Negotiating Citizenship Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System

While the designated 'rights' of capital to travel freely across borders have increased, the citizenship rights of the majority of people, particularly the most vulnerable, have tended to decline. Taking Canada as an example of a major host state to international migrants, this study considers how migrant women workers from ethnic minorities from two Third World regional settings -- the West Indies and the Philippines -- have attempted to negotiate citizenship rights in an age of neo-liberalism and globalization. The authors challenge traditional theories of citizenship, which either base citizenship on membership defined in narrow national terms, or insist that the nation-state is no longer determinant. Alternatively, they demonstrate how citizenship is a contested process, where 'gatekeepers' based in specific nation-states, and the uneven world system, create barriers to citizenship rights. The transnational character of migrants' lives -- their labour strategies, family households and political practices -- offer important challenges to inequitable and exclusionary aspects of nation-state citizenship. Book jacket.

Abigail B. Bakan is in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University, Ontario, Canada.

Daiva Stasiulis is in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University, Ottowa, Canada.