A recent study examines the reasons for the increased migration of Dominicans to faraway Argentina and looks at how many with illegal status have only been able to find work in prostitution. The Argentinean government recently eliminated the visa-free status for Dominicans and is giving opportunities for migrants to apply for temporary residency permits from January to July 2013. By March, 631 permits had been granted, according to the national immigration office website.
In an IPS press report, Clarisa Rondo of the Association of Dominicans Living in Argentina says that some 40,000 Dominicans are living in Argentina, including around 15,000 in Buenos Aires. She explains that while many Dominicans have done well for themselves, the lack of legal status has had an effect on the kind of jobs many migrants can secure.
Rondo told IPS that the women come in search of better employment opportunities, but often fall into prostitution networks due to the difficulty in finding other work.
Rondo explained that Argentina’s rigid peg of the peso to the dollar in the 1990s drove the influx of immigrants from the rest of the region, who earned here in pesos and exchanged them for the same amount in dollars, to send back home as remittances, she points out. This attracted Dominicans who would otherwise have migrated to the US or Spain.
That was one of the main reasons that Dominicans began to arrive, along with the common language – Spanish – and the demand in Argentina for people willing to do low-paid, low-skilled work – as domestics, nannies, caregivers for the elderly, hairdressers or restaurant workers, she said, as reported by IPS.
According to the Migration, Prostitution and Trafficking of Dominican Women in Argentina study by the Ecumenical Services for the Support and Orientation of Migrants and Refugees (CAREF) and commissioned by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) around 12,000-15,000 Dominicans came to Argentina from 1995 to 2002.
The study found that while in recent years the exchange rate is no longer a lure, Dominicans have continued to come in search of work abroad, women are aware that prostitution is one of the possibilities, from things they have heard about, but “many think it won’t happen to them.”
Sociologist Lucia Nunez Lodwick at the National University of San Martin studied the link between street prostitution and female migration in the Argentinean capital, focusing on women from the Dominican Republic, who are highly visible as they are black in a country with so few people of African descent. In her study, Nunez says black women in Argentina are often seen as highly sexual and this makes them more vulnerable. One Dominican woman working as a sex worker in Buenos Aires, who was interviewed by Nunez for her study, said “maybe they like (Dominican women) because we have big breasts.”
www.ipsnews.net/2013/05/dominican-women-in-argentina-especially-vulnerable/