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.