Women, Migration and Citizenship

Making Local, National and Transnational Connections

Alexandra Dobrowolsky, Evangelia Tastsoglou, Evangelia Tastsoglou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134779123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Given the recent and rapid changes to migration patterns and citizenship processes, this volume provides a timely, compelling, empirical and theoretical study of the gendered implications of such developments. More specifically, it draws out the multiple connections between migration and citizenship concerns and practices for women. The collection features original research that examines women's diverse im/migrant and refugee experiences and exposes how gender ideologies and practices organize migrant citizenship, in its various dimensions, at the local, national and transnational levels. The volume contributes to theoretical debates on gender, migration and citizenship and provides new insights into their interrelation. It includes rich case studies that range from the Philippines and Somalia to the Caribbean and from Australasia to Canada and Britain. Designed to have a multidisciplinary appeal, it is suitable for courses on migration, diversity, gender, race, ethnicity, law and public policy, comparative politics and international relations.

Chapter 1

Crossing Boundaries and Making Connections

Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Evangelia Tastsoglou

From the Post-War to the Post 9/11 Period

As a woman I have no country, as a woman I want no country, as a woman my country is the whole world.

Virginia Woolf articulated these sentiments at the start of the twentieth century, at a time – in between two devastating World Wars – when the world was rife with rising nationalisms, boundary disputes were deadly and exclusions were rampant (Stolcke 1997: 77). Today, Woolf’s aspirations fit remarkably well with certain theoretical trends that trace the development of a new cosmopolitanism and the formation of a fledgling, universal citizenship (Soysal 1994; Held 1995; Kymlicka 2001). These advocates of transnationalism in a postmodern, global world envision an enhanced, borderless citizenship based on political models where the exclusions of the traditional nation-state no longer exist.

To be sure, new global formations, exemplified by ‘post-national’ types of membership/citizenship (Soysal 2000), increasingly internationalized professional labour markets (Iredale 2001; Ball 2004), ‘imagined (global) communities’ that transgress the nation-state (Parreñas 2001), and the dynamic nature of migrants certainly ‘challenge any notion that the state and individual are hermetically sealed’ (Kapur 2003: 12). Ratna Kapur explains:

The inability to distinguish those who constitute national subjects from those who are alien or foreign is blurred reflecting the uneasy location of a distinct national entity with distinct borders and a distinct, clearly delineated national subject. The legitimizing tools of cohesion, unity and sovereignty become blunt in the face of a more complex and integrated world and global economy and the challenges posed by the transnational subaltern subject. (Kapur 2003: 12)

Nevertheless, as Verena Stolcke cautions:

Although it is nowadays commonplace to prophesy the end of the nation-state, the powerful ideological logic of the nation-state in reality appears to be far from fading away. Instead, progressively tighter nationality laws control the freedom of movement in particular of certain peoples despite or precisely because of ever more intense globalized economic competition (Stolcke 1997: 77).

And so, even in the twenty-first century, and despite creative, cosmopolitan ideals and dreams of citizenship reforms in a progressively inclusive world, Woolf’s proposition continues to prove to be more fiction than fact. States and citizenship still matter, greatly (Pettman 1999: 214) because we are witnessing, particularly in Canada and the United States, what some have described as the ‘tightening of citizenship’ (Joppke and Morawska 2003: 16) with more restrictions on access to citizenship, and even the scaling back of citizenship rights with changing citizenship regimes (Jenson and Phillips 1996; Ball 2004; Maher 2004; Dobrowolsky and Jenson 2004).

To be sure, a degree of broadening and de-ethnicization of citizenship has taken place in the European Union (EU). We see, for example, the inclusion of jus soli regulations on the acquisition of citizenship, greater tolerance of dual citizenship, and more relaxed attitudes toward minority identities within states. Ye t the evidence is ambiguous. For example, in many European states, despite human rights discourses, right-wing parties with anti-immigration platforms have gained political strength (Maher 2004: 138). Moreover, EU member states are not immune from reverting to more exclusionary practices, particularly towards migrants. This is clearly illustrated in this volume in the British case study vis-à-vis asylum seekers (see Dobrowolsky with Lister). Consequently, the importance of citizenship is on the increase in the EU, as well as in North America.

Furthermore, as Pauline Gardiner Barber argues in this collection, there seems to be a growing disjuncture between critical traditions of research regarding citizenship in theory, and the narrowing definitions of citizenship in practice. While the former seeks to address political and social exclusion philosophically, the latter refers to states using the rhetoric of social inclusion and social cohesion, but adopting policies that are more exclusive than inclusive, thereby, concretely, circumscribing their citizenship norms and processes (see Dobrowolsky with Lister in this volume).

