Migrant Encounters: Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility Across Asia 9780812291841

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction. Migrant Encounters
PART I. THE INTIMATE LIVES OF INTIMATE LABORERS
Chapter 1. Intimacies and Remittances: The Material Bases for Love and Intimate Labor Between Korean Men and Their Foreign Spouses in South Korea
Chapter 2. Migration and the (Im)morality of Everyday Life
PART II. MIGRATION AND THE NATIONAL FAMILY
Chapter 3. Children of the Emir: Perverse Integration and Incorporation in the Gulf
Chapter 4. Temporary Shelter in the Shadows: Migrant Mothers and Torture Claims in Hong Kong
Chapter 5. Troubling Jus Sanguinis: The State, Law, and Citizenships of Japanese- Filipino Youth in Japan
PART III. NEGOTIATING THE STATE
Chapter 6. Caged in and Breaking Loose: Intimate Labor, the State, and Migrant Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia and Other Arab Countries
Chapter 7. Reproduction Crisis, Illegality, and Migrant Women Under Capitalist Globalization: The Case of Taiwan
Chapter 8. Migrant Wives, Migrant Workers, and the Negotiation of (Il)legality in Singapore
Chapter 9. Regulating Cross- Border Intimacy: Authenticity Paradigms and the Specter of Illegality Among Chinese Marital Immigrants to Taiwan
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Migrant Encounters

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Migrant Encounters Intimate Labor, the State, and Mobility Across Asia

Edited by

Sara L. Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Migrant encounters : intimate labor, the state, and mobility across Asia / edited by Sara L. Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4754-1 (alk. paper) 1. Women immigrants—Asia. 2. Women immigrants—Government policy—Asia. 3. Women immigrants—Legal status, laws, etc.—Asia. 4. Asia—Emigration and immigration—Government policy. 5. Asia—Emigration and immigration—Law and legislation. 6. Asia—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. 7. Women foreign workers—Asia. 8. Intercountry marriage—Asia. 9. Labor mobility—Asia. 10. Social mobility—Asia. I. Friedman, Sara, editor, author. II. Mahdavi, Pardis, 1978– editor, author. JV6347.M527 2016 305.48’412095—dc23 2015005405

In memory of Irene Fernandez, whose work continues to inspire us all

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Contents

Introduction. Migrant Encounters

1

Sara L. Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi

PART I. THE INTIMATE LIVES OF INTIMATE LABORERS

Chapter 1. Intimacies and Remittances: The Material Bases for Love and Intimate Labor Between Korean Men and Their Foreign Spouses in South Korea 25 Hyun Mee Kim

Chapter 2. Migration and the (Im)morality of Everyday Life

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Filippo Osella

PART II. MIGRATION AND THE NATIONAL FAMILY

Chapter 3. Children of the Emir: Perverse Integration and Incorporation in the Gulf 71 Pardis Mahdavi

Chapter 4. Temporary Shelter in the Shadows: Migrant Mothers and Torture Claims in Hong Kong 92 Nicole Constable

Chapter 5. Troubling Jus Sanguinis: The State, Law, and Citizenships of Japanese-Filipino Youth in Japan 113 Nobue Suzuki

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PART III. NEGOTIATING THE STATE

Chapter 6. Caged in and Breaking Loose: Intimate Labor, the State, and Migrant Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia and Other Arab Countries 135 Mark Johnson and Christoph Wilcke

Chapter 7. Reproduction Crisis, Illegality, and Migrant Women Under Capitalist Globalization: The Case of Taiwan 160 Hsiao-Chuan Hsia

Chapter 8. Migrant Wives, Migrant Workers, and the Negotiation of (Il)legality in Singapore 184 Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Heng Leng Chee

Chapter 9. Regulating Cross-Border Intimacy: Authenticity Paradigms and the Specter of Illegality Among Chinese Marital Immigrants to Taiwan 206 Sara L. Friedman

List of Contributors Index

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233

Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Migrant Encounters Sara L. Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi

“I never thought being an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) would be like this; I always imagined it would be, I don’t know, maybe more nice, less painful,” recalled Benita, a young woman from Cavite, Philippines, who migrated to Dubai through informal channels in 2007 to work as a nanny.1 Faced with an abusive employer who failed to pay her wages, uncertain of her visa status, and desperate to earn money to support her family, Benita ran away from her employer a mere four months after arriving in Dubai and found work as a hostess in an underground bar, occasionally engaging in sex work on the side. Benita’s migration path skirted the boundaries of legally sanctioned routes and ultimately led her to informal employment in entertainment and sex work. Her migration trajectory was shaped by sending and receiving government policies, the interests of diverse state actors and employers, and her own migration needs and desires. This volume examines what happens when migrants such as Benita encounter both the restrictions and opportunities presented by state actors and policies, some of which leave deep marks on migrants’ own life paths and others which produce fragmentary, uneven traces. Our authors argue that such encounters transform both migrants themselves and the various states they move among, although often in unpredictable ways. These transformations may generate new forms of agency and subjectivity for migrants, as well as new state policies and governing capacities designed to manage increasing migratory flows or to respond to international human rights pressures. Viewing these encounters as productive processes, the chapters to follow document

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migrants’ creative responses to government regulations and the often contradictory ways these responses may be integrated into evolving migration regimes. Our authors organize their discussions around two analytic frames. The first addresses how migratory labor across Asia has transformed intimate relationships and the provision of care through explicitly racialized, gendered, and sexualized framings of cross-border mobility. Some authors ask how migration produces new modes of intimacy and sexual expression both at home and abroad, while others utilize the framework of “intimate labor” (Boris and Parreñas 2010) to interrogate how migrants are deemed suitable to perform devalued labors of care and intimacy that support domains of life otherwise identified as critical to the health and welfare of national populations: family, sexuality, and reproduction in its broadest sense. Adopting Viviana Zelizer’s (2005) “connected lives” approach, the authors trace the interconnections between social and economic mobility and the lives of both migrants and those with whom they work and form families. Assuming that intimacy is understood and enacted through culturally and socially specific values, relationships, and practices, we ask how cross-border intimate labor transforms care, bodily contact, affect, desire, and morality. Both in their explicitly commodified roles as domestic workers, nannies, and sex workers and as wives and mothers, migrants reconfigure the meaning of intimate engagements and the embodied forms through which intimacy is expressed. Put simply, migrant intimacies create new possibilities for interpersonal relationships, sexual desires, and gendered domesticity. At the same time, these cross-border intimacies provoke new modes of state power as governments struggle to regulate the intimate lives of migrants and citizens alike (Boehm 2012). The second analytical lens utilized by our authors focuses on encounters between migrants and the state across Asia specifically. In her recent study of “cosmopolitan sex workers,” Christine Chin describes global circuits and syndicates across Asia through which flexible citizens and capital flow from one cosmopolitan capital to another. Chin argues, and we agree, that these “cosmopolitan/global circuits,” which include mega cities such as Hong Kong, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Dubai, have become migratory destinations for the elite and those who serve them (Chin 2013). Throughout this volume, we focus on Asia as a series of emerging cosmopolitan locales that play host to an ever-moving turnstile of migrants of varying backgrounds. As their populations expand to encapsulate “global talent,” these countries necessarily must adapt to the changing demographics of their cityscapes.

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Situating themselves at various points along the extensive migration routes that extend from northeast Asia all the way to the Gulf region, our authors draw on ethnographic research and policy analysis to illustrate the detailed texture of migrants’ interactions with state actors and forces. Beginning from different perspectives, they ask what these encounters teach us about migrant agency and the workings of state power in a region now rife with diverse forms of cross-border mobility: for instance, when returned working-class migrants in Kerala confront state and upper class/caste discourses about failed migrant social reproduction and sexual immorality, when single Filipina migrant mothers in Japan go to court to claim citizenship for their mixed-heritage children, or when a foreign domestic worker in Singapore struggles with a bureaucracy intent on preventing her from switching her status to that of wife of a citizen. Precisely because many intra-Asian migration trajectories involve the work of intimacy in some form, they provide a valuable starting point for analyzing new modes of gendered and racialized intimacy emerging through cross-border mobility and the diverse forms of state power that both shape and respond to these intimate practices. Taken as a whole, this volume brings these two foci together to illustrate the productive and at times perverse dance engaged in by migrants and state actors as they move in and out of various intimate settings and relationships across Asia. Although states strive to fix migrants in specific categories, migrants challenge those very goals of fixity and singularity as they shift between roles and among spheres of caretaking, sexual, and emotional labor with their inherently flexible boundaries. The fluidity of state-migrant encounters generates an array of figures who populate the interstices of national societies and who undermine state efforts to define clear parameters of legality and legitimacy: for instance, runaway domestic workers, commodified migrant wives, transgressive sex workers, unmarried mothers, and children of uncertain parentage. Our authors follow these figures through cycles of interaction with state actors, citizens, migrant networks, and home communities to show how intimate labor migrations produce unpredictable policy consequences, new modes of intimacy, and alternative frameworks for assessing migrants’ claims to presence, rights, and citizenship.

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Encountering the State When Benita first sought overseas employment in 2007, she faced multiple restrictions and delays imposed by protectionist policies recently implemented by the government of the Philippines.2 Economic pressures to support her family forced Benita to seek out an alternative route that led to her vulnerable migration status in Dubai. After fleeing her abusive employer and working in the informal entertainment sector for several years, Benita was able to return home in 2012 during a state-mandated period of amnesty in Dubai for all migrants without working papers. She had been waiting for her chance, talking informally with employees of the Philippines embassy who frequented the bar where she worked each evening, and planning her return home. With their help and the amnesty period, Benita was reunited with her family and brought home enough money to build a house for her mother and daughters. Benita’s experiences attest to the complex faces and roles of the different bureaucracies and state actors encountered by migrants as they plan crossborder journeys and move in search of opportunity. Some state actors and policies may create obstacles to migration or thwart the resolution of migration-induced conflicts or abuses; others may facilitate overseas employment and cross-border family formation or offer solutions that resolve dilemmas produced by inflexible immigration and citizenship policies. State regulation of migration and labor is enacted through a vast apparatus of laws and policies that includes bilateral agreements, labor and broker policies, and governmental mandates. The institutional presence of the state is brought to life through diverse human faces, such as police, embassy workers, border officers, immigration service providers, health officials, and labor inspectors. Migrants and immigrants encounter state power in both human and institutional forms as they meet face-to-face with state actors and navigate the restrictions and opportunities created by immigration policy regimes. The rapid growth of migratory flows across Asia has forced states to develop new governing capacities and institutions. Together with the expansion of state apparatuses for border control, immigration regulation, and migrant policing we also see the development of migrant-oriented health and welfare services, training programs, and educational initiatives. These simultaneously disciplining and generative forms of state power create new statuses for migrants and citizens alike. Newly constructed power relations entwine state actors and institutions in the transformative projects engendered by contem-

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porary migration trends, producing often contradictory effects as those actors struggle to shape migration flows to meet nation-specific needs (Silvey 2007). As the authors in this volume analyze the various forms of state power invoked and produced by policies and institutions, they pause to evaluate how these formal visions of the state differ from migrants’ own encounters with different state actors and bureaucracies. Read together, the chapters move across the perspectives of migrants, citizens, and state actors to map the various images of the state created by state-migrant encounters in both sending and receiving countries. Some chapters focus on the publicly projected face of the state, while others interrogate what migrants, citizens, or the authors expect state responsibilities to be. Three possible visions of the state emerge through the ethnographic research that underpins this volume. The first is of the state as a regulatory entity invested in surveillance and control, as evident in border control mandates and the policing of populations when they cross borders to labor and reside abroad. The second is a neoliberal vision of the state as a facilitator of relationships between private actors in an effort to maximize national resources while diminishing governmental obligations: financial, legal, and infrastructural. One consequence of this neoliberal turn is the extension of “state effects” to nonstate actors who broaden the reach of state power by assuming governmental responsibilities and roles (Arextaga 2003; Trouillot 2001). The third, and perhaps most controversial, vision of the state is as both protector and regulator, wherein states enact policies (such as the one Benita faced in the Philippines) that are meant to protect their populations but that often have deleterious effects on migrant safety and well-being. Migrants encounter these different modes of state power in their everyday lives and may experience them simultaneously. From the perspective of migrants and immigrants, policies implemented by governments across the region frequently produce powerful debilitating effects: they increase the financial and life-threatening costs of migration and they enable states to create new statuses for migrants that deprive them of rights and claims to presence once they move across borders (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2009; De Genova 2002; Luibhéid 2013). Less well understood, however, are the consequences of this productive power for migrant subjectivities and intimate relationships, as well as for state governing capacities. This volume interrogates how these simultaneously disciplining and generative engagements transform migrants, citizens, and state actors and institutions in ways both subtle and overt.

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Immigration policies cultivate particular orientations among state actors toward migratory flows in general and toward specific kinds of migrants in their midst. Policymakers and bureaucrats are not all-powerful actors, however, who enjoy a comprehensive grasp of migration patterns and trends. They struggle to respond both to events on the ground and to international policy pressures. Operating under conditions of constant change and uncertainty, they strive to direct or restrict movements of people, address citizens’ needs for care and support, and maximize state resources, all with an eye toward cultivating a national body that will be competitive in a globalizing economy. Certainly our point is not to absolve governments of responsibility for violence, exclusion, and the failure to protect citizens and migrants, but we caution against rushing too quickly to assume in all instances a smoothly oiled, disciplinary, and repressive governmental machine (Ong 2006). As Hsia argues in Chapter 7, states may respond proactively and reactively to migration flows, and those responses produce different consequences for migrants situated unevenly in policy interstices. This variability exposes gaps and contradictions in state policies that often heighten migrants’ vulnerability to being rendered illegal, but these contradictions might also offer openings for movements dedicated to empowering migrants and asserting their claims to rights and recognition. Cognizant of this potential for migrant activism, a recent body of migration scholarship seeks to understand migrants as subjects in their own right as opposed to merely objects of state control or employer discipline (Andrijasevic and Anderson 2009; Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2009). Inspired by the sans papiers movement in France and the struggles of undocumented workers in the United States and Canada, this work recognizes migrants as collective political actors who make political claims that sometimes radically challenge the inequalities and exclusions produced by a state-based system of bordering practices.3 The chapters in this volume by Constable, Suzuki, and Hsia document the emergence of collective migrant subjectivities forged around struggles to claim identities as both migrant workers and family members and to secure the rights attendant to those diverse roles. Other chapters underscore more individualized forms of agency created through the intimate negotiations of cross-border couples or the tactical decisions made by migrant workers who seek greater mobility without the cost of denying existing family relationships or their own intimacy needs (see also Moukarbel 2009). Some migrants, in fact, create new subjectivities for themselves by utilizing resources unintentionally provided by the very migration regimes designed to

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limit their available identity categories and circumscribe their rights to presence and resources, such as the figure of the “freelancer” discussed by Johnson and Wilcke (Chapter 6).

Intimacy, Informality, Illegality The intimate effects of new migratory flows often generate “moral panics” (Cohen 1972) in response to a commingling of bodies, affective relationships, and commodified exchanges that redefines how the work of family is performed or intimate bonds imagined. Changing gender and sexual norms move with migrants across borders, unsettling gendered roles “back home” and exposing the instability of national or class-specific family models in both sending and receiving societies (see Chapter 2). Simultaneously, stereotypes about migrant sexualities in destination countries inspire heightened policing of migrants’ sexual behavior by authorities, employers, and migrant communities more generally. This policing is often justified in the name of protecting morality—that of both citizens and migrants—and as a needed response to the moral “threat” of human trafficking (Cheng 2010; Mahdavi 2011; Parreñas 2011). Yet in the interstices of this dominant policing environment, men and women may also draw on the freedoms enabled by migration to explore new sexual practices, intimate relationships, and alternative paths for mobilizing intimacy to achieve broader migration goals (see Chapters 2, 4, and 6; Mai and King 2009; Piper and Roces 2003; Pratt 2012). Increasing state and societal regulation in the face of rapidly expanding forms of intimate labor migration raises ethical questions about how to define intimate life and guarantee individual and community rights to maintain those life forms without excessive state or employer intrusion. As migration becomes a way of life for many who lack access to gainful employment in their home countries, the issue of how to protect migrants’ own intimate lives and care needs becomes more pressing. Sending countries such as the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and India now have multiple generations of migrants, and in China and Vietnam it is not uncommon for sisters, cousins, or mothers and daughters to migrate through cross-border marriages. As the sedimented effects of these migratory flows extend more deeply and widely through sending societies, how will they transform the intimate lives of intimate laborers themselves? Migrants, as Benhabib and Resnik astutely note, are not “disembodied

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individuals (or by default men), but are adults or children traveling with or leaving family members behind” (2009:4). Therefore, migrants face competing demands on their time, labor, and emotional investments as they perform care work abroad while also remaining attuned to the diverse needs of children, spouses, and elders left behind in their home country (Parreñas 2005; Pratt 2012). Some struggle to reunite families dispersed across borders while others fight for the right to care for and legalize children born in or brought to a destination country (Bhabha 2009; Constable 2014; Friedman 2010; Luibhéid 2013; van Walsum 2009). As Mahdavi, Constable, and Suzuki document in their chapters, migrant women face often herculean obstacles—both legal and social—when they seek to legalize children borne or conceived abroad. Migrants’ attempts to reconstitute their families inevitably bring them into contact with NGO activists and a variety of state and societal actors; these encounters reveal widespread contestation over who has the right to define the scope of legally recognized families, whether governments are obligated to support family reunification, and whose families count in the eyes of policy makers and activists. At stake here is migrants’ ability to maintain their intimate bonds and care commitments across borders in ways that are both socially sanctioned and state supported (Parreñas 2005; Pratt 2012). Closely attuned to the shifts in subjectivity engendered by cross-border intimate labor and family formation, this volume interrogates how migrants forge new subjectivities—adopting certain subject positions while rejecting others—in such contexts of confusing, ever-changing structural and legal pressures and constraints. By focusing on migratory settings defined by intimate labor and relationships, the volume shows how migrants turn to intimacy and their intimate lives as a platform from which to define and assert their rights (Giddens 1993). The sphere of the intimate, therefore, is not only shaped by structural forces; it simultaneously provides opportunities for renegotiating agency in relation to differing conditions of migration, employment, and family formation. Put another way, our authors probe the complex agency of migrants and their families by foregrounding experiences of love, care, companionship, and sexuality within analyses of the political economy of migration. Their attention to the intimate nature of the choices migrants make underscores the importance of subjectivity in both kinship and migration studies (Constable 2009; Mai and King 2009). As is now well documented, the family is simultaneously a site of pleasure, intimacy, exploration, oppression, and inequality (Padilla et al. 2008: xv). Movement across borders for extended periods of time heightens migrants’

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sensitivity to the complexities of family ties, especially as they negotiate their own needs and desires in relation to policy demands and restrictions (Pratt 2012). Scholars of migration in European and North American contexts have elucidated the powerful role of patriarchal values in defining immigration policies that devalue care work, discipline employer–migrant worker relations, and restrict migrants’ access to formal and informal membership in the nation. This patriarchal orientation is all the more contradictory given claims that such values no longer influence civil law or domestic relations among citizens (van Walsum and Spijkerboer 2007).4 The authors in this volume illustrate how intra-Asian migration flows have sparked policies that mobilize patriarchal (and often patrilineal) norms to discipline migrants and to narrow the scope of legitimate immigration claims. At the same time, they also speak eloquently about the many ways that migrants and immigrants actively redefine their own understandings of desirable and socially recognized familial roles: what it means to be a good spouse or parent, how one enacts care responsibilities across long distances, and how one creates new models of respectable intimacy in contexts of heightened policing and changing behavioral markers of morality and authenticity. If immigration policy has become the primary means of legal exclusion in liberal democracies, then migrants’ vulnerabilities before the law derive in many ways from their status as noncitizens who lack the protections and benefits that ostensibly accrue to juridical belonging (Bhabha 2010; Chin 2013; Pratt 2012). Feminist scholars have redefined the substance of citizenship through attention to the social, economic, and emotional claims that substantiate membership and that police the gendered boundaries between rightsbearing and rights-denied subjects. The absence of substantive citizenship rights (such as the right to support oneself and one’s family in the home country) may strip juridical citizenship of its meaningful qualities, in effect creating what Linda Kerber terms conditions of “essential statelessness” for “those trapped jobless in the underworld of the globalized marketplace” (2009:104). In contexts where immigration laws tie migrants’ legal status to an employer or spouse, the act of fleeing an abusive employment or marital relationship renders a migrant worker or immigrant spouse “illegal,” unable to exercise rights to move across borders, within economic sectors, or to nonabusive domestic settings. Many of the migrants whose experiences are analyzed in this volume operate in gray areas along an ever-shifting continuum of legal/illegal, licit/illicit, and formal/informal economies and statuses. Illegality is not a quality that

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adheres to human beings as a defining feature of their humanness; instead, it is a status produced by states and immigration policies through efforts to circumscribe the scope of the rights-bearing subject (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2009; De Genova 2002; Luibhéid 2013). As Garcés-Mascareñas astutely argues, illegality must be explained “from within . . . the context of immigration policy itself and the contradictions besetting the nation-state with regard to labour demands” (2010:83). By deploying intimacy as an overarching framework for analyzing migrations across Asia, this volume broadens Garcés-Mascareñas’ formulation to show how illegality is produced across a broad swath of intimate and care-based labors, those that are openly remunerated (as in the case of domestic and sex workers) and those framed by the noncommodified rhetoric of familial obligation and intimacy. Immigration policies, as Bridget Anderson (2009) notes, produce particular kinds of people by molding them into migrants, workers, and familial dependents: these molds, we suggest, also shape the forms of illegality that are made to attach to those statuses through the effects of immigration policies. Illegality may emerge from the barriers erected by migration categories (such as the distinction between worker and wife or the legal incompatibility of worker and mother), from the ways these categories interact with temporal restrictions designed to limit migrants’ presence in and impact on the host society, and from long-standing relationships of mutual dependence between legal/licit economies and illicit or informal sectors. Our authors demonstrate in fine detail how the realm of the illicit is produced and bolstered by formal laws, legal categories, and migration paradigms, with particular attention to the historical and national specificities of how migrant illegality is constructed. If illegality is a mirror image of legality in a given time and place (Garcés-Mascareñas 2010), then its defining features and contours will be shaped by the immigration regimes specific to particular nation-states and international norms in that historical moment (De Genova 2002:424). At the same time, however, intra-Asian migrations also display some shared trends with respect to how illegality is produced across the region, including its terms and configurations, and the consequences it generates for migrants forced to live within the “confine of legality” (De Genova and Peutz 2010; Garcés-Mascareñas 2010; Willen 2007). By bringing together labor migration and marital migration, the volume adds to this discussion a nuanced assessment of how illegality is produced by state investments in limiting what we call “migration pathway switching,” especially with regard to the fluidity of relationships and practices of intimate

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life. Not only do migrants move between formal and informal sectors of the economy, but some also seek to switch their status from temporary foreign worker to permanent spouse of a citizen with rights to residency and ultimately citizenship. The “wife or worker” and “mother or worker” paradigms interrogated in the chapters by Kim, Mahdavi, Constable, Hsia, Yeoh and Chee, and Friedman demonstrate state desires to fix migrants in a single status and restrict access to employment and residency rights. A migrant domestic worker on a temporary visa may become illegal by becoming pregnant or marrying a citizen, acts that establish claims to permanency and belonging rendered illegitimate by her original migration status. Conversely, migrants who enter as or who become wives find their desire or need to engage in paid employment foreclosed by policies that define them as family dependents: their legal status is tied to nonremunerated, reproductive labor in the domestic sphere. The flexibility of these categories across domestic and public spaces and relationships shows how state-produced illegality is also shaped by particular expectations for migrant intimacy and domesticity, requiring migrants to maneuver skillfully around the margins of legally recognized and socially condoned intimate practices. As we analyze the various forms of disenfranchisement experienced by migrants and their children who are made illegal by state practices, we also remain alert to new modes of intimate life produced by those struggling to get by in gray zones defined by the unstable intersection of migration policies with intimate labors.

Intra-Asian Migrations Since the 1970s, women and men have migrated with greater frequency within Asia as they move among major migration sending and receiving countries. Countries across the region are grappling with powerful economic changes that have produced booming economies in some areas and severe poverty in others. The 1970s oil boom in the Gulf increased demand for migrant workers overnight as the wealth of countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain soared. Similarly, Japan and the newly industrialized countries of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore experienced labor shortages in the wake of rapid industrialization, subsequent economic growth, and declining fertility. By contrast, Asia also is home to some of the world’s poorest countries, such as Nepal and Bangladesh, and those struggling with economic inequality and political transitions that

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make outmigration a desirable option for many, as in Indonesia, China, Vietnam, and the Philippines. These material disparities are coupled with radically divergent population trends across the region: Asia includes countries with the world’s lowest birth rates and those with the largest populations, and education levels for both men and women have soared in some places but stagnated in others.5 The convergence of these disparate economic, social, and demographic trends has generated richly varied forms of migration and immigration, the preponderance of which involve some type of domestic or care work, sex work, or marriage. Wealthier parts of the Asian region increasingly depend on migrants to perform these diverse forms of intimate labor, and even countries not typically considered among the wealthiest, such as Malaysia, import migrant domestic and care workers. As a consequence, poorer countries face their own “care deficit” as growing numbers of women migrate abroad (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Parreñas 2001, 2008). These intimate labor migrations require new efforts to understand cross-border movement, intimate life, family relations, and gendered labor in highly mobile Asian settings. Despite dramatic economic and demographic diversity across the region, migration and border-control regimes serve common purposes as responses to citizen demands for basic livelihood needs and welfare systems. Some sending countries, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, are highly dependent on remittances and rely on labor export to meet the employment needs of their citizens (Rodriguez 2010; Silvey 2007). For these governments, protecting migrants’ rights is secondary to promoting their nationals for overseas employment. However, these states also may succumb to international pressures to combat human trafficking by instituting protective policies that make their citizens less competitive on the international market and thereby encourage irregular migration routes. By contrast, receiving countries—such as the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—are invested in importing temporary workers and, in some cases, immigrant wives, to meet pressing care work demands created by growing economies, demographic shifts, and gaps in public welfare services; as a result, they are more likely to favor the interests of citizen-employers and spouses and turn a blind eye to exploitation or abuse. As several authors highlight, states across the region have increasingly failed to meet the needs of their citizens, not only by promoting and protecting their rights as workers abroad, but also by maintaining welfare regimes that would assist in the pro-

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vision of care or alleviate citizens’ dependence on overseas employment to support such care. Of course, migration across Asia is by no means a new phenomenon. There is a long history of population flows from China to Southeast Asia, from Korea to Japan, and from the Indian subcontinent to Southeast Asia and to other British colonies that stretched across the Gulf region and the Middle East. However, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century migrants were primarily men who labored as coolies in plantation economies or as domestic servants, only some of whom escaped the penury of hard labor by becoming traders, small-scale merchants, or, for the rare few, successful entrepreneurs. The costs and time involved in these migrations meant that they were rarely circular: although men regularly sent money back to families in their home country, visits were much less frequent, and some migrants ultimately established new families and households in their places of residence. These migratory patterns had cumulative effects that not only consolidated trade routes across land and sea, but also created important foundations for later postcolonial state formations throughout the region. Although interregional mobility continues to dominate contemporary migration flows, the kinds of jobs migrants perform have taken on a different face. The 1970s oil-fueled construction boom in the Gulf region brought millions of mostly male migrants from countries as diverse as India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka to labor on infrastructure and construction projects. Due to rapid declines in the building sector temporarily after 1985 and more recently as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, the stereotypical male migrant has gradually been replaced by a more feminized migrant labor force. Women from Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Nepal, and the Philippines have migrated in growing numbers to the Gulf to work as domestic workers, nurses, sex workers, and other service personnel (Castles and Miller 2008:ch. 6).6 This feminization of intra-Asian migration has emerged in South, Southeast, and East Asia as well. The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a rising demand for private caregivers to meet child- and elder-care needs as local women moved into the paid labor force in growing numbers. Singapore, Malaysia, India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan responded by opening their doors to temporary labor migrants employed in domestic and care work, service and entertainment sectors, and as assembly line workers in light industries (Cheng 2010; Constable 2007; Lan 2006; Parreñas 2011; Shah 2014). In some sending countries, such as the Philippines, the number of

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female migrants has come to equal or exceed that of their male counterparts, a sign of the expanding market for intimate laborers. In 2010, the category of domestic helper accounted for 51 percent of all new hires among female migrants from the Philippines. Moreover, 95 percent of those domestic workers were destined for countries within Asia, with Hong Kong and Kuwait as the top two destinations for Filipinas (Philippine Overseas Deployment Administration 2010). Cross-border migration within Asia is not only, as demographer Graeme Hugo argues, “very definitely a gendered process” (2005:17); it is also a process through which gendered labors are made legible through racial and national hierarchies. Migratory hierarchies of gender, race, and nationality also shape the growing flows of women migrating for marriage across the region (Clark 2001; Constable 2005; Faier 2009; Freeman 2011; Jongwilaiwan and Thompson 2011; Newendorp 2008; Piper and Roces 2003; Suzuki 2000).7 Beginning in the 1980s, cross-border marriages paired Chinese wives with Korean, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, and Japanese husbands. Women from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia have begun to marry men from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. Indian men may look for brides in Bangladesh, and some Chinese men are seeking wives from bordering countries such as Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. Although many of these husbands live in rural areas or are members of the urban working classes and thus are viewed as less desirable spouses by local women, others hail from the middle classes and white-collar sectors. Some men may be seeking more “traditional” brides to perform care work for elderly family members or young children from previous marriages—an example of how migrant women traverse spheres of intimate labor—whereas others may be disillusioned with female conationals following a divorce or failed romance. Women, too, have complex reasons for choosing an international marriage: many seek adventure and new life opportunities, others look for a fresh start after a previous marriage or romance, and still others feel obligated to support their birth families and seek access to more lucrative employment possibilities (Constable 2005; Kim 2010). As cross-border marriages constitute a growing proportion of new marital unions in many parts of Asia, they combine with other forms of intimate labor migration to produce new configurations of racialized and classed femininity and masculinity across the region. The shared features of intimacy, domesticity, and care work that define contemporary intra-Asian migration flows both affirm existing gender hierarchies and qualities and foster emergent subjectivities that rework those gender norms through new experiences and inti-

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mate attachments. These contradictory processes force men and women to navigate a fraught moral terrain at home and abroad as previously unquestioned (or, at the very least, dominant) understandings of gendered family roles and sexual morals are challenged by cross-border flows. Although most of the literature on gender and migration has focused on the consequences of migration for women and heterosexual femininity, we also call attention to new modes of masculinity produced by migration experiences and relationships with migrants and to the diverse gendered performances of intimacy and desire enabled by migratory mobility (see Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 8; Fajardo 2008).

Outline of the Volume The volume uses three foci to address the multiple effects of and conflicts produced by migrant-state encounters. Part I, The Intimate Lives of Intimate Laborers, examines the disruption and reconstitution of migrants’ own intimate lives and relationships through cycles of migration and return that generate national and local discourses about migrant morality and value. Hyun Mee Kim’s chapter explores how cross-border couples in South Korea respond to state policies promoting a commodified vision of the new multicultural family by redefining marital intimacy so that it satisfies both migrant wives’ remittance desires and citizen-husbands’ reproductive imperatives. Filippo Osella then offers a sensitive critique of a pervasive public discourse of moral panic articulated in response to decades of migration from Kerala in south India to the Gulf, showing how this middle-class discourse focuses on the “failed” efforts of working class Malayali migrants to achieve national bourgeois ideals of conjugal life and sexual morality. In Part II, Migration and the National Family, the authors address how immigration and nationality laws aim to produce certain kinds of national families and the consequences of such legal regimes for reproductive migrants. This section examines how migrants, through their reproductive capacities and intimate choices, contest the statuses available to them in host societies and challenge the legal obstacles they and their children face to national inclusion. The opening chapter by Pardis Mahdavi analyzes how migrants to the Persian Gulf countries are rendered illegal by becoming mothers and how their children may, in turn, become stateless as a consequence of those countries’ restrictive nationality and citizenship laws. Nicole Constable

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follows the strategies of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong who, when they become pregnant, turn to the protections offered under international asylum and torture protocols and file claims that enable them to extend their legal status in Hong Kong temporarily but ultimately prohibit them from working and fail to resolve pressing dilemmas regarding family recognition and legal residence. In Japan, as Nobue Suzuki documents, successful legal challenges by migrant workers-turned-mothers have revised strict citizenship laws to make children with Japanese fathers eligible for naturalized citizenship. These legal victories, however, have created new obstacles to substantive citizenship rights for these young adults as they struggle to create a recognized existence for themselves on the margins of family and nation. Part III, Negotiating the State, offers an in-depth look at how migrants respond creatively to conditions of illegality and irregularity produced by laws and policies that aim to distinguish among categories of intimate laborers and grant them different rights and statuses. The chapter by Mark Johnson and Christoph Wilcke examines the generative and gendered effects of state disciplinary power by documenting, first, how Arab countries in the Gulf and Middle East deploy a gendered concept of privacy to justify restrictive systems of migrant domestic worker employment, and second, how those disciplinary systems produce as their corollary irregular migrant domestic labor embodied by the figure of the “freelancer.” Hsiao-chuan Hsia’s chapter shows how migrant domestic workers and marriage migrants in Taiwan face an elaborate, ever-changing regulatory regime that produces a broad web of migrant illegality condoned by the state precisely because it reduces the costs of production and reproduction and fosters national competitiveness in a global economy. Brenda Yeoh and Heng Leng Chee argue that the Singaporean government’s strict distinctions between migrant wives and domestic workers also generate new forms of illegality as migrant domestic workers marry Singaporean men and migrant wives enter the workforce, both scenarios rendering migrant women illegal despite the policies designed to present this kind of “migration pathway switching.” Sara Friedman’s chapter concludes the section by asking how cross-border marriages between Chinese and Taiwanese are evaluated by Taiwanese bureaucrats through authenticity paradigms that not only fail to capture the complexities of transnational intimacies but may, as a consequence, encourage immigrants to pursue legal status through strategies that resemble “illegal” or “inauthentic” practices. By tracing the movements of intimate laborers across borders, this volume shows both how migrants maneuver within restrictive immigration policies

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and how states may produce the very kinds of migrant irregularity they aim to prevent, often through the unintended effects of their own regulatory practices. Through careful attention to movement between and across diverse forms of intimate labor, our authors also demonstrate how migration experiences challenge the paradigms used to distinguish among categories of migrants and migrant labor and question the effectiveness of policies designed around these paradigms, revealing in turn how state projects may unfold in ways that fail to capture the complexity of migrants’ experiences and desires. We aim collectively to recognize the creative strategies of migrants across Asia as part of envisioning new futures that respect the intimate lives of migrants and citizens alike.

Notes 1. “Benita,” interviewed by Mahdavi June 28, 2009, Dubai, UAE. 2. Protectionist policies enacted by states such as the Philippines may establish restrictive eligibility criteria for would-be migrants, require participation in training programs that delay migratory employment, and unilaterally set salary guidelines that are difficult to enforce. For a detailed discussion, see Mahdavi (2011) and Oishi (2005). 3. One powerful strand of this argument advocates a “no borders” approach that demands for every person “the freedom to move and, in this era of massive dispossession and displacement, the concomitant freedom to not be moved” (Anderson, Sharma, and Wright 2009:11). By adopting the viewpoint of migrants and not citizens, this approach identifies borders as always exploitative and exclusionary. Therefore, it challenges social justice movements to work not for greater fairness in immigration laws but for the dismantling of borders as devices for mobility control and capitalist labor exploitation. 4. Figures of failed or inappropriate migrant intimacy are controversial in part because they underscore how national families have yet to resolve long-standing patriarchal tensions and class-specific models of family reproduction and social citizenship based on the male breadwinner and female caregiver/dependent. As van Walsum and Spijkerboer argue with respect to European countries, these gendered class conflicts “have simply been projected onto people who have been symbolically placed on the outside” (2007:6). 5. Asia is home to three of the world’s four largest national populations: China, India, and Indonesia. 6. This is not to suggest that men no longer migrate to the Gulf, but simply that their numbers have declined dramatically since the heyday of the oil boom. As Osella (Chapter 2) demonstrates, some men still migrate to perform manual labor as well as semiprofessional and professional work. 7. Although much smaller numbers of men migrate across borders for marriage,

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they often face the same migratory restrictions and gendered forms of dependency experienced by immigrant wives (Friedman 2013).

References Anderson, Bridget. 2009. “What’s in a Name? Immigration Controls and Subjectivities: The Case of Au Pairs and Domestic Worker Visa Holders in the UK.” Subjectivity 29:407–24. Anderson, Bridget, Nandita Sharma, and Cynthia Wright. 2009. “Editorial: Why No Borders?” Refuge 26(2):5–18. Andrijasevic, Rutvica and Bridget Anderson. 2009. “Conflicts of Mobility: Migration, Labour and Political Subjectivities.” Subjectivity 29:363–66. Arextaga, Begoña. 2003. “Maddening States.” Annual Review of Anthropology 32:393–410. Benhabib, Seyla and Judith Resnik. 2009. “Introduction: Citizenship and Migration Theory Engendered.” In Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik, 1–44. New York: New York University Press. Bhabha, Jacqueline. 2009. “The ‘Mere Fortuity of Birth’? Children, Mothers, Borders, and the Meaning of Citizenship.” In Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik, 187–227. New York: New York University Press. ———, ed. 2010. Children Without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge. Boston: MIT Press. Boehm, Deborah A. 2012. Intimate Migrations: Gender, Family, and Illegality among Transnational Mexicans. New York: New York University Press. Boris, Eileen and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, eds. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Castles, Stephen and Mark J. Miller. 2008. The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World. New York: Guilford Press. Cheng, Sealing. 2010. On the Move for Love: Migrant Entertainers and the U.S. Military in South Korea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Chin, Christine B. N. 2013. Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Clark, Constance D. 2001. “Foreign Marriage, ‘Tradition,’ and the Politics of Border Crossings.” In China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture, edited by Nancy N. Chen, Constance D. Clark, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, and Lyn Jeffery, 104– 22. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers. London: Routledge. Constable, Nicole, ed. 2005. Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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———. 2007. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2009. “The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex, and Reproductive Labor.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38:49–64. ———. 2014. Born out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Genova, Nicholas P. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31:419–47. De Genova, Nicholas P. and Nathalie Peutz, eds. 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. 2002. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Faier, Lieba. 2009. Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fajardo, Kale Bantigue. 2008. “Transportation: Translating Filipino and Filipino American Tomboy Masculinities Through Global Migration and Seafaring.” GLQ 14(2–3):403–24. Freeman, Caren. 2011. Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration Between China and South Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friedman, Sara L. 2010. “Marital Immigration and Graduated Citizenship: PostNaturalization Restrictions on Mainland Chinese Spouses in Taiwan.” Pacific Affairs 83(1):73–93. ———. 2013. “Mobilizing Gender in Cross-Strait Marriages: Patrilineal Tensions, Care Work Expectations, and a Dependency Model of Marital Immigration.” In Mobile Horizons: Dynamics Across the Taiwan Strait, edited by Wen-hsin Yeh, 147–77. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. Garcés-Mascareñas, Blanca. 2010. “Legal Production of Illegality in a Comparative Perspective: The Cases of Malaysia and Spain.” Asia Europe Journal 8(1):77–89. Giddens, Anthony. 1993. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hugo, Graeme. 2005. “Migration in the Asia-Pacific Region.” A paper prepared for the Policy Analysis and Research Programme of the Global Commission on International Migration. http://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/site/myjahiasite/shared/shared/ mainsite/policy_and_research/gcim/rs/RS2.pdf. Jongwilaiwan, Rattana and Eric C. Thompson. 2011. “Thai Wives in Singapore and Transnational Patriarchy.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 18(1):1–19. Kerber, Linda. 2009. “The Stateless as the Citizen’s Other: A View from the United States.” In Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik, 76–123. New York: New York University Press. Kim, Minjeong. 2010. “Gender and International Marriage Migration.” Sociology Compass 4(9):718–31.

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Lan, Pei-Chia. 2006. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Luibhéid, Eithne. 2013. Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mahdavi, Pardis. 2011. Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mai, Nicola and Russell King. 2009. “Love, Sexuality and Migration: Mapping the Issue(s).” Mobilities 4(3):295–307. Moukarbel, Nayla. 2009. “Not Allowed to Love? Sri Lankan Maids in Lebanon.” Mobilities 4(3):329–47. Newendorp, Nicole DeJong. 2008. Uneasy Reunions: Immigration, Citizenship, and Family Life in Post-1997 Hong Kong. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Oishi, Nana. 2005. Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies, and Labor Migration in Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Padilla, Mark B., Jennifer S. Hirsch, Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, Robert Sember, and Richard G. Parker. 2008. “Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reflections on an Intimate Intersection.” In Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World, edited by Mark B. Padilla, Jennifer S. Hirsch, Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, Robert Sember, and Richard G. Parker, ix–xxxi. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2011. Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Philippine Overseas Deployment Administration. 2010. OFW Deployment by Occupation, Country and Sex: Full Year 2010. http://www.poea.gov.ph/stats/statistics.html. Retrieved August 13, 2012. Piper, Nicola and Mina Roces, eds. 2003. Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Pratt, Geraldine. 2012. Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rodriguez, Robyn Magalit. 2010. Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shah, Svati P. 2014. Street Corner Secrets: Sex, Work, and Migration in the City of Mumbai. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Silvey, Rachel. 2007. “Unequal Borders: Indonesian Transnational Migrants at Immigration Control.” Geopolitics 12(2):265–79.

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Suzuki, Nobue. 2000. “Between Two Shores: Transnational Projects and Filipina Wives in/from Japan.” Women’s Studies International Forum 23(4):431–44. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization.” Current Anthropology 42(1):125–38. van Walsum, Sarah K. 2009. “Transnational Mothering, National Immigration Policy, and European Law: The Experience of the Netherlands.” In Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik, 228–51. New York: New York University Press. van Walsum, Sarah and Thomas Spijkerboer. 2007. “Introduction.” In Women and Immigration Law: New Variations on Classical Feminist Themes, edited by Sarah van Walsum and Thomas Spijkerboer, 1–11. New York: Routledge-Cavendish. Willen, Sarah S. 2007. “Exploring ‘Illegal’ and ‘Irregular’ Migrants’ Lived Experiences of Law and State Power.” International Migration 45:2–7. Zelizer, Viviana A. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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PART I

THE INTIMATE LIVES OF INTIMATE LABORERS

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Chapter 1

Intimacies and Remittances: The Material Bases for Love and Intimate Labor Between Korean Men and Their Foreign Spouses in South Korea Hyun Mee Kim

Introduction The number of female migrants crossing national boundaries for the purpose of marrying, working as domestic helpers, and performing service labor has increased dramatically since the 1980s (Constable 2005; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Hsia 2004; Parreñas 2001; Piper and Roces 2003; Suzuki 2005). Reproductive and care labor, once confined to the domestic and private sectors, have increasingly become marketable commodities with concrete exchange value on the global market. However, there is little research on how the reproductive or care labor performed by female marriage migrants in international marriages acquires exchange value. Even though female marriage migrants are initially defined as migrants for “love” (King 2002; Mai and King 2009) who provide affection and reproductive sexuality, they also play a pivotal role in fostering transnational flows of money between sending and destination countries (Suzuki 2005; Huang and Yeoh 2008). Some marriage migrants become direct transmitters of remittances as income earners in host countries while others adjust their remittance practices over time as a consequence of their changing situation in the host country. To understand this

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process of value production and its consequences for how internationally married couples define and experience marital intimacy, we must examine closely how such couples divide and value their roles within the reproductive sphere and place such analysis in the context of migratory labor more broadly conceived. Following its regional neighbors Japan and Taiwan, South Korea has since the 1990s begun to actively recruit foreign brides for farmers and urban working-class men who occupy disadvantaged positions in the domestic marriage market. A family formed from a cross-border marriage is termed a “multicultural family” by the South Korean government, which regards the mobilization of foreign women in this manner as part of a national project to reproduce Korean families as basic social units and to increase the country’s declining population (Kim 2007). More than 235,942 female marriage migrants resided in South Korea as of 2014, and approximately 86,178 of these (roughly 30 percent) had received Korean citizenship (Korean Statistical Information Service 2014). In Korea, most international marriages are encouraged by central and local governments and commercially arranged by Korean brokers and local collaborators in sending countries. The institution of international marriage is a state production in contemporary Korea. By this I mean that the state produces specific policies for and visions of “foreign brides” that construct them as reliable members of the Korean patriarchal family. Government policy supporting migrant women thus focuses on how to assimilate these women into Korean society, with the goal of maintaining the traditional family. However, social relations that migrant women establish with their Korean families are diverse and fragmented, and the government’s project of creating the “multicultural family” cannot be consistent or fully successful (Kim 2007). This chapter illustrates how, within this state-mediated context of crossborder marriage, couples come to terms with explicit and tacit arrangements regarding the exchange of intimate labor, money, value, and love. I focus explicitly on remittance practices as a critical exchange that both constitutes and redefines marital intimacy. The mainstream research paradigms on remittances tend to sideline the role of emotions in the motivation for sending remittances and instead focus on economic and social consequences of remittances in the destination countries (Cohen 2005; Cohen 2011; Hernandez and Coutin 2006; Hirsch 2003; King, Dalipaj, and Mai 2006; Trager 1984; Vertovec 2009; Wong 2006). As a form of reproduction migration, crossborder marriage is based on multiple kinds of transactions, exchanging the

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mobility of money and gifts for intimate labor and love. These marriages create a series of exchanges and flows between spouses and families that are at once tangible and intangible. These activities—depending on the timing, number, and cultural meanings attached—determine the nature of intimacy and love between couples. Thus they prompt us to reevaluate the meanings of intimacy and love in relation to remittance practices. Remittances are frequently used as an economic resource that is exchanged for acts or duties that are expected of women. Domestic reproductive labor such as caring for elders, cleaning, cooking, and other household activities; familial reproductive activities including childbirth and child care; and cultural reproductive activities such as learning Korean are all contributions that migrant wives make to their husbands and conjugal families in exchange for remittances. Not only are remittances a method of control for the husband, but they are also an important negotiation resource that determines the relationship with the wife and creates the criteria by which love and reliability are measured and given meaning in commodified marriages. Despite a proliferation of literature on remittances in cross-border marriages, there is little attention given to how state policies, including models of assimilation and brokerage, confer culturally specific meanings on remittances and how married couples negotiate the amount and timing of remittances as a way of creating intimacy in their everyday lives. It is important to analyze the relationship between “institutionalized intimacy” and remittance practices. Institutionalized intimacy is a specific form of intimacy that is codified by entities such as the Korean state and commercial marriage brokers to ensure the reproduction of Korean family norms based on a gender hierarchy. Internationally married couples in Korea may internalize or resist state policies that regulate their spousal choices and married lives, but they are not free from all public discourses that circulate about cross-border marriages. Instead, they negotiate and actualize remittance desires and expectations in an environment shaped by policy dictates and popular imagination about their marriages. This chapter critically analyzes the socially constructed concept of marketability and the exchange values of “intimacy” in the daily lives of crossborder couples in South Korea by using ethnographic research to link and contrast state policies with the lived experiences of internationally married couples.1 To begin, I examine how the Korean state has created a specific model of the desirable female migrant subject and has designed an assimilationist model around that very subject.

