From Reproductive Assimilation to Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Framing and Regulating Immigrant Mothers and Children in Taiwan

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the case of Taiwan, one of the major destinations for marriage migrants in Asia, this article examines how the host state utilizes shifting discursive frames for Southeast Asian immigrants and their children to establish the regime of marital citizenship and achieve the project of nation building. I characterise the earlier regime as ‘reproductive assimilation’, which aimed to manage the potential risk that immigrant motherhood brings to ‘population quality’ through assimilation-oriented projects of monitoring childbirth and childrearing. The recent turn toward the ‘New Southbound Policy’ shifts the cultural frame toward ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ by reframing the ethnic difference of the ‘new second generation’ as a market asset for globalised national development.

KEYWORDS:

• Marriage migration
• immigrant motherhood
• marital citizenship
• maternal citizenship
• assimilation
• multiculturalism
• Taiwan

Acknowledgements

This article is based on a broader research project funded by the Ministry of Technology in Taiwan (MOST104-2420-H002-045-MY3). I am grateful to the comments of Fran Martin and the journal’s anonymous reviewers, as well as the assistance of Fu-Rong Yeh, Yu-Chien Lee, and Nathaniel Tuohy. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Asian Migration and Diasporas workshop held at City University of Hong Kong on February 29, 2016. I thank the participants for their helpful comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Pei-Chia Lan is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at National Taiwan University. Her fields of specialty include gender, work and migration. She is the author of Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan (Duke 2006), which won the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award, and Raising Global Families: Parenting, Immigration and Class in Taiwan and the US (Stanford 2018).

Notes

1. The total fertility rate dropped to 0.895 in 2010, the lowest in the world; the rate in 2016 was 1.17 (Ministry of the Interior 2017b). The crude divorce rate rose to 2.87 in 2003 and was 2.29 in 2016 (Ministry of the Interior 2017c). The crude marriage rate dropped to 5.07 in 2010 and was 6.31 in 2016 (Ministry of the Interior 2017d).

2. Yang et al. (2012) compiled multiple official census data and found that, although the general fertility rate of Southeast Asian immigrant mothers is higher than that of native women, the former’s marriage-duration specific fertility rate is actually lower than the latter’s. The fertility rate of Chinese spouses is the lowest, because almost forty percent of Chinese spouses were widowed or divorced prior to their marriages to Taiwanese veterans, so these unions are likely to stay childless (Chen 2008).

3. The fund was renamed as ‘New Resident Development Fund’ after 2015 (National Immigration Agency 2016).

4. The Family Education Act, section 1 (Legislative Yuan 2003).

5. The electronic version of the handbooks on prenatal care, children’s health, and parental education can be download from the website of Ministry of Education (2018).

6. The program was called the ‘Low-income foreign spouse family and children education plan’ when it was first introduced in 2006 and amended in 2009.

7. According to Article 31 in the Protection of Children and Youth Welfare and Rights Act: ‘The government will establish an assessment mechanism for the development of children aged below six, offering special care for early prevention, medical, schooling and family support for developmental delays in children as needed.’ (Legislative Yuan 2011)

8. See Tran (2005) for a criticism of the ethnocentric bias of the Business Weekly report.

9. Office of President 2016.

10. A participant spoke at the forum ‘Human-based New South-turn Policy: Cultivating Southeast Talents for Taiwan’ held on May 17, 2016.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan: [Grant Number MOST104-2420-H002-045-MY3].