Daiva Stasiulis

Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada

In Not One of the Family, experts on foreign domestic workers and workers-turned-activists document how the Canadian system has institutionalized unequal treatment of citizen and non-citizen workers. Since the 1940s, rights of citizenship for immigrant domestic workers in Canada have declined while the number of women recruited from Third World countries to work in Canadian homes has dramatically increased. The analysis in Not One of the Family is both theoretical to the practical, framing ideologies of privacy, maternalism, familialism, and rights, as well as examining government policy, labour organizing, and strategies to resist exploitation. A key resource for all centres for women and immigrant workers, Not One of the Family is also essential reading for civil rights and immigration lawyers, labour groups, and government policy makers.

Negotiating Citizenship: The case of foreign domestic workers in Canada

This paper argues that most conceptualizations of citizenship limit the purview of the discourse to static categories. ‘Citizenship’ is commonly seen as an ideal type, presuming a largely legal relationship between an inidividual and a single nationstate - more precisely only one type of nation-state, the advanced capitalist postwar model. Alternatively, we suggest a re-conceptualization of citizenship as a negotiated relationship, one which is subject therefore to change, and acted upon collectively within social, political and economic relations of conflict. This dynamic process of negotiation takes place within a context which is shaped by gendered, racial and class structures and ideologies; it also involves international hierarchies among states. Citizenship is therefore negotiated on global as well as national levels. This conceptualization is demonstrated by way of identifying one particular set of experiences of negotiated citizenship, involving foreign domestic workers in Canada. As non-citizens originating from Third World conditions, this is a case involving women of colour workers, highly prone to abusive conditions, and under the direction of employers who are more affluent First World citizens and predominantly white women. Original survey data based on interviews with Caribbean and Filipino domestic workers in Canada are used to demonstrate the varied, creative and effective strategies of two distinctive groups of non-citizens as they attempt to negotiate citizenship rights in restrictive national and international conditions.

THE ACTIVE CHILD CITIZEN: LESSONS FROM CANADIAN POLICY AND THE CHILDREN'S MOVEMENT

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has advanced a model of active citizenry for children, which is difficult to reconcile with the still dominant Western notions of childhood that fetishize innocence and attribute passivity and incompetence to children. This article explores the manner in which state policy, Canadian courts, and childrens politics in Canada have responded to the imaginary of the active child citizen. The Canadian government has provided limited political space to young people and has narrowly construed childrens participation rights as limited to family law and juvenile justice. The reluctance of adult decision-makers to open up policy-making to the contributions of children has been further hindered by the current anti-democratic cast of neo-liberal governance. This article examines how quasi-judicial tribunals and the Canadian courts have invoked the Convention in their dealings with child asylum seekers, only to construct childhood participation and childhood protection as mutually exclusive. The article concludes with a brief exploration of the alternative model of childrens citizenship revealed by the childrens movement organization, Free the Children. In contrast to the relative failure of adult decision-makers to implement the participation rights of children, the contemporary childrens movement advances a view of children as empowered, knowledgeable, compassionate and global citizens, who are nonetheless, like other marginalized groups, in need of special, group-differentiated protections.

International migration, rights, and the decline of ‘actually existing liberal democracy’

Abstract Theories of post‐national rights for non‐citizens presuppose a general trend in expansion of rights consistent with the growth of the post‐World War Two welfare state. In the late twentieth century, the context for the negotiation of rights has altered dramatically, such that most governments in capitalist democracies have accepted the priority of deficit reduction and global competitiveness over the promotion of social and redistributive justice. As unemployment and insecurity of citizens within advanced economies have deepened, immigration, refugee and citizenship policies have become more restrictive. Restrictive policies are supported by first world citizens defending declining public resources against growing numbers of third world migrants, who are also ideologically construed as ethnic/racial cultural threats. Policies of border fortification against undocumented and autonomous migrants have a spillover effect, leading to violence and undermining social citizenship rights for permanent res...

Hybrid citizenship and what's left

To ask ‘what’s left of citizenship?’ is to suggest that the meaning of citizenship can be fixed, that citizenship had evolved to its highest stage (yet) of development, but that forces associated with globalization have since battered, eroded and debased citizenship, leaving, in Benjamin Muller’s evocative metaphor, an Iceman, a mere carcass, skin stretched on bones. Neo-liberal governance has led to the thinning of citizenship through erosion of the social and political rights and entitlements that had done so much to bring a dynamic of equality and justice into capitalist polities. For those who govern, the thinning of citizenship also refers to the problematic attenuation of ties of identity and loyalty between formal citizens and the territorially-based nation-state. In the introduction to this issue of Citizenship Studies, however, Peter Nyers offers the sober reminder that the robustness of citizenship rights was never a part of reality for the mass of the world’s population. Having commenced as ‘participatory aristocracy’ anchored in property rights (Shafir, 2004, p. 16), and basing its ability to extend its benefits to non-propertied classes in wealthy states on the ill-gotten gains of colonialism and wars, the larger global story of citizenship is that of ‘global apartheid’ (Richmond, 1994), or a ‘global citizenship divide’ with vastly uneven distributions of rights and entitlements between the wealthy and poorer regions and citizenries of the world (Stasiulis and Bakan, 2003). The papers in this issue of CS inquire into the impact of another set of developments on the experience and practices of citizenship—namely, the securitization of political communities and border policies, and the proliferation of new technologies of surveillance and control. These are trends that clearly preceded the attacks in the US of September 11, 2001, as witnessed by the increased cooperation in anti-terrorist and immigration policies among European states. Yet such trends have accelerated and gained new public visibility and rationality in the post-‘9/11’ era. It is evident that emergent forms of governance, largely responding to perceived threats associated with ‘dangerous mobilities’ (of terrorists, asylum-seekers, non-citizen workers, viruses and other pathogens, and so on), require some fundamental rethinking and reconceptualization of citizenship practices and subjectivity. In the creative formulations of the authors of this issue of CS, these include ‘governing through neuroses’ (Isin), resignation in the face of the ‘new normal’ (Bhandar), identity management through biometrics (Muller), and domopolitics, shifting nation-state borders outward (to regions such as the EU) and inward (to hospitals, schools, credit institutions, and

Worrier Nation: Quebec's Value Codes for Immigrants

This article analyses the political and policy discourses of Quebecs integration toolkit for immigrants. With a focus on value codes for immigrants, I argue first, that recent debate on accommodation of immigrants and religious minorities resuscitates the dominant historical narrative of Quebecs fragility as a conquered settler colonial nation but where the major threat is defined as the cultural otherness of racialized immigrants and religious minorities. Second, such value codes instantiate a form of governmental strategy that combines neo-liberal and communitarian rationalities and insist on cultural assimilation as the price of entry into Quebec citizenship. Finally, the paper examines how Quebecs current national imaginary of the ‘worrier nation’ maps spatially onto the urban-rural divide.

Gender and Multiculturalism - Dislodging the Binary between Universal Human Rights and Culture/Tradition: North/South Perspectives

Multiculturalism is a concept that has been stretched to include a variety of political conditions, mainly in countries that have liberal democratic political systems and traditions. The articles in this special issue of Politikon, show how varied and complex the embodiment of multiculturalism as a political practice, or policy discourse in different political contexts can be, and how often the outcome of multicultural discourses creates a binary between culture and rights. The aim of this issue is to grapple with dislodging this binary. For many countries in North America and Europe, the problems associated with multiculturalism stem from the perceived challenges associated with accommodation and integration of immigrants, especially from non-western and Muslim countries into liberal democratic societies. One of the main contested areas is whether immigrants and cultural/religious minorities should be integrated solely as individuals, given the constitution of the subject under liberalism that reveres autonomy and independence, or accommodated as groups or communities, in a manner that recognizes collective rights but may adhere to discriminatory practices for women. As several of the articles in this special issue suggest (by du Toit, Gouws, Isaacs-Martin, Bilge, and Stasiulis), however, the binaries which structure much of the debate over cultural accommodation—such as the universalism of human (including gender) rights vs. the particularism of cultural rights are themselves informed by Eurocentric ‘civilizational’ assumptions that do not always stand up to scrutiny. For instance, the current trend in regulating the sartorial religious choices of Muslim women is based on the implicit patriarchy of Muslim men and culture in contradistinction to the imaginary absence, both past and present, of patriarchy in liberal societies. Both majority and minority, indigenous and non-indigenous conceptions of community contain within them imaginaries of the past and present. Mavroudi

Negotiating Citizenship in an Era of Globalization

Contemporary international migration poses a major challenge to modern conceptions of citizenship. It generates complex and multifaceted relationships of individuals to territories, nation-states, labour markets, communities and households. Perhaps more than any other process associated with globalization, international migration highlights the tensions between the universalistic claims of modern nation-state citizenship and its particularistic, and thus inequitable workings. Migration and immigration policies of liberal democratic states are implicitly and often explicitly discriminatory in class, racial, regional and national origins, linguistic, gender and other terms. Moreover, their discriminatory character is legitimated by international law and its interpretation within national jurisprudence that affirms and treats as self-evident the centrality of immigration control to the doctrine of strong, national, territorially based sovereignty.6

Introduction: Negotiating Citizenship

In 2000 there were over 130 million documented migrants worldwide, an increase from the 1965 figure of 75 million. This number swells to 150 million if the estimated number of undocumented migrants are included.1 Most migrants originate from the poorest regions in the world, and an augmenting percentage are women. The implications posed by the growing numbers of female migrant workers from Third World states for our understanding of citizenship is the subject of this study. In an age of globalization, when national borders are commonly considered to be a minor factor in the world system — permeable to multinational corporations, technology and international organizations — the experiences of poor women of colour seeking to migrate in order to support their families often escape analytic scrutiny.

Respatializing Social Citizenship and Security Among Dual Citizens in the Lebanese Diaspora

The focus in this chapter is on how dual nationals access safety and services in two domains – to negotiate their “security” in the context of the 2006 Lebanon war, and to access health care, and thus construct “social citizenship” in two national spaces and in more localized settings in Lebanon and Canada/Australia. While as citizens of Canada and Australia, these dual nationals generally expressed gratitude for the extraordinary evacuation services provided by the country of their more robust citizenship, some citizens, caught in heavily bombed areas, felt that more should have been done to bring them to safety. Similarly, while most dual citizens predictably rated the health care in Australia and Canada more highly than in Lebanon, some negotiated the deterioration of services in these countries by seeking private but more accessible services in Lebanon.