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Creating the “Multicultural Family” in South Korea In South Korea, the crises of the family and low birth rates have been important themes on various social agendas since the 1990s. The government’s concerns are driven by a persistent decline in domestic fertility rates, which dropped steadily from 1.71 births per woman in 1991 to 1.63 in 1995, and later decreased even more sharply to 1.29 in 2001 and 1.08 in 2005 (Korean Statistical Information Service 2010). Crude divorce rates per 1,000 people rose steadily from 1.1 in 1991 to 1.5 in 1995, rising further to 2.5 in 2001 and 2.6 in 2005 (Korean Statistical Information Service 2010). The most serious problem was a rapidly decreasing population in the rural areas where there was a scarcity of women willing to marry rural men and settle down in the countryside. By the mid-1980s, the plight of rural bachelors unable to find spouses had become a national issue, and it was brought to public attention by the media and, in some instances, by the protest suicides of bachelor farmers (Kendall 1996:4). This family crisis in rural communities and among the urban lower classes has meant that men are increasingly deprived of the material, social, and cultural resources necessary to achieve a model of adulthood based on the heterosexual, traditional family with its rigid gender hierarchy and sexual division of labor. The only strategy Korean men can use to form a family is to convert the transnational economic gaps between countries into a personal advantage. Korea’s marriage migration policy was implemented to alleviate the crisis of low birth rates and an aging population, as well as to restore a balanced ratio between men and women in the marriage market. By 1990, social organizations, churches, and for-profit companies had become involved in matchmaking for rural bachelors. Women of China’s ethnic Korean minority, Chosonjok, were initially preferred as brides because they were perceived as perpetuating the ethnic and linguistic homogeneity of the Korean nation (Freeman 2005, 2011; Lee 2005). In fact, the Korean state has played a pivotal role in regulating marriage migration: first, by allowing local governments to introduce the “Getting Rural Bachelors Married” project in the 1990s, and second, by implementing official Acts that enabled local governments to create “international marriage support programs for farmers and fishermen.” These Acts state that single men (not women) aged 35 to 50 who work in the agricultural or fishing industries can apply for financial support ranging from 3 to 8 million Korean

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won (US$2,700 to $7,100) to assist them in finding a wife through an international marriage (Kim 2007:110; see also Han 2007). Local governments quickly found it more convenient to rely on marriage brokers to secure a constant supply of women from other Asian countries. As a result, the new millennium witnessed a “marriage boom” as matchmaking businesses prospered, protected by Korean law that treated the mediation of international marriages as a legitimate business. A new regulation enacted in July 1998 stipulated that a marriage agency is an independent business that requires no permission from the government to conduct its transactions. This regulation led to a tripling in the number of marriage agencies from 700 in 1998 to approximately 2,000 in 2005 (Goh et al. 2006). The marriage business thus became a lucrative “transnational” industry, involving not only Korean brokers but also local collaborators and recruiters, as well as tourist and hotel businesses in various countries across Asia (Wang and Chang 2002). With this growth in brokerage came an expansion in the type of men targeted by brokers, with lower-class urban men and divorcees joining their rural counterparts in the search for foreign wives. This expansion was so successful that today approximately 70 percent of all internationally married couples in Korea live in urban areas. The nationalities of foreign women recruited for marriage became more diverse as well due to a sharp increase in market-oriented, transnational brokerage and increasingly specialized advertising as a result of brokers’ focus on certain countries. The most striking increase has been in the number of foreign brides from Vietnam. Marriages between Korean men and Vietnamese women increased from a total of 134 in 2002 to 1,402 in 2003, and then to a high of 10,128 in 2006, decreasing slightly to 8,282 in 2008, 7,249 in 2009, 9,623 in 2010, and 7,636 in 2011 (E-Nara Jipyo 2012). Brokers began to promote Southeast Asian women as a “more affordable and reliable model of the ideal ‘traditional’ bride” (Freeman 2011:234). Most of all, in order to maintain traditional gender hierarchies in the absence of material wealth, Korean men turned to the “young, docile, and poor” women from Vietnam and Cambodia advertised by brokers. The image of the “poor migrant bride” has been actively promoted and internalized by Korean brokers and Korean men who wish to reproduce a traditional patriarchal family. The presence of foreign wives in Korea, especially those from Southeast Asia, has generated diverse discourses about the emergence of a multicultural society. The shift from coethnic international marriages to multiethnic and

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interracial ones sparked national fears and anxieties about racial and cultural purity. Korea’s long-cherished cultural concept of the nation based on a homogenous Korean essence is being challenged by the rapid increase in marriage migrants from Southeast Asia. These challenges create a pressing dilemma of how to preserve a homogenous ethnic society in the face of the increasingly hybrid cultures generated by a reliance on transnational reproduction migration to maintain and reproduce Korean families. In response, the government funded and implemented a variety of programs to help migrant women settle down in South Korea and established more than 200 support centers across the country for these so-called “multicultural families.” The centers teach marriage migrants the Korean language and traditional Korean etiquette and provide counseling services for childrearing. Since 2006, the state has emphasized a strong assimilationist model to quickly “Koreanize” these ethnically diverse marriage migrants. Marriage migrants are often represented in the media as performers of “Korean-ness” who uphold core Korean cultural values and women’s traditional domestic roles as they assimilate into Korean society. Despite the governmental and public recognition of foreign women as new members of Korean society, the commercialized aspects of international marriage remain unchanged. In June 2008, the government implemented the Regulations on the International Marriage Brokerage Act as part of an effort to redress the growing abuses and exploitation caused by disguised marriages, scam marriages, and the providing of false information to those contracting an international marriage. Based on the 55th clause of the Basic Consumer Law, the Act stresses the “consumer rights” of Korean men. Because the men are responsible for brokerage fees, which amount to US$8,000 to $12,000, they have the right to seek compensation when harmed in the course of using the products or services of providers. Ultimately, the Brokerage Act positions brokerage within the consumer law, which leads to the “commodification” of migrant women as products to be bought and sold (Kim 2011). Despite marriage migrants’ differences in background, educational levels, and active economic participation, the widespread discourse surrounding international marriage and multicultural family labels these women as helpless and economically dependent “women from poor countries.” As the first settler-type migrants in South Korea, marriage migrants are situated uncomfortably between the state’s goals to reproduce Korean families through mobilizing these women’s childbearing and caretaking capacities and the state’s endorsement of migrant wives’ structurally marginalized position as women

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who are purchased but may be returned should they fail to fulfill expected gender roles. The Korean government’s policies for migrant women can be defined as “the patriarchal family-oriented welfare model” (Kim 2011:214). The gender ideology within this model imagines women solely as reproductive labor power and subsumes them in their intended roles of forming, maintaining, and reproducing the Korean family among the urban working classes and in rural areas. The institution of international marriage is created by collaboration between state policies and brokerage agencies’ commodification of foreign women. The sheer fact that a marriage is contracted, however, does not prevent the parties from entering into a personal relationship that cannot be reduced simply to a commodity exchange (Robinson 2007). The couple integrates material transactions with emotional attachments in ways that allow for a meaningful reinterpretation of intimacy in everyday life while also reproducing traditional Korean gender arrangements. This practice challenges the presumed boundary between intimacy and commodification by showing how intimate relationships and expressions are thoroughly infused with commodified exchanges and material transactions. These material transactions and immaterial forms of “homemaking” and “intimate relations” are the realities of life for couples who have married internationally. It is therefore useful to analyze how small economic and cultural changes between Korean males and their migrant wives influence the diverse ways they actualize their motivations for international marriage. In the next section, I will show how the state model infuses and guides the constructions and practices of intimacy through negotiations and actualizations of remittances between husbands and wives.

Remittances as Reaffirming Gender Ideologies For the 100 people from 29 families participating in the hometown visiting program . . . there were 25-ton trucks waiting at the Ho Chi Min airport to carry the luggage. The merchandise brought for the natal family were mainly “Cookoo” (Korean brand) rice cookers, baby formula, ginseng or ginseng-related products, ramen, detergents and other shower-related products, school supplies, and snacks, among others. . . . All the homes of married migrant women that were visited for the study had “Cookoo” rice cookers. (Hur-Oh 2011:82)

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This description of the arrival scene at Vietnam’s Ho Chi Min Airport vividly illustrates how international marriages link a woman’s natal family to the wider material world as consumers. Tan Hui, who came to Korea in 2009, expressed her marital expectations in terms of material changes: an international marriage is conceived as providing her with “floor-roof-motorcycle.” She explains her family’s expectations from her international marriage as first replacing the dirty earthen floor of their home, followed by rebuilding the roof and walls of the house with cement, and finally acquiring a motorcycle. Remittances thus make important contributions to the process of transforming Vietnam’s rural communities into market-oriented economies. Also, remittances play an important role in shaping the transnational family as “acts of recognition” that solidify the bonds between a woman’s natal and marital families (Thai 2008; Yeoh et al. 2013). Hong Thi Mi visited her home in Vietnam in 2010, and she told me about the preparatory process and distribution of goods. It took almost three or four months to prepare the list and buy the goods for my family and relatives in Vietnam. This was the first visit, six years after my marriage. The wedding was too hastily done. So my husband didn’t have time to meet all my brothers and relatives. When I returned home, we had to visit every elderly uncle and aunt and bring them a small gift and every dinner my relatives came to visit me at home. We had to stock all kinds of small gifts from Korea to be distributed to every visitor. These goods are representative “symbols” of Korea that cannot be found in their home towns, or they are everyday products that are of higher quality than those sold at home. Jang Soo Young, who married a Vietnamese woman, says, “Remittances are the cross that internationally married men must bear.” It is common knowledge that foreign women who marry Korean men have financial expectations of supporting their family back home. The Korean man who accepts such terms is therefore expected to fulfill his wife’s expectations by all possible means, whether he likes it or not. The Korean husbands I interviewed always mentioned their memories of their first visits to their wife’s home. Kim Chang-su, a 49-year-old Korean man married to a 27-year-old Vietnamese woman, described his own ambivalent feelings about the marriage:

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I was extremely angry and uncomfortable at the matchmaking sessions. It is like an animal market. I had to choose a woman out of 55 similar-looking Vietnamese women. The broker finally recommended my current wife who seemed the most appropriate for me. I did not have any feelings for her but agreed to get married. When I arrived at her house to get permission from her parents, I was shocked to see how poor her family was. It seemed that I had no choice but to marry and bring her to Korea. Even if my business went bankrupt at the time, I felt obliged to “help” them however I could. Korean men are often opposed to images that emphasize the commodification of foreign women in broker-mediated marriages, even though they are the active consumers of such commercial arrangements. In contrast to the practices of mail-order brides and correspondence marriages between Western men and Asian women, the emergence of intra-Asian marriage migration enables potential brides and grooms to meet face-to-face through matchmaking tours (Constable 2003; Kim 2010). Thus, even if there is a strong gender and geopolitical hierarchy empowering a Korean man to “choose” a woman, he also witnesses the economic conditions of his wife’s family and often is humbled as a result. This experience generates recognition that he is expected to accept his role as the sole provider of wealth for his wife’s family. Although it is accepted that remittances are the burden that internationally married husbands have to bear, in reality, many do not send money. Providing economic support for the wife’s family does not require the husband to assume the role of “Daddy Long Legs” who bridges the economic gap between his and his spouse’s country. Remittances, which depend largely on the willingness of the Korean husband, are often used as an important means of exerting control over the wife. In gatherings of Korean husbands who have married foreign wives, arguments about “whether remittances should be sent” are a major topic of debate, as well as “how much and how often” remittances should be “controlled” or “adjusted.” In some cases, husbands refuse to send remittances on the grounds that they will destroy the sanctity and authenticity of the marriage. They sometimes justify their refusal by blaming foreign women for using marriage to obtain money. Often, remittance expectations become a source of conflict and even violence between spouses.2 From the wife’s perspective, demanding remittances from the husband also carries risks. How much, how frequently, and for what reasons she can induce remittances are sources of unspoken worry. According to my

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interviewees, the following words of advice circulate widely among Vietnamese women married to Korean men: “It’s better if you don’t talk money during the first six months of marriage. It will be misconstrued that you married solely for money.” Women shy away from speaking about remittances because they may be suspected of fake marriages if they seem to be obsessed with sending money home. Although it is an unspoken truth that the wife married for economic reasons, she still does not want her marriage to be seen as an “exchange” or “negotiation.” Migrant wives are aware of Asian women in the past who were married off to settle debts or those who were sent to other households at a young age to perform housework and eventually to marry the man of the house, in the old tradition of early marriage. The women I interviewed also stressed that “women in the past” did not have “the right to choose” when it came to marriage. They claim that they are different from the countless women of the past who were sold into marriage by poor families. This story of the “bondage of women under feudalism” is precisely what they want to avoid. They are living in a society ostensibly removed from traditional patriarchy, and they have different positions as modern women with the freedom and power to choose their own paths in life. In public at least, these women do not think that being female restricts their “choices.” However, their material conditions sometimes go against their modern sensibility based on gender equality. They have difficulty expressing the contradiction between their strong sense of equality and the longing for their husband’s remittances as economically dependent wives. In order to maintain their self-esteem as modern women and to realize their goals in relocating overseas, they must meet a “husband who gives without asking.” They say this is the kind of man they “love.” Women I interviewed often expressed their feelings about husbands who send money to their families in the following way: “I am deeply moved by my husband and I am so happy that he really cares about me,” as one woman said to me. Several others believe that “lucky” women do get to meet “loveable” husbands, a characterization that embeds affect in the willing giving of resources. In this way, remittances are also an important part of building intimacy and love between spouses in an international marriage. Korean men and foreign women know that they are unable to fulfill the typical gender roles expected of the modern Korean family, which is based on a male breadwinner/female caregiver model. Migrant women feel obligated to work for money after they realize their husband’s economic situation. Though they differed in degree, migrant women expressed their dissatisfaction with their married lives in terms of the rigid

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gender separation of paid work and domestic responsibilities that undergirded their economic dependence and powerlessness (see also Freeman 2005:97). However, they also strongly believed that intimacy in their marriages could be strengthened and maintained through economic support from their husbands (see also Zelizer 2007). The commodifying effects of state policies and brokerage mediation reinforce a typical gender ideology that characterizes men as material providers. The Korean state’s strong assimilationist policy with respect to foreign wives is characterized by a reinscription of the patriarchal modern family in which the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the caregiver. Without sufficient resources and job security, Korean men fail to realize their wife’s dreams of a better life in South Korea. However, using the discrepancies between the exchange value of Korean money and foreign currencies, they are still able to remit funds and enhance the economic status of their wife’s family back home. Only through these transnational connections can a disadvantaged Korean man play the role of economic provider and reaffirm his masculine identity. For foreign women, despite their material deprivation and strong feelings of gender equality in the labor market, they are situated in such a way that they can develop a sense of intimacy with a husband who can remit. On the one hand, the migrant woman is portrayed as “the daughter who is making sacrifices for her family.” Since marriage migrants have moved into the arena of reproduction and unpaid household labor, unlike other women who migrated as wage laborers, their “remittance-sending” may not always be possible, and it can also be terminated at any time. Therefore, their ability to support their natal family by remitting money is unstable and unpredictable. Migrant wives’ simultaneous dependence on their husbands and desire to fulfill filial obligations make sending remittances the most urgent but difficult to realize act in their marriages. For this reason, the women have to invoke such values as love, care, intimacy, motherhood, and other nonmaterial resources that can be exchanged for a husband’s money so that he is motivated to send remittances. In this way, remittance desires encourage women to reaffirm their adherence to traditional gender roles as caregivers.

Remittances as a Parameter of Intimacy Remittances, although customarily expected in an international marriage, are not required by regulations and rules. Instead, they demand subtle and delicate

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communication between spouses. The love between spouses in an international marriage is often created and maintained by remittances. Remittances are the silent promise and the cornerstone of an enduring international marriage that also comprises rights and responsibilities. Marriages without remittances are unstable and cause anxiety and tension between spouses due to the continuous deferral of an unspoken promise (Brennan 2004). The married couple knows that remittances build marital intimacy. Sending remittances figures as an important parameter of intimacy in “marriages of convenience.” Whereas the lives of international couples vary widely, brokered marriages often lead to a superficial relationship due to the lack of time to cultivate emotions or engage in meaningful communication. Among all relationships, marriages facilitated by international brokers are more prone to drastic changes in intimacy before and after marriage. Women are surprised when their husbands abruptly stop showing affection and politeness and also stop showering them with gifts as they did during the short “courtship period” before marriage. Because some Korean men believe that harsh control and the use of threats are the only ways to prevent their wives from running away, they change their behavior quite dramatically after marriage, especially when faced with wives who express dissatisfaction after discovering their husband’s true economic conditions and social realities. The brokers play a role in resolving conflicts by offering counseling by telephone, paying visits, and inviting couples to their offices (Han and Seol 2008:59). One broker calls their services “emotional management,” which means that brokers have to manage the “emotions” of both Korean men and their foreign spouses when disappointments arise due to differing expectations and ideals about each other. In many cases, remittances are a mechanism that supplements the lack of spousal romance in an arranged marriage. Korean men’s willingness to send money to their wife’s family is often considered a way to maintain a marriage relationship that has yet to reach the stage of romantic intimacy and trust. Most migrant women imagine life in Korea based on portrayals in Korean television dramas, picturing Korea as a place of economic vitality, full of glamorous cities and resort-like farming villages. Above all, the romantic relationship between men and women—the image of the suave, polite man appearing in Korean dramas—stimulates their imaginations. During the rainy season in Vietnam when it is impossible to work outside, many Vietnamese women said they would spend days inside the home immersed in Korean dramas. They began to believe that the image of Korean life they saw on television would

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soon be their future. Whereas brokers and the Korean media foster orientalist images of marriage migrants as “familial and obedient,” the women actually perceive the nuclear family based on conjugal love and intimacy as the norm in modern Korea. Relatively young Vietnamese and Filipina women say that while they did not have feelings for Korean men prior to marrying, they had thought these men, who are typically much older, would “love only me” and “care for me” in a couple-centered Korean home. However, after they migrated to Korea, this version of reality quickly dissipated. Several husbands explained to me that the surest way of developing intimacy with their wife was to send remittances to her family because they were aware that this was the main motivation behind her decision to marry. “Material compensation” did play a significant role in wives’ marital assessment. Many foreign wives I interviewed frankly admitted that although they were “chosen” by a Korean man, they did not have strong feelings for their husbands initially. As their feelings for their husband grew, they began to have a sense of real married life. Many describe the cultivation of a shared bond through jointly pooling money to support their families in Korea and abroad. Bu Lian, a 27-year-old Vietnamese woman, came to Korea seven years ago, and she describes her married life as “most satisfactory.” Her husband, Mr. Kim, used to drink and stay out late at night with his friends and was not interested in thinking seriously about her families, both here and in Vietnam. Upon their first visit to Vietnam two years ago, Mr. Kim began to take his role as brother-in-law more seriously. Bu Lian’s younger sister had been paralyzed and required constant hospital treatment. Mr. Kim knew this but previously showed no sympathy. While spending seven days with her family members, he helped his father-inlaw with the farm work and began to see the appeal of living in Vietnam after he retires. He gave US$5,000 to Bu Lian’s family, money that was exhausted within six months to cover her younger sister’s hospital fees and to purchase a wheelchair. Mr. Kim told me that he remembered his sister-in-law wanted to learn to play the piano, but he could not afford to purchase the instrument for them. Mr. Kim felt sorry about his prior negligence of his duty as husband and son-in-law. He stopped drinking with his friends, let Bu Lian get a job in his friend’s restaurant, allowed her to save all the money she earned, and invited his father-in-law to come to Korea to engage in paid work. Mr. Kim and Bu Lian told me that they would save money to help realize her sister’s dream of being a singer and composer and would later open a business together. This example shows that spouses who share a life plan and commit to “having a

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better life” achieve new depth in their marriage through the process of realizing their goals together. Economic exchanges and remittances are expressions of devotion, love, and the willingness to create an enduring marriage even between international spouses whose communication is limited.

“Performing Korean-ness” and Remittances as Economic Exchange Women often become active agents who generate the economic and exchange values of their reproductive and care labor once they become accustomed to Korean life and realize their class status. Marriage migrants, in Cheng’s words, are “making sense of their lives where they are marginalized and stigmatized, yet [are] hopeful and agentive” (2010:5) as they pursue mobility for a better future. As women begin to realize the discrepancies between their expectations and actual realities, they gradually develop survival strategies by deciding what to “trade” or “exchange” with their husbands and their families. Women are not silent followers of the state-led “multicultural family” project to make them learn the Korean language, acclimate to Korean traditional culture, and become docile wives, even though they are willing to perform “Korean-ness” as a good strategy to enhance their status as mothers and workers. Remittances will only be realized once it has been “verified” that women have successfully settled in Korea, as evidenced by learning Korean, performing domestic duties, and giving birth to a child. The fact that most remittances or allowances are given to migrant women after their first childbirth clearly indicates that remittances are a form of economic compensation offered in exchange for their contributions to the family through reproduction. State policies that identify migrant women as reproducers of the Korean family but that simultaneously strive to mitigate the introduction of cultural diversity into the Korean family have created very strong assimilationist pressures on foreign wives. This state ideology has also been internalized by Korean husbands and their families. Lee Sun Jae, a successful farmer in Gyeonggi Province, opposes the idea that he should be responsible for “caring for and feeding the wife’s family forever,” but he believes it is the duty of the Korean husband to set up a foundation that enables his wife’s family to “eat and live.” During his five years of marriage to his Filipina wife, he has fulfilled his promises one by one with the money he saved over three years. During the first year of marriage, he remod-

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eled his wife’s family’s home in a “modern style,” while in the second year, he purchased a used truck for his father-in-law to help in his business, and in the third year he paid for his brother-in-law’s college tuition. After he had laid a foundation for his wife’s family to “eat and live,” he asked his wife, “I’ll stop the remittances now. Don’t worry any more about your family in the Philippines. Can you focus on raising our child?” She answered, “I don’t wish anything more from you. I am content.” Lee Sun Jae feels easy in his heart because he has fulfilled his duty but says he feels even happier because he sees his wife is also calm in her heart and mind, becoming a devoted mother and wife. He says he feels proud when he sees his wife teaching their child English. Lee Sun Jae’s Filipina wife, Judy, told me that initially she liked nothing about her husband, who was very short, ugly, and a little rude on their blind date, or matchmaking meeting, and she finally began to “love” her Korean husband only three years after marrying him. Over the years, her husband had bought her a computer, which enables her to use Skype to communicate with her own family in the Philippines, and he sent money to her family. In return, Judy began to offer her husband intangibles, such as sincerity, trust, and good maternal practices for their son. She has successfully completed a certain level of proficiency in the Korean language, as proof of the amount of hard work she has put into settling down in South Korea. She has also performed “Korean-ness” by making kimchii (spicy, pickled cabbage) and other Korean dishes in exchange for her husband’s fulfillment of his obligations. She defines their current state as a “real” marriage that she has chosen, as compared to her marriage three years ago, which was chosen by her husband. Lee Sun Jae was born in a farming village and experienced life in the city before returning to his native home in the rural area. He had wavered back and forth about whether he ought to return to the city or to settle down in his farming village. Eventually, seeing his Filipina wife give birth and become “established,” he too decided to settle down. Lee Sun Jae was able to successfully resume life in his farming village because he felt that his foreign wife was becoming more “settled” in their married life. Remittances are the external indicator of the bond formed between the husband who has fulfilled his duties and the wife who offers reciprocated feelings of affinity. They are also an important material mechanism that provides both spouses with a sense of stability and affinity as a Korean family. Remittances illustrate that female marriage migrants have settled down in Korea and have begun to reproduce Korean families. Although a remittance by itself is a simple substance, the preparation and sending of a wire includes

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emotions, consideration, willingness to communicate, detailed planning, and many more daily efforts. When his wife’s family’s economic situation improves, Mr. Lee grows proud of his role as a son-in-law and as the source of advice and consultation for her family members.

Navigating Life Strategies for Remitting To many migrant women, remittances are the purpose and intent of migration. However, through the migration process their goals and plans sometimes fail, while new plans and practices are formed or reconstructed. In addition, through the myriad environments encountered while working toward their goal of remittances, their plans change and adapt in response to their husband, neighbors, and Korean society as well as their family and circumstances back in their homeland. Through this process, a meaningful exchange system between remittances and the reproductive sphere is created, though in many cases fair exchanges do not occur at all. In limited financial situations in which remittances cannot be sent regularly, the husband reaches a silent point of “compromise” with his wife in order to preserve and continue spousal love. Many internationally married men do not possess any “extras” because their socioeconomic position requires constant effort simply to survive and preserve their basic standard of living. If the husband does not have the financial means to send remittances himself, he utilizes the symbolic power and practical utility of having Korean citizenship, which allows a migrant wife to invite one or more family members to Korea to help them find jobs, rather than providing direct monetary support.3 The whole process—of inviting the wife’s family to Korea, helping family members find jobs, providing emotional support, and treating them to local cuisines—is an appropriate mixture of economic, cultural, emotional, and symbolic long-term support. In other words, cash is not the only form of these economic exchanges.4 He can express his love for and faith in his wife by supporting her decision to send funds home from her own earnings. While living simultaneously in reproductive and productive labor networks over the course of their life cycles, migrant women create positions as direct senders of remittances or as inducers of remittances from their husbands. Tan Ling, a Vietnamese woman who has lived in Korea for more than three and a half years, earns a monthly wage of one million Korean won by working in a factory, and an additional 800,000 Korean won as a day laborer

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on local farms. She visits her country annually with the money she has saved. Her husband, who is thirty years her senior, says that because he has no earning ability, in order to maintain the marriage he does not interfere with her visits home or her sending of remittances. Huang Thi Nam, another Vietnamese woman whom I met, has lived in a rural village in Chungchung Province for five years. She left home with her one-year-old baby after she realized that all the promises her mother-in-law made both at the matchmaking meeting and after she came to Korea were not going to be fulfilled. In fact, her husband is mentally handicapped and her mother-in-law was the only person with whom Huang had negotiated before she decided to marry him. Her mother-in-law had told her that she would be compensated for marrying her husband with a large sum of cash—US$8,000— together with a round-trip air ticket after she had given birth and regular remittances to her natal family. After two years of marriage, and after having given birth to a child, Huang was still unable to visit her native home with the money she was promised. She later decided to “blackmail” her mother-in-law by leaving home, placing her child in a nearby orphanage, and doing wage labor. Her mother-in-law begged her to return home with the baby and offered to take care of the infant while Huang worked at a village flower farm until she had saved the amount of remittances she had been promised, which would be used by Huang’s family to purchase land. Huang was later indeed “freed” from childrearing and even from performing household chores. When I first met her, she had been working for two years at the flower farm, spending ten hours a day laboring to earn money. However, she told me that her mother-in-law would like to make another “deal” with her by asking her to divide her wage into two portions, one for Huang’s savings and the other to compensate the mother-in-law for caring for Huang’s daughter during the day. In Huang’s case, the endlessly deferred timing of remittances and a visit home depends on how well and in what ways she is able to negotiate with her mother-in-law over the economic value of the older woman’s “care labor,” as well as her own willingness to maintain a married life with a mentally disabled husband.

Conclusion: Migrant Women as Liminal Beings As global changes occur in national reproduction systems, areas of intimacy such as affective labor, childbirth, nurturing, and caregiving are being released

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from the private sphere and acquiring exchange value. Still, for migrant women to transform the many kinds of labor they voluntarily offer in the private sphere into an economic resource that takes the form of “remittance,” they must utilize the intimacy, love, and care that develop within the marriage. As Robinson points out, international marriages as a form of global cultural and economic flows “expose the women to new and diverse definitions and performances of femininity, encompassing sexuality, independence and conjugal roles” (2007:487). This chapter has analyzed how migrant wives manage the complicated and contradictory demands of sending remittances back home, maintaining intimacy with their husband and his family members, and reproducing the family in the host country. Although the institution of international marriage is a state production, this chapter illustrates how couples come to terms with explicit and tacit arrangements in the exchange of intimate labor, money, value, and love by focusing on the practices of remittances. These arrangements create a particular type of “institutionalized intimacy” between internationally married couples in South Korea. The Korean state’s strong assimilationist policy with respect to foreign wives reaffirms the modern patriarchal family with the man as breadwinner and the woman as caregiver. Without sufficient resources or job security, however, many Korean men fail to realize their wife’s dreams of a materially better life in South Korea. Yet by capitalizing on the differently valued currencies of Korea and their wife’s home country, they are able to remit funds and enhance the economic standing of their wife’s natal family. In so doing, Korean husbands also affirm their own masculinity and the value of their patriarchal roles within the family. Foreign women, despite their material deprivation in South Korea, can develop a sense of intimacy with husbands who can remit. However, the act of remitting is not automatic. Influenced by the reproductive and assimilationist orientation of state policies regulating marital migrants in Korea, husbands are inclined to send remittances only once they have “verified” that their wives have settled successfully in Korea, as evidenced by learning Korean, performing domestic duties, and giving birth to a child. Migrant women who work in the realms of both reproductive labor within the family and productive (wage) labor in society therefore simultaneously fulfill the demands of Koreanization and the need for cheap labor as they pursue their remittance goals. They navigate among complex and often conflicting demands created by this reproductive-productive nexus that positions them at the intersections of material and affective labor in both Korea and their homeland. In their pursuit of remittances, marriage migrants are also emerging as

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critical actors in global capitalist networks in which flows of reproductive labor reshape the diverse exchanges that constitute new bases of intimacy.

Notes 1. The research is based on data collected between August 2008 and December 2010 as part of the research project “Marrying Country: Cross-Border Unions and the Challenges of the Meanings of Marriage in South Korea.” This research includes thirty-five in-depth interviews and five focus group interviews with Korean men and foreign women whose marriages were arranged by brokers. Funding for the project was provided by the Amore-Pacific Research Foundation. All the names in this chapter are pseudonyms. 2. A survey (Seol et al. 2005) shows that 5.3 percent of the physical abuse against female marriage migrants is related to conflicts that arose from “not providing living expenses or allowances,” and 2.8 percent of the cases were related to the sending of remittances. 3. According to a 2009 national survey on the “multicultural family” in South Korea, 47.7 percent of women migrants invited their parents and siblings to Korea. Of these, Mongolian women accounted for the highest percentage (76.6 percent), followed by Korean Chinese (65.6 percent), Han Chinese (45.9 percent), Filipinas (35.86 percent), and Vietnamese women (27.2 percent). 4. It is estimated that migrant wives in Korea remit on average US$1,200 per year. Approximately 70 percent of Vietnamese women living in Korea were sending remittances to their families back home, the average annual amount being US$970, while Filipina women sent an average of US$880 annually (Seol et al. 2005).

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Chapter 2

Migration and the (Im)morality of Everyday Life Filippo Osella

Introduction In July 2009, the Kerala Monitor, one of the many Malayali1 Gulf-based online news magazines, published an interview with a Dr. K. M. Ansari, “a member of the UAE Psychological Association . . . who has a doctorate and many postgraduate degrees in psychology.” In an article titled “HIV, Oral Sex Common Among Indian Workers in the Gulf,” Dr. Ansari revealed that: Alcoholism is very common among the workers and after drinking session, they engage mostly in oral sex, not only with Indians, but workers from other nationalities like Pakistan, Egypt and Africa. There are several thousand Indian workers in labour camps and the potential danger from this culture of drinking, homosexual anarchy and HIV infection is yet to be fully understood by the Indian Government. . . . After the drinking session, the workers engage in silly talks about their wife and families back home. Loose comments like one’s wife could be sleeping with the neighbour or other such gossips strike their mind and they keep such points in their mind . . . and some of them even disown their own children back home. Written in English, the article speaks to the educated middle classes, taking pleasure in reiterating some common stereotypes that, as much in the media as in popular discourse, routinely pathologize and stigmatize migrants.

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In this chapter, I take Malayali migrants’ affective and intimate lives, and how these are represented and discussed in both Kerala (South India) and the Gulf countries of West Asia, as an entry point to reflect on the role of migration in the constitution and reproduction of modern subjectivities. The complexities and ambivalences surrounding relationships with the homeland are a recurrent concern of anthropological studies of migration and refugees. Migrants have to carefully negotiate and tailor ambitions and desires cultivated while working away from their homeland to the expectations and demands of families, communities, and the nation (see Frantz 2012; Gamburd 2000; Johnson 2010; Mahdavi 2011; Mills 1999). Indeed, in countries or communities of origin, local discourse—often sustained by or leading to state policies designed to “manage” migration—frequently represents migration as a morally ambiguous affair, fostering in equal measure economic development and “social problems,” for instance by weakening or disrupting existing kinship obligations and conjugal relations. This is the case even in localities such as Kerala, where migration has been normalized as a permanent feature of everyday life for a considerable time (Zachariah, Mathew et al. 2003; Zachariah, Nair et al. 2006). Moral panics about migration and its consequences have wide currency indeed; in so-called sending and receiving contexts alike, migrants regularly become the object of disciplinary or pedagogical interventions by the state and welfare organizations (see Ahmad 2009; Ben Jelloun 1977; Cohen 1972; George 2005; Hall et al. 1978; Mai 2002; Percot 2007; Rozario 2007; Sayad 2004). Although the outcomes of ongoing public and private scrutiny of migrants’ orientations and practices—of their sexuality, in particular—might be complex and unpredictable, these interrogations seldom lead to critical appraisals of local moral regimes or to the appreciation of moral ambiguity and inconsistence (cf. Marsden 2005, 2007). More often than not, during short visits or on eventual return, migrants have to struggle to reclaim their moral worth against the demands of local cultural norms and practices. Moral discourses are inevitably fragmented, contradictory, and contingent on specific social positions and political histories (cf. Fassin 2009; Zigon 2010), and yet in public debates they acquire normative import by appearing to give voice to shared notions of decency, respectability, and appropriate behavior belonging to the community and nation. The scene is set, then, for a “clash of cultures,” whereby the apparent incommensurability between homeland and place(s) of migration produces representations of migrants as objects of desire and threat in equal measure by virtue of their exposure to different/foreign cultural and physical environments.

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Data collected from 1989 to 2010 in both Kerala and some Gulf countries of West Asia, the principal destinations of Malayali migrants since the 1970s, led me to interrogate public anxieties about migration and to explore whether they have anything to do with the everyday lived experiences of migrants. I will argue that in Kerala, migrants’ social practices and esthetic orientations, as well as the wider cultural imaginary of migration, have been historically implicated in the constitution of modern Malayali subjectivities, whereby specific moralities, intimacies, and affects have become constitutive attributes of modern selfhood (see Osella and Osella 2000b). However, although migrants have always been part and parcel of Kerala’s moral environment, the articulation and consumption of popular debates and mediated images concerning migrants’ alleged immorality constitute an “ethical scene” (Cohen 2011) through which people—individually and collectively—apprehend themselves as moral subjects against an imaginary abject (migrant) Other. It is public interventions concerning migrants’ affective and intimate lives, then, that bring into being “that which is to be governed,” constituting those who spend part of their lives working abroad as migrants, a destabilizing or altogether threatening Other who requires sustained scrutiny and policing. At the same time, performances of morality—the making of and responses to moral panics (Cohen 1972) appearing in the media and circulating widely in society— lend immanence and confer legitimacy to an apparently common sense morality-as-culture, suggesting that there is a substantial “reality” in what is alluded to in the performance itself (Butler 1993). In other words, assemblages of socially located and competing disciplinary discourses and practices seeking to define and regulate relations between self and Other (Zigon 2010) are reconstituted as a singular and homogeneous “morality” (cf. Ewing 1990; Schielke 2009). I note here that in Kerala the production of a singular, normative morality is, in itself, a contradictory and nonlinear process that can only result in brittle and unstable arrangements. The social and cultural material—newspapers, magazines, television channels, movies, songs, religious and folk stories, and so on—as well as social actors—state apparatuses, voluntary organizations, public intellectuals, community leaders, and so on—that are deployed and participate in the production of normative notions of morality are necessarily multiple and fragmented. Thus hegemonic projects are always shot through, and at times undermined by, perspectives and aesthetics rooted in social positions differentiated by class, caste, community, political affiliation, gender, age, and education. In other words, the private and public imaginary consti-

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tuted by the consumption of and participation in “morality-talk” regarding migrants might be associated with the unfolding of specific hegemonic projects and interests—such as those of upper caste middle classes or state apparatuses—but cannot be reduced to them. In the following pages, I will first consider the entanglement of representations of migrants’ lives with concerns about public and private morality, and then I will move on to consider the role of migration in the constitution of the Malayali modern. Driving the discussion is the following question: whose morality is being produced and upheld in public debates concerning migrants’ intimate lives?

Kerala and the Gulf Indians make up roughly 60 percent of migrants to the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, where foreign residents comprise up to 87 percent of the population (Kapiszewski 2006). Of these, by far the largest proportion of migrants (around 45 percent out of more than five million Indians estimated to be working in the Gulf in 2009) comes from the southern Indian state of Kerala. Immigration regulations in GCC countries follow a similar pattern: all foreigners require an Arab sponsor as a legal guarantor for their work and residence in the country (the kafala system); residency is temporary and is linked to employment, and the latter normally consists of short (three to five year) contracts. Even those who spend all their working lives in the Gulf must therefore return regularly to Kerala in between contracts. The consequence of this forced circular migration is that the state’s economy has become substantially dependent on remittances. Malayali migrants to the GCC countries are predominantly male, mostly educated below secondary education, and employed in semi- or unskilled jobs. Immigration laws make reunification of families extremely difficult, so that the majority of migrants spend long periods without returning home, saving and sending remittances back home. There is also a substantial, and influential, Malayali middle class—professionals, white-collar workers, traders, and businessmen—who visit Kerala at least once a year and whose families might be living with them in the Gulf. But even those who are joined by their families will spend long stretches alone. Wives and children return regularly to Kerala for long visits and eventually resettle there when sons start higher education and daughters marry.

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Class differences between migrants are reflected in hierarchies of employment, accommodation, and lifestyles. There are a number of newspapers and satellite television channels catering to migrants, available in both Kerala and the Gulf, and most migrants keep in regular contact with family and friends back in Kerala via mobile phones and the Internet. Kerala is a state in which Hindu communities are, as in India as a whole, the majority population, but there are also substantial populations of Muslims and Christians.2 The three populations have high concentrations and dominance in geographically specific zones. I have worked in two main field sites: throughout the 1990s in an inland rural area (pseudonym Valiyagramam) in south Kerala, roughly equally split between various Hindu and Christian communities, formerly dependent upon rice paddy, in which ties to the Gulf developed only after the 1970s (Osella and Osella 2000b); and since 2002 in an urban coastal city in the north of the state known as Calicut or Kozhikode, in the zone of greatest Muslim significance where recorded ties to the Gulf stretch back to the tenth century (Osella and Osella 2007, 2008). These differences notwithstanding, in both locations, and the state as a whole, Dubai, Doha, or Dammam are more familiar than are Delhi or Kolkata, and the Gulf could be considered as part of the place that is Kerala.

Migrant Lives As teenagers in Valiyagramam, a village in central Kerala, Riju and Santhosh were inseparable friends, seen every day hanging out together and “timepassing.” At 17, when it became apparent that they would not pass their predegree exams, the two ran away from their home, going to Mumbai “to become underworld kings.” Returning home after three months, their lives took different directions. Riju was quickly dispatched to Saudi Arabia, where his mother’s brother arranged a clerical job for him in an international hotel in Jeddah where the uncle had been working as a manager for several years. Some five years later, Riju’s marriage was arranged with a Bahrain-raised migrant daughter. Once married, they lived separately: Riju in Saudi and then in Dubai, his wife in Bahrain, meeting a couple of times a year either in the Gulf or Kerala. Twenty years later, they are childless and contemplating divorce. “In the Gulf you have the whole world around you,” Riju tells me over a glass of juice in downtown Dubai,

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I have met people from all over the world; I know many Britishers. . . . In the hotel they are always by the swimming pool, especially women. It’s another world from Valiyagramam. I tried to join my wife in Bahrain, but my visa was refused twice. When I lost my job in Saudi, I decided to return to Valiyagramam and set up a small business. But she didn’t want to settle there; village life did not agree with her, she said, and her parents wanted her in Bahrain. In any case, my partner [father’s brother’s son] cheated me and I lost everything, so I went back [to the Gulf]. We hardly know each other my wife and I, and now we are divorcing. . . . Probably I will remarry, but I am not young any more, and no one wants a Gulfan [Gulf migrant] now. I meet Santhosh and his wife in Kuwait City. They got to know each other in Kolkata, where Santosh had been sent to learn air-conditioning maintenance after his failed attempt to become an “underworld king.” His wife was there to study nursing and soon “romance blossomed,” Santhosh told me, and “we did a ‘love marriage.’ ” After a brief stint as a recruit in the Indian army, Santhosh joined his wife in Kuwait, where she had been recruited in a government hospital. Making the most of a brief military career, he found a job as a security guard on a US army base, and eventually he landed a full-time position as “security consultant” with the United Nations, a job that has taken him around the world for various training courses. Santhosh and his wife have never shared accommodation in Kuwait, both jobs requiring residence in single-sex hostels. Now, with a good salary and substantial savings, Santhosh is thinking of sending his wife and school-age children back to Valiyagramam where he has built a palatial residence. He has some misgivings, though. Although Malayali herself, his wife is a Christian, and he is not sure how well she would settle with her Hindu in-laws. “In twenty years, we have never been to our home villages together,” Santhosh reflects. “People are too narrowminded there and all they want from you is money. We don’t have such problems in Kuwait.” Riju and Santhosh’s life experiences underscore some of the ways in which the geographies of migration, the legislations and regulations that shape and constrain the movement of people across the Indian Ocean, and the popular perceptions of those who work in the Gulf, affect or even determine the intimate and affective lives of Malayali migrants. In the labor-hungry, postliberation Kuwaiti economy, Santhosh’s love marriage can prosper and succeed in ways that would not have been possible in Kerala, where arranged marriages

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within one’s caste and community remain the norm. Bahrain’s management of migration along ethnic/national lines (Gardner 2010), on the contrary, contributed to Riju’s marital breakdown, a properly arranged marriage between spouses of similar religious and class background that in Kerala would have been the epitome of solidity and stability. Increasingly low salaries—compared to the huge differential that existed until the late 1990s between Kerala and Gulf wages—and precarious residence have taken the shine off Gulf migrants, so that Riju, unlike his counterparts who have been lucky or entrepreneurial enough to settle in a better foreign country—the United States, in particular— might find it hard to find another wife. In the meantime, state rhetoric and popular imagination that portrays Gulf migrants as economically inept, together with Kerala’s posteconomic liberalization hunger for cash to sustain expansive consumerism, make Riju and Santhosh vulnerable to rapacious fellow villagers and relatives.

