Isabelle Cheng

Making foreign women the mother of our nation: the exclusion and assimilation of immigrant women in Taiwan

Citizenship awarding is politicised. Conceiving female marriage migration as a national threat, Taiwans citizenship legislation is consciously designed and purposefully utilised to achieve exclusion and assimilation. Driven by a nationalistic impetus, it shows how Taiwan imagines itself as a modern, prosperous and homogenous nation and projects upon the immigrant outsiders as a threat to its self-identity. Examined through immigrant womens lived experiences, this citizenship legislation is biased by gender, class and ethnicity. The implementation of the legislation is not only an example of symbolic politics but also banal nationalism realised at grassroots level in the private domain. Immigrant womens lived experiences show that exclusion and assimilation stemmed from banal nationalism is not just an operation of symbolic politics but is also enmeshed with their everyday life.

Reality or pretense? Renouncing nationality and organized hypocrisy of the sovereignty of Taiwan

Adopting Krasner’s thesis of organized hypocrisy, this research examined the institution of sovereignty in regard to the naturalization of migrant spouses in Taiwan. Using migrant spouses as a case study, this article argues that the hypocrisy of Taiwan’s sovereignty lies in demanding migrants to renounce their native nationality or cancel their household registration. This demand not only fails to prevent statelessness but also prompts the origin state to recognize or reject Taiwan’s sovereignty. The interactions between Taiwan and the origin states of migrant spouses from Japan, Vietnam and China underline the hypocrisy of Taiwan’s sovereignty. The more Taiwan insists on migrant spouses renouncing their original nationality, the more this destabilizes Taiwan’s sovereignty because of its lack of international recognition.

Migrants, families and the state: be/coming Taiwanese in a transnational world

In the past three decades, significant turns in migration studies saw the emergence of transnationalism as an analytical framework with which to understand contemporary cross-border movements enabled by globalization and advances in the means of communication and transportation. With the aim of going beyond the understanding of the lives of migrants as conditioned by the institutions of nation-states, and also to shed light on the changing conditions of global capitalism, scholarship on transnational migration argues that social inquiry should approach migration phenomena from the perspective of migrants’ lives and focus on the social spheres emerging from their engagement with the global world (Glick-Schiller et al., 1992, 1995; Guarnizo and Smith, 2008; Portes et al., 1999; Vertovec, 2009). In the words of Amelina and Faist (2012: 1708), transnational migration studies ‘‘de-naturalized’’ categories such as nation and space and opened new possibilities to understand multiplicity, multi-locality, hybridity and diversity in migrants’ lives, identities and practices. Among others, transnational migration scholarship not only challenges the dichotomy between the local and global, but also establishes a conceptual link between different localities and social fields in migrants’ lives and practices. Since it surfaced in the field of migration studies, transnationalism has evolved in different directions. Focusing on the individual at the micro level, earlier literature on transnational migration studies often celebrated the agency of migrant actors in shaping their social universes. In contrast, recent debates have offered more problematized accounts which reconsidered