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ABSTRACT
Dominant discourses of immigrant value in Taiwan and across Asia distinguish marital immigrants from desirable professional immigrants who are assumed to contribute their talents and economic productivity to their new home. This article examines national anxieties about the compromised value of marital immigrants and it illustrates the strategies adopted by immigrant spouses as they carve out new means of producing value through productive and reproductive labors. Focusing on mainland Chinese spouses in Taiwan, the article argues that contested political relations between Taiwan and China foster immigration policies that construct Chinese marital immigrants as familial dependents whose material desires and suspect political commitments are held in check by their identification with reproductive and care labors. The article asks how this complex devaluation system affects the life strategies of comparatively elite marital immigrants, Chinese women and men with postsecondary degrees and former professional careers in China. The article analyzes how these immigrants maneuver around policies that restrict their access to skilled employment, yet without necessarily rejecting their reproductive contributions to Taiwanese society. Elite spouses experience new forms of precariousness produced by the intersection of intimate life decisions with heteronormative gender roles, aspirations for self-fulfillment, and the insecurities of immigrant status.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on nearly two years of non-consecutive research conducted in Taiwan and China between 2003 and 2013, with the most intensive period of fieldwork completed between 2007 and 2009. The project incorporates marital immigrants on both sides of the Taiwan Strait together with their citizen spouses and other family members. It also includes research with Taiwanese NGOs that provide services for immigrants or engage in rights-based activism, and with Taiwanese bureaucrats and officials in units directly involved in immigration policymaking, regulation, and policing. The author is extremely grateful to all of these participants for their valuable and generous contributions to the research. Thanks are also due to Nicola Piper for her invitation to present an early draft of this article at the workshop, “Marriage Migration in East Asia Revisited,” and to workshop participants for their helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The financial requirement was imposed on Chinese spouses in March 2004 but was not added to the laws regulating foreign spouses until 2007. For a more detailed discussion of the activist campaign against the financial requirement, see Friedman Citation2015.
2 Hsia Citation2015.
3 See the Act Governing Relations Between People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area, Article 10. Although this article appeared in laws and policies regulating both foreign and Chinese spouses, it reflected the broader array of social anxieties and political fears surrounding Chinese spouses’ “purpose” in Taiwan (the threat of sex work or political espionage, for instance), thereby heightening the stakes of violating the article’s wide purview. Most recently, this article was invoked to justify the deportation of three Chinese women who had entered Taiwan on tourist or visiting relatives visas but who had been found working as bar girls. See Kuan and Chen Citation2016.
4 Constable Citation2005. See also Freeman Citation2011; Kim Citation2015; Newendorp Citation2008.
5 Jones Citation2012; Piper Citation2003; Piper and Roces Citation2003; Yeoh and Chee Citation2015.
6 Schrover and Moloney Citation2014.
7 Chaloff and Lemaître Citation2009; Friedman and Mahdavi Citation2015. Japan’s policies regulating low-skilled labor migration are the most restrictive in the region, providing exceptions only for certain categories of employment, such as migrant entertainers (Parreñas Citation2011) or migrant co-ethnics, primarily South Americans of Japanese descent (Tsuda Citation2003). By contrast, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore permit the entry of temporary migrant workers under highly regulated conditions that attempt, not always successfully, to distinguish temporary workers from both marital immigrants and highly skilled migrants who enjoy the possibility of permanent residence and citizenship. See Constable Citation2007; Hsia Citation2015; Moon Citation2015; Yeoh and Chee Citation2015.
8 Schrover and Moloney Citation2014.
9 Kofman Citation2012, 64.
10 Kofman Citation2012, 64–65.
11 For example, Moon Citation2015; Yeoh and Chee Citation2015; Yeoh and Eng Citation2008.
12 For a detailed discussion of these laws and policies and the substance of the 2009 reforms, see Friedman Citation2015.
13 Butler Citation2009; Lorey Citation2015.
14 Butler Citation2009, 3.
15 According to Judith Butler, frames are historically situated and politically constituted fields “that prepare or shape a subject for recognition,” a condition that she terms “recognizability” (Butler Citation2009, 5).
16 Here I borrow the language of Nancy Fraser who uses the terms “redistribution” and “recognition” to identify justice projects that seek to redress economic inequalities and cultural disrespect, respectively. Although I agree with Fraser’s overall argument that struggles for justice must integrate goals of cultural recognition with socioeconomic redistribution, I argue that her concept of recognition presumes the existence of an already acknowledged viable identity as the basis for such politics, even when she analyzes struggles that aim to transform the very foundations of collective identity. See Fraser Citation1997. Butler’s theory of recognition intervenes at a prior moment to show how groups are denied acknowledgment of the very claim to a recognized existence.
17 Butler Citation2009, 4.
18 The PRC government insists on a principle of “one China,” meaning that it does not permit countries to recognize both the PRC and the ROC.
19 The 1992 Employment Services Act, the legislation that first permitted the entry of temporary labor migrants into Taiwan, explicitly excluded mainland Chinese from this category. Since President Ma Ying-jeou took office in 2008, categories of short-term visitors from the mainland have expanded to include tourists, students, those seeking medical treatment, and white-collar professionals.
20 Foreign spouses may not be able to capitalize on their work rights due to language barriers, domestic responsibilities, or opposition from husbands and in-laws. And although they are eligible for citizenship in four years, successfully naturalizing in that time frame requires them to reside in Taiwan for the full fourth year, a requirement that many are unable to meet due to family obligations in their home countries. See Wang and Bélanger Citation2008.
21 Edelman Citation2004. Chinese spouses’ ability to produce Taiwanese children does not erase the taint of their mainland origins, providing evidence of how even immigrants who reproduce heteronormatively may be excluded from the nation on other grounds. See Oswin Citation2012.
22 Friedman Citation2015.
23 According to Taiwan government statistics, ninety-five percent of Chinese spouses who applied for entry to Taiwan between 1987 and 2013 were women (Taiwan National Immigration Agency and Department of Household Registration Citation2014).
24 All personal names used in this article are pseudonyms.
25 Chinese spouses who divorce before acquiring ROC citizenship lose their right to remain legally in Taiwan unless they acquire legal custody (joint or sole) of a minor ROC citizen child. Because Taiwan courts are less likely to divide custodial and economic responsibilities between parents, immigrant spouses face a high hurdle when they have to prove their ability to support their children.
26 Chinese women also experience profound challenges to their gendered sense of self upon immigrating to Taiwan. As a consequence, many feel compelled to enact a disempowered version of femininity, a consequence of living in a society that they identify as more traditional and patriarchal than their own. See Friedman Citation2015.
27 I knew other Chinese women and men who considered higher education in Taiwan as a means to improve their prospects on the local job market, especially if their advanced degrees from China were not recognized in Taiwan. Some became discouraged from embarking on this path because they had to wait until they became a citizen to pursue a formal degree, at which point they felt they would be too old to see any substantive employment benefits. Others forged ahead by taking night classes while continuing to work during the day.
28 By economic marginalization I mean both the denial of access to the labor market and consignment to low-paying, temporary, and/or dead-end jobs that make it increasingly difficult for individual workers to form or support families. See Lorey Citation2015.
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Sara L. Friedman
Sara L. Friedman is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University, USA. She is the author of Exceptional States: Chinese Immigrants and Taiwanese Sovereignty (2015) and co-editor, with Pardis Mahdavi, of Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility Across Asia (2015). Her current research studies Chinese families that abandon an urban, middle-class existence in favor of alternative lifestyles and educational opportunities for their children.