Migration and “Morality Talk” Surely Santhosh and Riju have been luckier than many of their manuallaboring counterparts, earning good salaries in better working environments, and not being confined to cramped accommodations in the sweltering heat of dusty Gulf labor camps. By modern Kerala standards, their efforts to make a living, to keep—with various degrees of success—a family together, and to raise and educate children make their lives rather ordinary. This should not come as a surprise in a state of around 30 million people where, since the 1970s, thousands of men and women have spent a part or the whole of their working lives in the Gulf, away from spouses and children. And yet, in Kerala’s popular imagination, migrants’ lives are all but ordinary, their morality persistently scrutinized. Representations of Gulf migration and Gulf migrants populating the public imaginary have multiple sources and, as one might expect, have the inconsistence, malleability, and fast circulation that define taken-for-granted popular knowledge at large. Reporting real or imagined incidents and shifting between different registers—from malicious or humorous gossip to stern moral tale—stories recounted in villages or urban neighborhoods find their way into newspapers, magazines, television programs, and, most important, Malayali films, returning eventually to popular audiences in amplified and stereotyped form. This two-way traffic of representations is also animated by

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state actors/apparatuses, politicians, nongovernmental and community organizations whose interventions are shaped by, and in turn shape, popular understandings of Gulf migrants. As we will see later in this chapter, representations of migration have changed over time, and they are informed by class, caste, and community perspectives, so that taken-for-granted knowledge remains skewed in the direction of those actors who have a stronger voice in the public sphere. Migrants are found morally lacking, regularly accused of demanding extravagantly high dowries, cheating friends and relatives over money, printing fake currency, lending money at extortionate interest rates, consuming too conspicuously, and failing to support, or even abandoning, wives and children (see Osella and Osella 2000b). The apparent excesses of migrants are seen to have a domino effect on Kerala society as a whole, producing not only inflation of prices (especially of land), but also a generalized shift toward “materialistic” attitudes and selfishness, leading to the weakening of social responsibilities. Although migration has been endowed with the capacity to cause most, if not all, the “social ills” affecting modern Kerala, migrants’ sexuality attracts particular concern from communities and media. In popular gossip, often taken up in many popular weekly magazines or television chat shows, “sex parties” with alcohol and prostitutes, pornography, extramarital affairs, excessive masturbation, and homosexuality appear to be the staple diet of male migrants, both in the Gulf and on return to Kerala. Migrants are generally believed to be the main source of HIV infection in the state, and in recent years the media unabashedly reported instances of divorce where wives sought separation from their migrant husbands because these men had asked them to perform “lewd sexual acts” learned from watching pornographic DVDs in the Gulf. In the meantime, in various “sex scandals” that regularly rock the state, some of the perpetrators of sexual violence against young women literally sold into prostitution are often identified as current or former Gulf migrants. Actual reported incidents of sexual violence, then, give substance to and validate in the popular imagination what circulates as gossip. In turn, left-behind migrants’ families—notorious spendthrifts in popular imagination—are not spared from allegations of moral weaknesses. Youths growing up without the supervision of one or both parents are routinely accused of indulging in drug use and premarital sex; migrants’ wives are suspected of taking lovers to make up for their husbands’ long-term absences, leading to intense policing and control of their sexuality. When I returned for a short trip to Kozhikode in 2007, I was told that the previous year there had

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been two suicides in a Muslim-majority neighborhood. These were of married women with husbands in the Gulf; they had absconded with lovers, then been caught and dragged back to Kozhikode. Recriminations were violent, suicide the end result. Some people hinted that these “suicides” might actually have been forced; discussions of adultery also prompted people to speak to me about the fact that there has also been a recent spate of love marriages within the community, some of these with young Hindu men. During my visit, a “family life” public meeting was called by various community leaders to discuss how best to address these issues. Many participants blamed these events upon “Westernization” and the influence of global media, but all agreed that migrants’ wives had been given “too much freedom” and perhaps were suffering from “mental problems” due to the absence of husbands (the notorious “Gulf wife syndrome”; C. Osella 2012). It is entirely possible that some migrants’ wives might have extramarital relations, just as any other Malayali woman. During my fieldwork in Valiyagramam, for instance, two men committed suicide because they had been caught “red-handed” with married women, and I recorded several attempted suicides of women accused of being unfaithful to their husbands. And none of these women were “Gulf wives.” Likewise, there is little doubt that some Gulf migrants might have a penchant for alcohol and the services of sex workers, but, once again, in this they are not alone. In Kozhikode, for instance, there is a long history of informal “men’s clubs,” rooms above bazaar stores and shops where men gathered to gamble, drink alcohol, and, occasionally, to be “entertained” by male or female sex workers (F. Osella 2012). Meanwhile, in Valiyagramam it is not uncommon to find that alcohol drinking—in local “toddy shops” or nearby modern hotels—is accompanied by encounters with “village” sex workers, while in Kerala as a whole the press routinely reports sex scandals involving politicians or prominent businessmen. In everyday life, matters concerning sexual morality are normally negotiated in the name of discretion, as illustrated by the following episode. A small crowd of people had gathered outside Mathew’s parents’ house, waiting for the return of one of many Valiyagramam men working in the Gulf. By 1996, returning or visiting migrants were so commonplace as to go unnoticed beyond a close circle of relatives and neighbors. But this time it was different. Mathew—born into a modest Christian farming family and now a successful owner of a water-bottling plant in Abu Dhabi—was coming back unexpectedly because his mother had sent word to him that his wife was having an affair with his youngest brother, Manu. And, apparently, it was not the first

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time that the latter had taken advantage of his three Gulf migrant married brothers’ absences from the village. A taxi stopped outside the house, and a somewhat bedraggled Mathew stepped hurriedly inside without acknowledging greetings from the crowd that had parted to let him through. Listening in complete silence, we could hear screams and shouts coming from the house; eventually the door opened and a battered, sobbing Manu was kicked out. This “sex scandal” was on everyone’s lips for a few days, and various “community leaders,” friends, and neighbors intervened to mediate between both the brothers and Mathew and his wife. Within days, everyone came to agree that getting Manu married as soon as possible and sending him to the Gulf would be the best solution (eventually Manu refused to migrate, unwilling to leave his newlywed wife alone in the village). In the meantime, Mathew should anticipate moving his wife and children to their newly built house, while being warned that he should visit his family more often and for longer periods. Although many commented on the “bad character” of Manu and Mathew’s wife, the fact that she had been hospitalized after drinking pesticides in a botched suicide attempt, and that Manu had taken in stride the beating received from his brother, were enough evidence that they had realized the gravity of their actions. And yet, villagers also acknowledged that the affair was somewhat unremarkable in that relationships between a woman and her husband’s brother, as well as between cross-cousins, are normally flirtatious, if not sexually charged. Some older people also remarked that, after all, fraternal polyandry was not that uncommon in the village until recently. In both Valiyagramam and Kozhikode a degree of moral transgression— extramarital affairs, alcohol drinking, and ganja smoking, for instance—was tolerated as long as it remained discreet and did not result in public scandals. However, the willingness to overlook some degrees of moral indeterminacy or ambivalence in everyday life diminishes or disappears altogether when it comes to public debates or panics concerning the affective and intimate lives of (some) migrants. Border crossing becomes synonymous with going beyond the pale of morality and decency.

The Sexual “Excesses” of Migrants Tolerance and negotiations notwithstanding, these ethnographic vignettes from rural and urban Kerala reveal the not-so-hidden hand of patriarchy in determining what is morally acceptable or tolerable in men’s and women’s

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affective or sexual behaviors. Public critique and condemnation of men’s sociality and sexual desires (see C. Osella 2012) is not on the same scale as the social sanctions, and even violence, meted out to women suspected of immodesty or sexual impropriety. Significantly, though, while the sexual behavior and sociality of nonmigrants and migrants does not differ significantly in practice, it is the latter who are burdened with far greater responsibility for the apparent “crisis” of Kerala public and private morality. Although women—as migrants and as wives or daughters of migrants—are undoubtedly the primary objects of social anxiety and control, working class/low status male migrants are, in equal measure, the target of discourses and practices seeking to discipline their bodies and affect (see Sayad 2004). Kerala’s morality-asculture, that is, is written on both (migrant) men and women’s bodies through attempts to normalize intimacies and sexualities that eventually result in novel configurations of inequalities emerging at the intersection of class, caste, community, and gender (cf. Gedalof 1999). Returning to the Kerala Monitor article that opens this chapter, we find that a familiar hypersexualization of the male migrant takes a particular twist. I have written elsewhere (Osella and Osella 2000b; Osella and Osella 2006) that Gulf migration, as a moment of capital accumulation, has become part of the male life cycle, sustaining and making possible the reproduction of a modality of (successful) masculinity embodied by the “man of substance,” a wealthy and well-connected patron who can balance desire for personal fulfillment with social obligations toward relatives and neighbors, while attracting clients and dependents through strategic deployment of largesse. The big man’s social potency is inscribed on an equally potent sexual body (see also Srinivas 1976:54ff), but the estheticization and eroticization of successful manhood is heightened in migrants through their privileged relation with apparently unlimited amounts of cash, an inextinguishable and expendable source of potency (Osella and Osella 1999, 2000b). This enhanced sexual potency should be directed toward household reproduction—second honeymoons are arranged for visiting migrants to rekindle intimacy between spouses, with the expectation that a long-awaited pregnancy might follow— but might easily lead, as we have seen, to “excesses.” In the Kerala Monitor article, though, the hypersexualization of the male migrant is tarnished by ignorance—belief in grossly exaggerated gossip, inability to discern between proper (hetero) and improper (homo) sexual acts— and lack of control, as seen in the failure to defer sexual pleasure or the wasteful use of money. In other words, this scandal-mongering rhetoric

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reproduces the same stereotypes—“ignorance” and “lack of restraint”— normally employed by high status communities to reframe and naturalize caste-based hierarchies that have historically discriminated against exuntouchable groups and Muslims (Fuller 2003; Osella and Osella 2000b). The object of deprecation in the Kerala Monitor article and in popular representations more generally, then, is the low-status and working-class migrant, underscoring, first, the extent to which migration is perceived to have unsettled “traditional” hierarchies of caste/community and class (Osella and Osella 2000b, 2006) and, second, attempts—through the articulation of discourses seeking to normalize gender and sexuality—to recast the imaginary of migration in the mold of bourgeois ideals underpinning the Malayali modern. In turn, “flawed” conjugal ties and “inappropriate” sexualities—that is, negative indices of status and class normally associated with ex-untouchable communities and Muslims—call for the pedagogical intervention of the state and of a host of nongovernmental organizations to normalize not only intimate or affective lives, but also the economic behavior of migrant labor. Involving both federal and state governments, these interventions cover a wide range of fields, from HIV monitoring and prevention and the implementation of policies curtailing the emigration of unmarried women below thirty years of age, to schemes directed toward the economic and social rehabilitation of Gulf returnees (see Zachariah, Nair et al. 2006) and services offering migrants saving plans and financial advice on how to transfer and invest remittances. While community and religious organizations have begun to offer specialized counseling to migrants and their families to deal with what are locally perceived as migration-related problems, over the years Kerala has witnessed the mushrooming of structures—temples, churches, shrines, ashrams, hospitals—and practitioners—astrologers, healers, psychologists, consultants, agents—not only specialized in smoothing the path to a successful migration, but also in helping families keep their migrant members on the straight and narrow, so that remittances are sent regularly, savings are not wasted abroad on alcohol drinking and prostitutes, and so on. Gulf migration, that is, should be embedded in a rhetoric of stoicism and self-sacrifice on behalf of dependents and society at large, a rhetoric often reproduced in migrants’ narratives. In other words, the activities of this motley assemblage of regulatory bodies and “concerned” social actors are directed toward promoting “family values” and fostering responsible saving and “productive” investments to support the development of the state by strengthening the modern family.

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Migration and the Making of the Malayali Modern Tracing the emergence of Kerala modernity, Devika (2007) has argued that the production of a Malayali modern hinges on the “en-gendering of individuals,” a process that took place via the progressive dissolution of joint households and the redefinition of masculinities and femininities in the context of a neopatriarchal, and firmly heterosexual, “small” family (see also Arunima 2003; Jeffrey 1976; Kodoth 2001). That is, the Malayali modern entailed the fashioning of subjectivities that naturalize a hierarchical complementary opposition between men and women, realized and reproduced in the conjugal pair inhabiting the bourgeois nuclear household. There is little doubt that in Kerala establishing a (neopatriarchal) nuclear household is the dream and ambition of many, prompted by a desire to emulate those Malayalis perceived as modern, progressive, and economically better off because of their domestic arrangements (Osella and Osella 2000b). In recent years, the nuclear family has also been charged with growing expectations of conjugal intimacy. Configured as fulfillment of emotional needs, exclusivity of affect, and satisfaction of (hetero)sexual desire, “love” is now expected to blossom after marriage (C. Osella 2012; see also Dwyer 2000; Mody 2008; Parry 2004). In the English term “love”—normally used in these circumstances—coalesce otherwise discrete emotions associated with premam (romantic love), kamam (lust), and sneham (hierarchical care for dependents) (Devika 2007; Osella and Osella 1996). In Kerala, and India at large, the imaginary of “love” has a long and complex history and multiple representations and cannot, therefore, be reduced to the spreading of global ideals under contemporary neoliberal capitalism, yet it is also true that a novel esthetic of affection is gaining currency beyond the realm of young people’s premarital flirtations and “romances” (Lukose 2009; Osella and Osella 1998). At this point, one could simply argue that in Kerala, migration becomes the object of moral concerns and interrogations insofar as the “immoral” practices of (especially low-status and working-class) migrants destabilize hegemonic heteronormative gender regimes, undermining the production and reproduction of the idealized modern family. What makes this explanation partial, or altogether implausible, is that migration has historically been implicated in the production of gendered subjectivities underpinning the contemporary family, constitutive of the Kerala modern. Gathering pace since the late 1970s, Gulf migration has far exceeded any previous migratory flows in both the number of people it has involved and the

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amount of capital it has mobilized and generated. Gulf migration has provided not only the economic resources necessary for the expansion of the modern nuclear family model beyond the confines of the mostly urban, middle classes—the first significant migrant investment is invariably the construction of an independent house—but also the means for its long-term reproduction. Migrant families invest heavily in education for their children (often private, English-medium), and their privileged access to global consumer goods substantiates their participation in a “modern” life style. Gulf migration, a predominantly male affair, has made possible the realization of “modern” gender subjectivities entailing codependency and division of labor within the conjugal pair. A successful migrant is a man who has saved enough to build an independent household and who can send home enough remittances to sustain his family (Osella and Osella 1999, 2000a, 2006). Working-class migrants regularly withdraw their spouses from manual labor and, if necessary, migrants’ wives might contribute to household income with home-based activities, but their paramount duty should become the care and education of the children. Living for long stretches of time on different shores of the Indian Ocean, the married pair can safely rehearse and experience otherwise culturally inappropriate expressions of conjugal intimacy and “love” either virtually—through daily mobile phone or Internet communication—or directly during short but emotionally charged home visits. That is, migration-induced separations actually enable married couples to approximate the ideal of modern conjugal love and intimacy. Moreover, styles and esthetics of conjugal life witnessed or experienced in the Gulf by the few who are joined by their families are brought back to Kerala and become popularized as indices of “modern living.” These include specific orientations toward leisure, shopping, house-making, privacy, food, and so on (Osella and Osella 1999, 2000b). Migration, then, is not simply a prosthetic for local gender regimes, bolstering hegemonic imaginaries by virtue of the potential moral dangers it evokes, but it is directly implicated in the production and reproduction of sensibilities and practices at the core of modern Malayali subjectivities. Although the intense public scrutiny and policing of migrants’ intimate lives might take the guise of a diagnostic of or a response to moral alienation engendered by migration, it is in fact directed toward eliciting qualities and dispositions through which the Malayali working class at large can be molded and mold themselves into modern subjects. Along the way, however, these normative interventions reveal cracks in an idealized bourgeois conjugal life

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that, for many Malayalis, either remains beyond reach or generates substantial ambivalence.

Ambivalent Modernities The making and reproduction of the modern “small family” is not an easy affair, requiring economic and cultural resources unequally distributed in the social body. After migrants employed in semi- or unskilled jobs have repaid migration debts, discharged the most compelling kinship obligations, and managed to build an independent house, there are few resources left for anything else. Remittances are generally used for the day-to-day running of the household, maintenance and repair of the new residence becoming a substantial burden. For laboring nonmigrant Malayalis, the ever-increasing costs of land and building materials have put the dream of building or buying an independent house beyond their reach. Acquisition of consumer goods—from household appliances to vehicles—and access to private services—like healthcare and education—are the most evident indicators of social mobility, a project through which individuals, families, and communities strive to achieve ideals of “progress” and “development” (Osella and Osella 2000b). While in pre-1991 economic liberalization, Kerala migrants and the middle classes had privileged access to consumer goods and private services, the popularization of consumer loans extended access to new forms of consumption to workingand lower-middle-class nonmigrants. With declining Gulf earnings, galloping inflation, and higher interest rates on loans, in recent years maintaining “adequate” consumption levels and styles has become a substantial burden, as indicated by well-publicized instances of suicides following failure to repay bank debts (Nair and Menon 2007). Providing good education for children, a defining feature of the modern family, requires far more than money to invest in private English-medium education. Choosing a suitable kindergarten/ school/college and supporting children in their studies demands specific cultural competences and an investment of domestic resources, which might be lacking in non-middle-class households (C. Osella 2012). In turn, for many Malayalis the ideal of the modern nuclear family—built on notions of bourgeois autonomy and exclusive conjugality—rubs against the support and pleasures of everyday same-sex sociality. Many Kozhikode women, for instance, indeed feel reluctant to move away from joint households into a new “small house” where they will no longer have the company

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and domestic help of their mother, sisters, aunts, and cousins, but will be the sole domestic worker, deprived of continuous female company and under the rule of their husband (C. Osella 2012). At the same time, several Kozhikode Muslim men I met in the Gulf expressed the opinion that their “split site” life away from daily family responsibilities and from the demands of conjugality suited them, allowing them to negotiate the responsibilities and demands of married life in Kerala with the pleasures of intense homosocial intimacy in the Gulf (F. Osella 2012). In practice, then, these women’s and men’s commitments to a discourse of exclusive conjugality within a nuclear family are often mediated, and perhaps even made possible, by the prospect of enjoying long stretches of time away from their spouse in an intensely social, same-sex environment (Ahmad 2009). For many Malayali women and men, premam (romantic love), kamam (lust), and sneham (hierarchical care for dependents) remain separate expressions of emotional and physical attachment that might not easily be contained within the conjugal pair. Gulf migration, then, enables mediation, or temporary reconciliation of tensions and contradictions emerging at the interstices of Kerala modernity in that it allows for the material and cultural production and reproduction of modern forms of bourgeois conjugality, while making possible the emergence of novel spaces and forms of same-sex intimacy on which the latter depends.

Conclusions Let us return to Santhosh and Riju, who are left pondering their relationships with kin and neighbors. Santhosh worries about the prospect of losing hardearned savings to satisfy social obligations; Riju is bitter because he was forced to leave Valiyagramam for the Gulf once more after an unscrupulous partner, a close relative, “cheated” him into financial ruin. Over the years I have collected hundreds of similar stories, revealing the aggressive nature of a remittance-led economy—determined by stagnant production, expansive consumption, high inflation, and a cash-starved state increasingly delegating the provision of services to the private sector—that continues to reproduce the economic, cultural, and social need for even more migration, but also the ambiguity and precariousness of migrants’ relationships with others, especially those whose trust they hope to take for granted. Ties of reciprocity and mutuality, embedded in kinship and friendship, can easily turn into naked exploitation and deception. Although Riju’s and Santhosh’s stories of relatives’

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and fellow villagers’ rapacity make them somewhat skeptical of the mantle of morality with which Kerala shrouds itself, the ambivalent nature of social relations highlights the unhelpfulness here of abstract notions of morality or reciprocity that inform debates about “moral economies” (for a critique, see Fassin 2009; Roitman 2000). I have argued that there can be a huge discrepancy between the quite ordinary lives of migrants like Riju and Santosh and the debates they spark. In practice, moral panics about migration might have little empirical substance beyond malicious gossip, exaggerated rumors, and sensationalistic media reports (see also Gamburd 2008b:12ff, 2008a). I am not suggesting here that the problem actually lies elsewhere, that perhaps Kerala society as a whole is, or has become, “immoral.” Rather, I contend that moral inconsistence and indeterminacy are conditions of everyday life, as much in South India as in the Gulf, Europe, or the United States. Moral interrogations and debates entail, after all, a good degree of hypocrisy; they address others’ failings and weaknesses but seldom one’s own. It is precisely the centrality of migration to the articulation of modern subjectivities and the reproduction of novel forms of conjugality that, I argue, leads to interrogations about the morality of migrants. Debates taking place across Kerala’s social body—from state agencies and media to families and communities—address the predicaments of everyday life engendered by the Malayali modern as much as social dislocations resulting from participation in globalized labor markets. Working-class migrants bear the brunt of public critique, a move that by attributing failures and excesses to moral inadequacies of a section of the Kerala population conceals and tames inevitable contradictions inhabiting modern subjectivities, whose eruption in public life would destabilize Kerala’s modernist and firmly middle-class teleology of progress and development. The productive potentials of excess and social transgression, though, require management and containment rather than complete erasure, in that they animate and sustain postliberalization orientations toward the (re)production of social status and class position through sharp entrepreneurship, aggressive competition, and expansive consumption (Fernandes 2006; Lukose 2009; Vora 2008). By alluding to and keeping at the center of public imagination workingclass migrants’ alleged lack of self-control and moral fiber, morality-talk and moral panics deflect attention from and even legitimate the actual “excesses” of the middle classes. Celebrated as groundbreaking innovators and courted as potential investors in Kerala’s fledgling economy, Gulf-based Kerala business-

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men and professionals are seldom the object of public criticism, although everyone well knows that they make money by ruthlessly exploiting (predominantly) Malayali labor. More generally, middle-class and high-status Gulf migrants continue to be associated with the aura of enlightened cosmopolitanism characteristic of representations of elite migration and travel until the middle of the twentieth century (Devika 2012; Menon 2007).3 These politics of “incitement and containment” are directed, to use Mazzarella’s words, “not so much to keep[ing] the great unwashed from the gates as to prevent middle-class desire from having to confront the obscene pleasure of its own unwashed body” (2011:363). The pathologization of labor migrants, and consequent attempts to reform their economic and affective/sexual behaviors, allows the state, in turn, to reassert a nationalist rhetoric attributing the historical upliftment of Malayali working-class men and women solely to the implementation of progressive state policies embodied in the universally celebrated “Kerala Model” of development (Franke and Chasin 1994; for a critique, see Devika 2010). Substantially undermined by the centrality of migrants’ remittances and cultural creativity to the production of the Kerala modern and the “progress” of the state as a whole, the rhetoric of the developmental state demands that subalterns remain abject Others whose efforts to achieve emancipation and social mobility are tolerated only as long as they remain contingent upon and do not threaten middle-class hegemony over the (re)production of a Kerala modern.4

Notes I thank Kaveri Qureshi, Vekkal J. Varghese, Jock Stirrat, Laura Menin, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Jock Stirrat, Atreyee Sen, David Sancho, Geert De Neve, Tom Widger, Katy Gardner, Raminder Kaur, and J. Devika for their comments on early drafts of this chapter. Over the years, my ethnographic research has been supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Nuffield Foundation, to which bodies I am thankful. 1. Malayalam is the language spoken in Kerala; Malayalis are the people inhabiting Kerala. 2. The Government of India census records 17,883,449 Hindus; 7,863,842 Muslims; and 6,057,427 Christians (Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner 2011). 3. I thank J. Devika and V. J. Varghese for drawing my attention to colonial and early postcolonial representations of migration in Kerala. 4. Abject precisely because they draw attention, to paraphrase Julia Kristeva (1982), to the fragility of the Kerala modern and of the bourgeois subjectivities it entails.

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References Ahmad, Ali Nobil. 2009. “Bodies That (Don’t) Matter: Desire, Eroticism and Melancholia in Pakistani Labour Migration.” Mobilities 4:309–27. Arunima, G. 2003. There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar, c. 1850–1940. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. 1977. La plus haute des solitudes. Misère sexuelle d’émigrés nordsafricains. Paris: Seuil. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” London: Routledge. Cohen, Lawrence. 2011. “Ethical Publicity: On Transplant Victims, Wounded Communities, and the Moral Demands of Dreaming.” In Ethical Life in South Asia, edited by Anand Pandian and Daud Ali, 253–74. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Devika, J. 2007. En-gendering Individuals: The Language of Re-Forming in Early Twentieth Century Keralam. New Delhi: Orient Longman. ———. 2010. “Egalitarian Developmentalism, Communist Mobilization, and the Question of Caste in Kerala State, India.” Journal of Asian Studies 69(3):799–820. ———. 2012. “Migration, Transnationalism, and Modernity: Thinking of Kerala’s Many Cosmopolitanisms.” Cultural Dynamics 24(2-3):127–42. Dwyer, Rachel. 2000. All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sexuality and Romance in Modern India. London: Cassell. Ewing, Catherine. 1990. “The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency.” Ethos 18:251–78. Fassin, Didier. 2009. “Les économies morales revisitées.” Annales HSS 6:1237–66. Fernandes, Leela. 2006. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Franke, Richard W. and Barbara H. Chasin. 1994. Kerala: Development Through Radical Reform. New Delhi: Promilla. Frantz, Elizabeth A. 2012. “Exporting Subservience: Sri Lankan Women’s Migration for Domestic Work.” PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science. Fuller, Christopher J. 2003. “Caste.” In The Oxford India Companion to Sociology and Social Anthropology, edited by Veena Das, 477–501. New York: Oxford University Press. Gamburd, Michelle. 2000. The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2008a. Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor in Sri Lanka. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2008b. “Milk Teeth and Jet Planes: Kin Relations in Families of Sri Lanka’s Transnational Domestic Servants.” City & Society 20(1): 5–31. Gardner, Andrew. 2010. City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Gedaloff, Irene. 1999. Against Purity: Rethinking Identity with Indian and Western Feminisms. London: Routledge. George, Susan. 2005. When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Palgrave Macmillan. “HIV, Oral Sex Common Among Indian Workers in the Gulf.” 2009. Kerala Monitor, July 31. http://keralamonitor.net/hivoralworkers.html. Jeffrey, Robin. 1976. Decline of Nayar Dominance: Society and Politics in Travancore, 1847-1908. Delhi: Vikas. Johnson, Mark. 2010. “Diasporic Dreams, Middle-Class Moralities and Migrant Domestic Workers Among Muslim Filipinos in Saudi Arabia.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11(3‐4):428–48. Kapiszewski, Andrzej. 2006. Arab Versus Asian Migrant Workers in the GCC Countries. Report presented to the United Nations Expert Group Meeting on International Migration and Development in the Arab Region, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations Secretariat, Beirut, May 15-17, 2006 (UN/POP/EGM/2006/02). http://www.un.org/esa/population/meetings/EGM_Ittmig _Arab/P02_Kapiszewski.pdf. Kodoth, Praveena. 2001. “Courting Legitimacy or Delegitimizing Custom? Sexuality, Sambandham and Marriage Reform in Late-Nineteenth-Century Malabar.” Modern Asian Studies 35(2):349–84. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lukose, Ritty. 2009. Liberalization’s Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mahdavi, Pardis. 2011. Gridlock: Labor, Migration, and Human Trafficking in Dubai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mai, Nicola. 2002. “Myths and Moral Panics: Italian Identity and the Media Representation of Albanian Immigration.” In The Politics of Recognising Difference: Multiculturalism Italian Style, edited by Ralph D. Grillo and Jeff C. Pratt, 77–94. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Marsden, Magnus. 2005. “Muslim Village Intellectuals: The Life of the Mind in Northern Pakistan.” Anthropology Today 21(1):10–15. ———. 2007. “Music, Masculinity, Islam: ‘Illicit Pleasure’ and ‘Islamic Reform’ in Northern Pakistan.” American Ethnologist 34(3):473–90. Mazzarella, William. 2011. “The Obscenity of Censorship: Rethinking a Middle-Class Technology.” In Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle Classes, edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, 327–63. New York: Routledge. Menon, Dilip M. 2007. “A Local Cosmopolitan: Kesari Balakrishna Pillai and the Invention of Europe for a Modern Kerala.” Tapasam 2(3–4):383–412.

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Mills, Mary Beth. 1999. Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Mody, Perveez. 2008. The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the Law in Delhi. New Delhi: Routledge. Nair, K. N. and Vineetha Menon. 2007. Distress Debt and Suicides Among Agrarian Households: Findings from Three Village Studies in Kerala. Working Paper No. 397. Trivandrum: Centre for Development Studies. Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India. 2011. Population by Religious Communities. http://www.censusindia.gov.in. Retrieved November 15, 2011. Osella, Caroline. 2012. “Desires Under Reform: Contemporary Reconfigurations of Family, Marriage, Love and Gendering in a Transnational South Indian Matrilineal Muslim Community.” Culture and Religion 13(2):241–64. Osella, Caroline and Filippo Osella. 1998. “On Flirting and Friendship: Micro-Politics in a Hierarchical Society.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(2):189–206. ———. 2006. Men and Masculinities in South India. London: Anthem Press. ———. 2008. “Nuancing the Migrant Experience: Perspectives from Kerala, South India.” In Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora, edited by Susan Koshy and R. Radhakrishnan, 146–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2012. “Migration, Networks and Connectedness Across the Indian Ocean.” In Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf, edited by Mehran Kamrava and Zahra Babar, 105–36. London: Hurst. Osella, Filippo. 2012. “Malabar Secrets: South Indian Muslim Men’s (Homo)sociality Across the Indian Ocean.” Asian Studies Review 36(4):531–49. Osella, Filippo and Caroline Osella. 1996. “Articulation of Physical and Social Bodies in Kerala.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 30(1):37–68. ———. 1999. “From Transience to Immanence: Consumption, Life-Cycle and Social Mobility in Kerala, South India.” Modern Asian Studies 33(4): 989–1020. ———. 2000a. “Migration, Money and Masculinity in Kerala.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6(1):115–31. ———. 2000b. Social Mobility in Kerala: Modernity and Identity in Conflict. London: Pluto Press. ———. 2006. “Once upon a Time in the West: Stories of Migration and Modernity from Kerala, South India.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12(3):569–88. ———. 2007. “ ‘I Am Gulf ’: The Production of Cosmopolitanism in Kozhikode, Kerala, India.” In Cosmopolitanism Contested: The Confluence of History and Anthropology in the Indian Ocean, edited by Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse, 323–55. London: Hurst. Parry, Jonathan. 2004. “The Marital History of ‘A Thumb-Impression Man.’ ” In Telling Lives: South Asian Life Histories, edited by David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn, 281–317. New Delhi and Bloomington: Permanent Black and Indiana University Press.

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Percot, Marie S. 2007. “Indian Nurses in the Gulf: Two Generations of Female Migration.” South Asia Research 26(1):41–62. Roitman, Janet. 2000. “Economie morale, subjectivité et politique.” Critique internationale 6:48–56. Rozario, Santi. 2007. “Outside the Moral Economy? Single Female Migrants and the Changing Bangladeshi Family.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 18:154–71. Sayad, Abdelmalek. 2004. The Suffering of the Immigrant. Cambridge: Polity. Schielke, Samuli. 2009. “Ambivalent Commitments: Troubles of Morality, Religiosity and Aspiration Among Young Egyptians.” Journal of Religion in Africa 39(2):158–85. Srinivas, Mysore Narasimhachar. 1976. The Remembered Village. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Vora, Neha. 2008. “Producing Diasporas and Globalization: Indian Middle-Class Migrants in Dubai.” Anthropological Quarterly 81(2):377–406. Zachariah, Kunniparampil Curien, Elangikal Thomas Mathew, and S. Irudaya Rajan. 2003. Dynamics of Migration in Kerala: Dimensions, Determinants and Consequences. Hyderabad: Orient Longman. Zachariah, Kunniparampil Curien, P. R. Gopinathan Nair, and S. Irudaya Rajan. 2006. Return Emigrants in Kerala: Welfare, Rehabilitation and Development. New Delhi: Manohar. Zigon, Jarret. 2010. “Moral and Ethical Assemblages: A Response to Fassin and Stoczkowski.” Anthropological Theory 10(1–2):3–15.

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PART II

MIGRATION AND THE NATIONAL FAMILY

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Chapter 3

Children of the Emir: Perverse Integration and Incorporation in the Gulf Pardis Mahdavi

Field Notes, June 4, 2013, Kuwait City, Kuwait Four children are gathered around a table shaping play dough into various molds resembling animals of all kinds. Bits of red, pink, blue, and green dough have spilled off the table onto the woven IKEA rugs that feature trains and mountain landscapes. The other seven children run around barefoot, pushing toddler walkers that light up and play songs like “Twinkle Twinkle” at an electronically high pitch. Five adults, all of different nationalities, chase the children around, catching them and cuddling them at various intervals. Aisha, the woman who runs the Department of Family Nursing and therefore this orphanage, leads me to a couch at the center of the room. As I sit down on the couch, a five-year-old girl with thick, curly hair and a heart-melting smile walks up to me and asks to sit with me. I nod as she climbs onto my lap and introduces herself as Serena before reinserting her thumb into her mouth. She dips her hand into her pocket and produces a sticker before running off. “Serena is a good kid, but she doesn’t speak much,” Aisha tells me when Serena is out of earshot. As we walk into the adjacent room where five elaborately dressed toddler beds line the walls, Aisha continues to tell me about Serena. “Yes, we worried about Serena for a long time. She, like most of the children here, are what we call foundlings [yetim in Arabic]. They were literally found in baskets, either outside hospitals, in malls, or on street corners. Their

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parents are unknown and the police bring them here. These children become Kuwaiti citizens,” Aisha explains, referring to a Kuwaiti law that decrees that the children of unknown parents must be taken in, cared for, and made eligible for citizenship (Degree Law No. 82 of 1977, referred to as the Family Nursing Law). The facility that Aisha runs is truly state of the art, complete with twelve different cottages for children of various ages. The complex is large and features several playgrounds, parks, multiple medical centers with doctors and nurses available twenty-four hours a day, computers, and transportation to take the kids to and from school. “Some of the children, the girls in particular, stay here until they are in their mid to late twenties, and some, like Serena, will be taken to the palace, raised there and given a good life in the palace, but all of these children are children of the Emir,” Aisha says, adjusting her head scarf and wiping away the beads of sweat from her brow. “The Emir himself comes here several times a year, and others from the palace come at least once a month. They bring clothes, laptops, televisions, and lots of gifts for the children. He really considers all of them as children of Kuwait, no matter what they look like,” she continues as we walk into the next cottage. As we walk to the larger complex across the playground, Aisha pauses before opening the door. She turns to me and lowers her voice, “We try to make a good life for these children, and many of them are happy. We send them to school, and some of them do very well for themselves.” Almost as if on cue, a young woman wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt walks up to us. “This is Dunya,” Aisha says, motioning to the young woman, who stretches out her hand to greet me. “She is eighteen years old and graduating from high school next week. She is very talented in maths and so has won a scholarship to Kuwait University to study,” Aisha explains as Dunya blushes. I congratulate her before she turns to Aisha to give her a hug. “Good to see you Mama Aisha, and nice to have met you,” Dunya says, her seven bracelets jingling as she hurries off to join a group of her friends two cottages over. “Dunya was one of our foundlings. We think her mom was Sri Lankan or Bangladeshi, but because she was found outside the police station, she was brought here, given citizenship, and has working papers. She wasn’t raised at the palace like some of her friends because she is a bit darker, but still, she will do well in life,” Aisha sighs, looking down the corridor at Dunya. “But in here, in this cottage, are some of the kids you asked me about, the bidoun [stateless],” Aisha says. While the Degree Law 82 of 1977, and the subsequent Ministerial Order

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97 of 1993 generously offer citizenship to foundlings, children born in hospitals to unmarried migrant women are not offered the same benefits. The law is clear: citizenship and services are offered only to children in one of the following three categories: (1) children of unknown parents, (2) illegitimate children if the mother is Kuwaiti but the father is either unknown or the parents are not married (because pregnancy out of wedlock is illegal under Islamic laws, which govern much of the Kuwaiti legal system), or (3) children of destroyed families (one or both parents have passed away, been incarcerated, or otherwise are incapable of raising children). If, however, the mother of a child is known, and she is unmarried and not Kuwaiti, the child is not eligible for citizenship and becomes stateless. In these cases, women who go to the hospital for prenatal care or assistance in delivery are sent to prison, sometimes with their children, other times without. Some of the women are deported while the children remain in Kuwait. Other women remain incarcerated for long periods of time. In some cases, the women choose to abandon the child; in other cases, they are forcibly separated. As Aisha knocks on the door of the cottage, a young woman with dark sunken eyes answers the door. “This is Meysoon,” Aisha says as we enter the cottage. Five young women ranging in age from fifteen to twenty are watching music videos while reading magazines. Meysoon makes room on the couch for me to sit next to her. It takes a long time before she is ready to talk to me, but when she does, I am incredulous at the frankness with which she speaks. Aisha had told me that Meysoon was born to an Indian domestic worker in a local hospital nearby. The nurses had told Aisha very little, but what she did know was that Meysoon’s mother had been raped by her employer and then sent to jail. The nurses had cared for Meysoon for nine months, waiting to see if her mother would return after serving her jail time, but they had heard no word from her. They did not know whether she had been forcibly deported and not given access to the child or if she had abandoned Meysoon altogether. Her name had been chosen by the labor nurse on call the night she was born, who named her after her favorite aunt. Beyond this, Aisha did not know anything else. She had told Meysoon the story of how her name was chosen but had not shared any details with her about her birth mother. On her twelfth birthday (Meysoon is now fifteen), Aisha and the other caregivers at the center told Meysoon that she was stateless, which had sent Meysoon into a downward spiral. For the past three years she lived and remained solely with the other girls who were in the same situation. She started cutting class and attempted suicide on her fourteenth birthday.

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“My life hasn’t been easy,” Meysoon said, not making eye contact. “Mama Aisha and everyone here, they are good to us and they try their best, but for me, what is the point?” she continued, flipping through channels on the television screen as she spoke. “When the other kids travel, I can’t go. No passport. When others graduate from school, they can work or do a lot of things, but not me, no working papers. Lots of the girls get married and move out, but who will want to marry me?1 Some of the girls get to go to the palace and live there, but not me. They don’t want the bidoun. So I am here. And maybe I will always be here,” she says, turning off the television and rising from the couch. Some of Meysoon’s friends have left the cottage; others are in the kitchen making lunch, and she goes over to join them. After a few moments, she comes back to me to leave me with a parting thought: “It doesn’t make sense, does it? My mom didn’t do anything wrong; she went to the hospital to have me instead of leaving me at the mall. And now my life is forever ruined.”

Theorizing Integration The presence of children such as Meysoon, Serena, and Dunya and the creative responses of state and familial institutions to them demonstrate both the violent and transformative effects of migrant encounters with the state. Children such as Meysoon have been categorized as stateless and rendered illegal. Their legal status, however, is a result of laws that regulate citizenship transfer and migrant women’s reproductive capacities. Failing to recognize migrants’ intimate lives or acts of violence committed against them, these laws have produced a category of children who must now interact with the state, as their mothers did when they became pregnant, to ask for state responses to their predicaments. Structures of political economy such as market and labor regimes that depend on exporting or importing migrant labor in order to meet the demands of national economies can be experienced as violent within the intimate lives of migrant men and women. Similarly, laws about reunification, citizenship transfer, citizenship rights, and reproductive capacity both in home and host countries can also be experienced as a type of structural violence for migrants and their families. The realm of the intimate can highlight the violent intersections of citizenship (or lack thereof), labor, and migrant (il)legality. A focus on the intimate lives of laborers allows us to see the sphere

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of the intimate as transformative for some and violent for others. Attention to these children and the creative ways in which both they and the state work to define citizenship rights presents an opportunity to scrutinize constructions of the law within states and in response to migration. Meysoon and Serena are among the many children whose lives have been touched by the complexities of migration. Their experiences with the state point to biopolitical orientations of laws and regulations implemented to govern their lives. Although scholars have recently become more interested in the realm of intimate labor, very few studies examine the intimate lives of laborers themselves (Boris and Parreñas 2010).2 The experiences of migrant parents and their children who are raised in places such as Kuwait can be theorized through a variety of concepts. To better understand the predicaments faced by the children introduced in this chapter, two particular theoretical lenses prove useful: Foucault’s theories of biopower and theories about perverse integration and the legal production of illegality. Foucault’s notion of biopower is particularly salient in describing the contours of the lives of children such as Meysoon and Serena in that some children are rendered stateless or given citizenship not aligned with that of their parents due to state laws and power over migrant bodies. This biopower continues to be exercised through the bodies of the children in that their movements, locales, and status are regulated by the state purely because of their genealogy. In particular, biopower emphasizes a protection of life rather than a threat of death. In the case of these children, the Kuwaiti state is taking many steps to protect their lives, but it is this protection that both the children, and the mothers who wish to be united with their children, experience as constraint. The constraint is experienced by mothers, children, and various factions of the state seeking to exert biopolitical management schemes to control the existence of these “foreign” bodies within their borders. In many ways, the theoretical framework of perverse integration can best explain what these children and their mothers face. The phrase “perverse integration” was coined by sociologists Manuel Castells and Mitch Duneier to describe the ways in which formal and informal or legal and illegal economies collide. Informal economies are very often perversely integrated (Hopper 2002) into formal economies, with the formal depending on the informal. The integration is narrated as perverse because on the one hand, it works—that is to say, this type of integration is an instrumental response to otherwise challenging situations. It is also described as perverse because the state depends on this type of labor, presence, and status, while narrating it as a threat or

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outside the boundaries of the licit. The perversity is highlighted by the fact that these persons or industries have been categorized as illegal by the very state that relies on their incorporation. Garcés-Mascareñas expands on this argument, using the example of “illegal” migrants in Spain and Malaysia to show how illegal migrants are necessary both to define an “other” against the state and, more important, because they form a flexible oversupply of labor upon which the formal/legal economy rests (2010). Theories of perverse integration further exemplify the intertwined nature of legal and illegal processes and the symbiotic relationship between the state and illicit networks. Castells holds that “the process of social exclusion and the insufficiency of remedial policies of social integration lead to a key process of perverse integration referred to as the labor force in the criminal economy” (1999:74). Organized crime and illicit activities can simultaneously benefit members of the formal economy, making them an intrinsic (albeit perverse) part of systems in many countries. Perverse integration theorists such as Manuel Castells and Mitch Dunier note that informal or illicit economies are often intertwined with and depended upon by formal or licit economies, making them “perverse” (in that they are illicit but desirable) and integrated (in that formal economies depend on this labor). In this instance, the theory of perverse integration can be used as a stepping stone to look at the incorporation not of economies or labor, but of persons, bodies, and citizenship status. Indeed, this theoretical framework can be applied both to the women who become mothers in the host country and to their children, who become integrated in different ways in that country. Laws pertaining to childbirth out of wedlock, combined with laws about foundlings and children born to unmarried noncitizen mothers, produce a situation of illegality and/or statelessness, necessitating some type of informal incorporation to respond to the existence of what Paul Dresch has labeled “foreign matter” or foreign bodies (2006). Kuwaiti laws emphasize that an abandoned child found in a mall or on a street corner (whose parents are unknown) will be eligible for citizenship. However, a child born to an unmarried, noncitizen mother will be kept in country but defined as stateless. Paradoxically, then, a situation is created wherein a migrant woman is better off having her child at home and then abandoning it and working in the informal economy than she is coming forward, asking for prenatal assistance, or reporting the events that resulted in her pregnancy. If she comes forward, the odds are high that she will be separated from her child, detained, deported, and her child will become stateless. By contrast, if she manages to hide her pregnancy and aban-

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don her child, then she is able to continue working in country, while her child becomes eligible for highly coveted citizenship rights in Kuwait. These paradoxes produce a situation of problematic integration for abandoned children. In many ways, it is very progressive and generous that the Kuwaiti state extends citizenship rights and cares for abandoned children, regardless of race, gender, or perceived ethnicity. That abandoned children are afforded more rights than children of migrant women when the mother is known leads to a situation of perverse integration. Both the children abandoned by their mothers and those literally taken from mothers who are deported are perversely integrated in that they are raised and remain in country. Some are taken to the palaces and grow up to become very successful; others remain stateless and are raised in orphanages until they marry.3 The experiences of both the children and the mothers are shaped by host country laws about reproduction, citizenship, and marriage, as in the case of the children introduced in chapters by Constable and Suzuki in this volume. Building from Garcés-Mascareñas’ analysis of the legal production of illegality, mothers who are working legally in Kuwait are rendered illegal if they are unmarried and become pregnant in country due to clauses in their contracts that require celibacy during their time in the host country, coupled with sharia-based laws that criminalize pregnancy outside of marriage. The children of known mothers become illegal by virtue of the circumstances of their birth. These children are seen as less “deserving” of citizenship rights, given portrayals of their mothers as deliberate, scheming, or morally bankrupt. By contrast, children of unknown mothers are imagined as innocent, divorced from the crimes of their parent, and thus more desirable as citizens in need of saving and a home. What is perhaps most revealing in analyzing the legal status of these children and state responses to their presence is the way in which “children” as a category are taken up and used by the state. The “innocent” child who has been abandoned by its parents is seen as the responsibility of the state, while the child of the “deviant” migrant mother is also seen as in need of saving, but this time from its own parent. State regulations literally produce these children within particular categories and inscribe them with particular subjectivities. But the intervention of the state in the relationship of mother to child, ordinarily upheld as sacrosanct, reveals how the moralizing rhetoric of the state determines which persons are able to access what kinds of rights.4

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Citizenship Laws The official Kuwaiti Nationality Law was formulated in 1959 and amended in 1987.5 The Nationality Law includes 24 articles detailing the conditions required in order obtain Kuwaiti citizenship. To summarize, any person who is born to a Kuwaiti father, regardless of where he is born, is considered a Kuwaiti national (thus embodying the principle of jus sanguinis defined exclusively through patrilineal descent). If one is born to a father who is not a Kuwaiti national, nationality may be granted by decree upon the recommendation of the Minister of Population or the Emir, assuming one meets several conditions, including being Muslim by birth, having knowledge of the Arabic language, being of “good character,” and having lawfully resided in Kuwait for at least twenty consecutive years. For those who satisfy these conditions, however, citizenship may remain elusive. Those who gain citizenship through such measures have limited rights, including not being able to stand as a candidate for any parliamentary body. Kuwait does not recognize acquisition of citizenship through birth in its territories by citizens of other countries (jus soli). A foreign woman who has been married to a Kuwaiti national for at least fifteen years may also be granted citizenship, though this is not currently the case for foreign husbands. Dual citizenship is not accepted in Kuwait, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The issue of citizenship in Kuwait has been controversial because of the large number of migrant workers in the country. Kuwaiti law considers these migrant workers to be citizens of their countries of origin, and the children born in Kuwait of long-term migrant workers do not qualify for citizenship because citizenship is dependent on the father’s nationality rather than the child’s place of birth. This, along with other factors, has resulted in more than 100,000 stateless people called bidoun—literally translated as “without”—who reside and work in the country. Many bidoun were born and raised in Kuwait, some are stateless because their ancestors did not apply for citizenship during the country’s independence in 1961, others come from families wherein the father was foreign, and some are foreign men who have married Kuwaiti women (Toumi 2010). These stateless people are not recognized by the government, have difficulty obtaining official papers including identity cards and driving licenses, do not qualify for government jobs, and are among the poorest of the nation. In addition, children such as Meysoon (introduced at the beginning of this chapter) who were born to unmarried migrant women also become stateless or bidoun.

