“You are a foreigner and will always be a foreigner”: Intersectional non-belonging among Latin American women migrant workers in Israel

Abstract

(Non-)Belonging is an intersectional phenomenon, particularly among migrants. However, this quality has been insufficiently explored regarding migrant workers, who are multiply othered. To contribute to filling this lacuna and, more broadly, to understand the intersectional nature of (non-)belonging in an intercultural context more nuancedly, I explored Latin American women migrant workers in Israel. These women embody an extreme case of intersectional otherness, embedded in their migrant, (il)legal, occupational and gender statuses, alongside being non-Jews in a Jewish nation-state. A qualitative secondary data analysis (SDA) of in-depth interviews with Latin American women migrant workers in Israel was performed. Content analysis of the data identified a sense of non-belonging, whose intersectional nature was apparent through six expressions– (il)legal status constraints, social isolation, language barrier, professional inadequacy, cultural gap, and explicit references to their discrimination by official and informal Israel – each embedded in the joint operation of the migrants’ five bases of otherness. This phenomenology of (non-)belonging was shared by documented and undocumented participants, challenging the accepted understanding of migrants’ undocumented status as a “master status” that obscures their additional social statuses. Instead, the findings highlight the intersectional nature of migrants’ sense of (non-)belonging, particularly among women migrant workers. More broadly, the study demonstrates the need to adopt an intersectional perspective in exploring the complex phenomenon of (non-)belonging, especially in intercultural contexts.