Migrant Citizenship from Below

Family, Domestic Work, and Social Activism in Irregular Migration

K. Shinozaki

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781137410436
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137410429
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Arbeitsmarktforschung

Migrant Citizenship from Below explores the dynamic local and transnational lives of Filipina and Filipino migrant domestic workers living in Schönberg, Germany. Shinozaki examines their irregular migrant citizenship status from 'above', which is produced by complex interactions between Germany's welfare, care, and migration regimes and the Philippines' gendered politics of overseas employment. Despite the predominant representation of these workers as invisible, these spatially immobile migrants maintain sustained transnational engagements through parenting and religious practices. Shinozaki studies the reverse-gendered process of international reproductive labor migration, in which women traveled first and were later joined by men. Despite their structural vulnerability, participant observations and biographical interviews with the migrants demonstrate that they enact and negotiate migrant citizenship in the workplace, transnational households, religious practices and through accessing health provisions.

CHAPTER 1

Migrant Citizenship from Below

As I have increasingly become acquainted with the dynamic lives of irregular migrant domestic and care workers in Schönberg and their transnational engagement in different spheres of life, I have begun to question the common perception of them as being dually invisible and their presumed helplessness resulting from this invisibility. At the same time, to be sure, their structural positions are more than precarious and make them extremely vulnerable to exploitation. However, if we are to understand their experiences as irregular migrants working in private homes, we need to examine their ordinary lives (Bommes and Sciortino 2011a) without imposing some predetermined view “from above.” This has prompted me to conceptualize my fieldwork observations as what I refer to as “migrant citizenship from below,” viewed through a transnational and translocal lens.

This chapter establishes the analytical framework of the book. Citizenship and transnationalism are the two major nodes I have utilized in order to capture the structural conditions of irregular labor migration on the one hand, and the practices of migrants on the other. While national citizenship rights do not cross borders with migrants, migrant domestic workers from the Philippines continue to engage in sustained social and economic relations both locally and from a great distance. Thus, bringing together citizenship and transnationalism visualizes these simultaneous, interactive processes at both the national and transnational levels. Moreover, the actual experiences of migrant domestic workers are locally embedded, which leads me to suggest that localized practices in multiple locations across the borders are constitutive of citizenship as well (Guarnizo and Smith 1998). How do the migrants negotiate better working conditions despite a lack of formal rights as citizens? How do they negotiate the dominant gender norms that determine ideal Filipino citizens? While attaching particular importance to the perspective of the migrants from below, analogue to “transnationalism from below” (Guarnizo and Smith 1998, 3), I offer a framework that captures citizenship as a set of dynamic processes involving practices that are articulated as a response to the irregular migrant status created by both the Philippine and German states.

After defining the notion of citizenship, I discuss three factors that shape the notion of migrant citizenship from below. I begin by discussing an epistemological issue, namely the dominant role that the immigration context plays in creating “knowledgescapes” (Matthiesen 2013) about citizenship debates at the cost of still largely neglecting the sending context. I suggest that bringing the sending context into the equation of citizenship debates in a solid manner is crucial since the Philippine state extends its citizenship to its worker citizens abroad in order to keep them bound to the Philippine nation. Next, I move on to the second aspect of irregular migration status in connection with the German notion of citizenship, which is shifting from an ethnoculturalist tradition to an expansionist approach (Section “Irregular Migration Status”). Despite this change, new boundaries are being drawn, which function as an “external exclusion” barrier for irregular migrants. Although the irregular migrant citizenship status of Filipina and Filipino domestic workers has been created by a set of migration policies and regulations imposed from above, I advance in the next section at the notion of citizenship practices that is “enacted” from below (Isin 2008, 271).

Four Meanings of Citizenship

The concept of citizenship has recently witnessed renewed interest within multifarious academic discourses, and it has been deployed in order to capture a wide array of relations, matters, and phenomena, ranging from a set of rights and obligations between the state and its members to people’s experiences in a given “community” (Kivisto and Faist 2007). My analysis is particularly informed by the four interrelated dimensions of citizenship suggested by Linda Bosniak: citizenship as “legal status,” as “rights,” as “political activity,” and as “a form of collective identity and sentiment” (Bosniak 2000, 455; Yuval-Davis 1997). Citizenship as legal status denotes “formal or nominal membership in an organized political community,” with a set of rights and obligations that come with the status, at the present time ordinarily rooted in the nation-state (456). The second notion of citizenship is about rights and entitlements, which is central to Marshall’s (1950) conceptualization of citizenship.