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With citizenship privileges passing through the father, children whose fathers are unknown cannot register with the government. In addition, many citizenship laws in migrant-sending countries also bestow nationality through the father, and therefore children such as Meysoon are not eligible to return to the mother’s home countries because the embassies will not issue legal documentation for them. At least two of my interlocutors were seeking Indian passports in order to reunite with their mothers in India who were actively seeking their return. The Indian embassy, bound by pressures (though not laws) from the home country not to permit the return of children born to Indian female migrants, was not able to process their paperwork. They remain stateless in Kuwait without citizenship or working privileges. Over the years, there have been a number of calls for amendments to Kuwaiti nationality laws to support migrant workers’ rights as well as gender equality. In April of 2013, the country passed a bill to naturalize 4,000 stateless people, which is just the beginning of solving the problem of the stateless people (“Kuwait Passes Bill” 2013). Another controversial proposal, the current status of which is not clear, includes a call to grant foreign husbands of Kuwaiti women and their children Kuwaiti citizenship (Toumi 2010). There are also a number of NGOs (such as Trustline and Group 29) who are currently lobbying for the protection of the bidoun, though these efforts are still new and their results uncertain.

Stateless in the City Although many children who are stateless are raised in the state-sponsored orphanage introduced earlier, there are also hundreds of stateless children who become perversely incorporated simply by living and working illegally in Kuwait. Some of them remain with their mothers who have gone underground; others are informally taken in or adopted by coethnics who then employ them. Some of them live in Kuwait for many years, while others are caught when something goes wrong. Here I introduce the case studies of three such individuals who are stateless but were perversely incorporated in the host country. I met Cecilia one warm Wednesday afternoon when I visited the informal women’s shelter at the Philippines Embassy. One of the Filipino labor attachés had been kind enough to allow me to visit the women in the shelter on occasion to talk to them about their reasons for being in the shelter and their

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experiences there. Most of the women I met were between the ages of twenty and thirty and had migrated to Kuwait to work as domestic workers. When things went wrong with their employers and they were abused, had wages withheld, or in some cases, both, the women absconded and ran away to the shelter. A select few ended up in the shelter due to abuses incurred outside the workplace, which had rendered them illegal. An even smaller number were sent to the embassy by their employers when they were found to be pregnant. In most of those cases the embassy did its best to send the women home before the baby was born. I had just sat down to talk to a woman covered in knife wounds when a very young girl walked up and sat down across the table from me, eyeing the three muffins that another one of the women had brought me. I slid the plate over to her and she devoured one quickly. I was surprised to see a child in the shelter as usually the children were sent to the orphanage. “Oh, you met Cecilia?” asked Ellie, the woman I had come to speak to. I nodded and stretched out my hand to shake the little girl’s hand while introducing myself. She turned away and faced the window. I asked Ellie if I should leave as I had the feeling I was making Cecilia uncomfortable. “Don’t leave, please,” Cecilia interjected. “I want you to interview me, hear my story,” she said, trading seats with Ellie, who stood up and started brushing Cecilia’s hair. Cecilia took another muffin from my plate and began telling me her story. Cecilia thinks she is nine years old, though her mom, who was also living in the shelter, had told her that she had lost track of the years. When I asked Ellie and Cecilia whether I could speak to Cecilia’s mother, they shrugged their shoulders. I insisted that I needed her mother’s permission to talk to Cecilia, so she ran downstairs, had her mom sign the consent form, and returned. Ellie leaned over the balcony to ask Cecilia’s mom if she wanted to be interviewed by me, but she didn’t answer. Cecilia returned quickly, and she and Ellie resumed her story. They were both speaking quickly and I struggled to keep up, but I was able to piece together the details from the various stories they told. It turned out that Cecilia’s mother, Marissa, had become pregnant a year after arriving in Kuwait to work as a domestic worker. Instead of turning her in to the police, Marissa’s sponsor told her that she was welcome to have the child at home, but that she would be rendered illegal. They had explained to her that children born out of wedlock can sometimes be separated from their mothers, who are detained and often deported. Afraid of this outcome, Marissa had given birth at home (with the assistance of her employer’s sister), and from that point on neither Marissa nor Cecilia had left the house out of fear of being caught by the police. Marissa knew that Cecilia was stateless but

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was terrified her daughter would be taken away from her. When it came time to renew her visa and contract, Marissa was afraid to do so, fearing that the authorities would find out about Cecilia and arrest her. As soon as Cecilia was old enough to help around the house, she did so, and was rewarded with sweets from her mother’s employer. When Cecilia turned seven, however, Marissa’s employer began withholding her wages. The children Marissa cared for also grew increasingly undermining and would tease and often hurt Cecilia. Afraid to go to the authorities, Marissa worked two years without pay, while Cecilia suffered from increased teasing. At one point Cecilia was locked in the dryer by the two young boys who were Marissa’s charges. Another time, Cecilia recalled that the boys took turns throwing shoes at her. When Marissa tried to stand up for her daughter, her employer became very angry and started to hit Marissa. One afternoon her employer came home and poured boiling water on Marissa’s leg, complaining that Marissa had not prepared food for the children that was to their liking. The next morning, Marissa and Cecilia packed their things and decided to take their chances by running away to the Philippines Embassy. They were placed in the informal shelter while their cases were examined. For nine years Cecilia had managed to be incorporated into her mother’s employers’ home, but now that had ended. She expressed extreme fear at what would happen next. Alia’s story was similar to Cecilia’s, with the exception that she had remained perversely incorporated in Kuwait for twenty-seven years. Alia was born to an unwed Indian domestic worker who had decided to give birth in the hospital in Kuwait City. As happens in many instances, Alia’s mother was sent to jail, while Alia remained at the hospital and was cared for by the nurses and hospital staff. One of the nurses named Alia after her aunt, and she was the one to tell Alia the very limited details she knew about the circumstances of her birth. At first the nurses would take Alia to the prison to be nursed by her mother. After six months, however, Alia’s mother was no longer in jail and nowhere to be found. The hospital staff did not know whether she had been deported or had voluntarily returned to India. Alia’s father was unknown but her mother known, and at the time, it was difficult for children in her circumstance to be sent to the orphanage (as the Emir had not yet passed a decree allowing for the transfer of stateless children). Without any clear place to send the child, the nurses ended up raising Alia in the hospital. “I lived in the hospital until I was seven years old,” Alia recalled. “But I helped out the nurses, the ones who would give me candies and treats. I would help them, I would go do things for them, pick up their laundry, get them

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medicines, get them lunch, and they helped me too.” But the nurses would also tell Alia that she needed to leave the hospital, perhaps even go to school. “It was hard though; I was a little girl, and all I knew was life in the hospital,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave because I had become attached to the nurses, but at the same time, I did want to have a home.” One day an Indian couple came to the hospital for fertility services. When they met Alia, they asked the nurses whether they could take her home. They promised to take good care of her and give her a good life. At the time, adoption in Kuwait was not common nor were there any laws governing child adoption. Today, Kuwaiti citizens may adopt, but noncitizens, such as the couple who informally adopted Alia, are not permitted to do so, and even citizens may not adopt bidoun. Alia remembered that the nurses felt conflicted about allowing Alia to go with the couple. “They kept asking me, ‘do you want to go with them?’ And they told me that if I didn’t want to go, I didn’t have to and I could stay.” Alia was unsure of what to do, but the Indian couple came to visit her every day for one week, bringing her presents, clothes, and sweets. After a week of getting to know them, Alia told the nurses she would like to go and have a home. They told her she was welcome back to the hospital any time, and said their good byes. Alia lived with this couple for the next ten years. Though she was stateless, they arranged for her to go to the Indian school after teaching her to read and write. She did not fully understand the implications of her lack of citizenship until the Indian couple’s work permits were finished and they were preparing to go back to India. “They had often gone in the summers, but one of them would stay behind with me. Whenever they traveled, someone stayed with me, or I was sent to stay with friends. I didn’t really understand what it all meant until I was seventeen and they told me they were leaving for good,” Alia said. When Alia asked if she could go to India with them, they explained to her that she would have to stay in Kuwait because she did not have a passport. Alia was unsure of what to do next or where to go. “In those days, I cried a lot, even cried myself to sleep most nights,” she said. One day, three weeks before the Indian couple was scheduled to return home, some friends of theirs came over for a visit. These friends had two children, aged two and three, and the wife was pregnant with a third child. Upon hearing about Alia’s situation, the wife offered Alia full room and board if she would agree to work for the family as a nanny and housekeeper. Alia agreed and has been living with this family for the past ten years. She is now twenty-seven years old and has never

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left Kuwait’s borders. Although she knows that she is stateless, and thus that working for an employer is technically illegal, she narrates her situation in terms of familial incorporation. “It’s true I am working here for the family, but it’s also like I’m one of the family, so perhaps it’s not work. Also Kuwait is my home, the only home I have ever known, so I feel happy to stay here,” she explained. Both Cecilia and Alia were incorporated informally by families in Kuwait. Though neither of them has been able to obtain citizenship, they both circumvented laws about their presence in Kuwait through informal channels, thus manifesting the perverse (in that it is illegal but works) aspect of their integration. Their living and working situations underscore the legal production of illegality in that both young women were living and working illegally in the host country, not because they did anything illegal, but because the host country laws were not flexible enough to accommodate the circumstances of their birth. In addition, the incongruence between home and host country laws further restricted their movements, keeping them stateless and immobile. Like Meysoon (introduced at the beginning of the chapter), Elham was born in a local hospital in Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates. Now twenty years old, Elham has returned to work as a volunteer in the same hospital in which she was born. She has never left the tiny emirate of Ras Al Khaimah (or RAK), not even to visit Dubai. From the little that Elham knows, her mother was a Nepali woman who had a “love case,” according to the prison wardens who narrated her story to Elham. Her mother had migrated to Dubai initially to work as a domestic worker. There she had met another Nepali young man working as a security guard at a local business. When he was transferred to RAK, he persuaded Elham’s mother to join him, which she did, absconding from her sponsor in Dubai, thus rendering her illegal. Elham’s father and mother had moved in with each other in RAK, and before long, Elham’s mother became pregnant. At some point her mother was arrested, but Elham was not clear on this aspect of the story, though different jail wardens, including the one who informally adopted her and had raised her thus far, had told different versions to her. Elham’s mother was arrested and tried for the crime of zina (adultery and fornication) like many other women who become pregnant outside of wedlock. The wardens were unclear about whether her mother had been picked up initially because she was without working papers, or whether someone had seen her swollen belly and brought her in. Either way, she was arrested and sent to jail after giving birth to Elham in a hospital nearby. As soon as she was born, Elham was sent to live in the prison with her mother, who remained

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staunchly by her side for two years, refusing to go back to Nepal without her. Eventually, however, she was deported, and Elham stayed behind; unable to travel with her mother, she was to remain in RAK for the foreseeable future. Elham’s mother, however, had become very close with several of the prison wardens. Many of the wardens tried to help the women who were in their charge by bringing them food, clothes, and money. The wardens played a large role in trying to secure funds to send the women home, and when possible, to get the babies home as well. Amira, the warden who raised Elham, was one of the more involved members of the prison staff. A woman in her late fifties, Amira had never married and did not have children of her own. She had raised Elham as her daughter but had always been very clear with Elham that she was not her birth mother, telling Elham stories about her birth mother’s bravery and hoping that one day they would be able to travel to Nepal together to visit her biological family. I only had the opportunity to talk briefly with Amira, but she said in our short interview that she was committed to the women in her charge, specifically those who had children. “It breaks my heart that a mother would have to be separated from her baby, no matter what the circumstances of her being pregnant are,” Amira proclaimed. “Some of the other guards, they think we should only help those who are love cases, some think we should help the rape cases, but I always thought we should help every mother and child,” she added. When Elham was just over two years old, her mother was informed that she was going to be deported, but the child could not come with her. Distraught, she begged Amira to take Elham in and to take good care of her. “Elham’s real mother said to me, ‘take my baby girl, protect her like she is your own,’ ” Amira recalled. Amira had grown quite close with Elham as she had been working tirelessly to procure her travel documents so that she could return with her mother. Many of the wardens were able to successfully help the women in their charge, and Amira noted that she alone had seen over a dozen babies return home with their mothers. “I have never understood why some could go home and others were kept here. It seemed always to me that if a mother wanted to take the baby home, that she should be able to,” Amira mused aloud. For the first few years that Elham lived with Amira, Amira continued to work to procure travel documents, citizenship papers, or some type of documentation for Elham. Frustrated at the seemingly never ending series of closing doors, Amira finally accepted that Elham was likely to live with her, stateless, in RAK for many years to come. Elham and Amira grew closer as

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time passed, and Amira was able to talk with friends of hers at a local school to allow Elham to enroll in classes, despite her undocumented status. After graduating from high school, Elham began volunteering at the hospital in which she was born. “It hasn’t been easy for me, growing up in RAK, knowing I can’t leave,” Elham explained. She indicated on more than one occasion that she was reluctant even to venture to the other Emirates for fear that she would be arrested, searched for documentation, and then imprisoned. “As long as I’m in RAK, I know Amira knows people, has good wasta (social capital), you know? She can help me, and I know RAK people. They are good, don’t want to give me trouble,” notes Elham. What she has heard about Dubai and neighboring Emirates makes her uneasy. “I know lots of people in jail in Dubai, and lots of kids like me without papers living in bad places in Abu Dhabi. I don’t want this for me,” she adds. Elham, like many other young people in her situation, navigates her potential encounters with the state in dexterous and creative ways, demonstrating the necessary fluidity of both Elham’s status and the state actors she imagines. Elham knows that certain encounters with legal figures and authorities can be negotiable, as long as she remains in spaces where she has social capital. That she, and others like her, have been able to remain in country and have had the opportunity to be educated and now work informally demonstrates the necessary flexibility of the state. Her knowledge of safe spaces where she can live and work also demonstrates her own creative ability to be incorporated and carve out her own type of “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999).

Royally Incorporated The first time I heard about orphaned children being raised in the palaces or by the Emir, I was skeptical. A group of expatriate academics told me that they had heard this was common practice, though the information seemed to be tacit knowledge. The more I discussed this with locals, members of NGOs, and even hospital staff, the more the rumors were confirmed. But no one had met anyone who had been raised in the palaces. Rather, they had heard that children were sent there and that the Emir and his family were raising dozens of these children each year. Nurses at the local hospitals said that children they looked after were often sent to the palaces after a few years of being stateless in the hospital. Aisha, who ran the orphanage introduced at the beginning of

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this chapter, had also indicated that some of the children from her orphanage were sent to the palace to be raised there. But whenever I asked if anyone had actually been inside the palaces to see the children living there, or if anyone had met any young adults who had been raised there, the answer was always murky. No one had been inside the palaces or had met the adults who grew up there. One day, however, I met Barbara. Barbara is a British woman who moved to the Gulf when her husband, who works in the oil industry, was relocated. She had been a teacher back in the United Kingdom and sought out teaching jobs in the various countries she and her husband moved to. When they moved to Kuwait, Barbara’s first job had been teaching English to a group of children called the “children of the Emir.” These were not the Emir’s actual children, but rather the orphaned children who had become incorporated in the palaces. With Barbara’s stories, the knowledge went from tacit to actual, as she narrated her experiences over fifteen years of teaching at the palace. “Well, yes, of course the children of the Emir, the ‘royal foundlings’ as I like to call them, of course they exist,” she said in her soft but high-pitched voice. “Every day for about fifteen years I went up to the palace to teach them English,” she elaborated, pulling cracked pictures of various children out of her wallet. The children looked like a diverse group, but all were clothed in the dishdasha or burqa reflecting the local dress in Kuwait. “They are a lovely bunch, and it is great to have the opportunity to work with them inside the palace. They range in age from five to fifteen, boys and girls, and all of them speak Arabic and now English fluently,” Barbara explained. She noted that most of the children were sent to school, and Barbara was just the English tutor hired by the Emir to ensure that the children’s English would be as good as their Arabic. “They do have everything they need, these kids. Laptops, phones, games, and plenty of clothes. They are well cared for, but some of them want to go home or want to understand who their parents are,” Barbara reflected. After fifteen years of working with these children, Barbara had decided to work with local NGOs to lobby the government to change its citizenship laws so that some of the children could find their parents. She also worked with women who were detained or deported due to pregnancy out of wedlock, and in some cases she was able to manage their cases so that they could return home with their children. “Even though the lives of these children in the palace are good, it is still hard for them, and I know it’s hard for the mothers who are separated from the kids. It was these experiences that

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motivated me to do the work I do now,” Barbara explained, showing me pictures of women with their babies who—thanks to Barbara’s help—were on their way home. After meeting Barbara, I had the good fortune to meet Mona, a twentyfive-year-old young woman who had once been a “child of the Emir.” Though she did not know or remember where she was born, Mona did remember spending a short amount of time in the hospital before moving to the palace at the age of roughly four (to this day, Mona is unsure of her birthday or actual age, but she gave me rough estimates based on what she had been told in the palace). A tall young woman with thick eyebrows and elongated eyelashes, Mona now runs a daycare program in Kuwait City. She also sits on the board of a public school nearby and is very active in children’s education. “I think I’m passionate about what I do because I was lucky enough to be well taken care of and I got such a great education,” Mona said in perfect English. Though her head, body, and much of her face were covered by layers of black fabric, Mona’s kohl-lined eyes were extremely expressive and they widened when she spoke of her past. “I was one of the lucky ones. I don’t know who my parents are, but because I was abandoned at a hospital, I got Kuwaiti citizenship. To add to that good luck, I was also raised in the palace; it doesn’t get much better than that for someone like me,” she said. Mona lived in a large room at the palace with three other girls for most of her life. She recalled rising early for morning prayers and learning the Koran from a young age. She said that although she was asked to help out around the palace, most of her time there was spent becoming educated in different ways. She had been raised by a family member of the Emir who was adamant that all the children in her care be well-rounded. For this reason, she had arranged for Mona and her “siblings” to go to school, have language tutoring in English and French, and on occasion extra art classes. Mona reflected on this time in her life with mixed emotions. “It wasn’t always easy, and when I was a teenager, I was angry a lot. I wanted to know who and where my parents were; I wanted to be like some of my friends at school,” she remembered. But as the years passed, Mona noted that she became grateful for the support and attention she received as a “child of the Emir.” “We were always told we were special and that we were lucky. After a while I started to feel that way, and I still do,” she said. At the age of twenty-two, Mona met a young man named Faisal. They were married a year later and Mona moved out of the palace and into an apartment with Faisal. They are now expecting their first child, who will definitely be a citizen like his parents. “I hope my baby is as lucky as I am,” Mona said,

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patting her belly. “She won’t be raised in a palace, but we will do our best,” she said with a laugh. Mona, like the children who Barbara worked with, became a ward of the state and was affectionately referred to as a “child of the Emir.” This nomenclature suggests the imagination of a state that understands itself as a parent to these children who then become citizens. Kuwaiti citizenship and its attendant benefits are highly coveted by many migrants in the Gulf. That these children are able to attain it and that they are cared for by the state in these ways show the transformative impact of these children on the state. The children themselves are also transformed by their incorporation within the state as they become citizens who can access an array of benefits offered by the Kuwaiti state. Many children in similar situations, such as those presented by Suzuki and Constable in this volume, would not be able to access similar citizenship rights in their respective host countries. Migrant mothers in Japan and Hong Kong who abandon their children are not ensured that these “foundlings” will be able to attain citizenship. Thus, the presence of the “children of the Emir” has powerfully transformed state rhetoric about citizenship. Unfortunately, however, the rhetoric is closely tied to who is seen as deserving of such rights, a category that is closely tied to the mothers of the children and the circumstances of their conception and birth.

Working Together, Moving Forward Though it may seem that the future is bleak for young people like Meysoon, Cecilia, or even Alia, rapid changes in Kuwait may improve their futures. Most notably, adoption is becoming increasingly acceptable and even encouraged within Kuwait and throughout the GCC countries. According to Dr. Mona, who runs the Complex of Social Care Homes within the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor, adoption is on the rise in Kuwait due to a shift in discourse from the royal family. “The Emir and members of the royal family have come forward to encourage Kuwaitis to adopt orphans, saying it is an act of extreme religious piety and even a religious duty within Islam,” she explained, reflecting on the fact that the language of religion is often deployed by the ruling families to spur nationals to action. Degree Law No. 82 of 1977, referred to as the Family Nursing Law, was the first document established in Kuwait to structure the emerging adoption system. This law sets out a series of requirement for “nursing families,” the term given to adoptive families, including the following:

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The child’s nurser must be Kuwaiti married to Kuwaiti or non-Kuwaiti woman. The nursemaid must be Kuwaiti married to Kuwaiti or nonKuwaiti man. The nurser [man] and nursemaid must be Muslims. The financial capability for caring for the nursed child [must be determined]. The nurser and nursemaid shall be socially matured and free from mental disturbances. The nurser and nursemaid shall be morally matured and having good manners. The nursing family must reside in Kuwait for following up [raising] the child. (Article 6 of Law No. 82 of 1977 regarding Family Nursing) Several things bear mentioning about this law and its application. The first is the emphasis that only Kuwaiti nationals, and only those who are in “good moral and financial standing,” may adopt. This makes it challenging for the many noncitizens and non-Muslims who would like to adopt children to do so. Other challenges of this law are not written but discussed by activists such as Aisha and Dr. Mona, who work within this realm. “A big problem is that the kids who are bidoun cannot be adopted. It is prohibited, and so these kids stay here until they can marry,” Aisha explained when discussing the situation of Meysoon and her friends. Dr. Mona also pointed to the fact that though this law was passed in 1977, the practice of adoption and number of families who do adopt was very low until just recently. “It’s true that that is an old law,” she said, referring to the Family Nursing Law. “But it just wasn’t as common; we didn’t have people coming to us to adopt children. There were the kids who were sent to the palace and then everyone else. But that is changing rapidly. I would say in the last five years or so, we have had many more cases of adoption.” Though she did not have the exact numbers, she reflected on anecdotal evidence that suggested that the number of children adopted from her orphanage last year was more than four times the number adopted a decade ago. In addition, the last five years have seen the proliferation of numerous NGOs, particularly groups and organizations advocating human rights and for the rights of the bidoun. Examples of these organizations include Group 29 and Human Line, both organizations made up of pro bono lawyers and activists who are seeking citizenship rights and legal recognition for Kuwait’s growing stateless population. Other groups, such as the Kuwait Institute for Human Rights (established, like Group 29 and Human Line, only in the past two years), are active in promoting the rights of migrants and justice under the rule of law for everyone within Kuwaiti borders. Finally, international

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organizations such as the International Organization for Migration and the International Labor Organization also are very active in the country by organizing workshops and symposia on issues pertaining to human trafficking, migrants’ rights, and labor issues. During my time in the field, I met dozens of activists and members of civil society in Kuwait who were interested in working on issues such as statelessness, migrants’ rights, and trafficking. Though the situation of the children of migrants, such as those introduced here, has not been the specific mandate of any of the organizations with whom I spoke, the tangential work being done on related issues is likely to extend to this vulnerable population about which so little is known. When I relayed the stories and situations of young people like Meysoon and Alia, the activists I met were shocked and surprised. They, like many other locals, indicated that they did not know such laws existed, let alone that the laws would create this paradoxical situation of illegality for so many children. It seems that the presence of the stateless children might soon transform the state and state laws about citizenship rights. “This is a very sad situation you tell us of,” reflected Essie, a human rights lawyer working with groups such as Human Line. “We didn’t know about it, but now that we know, we can do something,” she said. Mehri, the executive director of another human rights organization built on Essie’s initial response. “I think that is how it is in Kuwait; there are a lot of things happening, but we just don’t know. When we know, we can do something about it, and there is the desire to change, but we just don’t know. Knowing is power. Understanding the stories is a step to helping. And I think no one wants these young people to suffer,” she explained. Essie continued, responding to Mehri’s thoughts. “Yes, it is this way. People just don’t know. The ones who make the laws, they don’t know that this can happen. And then the people working with the kids, they don’t know what to do. It’s important to have dialogue so that we can be clear about the problems. And then we can help.” When I last talked to Meysoon, she was very happy because she had been in touch with a few pro bono lawyers from Human Line and was very hopeful that she might be able to procure a passport to go in search of her mother. Though she had little information about her mother’s whereabouts, the lawyers had also put her in touch with the Indian embassy, which was trying to track down her mother and her address. Working together, NGOs, embassies, and government organizations may be able to revise existing policies so that they become more adequate to the task of meeting the lived realities of young people in Kuwait and across Asia.

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Notes 1. Women can only leave the orphanage if they marry because Kuwaiti law does not permit single women to rent or buy houses on their own. 2. Boris and Parreñas define intimate labor as encompassing “a range of activities, including bodily and household upkeep, personal and family maintenance, and sexual contact and liaison. It entails touch, whether of children or customers; bodily or emotional closeness or personal familiarity, such as sexual intercourse and bathing another; or close observation of another and knowledge of personal information, such as watching elderly people or advising trainees” (2010:2). 3. Due to a lack of data tracking the lives of these orphans, it is not clear what percentage marry and whether outcomes vary depending on gender. What I did observe during my fieldwork was that there were dozens of women living out their adult lives in the orphanage because they had not married. There were no men above the age of eighteen living on the compound. 4. Special thanks to Sara Friedman for this key insight. 5. The English translation of the law can be found on the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) website (http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b4ef1c.html).

References Boris, Eileen and Rhacel Parreñas, eds. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Castells, Manuel. 1999. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Dresch, Paul. 2006. “Foreign Matter: The Place of Strangers in Gulf Society.” In Globalization and the Gulf, edited by John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed Al-Mutawa, 200–22. Abingdon: Routledge. Garcés-Mascareñas, Blanca. 2010. “Legal Production of Illegality in a Comparative Perspective: The Cases of Malaysia and Spain.” Asia Europe Journal 8(1):77–89. Hopper, Kim. 2002. Reckoning with Homelessness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. “Kuwait Passes Bill to Naturalize 4,000 Stateless People.” 2013. Agence France-Presse, March 21. http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/2013/03/21/Kuwait-passes-bill-to -naturalize-4-000-stateless-people.html. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Toumi, Habib. 2010. “Non-Kuwaiti Husbands May Get Kuwaiti Citizenship if Wives Approve.” http://www.habibtoumi.com.

Chapter 4

Temporary Shelter in the Shadows: Migrant Mothers and Torture Claims in Hong Kong Nicole Constable

Introduction This chapter describes migrant workers who go abroad to do intimate domestic care work for their employers (caregiving, cooking, and cleaning), but contrary to the expectations of the sending and receiving states, and contrary to the expectations of their family members back home and their employers in Hong Kong, have intimate relations of their own, get pregnant, and have babies abroad. As I describe below, migrant workers’ intimate relations lead to new, but often temporary, family formations; to unintended and creative uses of laws and policies; and to alternative frameworks for assessing migrants’ claims to their rights and social belonging. Migrant mothers are constrained by but also utilize particular laws and policies. The latter I view as “tactics,” following the work of Michel de Certeau. As he describes, tactics are “procedures that gain validity in relation to the pertinence they lend to time—to the circumstances which the precise instant of an intervention transforms into a favorable situation, to the rapidity of the movements that change the organization of a space, to the relations among successive moments in an action, to the possible intersections of durations” (de Certeau 1984:38). Indeed, “time” is central to mothers’ tactics, which are interventions that transform a bad situation into a more favorable one, that change the organization of space and that fundamentally extend and trans-

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form their time in Hong Kong, allowing them to stay longer. Key tactics relate to filing claims under either the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (the “Refugee Convention” for short) or the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (the “Convention Against Torture”). Filing torture claims, and the circumstances surrounding migrant mothers’ decisions to do so, are the main focus of this paper.

The Context Over 300,000 “foreign domestic helpers” (also known as “helpers”) or foreign domestic workers (“FDWs”), as domestic worker activists prefer to be called, reside in Hong Kong. They hold two-year visas that are linked to their employment contracts. The vast majority of migrant domestic workers are women. The largest numbers come from Indonesia, almost half from the Philippines, and smaller numbers from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and other countries. Whereas much scholarly attention has been paid to work experiences of foreign domestic workers, and to the care work or intimate labor they provide in Hong Kong and elsewhere (e.g., Constable 2007; Lan 2006), far less has been written about the difficulties they face in forming or maintaining their own intimate lives and relations (but see Parreñas 2005; Pratt 2012). Nor has much attention been paid to FDWs who have overstayed their visas and remain in the region as undocumented “overstayers” or those who are on “recognizance,” having filed claims for asylum with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) or under the Convention Against Torture with the Hong Kong government (but see Sim and Wee 2010). Pointing to the structural and ideological incompatibility of being both a foreign domestic worker and a mother while in Hong Kong (providing intimate labor for others and having an intimate life of one’s own), this chapter focuses on FDWs who either lose or forego their domestic worker contracts and their visas when they become pregnant. As I argue, the subjectivities of domestic worker and mother are highly incongruous for them. FDWs who become pregnant and want to give birth in Hong Kong struggle against many formal and informal pressures to be “good workers” at the expense of being good mothers. “Good workers” are beholden and grateful to their employers. The official and intended purpose of allowing migrant workers to come to Hong Kong in the first place is to provide reproductive labor (in the broadest

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sense) to more privileged local citizens and permanent residents, not fulfilling their own reproductive goals. Exercising their own reproductive desires requires that migrant women struggle with and often resist the normal and expected role and status of “good” migrant worker. Among Hong Kong’s overstayers and recognizance paper holders are likely hundreds or thousands of former FDWs who became pregnant or gave birth in Hong Kong (PathFinders 2012; Ullah 2010). Whereas my larger research project (Constable 2014) focuses on a wide variety of experiences of migrant mothers and their children—including the rare cases of FDWs who manage to continue to work and to remain legally in Hong Kong during and after pregnancy and childbirth, and former FDWs who marry locals, as well as those who overstay (and are without recognizance papers)—this chapter concentrates primarily on the experiences of former FDWs who become pregnant and then file torture claims, which provide them with “recognizance,” a form of official recognition in which they are prohibited from working and effectively rendered stateless, as they must disavow their claims to citizenship in their home countries while seeking asylum. Such status excludes them and their children from support from their consulates and their lives are shaped and delineated in what appear to be both intended and unintended ways by Hong Kong and international laws and policies. As discussed below, the experiences of former FDWs who become mothers and torture claimants can be understood as partly taking place “in the shadow of the state” or perhaps, more accurately, at the margins of society, outside of its normative structures and sometimes outside of the law, or within a grey area of what is tolerated or overlooked but not permitted. They exist in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” condition where trust is at a minimum and secrets are not revealed for fear that if someone knows what they are doing, they might be turned in. This includes women’s peers and government officials; the former of whom may be prone to jealousy, and the latter of whom are often overworked and eager to avoid time-consuming bureaucratic complications. Moreover, after FDWs’ visas expire and they no longer have domestic worker contracts, women’s lives may take on a sort of Alice in Wonderland quality: once they become pregnant, they move further and further from the domestic worker lives they once knew and that society at large condones and strictly circumscribes; as they become single mothers with illegitimate or mixed race babies, they do illegal work, and they manage in ways that were once inconceivable but now seem ordinary. Yet they are aware of their “deportability” (De Genova 2002). As Susan Coutin writes of “the undocumented,” much of

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the time “they are undifferentiated from those around them, but then suddenly when legal reality is superimposed on daily life, they are once more in a space of nonexistence” (2000:40). Migrant women’s experiences point to some of the unintended effects of laws and policies on their everyday lives and intimate relations and some of the creative ways that they survive when they no longer hold valid work visas and have no familial safety nets. In her study of “migrant illegality” and its construction in Israel, Sarah Willen considers juridical status, sociopolitical conditions, and lived experiences. She stresses the importance of examining “migrants’ modes of being in the world” and linking these with intended and unintended consequences of laws and policies (2007:9). Her key focus on everyday life articulates well with ethnographic approaches that illuminate the subtle and complex processes through which policies not only impact everyday lives, but are also approached or grappled with by migrants as they struggle to find logic, meaning, and humanity in what often appear to be heartless bureaucratic procedures and policies. Like other chapters in this volume, this one raises questions about the multifariousness of “the state” and the multiple roles and positions of state actors as they intersect with and influence women’s choices and options. The state—in this case referring to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, its government, government employees, and its policies and laws—at once undermines and facilitates the irregular status of migrants, “producing illegality” (De Genova 2002:419) and constructing categories of documented and undocumented persons who are understood as “exceptional” in their exclusion from the benefits and privileges of citizens and workers with greater class privilege. This chapter thus demonstrates the ambivalent, and in a sense contradictory, role of the state in the construction of irregular status among former FDWs in Hong Kong. Hong Kong condones and facilitates the temporary migration of foreign domestic workers, yet excludes them from participation as citizens and denies them right of abode. Workers are imported to perform intimate labor and are welcome to the extent that they embrace the role of low paid worker and reject other intimate roles and gendered subjectivities. Since the construct of the “foreign domestic helper” is effectively incompatible with what I call local motherhood (as opposed to long distance mothering), those who become mothers in Hong Kong often have little choice but to subsist at the margins of society and to utilize policies in creative and unintended ways. This chapter thus provides glimpses of the intimate lives of workers as they struggle with how to be both migrant mothers and migrant workers.

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Intimate Labor and Intimate Lives FDWs, mainly in their twenties and thirties, some married, many single, take up domestic work—the intimate labor of child care, elderly care, cooking and cleaning—living and working fulltime in the households of Hong Kong residents. This intimate labor for others significantly disrupts their own intimate lives and relations back home. They migrate for work at a time when, if they remained at home, they would marry, have children, and provide labor within the intimate spaces of their own households. Most FDWs work in Hong Kong for one or more two-year contracts and return home when their visas expire, but some do not. Prohibited from bringing family members with them to Hong Kong, and required to “live in” with their employers, FDWs are expected to be unencumbered by daily responsibilities to their own family members and to devote themselves to the needs of their employers. Today, some employers explicitly prohibit FDWs from forming romantic attachments, sometimes going so far as to threaten them with termination or punishment if they do so. Other employers, sometimes with the help of the recruitment agency, aim to restrict a worker’s ability to develop relationships by regulating her curfew and her time off, prohibiting the use of telephones, restricting her ability to socialize at the market or outside of the home, or by creating an impression of constant supervision and surveillance. Nevertheless, FDWs are legally entitled to one day off a week, and attempts to prevent them from forming romantic relationships are likely futile. FDWs who do not own mobile phones are rare, and they can easily send and receive text messages. Workers often have opportunities to establish relationships with men and women through a variety of personal networks and social venues ranging from religious establishments to public spaces. Parties and gatherings in parks when the weather is good, or in weekend boarding houses rented by multiple individuals who pool their money, or in rooms that are rented by the hour, offer less expensive settings for gatherings than bars and restaurants. Many women told me they were introduced to men by their friends, or approached directly by men in Kowloon Park, Star Ferry, Central, or Causeway Bay on Sundays, or on public transportation, in places of worship, or in markets. Indeed, many MTR (Mass Transit Railway) station exits, small ethnic food shops, and street markets are regular “hangouts” for men and women to meet almost any time of day or night and any day of the week. While employers regard FDW romances as unnecessary and unfortunate

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distractions, or at worst as indicative of a FDW’s moral failings, since her primary focus and commitment ought to be to the employer’s family, they consider it a critical problem when a domestic worker becomes pregnant. Some employers are concerned about FDWs’ “morals” and criticize domestic worker sexual practices (Constable 1996, 1997, 2000), but the main concern for many employers is practical. How can they manage without a domestic worker and the disruption caused by a domestic worker’s pregnancy or maternity leave? As one employer put it “we would have to take care of her, and she is here to take care of us.” In many Hong Kong households, hiring a fulltime live-in FDW allows households to earn two incomes. They are thus highly dependent on the FDW’s labor for everything from child care or elderly care to marketing, cooking, cleaning, and other household work. Moreover, given the relatively low household income required to hire a FDW, some lower middle class households say that hiring a temporary replacement while paying maternity benefits puts a serious strain on their household finances. Clearly, and perhaps not surprisingly, the commonly stated public concerns are those of employers, not of workers. This is reinforced by the idea that hiring FDWs is a form of “work-as-aid” for which FDWs should be grateful, and not demand their labor rights (Constable 2014:16–18). The idea that a FDW might have the right to hold a job and have a child in Hong Kong is antithetical to the construction of “domestic helpers.” Her pregnancy or motherhood is seen as impinging on the rights of employers, not those of workers. The domestic worker employment contract defines her solely as a temporary migrant and a domestic worker. In her workplace for six days a week, the FDW subjectivity dominates and effectively subsumes other aspects that can only be expressed outside of work. Migrant workers who forsake their legal FDW work in exchange for motherhood in Hong Kong are transgressive, embracing a subjectivity that is considered incompatible with that of FDW. Unlike Singapore, which requires FDWs to undergo regular pregnancy tests and requires that they return home if they are pregnant, Hong Kong’s policies do not prohibit FDWs from being or becoming pregnant. Hong Kong’s Employment Ordinance includes a prohibition against terminating pregnant workers—including domestic workers—who have provided medical certification of their pregnancy to the employer. But in practice it is well known that employers do not want pregnant domestic workers and that they often terminate their contracts if they are pregnant. Domestic workers, on the other hand, are often reluctant to tell their employers they are pregnant too early, for fear

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of being terminated. Often they delay notifying their employers about pregnancy as long as possible, which means they are not protected by the Employment Ordinance. As long as an employer has not been officially notified of the pregnancy, the worker can be given a month’s notice or pay in lieu of notice and legally terminated for no reason. In some cases, fearing the employer’s reaction to her pregnancy, a woman chooses to terminate her own contract before the employer finds out. By doing so she forfeits her right to paid maternity leave and loses her health benefits once her visa runs out (two weeks after the termination of her contract). In yet other cases, employers may abide by the rules, allowing the worker maternity leave, but the worker may choose not to return to work afterward because she cannot bring her child with her to work and cannot afford local childcare. Few and far between are employers who allow a FDW to keep her child with her (space is often a factor). It is financially prohibitive for a FDW—whose legal salary is about US$400 to US$500 per month—to hire someone to care for her child six days a week. Among the many factors that lead women (whether pregnant or not) to remain in Hong Kong after their contracts and visas expire are financial ones. Given Hong Kong’s New Conditions of Stay, popularly referred to as the “twoweek rule,” workers must have a new contract or leave Hong Kong within two weeks of the termination of their contracts; those who remain without permission after the two-week period have overstayed.1 If a domestic worker’s contract has ended or was terminated early and she still owes money to the recruitment agency, or if she feels pressure to continue to send remittances home but cannot afford to pay the equivalent of an additional five months of wages that it costs to process a new contract with an Indonesian recruitment agency (the cost is less in the Philippines), she may weigh the risks and decide to remain in Hong Kong without a valid visa. Some women who overstayed their visas spoke to me about the initial appeal of remaining and working illegally in Hong Kong. They expected to earn more than double the HK$3580 monthly wage of a FDW, commonly receiving around HK$8000 or HK$9000 a month to wash dishes or assist in the kitchen of a restaurant.2 To some, the notion of “living out” (away from the employer) in a boarding house or a subdivided flat with other migrant workers and the freedom it afforded were also appealing, despite the cost of renting as opposed to living in. 3 Other factors that might prompt a woman to overstay include romantic relationships in Hong Kong, which might end if they leave, or pregnancies that are “out of wedlock” and therefore make it difficult to envision returning home without bringing shame and humiliation to oneself and one’s family.

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As a result, women who are pregnant or give birth in Hong Kong may be more likely than others to choose to remain there after their visas have expired. Similar to other workers, once a pregnant FDW has been terminated or has left her employer, she is faced with the challenge of how to secure food, shelter, and medical care for herself and her child. There are three main options which in practice overlap or alternate over a period of time. One is to “surrender” or turn oneself in to immigration authorities and to agree to be deported. As long as a person has not overstayed her visa too long (usually under two years) she is likely to be given a suspended sentence (on condition that she does not breach any other conditions of stay), and she is then required to return directly home with her child. A second option is to become undocumented and to live under the official radar, finding shelter with acquaintances, friends, or boyfriends who are themselves overstayers or asylum seekers. As long as she is physically capable of working, she may find work to help cover rent and food. A third option—the one that I primarily focus on in the remainder of this chapter—is to file a torture claim. This provides her with recognizance papers and minimal material benefits for a limited period of time—sometimes for several years—while the claim is being processed. This option is often combined with doing “illegal work” or, as is often the case, is opted for after one has been arrested for doing illegal work as a way to defer deportation and remain longer in Hong Kong. The next section presents the story of Endri (a pseudonym) to provide some ethnographic basis for the discussion and analysis that follows. Endri was one of more than fifty mothers and former domestic workers whom I got to know in 2010 through 2012. She is one of dozens of women whom I typically saw and socialized with several times a week. Although there are unique qualities to each of the women and their stories, and there is no “typical” experience, I focus on Endri because her story points to many common themes: her temporary relationship with an asylum seeker in Hong Kong who fathered her children but played no practical role in her life or her children’s lives, her choice of giving birth in Hong Kong, her decision to file a torture claim, her strategies for survival in Hong Kong, and her reluctance and her frequently delayed plan to return home. Less typical—but not unique—was her arrest and her experience in prison.

