel. African asylum-seeking women in Israel have been and are continually, extrinsically and intrinsically tugged in opposing directions, carry an unresolved past and an uncertain future, and must constantly negotiate their complex reality (Marchesani, 2012). Foxen and Nadeau (2011), who analysed the multiple and contradictory aspects of refugee stories in the course of therapy, have pointed to the fact that refugee stories rarely fit linear, coherent, or standard narrative forms. They argue that although multiplicity and inconsistency in narratives are present in all clinical settings, it becomes particularly salient when working with refugee and immigrant families for reasons connected with forms of rupture that are often produced by displacement and trauma, and with the often confusing and chaotic nature of pre-migratory experiences. They conclude that balancing these multiple references from both past and present and home and host contexts, can produce a multiplicity of shifting, and seemingly contradictory, self-representations that are put forth or played down depending on present circumstances and audiences (Foxen & Nadeau, 2011).

Throughout the interviews, participants’ stories suggested they were both forced to leave their home country and made an autonomous decision to migrate. The relational dialectic theory offers a compelling explanation for the both/and feelings expressed by the women in this study and is a useful epistemological addition to existing theories on the determinants of international migration (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996; Montgomery & Baxter, 1998). From a relational dialectics perspective, “social life exists in and through people’s communicative practices, by which people give voice to multiple (perhaps even infinite) opposing tendencies” (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996, p. 4). Hence, contradictions are not perceived as evidence of failure or inaccuracy in a person’s narrative, rather as an inherent aspect of social life that illustrates the multifaceted communicative processes that come with it (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996). Dialectic inquiry has a both-and rather than an either-or orientation (Montgomery & Baxter, 1998). This perspective allows a validation of the participants’ accounts, without privileging one account over another and by acknowledging inconsistency and contradictions, not as evidence of inaccuracy or fabrication, rather as integral and meaningful aspects of the women’s stories.

The themes uncovered in this research both hold commonalities with, as well as extend, previous research on dialectic communicative tensions experienced by refugees. A study on the communication of six male and female Sudanese refugees with resettlement organizations in the United States (Steimel, 2010) identified four dialectical tensions in the participants’ descriptions of their exchanges with the organizations: dissemination and dialogue, emancipation and control, empowerment and oppression, and integration and separation. Steimel (2010, p. 134) concluded, “the more that can be learned about these communicative tensions and the strategies used to manage them, the more likely it is that the refugee resettlement process will benefit refugees.”

Semlak et al. (2008) conducted two focus groups with 12 African refugee women in the United States to uncover the communicative challenges they experienced during the cross-cultural adaptation process. The themes they identified, mirroring some of our findings, included: positive and negative features of their new lives, being included and excluded, being accepted and rejected, and real and ideal. Semlak et al. (2008) noted that the most frequent positive-negative dialectic discussed by their participants was a change in their intimate relationships, which they attributed to moving to the US. They further suggest that the complex reality forced migrants faced in the host country can influence the way they speak about their experiences.

This study extends knowledge on dialectic tensions experienced and expressed by refugees and forced migrants by uncovering communicative challenges not only associated with women’s current situation in the host country but also their pre-migratory decision-making process. Further, unlike the interviewees in the studies of Steimel (2010) and Semlak et al. (2008), whose participants were legally recognized as refugees, all of the participants in this study lived in legal limbo at the time of the study. This situation likely accentuated the challenges and drawbacks of life in Israel. When taken together, women’s traumatic and unresolved past, their volatile and insecure present, and their uncertain future may have made it even more difficult to present a conventionally organized narrative.

Implications

The multiplicity of material, social, and psychological factors that were found to be involved in the decision of African asylum-seeking women to leave home and journey to Israel, and the dialectic tensions that shaped their current perspective on this process, hold several implications for future research and practice. First, the study of asylum seekers’ lives may be enriched by attuning to the ways in which they narrate their lives. In particular, attention could be paid to the expression of contradictory sentiments and actions and unconventional narrative structures (McKenzie-Mohr & Lafrance, 2011). The same could be said for attuning to how they narrate the experiences of those around them. As reported in the findings, the tendency of participants to underreport or minimize experiences due to cultural norms and taboos not only impacted contradictions in their accounts, but also seemed to have been the reason women referred to negative experiences, especially those surrounding sexual violence, by describing the experiences of women they knew or travelled with rather than their own. In listening to expressions of contradiction and inconsistency, researchers and helping professionals allow the messiness to surface in a way that adds meaning to the complex reality asylum seekers face.

These findings hold significant implications for host-country authorities and the bureaucratic procedures they establish for guaranteeing asylum seekers protection and refuge. As the findings suggest, and others (Eastmond, 2007) have argued, asylum determination procedures constitute a profoundly challenging context for refugee stories. According to Kagan (2003), ‘the most widely cited reason for rejecting refugee applicants’ credibility are inconsistencies within their accounts, or between separate occasions when they are asked to explain and re-explain their experiences’ (386–387). If countries are to maintain their commitment to the protection and humanitarian causes of the Refugee Convention, then more understanding, cultural and circumstantial sensitivity, and adaptation is needed during communicative processes with asylum seekers (Herlihy et al., 2010; Jubany, 2011; Kagan, 2003; Kalin, 1986; Millbank, 2009).

Limitations

The main limitation of this study was the divergent cultural and language capacities of the researchers and participants. Although the use of interpreters proved beneficial with regards to procuring lingual and cultural clarity, it also added further complexity. For example, a plausible issue that was not thoroughly evaluated and which may have influenced women’s perceptions and/or the information they provided during interviews, could be the way in which the interpreter’s gender, nationality, ethnicity, and position within the migrant community in Tel Aviv may have influenced the interview context. Future research may want to explore this complex interface, as interpreters often play key roles in representing asylum seekers during communication with organizational members of NGOs and more significantly, during communication with host country authorities.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.