The absence of institutional support for widely available and accessible care, the insufficient numbers of care workers, and many other factors have led to a worldwide care deficit. Indeed, the International Labour Organization (ILO) argues that there will be a ‘severe and unsustainable global care crisis’ unless new policy solutions are proposed (Addati et al, 2018: xxvii).
This article unearths hidden narratives that have been ignored in care migration research by using intersectional, decolonial and queer approaches. I examine the following: the accounts of a child of a migrant caregiver versus the child of a migrant caregiver’s employer; caregiver ‘Clara’s’ experience when working for an employer who was a surrogate grandmother; and caregiver ‘Linda’s’ lived experiences of being in a same-sex partnership in Canada while still being legally married to a man in the Philippines. Ultimately, I show how care migration research benefits from considering the ‘spectral histories’ that are part of people’s encounters with care migration.
This article highlights the manifold ways that migrants strategically use their social networks in order to survive in Alberta with compromised legal status. The conditionality of their status is affected by individual encounters and by new policy developments, showing that their ability to control their life trajectories is constrained by factors beyond their control. Nevertheless, although they experienced high amounts of stress because of their situations, the role played by cognitive processes, which include imagining, strategizing, and what I call “inter?provincial legal consciousness”, allowed them to exercise agency. These processes allowed them to build communities and networks of support and to imagine potential life paths in other provinces through other provinces’ provincial nominee programmes.
In light of the Canadian Journal of Political Science (CJPS) self-reflexive “50th Anniversary” issue on the state of Canadian political science (CPS), this article maps the discipline’s engagement with intersectional anti-oppression scholarship. Analyzing abstracts in CJPS and the Canadian Political Science Review, we argue while these journals—and mainstream CPS more generally—tackle questions of diversity, there remains a gap between conversations recognized in these particular forums and the incorporation of what we term an intersectional antioppression lens. In its deconstruction of systems of power and privilege, we explore analytic and pedagogical possibilities this lens presents for mainstream CPS.
This study examines the impact of attaining permanent resident status on the employment integration of migrant caregivers in Canada. The authors use survey data from 631 caregivers who arrived as migrants under a temporary foreign worker program before transitioning to permanent residency, as well as data from 47 focus group discussions. The authors find that although most caregivers do switch out of caregiving work over time, they often remain within a few, lower-skilled occupations. Postsecondary education acquired before migration has no impact on occupational mobility. Caregivers’ lack of financial stability and the stigmatization of their employment experience often constrain their labor market options; moreover, an emotional bond and sense of obligation toward employers often hinder their ability to move out into other occupations, even after receiving legal permanent resident status. From the empirical results, the authors provide theoretical insights into the complex relationship between immigration patterns and labor markets.
Using the results of ethnographic research and focus group interviews with Filipino temporary foreign workers in Alberta, Canada, the goal of this article is to bring temporary foreign workers into academic and policy discussions by critically assessing how they fare at different stages of the migration process. Such analysis shows the strengths of ideational, affective and structural factors in determining temporary foreign workers’ motivations and goals. Ultimately, this article shows that temporary foreign workers reconstruct belonging and remake citizenship by making membership claims in Canada on the basis of their economic and social contributions to the country. Such claims, however, are grounded in dual modes of belonging in both Canada and in the Philippines. Their participation in migrants’ rights organizations that endeavour to provide temporary foreign workers with pathways to permanent residency shows their belief in their ‘right to have rights’ (Isin, 2008).
“This edited volume analyzes citizenship through attention to its Others, bringing together research on the exclusion of migrants, welfare claimants, women, children and others. By defining citizenship as legal status, political belonging, and membership rights, it reveals the partiality of citizenship’s inclusion and claims to equality. It also explores the significance of citizenship talk, and of migration and citizenship policy and practice to citizens. Opening with an examination of the ‘Good Citizen’, each subsequent chapter examines one manifestation of a Citizenship’s Other, ending with a consideration of what this means for the politics of citizenship. The effect is to bring established and emerging scholars into conversation on one of the burning issues of our time. “– Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index.
The set of short papers that follows this essay reflect on the ways in which field-based research on contemporary social, economic, and environmental issues is conducted at the interface of academic and activist spheres of practice in Southeast Asia. While many academics, including several featured in this collection, see their research as activist in itself, it is also the case that institutional frameworks in different contexts in Southeast Asia construct the two categories as separate sets of practices. Our goal, then, is to explore the ways in which these practices come together.
I argue in this article that migrant workers’ resistance to neoliberalism, as seen through their participation in the migrant organizations highlights their ability to establish ‘spaces of power’ amid debilitating living and working conditions. This, then, illustrates how feminism in the 21st century is alive and well. In fact, the strengths of their activism show the transformative and radical possibilities of feminism by highlighting that structural transformations, and not only liberal attempts at inclusion, are necessary for gender justice.
By critically assessing Filipino migrants’ fraught and uneven experiences of the public, I illustrate how race and class hierarchies operate to mark Filipino temporary foreign workers as foreign ‘others’. Because public spaces are structured in gendered and racialized ways, Filipino migrants strategically navigate public spaces to ensure their safety and create their own spaces of belonging that give them refuge against xenophobia. I argue further that the paradoxical discourses of multicultural inclusion and economic protectionism invoke the figure of the ‘good’ migrant and the ‘bad’ migrant. These, in turn, promote contradictory actions towards migrants, whose public acceptance hinge on wildly variable and changing notions of inclusion/exclusion and economic acceptability. These lead to the passage of inconsistent policies where migrants are read as being ‘good’ one day, and as being ‘bad’ the next.