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“Hong Kong Happy” in the Shadow of the State Endri, in her late twenties when I met her in 2011, arrived in Hong Kong from Java in 2002 to work as a “helper.” Like many other Indonesians who went to work abroad after middle school at the age of fifteen or sixteen, she was below Indonesia’s requisite minimum age of eighteen, so her recruitment agency in Indonesia easily found her someone else’s papers (typically a school certificate) to use as the basis for her new identity. Her new identity added three years to her age and gave her a new name and new birth date—so that she could secure a passport and go to work abroad. After several months in an Indonesian recruiter’s training camp, where she learned Cantonese and some fundamentals of domestic work, she was sent to work in Hong Kong. Like many others, she originally went to Hong Kong because she wanted to earn money and because her friends had told her that Hong Kong was a good place. Unlike many other Indonesian women I met whose families were poor farmers, Endri described her family as “not rich or poor.” But like many others, she nonetheless wanted to help her family financially. She was also drawn by a desire for adventure and independence. Altogether, over the years, Endri had five different employers, most of whom she said she got along with quite well. She worked for the first two for one contract each, a total of four years. While working for her second employer, unbeknownst to them, she met her first boyfriend, a Pakistani asylum seeker. As she explained, she was very young and lonely when she met him at a party of Indonesian domestic workers and South Asian men on a Sunday. He was kind and handsome and swept her off her feet. She loved him a lot and planned to be with him forever, but it turned out that he had many girlfriends. After a year together they split up. For the next year or so, still in her teens and “broken hearted,” she “was with no one” and she ignored attention from men and encouragement from friends to move on and have some fun. She worked for her third employer for four years. During that time she met a good-looking Indian watch trader, also an asylum seeker, who eventually became her boyfriend and the father of her two children. They originally met on the MTR when he asked to borrow her phone. Using a common ploy, he used her mobile phone to call his own and thereby got her number and started calling her regularly. At first she said she “kept away from him and was afraid of him.” Then, as he persisted, she told him “that I just want to be friends and that I had been badly hurt.” But he kept calling and texting and visited her on Sundays and tried to convince her to be

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his girlfriend. He said “five fingers are not alike,” meaning that “not all men are like my Pakistani boyfriend,” and he “promised to love and care for me forever.” Although she “did not believe him at first,” he persisted and said “he will make me forget.” At first “he calls me every day. Then on Sundays we eat together and play; then later I love and trust him.” While still working for her third employer, Endri became pregnant and took advantage of her maternity benefits to give birth in Hong Kong. As a domestic worker, her Hong Kong identity card entitled her to the highly subsidized hospital rates enjoyed by Hong Kong locals (her delivery cost about HK$300 for three days in the hospital). When her baby was several weeks old, she returned to Indonesia, having used up her maternity leave, thus forfeiting her job. She remained there for a few months, then sought another job and returned again to Hong Kong to work, leaving her baby in the care of her mother. After she had worked for her fourth employer for ten months, she terminated her contract, giving her employer the requisite one-month notice. The work, which included looking after an old incontinent dog that slept on her bed, had become unbearable. She then took up work with her fifth employer. During that time her boyfriend learned that his asylum claim had been rejected, and he broke up with her and returned to India. Unbeknownst to her or her boyfriend, when he left she was one month pregnant. Shortly after, she was—as she and others who knew her well described—“wrongly accused of theft” and was sentenced to eight months in prison. She began her prison sentence when she was four months pregnant. Her second baby was born during her sentence. When she was in labor, she was taken to a public hospital to deliver, then the baby spent her first four months in prison with her mother. At the beginning of her second pregnancy, given her boyfriend’s departure and their breakup, Endri had briefly considered having an abortion but ultimately decided against it. She also considered giving the baby up for adoption in Hong Kong. After the baby was born, a friend in Indonesia who had been married for ten years but had no children asked if she could have the baby, but by then Endri had decided to keep her, half hoping the baby might help her to win her boyfriend back. When we talked, Endri adamantly said that she must now devote herself to being a good mother and that she did not want another boyfriend in Hong Kong because she refused to be hurt again and did not trust men. After her boyfriend left, she fantasized about having “a family life” with him. She learned that he was in China with his new Indian wife, a woman his parents

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approved of, but who his friends told her is “thin and ugly.” At some point, he told her he would marry her as well, but she said she did not think he meant it. As she explained, I can’t be like friends who are Hong Kong happy even when they know a relationship will not last beyond Hong Kong. I can’t lie and just love them and be Hong Kong happy. I don’t want a broken heart. Lonely is okay. I have children to think about. [In Hong Kong] men are not serious. Maybe 1 in a 1000 men are good ones. . . . My friends meet other boys. I cannot because my heart was very broken. Sometime I dream that he is back and we have a happy family. But I need to work to take care of my babies and it will work only in the dreams. When she left prison, Endri filed a torture claim with the Immigration Department. Like many others, she vaguely knew about such claims from her boyfriend, but she also learned of them from other former FDWs in prison. Many women, to my surprise, reported learning about torture claims from immigration officers, hospital staff, or social workers. As Endri told me about her claim, she seemed to dismiss its content, and quickly said she knew she would not ultimately win it. Meanwhile, simply having filed her claim meant she could not be deported and, as discussed below, it provided her and her baby with access to basic support through the government-funded organization of International Social Services (ISS) and a few other charity organizations.

Torture Claims “Why do so many women file torture claims?” I asked one former domestic worker torture claimant in 2011. “That’s easy,” she answered, “it’s because you get free rent and free food! In Indonesia we have to work for money!” Despite her seemingly simple answer, I found that most torture claimants worked and most considered the meager resources provided by ISS insufficient. Many considered the opportunities to earn money in Hong Kong far better than in Indonesia, which is why they migrated in the first place. Time is one of the most valuable resources that a torture claim provides; time in Hong Kong delays their return and provides an opportunity to shape and better exert control over the circumstances and conditions of their return.

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Filing a torture claim is especially useful to women with children, as noted above, because what they often want and need more than anything is time to figure out what to do next. It is also useful for government clerks and functionaries in the immigration department, in the social welfare department, and in hospitals who often are the ones who recommend to women that they file torture claims so as to remain in Hong Kong. Several women told me that when they told their immigration case officer, “I do not want to go home” or “I am afraid of what will happen to me if I go home,” the case officer told them to file a torture claim. Women also learned about torture claims from social workers and hospital staff who told them to go to ISS to find out how to file a claim so as to get prenatal care and deliver in the hospital. In promoting this option, the former worker (or pregnant worker) not only learned about what appeared to be a legitimate option but she also became someone else’s problem. She left and went elsewhere, which some suggested was a major motive for overworked petty bureaucrats. In a broad sense, two sorts of “asylum” claims could be made in Hong Kong at the time of my research. One was for those who seek refugee status through the UNHCR, and the other was for those who petition under the Convention Against Torture, to which Hong Kong is a signatory, and which is run by the Hong Kong government’s Immigration Department. Although some asylum seekers apply for one and then the other after they are turned down by the first, torture claims were, until very recently, more common among former FDWs. From 2006 to 2011, there were more than 10,000 torture claims submitted to the Hong Kong government, over 15 percent of which were from former FDWs. After the Hong Kong government began accepting torture claims, the number of claims from former FDWs increased from only 2 in 2006, to a peak of 600 in 2010, and then down to 244 in 2012 (Constable 2014:190–91).4 Torture claims provide legitimate opportunities for individuals to avoid deportation. Only one torture claim has ever been approved in Hong Kong (as of this writing), and legal experts claim it is next to impossible for those who enter Hong Kong as domestic workers (and work as FDWs) to win a claim, but it nonetheless provides a way for individuals to remain in Hong Kong with recognizance papers (or what some call “immigration papers”) while the claim is under review. Although this was not the original purpose of the process, it is how it works for many former domestic worker mothers who are claimants. As one lawyer explained, such cases are almost impossible to win. The

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only case ever granted in Hong Kong was to a person who arrived there and immediately filed a claim. If a woman originally came to Hong Kong as a domestic worker on a work visa, worked for a period of time and then only later files a torture claim, it is difficult for her to prove that she would face torture if she returned home. Although women might claim that they and their children will face discrimination because the child was born “out of wedlock” or because of the child’s father’s religious, national, racial, or ethnic identity or her own religious conversion, or because their families will disown them or cause them physical or mental harm, this does not fit the convention’s definition of “torture” as mental or physical violence that is condoned or perpetrated by a representative of the state or by others without an effort by the state to prevent it.5 As noted, a claimant is not permitted to work but can remain in Hong Kong while the case is pending.6 During that time, some torture claimants make ends meet by locating low-paying illegal work that places them in vulnerable and exploitable positions. With the approval of Hong Kong’s Social Welfare officials, they are also eligible for meager “in-kind” social support from ISS. ISS distributes food to torture or asylum seekers every ten days. Basic food such as rice and milk are provided. According to its website, ISS also provides donated clothing when available and housing in flats that house eleven people or, with approval, housing allowance paid directly to the landlord (http://www.isshk.org/e/customize/migrants_assistance.asp). According to the women I spoke with, ISS provides adults with HK$1200 per month in rent and an additional HK$600 if they have a child. The rent is paid directly to the landlord, and the landlord and the space provided must be “approved” by ISS. They provide allowance for transportation to hearings and medical appointments and a monthly allocation of basic toiletries such as shampoo, soap, and toothpaste. I was told that the funds provided by ISS are often insufficient to cover the whole rent and that they do not normally provide the required rental deposit. However, certain landlords who rent out rooms in subdivided flats or old houses with makeshift rooms and often illegal extensions in the New Territories will be flexible and negotiate with tenants so that they can be creative about paying the rent that ISS does not cover. One creative strategy I learned about was finding roommates with whom to share the small space and who can contribute to the rent or provide babysitting services. Tenants are not difficult to find. They include undocumented workers, FDWs whose employers have kicked them out, and women who

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have visas but no place to live while they await a legal hearing or labor tribunal case against an employer. Some women stay with boyfriends but sublet their rooms to others. One asylum seeker I knew stayed with a friend and rented out his geographically well-situated room by the night (like a hotel room) to African traders and businessmen who traveled between Hong Kong and China. Among the arrangements I observed were employed FDWs who paid ISS recipients to have a place to stay—and where they could cook or rest or socialize—on Sundays, so they could be away from their employers. One European employer paid for the arrangement herself. I knew undocumented workers who shared a room and a mattress with a torture claimant and her child for several weeks or months in exchange for money or babysitting. Fellow torture claimants who shared a room sometimes got money back from the landlord, who in turn made more money by renting out the second room to someone else. I knew of ISS case workers who checked up on the housing arrangements and made surprise visits to make sure the clients lived in the place for which the rent was paid and in “suitable” spaces. Several women and children I knew were required to move from dangerous illegal rooftop structures or from flats that were suspected of housing sex workers. This sort of surveillance, however, is rarely effective enough to deter creative tenant arrangements, some of which can be explained as guests who are “just visiting.” With the additional money provided by the creative use of “tenants,” torture claimants buy necessities that are not necessarily provided by charities, including highly valued disposable diapers. As Endri and others explained, disposable diapers are one of their biggest expenses (up to HK$400 per month). She and others complained of discrimination against Muslim mothers by Christian charities. From their perspective, diapers were only given to Christian asylum seekers and torture claimants. An alternative explanation was that some organizations did not consider former FDWs “legitimate” torture claimants and only gave mothers supplies if the child’s father was a “legitimate” claimant and a client of that organization.7 Tenants and roommates also pooled their resources and their labor to facilitate other means of earning money. One popular way to earn money “without working” or with minimal chance of being caught was by queuing (waiting in line) for high demand consumer goods. The November 2011 lines outside the Apple Store in Hong Kong for the new iPhone 4S provided an excellent source of income for several mothers who spent three nights camping in line (some with their children) amid crowds of people and clusters of

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South Asian men who had also been hired by “bosses” to buy the limited five phones that had just been released in Asia. The basic model cost HK$5080 and could then be resold by the bosses for at least another HK$1000 in Hong Kong shops. Several groups of mainland Chinese also joined the line, planning to resell the phones at a profit in China. Endri, who helped organize a work team for her South Asian boss (a friend of her ex-boyfriend), who preferred to hire women—especially mothers—because they are “less trouble” than men, received HK$2000 compensation (and her one-year-old another HK$200) and most of the women on her team received HK$1500 (approximately US$200) for the three nights. This income was especially welcome for the single mothers I knew who were also torture claimants, including two mothers who planned to return to Indonesia the week after this “queuing job” and who were otherwise penniless, one mother who considered a roommate a last resort and needed the money to cover her rent, and one mother who was actively saving money each month for her eventual return home. This money-making scheme was especially “safe” because it would be difficult for the police to “prove” that it was a job. Although these women would be most unlikely owners of such phones, which cost HK$5080 in the first instance, they nonetheless participated in and benefited from the global market in luxury goods. When asked by police to show the money with which to purchase the phone, presumably to justify their occupation of space in the line, they simply provided the rehearsed reply and told the officer that a friend would bring the money when they reached the front of the line. Two women I knew joked about how many buses it would take to hold all the South and Southeast Asian undocumented migrants and illegal workers should immigration choose to round them all up and haul them off to the detention center in Castle Peak. Despite police attempts to break up the crowd, the queuers continued to return through the night and to defend their places in line so as to be among the first allowed in the Apple Store before the phones ran out. When it was all over and the women I knew managed to defend their places and earn their pay they chatted nostalgically about how much fun it was: free McDonald’s food from their bosses, a festival atmosphere, and being surrounded by the company of friends who helped to hold and entertain their babies. Following many complaints from locals who claimed they were excluded from purchasing iPhones directly from Apple, Apple switched to an online pre-ordering system shortly afterwards, doing away with one opportunity for “queuers.” As Endri and other explained, however, there are still plenty of

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other opportunities for queuing in Hong Kong as concert tickets and limited edition goods are always desired by those too busy and wealthy to wait in line for themselves. In 2010 I was told that those who had filed torture claims were likely to be facing a five-year backlog.8 But by late 2011 it was evident that many former FDW cases were being expedited and rapidly rejected. In the course of my research I met dozens of former domestic workers who had filed torture claims several years earlier. While at first they might have harbored hopes that the claim might allow them to remain in Hong Kong or to settle elsewhere, when I talked to them in 2011 and 2012, none of them expected to win their claims. Yet women still filed them, knowing that it might allow them to remain in Hong Kong at least a few months longer. By the middle of 2011 it was evident to NGO staff and to applicants themselves that the heyday of former FDWs filing torture claims was on the wane. Official figures report that thirtysix former FDW claimants were rejected in 2010 and more than 400 each of the subsequent two years (Constable 2014:191). Some women in 2011 reported being rejected out of hand, without being allowed to submit a claim, being told they had no basis to apply. Others, who had recently filed, received rejections much faster that those who had filed years earlier and who had still not received a final judgment. These rejections—several of which I read or was told about—all followed a similar format: they acknowledged that women might face difficulties back home but stressed that those difficulties did not fit the official definition of “torture” as set out in the convention. Some were told that the Philippine or Indonesian governments would protect them from domestic violence or persecution and that given the claimant’s experience in Hong Kong, they could conceivably find another place to live in Indonesia or the Philippines. Several women I knew chose not to wait to be rejected or deported and instead withdrew their cases and returned home on their own terms. Some did so after being arrested and serving time in prison for illegal work and being unwilling to take that risk again. Others withdrew their cases because they had had enough time to communicate with their families about the child and their families had become accustomed to the idea and were willing to welcome them back, or offered to take care for the child so that the women could return to work abroad again and resume sending remittances.

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The Threat of Migrants In Hong Kong, as in many other wealthy migrant destination countries of the so-called global north, both documented and undocumented migrant workers resolve the problem of local labor shortages. Migrant workers are often willing to do 3D (dirty, difficult, dangerous or demeaning) jobs that locals do not want to do, and they often do them for much lower wages than locals. Yet despite the widely acknowledged benefits they bring to locals, migrants in the twenty-first century are widely viewed as a problem and as a threat to the status and well-being of the citizens of the destination country. It is assumed that as temporary migrants from less wealthy regions, they would naturally want to stay longer, settle there permanently, and bring family members to join them because the conditions are better than in their home countries. Despite the benefits workers provide to their employers and to the wider community, the literal and figurative costs of providing them and their family members with the social benefits of citizens or permanent residents (such as schooling, medical care, access to public housing, and a living wage) are, in many places, considered too high a price to pay. Policies are written, implemented, and adjusted to guarantee that temporary migrants (“foreign workers” or “guest workers”) remain strictly temporary, precarious, and deportable, thus institutionalizing the socioeconomic inequalities between citizens and others. Among former domestic workers and their children in Hong Kong, the process is especially painful and painstaking and the prospects for acquiring residency virtually impossible. Yet these women creatively and perhaps desperately seize opportunities that allow them to remain in Hong Kong, at least longer if not permanently. At the very least, this allows them the possibility of earning additional money, albeit illegally, and to delay the inevitable point at which they will likely need to return home, to face the decision of whether to do so with or without their child, whether to attempt reconciliation with their families back home, and whether in some cases they can figure out a way to go abroad again—necessarily to a different destination such as Taiwan or Singapore or the Middle East since they will not be permitted to return to Hong Kong—to earn money to support themselves, their families, and the new child. This chapter has provided examples of how the everyday lives, experiences, and decision-making processes of former FDW mothers are influenced and shaped by Hong Kong laws and policies. Policies regarding labor migra-

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tion and residency (or “citizenship” in the broadest sense) impact people’s everyday lives in unfortunate, unequal, and unintended ways. The impact can be especially harsh for pregnant FDWs and those with Hong Kong born babies. Policies and practices that define FDWs narrowly as workers, and regulations such as Hong Kong’s “two-week rule,” which force workers to return home within two weeks of the termination of their contracts (in the absence of a new one), paired with the common practice of terminating pregnant workers, have both intended and unintended consequences. The intended or stated consequence is to regulate workers and to restrict their stay in Hong Kong. The unintended consequences are to encourage some workers (especially pregnant ones) to overstay and to thus take advantage of tactics such as filing torture claims or asylum claims, and filing appeals when those claims are rejected, as they inevitably are, in order to remain in Hong Kong, longer if not permanently. As overstayers, torture claimants, or asylum seekers, who receive minimal material support, women (especially former FDW mothers) often feel they have little option but to supplement ISS provisions by working illegally. As such, they provide cheap labor to the precarious low wage sector that locals avoid. Such workers, like Endri, are sometimes caught and spend time in prison. They are among what De Genova calls “deportable noncitizens [who] are pervasively subjected to myriad conditions of social degradation, globally” (2013:1). This chapter shows, like the rest of this volume, how migrant workers encounter both obstacles and opportunities in the communities where they work. They learn to maneuver around restrictive immigration policies. States, moreover, often unintentionally produce the very kinds of migrant irregularity they aim to prevent. Torture claims have become a means for overstayers, undocumented workers, and FDWs whose visas expired, to remain in Hong Kong longer, but usually not permanently. For migrant mothers in particular, torture claims are currently a useful tactic and a source of agency, a tactic that helps them to claim and express their subjectivities as mothers, not just workers, and to stay in Hong Kong with their babies and sometimes with their partners. Since 2011, when the processing of torture claims became more rapid, many applicants received quick rejections and went home. Yet several years after I met her, close to six years since she filed her initial claim, Endri is still in Hong Kong with her younger daughter. Her torture claim was rejected, as were her appeal and her asylum claim. But she had found another tactic to stay longer, I learned in early 2014, something she assured me she would explain in person when we meet again.

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Notes Some of the material discussed in this chapter first appeared in Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor (University of California Press, 2014). I am grateful to them for permission to use it here. I also wish to thank Sara Friedman, Pardis Mahdavi, the participants in our Bellagio Seminar, and the staff and clients at PathFinders Hong Kong, the Mission for Migrant Workers, the Asian Migrants Coordinating Body, Christian Action, and the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants. I owe my biggest debt of gratitude to the migrant workers, migrant mothers, and migrant activists who have shared their lives with me and taught me to see the world with new eyes. I dedicate this chapter to Dr. Irene Fernandez. 1. See Sim and Wee (2010:150–51) and Wee and Sim (2005:189–92) for a concise discussion of the negative implications of the two-week rule for workers; see also Constable (2007:145–48). 2. In 2008 the minimum monthly wage was set at HK$3,580 per month. In June 2011 it was raised to HK$3,740 for new contracts and in 2014 to HK$4,110. One US dollar is worth about HK$7.78. 3. This is part of the process that Nicholas De Genova describes as “the reification of migrant ‘illegality,’ ” which is “always accompanied by its shadowy, publicly unacknowledged or disavowed, obscene supplement: the large-scale recruitment of illegalized migrants as legally vulnerable, precarious, and thus tractable labour” (2013:2). 4. As of this writing in 2014, the processes for reviewing torture and asylum claims are being combined, along with claims against other cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment or punishment. 5. Torture is defined in Article 1 of the 1985 UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind . . . when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in official capacity.” Article 3 states that “No State Party shall expel, return [refouler] or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture” and that “For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.” 6. In 2010, hundreds of South Asian torture claimants left Hong Kong after an earlier policy allowing such claimants to work was reversed (“South Asian Asylum Seekers” 2010). 7. Staff at such organizations disputed these claims and said they simply had a limit to how many clients they could effectively assist.

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8. One journalist estimated, perhaps tongue in cheek, that given the current rate of reviewing torture claims, it would take thirty-one years to process all the claimants (Tsang 2011).

References Constable, Nicole. 1996. “Jealousy, Chastity and Abuse: Chinese Maids and Foreign Helpers in Hong Kong.” Modern China 22(4):448–79. ———. 1997. “Sexuality and Discipline Among Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong.” American Ethnologist 24(3):539–58. ———. 2000. “Dolls, T-Birds, and Ideal Workers: The Negotiation of Filipino Identity in Hong Kong.” In Home and Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Kathleen M. Adams and Sara A. Dickey, 221–47. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2007. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2014. Born Out of Place: Migrant Mothers and the Politics of International Labor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coutin, Susan. 2000. Legalizing Moves: Salvadorian Immigrants’ Struggle for U.S. Residency. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Stephen F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Genova, Nicholas. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31:419–47. ———. 2013. “Spectacles of Migrant ‘Illegality’: The Scene of Exclusion, the Obscene of Inclusion.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36(7):1180–98. Lan, Pei-Chia. 2006. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. PathFinders. 2012. PathFinders 2011 Annual Report. Tai Kok Tsui, Kowloon, Hong Kong: PathFinders. Pratt, Geraldine. 2012. Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sim, Amy and Vivienne Wee. 2010. “Undocumented Indonesian Workers in Macau: The Human Outcome of Colluding Interests.” In Migrant Workers in Asia: Distant Divides, Intimate Connections, edited by Nicole Constable, 145–63. New York: Routledge. “South Asian Asylum Seekers Withdraw Torture Claims in Hong Kong.” 2010. Earth Times, January 5. http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/302135. Retrieved February 5, 2011.

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Tsang, Phyllis. 2011. “6,700 Cases Pending as Torture Claimants Prove Slow to Screen.” Vision First, January 14. http://visionfirstnow.org/1019/6700-cases-pending-as -torture-claimants-prove-slow-to-screen. Retrieved February 5, 2011. Ullah, A. K. M. Ahsan. 2010. “Premarital Pregnancies among Migrant Workers: The Case of Domestic Helpers in Hong Kong.” Asian Journal of Asian Studies 16(1):62-90. UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, December 10, 1984, 1465 U.N.T.S. 85. Wee, Vivienne and Amy Sim. 2005. “Hong Kong as a Destination for Migrant Domestic Workers.” In Asian Women as Transnational Domestic Workers, edited by Shirlena Huang, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Noor A. Rahman, 175–209. Singapore: Marshall Cavendish Academic. Willen, Sarah S. 2007. Transnational Migration to Israel in Global Comparative Context. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Chapter 5

Troubling Jus Sanguinis: The State, Law, and Citizenships of Japanese-Filipino Youth in Japan Nobue Suzuki

In the literature on immigrants’ experiences, children have occupied a limited space. They have commonly been depicted as “children of immigrants” in sociological studies that are chiefly concerned with their degrees of adaptation to the host society (e.g., Rumbaut and Portes 2001). In response to the global migration of women over the past several decades and the prolonged family separations that have resulted, scholars have begun to pay more attention to “children left behind” in their home society by their migrating parents, especially by mothers (Olwig 1999; Parreñas 2005). These children have now become old enough to join their parent(s) abroad. However, few studies have thus far considered the issues pertaining to the nationality and citizenship— otherwise defined as the rights claims—of children who are joining their mothers abroad and the ambivalences that are engendered in the process of family reunification in their adopted societies. Although most nation-states consider the family to be the basic unit of society and expect members to care for each other by living together, for immigrants such ideals are not easily realized in their destination countries. Rather, various state regimes make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to bring family members to their societies of residence. Marriage to a citizen of the host state and childbirth within that union have been relatively easy ways

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for foreigners to establish legal status, which may enable them to bring family members from their home societies. However, even if the state offers immigrants certain rights, it often does so for political reasons, including upholding a humanitarian facade vis-à-vis the international community. With intensified cross-border movement, most states have, in fact, been struggling to retain their national “purity” against a rising tide of foreign residents and citizens (see Chapter 1). Like its neighbor South Korea, the post– World War II Japanese state constructed itself as a homogenous, ethno-racial nation. The romance of this mono-ethnic nation has created a bounded field in which other people and elements are consciously and unconsciously devalued, if not excluded outright from its embrace. Japan does promote the ideas of “internationalization” (kokusaika) and the “living together” (kyōsei) of people with differences. In reality, however, the state has maintained strict restrictions on new immigrants’ rights to family reunification. Amid growing anxieties about its ethnically diluted population owing to the increasing numbers of foreign residents and binational marriages, Japan has essentially retained a nonimmigration policy to this day. This is true even if the family members are children born to Japanese nationals, and such children must satisfy certain conditions in order to qualify for membership. In 2008, ten unmarried Filipina mothers of minor children fathered by Japanese men sued the Japanese state in order to redress their children’s denied Japanese nationality and to secure the unity of their family (Suzuki 2010). They succeeded in amending the law so that the children would be recognized as Japanese nationals from birth. This was a historic victory for unwed foreign women and their children, especially for women who work(ed) as hostesses in Japan’s stigmatized nightlife industries (see below for details). However, creating the possibility for children of ethno-nationally mixed parentage to obtain Japanese nationality does not in itself guarantee their inclusion in Japanese society. Thus, despite their mothers’ legal success, these new nationals face a precarious citizenship support system that has left many of them feeling estranged both at home and in their “fatherland.” Based on data I have collected from children of unwed Filipinas and Japanese men living in the Tokyo area, I analyze the complex consequences of the law’s amendment and subsequent family reunification for the nationality and citizenship experiences of children whose fathers long ago abandoned their families.1 Thus, this chapter investigates certain aspects of the intimate lives of intimate laborers in the aftermath of their massive migration to Japan and subsequent marriage and/or sexual relationships with local men. Childbirth

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and family formation and dissolution are especially pertinent for a discussion of the global migration of female intimate laborers and their complicated and precarious lives abroad. Reflecting this complexity, I use the term children to mean not so much “young people” or “minors” but “descendants,” to underscore their divergent and unequal kin and national filiations as well as the power differentials between them and their mothers and adult relatives. As I show, these different experiences of filiation and power have substantively shaped these youngsters’ lives in the intimate sphere of the family. Below, I first summarize recent discussions of children from the perspective of feminized global migration and migrants’ family relations. Scholars have suggested that children are not passive participants in family migration strategies but instead exercise their own agency and sometimes even subvert parental power. Nonetheless, as newly arrived members at home and in the host society, young immigrants usually face a different set of disciplinary forces. The children in this chapter experience these new forms of discipline as they change their nationality, a process that supposedly grants them citizenship rights. Their disadvantaged immigrant family members, however, may subsequently construe the youngsters’ new nationality as a vital asset for family survival. In the second section, I introduce the emerging body of studies of nationality and citizenship in the context of cross-border mobility and define how I use these terms in this chapter. The third section details Filipinas’ migration to Japan, where they provided intimate labor for Japanese men as nightlife hostesses and sexual partners. Nonmarital Japanese-Filipino children were born as a consequence of these liaisons, and some of their mothers subsequently defied Japan’s nationality law. This section also clarifies how the ethno-national construction of the Japanese nation-state and its legal bases have shaped the legal and socioeconomic lives of these youth. I then present two ethnographic examples of Japanese-Filipino children to capture the particular ways in which they became Japanese nationals and experienced citizenship in the family and in Japan. Their experiences suggest that their desire to acquire Japanese nationality with the hope of establishing family relations with their biological fathers and achieving better life chances in Japan has produced unexpected difficulties because of their newly acquired nationality and the indifferent state response to their plight. Prior to discussing the tangled legal, sociopolitical, and familial situations in which these youth find themselves, I provide an ethnographic example to illustrate the issues I am raising here. Keiji (“KG”)2 is a twenty-year-old man who is the son of an unwed Filipina

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mother, Arlene, and a Japanese father, Satō. Satō exited his relationship with Arlene before KG was born without recognizing KG as his son and thus without conferring Japanese nationality on him. Subsequently, Arlene sent KG to the Philippines to be cared for by his grandparents while she remained in Japan to work and support them. In April 2009, a year after KG graduated from high school, Arlene invited him to join her and her current Filipino livein partner and their two young children in Japan. The reason for Arlene’s invitation, KG was told, was to be able to “live with everyone in the family together.” KG came to Japan with the additional hope of meeting his biological father and acquiring Japanese nationality, difficult though those desires were to realize, as I discuss below. However, with assistance from groups committed to supporting these children, KG was able to locate his father. KG described the process and subsequent joy as follows: I really prepared myself that I wouldn’t be able to see my father . . . and even if I saw him, most cases like my friends, they were not recognized by their father and denied. But God is so good. . . . [My supporters], even if we only met for the first time, were telling me “Don’t give up! There’s still hope.” . . . [They returned to me] so quickly [to say], “We found your father!” YEAH! It was so thrilling, you know? For many youngsters who share similar backgrounds, meeting their fathers and attaining Japanese nationality do not necessarily generate a happy ending. Instead, what often awaits these youth are heavy responsibilities to support their family members in Japan, many of whom they had only tenuous contact with before their reunification. KG thus explained to me some of his new life situations after changing his nationality: So, I am definitely aware of my responsibilities to my family, but how can I help if I have not established myself? It seems like [Mom] wanted me to work and work. She said, “Your dreams would be fine so long as you have money.” But I wanted to have a different path [from what she expects me to follow]. It’s too risky but I want to pursue my dreams. [Mom] said, “It’s just the same [son].” “What’s my reward?” [I’d ask her]. And even at my [young] age, I really want a job that enriches my personality. Then, you quickly learn that [the family] always think that I am half Japanese because of the way I look, right? So, “once you go to Japan, you can get [what you want].” But the reality is cruel. I need

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to find a stable job. . . . My choice [to come here] has been taxing for me. In this chapter, I examine the kinds of ambivalences KG expresses here that are born out of the gap between his nationality and the weakly honored citizenship of Japanese-Filipino children. Their struggles began in the processes of women’s global migration and engagements in intimate labor in Japan and their subsequent legal victory. And, at present, the youngsters’ struggles are situated in complex immigrant family dynamics and in the shadows of Japan’s exclusionary immigration policies.

Children and the Family in Global Migration In studies of global migration, scholars and development researchers have tended to speak from adult- and Western-centric perspectives that render children innocent, dependent, and passive (e.g., Matsui 1988; Reese 2001; Rodriguez Garcia 2006; for a concise summary, see Ní Laoire et al. 2011:1–8). Departing from such an understanding of child migration, a body of literature emerging since the late 1990s has situated children in the changing family relations that are evolving in global migration processes (Dreby 2007; Knörr 2005; Ní Laoire et al. 2011; Olwig 1999; Orellana et al. 2001). These studies suggest that far from being passive, the experiences of children involved in migration are dynamic, conflict-laden, and sometimes even subversive of the usual order and power relations within a family. Their lives and values are in flux while moving between different states, systems, and cultures. One such example is the case of child migrants who grow up in the host society and become linguistic and cultural interpreters for their parents (Reynolds and Orellana 2009). Being exposed in their adopted societies to discourses on children’s rights that offer protection from parental abuse, young immigrants may openly do things that would normally invite punishment if done in their parental homeland (Ong 2003). Thus, children’s knowledge of two sets of norms, linguistic skills, and alternative behaviors potentially challenges the cultural norms and generational power of their parents. In other situations, family members utilize other members’ access to better material conditions. Under contemporary neoliberal conditions, “family values” can easily be transformed into the “value of the family” according to which members expect, explore, and exploit the economic usefulness of other

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family members living in financially better-off countries (Creed 2000). Intrafamilial competition over values and resources may intensify when family members are situated in different geographical locations because of imagined gaps in material power between the home society in the “South” and host society in the “North” (Suzuki 2004). Karen Olwig (1999), for example, has shown that the basic well-being of children left behind may depend on their material usefulness in the eyes of their caretaking relatives in the homeland. Even if remittances children receive from parents abroad ease their difficulties, the children’s caretakers at home may nevertheless appropriate the money and their wards’ labor for their own benefit. Conversely, when children receive no financial support from their overseas parents, they may feel an absence of parental care. When they join their biological parents abroad, the estranged youngsters may feel uncomfortable calling strangers their “parents” and the unfamiliar and unwelcoming place their “home.” As KG’s case illustrates, even if they have secured legal citizenship or long-term residency, these youngsters may experience undesirable familial citizenship at home and alienation in the host society. While not falling into the trap of a “victim” discourse, Geraldine Pratt (2012), on the other hand, has extended these observations and shown the family conflicts among Filipina domestics who came to Vancouver on Canada’s Live-In Caregiver Program and their children in the processes of separation and reunification in Canada. The Program is one of the very few schemes in the world that, after two years, technically grants migrant domestics access to permanent residency, which in turn enables them to sponsor their family members’ immigration. Yet, the bureaucratic obstacles to realizing this goal, compounded by migrant women’s acute socioeconomic hardships, result in long periods of separation for family members. These separations have generated multiple conflicts when families are finally reunited. Pratt suggests that the structural violence committed by both the Philippine and Canadian governments fails to support these immigrants so that they may enjoy stability and dignity. Although the youth introduced in this chapter are categorically Japanese nationals, many of them nevertheless share some of the experiences of state violence Pratt describes: personal, familial, and social dislocation to the extent that they feel estranged in their “homeland.” Their situations can be worse than Pratt’s cases in Vancouver because Filipinos’ proficiency in English, albeit at various levels, does not help them much in Japan, and they must navigate their lives in the Japanese language. While many nation-states, including

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immigrant countries, expect the unity of people through cultural and linguistic competences, these culturally Filipino children in Japan may find that their legal Japanese nationality actually weakens their citizenship claims to rights and belonging.

Unallied Nationality and Citizenship One’s national belonging, rights claims, and life chances are seriously challenged when an individual crosses significant political, legal, and social borders. This is because the state defines who its members are and what benefits they are entitled to as well as what duties they are expected to perform. Scholars have used the concepts of nationality and citizenship to describe this inclusion/exclusion of a particular group of people and their entitlements, but both terms have multiple meanings. I use “nationality” to mean those who are legal-juridical members of a country—that is, passport holders—regardless of their ethnicity, social ties, or attachments. Citizenship, on the other hand, refers to the provision of rights and protections that are ideally applied equally to all legal members of a nation-state, making them citizens or rights-bearing individuals (Bosniak 2006). Yet in reality, class, gender, ethnicity, and other differences create a gap between nationality and citizenship such that people within the nation-state do not necessarily enjoy the same access to social services or have the same ability to claim their rights (e.g., Caldwell et al. 2009). This disparity may be felt more acutely when people relocate to unfamiliar places, resulting in feelings of estrangement for both foreign-born and indigenous nationals. For instance, unlike their urban counterparts, Chinese rural residents who migrate to urban areas within China cannot exercise their civil rights to be educated because China’s household registration system attaches those rights to a particular locality (Di Martino 2011). Because they lack the official documents of urban residency, rural nationals experience life conditions that Jacqueline Bhabha (2011) calls “effective statelessness.” Linda Kerber (2007:19) considers these people “noncitizen nationals” because they are Chinese nationals but do not enjoy state protections and rights provisions. Similarly, numerous Japanese-Filipino children are becoming noncitizen nationals, Japanese nationals without the kinds of rights that other nationals enjoy. Moreover, having been separated from their families for a number of years, many of them have trouble establishing membership in their own family. Indeed, for countless global migrants the meanings of family and of family

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relationships may depart significantly from culturally endorsed norms and become sites of conflict (see Chapters 1, 9). Such is the case of KG described above. But how do they become Japanese nationals to begin with? I now turn to the historical, legal, and sociopolitical processes that have enabled the birth of Japanese-Filipino children and structured their ability to become Japanese nationals.

Birth, Nationality, and Japanese Laws The contemporary presence of children born to Filipina mothers and Japanese fathers is closely tied to Japan’s capitalist expansion in Asia. From the 1950s, Japanese companies sent employees, mostly men, to the Philippines, some of whom became involved in sexual and marital relationships with local women. In the 1970s, the rise of sex tourism, initially promoted by then Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and soon followed by Japanese tourist industries, expanded sexual contact zones for the two peoples (Richter 1989: chap. 3; Truong 1990; see also Suzuki 2000). After the massive protests against sex tourism during that decade, the direction of flows reversed and Japan became the primary recipient of Filipina entertainers in their teens and twenties working in Japan’s nightlife establishments. Most intimate laborers came on entertainer visas, which lasted for a maximum of six months. Other Filipinas had various visas which allowed them to work part time (e.g., as students) and still others did so as tourists without work permits. The businesses as well as the situations of the people involved—Japanese customers, mostly men, and Filipina workers, mostly women—made the nightclubs circumstantial contact zones in which both parties could explore affective, sexual, and material opportunities. The “game” in the clubs commonly required that the women provide feminine services and sexualized overtures to let their customers enjoy their male importance (Suzuki 2000; Parreñas 2011). Receiving such gendered care led many men to desire these women as sexual and/or marital partners.3 Conversely, the women felt lonely and insecure working in the nightlife business in a foreign country, which also diminished their gendered value among Christian and Muslim Filipinas (see the case of Helen, below). Furthermore, many had children of their own in the Philippines from previous relationships, often with Filipino men (Suzuki 2002). Aside from these children left behind, the majority of the women also felt a strong responsibility to “uplift” the quality of life for their natal families

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in the Philippines. For them, marriage to a Japanese national was, or appeared to be, a sure way to remain “respectable” and achieve their goals. Other Filipinas also met their Japanese partners through business contacts, matrimonial introductions, and in other contact zones in Japan and the Philippines. Marriage and sexual relationships took place under these structural, capitalist, familial, and personal conditions, leading to the birth of Japanese-Filipino children. Although Japan and the Philippines are both jus sanguinis states— conferring nationality through descent from a national—they require different conditions to determine children’s nationality. Under the 1987 constitution of the Philippines, a child becomes a Filipino citizen (i.e., “national” in this chapter) when she or he has a Filipino-citizen parent at the time of birth, and from 2003 the government began to honor dual citizenship. Japan, on the other hand, requires more complex criteria, and multiple nationalities are not legally recognized for Japanese aged twenty-two and older. Before the 2008 amendment, Japanese nationality was assessed using a matrix of the Nationality Law (NL) and the Civil Code (CC). NL Article 2-1 defines the Japanese nationality of a child as follows: “When, at the time of its birth, the father or the mother is a Japanese national.” NL Article 3-1 further qualified (before the 2008 amendment) that having a Japanese parent “at the time of its birth” meant under the law that the parents were formally married or the Japanese parent (practically, the father) officially acknowledged the child prenatally. In other words, for a child born to unmarried parents when only the father was Japanese, the father had to officially acknowledge paternity before the child’s birth for the child to become a Japanese national. Prior to the development of scientific methods to prove genetic relationships, and in this matter even after such innovations, the state determined a child’s biological father based on CC 772, which states, “a child conceived by a wife during marriage shall be presumed to be the child of her husband.” The institution of marriage has thus been a critical state technology to establish an individual’s civil status and Japanese nationality in the case of cross-national relationships, but this reliance on marriage as the basis for paternity made it impossible for a child conceived out of wedlock and whose mother was not Japanese to acquire Japanese nationality. Unaware of these legal constraints in Japan, most Filipinas assumed that giving birth in Japan to children fathered by Japanese men would make the children Japanese nationals. These legal issues obviously do not concern Filipinas who are married to Japanese men and who thus have secured the

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Japanese nationality of their children through the legal imprimatur of marriage. However, in many other cases Filipinas have been detrimentally affected because their Japanese partners deserted them without recognizing their children. Tracing the men’s whereabouts is also difficult for most Filipinas, as the majority cannot read Japanese and many have limited knowledge of their partners’ backgrounds, including their names written in Japanese characters. Some had wedding ceremonies in Japan and/or in the Philippines, but for the Japanese to formalize their marriages, they must report them to Japanese authorities. Many men failed to do so because they were already married or avoided responsibilities. At various times, when the women realized the necessity, they registered their children with Philippine authorities. Many mothers returned to the Philippines when their visas expired or when they found no opportunities to sustain their lives in Japan. Although there is no way of knowing the exact number, concerned people “guesstimate” that there are tens of thousands of these “illegitimate” non-Japanese national children, and the figure rose steadily starting in the 1980s. In the 2000s, with support from various organizations, some Filipinas decided to take legal action and they successfully removed the clause “at the time of its birth” in 2008. This meant that nonmarital children of foreign women who are recognized postpartum by their Japanese fathers become eligible for Japanese nationality (for details, see Suzuki 2010). Securing one’s nationality (legal citizenship) alone, however, does not assure other citizenships. In fact, how a nation-state defines itself as a unified body also determines how differently situated individuals within it may claim their rights and entitlements. As mentioned above, Japan, especially in its postwar configuration, has defined its nationhood as ethno-racially homogenous, and the government has promoted an ideology of a unified state territory peopled by Japanese nationals all presumably possessing appropriate linguistic and cultural capital inculcated through the national education system. Japan’s adherence to a nonimmigrant policy reflects this idealized nationhood, and as a consequence, there have been no state-organized language and skills training programs for newcomer residents. When these programs are provided, often on an ad hoc basis by local governments or affiliated “international exchange associations,” the language instructors, their dedication notwithstanding, tend to be volunteers. Thus, both a valorized model of homogenous nationhood and the lack of formal programs to help newcomers expand their life chances are likely to widen the chasm between nationality and citizenship. Moreover, Japan’s refusal to recognize dual or multiple na-

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tionalities eliminates the possibility of “flexible citizenship” (Ong 1999) that enables individuals to navigate between different countries in order to optimize rights and opportunities. Under these conditions, the Filipinas’ 2008 legal victory has created a crack in a model of unified ethno-racial nationhood based on the jus sanguinis principle. Yet, their challenge may paradoxically also engender boomerang effects on their children’s lives, leading them to experience effective statelessness in their “fatherland” as well as at home with their (estranged) maternal family. The vignettes below of young newcomer Japanese nationals reflect some of these challenges. Although other citizenships are worthy of investigating in their own right, I focus primarily on the young people’s social (including familial) and economic citizenships.

New Japanese-National Youth and Their Citizenships The number of Filipino nationals aged zero to nineteen registered in Japan in the eleven years between 2001 and 2012 increased from 10,813 to 27,496 (Ministry of Justice 2013a). Some joined their families in Japan and subsequently made claims for Japanese nationality. Others had been in Japan from birth and changed their nationality there. As of June 30, 2013, 4,417 children (out of 4,720 applicants) of unwed Japanese-foreign couples have been granted Japanese nationality (Ministry of Justice 2013b). Although those who grew up in Japan may share some of the experiences described below, I focus on those who relocated to Japan in their teens, as the gap between nationality and citizenship is more salient for the latter. Reina

Reina’s mother, Helen, met Reina’s father, Fukuda, at a karaoke bar in the late 1980s. He was married with children, but he told Helen that he was in the process of divorcing his wife. Fukuda was initially sincere with Helen, but he deserted her and Reina right after Reina’s birth in Parañaque, a city south of Manila. Reina grew up with her great-grandparents and extended family and emphasized that they treated her well. Still, she felt empty and her wish was to learn about the Japanese side of herself so that she could complete her dualethnic identity. She also felt intimidated by other people such as her school teacher who constantly bullied her for not having a middle name, which under the Philippine Family Code is the mother’s maiden name for children

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born to a married couple. Having no means to remedy her situation, all Reina could do was to look at Fukuda’s photos and listen to his voice recorded on an audiotape. Meanwhile, her maternal grandmother, Remy, married a Japanese man with the intention of establishing a base in Japan for Helen and Reina. Remy also contacted a support group for children like Reina in order to locate Fukuda. With the help of these groups, when she was in her mid-teens, Reina was able to meet Fukuda in Tokyo for the first time in her life. As he promised, he had divorced his first wife; however, he had established another family at the time of their meeting. Originally, he refused to recognize Reina because doing so would inform his mother and wife about Reina’s existence through the family registration (koseki) system. Doing so would also mean that Reina, as his “illegitimate” child, would establish her right to inheritance, even if it was one half that of his “legitimate” children (CC 900-4 as of August 2014). Instead of formally acknowledging her, he agreed to provide a child allowance of 20,000 yen per month for her education until age twenty (Japan’s official age of majority), for Reina was then attending a private school. Though infrequently, he also wrote her letters and e-mails and promised to see her go through important rites of passage. Two years after Reina met him, Fukuda decided to acknowledge her as his daughter. This change in attitude seemed partly to reflect the fact that Fukuda learned that his own father had a child with his mistress who, like Reina, suffered as an “illegitimate” child. He then became determined not to repeat the dark side of his family history. Although Reina told me that her father was having difficulty in his business, Helen, who assumed that Fukuda enjoyed an easy life in affluent Japan, made a request that instead of sending monthly allowances to Reina, he could instead send Helen the remaining money in a lump sum. Helen could then buy a house for Reina, which Reina personally did not care about. Soon after this, he stopped answering Reina’s calls. Helen and Remy described their communication with Fukuda and his attitudes toward them as follows: Helen: Reina has grown up, of course. Then, her father is having an easy life. But Reina says he answers the phone and hangs up. Nobue: That really hurts, no? Helen: Reina isn’t angry [at him]. [So,] he can just ask us, “Are you OK?” “What’s up?” “Are there any problems?” Right? But he hangs up the phone.