The third dimension of citizenship as political activity refers to collective active engagement in a political community (Bosniak 2000, 470). This understanding brings the dimension of citizenship practice to the fore. Although, in the civic republican tradition, formal state institutions are presumed to be the locus of political citizenship, such an exclusive focus would mean introducing a statist, overly formalist bias, creating problems. It would result in making invisible many practices, especially those affecting marginalized groups along the intersecting social divisions of gender, racialization, and class, who notoriously have little access to state-level politics. Studies of social movements make a strong case for lived/experienced citizenship embedded in a particular locality. They pinpoint the migrants’ and their supporters’ engagement in lobbying for the attainment of civil and social citizenship rights (Anderson 2009; Piper 2013; Schwenken 2013; Siim 2000). The fourth dimension addresses an emotional aspect of citizenship that “describes the affective ties of identification and solidarity that we maintain with groups of other people in the world . . . [It] evoke[s] the quality of belonging—the felt aspects of community membership,” which derive from the other three dimensions (Bosniak 2000, 479). Inspired by Bosniak’s work (2000), which critically reflects the multifaceted dimension of citizenship in a systematic manner in processes of globalization, I define citizenship in terms of status and practice in a mutually influencing way. While the former denotes “formal” citizenship, that is, legal status and a set of rights and obligations, the latter a form of collective identity and sentiment, and political activity. It is through the enactment of practice in a broad sense that “substantial” citizenship can be gained. As I shall advance in the following sections, central to migrant citizenship from below is the process of constant interplay of status and practices across nation-state borders.

The discussion of citizenship in connection with migration in Europe generally and Germany in particular largely revolves around such topics as nationhood (Brubaker 1992; Joppke 1999), the status, rights and obligations of long-term settlers or “denizens” (Hammar 1990), dual citizenship (Böcker and Thränhardt 2003; Faist and Kivisto 2007), naturalization in relation to the issue of integration (Diehl and Fick 2012; Ersanilli and Koopmans 2010), the emergent discourse of universal personhood instead of nation-state based citizenship—“post-national membership”—(Soysal 1994; Joppke 2010), and the issue of belonging (Pries 2013). Biological and cultural reproduction and parenting are also constitutive of citizenship as parents gain access to citizenship entitlements through parenting (Turner 2001; Yuval-Davis 1997). The right to residency of a US-born child given to irregular migrant parents, and childcare and eldercare provisions and entitlements to parents and other caring (mostly female) adults (Lister et al. 2007; Turner 2001) are examples of this. In particular, as feminist scholars have shown, “motherhood constitutes women as paradoxical subjects of citizenship” (Erel 2011, 696) because procreation and caregiving activities contribute to the reproduction of the nation and to social citizenship through (largely) unpaid reproductive labor while their exclusion from political citizenship has been legitimated on the basis of their very motherhood (Pateman 1988a; Yuval-Davis 1997). Connecting feminist scholarship and the study of immigration on the theme of citizenship, Umut Erel (2011) argues that “[m]igrant mothering questions the idea that bearing and rearing children ‘naturally’ transmits ethnically bounded, homogeneous cultural capital to children which is the basis for ethnic or national belonging. Recognizing migrant mothers as citizens raises the question of how plural ethnic identities can relate to citizenship identity . . . [Migrant mothers] can be construed either as potentially diluting or undermining the cultural and social cohesion of a citizen community or as revitalizing this very community” (696).