Globalization complicates matters, no doubt, but in spite of, and sometimes as a reaction to new challenges from ‘above’ and ‘below,’ states still have the capacity to set and enforce an array of laws and limitations. While some walls and fences have come down, literally and figuratively, state actors may also resurrect, or reinstate, and clearly regulate and reinforce others. For instance, despite the increasing internationalization of professional labour markets (e.g. the IT industry), and state competition for professional skill, the global trend is toward temporary skilled labour migration with all kinds of inequalities and contradictions in the treatment of temporary and permanent migrants within states (Iredale 2001: 20–21). As Preibisch and Santamaría in this volume illustrate, the state can grant, and withhold, citizenship rights, and given its access to various regulatory mechanisms, the state can exert its hegemonic authority.

With shrinking opportunities for male employment for many countries in the South, reduced opportunities for traditional forms of profit making, and the fall of government revenues (partly linked to the burden of debt-servicing), the task of ensuring family and community survival has increasingly fallen on women’s shoulders. Sassen calls this phenomenon the ‘feminization of survival’ (2000: 506). In an era of globalization, the consequences of the feminization of survival involve the increasing incorporation of migrants and women from the South, as the global world’s newest proletariat, into the global capitalist activities of the North, all under severely diminished citizenship regimes.

Women are disproportionately found in these low-paid, formal right-restricted ‘serving classes.’ Assuming globalized social reproductive labour, women work not just as nannies and domestic workers (Maher 2004; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Parreñas 2002, 2000; Sassen 2000, 2002) but also in the whole ‘transnational care services sector’ (Yeates 2004b). We also find them engaged in other low-wage, precarious work of various kinds, from clerical and blue-collar work to work in the sex trade. And of course, we must also consider here the plight of undocumented, trafficked women who can live in the most extreme conditions of bondage and abuse (Sassen 2000: 510, 518 and 2002: 273).

There are, then, important gendered and racialized ‘tie-ins’ (Sassen 2000: 519) and synergies on multiple levels between and within states of the North (in terms of labour markets, immigration policies, welfare regimes and so forth) and states of the South (in terms of emigration policies, development policies, labour markets, welfare regimes and forms of patriarchy), international organizations (e.g. IMF, World Bank), SAPS, development policies, migration agencies and networks, and ‘alternative global circuits’ (or alternative ‘survival circuits,’ Sassen 2000: 523 and 2002: 267).

At the same time, alongside these intense, and complex, globalized, migration patterns, we see an anti-(im)migrant backlash reinforced by a security/global (im)migration nexus. The growing calls, especially on the part of states of the North, for security and a law and order agenda have resulted in the securitization of migration. This security/(im)migration association is in evidence in various state-sanctioned restrictive and coercive measures, especially in wealthier immigration countries around the world (Brouwer 2002; Faist 2002; Humphrey 2003; Robin-Olivier 2005). For example, post-9/11 immigration policies in North America are now linked to security concerns (see Daniels, Macklem and Roach 2001; Macklin 2001; Abu-Laban and Gabriel 2003; Roach 2003; Drache 2004; Whitaker 2004). As states have increasingly transformed international migration issues and ethnic differences into security issues, attitudes and policies have hardened. We see this in the form of amplified border controls in North America, along with various ‘crack downs’ on migration violations, and tougher policies on immigration and asylum, more broadly.

Even though states all over Western Europe, North America and Australasia are beefing up external controls as well as internal controls, especially of noncitizens, both citizens and non-citizens alike are feeling more insecure (Crocker, Dobrowolsky, Keeble and Tastsoglou 2005). For migrants the situation is particularly precarious. Engin Isin and Patricia Wood explain, after migrating, for many ‘the place to which they have escaped is no more secure than that which they left. Even in a more peaceful haven, their legal status or that of any family they have left behind may remain unresolved for years’ (Isin and Wood: 1999: 51). And now, in a tightened security environment where targeting of ‘the Other’ becomes more explicit, it is not surprising that we see heightened levels of insecurity on the part of migrants. As recent research illustrates (Crocker et al. 2005) women (im)migrants, and especially those whose ‘Otherness’ is visible, those who wear headscarves for instance, feel highly exposed and at risk. These changes and others indicate a clear change in citizenship regimes and practices across the western world.

Despite the rise of this security state, heightened levels of insecurity, and the changing context vis-à-vis citizenship, individuals and groups continue to contest and transgress such limitations, and others. As we shall see, migration levels are growing and these gendered and racialized cross-border movements do challenge and can even reconfigure typical boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. As Sassen (2000: 509) argues, an important new area of scholarship focuses on ‘new forms of cross border solidarity and experiences of membership and identity formation that represents new subjectivities, including feminist subjectivities.’ In an increasingly volatile terrain, and as a result of contested claims-making, new citizenship practices are unfolding. And here, as Wendy Larner observes in her chapter in this book, minority and (im)migrant women especially find themselves ‘on the front line.’ Consequently, the paradoxes of citizenship persist, continue to perplex and provoke, presenting both obstacles and opportunities. These are the very concerns that this book sets out to address.

Goals, Objectives and Scope

This collection is all about women crossing, contesting and reconfiguring various boundaries. It sheds light on why and how migrant women are navigating political, social, economic and psychological spaces and negotiating global, regional, national and local dimensions of belonging, in contexts of both opportunity and constraint. The contributors to this volume explore continuities and changes, given complicated contemporary global realities that stem from the intricate interplay of gender, migration and citizenship, and the inclusions and exclusions that result under specific conditions. This book, in a nutshell, seeks to cross boundaries and strives to make connections.

