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Abstract
Citizenship awarding is politicised. Conceiving female marriage migration as a national threat, Taiwan's 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 women's 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 women's 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.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to give thanks for the critical suggestions of the two anonymous reviewers and the generosity of Dr Ming-Yeh Rawnsley for offering her constructive suggestions. This paper was first presented at the Conference on Transacted Intimacy: Political Economy of International Marriages in Asia at Asian Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 14 October 2010. A later revised version was presented at the Annual Conference of the European Association of Taiwan Studies (EATS), 18 June 2012, University of Southern Denmark, Sonderberg.
Notes
1. Schuck, Citizens, Strangers, and In-Betweens, 217.
2. Bélanger, “Marriage''; Jones and Shen, “International Marriage”; Wang, “Hidden Spaces.”
3. Two thirds of the immigrant wives (272,670) are from Mainland China, whereas the other third are from Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Cambodia, numbering 83,999, 26,551, 6,468, 5,561 and 4,303 respectively. The official statistics of Chinese migration began in 1987. From then to 2010, a total of 285,158 Mainland Chinese men and women who are spouses of local citizens resided in Taiwan. The great majority of them (95.6%) are women, and 30% of these Chinese wives (84,205) have acquired citizenship, in contrast to the small number of 1,859 Chinese husbands who acquired citizenship. See MoI, “Acquirement of ROC Nationality by Cause''; NIA, “Numbers of Foreign Spouses and Mainland Spouses.''
4. MoI, “Acquirement of the ROC Nationality by Cause.”
5. Bélanger, Lee, and Wang, “Ethnic Diversity,” 1112.
6. NICT, Understanding Taiwan, 19–21.
7. Fan, “Who Can Work Abroad?”
8. Lan, “They Have Money.”
9. Fan, “Who Can Work Abroad?;” Wang, “Otherness Discourse”; Wang, “Grassroots Transnational Investment”; Wang, “From ‘Farming Daughters’ to ‘Virgin Brides’.”
10. Farris, “Women's Liberation''; Lee, “In the Name”; Thornton et al., “From Arranged Marriage”; EY, Women and Men.
11. Wang and Chang, “The Commodification of International Marriages.”
12. Hsia, Don't Call Me Foreign Brides, 181.
13. Hsia, “Imaged and Imagined Threat”; Williams and Yu, “Domestic Violence in Cross-Border Marriage.”
14. US Department of State, 2005 Country Reports.
15. MOFA, “Preventing Transnational Human Trafficking.”
16. Fan, “A Study of Reproduction''. Two most infamous examples of politicians' racist slurs of immigrant women's reproduction are an education official openly calling on immigrant women to refrain from ‘producing too many babies’ (China Times, July 13, 2006), and a lawmaker claiming that Vietnamese women carry residues of Agent Orange and are ‘prone to give birth to deformed infants’, thus they should be denied birth allowances ( Broadcasting Corporation of China News, March 31, 2006; United Daily News, April 1, 2006).
17. Yuval-Davis, “Nationalism, Feminism, and Gender Relations,” 123–24.
18. Hsia, “Imaged and Imagined Threat”; Chen, “Intercultural Marriage and Its Impact”; Wang, “From ‘Farming Daughters’ to ‘Virgin Brides’.”
19. Harrison, Legitimacy, Meaning, and Knowledge, 137–144.
20. NSC, National Security Report, 60–61; CEPD, 18.
21. Öniş, “The Logic of the Developmental State.”
22. For `professional migrants' and `white-collar migrants', see CEPD, A Proposal, 5, 24, 26–7; MoI, The Changing Composition; MoI, A White Paper; for the `quality' deficit, see Yu, A Report, 1, 38; NSC, National Security Report, 61.
23. Piper, “International Marriage in Japan.”
24. Hsia, “Prospects and Impasse of Multicultural Citizenship”; Chao, “Household Registration.”
25. Chen, “Gendered Borders.”
26. Tseng and Wu, “Reconfiguring Citizenship and Nationality.”
27. Friedman, “Marital Immigration and Graduated Citizenship.”
28. Chao, “Imagined Modernities”; “Household Registration.”
29. Tsai, “‘Foreign Brides’ Meets Ethnic Politics,” 262; Bélanger et al., “Ethnic Diversity and Statistics in East Asia.”
