Negotiating Citizenship

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.