The Social Impact of Migration on Immigrant Women: Gendered Disruptions, Resilience, and Identity

Abstract Migration is a profoundly disruptive process that reshapes women’s lives across social, cultural, and structural systems, with important implications for their well-being, identity, and agency. Yet much of the scholarship on women and migration remains fragmented, often framed through debates about the feminization of migration that emphasize numerical shifts rather than lived experiences. Drawing on qualitative data ( N = 71) in a Midwestern US region, our study examines the disruptive impact of migration on immigrant women using a critical feminist lens across individual, family, community, and structural levels. Findings highlight a dual reality: women gain freedom, agency, and educational and employment opportunities in new spaces, while simultaneously experiencing discrimination, loss of status, and heightened vulnerability to violence and systemic inequities. These disruptions reflect the simultaneous realities of loss and opportunity that women must navigate as they renegotiate identity, belonging, and survival. By conceptualizing migration as a disruptive force, our findings contribute to migration scholarship by advancing a more holistic framework that acknowledges both vulnerabilities and opportunities in immigrant women’s lives. We argue that conceptualizing migration as gendered disruption extends existing feminist migration scholarship by moving beyond demographic understandings of the feminization of migration toward a multilevel understanding of how migration continuously reorganizes women's identities, relationships, opportunities, and structural conditions.