Domestic burden in an unfamiliar new homeland: gender, immigration, and household-serving trip frequencies

Research shows that immigrants face greater mobility constraints in an unfamiliar environment, particularly immigrant women. But whether and how immigrant women adjust their household-serving trip frequencies accordingly remains largely unknown. Utilizing data of adult male and female members in nuclear families from the 2017 National Household Travel Survey conducted in the United States and applying the negative binomial regression model, it is found that, all else holds constant, being a woman correlates with making more escorting and shopping trips, but being an immigrant does not. In other words, immigrant women escort others and go shopping as often as native-born women. However, it is also found that, all else being equal, spouses of immigrants make more escorting and shopping trips than spouses of natives, especially husbands of immigrant women. Taken together, these results suggest that although men with an immigrant wife take on more household-serving travel duties so that the within-household gender travel gap narrows, the household-serving travel burden on immigrant women is not lessened compared to that on native-born women. Therefore, while encouraging male participation in household labor is a common strategy to reduce women’s domestic load, assistance from outside the home should be provided in particular to immigrant women for alleviating their household-serving travel burden.