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Remy: Whatever the amount; whenever it is. . . .4 Helen: So, he was regretting. [With] the monthly allowance he sent to Reina, “you just buy a house for Reina.” Then, there’re no remittances for a long time. . . . Now, he angrily tells us, “you’re just after the money.” “After the money”?! First place, we never demanded anything! Reina’s mother and grandmother’s financial expectations for Fukuda exacerbated Reina’s already complicated relationship with her father. Although growing tired of Fukuda’s reluctance to meet her in person and their failure to build “father-daughter bonding,” Reina was nevertheless able to become a Japanese national in the late 2000s—one year before reaching the age limit for claiming Japanese nationality. At around this time, she became the family breadwinner for (now widowed) Remy, Helen, and Helen’s two other school-age children (Reina’s half siblings by different fathers), all of whom lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in Saitama, north of Tokyo. To learn “the language of my country” as well as to get a job, Reina attended a Japanese language school. Her language skills have improved over the years, but her ability is still too limited to take up an office job even at the entry level. To increase her employability, she returned to the Philippines in order to attend college. While Reina has been studying, Remy and Helen have picked up part-time jobs, sold—perhaps without a license—Filipino food in the Filipino community, and collected welfare allowances. Still, they could not afford to wait for Reina to complete her education. Thus far, Reina has only been able to pick up part-time jobs within the Filipino enclave in her vicinity. Both Remy and Helen emphasized to me that Reina’s lack of job security has really made their lives hard and that only informal jobs have been available to her even though she is now a Japanese national. Most recently, Reina started working at a bar as a hostess. From the time I first met her in the late 2000s, she adhered to Catholic values and was modest in her choice of clothing and behaviors. Although working in the nightlife industry is not necessarily bad in many ways, the work is unlikely to help her land a better job or give her opportunities for upward mobility. Working at a bar seems to suggest that she has found no alternative. According to a Filipino supporter of these youngsters, poverty pulled Reina into such work, a situation similar to those of many other youngsters like her with little cultural and social capital. Before I learned about her work at the bar, I asked what future

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she imagined for herself. Reina paused for a long time. A hope she had for Fukuda, despite their strained relationship, was to be introduced to his family as his daughter. This seems unlikely to happen, however, and one of the few visible connections she has to her father today is one of the two 300-yen umbrellas that Fukuda bought, one for her and another for himself, on her birthday as the night ended in rain. KG

As introduced earlier, KG came to Japan to live with his mother and locate his father, whom he had never met. Many youngsters share his hope, but KG had to settle a legally entangled case. Initially, KG only knew his father’s name in romanization, his status as the manager of a nightclub at the time of KG’s conception, and the nearest train station to the club. Only a few weeks after I received this information, KG’s grandmother in the Philippines accidentally found a photo of KG’s father, Satō, a photo with Satō’s address written on the back. It was miraculous that KG’s supporters located his father, who still lived at the same address. Satō agreed to acknowledge KG with little hesitation. However, KG had to document that his mother, Arlene, was single at the time of conception so as not to become subject to CC 772 (see above). It turned out, however, that Arlene was married to another Japanese national who had left her soon after the marriage without formally divorcing. Arlene told KG and the support group that she had completely forgotten about him until she received her documents from the Philippine government. This meant that this man, according to the law, would be recognized as KG’s father. The only way to establish the father-child filiation between Satō and KG was to request more collaboration from Satō and to petition the court for intervention. KG and his supporters went through a series of negotiations with both parties, and only a few months before his twentieth birthday KG was granted Japanese nationality. As described above, he was thrilled to achieve what initially appeared to be absolutely impossible. At the same time, KG has become ambivalent towards his mother because of her financial and familial demands on him. Unlike the surprisingly positive consequence of his claim to Japanese nationality, much of KG’s life has since turned into something he did not expect. First, since KG had never lived with his mother, except for the times she was vacationing in Manila, he needed to adjust to her and her family. Similar to other children left behind, KG was attached to his grandparents more than to his biological mother. As illustrated above, KG also figured that his mother’s

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unspoken reason for bringing him to Japan was to make him work for her present family. Living in the post–Lehman Shock recession, their financial situation has been insecure, with Arlene juggling unstable part-time jobs and her husband, aged twenty-six, unemployed while their children needed to be fed. Observing their situation, KG picked up a job at a fast-food restaurant and gave his earnings to his mother. He also sent a small portion of them to his grandparents as a token of his gratitude. Soon, however, KG began quarreling with Arlene, who also asked him to take care of “his siblings” as their eldest brother. While obeying his mother, KG was upset with his stepfather, for whom he had little respect. This is partly because KG’s stepfather is only six years older than he, but also because KG felt that his stepfather was not fulfilling his culturally prescribed haligi ng tahanan (breadwinner) role. KG also grew to dislike the way his mother spent money—a significant part of which was his hard-earned cash—beyond their needs and economic standing. Frustrated, KG moved out of his mother’s home and until very recently lived with two other Filipino youngsters he met in their neighborhood. Family unification for KG lasted less than two years. KG became physically and financially independent of his mother and sustained his life while continuing to remit money to his grandparents. Although finding a job was difficult, initially KG was lucky to have a kind manager at the restaurant who gave him six-hour shifts and language textbooks. But a new manager reduced KG’s hours to three per day and assigned him to the busiest time during lunch. At peak times, KG worked at the grill making 300 patties and fries an hour. Still, the manager scolded him for whatever he did not like. Each month, KG worried about whether he would be able to pay his share of the rent. Despite the hardships, he continued to take Japanese language lessons at the city hall, which have helped him acquire a third-grade level of competency. Like some of his new friends, who also recently became Japanese nationals, KG originally wished to attend at least a night high school. Instead of doing so, in late 2011 he returned to the Philippines with the goal of figuring out what options he may have for his future.

Conclusion As Linda Kerber (2007:30–31) has argued, in the present volatile politicaleconomic context, “statelessness is no longer so easily measured only by the presence or absence of a passport; it is a state of being, continually produced

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by new and increasingly extreme forms of restriction.” The children born to unwed Filipina mothers and Japanese fathers discussed in this chapter have successively possessed a passport—first Filipino and then Japanese. Yet, they have experienced differential degrees of exclusion and effective statelessness. Some youngsters have to unravel enormously complex legal and human entanglements and this chapter alone cannot address them all. In this final section, I instead draw out a few points in order to highlight these young people’s particular circumstances within the family and in their adopted “fatherland.” Most fundamentally, Japan’s nightlife industries created intimate contact zones for Filipina entertainers and Japanese men to develop relationships, leading to the birth of these youngsters. However, Japan’s jus sanguinis principles originally excluded these youth from the Japanese nation. The lack of Japanese nationality not only made them “feel empty” but also enhanced their desire to learn about the “Japanese half of [my]self.” Filipina mothers’ legal challenges have successfully expanded the ethno-racial parameters of Japan’s citizenry, enabling their children to acquire Japanese nationality and alleviate some of their emotional dislocation. Yet, despite these women’s legal victory, Japan on the whole continues to adhere to a romanticized mono-ethnic vision of nationhood built upon the presumed unity of people, culture, and language within its borders. The enduring absence of a national immigration policy is one example of how difficult it is to expand upon the opening created by the mothers’ legal achievement in order to accommodate the diverse citizenships of new Japanese nationals. The descent-based construction of the Japanese nation-state thus continues to exclude ethnically diverse nationals who grew up outside of Japan’s social and educational milieu. Some of the ramifications of the youngsters’ acquisition of Japanese nationality were observed most immediately in their families. As seen in the cases of Reina and KG, even if cooperative in legally acknowledging their children, many Japanese fathers eventually fade away from, if not literally abandon, their children again. After having shared some good times with their fathers, youngsters such as Reina bear even deeper scars from this second abandonment. At the same time, the presence of Japanese-national children generates legal advantages, at least psychologically, for other family members even if the latter hold visas that enable them to reside legally in Japan (these visas are, however, subject to the discretion of the Justice Minister). Instead of nurturing their children to enjoy their rights and social citizenship in the family, mothers often make their children care for other members of their (previously) estranged families.

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More practically, because of their families’ underprivileged lives in Japan, these youngsters, especially when they are in their late teens and older, are found to be materially useful and are asked to contribute financially to their families, in some cases soon after their arrival in Japan. Reina has tried to meet this expectation out of her sense of familial obligation as Helen’s oldest daughter. Conversely, KG did so rather reluctantly, not least because his young stepfather did not perform his breadwinner role. KG wanted to receive an education first in the Japanese language and subsequently in school, but his mother’s reliance on his meager income prevented him from doing so. Education, and most immediately the acquisition of language skills, does not guarantee but helps youth accumulate, however limited, cultural capital, which in turn can be converted into the economic and symbolic capital needed to achieve social citizenship outside the family, including basic material well-being and possibly upward mobility. Unable to secure access to education, KG is experiencing an effective statelessness that in many ways resembles that faced by Chinese rural-to-urban migrants. The family is not the only institution in which these youth face difficulties achieving and expanding their social and economic citizenships. As mentioned earlier, it is the Japanese state which has not established systematic, nationwide integration programs for new nationals like Reina and KG as well as for other long-term foreign residents. Instead, there are only makeshift measures. For instance, in the wake of the 2008 global economic crisis and the soaring jobless rates among foreign workers, Japan has provided employment information for both employers and foreign job seekers, and the Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE) has offered practical training without charge in the Japanese language and job-related skills in the cities nationwide that boast the largest numbers of foreign residents. However, their services have focused mainly on Latin Americans of Japanese descent. JICE Nagoya, in Central Japan, is the only institution that offers training for Filipinos (turned Japanese nationals). My Filipina interlocutors there enjoyed the training but did not find it fruitful in any practical way, especially given their multiply disadvantaged job prospects as middle-aged women who bear the stigma of former “entertainer.” The Ministry of Education, meanwhile, offers measures to accommodate the needs of Japanese-returnee and foreign-national children within Japan’s compulsory education system.5 The decision about whether or not to include new Japanese nationals like Reina and KG in the categories of “returnee” or “foreign-national” is at the discretion of regional education boards. Even if we suppose Reina and KG qualified as “returnees,”

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Japan’s age-grade system prevents them from enrolling in junior high school (seventh to ninth grade), where they could acquire language skills and study in the Japanese language, because they have exceeded the age limit of fifteen and have already graduated from high school (seventh to tenth grade) in the Philippines. Regardless of their language proficiency, they must enter high school in Japan to benefit from such services.5 From the perspective of the Philippine government, these youngsters are no longer Philippine citizens and therefore the government does not recognize any responsibility for their well-being. Despite Filipino group leaders’ lobbying at the Philippine Embassy in Japan to extend Philippine educational programs to (former) Filipinos in Japan, a high official there told me in a manner that was logically correct but disheartening in a humanitarian sense, that Japan was richer than his country and therefore Japan could offer such services to these “Japanese-national” youth. Instead of being stymied by the unwillingness of both states, KG personally decided to return to the Philippines in order to explore his opportunities there. Blocked from achieving cultural and economic citizenships in Japan, KG is now trying to build a transnational foundation for his citizenships in the Philippines. As Fukuda discouraged Reina from acquiring job-related certificates from the Philippines because of the uncertainty of their transferability to Japan, it is not clear whether any academic degrees or skills KG may acquire there will help him in Japan. KG nevertheless has made himself an informal “flexible citizen” by moving between the state where he is a “noncitizen national” and the “foreign” state where he is a cultural citizen without legal citizenship, with the hope of eventually acquiring legitimate citizenship in his foreign “homeland.”

Notes 1. The research for various parts of this chapter was funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science #21320162, #21402132, and #24401039. I have been doing fieldwork on this issue intermittently since 2005. My research consists both of interviews and casual conversations with these young people and people surrounding them and of participant observation at activities they organize. Because I live in Tokyo where I meet them not only for my research but also by chance encounters, I cannot provide an exact count of my informants. I am also doing virtual fieldwork through social network services on the Internet. 2. All the personal names of my informants are pseudonyms. 3. For more on the men’s desires to marry Filipinas, see Suzuki (2007).

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4. Although they are not native speakers of Japanese, Remy’s aside here in Japanese (“ikura demo, itsu demo”) with a singing tone reflects her expectation of remittances from Fukuda. 5. Based on her research in Vancouver, Pratt (2012), however, warns that Filipino high school graduates tend to think that they are “finished” with high school and are reluctant to repeat their studies in Canada.

References Bhabha, Jacqueline. 2011. “From Citizen to Migrant: The Scope of Child Statelessness in the Twenty-First Century.” In Children Without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge, edited by Jacqueline Bhabha, 1–40. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bosniak, Linda. 2006. The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Caldwell, Kia Lilly et al., eds. 2009. Gendered Citizenship: Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture. New York: Palgrave. Creed, Gerald W. 2000. “ ‘Family Values’ and Domestic Economies.” Annual Review of Anthropology 29:329–55. Di Martino, Kirsten. 2011. “China: Ensuring Equal Access to Education and Health Care for Children of Internal Migrants.” In Children Without a State: A Global Human Rights Challenge, edited by Jacqueline Bhabha, 279–306. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dreby, Joanna. 2007. “Children and Power in Mexican Transnational Families.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 69:1050–64. Kerber, Linda K. 2007. “The Stateless as the Citizen’s Other.” American Historical Review 12(1):1–34. Knörr, Jacqueline and Angela Nunes. 2005. “Introduction.” In Childhood and Migration: From Experience to Agency, edited by Jacqueline Knörr, 9–21. London: Transcript Verlag. Matsui, Yayori. 1998. Nippon no Otōsan ni Aitai (I Want to Meet Father in Japan). Tokyo: Iwanami. Ministry of Justice. 2013a. Table 1. Registered Foreigners by Nationality and Visa. http:// www.e-stat.go.jp/SG1/estat/List.do?lid=000001111233. Retrieved January 25, 2014. ———. 2013b. Kaisei Kokusekihō ni Tomonau Kokuseki Shutokutodoke no Jōkyō (The Situation of Nationality Claims After the Law Amendment). http://www.moj.go.jp/ MINJI/MINJI41/minji174.html. Retrieved January 25, 2014. Ní Laoire, Caitríona et al. 2011. Childhood and Migration in Europe: Portraits of Mobility, Identity, and Belonging in Contemporary Ireland. London: Ashgate. Olwig, Karen. 1999. “Narratives of the Children Left Behind.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 25(2): 267–84. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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———. 2003. Buddha Is Hiding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Orellana, Marjorie et al. 2001. “Transnational Childhoods: The Participation of Children in Processes of Family Migration.” Social Problems 48(4):572–91. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2011. Illicit Flirtations: Labor, Migration, and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pratt, Geraldine. 2012. Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reese, Leslie. 2001. “Morality and Identity in Mexican Immigrant Parents’ Visions of the Future.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27(3):455–72. Reynolds, Jennifer and Marjorie Orellana. 2009. “New Immigrant Youth Interpreting in White Public Space.” American Anthropologist 111(2):211–23. Richter, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Tourism in Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Rodriguez Garcia, Dan. 2006. “Mixed Marriages and Transnational Families in the Intercultural Context: A Case Study of African-Spanish Couples in Catalonia.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 32(3):403–33. Rumbaut, Ruben and Alejandro Portes, eds. 2001. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Suzuki, Nobue. 2000. “Between Two Shores: Transnational Projects and Filipina Wives in/from Japan.” Women’s Studies International Forum 23(4):431–44. ———. 2002. “Gendered Surveillance and Sexual Violence in Filipina Pre-Migration Experiences to Japan.” In Gender Politics in the Asia Pacific Region, edited by Brenda S. A. Yeoh, Peggy Teo, and Shirlena Huang, 99–119. London: Routledge. ———. 2004. “Tripartite Desires: Filipina-Japanese Marriages and Fantasies of Transnational Traversal.” In Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia, edited by Nicole Constable, 124–44. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2007. “Marrying a Marilyn of the Tropics: Manhood and Nationhood in FilipinaJapanese Marriages.” Anthropological Quarterly 80(2):427–54. ———. 2010. “Outlawed Children: Japanese-Filipino Children, Legal Defiance, and Ambivalent Citizenships.” Pacific Affairs 83(1):31–50. Truong, Thanh-Dam. 1990. Sex, Money and Morality: Prostitution and Tourism in SouthEast Asia. London: Zed Books.

PART III

NEGOTIATING THE STATE

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Chapter 6

Caged in and Breaking Loose: Intimate Labor, the State, and Migrant Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia and Other Arab Countries Mark Johnson and Christoph Wilcke

Introduction This chapter is about migrant domestic workers in a number of Arab countries in the Middle East, namely Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, and, chiefly, Saudi Arabia. We show how governments in those countries deploy a gendered concept of privacy to justify systems of migrant domestic worker employment that bind employees to their employers, confer unregulated power on the latter, and divest receiving states of responsibility for migrants. This regular system of unregulated power produces as its corollary an irregular system of migrant domestic labor as evidenced by the figure of the “freelancer.” Freelancers challenge claims made by receiving states about the necessity of conventional employment and sponsorship arrangements. They demonstrate the generative processes and gendered effects of state disciplinary power (Foucault 1978; see also Introduction).1 Domestic work fits clearly within the definition of intimate labor proposed by Boris and Parreñas as “work that involves embodied and affective interactions in the service of social reproduction” (2010:7). We suggest that the concept of intimate labor may best be deployed as a question: that is, how, when, and where are certain types of work deemed to be intimate, private, and

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personal, and what are the social consequences and corollaries of construing that work as such? Posing the question in this way responds to Boris and Parreñas’s invitation to think of intimate labor as situated at the intersections of the private and public, mindful of the scholarly work that discloses how putatively private and intimate relations, such as the family, turn out to be shaped and surveilled by various public institutions (e.g., Folbre and Bittman 2004; Nelson and Garey 2009). Moreover, as feminists contend, the work that some people, women especially, do has frequently been devalued or unpaid because of the gender normative associations that construe what they do and the effort expended as natural aptitude and inclination and/or “voluntary” work in the service of love. Intimate labor also defines the work done by and associated with a feminized, though not always female-bodied, ethnic or racialized migrant other in an increasingly globalized world (see Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). Although domestic labor performed by migrants is nominally recognized as a contractual relationship of employment or a commoditized form of intimacy (Constable 2009), its construal as a private, personal, and intimate relation renders that work of lesser economic value, reduces legal protections, and legitimates endless expectations about the varied sorts of work that migrants might be called on to undertake. Across the world migrant domestic workers are often denied the right to live independently and enjoy family life in host countries. They are instead incorporated as dependents within the family they work for, a designation used by employers to obfuscate their contractual obligations and by governments to abdicate responsibility for these workers (Anderson 2000; Bakan and Stasiulis 1997). The putatively private relation between employer and employee is structured asymmetrically not just by social divisions of race, class, and gender but by the differential residency and citizenship status that migrant domestic workers occupy in various host countries. In each of the countries described here, the state benefits politically and economically from a system of structural violence (Gardner 2010; see also Mahdavi 2011:95–97) that grants its citizens unregulated power over domestic labor with practically assured impunity and at minimal cost to the states themselves. It is not only the case that migrant workers are denied permanent residency and citizenship rights, but also that the system of migrant visa sponsorship makes the employer a proxy for the state. As Longva contends, “Through this delegation, dominance [is] no longer merely a property of macro relations between the state and its migrant population but a central

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component in the relationship between individual natives and individual migrants” (1997:109; see also Gardner 2010:220). This doubly “privatized,” but in reality state-produced and -sanctioned, relation between sponsor/employer and migrant/employee consolidates the former’s power and control over the latter. It also ensures that government authorities rarely, if ever, intervene to protect migrant domestic workers’ interests either as foreign residents or employees. Rather, the state acts as guarantor of unequal labor relations justified ideologically on the basis of the inviolability of the home and domestic sphere and enforced by making migrants’ residency status contingent on the continued performance of their intimate labor. In that way, migrant domestic workers are subject to a regime of deportability (De Genova 2002; De Genova and Peutz 2010) whose corollary is the restriction and denial of rights of and over the movement and mobility of their embodied and affective reproductive labor (Rubin 1975). The systems that produce and sustain migrant domestic worker subordination and their everyday forms of resistance have been written about extensively (e.g., Anderson 2000; Constable 2007; Gamburd 2000; Moukarbel 2009; Parreñas 2001; Silvey 2004, 2006). The existing literature demonstrates that power is never absolute, is both enabling and constraining, and produces different sorts of embodied subjectivities capable of acting in sometimes surprising ways (e.g., Bourdieu 1992; de Certeau 1988; Foucault 1978; Scott 1985, 1990). In this chapter, we highlight one way that migrant domestic workers are enabled to act against the system of extreme coercion that they face; that is, by absconding, or more precisely, in the words of migrant domestic workers, going “freelance.” Going freelance is, we suggest, both a manifestation of migrant domestic workers’ disaffection (Manalansan 2010) and provoked by specific experiences of abuse and exploitation. In that situation, as Longva contends with respect to migrant domestic workers in Kuwait, it may be considered the “‘weapon of the weak’ . . . par excellence” (1997:97). Freelancing, in short, is a product of and response to the existing system of domestic labor organized in and through the kafala system of sponsorship (Gardner 2010) that makes the fulfillment of the contract of employment, where one actually exists, contingent on the good will and benevolence of individual employers and transforms an employee’s withdrawal of their labor into an act of civil if not criminal disobedience. State response to freelancing is predictably inconsistent. On the one hand, the state averts its gaze from employers who enter routinely into informal

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employment arrangements with freelancers. On the other hand, it prosecutes regularly those employees found or reported by employers to have irregular residency status. Neither the state nor employers consider seriously the suggestion that people become freelancers as a direct result of the existing state of labor relations. Nonetheless, while activist groups and NGOs mobilize sending states and apply international pressure to change the kafala system to increase workers’ rights and formally regulate employers’ power, on an everyday basis it is the freelancer who seizes the opportunities of escape and enters into an informal employment relation to exact some limited concessions and improved conditions of service from employers. In so doing, freelancers make explicit the contractual basis and mobility of their intimate labors, challenge the legitimating fictions of private familial relations that normatively underpin receiving states’ material investment in the present structure of migrant labor, and repudiate their ascription as docile bodies groomed affectively for care by the sending state.

Caged In: Hiding Abuse Behind the Shield of Intimacy Domestic work is labor performed in the intimacy of a family home. In much of the Middle East, and in the Gulf States in particular, the state abdicates an interest in regulating the domestic workspace in favor of shielding the home from government intrusion (see Chapter 7). Political and economic interests lie at the heart of this abdication, but governments, and citizens who are employers of domestic workers, couch them in the language of respect for the privacy of the home or the protection of gender-based norms of behavior. High officials in Jordan, for example, including the attorney general, the most senior judge, and senior police officers, explained to Human Rights Watch that confining a migrant domestic worker to the house was for her own protection from immoral attacks or proposals, and thus for the protection of the employer’s reputation and that of his family (Human Rights Watch 2011b:34). Employers frequently consider the domestic worker part of the family, albeit with different rights and duties, and thus consider a misstep by the worker, or an attack on her, an infringement on their honor and privacy. These state-sanctioned and state-enforced conventions are premised on gender regimes that ascribe to men power and authority over the household. This is not about unchanging patriarchal structures or kinship ideologies but

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about the way that some Arab governments have deliberately sought to position themselves as the guardians of gender ideologies that construe women first and foremost as wives and mothers. In the case of Saudi Arabia, in particular, the legitimacy of the ruling elite depends in part on its being seen to moderate outside influences and guard against the corrupting influence of foreign culture by publically affirming the privacy of the home and the protection of the modesty of women within it (Al-Rasheed 2007:128–29; Doumato 2000). State discourse about the inviolability of the home conceals both state and other external institutions’ involvement in policing intimate relations and official willingness to violate the privacy principle when it suits. In Saudi Arabia, a mobile phone app enables border control officials to automatically send an alert to men when one of their female “dependents” seeks to leave the country. Saudi women’s protests led to a review and revision of the procedure, but men will still be able to “opt in” to the service and designate which of their dependents’ movements they wish to be alerted to (Harding 2012; “Saudi Women Celebrate” 2014). More broadly, the laws of each country under review empower prosecutors to issue search warrants for private homes when there is reasonable evidence of a crime. Government law enforcement agencies have shown few scruples about entering homes, even without a warrant, when the suspect, though usually a man, is accused of crimes, such as terrorism, or even speech crimes, such as offending the king, emir, or president. At the same time, in Saudi Arabia, police as a general matter do not enter private homes when women alleging domestic abuse have called for help, unless the male head of household invites them inside—though he may very well be the person alleged to have perpetrated the abuse (Human Rights Watch 2008b:22–23). The point is that government authorities choose not to intervene in domestic abuse that involves either citizen women or migrant domestic workers precisely because that contributes to the public image of the government as protecting “traditional” cultural norms and ensures that citizen employers are in the most economically advantageous position. In what follows we show further how this gendered discourse of privacy and intimacy—routinely violated by states when required and increasingly subject to challenge by Arab women—is deployed and extended by governments and employers in and through the state sponsorship system.

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Sponsoring Exploitation The sponsorship system is the primary vehicle by which governments confer powers over the migrant worker on the employer, or sponsor. Briefly, a sponsor requests a work visa for a migrant worker employee—for two years, usually—on the basis that the sponsor not only is the employer but also assumes nominal responsibility for ensuring that the latter abides by his or her conditions of stay. Sponsorship grants the sponsor the power to restrict a migrant worker’s transfer to another employer and to prevent his or her exit from the country. Although all migrant workers in this region are subject to the sponsorship system, there are three elements of state law and government policy that significantly skew the power relation between employer and migrant domestic worker. First, while other categories of workers are covered to greater or lesser degrees by employment law, an employer’s obligations toward a migrant domestic worker are not anchored in law, but are merely contractual arrangements (Jordan, which extended limited employment rights to domestic workers in 2009, is the sole exception). As part of the contract of employment, employers agree to pay a fixed salary. In a division of labor naturalized in terms of gender, race, and nationality, salary is fixed according to origin: Nepalese, Indian, and Ethiopian workers command the lowest salaries, followed by Sri Lankans and Indonesians, with Filipinas generally commanding the highest. This region-wide wage hierarchy among female domestic workers is one effect of a lack of labor laws and their enforcement. Just as important, these standardized contracts are favorable to the employer because they allow the employer to break a contract with impunity, such as withholding wages, while imposing state-enforced sanctions against the migrant domestic employee even when she breaks the contract for good reason.2 In Lebanon, an employer can break a contract if a migrant domestic worker “commits a mistake, [or] acts negligently,” but the contract leaves mistakes and negligence undefined (Human Rights Watch 2010a:18). The migrant domestic worker, by contrast, is allowed to break the contract without penalty only “if the employer or a member of the household beat or sexually harassed her and the act was proved in medical reports by a forensic doctor and in investigative reports from the police or the ministry of labor” (Human Rights Watch 2010a:18). In Jordan, the contract does delimit the circumstances allowing the employer to break the contract, but a migrant domestic worker can do so only when she can provide evidence that the employer failed

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to pay her salary on time or to obtain the necessary work and residency permits. That means that a migrant domestic worker in Jordan cannot legally end her contract early, even if her employer makes her work eighteen or more hours a day without rest (Human Rights Watch 2011b). Second, all countries restrict a migrant domestic worker’s ability to transfer to another employer without the consent of the initial employer/sponsor.3 The sponsorship system ties a domestic worker’s documented (or “legal”) residency status to one employer, who is also the sponsor of her residency. If employment ends, then the migrant domestic worker’s documented residency status also ends, leaving her vulnerable to arrest and deportation, and unable to work legally. Saudi Arabia requires a migrant worker’s sponsor/employer to obtain an exit visa for the worker to be able to leave the country, a power sponsors/employers use to coerce migrant domestic workers to forgo any claims against them. Third, the concept of the sponsorship system is wider than the legal powers conferred on the employer. Rather it is underpinned by the notion that the state ought not to interfere in matters between the employer/sponsor and the migrant worker when labor is undertaken in the privacy of the home and family. This not only assumes that intimate labor is performed exclusively in the home but also determines the general conditions of residence that confine migrant domestic workers to the home. In Lebanon, migrant domestic workers are obliged as a condition of their visa to live inside employers’ homes, and leaving the house requires their employer’s consent (Human Rights Watch 2010a).4 Even where limitations on migrant domestic workers’ movements and living arrangements are not legally or contractually delimited and defined, the legal powers conferred on employers coupled with a policy of noninterference effectively sanction employers’ criminal behavior toward migrant domestic workers that includes forcible confinement and restrictions on internationally guaranteed rights to freedom of movement and to work. Forced confinement is a crime in some countries like Kuwait, Lebanon, or Jordan, but few prosecutions have taken place when migrant domestic workers are the victims. In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, passport confiscation is illegal, but the authorities do not routinely pursue offenses against migrant domestic workers, whereas in Lebanon, Kuwait, and other Gulf States, employers can confiscate migrant domestic workers’ passports without violating domestic law. Two studies on migrant domestic workers in Lebanon found that 85 percent did not have their passports and 60 percent were locked inside the house (Human Rights

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Watch 2010a:22). In Lebanon, a judge even ruled that two Filipina migrant domestic workers who took their passports when they left their employment had “stolen” their own identity documents, apparently bestowing on the employers if not ownership, then at least a right to possession of the workers’ documents (42). The governments’ complacency in prosecuting crimes against migrant domestic workers extends beyond passport confiscation and forced confinement. Although prosecutors pursued some cases of physical and sexual assault against migrant domestic workers, police in all countries sometimes dismissed migrant domestic workers attempting to complain of serious crimes, such as severe physical assault or rape. Kuwaiti, Jordanian, and Saudi police in several cases returned the worker to her abusive employer or sent her on to her country’s embassy without registering her complaint. In Saudi Arabia, police sometimes do not take complaints by a woman without the presence of her male legal guardian or, for foreign women, her sponsor, making it nearly impossible for migrant domestic workers to make a formal report of abuses to the authorities (Human Rights Watch 2008b:22–23). By contrast, government prosecutors detained and tried migrant domestic workers who had left their employment based on employers’ accusations of theft against them. Employers were sometimes frank that these countercharges of theft were spurious and retaliatory for migrant domestic workers’ accusations of abuse against them, or to forestall any monetary or criminal claims against them. In Kuwait by law, and in all other countries by practice, police may also detain migrant domestic workers for “absconding” (Human Rights Watch 2010b). Two Jordanian employers, who regarded themselves as model employers providing a comfortable and fair working environment for the worker, admitted that their migrant domestic workers had not returned home for vacation in years, a contractual entitlement due every two years, and that they did not give them a weekly day off or allow them to go out. The first employer said she kept her employee’s identity documents because her migrant domestic worker would not know what to do with them: “How can she have them? She doesn’t even know the end of the street!” (Human Rights Watch 2011b:26). The second employer said she had prohibited her migrant domestic worker of more than ten years from having a mobile phone, fearing she may engage in improper relationships. Lebanese and Kuwaiti employers echoed these sentiments: “How can I guarantee that she won’t open the door to strangers?” one Lebanese employer commented, justifying her migrant domestic worker’s

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confinement (Human Rights Watch 2010a:22). Kuwaiti employers’ fears of domestic workers finding other jobs or boyfriends led many to prohibit any independent movement. Preserving female worker’s morality, public morality, and their own reputation is used routinely by employers throughout the region to justify forced confinement, in the same way that the privacy of the home is used by government officials to justify the lack of and/or failure to enforce legal protections for migrant domestic workers. However, just as the discourse of privacy is a convenient way to keep labor costs low for states and citizen employers, everyday restrictions on workers’ freedom of movement and communication also increased employers’ powers of exploitation. Some employers frankly acknowledged that restricting migrant domestic workers’ movement and communication was necessary to prevent “other [migrant] workers from spoiling them” and luring their workers to seek better employment elsewhere (Human Rights Watch 2010a:22). An Ethiopian migrant domestic worker in Kuwait said her employer punched her after discovering that she had a cell phone, for fear she would learn of better working conditions. Community activists helping migrant domestic workers in Jordan explained that employers were afraid to let their domestic workers go out “because they might hear of others earning higher salaries” (Human Rights Watch 2011b:35). The situation that migrant domestic workers face in Arab countries is by no means entirely unique and in a number of important respects is similar to that encountered by migrant domestic workers elsewhere (see Anderson 2000; Constable 2007, also Chapters 4 and 7). Nonetheless, the situation of migrant domestic workers in a number of Arab countries, and in the Gulf in particular, exhibits traits different from those elsewhere. The sponsorship system confers more coercive power on the sponsor/employer by conditioning a change in a migrant domestic worker’s employer or a return to her home country on his/her consent, and migrant domestic workers are often more isolated both because of the legal conditions of residency imposed on migrant domestic workers in some countries and because of state-sanctioned cultural norms that view single women in public as a moral hazard.

Breaking Loose: Freelancing in the Kingdom and Beyond The human rights perspective outlined above provides a comprehensive indictment of a system of migrant domestic labor in the Middle East that binds

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employees to their employers, confers unregulated power on the latter, and divests receiving states of responsibility for protecting labor rights. In what follows, we examine one of the ways that this system of constraints creates forms of agency even under conditions of extreme duress: that is, by enabling and provoking migrant domestic workers to go freelance. We begin with an unsolicited and informal conversation that Johnson had with a Saudi academic in Riyadh in April 2009. The academic recounted a series of trouble with Muslim Filipina domestic workers. The most recent one had absconded just a few weeks into her contract. He called the embassy and the police but no one was able to locate her. He previously had another domestic worker who worked for his family for two years (her contract period) and they wanted her to stay on, but she left, too. He did not specify the circumstances of her leaving but suggested that, like the one who absconded shortly after arriving, she had not returned to the Philippines but had disappeared. He explained that he paid them SR800 a month (about US$200 at the time in 2009). He surmised that they left in hopes that they would find employment working for someone else for a higher salary. He recently hired an Indonesian domestic worker through an unspecified third party and now paid SR2,000 per month, though he suspected that the maid received no more than half of that. He had been surprised that the first maid did not take the opportunity to renew her contract and upset about the second Filipino domestic worker because of the time and money she had cost them. The Saudi academic’s story is not unusual. Recruitment agencies charge prospective employers, or sponsors, from US$1,000 to more than $3,000 in upfront fees to hire a migrant domestic worker. Given migrant domestic worker salaries of between US$100 and $200 a month, $3,000 is not far below a worker’s total earnings for the usual two-year contract period. In interviews Human Rights Watch conducted with employers, the fear of losing the value of the upfront recruiting fees emerged as a primary factor cited to justify abuses against their domestic workers (e.g., Human Rights Watch 2011b:95 ff.). While employers accuse migrant domestic workers of breaking contracts illegally for personal gain, stories told by migrant domestic workers and their fellow migrants present a far more complex picture. What Saudi officials refer to as “absconding,” Filipinos refer to, in Tagalog, as takas, a word that describes someone who has taken flight to escape confinement and/or an abusive employer. Migrant Filipinos in Saudi Arabia reported frequently that they knew of domestic workers who had left employers to escape abuse. Many also said that they knew of or had heard about domestic workers who would leave

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one employer for another in pursuit of better wages and working conditions. A successful Filipina businesswoman living in Jeddah described bitterly how her Filipino worker had told her she was leaving immediately. She could only afford to pay SR800, while the worker claimed to have found an employer apparently willing and able to pay SR1,200. Describing irregular migrant domestic workers as takas explicitly foregrounds the exploitive and abusive conditions that are said to occasion flight while acknowledging that the women who do so may also leave in pursuit of better wages and conditions of employment. Domestic workers we talked to referred to themselves not as takas but as “freelancers.” The term freelancing is used widely throughout the region and beyond by migrant domestic workers who have left their place of official employment to live outside of their employer’s home, usually as an irregular migrant (e.g., Frantz 2008; Moukarbel 2009; de Regt 2010). In Saudi Arabia, freelancing is neither singularly associated with domestic workers nor that unusual among migrant Filipinos, and it operates in a number of different ways. The least risky form of freelance work is to enter into a paid agreement with a sponsor to allow them to work for someone else while formally, for the purposes of legal residency, remaining tied to that sponsor. It need not be the original employer from whom one rents sponsorship. Migrants reported that they knew or had heard about Saudis who set up a business and applied for a number of visas to recruit fictional foreign employees. They then “rent” those official papers to migrants who wish to alter their employment status or extend their stay (see also Longva 1997:107). Government officials are reported to be involved, benefiting economically from a rent system of buying and selling “sponsorship” titles over migrant workers (Human Rights Watch telephone interview with Saudi lawyer, Riyadh, August 2011). The “rental” of visa sponsorship and residency permits also appears to operate between private households when one household “rents” visa sponsorship and residency papers for a household worker to another. The other more precarious way of going freelance is to leave one employer to work for another without the agreement or consent of the original employer and without securing “formal” sponsorship. That is often the only alternative open to migrant domestic workers who are excluded from the provisions of recently introduced laws in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that permit other employees to leave their employers without prior consent after a three year period. Leaving an employer without consent is risky for a variety of reasons. First, domestic workers who leave their employers are likely to be

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reported to the authorities and if apprehended, will be treated in violation of residency laws, and possibly even as criminals. That is, in Kuwait by law, and in all other countries by practice, police will detain escaped migrant domestic workers for “absconding” (e.g., Human Rights Watch 2010b; Mahdavi 2011:194; Strobl 2009). Second, they are often forced to leave without any formal residency papers or their passports, which often remain in the possession of their employer. Third, precisely because a lone Asian woman traveling or moving about on her own is more likely to attract attention in public, and because in Saudi Arabia it is virtually impossible for a single woman to find accommodation on her own, there is a greater risk of abduction by the authorities or worse: one migrant domestic worker who absconded from an abusive employer reported that she was picked up by a man who offered assistance but then sexually assaulted her. Freelancing is not just an unintended consequence of the state sponsorship system. Rather the state is also complicit in, and profits from, the production of this form of irregular labor (see also Chapter 7). In the regular system of state sponsorship, the gendered notion of privacy functions to protect a system that is heavily slanted in favor of the employer. In the system of irregular migrant work that is its corollary, privacy is also the basis on which the state can conveniently turn a blind eye to employer violations of the state sponsorship system, while using a system of fines to heavily penalize those migrants whose residential status is deemed to be irregular. That selective vision paradoxically provides migrant domestic workers who have left their original employer some small opening to negotiate better pay and working conditions outside of the formal sponsorship system, but it does so at a price. In order to flesh out the actual experience of what becoming a freelancer entails, we present below four migrant domestic workers’ stories of their experiences in Saudi Arabia. The first three stories were related to Johnson by migrant domestic workers in the home of middle-class Filipinos in Riyadh in May 2009. The fourth story was recounted to Johnson at a boarding house in Manila.

Freelancing: Four Migrant Women’s Stories Mel (a woman in her twenties) is from Ipil, Zamboanga, in the southern Philippines. She first came to Saudi in 2007 to work as a nanny. She said that at first, things were “OK,” that the “madam” treated her well enough, but that the

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problem was the children. When she left the household, there were five of them whom she helped care for, aged fourteen, nine, eight, four, and a twomonth-old. She said the older children increasingly treated her with disrespect, sometimes kicking, swearing, and calling her all sorts of names and referring to her as a “dog.” After an Indonesian workmate left, and not wanting to face the children alone, she decided to escape. She had, through a mutual acquaintance whom she called after escaping, been put in touch with a professional Filipino couple for whom she was now working and in whose home Johnson met her. Mel’s plan was to continue to work for the family until she had enough money both to ensure she was able to obtain necessary papers to allow her to leave the country and to have something to bring back with her to the Philippines. She said she did not have any plans to look for other extra work. Amanda was also working for another Filipino professional couple who lived next door to the family with whom Mel had worked and where Johnson met and talked to her. She qualified as a teacher in Zamboanga and had come to Saudi to work as a medical secretary in 2007. When she arrived, she found that her original contract had been transferred, without her knowledge or consent, to a Saudi family for whom she was expected to undertake domestic work. She worked for them for two months and then escaped. The reason she left, she said, was that she did not want “to get involved.” When asked what that meant, she said that the eldest teenage son of the family said he liked her and had made several passes at her. She was afraid of his intentions and did not want to stick around. “Where did you go when you left?” one of her companions listening to her story interjected rhetorically, knowing in advance, it seemed, what her answer would be. Flicking her abaya over her shoulder, Amanda threw her head back and, adopting a haughty expression, said she had picked up her phone, ordered a taxi, and asked the driver to take her to the Faisaliyah Tower (a well-known landmark and ritzy shopping center in Riyadh). Everyone laughed and exclaimed, “Sosyal!” (What style!). From Faisaliyah, Amanda called a distant relative who came to pick her up, a cousin whose wife was a nurse working in the same hospital as the woman for whom she now worked and in whose home we sat. She managed to recover her passport and residency card because one of the drivers in the household, a Filipino, had been able to retrieve it for her. With her residency permit, she felt secure moving around and was able to get a job as a freelancer in a school teaching a Philippine curriculum. When her residency permit (iqama) expired, she had to go into hiding and was now working irregularly

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for the professional couple who had provided her with a place to stay while she looked for a new position. She helped to look after their four-year-old son. She hoped that she might either find work as a medical secretary or as a teacher again in another school, whether freelance or on a regular contract. Lang is from Basilan, an island municipality in the Southern Philippines, and has four children there, children she had with her first husband, who is now deceased. She first came to Saudi Arabia in 1994 and was employed as a care worker for the first three years in a rehabilitation center. She returned in 1999 after a short break in the Philippines and worked for eight months in domestic work in a Saudi home. She left that job because her employer was always quarrelling with her. She said that she sought and secured the help of the embassy in securing release from her employer. Subsequently, she was able to find work as a freelancer for a French family in the foreigner’s compound for five months. She was well paid, her working conditions were good, and she was able to live outside the home and socialize with friends. During that time, she met and married her second husband, an Ilocano convert to Islam (balik Islam) who was working as a mechanic. When her employer departed, she was left without work. At the time of interview, she had one daughter with her second husband and lived with them in Riyadh. The final story presented here is that of Deng, a middle-aged woman who is legally married but separated from her husband (who had taken a new wife) and her several children who live with her husband in Basilan. Deng had recently returned to Manila from Riyadh where she had lately been imprisoned for some months, an abrupt and unpleasant end to a three-year sojourn and her fifth outing as a migrant domestic worker in the Kingdom. Piecing together a story that was recounted with some agitation, it appears that Deng had either left or been forced out of her original employer’s home and her employer kept her passport, residency papers, salary, and mobile phone. She then spent a year working “outside,” that is, working irregularly in a variety of foreign expat homes in a gated community and living with friends who were also freelancers. At various points in recounting her traumatic story, Deng suggested that it was either her original employer or fellow Filipinos, identified as balik Islam (new Muslim converts) alleged to be in the pay of the religious police, or possibly both, who turned her in to the authorities because of her status as an illegal worker and/or because she and her friends freely mixed with and invited other men into their home. Initially aghast at hearing about her arrest, the others listening with Johnson increasingly interrupted Deng and became her main interlocutors: did

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she run away or was she driven from her employer’s home? Why did her employer take her phone? Was it because of boyfriends? Did she see out her original contract, and how long was she TNT (tago nang tago, literally hide and hide, an irregular migrant)? Visibly weary from all the questions going back and forth, Deng went to her bedroom and collected her phone, returning to replay what Johnson at first thought was going to be a video recording of her arrest. As it turned out, it was just a picture of her flat in Riyadh and of her and her friends, women and men watching TV: that, she said, ironically, was her “sin.” She said that despite the arrest she enjoyed her life there, had made good friends and that given the opportunity she would return, possibly not to Riyadh but to Dubai or Qatar where she had also previously worked. And although she might go as domestic worker, she reckoned that her best bet would still be to work outside of the home as a freelancer because she did not have qualifications that would enable her to secure a better-paying job through normal routes.