This cursory overview showcases the great breadth and scope of citizenship studies, and yet irregular migrants are barely found in citizenship debates. When they are, the discussion centers on their precariousness as “un-citizens” (Nash 2009, 1078) as well as they are discussed as one of the heterogeneous categories of “non-citizens” of their country of residence (in the Canadian context, Goldring and Landolt 2013a, 4).¹ These studies have demonstrated not only how diverse and fluid noncitizen status is, but also how state policies produce various noncitizen categories and how variable the capacity of involved actors is to meet or challenge conditions (Goldring and Landolt 2013b), shedding light on the residential society’s perspective on citizenship. While I find Luin Goldring’s and Patricia Landolt’s nuanced conceptualizations extremely useful to move away from conventional fixed dualism of “illegal” versus “legal” migration status and a structure versus agency dichotomy, I build on Goldring’s (2001) earlier work on “‘transnationaliz[ing] feminist work on citizenship and bring[ing] citizenship practice into discussions of transnationalism (63). I propose reframing the perspective of citizenship from a question of the society of residence to that of the transnational engagement and embeddedness in multiple localities spanning more than one nation-state. More specifically, I frame their structural location and acts of negotiation as migrant citizenship from below in order to highlight three aspects: transnational dimension of migrants’ citizenship, the irregularity of their migration status, and the migrants’ capacity to negotiate such a citizenship status, the central aspect of my book, which constitutes migrant citizenship from below.

Dominant Immigration Context, Neglected Emigration Context: Rectifying the Invisibility of Irregular Migrants’ Citizenship through Adopting a Transnational Lens

First, by using the term “migrant citizenship,” I aim to highlight migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness in, and belonging to, different locations spanning multiple nation-states. Although the majority of Filipina and Filipino domestic workers in my study were not able to access their rights associated with their Filipino citizenship, I still consider their simultaneous embeddedness important. This is because citizenship is a multitiered concept referring to practices rather than strictly adhering to a juridical understanding of having a set of rights and obligations (see the discussion in the previous section). Additionally, it pertains to epistemological considerations. Dominant scholarly debates around citizenship seldom consider irregular migrants as a core subject of inquiry, which leads to making them invisible as citizens. I wish to rectify the invisibility of their citizenship through adopting a transnational lens. Why does the citizenship of irregular migrants become silenced? I argue in a similar way to Knorr-Cetina that knowledge, including that relating to citizenship, should be seen as “practiced—within structures, processes, and environments that make up specific epistemic settings” (Knorr-Cetina 1999, 8, emphasis in original). These epistemic “KnowledgeScapes” have wider spatial implications (Matthiesen 2013, 180). Due to the dominant role that the countries of immigration play in producing knowledge in the study of migration (Castles 2010; Fitzgerald 2006), it is not surprising that a disproportionate emphasis in discussions of citizenship has been placed on the immigration rather than emigration contexts (Barry 2006). By the same token, citizenship debates are mainly focused on migrants and their offspring officially residing in the country of immigration rather than irregular migrants because, in terms of status (i.e., legal status and a set of rights and obligations), they are already citizens, “denizens,” or have a higher likelihood of formally becoming citizens, of the country of immigration. This mode of epistemic governance favoring the perspective of the country of immigration (i.e., the country of migrant residence) may explain why irregular migrants barely appear in citizenship scholarship as a core subject in the receiving context, which results in making them invisible as citizens.

However, a sole focus on the immigration context would reveal only a partial picture of their lives, if we were to pay attention to the lived realities of these migrants, spanning multiple locations in more than one nation-state. Transnationalization referred to as “sustained cross-border ties, events and processes across the borders of several national states” (Faist 2010, 1667), has been popularized since the pathbreaking work, Nations Unbound, by Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc (1994). A wealth of transnational migration studies has demonstrated that a large number of migrants are engaging in a wide spectrum of transborder activities, ranging from trading and business (Morokvasic 1994; Nowicka 2013; Ong 1999; Peberdy and Rogerson 2000; Portes, Guarnizo, and Haller 2002; Portes and Yiu 2013) to politics (Gerharz 2014; Guarnizo, Portes, and Haller 2003; Itzigsohn and Villacrés 2008; Law 2003), religion (Levitt 2007; Werbner 2002; Wuthnow and Offutt 2008) and interactions with families and friends between “here,” “there” (back home), and other parts of the world (Asis, Huang, and Yeoh 2004; Baldassar and Merla 2014b; Boccagni 2012; Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Carling, Menjívar, and Schmalzbauer 2012; Faist 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila1997; Madianou 2012; Madianou and Miller 2012; Mazzucato and Schans 2011; Parreñas 2001, 2005; Pries 1997; Vertovec 2004). Most studies have concentrated on the lifeworld of migrants, families, networks, and communities, which have led some observers to speak of transnational social fields (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994) and transnational social spaces (Faist 2000; Pries 2001). Much of this existing literature on transnational migration has focused on heterogeneous groups of migrants who can be spatially mobile or hypermobile, ranging from permanent settlers, intra-EU migrants, dual citizenship holders to contract workers with regular migration status, and, more recently, skilled professionals.² Thus, the (potential) spatial mobility capital (Murphy-Lejeune 2002; Shinozaki 2014a) facilitated by the more privileged citizenship rights of these diverse groups of migrants seems to be often presumed to be a primary feature in forging migrant transnationalism. Some studies go further to demonstrate the likelihood of transnational activities among a more selected group of migrants. Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, Alejandro Portes, and William Haller (2003) show that

