Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System

by Daiva K. Stasiulis, Abigail B. Bakan

While the designated rights of capital to travel freely across borders have increased under neo-liberal globalization, the citizenship rights of many people, particularly the most vulnerable, have tended to decline. Using Canada as an example of a major recipient state of international migrants, "Negotiating Citizenship" considers how migrant women workers from two settings in the global South-the West Indies and the Philippines-have attempted to negotiate citizenship across the global citizenship divide.

Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan challenge traditional liberal and post-national theories of citizenship with a number of approaches: historical documentary analyses, investigation of the political economy of the sending states, interviews with migrant live-in caregivers and nurses, legal analyses of domestic worker case law, and analysis of social movement politics. "Negotiating Citizenship" demonstrates that the transnational character of migrants' lives-their migration and labour strategies, family households, and political practices-offer important challenges to inequitable and exclusionary aspects of contemporary nation-state citizenship.

240 pages, Paperback

First published December 19, 2003