Disaffection, Abuse, and Prospects for a Better Situation There are a number of points to be drawn from the above stories. The first, that relates directly back to the concept of intimate labor, is to draw attention to what Martin Manalansan (2010) refers to as “disaffection.” That is, while it is said routinely, by migrants themselves and by others, that Filipino domestic workers are both caring and careful, the effect of those gendered and racialized ascriptions of Filipino affect is to naturalize the work and labor they perform and render it of lesser value. Manalansan reminds us of the role of the Philippine state in inculcating the discourse of the caring Filipino and promoting the processes through which people acquire and become skilled at caring. He also reminds us that the performance of care in many situations involves disaffection. For Manalansan, disaffection is about both “emotional distance, alienation, antipathy” and, more precisely, “disloyalty to regimes of power and authority” (2010:217). Disaffection, he suggests, may be manifested in a variety of ways but is best characterized, following Berlant (2008, in Manalansan 2010), as composure: an often carefully managed and deliberately staged economy of affect. Though we have only migrant testimonies, rather than firsthand observation, there is ample evidence above—in descriptions of the situations they encountered and of the audacity and style of their departure—both of women’s “disloyalty to regimes of power and authority”

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and of their composure. It is also possible to see evidence of that same disaffection in the unexpected departures of migrant domestic workers and their reported effects on both the Saudi academic in Riyadh and the middle-class Filipina businesswoman in Jeddah: that is, anger, bitterness, and, perhaps most especially, evident surprise. Second, while the actions of freelancers make explicit their disaffection, open acts of defiance are based mainly on serious provocation. That is, in keeping with what has been reported in Human Rights Watch reports from across the region, all of the women indicated that they ran away to escape extremely exploitative and abusive situations (see also Mahdavi 2011).5 They subsequently became freelancers who sought better living and working conditions. It is important to clarify that the threat of going freelance does not appear to be a significant bargaining chip in negotiations between domestic workers and their regular employers/sponsors. Rather, it is only after one has left that regular employment and become a freelancer that opportunities arise to seek out and bargain for an improved situation. Third, migrant Filipinos do report good employers among Saudi nationals. Among the more than eighty domestic workers Johnson and Pingol talked with in Saudi Arabia and in the Philippines, roughly a third described their employers and their situations as good and decent; there were also stories about generous employers. Stories of good employers that circulate in the migrant community also motivate people to leave a poor employer, as was the case with Amanda and Lang. As Lang’s and Deng’s stories indicate, there is also a significant population of affluent non-Saudis—Europeans and Asians, middle-class and elite Filipinos among them—who require and seek out the services of migrant domestic workers. They are commonly, though not always, reported by migrant Filipinos to be both more generous in the remuneration they offer and in the conditions of work. Overall, as reported widely from across the region and elsewhere, women who worked as freelancers and lived outside of their employers’ homes were likely to report better pay and working conditions and greater autonomy than those employed on a regular contractual basis in Saudi homes (Constable 2009; Frantz 2008; Human Rights Watch 2011b; Mahdavi 2011:241; Moukarbel 2009). Fourth, although there are many structural commonalities across receiving Arab states, there are significant differences in law, practice, and procedures that make freelancing easier, if not always better, in some places than in others. In Saudi Arabia, where gender segregation and restrictions on women’s movement and living arrangements are legally sanctioned and publicly

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enforced both by the state and by nonstate surveillance (see Alhadar and McCahill 2011), it is very difficult for lone migrant women to negotiate life as freelancers outside of sponsors’ homes. To lessen the risks and increase the probability of success as freelancers in Saudi Arabia, migrants mobilize and rely on social networks among their own migrant communities (see also de Regt 2008; Johnson 2010; Longva 1997:96). Filipino migrant domestic workers account for approximately 20 percent of the more than one and a half million Filipinos in Saudi Arabia. Our research suggests that there is a reasonable expectation among migrant domestic workers that they can rely on either kinfolk or kababayan (compatriots) to come to their aid and facilitate choices they make, whether to help them escape abuse, offer them a place to stay and employment while they seek new pastures, and/or to put them in touch with someone who knows someone— whether a Saudi, fellow Filipino, or other expatriate—who needs an employee. Migrant domestic workers also often benefit from the support and succor of well-established voluntary associations that assist migrant compatriots in Saudi Arabia, both from within and outside of the country (Bultron 2011; Rodriguez 2009, 2011).6 However, neither the affective ties of one’s compatriots nor the interventions of kinfolk come without costs. Those costs may include taking on both paid and/or unpaid intimate labor within the household of the more middleclass compatriot. Further, while domestic workers talk about leaving employers to go freelance, they are, as indicated above, routinely referred to by other Filipinos as being takas (escapees). To go freelance conveys a sense of agency and choice, as well as composure, and, in the Saudi Arabian context, of being able to work the highly restrictive system of sponsorship to one’s advantage. Identifying someone as takas, by contrast, conveys pity for a victim of difficult circumstances whose only option is to take flight and run. One Filipino woman who routinely employed irregular Filipino workers in her beauty parlor described her business as “an orphanage for takas.” Especially as applied to domestic workers, takas may also suggest some moral failing on the part of the person so identified, and in the case of women, carries a stigma that as Deng’s story tragically illustrates is linked either to an assumption that they have been sexually violated and/or to judgment about their presumed sexual promiscuity. Deng’s story is a cautionary note about overly romantic portrayals of national solidarity in a situation where cross-gender sociality and intimacy are, for women especially, culturally and religiously censured outside of the heavily policed and normatively enforced regimes of recognized marital

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relations both at home and abroad (Johnson 2010; Pingol 2010; see also Frantz 2008:623 and Smith 2010 on Sri Lankan freelancers in Jordan and Lebanon, respectively). Freelancing is thus an exchange of one set of risks and possibilities for another. From a migrant domestic worker’s perspective, undertaking work abroad is always a gamble. Where working for a decent employer with a guarantee of basic rights is not a legally enforced expectation—true of many places, not just Saudi Arabia or other countries in that region—Filipino migrant domestic workers often describe the outcome as “a matter of luck” (swerte-swerte). Though migrants talk about luck and good fortune, taking a gamble is not simply a passive acceptance of one’s fate. Rather, stories of good employers and decent remuneration promote the repeated throw of the dice, whether as regular or freelance workers, to maximize the possibility of landing a decent situation. That is to say, migrant domestic workers are, in one sense, acting very rationally precisely because they know that the state sponsorship system ensures that the market conditions are very much unequally set against them. In sum, there are potential material and symbolic benefits to migrant domestic workers as freelancers. Being a freelancer conveys both to self and others the capacity to take positive action the aim or goal of which is more than simply escape or flight and is a conscious refusal of the other status categories variously ascribed to, and occupied by, domestic workers—be it the putatively good and compliant servant, absconder, criminal, victim, or runaway charity case. Those categories, too, may and do enable different sorts of agency and forms of “tactical” if not “strategic” resistance (de Certeau 1988). What is particular about migrant domestic workers’ claim to freelancer status is that it is an already hard-won achievement established by the withdrawal of their embodied and affective labor from employers who are otherwise granted enormous coercive power over them in law and in practice. Freelancing conveys also the actual situation in which many migrant women domestic workers find themselves having no other formal recourse beyond themselves and their social networks through which to secure either their basic human rights or conditions of existence. One might say that it is a statement of defiant agency produced by and in the face of extreme precarity (Butler 2009).

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Conclusion: Prospects for Change and Transformation In this chapter, we described how the state confers enormous power on employers over migrant employees through the system of sponsorship. Receiving states legitimate the system of exploitation on the basis of protecting the privacy of the home to conceal and secure their political and economic interests. The system also produces a particular form of resistance, that of the irregular freelancer. Freelancing is both a manifestation of disaffection engendered by structural violence and a response to experiences of exploitation and/or acts of abuse. Few actors have the resources necessary to rectify the system of exploitation and abuse that receiving governments enable and perpetuate against both regular and irregular migrant domestic workers. By way of conclusion, we review three sets of social agents that might effect change: sending states and transnational organizations, host nationals, and migrants. International nongovernmental organizations, the media, and pressure by some sending governments, the United States, and United Nations organizations have been able to extract some political concessions. For example, most countries in the region, with the exclusion of Kuwait, have now put in place an antitrafficking law criminalizing forced labor for exploitation, but the laws mainly collect dust in prosecutors’ drawers or are implemented in ways that work against migrant workers’ interests (Mahdavi 2011). In Jordan, the 2009 migrant domestic workers bylaw gives labor officials the right to inspect the house where a migrant domestic worker is employed when a labor violation has been reported, but officials have not yet made full use of these new powers. A Saudi proposal (which Kuwait also claims for itself) of shifting sponsorship away from individual employers to a handful of large, state-run or state-supervised recruitment and employment agencies has not yet been put into practice, although it looks set to go ahead. Until receiving states enact and enforce comprehensive employment legislation that guarantees domestic workers’ rights in private domestic settings, including the right to leave their place of work and seek new employment without threat of deportation, fine, or imprisonment, these piecemeal changes are unlikely to ensure much-needed labor protections for migrant domestic workers. In the meantime, sending countries suspend, and sometimes renew, official cooperation in the deployment of their nationals as domestic workers to the Gulf or the Levant. Unfortunately, as Friedman and Mahdavi discuss in the introduction, sending countries’ protective policies may encourage migrants to seek routes abroad that subject them to greater abuses (or

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“trafficking-like” situations). Sending states must collaborate to ensure that receiving states do not engage in a race to the bottom by recruiting migrant domestic workers from countries whose governments have not been active in securing their nationals’ rights abroad. None of this collaboration is taking place, however, as demonstrated by the difficulties in convening the Dhaka round of meetings among labor-sending countries.7 Given ineffective coalition building among labor-sending countries, might pressure for change come from a coalition of migrant and citizen women within host countries? Women’s changing roles across the region and their increasing move into paid labor, often outside of the home, have driven demand for migrant domestic labor. Women’s movements are challenging normative and legal frameworks that make women dependent on men and variously restrict and curtail the enjoyment of their rights, such as participation in the workforce or, as in Saudi Arabia, even driving a car. However, as yet, there is little evidence of any meaningful coalition across the divides of race, class, and citizenship to challenge the gendered system of statesanctioned norms that underpin and legitimate the sponsorship system and restrictions on migrant women’s autonomy.8 There are at least two reasons for this. First, the existing gender regime produces a conflict of interest between citizen women and migrant domestic workers, the latter of whom consistently reported that it was primarily the “madam” who ran the household affairs and carried out abusive practices. Second, as Longva (1997:220) suggests, citizen women distinguish themselves routinely as virtuous daughters, wives, and mothers from economically and morally impoverished migrant domestic workers whose labor they rely on to be both modern and traditional women. Finally, what about migrant domestic workers themselves as possible agents of change? Domestic workers face legal and practical restrictions that prevent them from organizing around their interests and limit significantly possibilities for overt forms of collective action. Nonetheless, migrant workers, including domestic workers, have found ways to act transnationally through collective action in home and host countries mobilized via networks of voluntary associations. These networks are created and facilitated through migrant alliances such as, for example, the Center for Migrant Advocacy, Migrante International, and the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants (Bultron 2011; Rodriguez 2009, 2011). Migrant alliances have not only been vital in providing support and succor to migrants living and working abroad as well as to families at home, but they also have had some success in pressing sending countries to intervene on behalf of their citizens abroad.

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On an everyday basis, to leave without consent and to seek employment elsewhere as an irregular migrant or freelancer remain the most overt and direct forms of resistance available to migrant domestic workers against the unregulated power of employers. Freelancing might be deemed, following Bourdieu, to be simply a “weak weapon” (2001:32, cf. Longva 1997:97), insofar as it does not alter the situation fundamentally and relies on the complicity of both states and sponsors/employers. That is not to say that freelancing is entirely without broader effect. It is an important way that women and men register disaffection and makes explicit the temporally and materially contingent basis of their intimate labor in a situation where there is otherwise a presumption of ownership and control over their bodies and the work that they do. It also reveals the gaps between the state-sanctioned cultural fictions that publically legitimate and sustain the system of sponsorship and the more variable social practices of employees and employers. Freelancers belie government claims that cultural norms about the intimacy of domestic work dictate that employees must live in, be part of, and be restricted to the family home in which they labor. Structural change requires a fundamental transformation of the sponsorship system and will most likely come about through the concerted efforts of international organizations, transnational migrant alliances, and sending states to exert pressure on receiving states to enshrine and uphold international laws and conventions on the rights of all workers. However, it may be that those groups and organizations pressing for change could better leverage the disaffection of migrant domestic workers and find new ways to tap into the evident composure, strength, and creative capacities of those freelancers who test and challenge the system on a daily basis.

Notes 1. The chapter grows out of a conversation between Christoph Wilcke, formerly a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch and regional director of Transparency International, and Mark Johnson. The first part of the chapter draws on findings from a recent series of Human Rights Watch reports and country studies about Saudi Arabia (Human Rights Watch 2008a, 2008b, 2011a), Lebanon (Human Rights Watch 2010a), Kuwait (Human Rights Watch 2010b), and Jordan (Human Rights Watch 2011b). The second part draws on ethnographic research among Filipino migrants in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia conducted by Mark Johnson and his late colleague Alicia Pingol: Pingol, in Jeddah and Riyadh from September 2007 to January 2008; and Johnson, mainly in Riyadh

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in April–May 2009. Research in Saudi Arabia was complemented by research in the Philippines before and after visits to Saudi Arabia. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (grant ref. AH/E508790/1/APPID: 123592). Alice sadly died at her home place in Laoag, Philippines in March 2012. 2. Migrant domestic workers report regularly that their employers fail to pay salaries in full or on time, a practice justified routinely in terms of employers recouping part of the upfront recruitment fees (Human Rights Watch 2008a, 2011b). 3. Changes in Kuwaiti and Saudi law exempting migrant workers from this condition if they have worked for more than three years or if their employer has failed to pay them do not apply to migrant domestic workers (a similar change in United Arab Emirates law in January 2011 applies to migrant domestic workers). 4. Until recently, that was also true of the Jordanian migrant domestic worker contract (Human Rights Watch 2011b). Kuwait’s 2006 standardized contract “allows” the migrant domestic worker to spend her weekly day off with the employer’s family, interpreted to mean she cannot go out alone (2010b). In Saudi Arabia, migrant domestic workers and other single female workers are proscribed from living on their own, and their movements are constrained by state-enforced norms that insist a woman must be accompanied by a male guardian/employer (2008a). 5. It is difficult to provide reliable information about numbers of “absconders” (see also Human Rights Watch 2008a:22–23, 121). One estimate from the Centre for Migrant Advocacy gives a figure of 600 runaway Filipino domestic workers in 2004 (Abano 2006:17), while another estimate from the Saudi-based NGO Pusong Mamon Task Force, which provides assistance to runaway Filipinos in that country, suggested that between four and six migrant domestic workers absconded daily, rising to a peak of twelve per day during the month of Ramadan (Fabricante 2006:56). 6. One example of that is the mobile SOS SMS helpline coordinated by the Center for Migrant Advocacy (CMA) and its OFW partner, the Saudi-based Pusong Mamon Task Force (“OFW Helpline Featured” 2008). 7. The first three meetings of the so-called Colombo Process, a series of regional consultative meetings on Asian labor migration, were held in successive years, starting in 2003, but it took from 2005 until 2011 for the fourth meeting in Dhaka to take place amid lagging cooperation and increased competition among Asian labor-sending countries. 8. The Jordanian Women’s Union, the country’s oldest women’s organization, conducted an only partially successful outreach program of education on migrant domestic workers’ rights to its own members before attempting to lobby the government for changes.

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References Abano, Rhodora. 2006. “Background Presentation—Highlights of CMA’s 2005 Migrant Rights Report.” In Ganito Tayo Ngayon, Paano Tayo Bukas: Prospects of Filipino Labour Migration and Philippine Development. Dr. Alfredo J. Ganapin Advocacy Forum 1 Series 2006, 6–25. http://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/philippinen/04522. pdf. Retrieved April 1, 2014. Alhadar, Ibrahim and Michael McCahill. 2011. “The Use of Surveillance Cameras in a Riyadh Shopping Mall: Protecting Profits or Protecting Morality?” Theoretical Criminology 15(3):315–30. Al-Rasheed, Madawi. 2007. Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, Bridget. 2000. Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour. London: Zed. Bakan, Abigail and Daiva Stasiulis, eds. 1997. Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Boris, Eileen and Rhacel Parreñas, eds. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies and the Politics of Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1992. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2001. Masculine Domination. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bultron, Ramon. 2011. “Empowerment of Migrant Workers in Intimate Labor.” Paper presented at the conference Rethinking Intimate Labor Through Inter-Asian Migrations, June 6–10, Bellagio Center, Italy. Butler, Judith. 2009. “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics.” AIBR: Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana. 4(3):i–xiii. Constable, Nicole. 2007. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2009. “The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex, and Reproductive Labor.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38:49–64. de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. De Genova, Nicholas. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31:419–47. De Genova, Nicholas and Nathalie Peutz, eds. 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. de Regt, Marina. 2008. “High in the Hierarchy, Rich in Diversity: Asian Domestic Workers, Their Networks, and Employers’ Preferences in Yemen.” Critical Asian Studies 40(4):587–608. ———. 2010. “Ways to Come, Ways to Leave: Gender, Il/legality and Mobility Among Ethiopian Domestic Workers in Yemen.” Gender and Society 24(2): 237–60. Doumato, Eleanor. 2000. Getting God’s Ear: Women, Islam and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. 2003. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. London: Granta Books. Fabricante, Rashid. 2006 “Ganito Kami Ngayon, Paano Tayo Bukas.” In Ganito Tayo Ngayon, Paano Tayo Bukas: Prospects of Filipino Labour Migration and Philippine Development. Dr. Alfredo J. Ganapin Advocacy Forum 1 Series 2006, 45–70. Folbre, Nancy and Michael Bittman, eds. 2004. Family Time: The Social Organization of Care. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House. Frantz, Elizabeth. 2008. “Of Maids and Madams: Sri Lankan Domestic Workers and Their Employers in Jordan.” Critical Asian Studies 40(4):609–38. Gamburd, Michelle. 2000. The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gardner, Andrew. 2010. “Engulfed: Indian Guest Workers, Bahraini Citizens and the Structural Violence of the Kafala System.” In The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and Freedom of Movement, edited by Nicholas De Genova and Natalie Peutz, 305–49. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Harding, Luke. 2012. “Saudi Arabia Criticised over Text Alerts Tracking Women’s Movements: Male ‘Guardians’ Receive Text Message Whenever Women Leave Country Under New System.” The Guardian, November 23. http://www.theguardian.com/ world/2012/nov/23/saudi-arabia-text-alerts-women. Retrieved March 5, 2014. Human Rights Watch. 2008a. “As If I Am Not Human”: Abuses Against Asian Domestic Workers in Saudi Arabia. New York: Human Rights Watch. ———. 2008b. Perpetual Minors: Human Rights Abuses Stemming from Male Guardianship and Sex Segregation in Saudi Arabia. New York: Human Rights Watch. ———. 2010a. Without Protection: How the Lebanese Justice System Fails Migrant Domestic Workers. New York: Human Rights Watch. ———. 2010b. Walls at Every Turn: Abuse of Migrant Domestic Workers Through Kuwait’s Sponsorship System. New York: Human Rights Watch. ———. 2011a. “Saudi Arabia: Country Report.” New York: Human Rights Watch. ———. 2011b. Domestic Plight: How Jordanian Laws, Officials, Employers, and Recruiters Fail Abused Migrant Domestic Workers. New York: Human Rights Watch. Johnson, Mark. 2010. “Diasporic Dreams, Middle Class Moralities and Migrant Domestic Workers Among Muslim Filipinos in Saudi Arabia.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11(3–4):428–48. Longva, Anh Nga. 1997. Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion, and Society in Kuwait. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Mahdavi, Pardis. 2011. Gridlock: Labor, Migration and Human Trafficking in Dubai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Manalansan, Martin. 2010. “Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life.” In Political Emotions, edited by Ann Cvetkovich, Janet Staiger, and Ann Reynolds, 215–28. New York: Routledge.

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Moukarbel, Nayla. 2009. Sri Lankan Housemaids in Lebanon: A Case of “Symbolic Violence” and “Everyday Forms of Resistance.” Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Nelson, Margaret and Anita Garey, eds. 2009. Who’s Watching: Daily Practices of Surveillance Among Contemporary Families. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. “OFW Helpline Featured at Migration Fair in Brussels.” 2008. Migration for Development, December 3. http://www.migration4development.org/content/ofw-helpline-featured -migration-fair-brussels. Retrieved January 9, 2012. Parreñas, Rhacel. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pingol, Alicia. 2010. “Filipino Women Workers in Saudi: Making Offerings for the Here and Now and the Hereafter.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11(3–4):394–410. Rodriguez, Robyn. 2009. “Challenging the Limits of the Law: Filipina Migrant Workers’ Transnational Struggles in the World for Protection and Social Justice.” In Globalization and Third World Women, edited by Ligaya Lindio-McGovern and Isidor Wallimann, 49–63. Farnham, England: Ashgate Press. ———. 2011. “Philippine Migrant Workers’ Transnationalism in the Middle East.” International Labor and Working-Class History 79:48–61. Rubin, Gayle. 1975. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” In Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna Reiter, 157–210. New York: Monthly Review Press. “Saudi Women Celebrate: Monitoring System of Cross-Border Movements Suspended.” 2014. rt.com. http://rt.com/news/saudi-suspends-women-travel-619. Retrieved March 5, 2014. Scott, James. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Silvey, Rachel. 2004. “Transnational Domestication: State Power and Indonesian Migrant Women in Saudi Arabia.” Political Geography 23:245–64. ———. 2006. “Consuming the Transnational Family: Indonesian Migrant Domestic Workers to Saudi Arabia.” Global Networks 6(1):23–40. Smith, Monica. 2010. “Erasure of Sexuality and Desire: State Morality and Sri Lankan Migrants in Beirut, Lebanon.” The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11(3–4):378–93. Strobl, Staci. 2009. “Policing Housemaids: The Criminalization of Domestic Workers in Bahrain.” British Journal of Criminology 49(2):165–83.

Chapter 7

Reproduction Crisis, Illegality, and Migrant Women Under Capitalist Globalization: The Case of Taiwan Hsiao-Chuan Hsia

Fang, a Vietnamese woman, worked in Taiwan as a caregiver in 2003 but ran away from her abusive employer after three months and became undocumented. She met her Taiwanese husband and had a son while occupying this undocumented status. To regularize her status, her husband suggested that she surrender herself to the authorities, assuming that their marriage would grant her legal standing. To their surprise, she was deported and banned from reentering Taiwan for five years because of her illegal status as a “runaway.” Fang’s husband was left with their son in Taiwan and persistently sought help from many sources while Fang waited anxiously in Vietnam. They were eventually reunited when authorities bent the rules in the face of continuous petitioning and protest by several migrant advocacy groups.

Introduction Fang’s suffering is not an isolated case. Since the late 1980s, an increasing number of foreign women have migrated to Taiwan as domestic workers, caregivers, or wives, and many of them end up becoming “illegal.” This chapter analyzes why this phenomenon of illegality is emerging among migrant women.

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One of the characteristics of the increasingly prevalent feminization of migration is that a significant portion of migrant women, if not a great majority, are involved in intimate labor performed in households and domestic units (Boris and Parreñas 2010; Constable 2009; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002; Lan 2008). This chapter addresses the type of intimate labor associated with reproductive labor, including female migrant workers providing domestic services and care work and female marriage migrants who are homemakers and reproduce the next generation. As globalization expands the scale of international migration, reproductive labor has also been restructured on a global scale (see Chapter 1). Migrant women from less developed countries cross borders to provide reproductive labor for the “maintenance” and “renewal” of productive labor in the more developed countries (Burawoy 1976). In addition to this paid migrant reproductive labor (Hochschild 2000; Lan 2006; Parreñas 2001), an increasing number of migrant women provide unpaid reproductive labor in receiving countries as wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law. This phenomenon of marriage (im)migration has paralleled labor migration as women from poorer countries migrate to richer countries through cross-border marriages (Constable 2005; Hsia 1997, 2004, 2010; Piper and Roces 2003; Chapters 1, 8, 9 this volume). Most research treats migrant domestic workers and marriage migrants as separate categories, however, rather than articulating their interconnectedness in a broader framework. Building from two decades of research on female migration to Taiwan (Hsia 2006), this chapter explains how the Taiwanese state produces illegality among migrant women engaged in reproductive labor by comparing and contrasting the conditions of migrant domestic workers and marriage migrants. The primary empirical bases of this chapter derive from three sets of data collected in Taiwan over the course of two years: a study of the causes and experiences of undocumented migrants, research on the experiences of marriage migrants concerning citizenship and domestic violence, and a comparative study of Filipina and Indonesian domestic workers. The overarching framework of this chapter is the growing reproduction crisis under capitalist globalization, as illustrated in Figure 7.1. As capitalist globalization intensifies, the welfare state is in crisis and many social services are eliminated. Rising living costs combined with the lack of a comprehensive social welfare system lead women in more developed countries to seek cheaper surrogates to take care of household needs while they work to provide income for their households. Therefore, many countries have established

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Extended Capital Accumulation for Core and Semi-Peripheral States

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Reducing Costs for Production and Social Expenditures

▶ Reproduction Crisis

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strengthening

Welfare and Immigration Policies Strengthening Family Ideology

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Middle Class’s Reproduction Crisis

Farmers and Working Transfer Status

Class’s Reproduction Crisis

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Reactive Immigration

Policy of Welfare Migrants

Policy of Marriage

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▶ Anxiety Intensified by Globalization

intensifying

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mobilizing

Policies

Proactive State

Intervention in

Obstructing

Intervention in

Irregularity at

Transfer of

Irregularity at

“Home”

Status

“Home”

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Figure 7.1. Analytical framework of migrant reproductive labor under capitalist globalization.

justification

Reactive State

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policies that allow for the importing of migrant domestic workers (Kofman et al. 2000) to resolve the crisis of reproduction which leads to what I term “the restructuring of reproduction” (Hsia 2008b), in which women from less developed countries migrate to perform reproductive labor for the more developed countries—that is, in the reverse direction to the restructuring of production. However, these policies of importing migrant domestic workers serve only as “Band-Aid” solutions, especially as fertility rates in more developed countries continue to drop with rapid increases in the costs of childrearing. Moreover, although middle-class families can resort to hiring migrant domestic workers, farmers and working-class families cannot afford to hire this type of labor. Consequently, working-class and rural men in the more developed countries follow the flight of capital to neighboring, less developed countries in search of brides (Hsia 2010; Chapters 1, 8, 9 this volume). Despite similar reproductive needs motivating the cross-border movement of women as wives and domestic workers, states take different policy approaches to these two types of migrants. The Taiwanese government adopted a “proactive” approach to importing blue-collar migrant workers by initiating a comprehensive labor-import policy. By contrast, it took a very “reactive” approach to marriage migrants by reluctantly formulating an immigration policy only when the number of marriage migrants and their children could no longer be ignored. However, when it comes to state intervention in response to “irregular” migrants, the state takes a “reactive” approach to migrant domestic workers whose abuses are overlooked because their workplaces are considered the “private domain” of the employer, but adopts a “proactive” approach to potentially irregular marriage migrants whose homes are not seen as inviolable but open to investigation by the authorities. These contradictions in state policies are the result of national anxieties about the potential impact of migrant women’s “lower status” on Taiwan’s ability to compete in a global economy. The policies in turn create a broad web of illegality among migrant women. Unlike some research that sees illegality as the state’s failure to manage cross-border migration (Cornelius and Tsuda 2004; Coutin 1996), this chapter argues that the state itself produces illegality and further sustains it, rather than reforming policies to prevent them from producing illegality. By maintaining the illegal status of migrant women and mobilizing national anxiety to criminalize migrant women, the state benefits from lowered costs of production and reproduction, which it hopes will enable the country to survive in the wake of intensifying competition in a global

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economy, and evades its responsibilities for providing systematic welfare to its citizens, especially the underprivileged. In turn, the state has transformed itself into a corporate-like entity which sees competitiveness, rather than equality and justice, as the ultimate goal. The citizens have assumed a consumer-like status by merely demanding that the state (the corporation) ensures the “quality” of the “commodities” they purchase (e.g., migrant women), rather than exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens by holding the state accountable for ensuring equality, justice, and a basic standard of living for all.

State Policies on Foreign Reproductive Labor in Taiwan As Taiwan moved from the “periphery” to the “semi-periphery” in the world system beginning in the mid-1980s, it started importing migrant workers to supplement its own labor force and became a host country for many marriage migrants in the region (Hsia 2004). The first influx of foreign labor to Taiwan occurred in 1989 when the state gave permission to recruit three thousand migrant workers to supply labor for fourteen key national infrastructure projects. Soon after, the government added a second category of migrant worker: the “migrant care worker” (including home-based care workers and domestic helpers), later called “migrant welfare worker.” Because Chinese patriarchal family traditions continue to exist, the government is allowed to play a minimal role in the provision of long-term care by defining elder care as a private family responsibility typically performed by women. While it is becoming increasingly difficult for Taiwanese women to stay at home to carry out these necessary care duties within the family, as the rate of female employment and the size of the aging population increase, many married Taiwanese women adopt the strategy of “passing the dirty work to others” when they are unable or unwilling to perform these duties. Since the early 1990s, the lack of public intervention has turned the rising need for care work into a profitable market niche (Wang 2010). According to Wang (2010), private nursing attendants offer the most expensive care that only affluent families can afford. Though there are publicly subsidized home care services and nursing homes, these meet only a very small proportion of the need for elder care. Since the Taiwanese government permitted the importing of migrant domestic workers, these workers have offered the least expensive form of elder care and have become the primary providers of in-home care. Recruiting migrant workers is presented by the state as a type of

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welfare, which, ironically, is not provided by the state but by the market; all the government does is give families the right to access the market. In 1992, Taiwan’s legislature passed the Employment Services Act, which formed the legal basis for labor-import policies and propelled the dramatic increase in the recruitment of Southeast Asian migrant workers to labor in 3D occupations, including manufacturing, construction, and welfare sectors. Due to persistent political tensions between Taiwan and China, PRC workers were explicitly excluded from the Act and to this day are not permitted to enter Taiwan as blue-collar migrant workers (Tseng 2004). By the end of 2010, the number of migrant workers in the 3D sectors reached 379,653. As of 2011, the top source countries for migrant workers in 3D sectors included Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. In 1996, migrant workers in productive industries (including agriculture, manufacturing, and construction sectors) made up 87 percent of all migrants, while migrant workers in welfare represented only 12.8 percent (Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training, CLA 2002). The percentage of migrant workers in welfare sectors grew rapidly, however, reaching 49 percent in 2010 (Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training, CLA 2011). The increasing rate of migrant workers performing reproductive labor corresponds to the increasing rate of women migrant workers. In 1998, the percentage of women among all blue-collar migrant workers was 26.4 percent, but reached 63.1 percent by the end of 2010. Moreover, migrant women may be hired as “care workers” or “domestic helpers” in their contracts; however, in reality, the distinction between these two categories is blurred. Therefore, this chapter uses “migrant domestic workers” to refer to migrant women working in the households of their employers, regardless of the occupational category into which they are recruited. Although migrant domestic workers have filled a great portion of the need for care work, there are many farming and working-class families who cannot afford to hire this type of labor. In addition to their elder-care needs, many farming and working-class families also seek women to marry their sons, bear children, and continue the family line. However, the men of these families are no longer seen as desirable marriage partners by local women as a result of their poor economic prospects, the consequence of Taiwan’s long-term distorted development policies and the decline of the agricultural economy and exodus of labor-intensive industries under neoliberal globalization. As a result, these men look abroad for wives; therefore, the “foreign bride phenomenon” emerges (Hsia 1997, 2004).

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Similar to the trends of blue-collar migrant workers recruited to Taiwan, the number of women from Southeast Asia and mainland China entering Taiwan as foreign spouses increased significantly beginning in the late 1980s. According to statistics released in 2002 by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, one in every four new marriages in Taiwan was between a citizen and a foreigner, although the percentage decreased after 2003 and now hovers between 15 and 20 percent of all marriages registered annually. The vast majority of foreign spouses are Southeast Asian and mainland Chinese women married to Taiwanese men. From January 1, 1985 to February 28, 2011, there were 446,143 foreign spouses in the country (29.3 percent from Southeast Asia and 64.2 percent from mainland China). Over 90 percent of these foreign spouses are women (Ministry of Interior 2011).

Proactive Labor-Import Policy Versus Reactive Immigration Policy The Taiwanese government has taken many initiatives to import foreign labor. Regulations and policies about foreigners working in Taiwan are very clearly class based, with blue-collar foreign workers governed by separate and much stricter regulations than professional, technical, and managerial foreigners. For the purposes of this chapter, I use the term migrant worker to refer to bluecollar migrants only. For blue-collar migrants, a quota system is imposed to restrict the importation of migrant workers to a limited number of countries and to certain industries and occupations. Migrant workers can only stay in Taiwan for a limited number of years (as of February 1, 2012, the maximum duration of stay was extended to twelve years), they are not eligible to apply for permanent residency or citizenship, and during their stay they have no freedom to choose their residence or employer without permission from the government. Moreover, migrant workers are neither allowed to bring their family members to Taiwan nor to form a new family in Taiwan. Prior to the changes in the law implemented in November 2002, women migrant workers found pregnant at their required regular medical check-ups would be deported immediately (Lan 2006; Tseng 2004). Whereas the Taiwanese government took a “proactive” approach to importing migrant workers, it took a very “reactive” approach to marriage migrants, both those from Southeast Asia and the PRC. Because this chapter

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focuses on interconnections between marriage migrants and female migrant workers, and because mainland Chinese are not permitted to enter Taiwan as migrant workers, my analysis focuses on government policies developed in response to Southeast Asian marriage migrants. The Taiwanese government did not develop a full-fledged immigration policy until 2003, though the significant influx of marriage migrants began in the late 1980s.1 As the first researcher working on Southeast Asian marriage migration issues starting in 1994, I observed how the attitudes of government officials suddenly changed in late 2002. As of mid-2002, government officials did not consider issues of marriage migrants to be within their scope of responsibility. They simply hoped that the “foreign bride” phenomenon would be short-lived.2 However, in late 2002, the government’s position shifted dramatically with the release of two major statistics that indicated the prevalence of marriage migrants from Southeast Asia and the PRC and the increasing rate of children born to marriage migrants. Since then, the government of Taiwan has quickly initiated support programs and revised immigrationrelated laws to control the inflow of marriage migrants, increase barriers for them to acquire citizenship, and assimilate them into Taiwanese culture (Hsia 2012). These immigration policies are indeed reactive in that they are a response to the statistical prevalence of marriage migrants and their children, a response motivated by national fears about the imagined deteriorating “quality of the population” due to global flows that have restructured Taiwanese families (Hsia 2007).

Reactive State Intervention Versus Proactive State Intervention When it comes to state intervention in response to potential exploitation or irregularities in migrant workers’ and immigrant spouses’ legal status, state actors have adopted very different approaches with respect to these two populations. In contrast to the proactive nature of labor-import policies, the state takes a reactive approach to exploitation among migrant domestic workers. Government officials are very reluctant to inspect the workplaces of migrant domestic workers based on the reasoning that government authorities should not enter private homes (see Chapter 6). Though migrant workers in productive industries are also subject to exploitation, migrant domestic workers are even more vulnerable because their workplace is the private home of their

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employer, a situation that justifies authorities’ unwillingness to intervene when migrant domestic workers report abusive working conditions to the government. After receiving such a report, labor inspectors will inform the employer of the scheduled date and time of their inspection; the advance warning thereby allows the employer to remedy the situation and reduce the possibility of a formal case being filed. As one Filipina migrant domestic worker who participated in a focus group I conducted in 2011 said, One of my friends was forced to sleep on the balcony and she finally could not stand it and reported it to the labor office. But the labor office called the employer first, and the employer just rearranged the house to make it appear that she had a room to sleep in when the official came for inspection. After the inspection, she was back to sleeping on the balcony. And she is afraid of reporting it again because her employer knows she complained to the labor office and she is worried that the employer will terminate her. The Council of Labor Affairs (CLA) officials interviewed in Chen’s study (2011:117–18) commented that although they are aware that migrant domestic workers work long hours and are ordered by employers to do tasks beyond those described in their employment contracts, they will not initiate inspections because “authorities should not enter private homes unless they are reported as violating regulations.” However, as the institution responsible for migrant workers, the CLA is entitled by law to inspect the workplaces of migrant workers, including private homes that serve as the workplaces for migrant domestic workers. In contrast to their reluctance to inspect migrant domestic workers’ workplaces, government officials have few reservations about regularly inspecting marriage migrants’ homes. Because government officials suspect that many migrants from less developed countries simply use marriage to a Taiwanese to acquire residency and citizenship, they constantly inspect the “authenticity” of the marriages, including visiting the homes of marriage migrants to find any signs of “fake” marriage. If a migrant wife is reported missing, including by an abusive husband or his family members, her residency or even citizenship status could be jeopardized (Chapter 9). Furthermore, since blue-collar migrants are not eligible to apply for permanent residency or citizenship in Taiwan, they can acquire residency and citizenship only by marrying Taiwanese nationals, an option that is seen by

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government authorities as a loophole manipulated by migrant workers. Consequently, as in other countries in the region such as Singapore (Chapter 8), regulations were established barring migrant workers from directly transferring their status from migrant worker to foreign spouse. If they want to marry a Taiwanese citizen after they have entered Taiwan as a migrant worker, they must first exit the country and apply for a spousal visa in their home country. The years they have stayed in Taiwan as a migrant worker cannot be counted toward the years of residence required to apply for permanent residence or citizenship as a spouse. Moreover, if they have violated any laws when they were a migrant worker, including escaping from abusive employers and consequently becoming a “runaway,” they are banned from entering Taiwan for a period of time even after marrying a Taiwanese, as experienced by Fang, the Vietnamese woman at the start of this chapter. As we can see, the state takes two contrasting positions with respect to intervening in the private homes of citizens. It takes an approach of “reactive intervention” when it comes to the workplaces of migrant domestic workers, while it adopts “proactive intervention” when it comes to the residences of marriage migrants. While on the surface these two contrasting approaches appear contradictory, their underlying logic is consistent: migrant women from less developed countries are perceived as “untrustworthy others” who are likely to harm “innocent” citizens, that is, “we Taiwanese.” To protect the interests of “we Taiwanese,” whether employers or potentially naive citizenspouses, state actors consequently ignore abuses in the private homes that serve as the workplaces of migrant domestic workers, but actively invade the homes of marriage migrants who are suspected of tricking innocent Taiwanese.

National Anxiety Intensified by Capitalist Globalization Why does the Taiwanese government adopt these contrasting approaches to governing the influx of migrant workers and marriage migrants? I suggest that the state successfully mobilizes a sense of “moral panic” (Cohen 1972) among the Taiwanese public to justify its contradictory policies in the face of challenges to Taiwan’s citizenship tradition with globalization and the subsequent rise in national anxiety about Taiwan’s competitiveness in the global economy. Taiwan’s citizenship laws are based on jus sanguinis principles that define

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national incorporation on a descent basis that reflects a patriarchal Chinese emphasis on male lineage and ancestry (Cheng 2002). As a result, prior to changes in the Nationality Act effective in January 2000, foreigners could not be naturalized as Taiwanese citizens unless they were women married to Taiwanese men (Chen 2009; Hsia 2009). In 2003, the Ministry of Interior (MOI), charged with addressing the “foreign brides” phenomenon, drafted the Immigration Policy Guidelines and tried to rush through the establishment of a National Immigration Agency (NIA). The Guidelines focused on creating incentives for professional, managerial and skilled foreigners to immigrate to Taiwan, and stipulated that bluecollar migrants were not allowed to apply for permanent residency and naturalization. Despite various attempts by the Taiwanese government to deter workingclass foreigners from immigrating to Taiwan, it could do little to stem the rising flow of marriage migrants from Southeast Asia and mainland China, since it could not legitimately forbid its citizens from marrying nonnationals. These marriage flows have enhanced national anxieties about the ostensibly deteriorating “quality of the population,” which is assumed to hinder Taiwan’s competiveness in the global economy. Unsupported by reliable data, this claim is based on the assumption that since marriage migrants hail from developing countries, they must lack the “qualities” necessary to educate their own children, an argument clearly infused with sexist, racist, and classist overtones (Hsia 2007). While Taiwan’s exclusionary tradition of citizenship can be viewed as xenophobic in a general sense, resentment is directed mostly towards foreigners from less developed countries. What constitutes a threat and creates national anxiety are foreign women from Third World countries, that is, the lower class in the international division of labor. Ironically, Taiwan’s exclusionary and patriarchal tradition of citizenship itself allows many women from less developed countries to immigrate to Taiwan through marriage. Because the Nationality Act requires foreigners to abandon their original citizenship to gain Taiwanese citizenship, very few foreign husbands (or wives) from developed countries attempt to apply for Taiwanese citizenship. Hence, the great majority of foreigners naturalized as Taiwanese citizens are marriage migrants from less developed countries, a trend that further enhances national anxieties about the competitiveness of the population, especially the next generation produced by these marriage migrants. As a result of this national anxiety, the government has increased the barriers to citizenship for marriage migrants and has instituted proce-

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dures to weed out migrants in ostensibly “fake” marriages, which in turn contributes to the creation of illegality. In the sections to follow, I illustrate how both reactive and proactive approaches to state intervention create illegality among migrant women and potentially transform the state apparatus and its relationship with Taiwanese citizens.

State-Produced Illegality Among Migrant Women Many so-called “illegal” migrants enter Taiwan legally but later become “illegal.” According to statistics provided by the NIA, from the Agency’s inception on January 1, 2007 to April 30, 2010, 25,238 foreigners overstayed their visas, 73.2 percent of whom were migrant workers.3 Moreover, 69.4 percent of the total number of overstaying foreigners were women and 71.4 percent of the overstaying migrant workers were women, both figures disproportionately higher than the percentage of women among all blue-collar migrants. This higher rate of female migrant workers illegally overstaying their visas corresponds to the higher rate of female migrant workers recruited in the welfare sector (77.2 percent) and reflects the exploitative working conditions in that sector especially (Hsia and Wang 2010). As Hsia and Wang (2010) argue, many undocumented migrants enter Taiwan with legal status and become “illegal” due to ill-designed policies and administrative negligence and malpractice. Migrant women from less developed countries are constantly suspected of manipulating the system to serve their own interest (Hsia 2007); as a result, the tiniest misstep easily renders them illegal. The following discussion illustrates how state policies and regulations produce the illegality of migrant women involved in reproductive labor. Difficult Requirements and Frequent Policy Changes

To control the inflow of marriage migrants, the Taiwanese government intentionally makes the naturalization process for a marriage migrant very complicated and difficult. Consequently, those who stumble in the process and fail to complete all required procedures easily become undocumented. To begin, one may have married his or her Taiwanese spouse outside of Taiwan but the legal documents (such as the marriage certificate) were not validated by the overseas offices of Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). For example, Nancy met her Taiwanese husband in 1988 in her home country, South

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Africa, when he worked as a seaman and went ashore with his crew. They married in South Africa and Nancy joined her husband in Taiwan in 1989. Nancy later learned that her marriage could not be registered in Taiwan because their marriage certificate was not validated by the MOFA office in South Africa. Because Nancy’s husband could not afford for her to return to her home country to complete the paperwork, Nancy consequently became undocumented and has remained so for more than twenty years. In addition, migrant women who have married a Taiwanese national in Taiwan but cannot change their status to that of foreign spouse also become undocumented. Cases include those who entered Taiwan originally as tourists, students, or blue-collar workers, but did not exit Taiwan to apply for a spouse visa and who thereby became “illegal” after their original visa expired, despite their marriage to a citizen. It is noteworthy that foreigners from “first world” countries can change their status to “foreign spouse” without exiting Taiwan, which also reflects the classist and racist ideology shaping Taiwan’s immigration policies (Hsia 2007). There are many reasons why marriage migrants fail to complete the required procedures. They might lack awareness of the requirements, they might not be able to afford to return to their home country to apply for a spouse visa, and they might fear being refused a spouse visa to reenter Taiwan or having their reentry delayed because they previously “ran away” from an employer. This fear is particularly prevalent among marriage migrants who used to work as migrant workers in Taiwan because they are constantly suspected by the authorities of having arranged a “fake marriage.” This fear is not without grounds. For instance, the TransAsia Sisters Association of Taiwan (TASAT), together with other migrant advocacy groups, held various protests and forums in 2012 exposing cases in which marriage migrants who used to work in Taiwan as migrant workers have been denied spousal visas.4 Illness can also become an obstacle to obtaining citizenship. Marriage migrants are required to submit health certificates when they apply for visas, alien residence certificates, permanent residence, and even to extend their residency. If they fail the required health examinations, they will not be permitted to stay in Taiwan. Moreover, according to the HIV Infection Control and Patient Rights Protection Act, if a foreign spouse tests positive for HIV, her visa or permit of stay or residence will be revoked and she will be deported. Even if a foreign wife has minor children, she will be deported because of her HIV infection, unless she can prove and petition in writing that she was “infected by her native spouse or infected through the process of receiving

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medical care in the country.” That is, marriage migrants whose HIV test results are positive but who cannot successfully petition to stay will become undocumented if they do not leave Taiwan. One interlocutor, June, from Thailand, married her Taiwanese husband in 1992 and in 1996 gave birth to their second child. The child was found to be HIV positive and subsequently June was found to be HIV positive as well. June faced deportation because she could not prove she was infected through the process of receiving medical care in Taiwan, nor could she prove that she was infected by her husband because he tested negative. Out of fear of being separated from her family forever, June stayed in Taiwan and became undocumented. Marriage migrants who end their marriages before acquiring citizenship and continue to reside in Taiwan may become undocumented. Before the efforts of immigrant rights organizations resulted in the amendment of the Immigration Act in January 2008, marriage migrants whose marriage ended before they had obtained citizenship, even if the divorce was due to domestic violence, faced deportation once their visa expired (Hsia 2008a). Though the 2008 amendment permitted divorced marriage migrants to continue to reside under certain circumstances, including “if s/he is physically or mentally abused by the spouse and protected by a court-issued protection order; and if s/he suffered from family violence and divorced after the judgment of the court, and also has minor children,” there are still obstacles which could lead to them becoming undocumented. They are still required to apply for and receive a court-issued protection order, which might be difficult because of the barriers marriage migrants face in reporting domestic violence (see Chapter 9). Hsia and Huang (2010) found that marriage migrants have difficulty accessing services due to their unfamiliarity with local languages and their isolated living environment. Although the Taiwanese government established a reporting system for domestic violence cases, many marriage migrants do not know that they can report domestic violence or how to report it. Without police report records or medical evidence, it is impossible for them to acquire court-issued protection orders. If they run away from their violent home without a protection order and are reported as “missing” by their husband’s family, they become “illegal.” Additionally, as Friedman describes in Chapter 9, court-issued protection orders expire, and therefore they do not guarantee permanent residence. Problematically, if foreign spouses divorce before acquiring citizenship, they cannot continue to stay if they have no children, and those with children can only stay until their children come of age (Hsia and Huang 2010).