it is not the least educated, more marginal, or more recent arrivals who are most prone to retain ties with their home country politics . . . Educated immigrants are more capable of following events in their home countries and seeking a role in them; the passage of time and acquisition of U.S. citizenship do not necessarily reduce this interest since their assimilative potential is balanced by the greater security and stability that they produce. A U.S. passport enables former migrants to travel back and forth without restrictions; greater time in the United States is usually associated with economic stability and more resources to invest in favored political causes. (1229)

Undeniably, privileged formal citizenship (i.e., status and rights)—the first two dimensions of citizenship—greatly facilitate spatial mobility, as in practical terms these enable migrants to travel without a visa, or simply by carrying an identity card, if we take contemporary European movers as an example. Nonetheless, it would be misleading to conflate migrants’ access to spatial mobility with an assumption that transnational engagement is the sole terrain of migrants with mobility capital only. In her survey of studies of transnational migration and irregular migration, Masja van Meeteren (2012) critically evaluates that the former scholarship either does not pay attention to the transnational engagement of irregular migrants or views the extent of transnational activities as corresponding to legal status alongside other higher human capital resources. Thus, “[f]ollowing this line of reasoning, it is likely that irregular migrants’ engagement in transnational activities is negligible” (van Meeteren 2012, 316). On the other hand, the latter

implicitly assume[s] that irregular migrants have no opportunity to engage in transnational activities because they have to struggle to survive . . . Researchers implicitly assume that while irregular migrants are busy surviving, they have no room to engage in transnational activity, so they therefore devote little attention to it. (van Meeteren 2012, 316)

My view is that voluminous transnational studies focus on temporal and spatial separation and distance, therein making a reference to irregular migration status or includeing irregular migrants in their samples (Baldassar and Merla 2014a; Dreby 2006; Fauser 2012; Madianou and Miller 2012; Pries 1996, 2010). Nevertheless, overall, irregular migration status seems to have caught only marginal attention as a potential factor for migrants’ transnational engagement, while some studies do examine the irregularity as a core subject of their analysis: irregular migrants’ homeward oriented aspirations (van Meeteren 2012), transnational parenting practices among Filipina irregular migrants (Fresnoza-Flot 2009), and the organization of funeral in their hometowns by Ghanaian irregular migrants living in Amsterdam (Mazzucato, Kabki, and Smith 2006).

What is needed is a conceptual device to advance this line of literature and render visible these migrants’ simultaneous embeddedness, both as agents and structurally, in multiple locations across nation-state borders. I wish to do so through a transnational lens, a perspective that is “able to look both at new social formations sui generis, such as transnational social spaces . . . and at how old national institutions acquire new meanings and functions in the process of cross-border transborder formation” (Faist 2010, 1672). Thomas Faist uses dual citizenship as an example of one such national institution, which defines social closure and boundaries between members and nonmembers. However, thinking through citizenship from a transnational perspective would also mean to question a conventional wisdom in the notion of citizenship that there is a territorial congruence between rights and identity constructed along the national boundaries (Soysal 1994). Inspired by this line of discussions, I propose examining the hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Migrant Citizenship from Below
• 2  Setting the Scene
• 3  Transforming a Private Home
• 4  Gendered Parenting across Borders
• 5  Social Activism in the Making
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index