Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global
System, Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan, Toronto: University
of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. 233.
Negotiating Citizenship is a thoughtful, well-researched and
insightful book concerned with the topical issue of citizenship and
contesting citizenship rights within the context of global capitalism. It
is a timely and comprehensive piece that interrogates and dissects
traditional theories of citizenship, and offers an alternative theoretical
perspective on the basis of examining the status and condition of foreign
domestic workers and nurses who migrate to Canada from two similar but
different regions of the world: the Caribbean and the Phillipines. In
creating the context for discussion, the work takes the reader on the
journey of these migrant women workers from their home countries in the
“Third World” where national labour markets are becoming
increasingly unable to absorb surplus labour and where they have been
adversely affected by the anti-social structural adjustment policies of
the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to the more economically developed
Canada where the state encourages them to work without providing them with
citizenship rights. By so doing, as the text points out, the Canadian
state, which still has primacy under globalization, reinforces the
vulnerability of an already vulnerable social group for which migration is
a survival strategy.