At its most straightforward level, the volume is about (im)migrant women moving across local, national and transnational borders, and what happens to them when doing so. More profoundly, it explores how, as active human agents, they take up challenges and often transform them into opportunities and what the significance of this is for women’s citizenship. In so doing, the book plumbs the interrelations between gender, migration and citizenship and details how they concretely and complexly play out.

On one hand, contributors strive to ground abstract theorizing on these contested issues. The volume’s empirical studies add sociological substance to current philosophical treatments on citizenship and migration. On the other hand, the chapters are careful to avoid ‘crude empiricism’ that can also distinguish these areas of study (Ackers 1998: 22). Here theoretical propositions are advanced and insights are provided that connect gender, migration and citizenship. The aim then is to examine the interplay of theories of migration and citizenship with feminist analyses and women (im)migrants’ real-life experiences.

Women comprise an absolute majority around the world and constitute ever-larger numbers of (im)migrants. Globally, women migrate at approximately the same rate as men, but men constitute a higher proportion of migrants to ‘developing countries’ whereas women comprise a majority of migrants to many ‘developed’ countries (DeLaet 1999: 2). For example, on a yearly basis, approximately 75,000 women leave South and South East Asia to work as nurses, domestic and service industry workers in Australia, Canada, the United States and Western Europe. By the late 1990s over 1 million (nearly 1.5 million) Asian women were working elsewhere in Asia and in the Middle East as foreign domestic workers alone (Seager 2003). It is also frequently suggested that the majority of refugees are women and children. As DeLaet points out, such presumptions can be based on stereotypical portrayals (1999: 9); however, there is no denying that, women and children comprise substantial numbers of refugees, and that overall, the position of refugee women is even more uncertain than that of men, given their weaker political, social and economic status (Yuval-Davis 1997: 109).

The numbers of women (im)migrants are on the rise and the conditions that they face and live through can be daunting and often deplorable. Many are forced to leave their countries of origin given conditions of disadvantage and exclusion only to face similar situations in their host countries. Of course, there are various degrees of marginalization at play. For example, some women struggle for their very existence, others with ‘absolute or subsistence poverty’ and still others fight for ‘social and territorial justice; notions of need, welfare and social status’ (Ackers 1998: 26). There are obviously many differences between women and yet there are also points of commonality. For example, while not all women are poor, ‘nowhere are women as well off or well paid as men are’ (Pettman 1999: 214). Despite women’s multiple, intersecting identities (such as race, ethnicity, class, ability, sexual orientation, age, religion and so on) they all experience elements of exclusion unique to their gender at some level (Kofman et al. 2000: 83–84; Raghuram and Kofman 2004: 97). All this is compounded by the fact that women (im)migrants frequently find themselves in citizenship limbo, or with various kinds of ‘partial citizenship’ as is the case for temporary workers (Parreñas 2001), with very few if any rights to draw upon. This, in turn, can lead to further deprivation and impoverishment, and an array of abuses or forms of exploitation.

Yet, while (im)migrant women can and do put their lives on the line, they should not be cast as victims, as they are by no means passive. This has been a problematic feature of the literature on migrants which has tended to portray women unidimensionally as ‘unskilled, weak and lacking the ability to shape their own fate or to defend themselves against exploitation or the marginality of secondary or reserve army of labor status’ (Ip and Lever-Tracy 1999: 59). In contrast, more recent studies indicate that women can be, and often are, the primary movers (principal applicants) in the migration of their families, for certain types of migration, especially among the highly skilled (Raghuram 2004), beyond having been primary movers historically in feminized, care-oriented occupations (e.g. nursing, domestic work) that have been in demand at different times (Yeates 2004a).

In our collection, (im)migrant women are shown to be complex subjects whose autonomous action, and agency even under the most dire circumstances (as in refugee camps, see Abdi in this volume), should not be underplayed. They are affected by structural processes (glob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Crossing Boundaries and Making Connections
• 2 Developing a Feminist Analysis of Citizenship of Caribbean Immigrant Women in Canada: Key Dimensions and Conceptual Challenges
• 3 Locating Gendered Subjects in Vocabularies of Citizenship
• 4 Why do Skilled Women and Men Emigrating from China to Canada get Bad Jobs?
• 5 Engendering Labour Migration: The Case of Foreign Workers in Canadian Agriculture
• 6 Brokering Citizenship Claims: Neo-liberalism, Biculturalism and Multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand
• 7 Social Exclusion and Changes to Citizenship: Women and Children, Minorities and Migrants in Britain
• 8 Citizenship, Identity, Agency and Resistance among Canadian and Australian Women of South Asian Origin
• 9 Gender, Migration and Citizenship: Immigrant Women and the Politics of Belonging in the Canadian Maritimes
• 10 Refugees, Gender-based Violence and Resistance: A Case Study of Somali Refugee Women in Kenya
• Index