30. Lee, “Belated Modernities.”
31. Tseng and Komiya, Classism, 100.
32. Lan, “Migrant Women's Bodies as Boundary Markers,'' 643, 851.
33. Lan, “White Privilege,” 1679.
34. Ito, “Crafting Migrant Women's Citizenship”; Bélanger et al., “Ethnic Diversity and Statistics in East Asia.”
35. Faist, “The Fixed and Porous Boundaries.”
36. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship; Sassen, Losing Control; Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging”; Freeman, “Immigrant Incorporation in Western Democracies.”
37. Freeman, “Immigrant Incorporation in Western Democracies.”
38. Cheng, “The Becoming of Immigrants.”
39. Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood, 21
40. Selya, Development and Demographic Change, 308; Tseng, “Beyond ‘Little Taipei’.”
41. It was either a monthly salary that was twice as high as the official minimum wage, or yearly savings that were 24 times the official minimum wage.
42. Liao, “Marriage Immigrants’ Human Rights,” 104.
43. Such proof can be obtained by two different means. One is to attend publicly-funded language/orientation courses or to enrol at any formal educational institution. The other is to pass the Test of Basic Language Abilities and Knowledge of Rights and Duties of Naturalised Citizens. The latter is similar to the integration test required of foreign spouses of Dutch nationals and the Life in the UK and English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) tests required of applicants for permanent residency and naturalisation in the UK (de Hart, “The Unity of the Family?,” 196; Home Office, Life in the United Kingdom).
44. EY, A Draft Bill of Some Amendments.
45. In fact, there exists a double standard within the Nationality Act, which implicitly tolerates home born citizens acquiring other nationalities (Tseng, An Analysis of the Immigration Act, 31; CY, An Investigation Report). Politicians included, some ROC citizens pursued a second nationality for multiple purposes: a safety valve against the possibility of war between Taiwan and China, a convenience to facilitate business travel around the world, as access to social welfare of other countries, and a chance of having a better life and a higher quality of education for their children (Tseng, “The Mobility of People and Capital;” Beal and Sos, “Asian Nationalism in the Diaspora,” 134–40; Chee, “Migrating for the Children.”).
46. Faist, “The Fixed and Porous Boundaries,” 3.
47. Chen, “Gendered Borders.” Before 2000, foreign wives were awarded ROC citizenship automatically upon their marriage. However, this would not be realised until they, as required by an administrative decree, renounced their previous nationality. In the draft bill, the government stated that in order to achieve gender equality, automatic awarding to foreign wives was abolished. Foreign wives and, foreign husbands alike, are to apply for citizenship via naturalisation.
48. Acts of the Conference for the Codification of International Law (Acts) 1930 vol.1: 76, cited by Leppänen, “The Conflicting Interests of Women's Organisations,” 243.
49. De Hart, “The Morality of Maria Toet,” 54–5.
50. Chao, “Household Registration.”
51. MoI, “Legal Amendments.”
52. MoI, “Lowering the Criterion of Language Ability.”
53. Hsia, “Selfing and Othering,” 89–113; 124–36; Kung, “The Politics of International Marriages,” 182–83.
54. Young, “A Study of Taiwanese Attitude toward Immigrants,” 53, 58–61, 63–65, 70–71.
55. A similar case of a Vietnamese wife can be found at the website of the Vietnamese Migrant Workers and Brides Office, an organisation founded by a Vietnamese Catholic missionary in Taiwan. Details of the case are available at http://www.tauwanact.net.article.php3?id_article=5.
56. For example, in the name of preventing human trafficking, the government in August 2003 launched a ‘visit and investigate’ operation to ensure immigrant women's whereabouts and the results determined whether to renew their residency permit (Young, “A Study of Taiwanese Attitude toward Immigrants,” 67).
57. Lan, “New Global Politics of Reproductive Labor”; “Migrant Women's bodies as Boundary Markers”; Piper and Roces, Wife or Worker, 5–8.
58. Del Rosario, “Bridal Diaspora,” 264.
59. Jones and Shen, “International Marriage in East and Southeast Asia,” 21.
60. Pariwala and Uberio, Marriage, Migration and Gender, 28–30.
61. Wang, “From ‘Farming Daughters’ to ‘Virgin Brides’;” Hugo and Nguyen, “Marriage Migration between Vietnam and Taiwan.”
62. Knop, “Relational Nationality,” 94–6, 111–16.
63. Yuval-David and Anthias, Women-Nation-State, 7.
64. Billig, Banal Nationalism.