32.2, 2008
www.msvu.ca/atlantis
2007 WINNER OF THE CWSA/ACEF ANNUAL BOOK AWARD BOOK REVIEW
Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System. Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan. University of Toronto Press, 2005; 233 pages; ISBN 0802079156; $29.95 (paper).
Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan review the history and current state of Canada's treatment of racialized women workers, from the explicitly racist policies of decades past to the more subtle discriminatory practices of today. They apply the term "gatekeepers" to the array of state actors - both in immigrant sending and receiving countries - and the professional and educational accreditation bodies in host countries, as well as the private placement agencies that recruit workers abroad for Canadian employers. Citizenship, say the authors, is a "negotiated process" involving not just the gatekeepers but the migrants as well. Nor is citizenship static, they argue, but is reconstructed for each successive historical period and enforced by state and non-state gatekeepers.
The authors' main focus is on how full citizenship rights are denied to many immigrant women of colour, especially by the gate keeping roles played by government policies and private employment agencies. They describe how Canada maintains exclusionary policies that fail to recognize the migratory nature of the globalized labour market and refuses to award full citizenship rights - such as access to social services, the freedom to live outside the employer's home in the case of domestic workers, and automatic landed immigrant status - to many immigrant women, especially women of colour. The authors interviewed senior managers of private employment agencies and heard described blatantly racist attitudes - and recruitment practices - that work against both nurses and domestic workers, especially those from the West Indies. A class divide co-exists with a racial divide, however, with immigrant nurses having more rights than domestic workers.
Using a case study approach and a series of 1994 interviews with both domestic workers and nurses from the West Indies and the Philippines, the authors sketch the barriers to citizenship each has faced and describe how workers have struggled to expand their rights. At times, the resistance is individual. Many domestic workers interviewed do not live in with their employers, for example. Many women, especially from the West Indies, who face racism the most, work illegally. Workers also resist collectively. Filipino migrants have been especially active in advancing the citizenship rights. Transnational networks challenge the convention that workers owe allegiance to one nation-state. Thus, say the authors, "the global citizenship divide can be...challenged by the dissident citizenship practices of determined non-citizen activists."

While much of the research that Stasiulis and Bakan have based their findings on is more than a decade old, they nonetheless bring many thoughtful insights to the question of how citizenship is defined and negotiated in this latest era of globalization.
Wendy Cuthbertson Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations