C'mon ladies....

Rawr. So apparently we all should be quite peeved that Lady Scotland, the attorney general and the highest legal authority in England and Wales, has employed - oh no! - an illegal immigrant. Never mind that said illegal immigrant is "not a welfare scrounger, drugs racketeer or slum landlord, but a respectable, hard-working, married woman." 

This story becomes even more Greek tragedy-esque when we remember that it was Lady Scotland that played a crucial role in steering the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act of 2006 which, among other provisions, imposes stricter penalties for employers that failed to ensure their employees were able to work legally in the UK blah blah blah boring legal political stuff...Fuckit, Herstorian is bored. Let's gossip about the gals!

Mrs. Loloahi Tapui-Zivancevic grew up in a one-room house with five sisters and two brothers on the island of Vava'u in Tonga. Her family lives on the meagre income garnered from her sisters' mat-weaving business for the tourism industry and her fathers' subsistance farming. She attended school until age 17, and then helped her mother to run their impoverished household.  As the oldest sibling, it was considered her responsibility to provide for her younger siblings. She emigrated to the UK on a student visa in 2003. Since then she has supported her family in Tonga with regular remittances. 

 "I thought she was a really nice woman", says Lady Scotland, (Hmmmmm....Herstorian thinks so too) "but it looks as if I made a number of errors of judgment in terms of character."

Herstorian is confused. Exactly what kind of character has Mrs. Tapui-Zinvancevic displayed? Helping her mother to run a household under circumstances that are less than ideal?  Getting an education? Supporting a family? Sure she was - oh, dear! that evil of evils -Illegal. But Herstorian still suspects Lady Scotland might have had it right in the beginning. 

In a speech at the "Women of the Year" Lunchean in 1993 Lady Scotland argued there is a female and a male way to do things in any profession. Herstorian wishes Lady Scotland would take a dose of her own advice and look at the Loloahi scandal with a female perspective. 

Tough, tough. No worries though, L.S.! Herstorian will help get you started....

Hmmmm...a female perspective... Well, it might guide us to an understanding that the Loloahi Tapui-Zivanocevic is hardly an individual, isolated incident.  Women make up the bulk of the world's poor. No surprise then, that women make up the bulk of the world's survival migrants. Many developing nations rely on the remittances sent home by their surplus supply of desperate - and therefore cheap and exploitable - female labour and encourage migration as a development strategy. At the same time, developed industrial nations (England, that means you) rely on draconian immigration policies to keep needed migrant labour 'illegal' and therefore cheap.  

L.S., a female perspective involves examining incidents like the Loloahi Tapui-Zivancevic scandal for what they reveal about wider structural gender inequalities. It means questioning "common sense" statements like "she is illegal" for what they really mean. It means discovering who is really benefitting from controlling the discourse surrounding issues like "illegal" migration (Ahem...Herstorian says the answer is men, the answer is always men...kidding. Kinda.). 

It means seeing beyond the values and the ways of thinking about the world that serve to impoverish, subjugate and exploit women. Come on, ladies....let's all follow our first instincts and be "really nice" to one another.