Dear Friends

This double publication of Women In Action on the issue of women and migration comes to you in a most auspicious time. In June this year, the issue was raised both at the United Nations International Conference and the parallel NGO Forum on Human Rights which was held in Vienna. It will again be raised this coming November during the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific or ESCAP convened NGO-WID Symposium, supposedly a meeting of 30 women in development experts in the region but due to the intervention of women's organizations and networks in the region is turning out to be more of a forum of women activists.

Although women's conditions have found universal parallelisms, each country and each region and each culture and each historical period exhibit particularities that make distinctive our feminist struggles. At present and in the region of Asia and the Pacific, two major phenomena highlight women's poverty and problematic conditions - women's migration and sex traffic in women. Isis International's transfer to the region enables us to be vitally a part of women's reality, as well as participant in the dynamic of the regional women's movement sharpening analyses of and actual addressing of the problems. In an information packet we released earlier this year, Isis International had focused on the issue of sex traffic in women. In this particular publication, we give attention to the issue of women and migration and offer to you, our readers and our compatriots, several original analytical, research based, and policy forwarding articles; a selection around the world of women in action stories, personal accounts, and network strategies, as well as a preliminary or in progress matrix of sending, receiving, and in-country women's migration profiles.

We realize, this double publication is not at all inclusive of all the views and accounts and events pertinent to the problems and recommendations on the issue. Nor, is the problem confined to just the region of Asia and the Pacific. Already, we hear of women from the former socialist republics moving across borders and continents. However, we have not yet come upon written materials on the phenomenon. We welcome submissions, starting with letters from you, our readers, in this regard. In our own way of communication networking, we intend to let these be known and be acted upon by women's movements and policy makers.

For now, we thank each of you who have taken the time to write specifically on the issue and for this double publication, as we cheer on those who have began to organize and have been hard at work in surfacing and addressing the complex needs and problems of migrant women and their families and communities. We also breathe in unity with all women who remain and shall still become at risk and remind ourselves to utter words and engage in rituals of graces and blessings for safe passages, productive outcomes, and triumphant missions.

Isis International - Manila