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If divorced migrants want to apply for citizenship, they must apply as “general foreigners” who face much stricter eligibility requirements, such as financial proof of property worth five million Taiwan dollars (approximately US$170,000). With the economic difficulties most marriage migrants encounter, it is virtually impossible for them to satisfy this requirement. Many marriage migrants do not want to return to their home countries after a divorce because their home communities view divorced women as shameful. However, if they continue to stay in Taiwan after the expiration date of their residency permit, they become “illegal.” Finally, because Taiwan has adopted a reactive approach to the formulation of immigration policy, resulting in often hastily designed laws and regulations, the government frequently revises the laws and regulations governing marriage migrants. Some marriage migrants become “illegal” not through any fault of their own but because the laws change under their feet. In other cases, foreign spouses who were deemed “illegal” under old regulations find they cannot regularize their status despite new regulations that eliminate their prior illegality. For instance, prior to the 2008 amendment of the Immigration Act, minor offenses such as gambling and car accidents would lead to the deportation of a marriage migrant without citizenship. Some marriage migrants committed minor offenses and did not exit Taiwan because of family care responsibilities or because of difficulty making a living in their home countries. They became overstayers and thus undocumented. Though the new regulations exclude minor criminal offenses from the grounds for deportation, those who did not exit as required by the old regulations remain illegal. Although they can exit and reenter with a legal status, some are reluctant to do so because they fear that they will be banned from returning to Taiwan. Because the laws and regulations governing foreigners are very complicated and have changed frequently, most marriage migrants and migrant workers need to consult government agencies to learn about the most updated versions. However, many bureaucrats, especially those dealing with issues concerning marriage migrants, are not familiar with the most updated laws and regulations. Moreover, most of them hold stereotypical views of migrants and discriminate against them, as do state policies and the public more generally. Consequently, some migrant women become undocumented because they are given false information or even because of negligence on the part of public service providers. For instance, when Sally, a Vietnamese marriage migrant, went to her local NIA branch office to request information about how

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to apply for an Identification Certificate, the woman at the counter glared at her and replied in a very unfriendly tone, “You haven’t been here for three years yet! Come back when you have lived here for more than three years!” Sally explained to the staff person that she only wanted to understand the procedures and requirements, but the woman responded, “I am telling you, even if I tell you today, you will forget right away” (Hsia and Huang 2010). Similarly, migrant workers who seek help from state authorities often experience negligence. My focus groups with migrant domestic workers showed that when they experience exploitation and call the CLA hotline for help, they are often given advice such as “just endure it if you want to stay in Taiwan.” Some migrant workers who cannot receive help decide to “run away” from exploitative working conditions and become “illegal” migrants. Despite the problems with the regulations governing marriage migrants, the status of foreign spouse is considered relatively stable when compared to that of migrant worker. Therefore, some blue-collar migrant women enter Taiwan through an arranged marriage with a Taiwanese man. They will become “illegal” once their spousal visa expires or they are caught by the authorities. These women report several reasons for choosing an arranged marriage as their method of entry. Some seek to avoid the exploitative system encountered by migrant workers (see more below), and others hail from countries removed from the Taiwanese government’s list of source countries for labor import.5 For this latter group, the only pathway to work in Taiwan is through marriage. Exploitative System of Migrant Labor

A great majority of undocumented migrants are migrant workers, who are reported as “runaways” by the state authorities. The reasons for running away include escaping exploitative working conditions and control from brokers, and continuing to earn money to support their families (Hsia and Wang 2010). Because domestic workers are not covered by the Labor Standards Law and thus their basic labor rights are not protected, they face harsh working conditions such as no days off, long working hours, and even twenty-fourhour on-call requirements. Additionally, similar to Gardner’s (2010) analysis of the kafala system in the Gulf, by binding migrant domestic workers to individual citizens (including employers and brokers), the Taiwanese government creates systematic and structural violence against migrant women, who can be deported not only by the state but also by individual citizens. Consequently, the path to “illegality” by running away from abusive employers and

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brokers is a strategic response to the systematic abuse enabled by labor import policies themselves. Jane’s story is typical among migrant domestic workers who eventually run away from employers. She worked for a big family with ten adults and fifteen children. In addition to cooking three meals a day, she had to clean, do laundry, and care for young children. Jane worked from six in the morning until three the next morning. She had worked for this employer for four months without being able to contact anyone and did not have any days off. Eventually, she decided to run away. I am not allowed to go out and to make a phone call. There is one time, the driver fetched me to another house to clean and I saw a 7-Eleven. I asked the driver to stop for a while for me to make a phone call. I told him it’s an emergency. Then he said, “OK. Make it fast!” Then I borrowed NT$100 from him to buy a phone card because my employer remitted my salary directly to my account in the Philippines so I did not have any cash with me. . . . I did not have a cell phone because the broker told my employer not to let me use it or I will be influenced by others. . . . I lacked sleep badly. . . . I even burned myself when ironing clothes at midnight after they all slept. Every day I felt like I was floating. So this is the reason why I ran away. Although many migrant domestic workers run away because of exploitative working conditions, others run away from employers who treat them fairly. They run away because they are worried that the employer will not continue to employ them, yet they need to work to pay off debts and support their family. Joy came to work in Taiwan in 2003 to support her young children in the Philippines. Though she had a contract as a care worker, she actually worked as a domestic worker. Fortunately, her employer treated her fairly. She decided to run away from her employer because she sensed her employer would not renew her contract. I needed to extend my contract after two years. Since they did not extend me so I planned to run away. Actually, I asked them if they wanted me to extend the contract. They just assured me that they will. However, since I was active in the organization, I had an idea how to process the papers. Though they kept assuring me that they will extend

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my contract, how can they process my papers in only three to four days? . . . So I already had an idea that they will not extend my contract. . . . I was afraid that they did not process my papers and they already had the ticket to send me home, so I decided to run away. . . . I cannot afford to go home because I still have lots of responsibilities in my country. My source of living is here and if I lose my job here, my support to my loved ones will be cut off. We do not know why Joy’s employer did not extend her contract. But from other stories we know that the labor-import system actually encourages an employer to hire a new migrant domestic worker, instead of extending the contract for the old one. While the CLA claims to have a policy for “directhiring,” that is, to hire a migrant worker without a broker, the procedure is so complicated that most employers utilize the services of a broker. Moreover, since rehired migrants are required to exit Taiwan and reenter for the extended term, many employers prefer (or are encouraged by brokers) to hire a new migrant, so that there will not be a “window period” when they are waiting for the rehired migrant to return to the job. This “window period” is particularly troublesome for employers of care workers, whose jobs are to care for the ill or disabled members of the household who require constant attention. Due to their financial responsibilities, migrant workers who run away must continue to work. For migrant women to find jobs after running away from employers, a market must be available. This market, ironically, has been created by weak state responses to widespread societal demand for long-term care and care for young children. Because the government has stopped issuing almost all permits for migrant domestic helpers, while setting no quotas on recruiting migrant care workers, many households supply false information to be eligible to apply for a migrant care worker and then assign that worker to do household chores or childcare, as Joy’s former employer did. To apply for a migrant care worker at home, the elderly or disabled person must go to a public hospital to be assessed by a medical team and only those who require intensive care are eligible. Many employers actually pay brokers a fee to acquire a certificate that makes them eligible to sponsor a migrant care worker, when, in fact, they really seek a migrant domestic helper (Chen 2011). Those who need to hire a domestic helper but are not eligible to apply for a migrant care worker and cannot, or choose not to, purchase the required

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medical certificates often opt to hire migrants who have run away from their original employers. It is this widespread need for migrant domestic workers and the limited official channels available to hire them that creates the market for “runaway” migrant women. In other words, it is the state-produced market that enables undocumented migrant women to survive in Taiwan. Moreover, by maintaining the constant pool of migrants with illegal status, the state can further evade its responsibility to provide comprehensive welfare, since those who are not wealthy enough to hire private nursing attendants and yet not eligible to apply for publicly subsidized care services or migrant workers can hire “runaways” to fulfil their welfare needs. Originally, the government set up strict eligibility criteria for Taiwanese citizens to qualify to hire migrant domestic workers in order to protect the job market for local domestic and care workers. Nevertheless, by creating a “black market” for undocumented migrant domestic workers, the state neglects its responsibilities to citizens who would fill such a niche while fulfilling other citizens’ welfare needs.

State-Produced and State-Sustained Illegality Reduces Costs of Production and Reproduction Both the “reactive” and “proactive” modes of state intervention produce migrant women’s illegality in Taiwan. As pointed out by De Genova and Peutz (2010), the “illegality” of migrant women is produced by the very system responsible for the management of migrants. Moreover, the fact that the state refuses to reform policies, despite government officials’ recognition of the state’s responsibility in creating illegality, shows that the state does not only produce illegality but also actively sustains it. Despite continuous protests by organizations advocating for im/migrant rights, the state refuses to develop a systematic response to legalizing undocumented im/migrants who are obviously victims of ill-designed state policies and administrative malpractice. State authorities fear that any systematic legalization process will become a loophole manipulated by “undesirable” migrants (i.e., blue-collar migrants) to acquire residency and citizenship, after which they will become social burdens because they are assumed to be abusing social welfare and benefits. At the same time, state authorities espouse a rhetoric that associates undocumented im/migrants with increased crime and social problems that cost the public resources and money. This rhetoric

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further justifies efforts to strengthen regulations that criminalize marriage migrants and migrant workers. While all blue-collar migrants are considered “undesirable,” migrant women are seen as particular threats because they may marry Taiwanese citizens and reproduce Taiwanese children, who are assumed to lower the “quality of the population” in the face of an increasingly competitive global market. By constructing migrant women as “threats,” state authorities successfully argue that it is the duty of the government to protect the institution of citizenship from abuses by such foreign-national women. By maintaining the illegal status of migrant women and mobilizing national anxiety to criminalize migrant women, the state benefits in two ways. First, it benefits from lowering the costs of production and reproduction, which it hopes will enable the country to survive in the wake of intensifying competition in a global economy. On the one hand, the only paid jobs available to undocumented migrants are those without benefits or insurance. Moreover, employers tend to pay them less because of their illegal status. On the other hand, although migrant workers paid income tax and dues for national health insurance and labor insurance while documented, their benefits are immediately invalidated, that is, confiscated by the state, once they become “illegal.” Therefore, they lose their health insurance coverage and cannot claim benefits for occupational injuries or funeral benefits from their labor insurance (Hsia and Wang 2010). Moreover, by not reforming policies that produce migrant women’s illegality, the state maintains the poor working conditions for migrant women so that the cost of production remains low. Second, by maintaining the illegality of migrant women and associating such illegality with a host of social problems, the state evades blame for creating the very system that produces illegality and abdicates responsibility for providing comprehensive welfare for its citizens, especially the underprivileged, by redistributing resources and wealth. As mentioned previously, the influx of migrant women is indeed the result of the needs encapsulated within the realm of reproductive labor, which the state fails to meet. By maintaining a pool of undocumented migrant women, the state facilitates the fulfillment of a great majority of citizens’ welfare needs. Moreover, by invoking citizens’ “moral panics” (Cohen 1972) about the illegality of migrant women, the state directs citizens’ attention away from state accountability and toward worrying about how “we-Taiwanese” are threatened by “them–illegal migrants.” Because the state evades its responsibility to provide a comprehensive welfare system, it is not pressured to reform the tax system so that the wealthy are

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taxed at a much higher rate, thereby keeping the costs of production for the capitalists low and maintaining the position that such low costs are essential to preserving Taiwan’s competitiveness in the globalized market. Furthermore, government policies that criminalize marriage migrants and migrant domestic workers are implemented in the name of “protecting the public interest” of Taiwanese against “foreign invaders.” In this militarist discourse, what is at stake is the “quality of the population,” perceived as the weapon needed to win the war in the competitive globalized market. In this discourse, the state apparatus becomes a corporate-like entity, whose ultimate goal is to maintain and advance its competitiveness in the global economy, rather than ensuring equality and justice by narrowing the gap between the haves and have-nots. In turn, citizens have assumed a consumer-like status by merely demanding that the state (the corporation) insures the “quality” of the “commodities” they purchase (e.g., migrant women), rather than exercising their rights and responsibilities to hold the state accountable for providing welfare and advancing equality and justice.

Notes 1. Though the Entry/Exit and Immigration Law was passed in 1999, it mostly stipulated regulations regarding entering and exiting Taiwan. Mainland Chinese fall under a separate law that was first passed in 1992 (see Chapter 9). 2. In everyday discourse, the term foreign bride refers to marriage migrants from Southeast Asia and sometimes mainland China. Women from the United States, Japan, and other developed countries are not referred to as “foreign brides.” 3. The total figure includes foreigners and mainland Chinese. 4. See https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bzxrhbz-YNw0YzNVcUF5NzBOU0U/edit. 5. Cases include countries such as Indonesia and the Philippines, which were originally on the list but were banned by the Taiwanese government for a time due to diplomatic conflicts. Migrant workers had to find another way to enter Taiwan during the period of the ban.

References Boris, Eileen and Rhacel Parreñas, eds. 2010. Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Burawoy, Michael. 1976. “The Function of Reproduction of Migrant Labor: Comparative Material from Southern Africa and the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 81(5):1050–87.

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Bureau of Employment and Vocational Training, Council on Labor Affairs. 2002. Waiji Laogong Quanyi Baogaoshu (Report on Protecting Foreign Workers’ Rights). Taipei. ———. 2011. “Table 12–2: Foreign Workers in Productive Industries and Social Welfare by Industry.” http://statdb.cla.gov.tw/html/mon/212020.htm. Retrieved May 1, 2011. Chen, Chao-ju. 2009. “Gendered Borders: The Historical Formation of Women’s Nationality Under Law in Taiwan.” Positions 17(2):289–314. Chen, Chen-fen. 2011. “Guanli huo boxue? Jiating waiji kanhugong guzhu de shengcun zhi dao” (Management or Exploitation? The Survival Strategy of Employer of Family Foreign Care Workers). Taiwan Shehui Yanjiu Jikan (Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies) 85:89–155. Cheng, Lucie. 2002. “Transnational Labor, Citizenship and the Taiwan State.” In East Asian Law: Universal Norms and Local Cultures, edited by Arthur Rosett, Lucie Cheng, and Margaret Y. K. Woo, 85–105. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Cohen, Stanley. 1972. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Oxford: Blackwell. Constable, Nicole, ed. 2005. Cross-Border Marriages: Gender and Mobility in Transnational Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2009. “The Commodification of Intimacy: Marriage, Sex and Reproductive Labor.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38:49–64. Cornelius, Wayne A. and Takeyuki Tsuda. 2004. “Controlling Immigration: The Limits of Government Intervention.” In Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, 2nd ed., edited by Wayne A. Cornelius et al., 3–47. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Coutin, Susan Bibler. 1996. “Differences Within Accounts of U.S. Immigration Law.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 19(1):11–20. De Genova, Nicholas and Nathalie Peutz, eds. 2010. The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Arlie R. Hochschild, eds. 2002. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Press. Gardner, Andrew M. 2010. “Engulfed: Indian Guest Workers, Bahraini Citizens, and the Structural Violence of the Kafala System.” In The Deportation Regime: Sovereignty, Space, and the Freedom of Movement, edited by Nicholas De Genova and Nathalie Peutz, 196–223. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hochschild, Arlie R. 2000. “Global Care Chains and Emotional Surplus Value.” In On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism, edited by Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, 130-46. London: Jonathan Cape. Hsia, Hsiao-Chuan. 1997. Selfing and Othering in the “Foreign Bride” Phenomenon: Study of Class, Gender and Ethnicity in the Transnational Marriages Between Taiwanese Men and Indonesian Women. PhD dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Florida, Gainesville. ———. 2004. “Internationalization of Capital and the Trade in Asian Women: The Case

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of ‘Foreign Brides’ in Taiwan.” In Women and Globalization, edited by Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana, 181–229. New York: Humanity Books. ———. 2006. “Empowering ‘Foreign Brides’ and Community Through Praxis-Oriented Research.” Societies Without Borders 1(1):93–111. ———. 2007. “Imaged and Imagined Threat to the Nation: The Media Construction of ‘Foreign Brides’ Phenomenon as Social Problems in Taiwan.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8(1):55–85. ———. 2008a. “The Development of Immigrant Movement in Taiwan: The Case of Alliance of Human Rights Legislation for Immigrants and Migrants.” Development and Society 37(2):187–217. ———. 2008b. “Foreign Brides and Immigration Control.” International Migrants Alliance 2008 Founding Assembly Document, 98–108. Hong Kong: Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants. ———. 2009. “Foreign Brides, Multiple Citizenship and the Immigrant Movement in Taiwan.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 18(1):17–46. ———, ed. 2010. For Better or for Worse: Comparative Research on Equity and Access for Marriage Migrants. Hong Kong: Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants. ———. 2012. “The Tug of War over Multiculturalism: Contestation Between Governing and Empowering Immigrants in Taiwan.” In Migration and Diversity in Asian Contexts, edited by Lai Ah Eng, Francis L. Collins, and Brenda S. A. Yeoh, 130–49. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Hsia, Hsiao-Chuan and Lola Chih-Hsien Huang. 2010. “Taiwan.” In For Better or for Worse: Comparative Research on Equity and Access for Marriage Migrants, edited by Hsiao-Chuan Hsia, 27–73. Hong Kong: Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants. Hsia, Hsiao-Chuan and Frank T. Y. Wang. 2010. “Yuqi juliu yimin zhi shizheng yanjiu” (An Empirical Study of Undocumented Im/migrants). Quanguo Lüshi (Taiwan Bar Journal) 9:5–49. Kofman, Eleonore, Annie Phizacklea, Parvati Raghuram, and Rosemary Sales. 2000. Gender and International Migration in Europe: Employment, Welfare and Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Lan, Pei-Chia. 2006. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2008. “Migrant Women’s Bodies as Boundary Markers: Reproductive Crisis and Sexual Control in the Ethnic Frontiers of Taiwan.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33(4):833–61. Ministry of Interior. 2011. Statistics on the Marriages Between Citizens and Foreigners [in Chinese]. http://www.immigration.gov.tw/public/Attachment/13249411378.xls. Retrieved April 20, 2011. Parreñas, Rhacel S. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Piper, Nicola and Mina Roces, eds., 2003. Wife or Worker? Asian Women and Migration. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Tseng, Yen-fen. 2004. “Politics of Importing Foreigners: Taiwan’s Foreign Labor Policy.” In Migration Between States and Markets, edited by H. B. Entzinger, Marco Martiniello, and Catherine Wihtol de Wenden, 101–20. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Wang, Frank T. Y. 2010. “From Undutiful Daughter-in-Law to Cold-Blooded Migrant Household Worker.” In Transnationale Sorgearbeit: Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen und gesellschaftliche Praxis (Transnational Carework: Legal Frameworks, Practice in Society, Socio-Political Challenges), edited by Kirsten Scheiwe and Johanna Krawietz, 309–28. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.

Chapter 8

Migrant Wives, Migrant Workers, and the Negotiation of (Il)legality in Singapore Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Heng Leng Chee

The Production of (Il)legal Migrant Subjectivities Boon, a factory manager in his late thirties, lives with Zhang Yin, his beautician wife, in a three-room government-housing apartment.1 Formerly from Malaysia, he is now a Singaporean citizen, while Zhang Yin is a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) holding Singaporean permanent residency (PR). She entered Singapore in 1997 on a work permit to take up a factory job, where she met Boon, who was working as a technician in the same factory. Boon told us that they fell in love, but had to go through a “testing time” of three years before they could get married in 2001, and another two years after that before they managed to stabilize their lives in Singapore (Interview, November 25, 2010). In relating his story, Boon first explained that there is a stipulation forbidding foreigners holding work permits from marrying any Singapore PR or citizen. He was only a Singapore PR back then, but even so, the human resource department had warned Zhang Yin that she was not to develop a romantic relationship with any Singaporean or PR, and if she violated this stipulation, they would deport her back to China and confiscate her S$5,000 deposit as well. Before Boon and Zhang Yin could register their marriage, therefore, they had to seek approval from Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM). As they understood it, the success of their application would hinge

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on Boon’s educational level, job, and salary. Boon worked hard to improve himself through registering for a diploma course while working at the same time. After three years, they applied and were successful in obtaining permission for their marriage from MOM. After marriage, however, Zhang Yin had to resign from her job as she could no longer be legally employed on the short-term social visit pass that she was issued upon becoming a “foreign spouse.” For a period of two years before she obtained PR status, therefore, the couple could only afford to rent a small room because Boon bore the sole responsibility for making ends meet and providing for the two of them. He said, “It was a tough period but once we passed through that difficult phase, I felt it was the right time for me to apply for Singaporean citizenship.” Zhang Yin became a PR in 2003, and they bought their first apartment in 2004, fulfilling their dream of having a place that they can call home. For all their difficulties, Boon considers himself fortunate when compared to a friend in similar circumstances who had to go through three rounds of applications before receiving approval. Boon’s narrative illustrates clearly the key theme of this chapter, which focuses on how the (il)legalities of migration, as constructed by the Singaporean state, impinge on the intimate lives of migrants and their citizen spouses. In particular, we give attention to the construction of “(il)legality” within what has been called the “wife or worker?” paradox in which on the one hand, women from developing Asian countries who enter Singapore as foreign workers (such as Zhang Yin) are not permitted by law to marry Singapore citizens and PRs (such as Boon), and on the other hand, the growing numbers of Asian women who enter Singapore as marriage migrants are not allowed to take up paid work (as illustrated when Zhang Yin finally transitioned to “wife” status and before she was given PR). With the “feminization of migration” in Asia (Gaetano and Yeoh 2008) and the increasing range of opportunities for Asian women to cross international borders, “the binary division of female migrants in the region as either wives or workers” is becoming unsustainable given “the fungibility (and indeed, in many cases, artificiality) of the distinction drawn between these states” (Jones 2012:288). Yet the wife/worker paradox continues to hold salience for migrant women such as Zhang Yin (and her would-be husband Boon) who are concerned with carving out “legal” migration pathways for themselves and avoiding the taint of “illegality.” Indeed, across political cultures and regulatory regimes, “illegal immigration has emerged as a generalized fact in virtually all of the wealthiest

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nation-states,” and at the same time “illegal” migrants have featured prominently on policy agendas around the world (De Genova 2002:419). The concentration of worldwide attention on “illegal” migration, however, tends to mask the fact that concepts of “legality” and “illegality” are not fixed categories and cannot be taken for granted. Scholars have argued that “(il)legality” is in fact not a singular or essentialized object, but the product of a particular confluence of circumstances which, therefore, may be understood differently in different periods and places. Relying on Foucauldian conceptions of power, for example, Coutin (1993) examines how everyday practices produce knowledge which constitutes individuals as citizens, legal residents, illegal aliens, and so forth. Garcés-Mascareñas (2010:87) locates migrants’ “illegality” within the fundamental dilemma confronting states between the demands of “markets [that] require a policy of open borders to provide as many migrant workers as demanded” on the one hand, and those of “citizenship [that] require some degree of closure to the outside so as to protect the economic, social, political and cultural boundaries of the nation-state” on the other. States try to resolve the dilemma by managing migrants (such as Zhang Yin) as pure economic labor that can be governed by erecting multiple barriers to control inclusion and exclusion, a task that may fail because migrants are irreducible to pure labor but continue to act as social, political, psychological, emotional, and relational subjects (no barrier could stop Zhang Yin and Boon from “falling in love”). Hence, migrant (il)legality is produced in the space hemmed in by the “intractable antagonism between demands for migrant labor and demands for closure” (Garcés-Mascareñas 2010:87). State power operating in this space takes the form of strategies including (a) policing territorial borders; (b) temporalizing presence; and (c) limiting human rights to discourage belonging and instead increase the sense of insecurity (2010). In the first instance, illegality is the result of the “bureaucratization and commercialization” of the border: given the excessive red tape, endless paperwork, physical barriers, and high costs charged by intermediaries involved in negotiating territorial boundaries, migrants may be compelled to opt for illegal entry (2010:82).2 As Pieke and Xiang argue, “ ‘legality’ . . . [is] not [an] intrinsic quality that migrants do or do not possess, but bureaucratic statuses manufactured and commercially supplied in the process of migration” (2007:2). Second, illegality is also the product of policies that set limits on the temporal presence of the migrant, leading to legal migrants being transformed into illegal overstayers once contracts or visas expire. Third, Garcés-Mascareñas (2010:86) develops

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the concept of the “confine of legality” occurring within the borders of the nation-state, which ensures that legal migrants are “immobilised in the job market, made dependent on their employers, and defined as purely and exclusively temporary labor.” Keeping within the “confine” despite the limits to rights within this space is what migrants attempt to do, for fear of deportation should they escape the “confine.” In short, “deportation policies delimit the symbolic precinct of illegality” and construct migrants rendered illegal as “deportable subjects” (2010:87). As we already glimpsed in Zhang Yin and Boon’s story, achieving “legality” and eschewing becoming “deportable subjects” are things that migrants must work hard to achieve (such as slogging it out to pass a diploma course in Boon’s case); once achieved, “legality” extracts a substantial cost (Zhang Yin had to give up paid work once she succeeded in becoming a wife). The legal pathway for migrants is long and difficult, and success seems arbitrary, so much so that when Boon’s nephew later told him that he was dating a PRC girlfriend, Boon advised him not to pursue the relationship because he would never be able to meet the necessary requirements, both academic and financial, to qualify for a transnational marriage. By treating the concept of (il)legality as produced in the contradictory space between state strategies and human endeavor, scholars have also identified a “gray zone” between “legality” and “illegality.” This is an area shaped and contoured by socialized perception and flexible interpretation of what constitutes legitimate activities and what does not (see also Chee, Yeoh, and Shuib 2012; Chapter 9). In her work on Guatemalan and El Salvadoran immigrants in the United States, Menjívar (2006:1007), for example, explores the links between “liminal legality” and human subjectivities, arguing that immigrants’ “uncertain legality” transforms them into transitional beings “neither one thing or another, or maybe both, or neither here nor there, or maybe nowhere.” Baas (2011:177– 78) shows that social acceptability helps to sustain the gray zone by conferring legitimacy or normalcy on an illegal activity (e.g., among student migrants in Australia, working more than the legally permissible number of hours was seen as something that “everybody else” was doing and hence acceptable, if not expected). At the same time, he observes that the state of liminality in migrant lives need not be one characterized by creativity, the inversion of rules, or the need to challenge authority; it can also describe a constraining set of circumstances “locked in-between certain narrowly defined realms” as we saw in Zhang Yin and Boon’s description of the two-year “tough period” that tested their resolve.

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By drawing from the literature on the production of “(il)legality” and treating “legal” and “illegal” as unstable and sometimes conjoined categories, we seek to contribute to the discussion of the production of pathways of (il) legality through our study of international marriage in Singapore, a nationstate which operates a complex disciplinary matrix of migration categories kept separate and distinct in order not only to control entry and length of presence, but also to constrain and calibrate social and economic rights available to different categories of migrants. Our contribution to the discussion focuses on the production of migrants’ (and their citizen-husbands’) subjectivities in the structural context of rigid and relentlessly applied state immigration policies. Migrant workers in Singapore cannot easily change their immigration status even by leaving the country and reapplying to enter under a different category. The only way in which a migrant worker can cross over to become a “foreign wife” is if the government allows it, revealing the quasi-parental nature of state-society relations. Whether or not they noticed the pun, more than one interviewee commented on the irony of having to seek permission to marry from MOM. Our chapter points to how the inescapability of the narrow and unchanging confines of “migrant worker” and “migrant wife” gives rise to a state of liminality characterized by particular migrant and citizen subjectivities. These are constituted by a heightened sense of anxiety as well as constant interaction with state-imposed constraints through careful plotting and calculations so as not to veer from the path of legality.3

Context and Methods In recent years, cross-nationality marriages involving a citizen and a foreign spouse have accounted for over a third of all marriages registered in Singapore (this was 40.6 percent in 2009; Singapore Department of Statistics 2012). Foreign spouses tend to come mainly from other countries in Asia. In 2009, 97 percent of noncitizen brides and 66.7 percent of noncitizen grooms were of Asian origin (Population in Brief 2010). In 2010, 6,335 male Singaporeans and PRs wedded foreign brides, while 1,895 of their female counterparts married foreign men (Population in Brief 2011). This reflects the dominant pattern of male Singapore citizens and PRs marrying foreigners (rising from 19.1 percent in 1999 to 26 percent of the total number of marriages in 2010) compared to female Singaporeans and PRs marrying foreign men (which also rose from

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5.3 percent in 1999 to 7.8 percent of the total number of marriages in 2010; Population in Brief 2011). The increasing proportion of Singaporean men seeking “foreign brides” from the Asian region reflects the growing mismatch in marriage expectations between the two largest groups of singles: on the one hand, independent-minded, financially well-resourced graduate women with sophisticated expectations of marriage partners, and on the other, Chinesespeaking blue-collar male workers with low levels of education, purportedly with a preference for women willing to uphold traditional gender roles and values. This demographic context of very high proportions of international marriages provides the background for our project “State Boundaries, Cultural Politics and Gender Negotiations in International Marriages in Singapore and Malaysia.” We draw primarily on material gathered from two clusters of indepth interviews conducted as part of this larger project. The first cluster of interviews included thirty-five Vietnamese women who had married Singaporean men and twenty-four of their husbands.4 From December 2008 through October 2009, we conducted English classes specifically designed for Vietnamese women who had only primary education and very little prior exposure to English. We drew our study participants from these classes, which offered a platform for Vietnamese marriage migrants to meet and socialize. Through their networking and social events such as picnics and barbecues, we were able to reach out to a wider network of Vietnamese women (and their husbands). The class attendees were informed of our research project, but we made it clear that class attendance did not require that they participate in the project. We conducted prolonged chats and interviews with those who consented, while observational notes were made from the classes and various social interactions. We also draw on a second cluster of interviews conducted between April 2009 and October 2011 with migrant women (and Singaporean husbands of migrant women) who had been, prior to contracting marriage with their Singaporean husbands, work permit holders engaged in low-skilled contract labor. Under Singapore’s Marriage Restriction Policy, all current and former work permit holders are not permitted to marry a Singapore citizen or PR.5 The couples in this cluster would have had to appeal to the government for special permission to marry in Singapore. There were considerable barriers to identifying and obtaining interviews from work permit holders–turned–foreign wives given the stigma of illegality attached to these marriages, but eventually we managed to interview three couples (both husband and wife), two

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wives (but not their husbands), and one husband (whose wife was in the Philippines because she had been banned from entering Singapore). We had traced these cases via our social networks, including NGO groups and friends. There were other cases that we came to know of, but we were not successful in obtaining consent for interviews. All but one of the cases that we interviewed were successful in their applications to the government of Singapore. Although we managed to interview only one case of a failed application, we are acutely aware that this does not mean that there are fewer failures than successes. Indeed, those who fail would either be “underground” or no longer living in Singapore.6

From “Worker” to “Wife”? As a labor-scarce city-state without a hinterland, Singapore has had to depend on drawing more women into the waged economy (the female labor force participation rate crossed the 50 percent mark in 2000 and increased to 56.5 percent in 2010) as well as on foreign labor of all classes, skilled and unskilled (foreigners constitute more than 30 percent of the country’s work force, the highest in Asia with the exception of the Gulf), to sustain its aspirations to attain a place in the global city “super league.” In 1978, in response to the developing crisis in the reproductive sphere— increased female labor force participation resulted in dwindling stocks of traditional paid substitutes such as local amahs and “servant girls,” as well as the decline of the extended household and the loss of help in household work from extended family members—state authorities finally allowed a limited recruitment of domestic servants from Thailand, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines. By 2011, the number of foreign domestic workers reached 201,000 (The Straits Times, November 30, 2011), the majority split roughly between Indonesians and Filipinos, with a smaller proportion of Sri Lankans and a sprinkling of other nationalities. Singapore’s state policy opposes long-term or permanent immigration of unskilled labor. Foreign workers are seen largely as “a buffer to even out the swings of the business cycle” (The Straits Times, November 17, 1988) and are subject to repatriation during periods of economic downturn.7 In the case of foreign domestic workers, a range of policy measures has been put in place to ensure surveillance of migrant bodies and to prevent them from gaining a permanent structural foothold in the geobody of the nation (Yeoh, Huang, and Gonzalez 1999). One set of such measures frames

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labor and immigration conditions in such a way as to promote transience of the individual in the host nation-state. Low-skilled migrant women can enter the nation-state for work only if they have been successfully processed for work permits (mainly to work as foreign domestic workers). Once within the borders of the nation-state, they are restricted to working in the home of the employer named on the work permit for a period of two years (renewable on application and only if the worker is below fifty years of age at the time of application, is medically fit, and has not contravened any of the work permit conditions). Employers are also required to furnish a security deposit of S$5,000, which may be forfeited if the foreign domestic worker “runs away” (and hence becomes an “overstayer” in the nation-state), a measure that often results in employers intensifying surveillance over their foreign domestic workers and in some cases forbidding days off. In short, these regulatory mechanisms not only police territorial borders to ensure the legal entry of a regulated number of migrant laboring bodies but are also set up to “temporalize” or control the length of presence. Foreign domestic workers are expected to remain within the “confine of legality” or face possible deportation (Garcés-Mascareñas 2010). That the “confine of legality” was a reality for some migrants became apparent in the stories we heard in the field. Raizah, a forty-five-year-old Filipina who was eventually successful in her marriage to a Singaporean Malay, told us of her friend, a Filipina who married a Singaporean and then was caught when someone told on her. Even though they already had a baby by then, she was repatriated back to the Philippines. Raizah explained that her friend “Cannot stay here. Because . . . she changed her name, but they caught the work permit, the thumbprint” (Interview, March 4, 2011). State policies directed at transience do not simply target the individual migrant but strictly circumscribe family formation, affecting both citizen and noncitizen spouses. While low-skilled migrant workers may be physically “inside” the nation-state, they are rendered “ ‘outside’ in any social, labor-related and symbolic sense” (Garcés-Mascareñas 2010:81). As a work permit holder, the foreign domestic worker cannot bring along any dependents and is prohibited from marrying Singapore citizens and PRs, or becoming pregnant. The rigidity in making a clear distinction between a migration category (“work permit holder”) intended to meet the need for “productive” (if lowly paid) labor to provide care in the Singapore home, on the one hand, and another category (“foreign spouse”) that also meets the demand for (unpaid) “reproductive” labor in homes, on the other, is symptomatic of the way

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“categorize-and-control” migration policies work.8 Under the Marriage Restriction Policy, a work permit holder must seek permission from the Controller of Work Permits to marry a Singaporean or PR, whether in or outside Singapore. This rule also applies retrospectively to former work permit holders, even years after they have left Singapore (The New Paper, March 20, 2004). According to an MOM spokesman, such a policy “is necessary to discourage the large pool of unskilled or lower skilled migrant workers from sinking roots in Singapore through marriage with locals” (quoted in The New Paper, March 20, 2004).9 When the Marriage Restriction Policy was queried in Parliament in 2008, Acting Manpower Minister Ng Eng Hen clarified the need for this policy and why it is also binding on former work permit holders in terms of “sending a strong signal,” saying, “We need a strong signal. . . . There are 500,000 work permit holders here, mainly less skilled or unskilled workers. . . . We need to be very careful that the couple is able to look after themselves and their family, and not become a burden to the society or state in the longer term” (The New Paper, October 22, 2008). In a case reported in The Straits Times (August 20, 2004), for example, Rosalie Sarmiento, a Filipino who worked in Singapore from 1991 to 1993 as a foreign domestic worker returned in 1999 to marry a Singaporean man, Quek Yam Lai, whom she first met in the early 1990s. Worried that she would not be allowed to register her marriage to Quek, she entered Singapore using false identity papers, declared to the authorities that she had never worked in Singapore, and registered her marriage as Criselda Collantes Flores. On conviction, she was jailed for four weeks and faced possible deportation. The ban on marriage is also, in the case of low-skilled migrant women, coupled with strict surveillance prohibiting pregnancy. Foreign domestic workers must undergo medical screenings for pregnancy every six months (in addition to other tests for HIV and venereal diseases) and those who fail the medical examination will be repatriated immediately without exception. Such exclusionary measures targeted at forbidding procreation are doubly ironic in the context of rapidly plummeting fertility in Singapore, escalating state anxieties about the failure of the nation to reproduce itself, and the various rounds of new pronatalist measures to encourage more babies among the Singaporean citizenry. The draconian effects of the Marriage Restriction Policy are keenly felt. Given that the largest group of cross-nationality marriages is between older, less educated Singaporean men with blue-collar jobs and younger Asian women from less developed countries in the region (elaborated in the next

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section), it may be argued that state anxieties over reproduction center not only on rapidly falling fertility rates overall, but more specifically on who exactly is reproducing the nation. With prevailing social norms for women to “marry up” and men to “marry down,” the men in the former category tend to have more difficulty attracting potential marriage partners within Singapore and, therefore, have to widen their search in the region. It is precisely this category of men who may not pass muster when their financial wherewithal comes under state scrutiny. In 2008, for example, The New Paper (October 22, 2008) told the story of forty-four-year-old Kumar Kanna, who failed after twenty appeals in four years to obtain permission to marry his girlfriend, thirty-four-year-old Pacita Vallejos Tibayan, a Filipina who had worked in Singapore as a foreign domestic worker between 2002 and 2004 but had since returned to the Philippines. A sales manager in an electronics shop, Kanna said an MOM officer told him that it was because his monthly S$1,700 income then (by 2008, he claimed that his salary had increased to about S$2,500) was deemed too low to support a family. He added that he sent S$300 to Tibayan (a high school graduate who sold sundry goods in the market for a living in the Philippines) every month and reckoned that he spent about S$1,500 a year on air tickets and phone bills to keep in contact with her. They were able to meet only twice a year, during Chinese New Year when Kanna would fly to the Philippines and during Deepavali when Tibayan visited Singapore. Kanna’s frustrations were multiplied by the ironies he observed in his situation: The government keeps encouraging us to get married and have babies. I want to do that, but the government is also standing in my way. Unlike others who cannot find a partner, I have already found my love, but I am unable to be with her due to certain unclear rules from MOM. . . . It is ridiculous for me to be appealing so many times. Usually, people seek for marriage approval from parents, while for my case, I need to seek approval from MOM! In these instances, “illegality” is the direct product of state-imposed restrictive policies that control the reproductive rights of migrant women (and those of certain sectors of the Singaporean citizenry) with the justification that this is for the greater good of Singaporean society. Remaining on the straight and narrow legal pathway in trying to make the transition “from worker to wife” is not only particularly difficult, but may eventually lead nowhere (as we note in

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Kanna and Tibayan’s narrative four years after they planned to marry). In another case that emerged from our interviews, we learned of a Filipina domestic worker who had to return to the Philippines as she had become pregnant (thus contravening the terms of her contract) even though her Singaporean boyfriend had wanted to register their marriage in Singapore (related to us by Hernie, an NGO volunteer in Singapore, Interview, March 1, 2011). They did not succeed in their appeal to marry and the “marriage” eventually fell apart because the Singaporean man “gave up trying” after a while, leaving the woman and their child to fend for themselves in the Philippines. There is hence every inducement for migrant women trapped in the transitional gray zone to attempt creative if not necessarily legal ways to “escape” their categorization and “switch” migration pathways (see also Constable 2003; Introduction and Chapter 4, this volume). In one case, a Filipina domestic worker and her Singaporean employer went through marriage rites in the Philippines but did not register their marriage in Singapore (related to us by Hernie, an NGO volunteer, Interview, March 1, 2011). On paper, her legal status is that of a foreign domestic worker under the sponsorship of her “employer,” but “they live as a married couple” in the man’s home in Singapore. These maneuvers create a superficial sense of normalcy that is fraught with vulnerabilities as the woman has made the transition at one level to becoming a “wife,” but without actually shifting her structural position under Singapore’s migration regime from that of being a foreign domestic worker. While cases such as this one confirm the existence of gaps within the marriagemigration nexus that can be exploited creatively to produce new subjectivities for both citizens and noncitizens, in other cases the scrutiny of the law and its panoptic apparatus may prove to be too difficult to escape, as we see below. Jim, a sixty-nine-year-old retiree, had married Elvira, his Filipina domestic worker, some thirteen years ago in the Philippines, but has had no success in obtaining permission for his wife to live with him in Singapore. His case was complicated by Elvira having changed her name to Casey in 1997 when she gave up her first work permit, which was issued under Jim’s daughter’s name, and applied to come in on another work permit with Jim as the employer. “Because during those times, the Filipino that have come to work here, they go back they normally change their name because they find that if they don’t change name, the MOM will not approve it, after a year you work, you cannot work anymore.” (Interview, October 6, 2010)

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Although they were married, Elvira’s residence was covered by a work permit issued in the name of Casey for ten years, until she returned to the Philippines in 2007. The couple’s intention was to live in the Philippines from then on, but because Jim was offered more work, he stayed on in Singapore. Elvira returned to Singapore in 2008, but was only issued a three-month social visit pass. So she come out, so every three months she will come out every three months. So we go to ICA [Immigration and Checkpoints Authority], approve, and stay another three months. Then she go back and another three months. I was thinking, why don’t I apply for long term? But ICA say “your marriage is not recognized by MOM.” I said I don’t know. I signed consent; I don’t know that there is such law. That I must get permission from MOM. I thought when I marry somebody I get permission from my father-in-law, or mother-in-law, I do not know. So they said, “OK, we give you a short-term extension, three months.” We kept appealing, appealing, appealing until ICA wrote to me: we are referring your case to MOM. (Interview, October 6, 2010) On her next visit, Elvira tried coming into Singapore as “Elvira Toh” (following the custom of changing a maiden name to one’s husband’s name) but was detained for three hours at the Singapore airport checkpoint, fingerprinted “many times,” and only allowed to go when she finally furnished Jim’s name and identity card number. A few days later, the MOM called Jim up for an “interview” during which he was shown two photographs of his wife, one labeled “Casey” and the other “Elvira.” The officer asked, “Are these the same person?” Jim had no choice but to sign a document admitting that Casey and Elvira were the same person. After this, Elvira was banned from visiting Singapore altogether. Jim has appealed through his Member of Parliament thirteen or fourteen times to no avail: “They just keep telling you she contravened her work permit; she has to serve her ban. We ask how long; they won’t tell you. . . . So the MP keep on writing la. How long? They just say she has to serve her ban” (Interview, October 6, 2010). Even with the few “success stories” we heard from the field, successful reinvention of one’s structural position from “worker” to “wife” required at least one important precondition (the man’s economic standing, which marks his recognition as a desirable, productive citizen) as well as the capacity to negotiate a thicket of legal intricacies.10 Tammy, a twenty-eight-year-old

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Indonesian Muslim, was engaged to be married to Jack, the thirty-six-yearold son of her first (Chinese Singaporean) employer for whom she had previously worked as a foreign domestic worker for three and a half years (her job was to provide round-the-clock care to Jack’s mother, who had diabetes). Their relationship blossomed when she was working for her second (current) employer, providing “housekeeping services” in a condominium apartment with six tenants. Jack had been recently divorced, and he works for an oil company. When we met them in October 2010, the couple was planning to apply to the MOM for permission to register their marriage in a year’s time, and were embarking on a strategy that they believed would increase their chances of success: Tammy had been studying hard and would soon be obtaining a diploma in hotel management (apparently she has plenty of time on her hands while working for her current employer) as she felt that obtaining a better educational qualification might enhance their chances of getting the MOM’s permission to marry. Jack lamented that when they approached the MOM for advice, the MOM merely gave him the “Application for Permission to Marry a Singaporean Citizen/Singapore Permanent Resident” form without further assistance.11 Proactively seeking the advice of NGOs (mentioning both the Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics [HOME] and Transient Workers Count Too [TWC2]) and checking with friends who had married foreign wives, Jack figured out the process: he said that the MOM needed to “clear out” Tammy’s name from the Work Permit list, either by changing her to an “S” Pass or a “green card,” which required the holder to stay in Singapore for up to one year while waiting for PR status, before he or she was allowed to register for marriage. On reflection, Jack reckoned that the process of marrying Tammy was going to be hard, unlike his friends’ marriages to women from China, and wondered why this was so.12 Remaining on the legal track was important to Tammy and Jack in order to increase their chances of a legal union in the eyes of the Singaporean state and a future together in Singapore. This required considerable knowledge of the ins and outs of the system as well as patience and planning to negotiate its intricacies. While Jack and Tammy seemed to have avoided pitfalls that could cast a shadow of illegality on their intended marriage, Jack had no answer to the question in his mind: Why is it so difficult to marry a foreign woman just because she used to be a domestic worker, especially in comparison to the ease with which his contemporaries marry foreign brides?

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From “Wife” to “Worker”? Marrying a citizen of Singapore does not automatically qualify a foreign wife for PR, let alone Singaporean citizenship. Foreign wives first enter Singapore on either a Short-Term or Long-Term Visit Pass (LTVP) that needs to be renewed every three to twelve months. There are about 9,400 foreign spouses on the LTVP, which has to be renewed yearly (The Straits Times, March 6, 2012). Renewal is dependent on the Singaporean husband’s willingness to support his wife’s application. Foreign wives are not allowed to seek employment under the LTVP category, and this becomes a strong incentive for them to apply for Singapore PR as a means of opening the door to employment. However, the PR application process is fraught terrain that is difficult to negotiate with any degree of certainty. Again, the process depends on the husband’s sponsorship, while evaluation of applications by the state apparatus remains a black box, the common belief being that the criteria for success are largely economic factors such as the husband’s education, employment status and history, income level, Central Provident Fund (CPF) balance, and tax records. For Vietnamese wives whose entry into Singapore is currently dependent on a social visit pass, securing PR status is a pressing concern as residency rights represent a major pathway to paid work, possible healthcare benefits, and an independent source of income. Without PR status, migrant wives are not allowed to seek legal employment in Singapore, thereby cutting off opportunities to build up their own independent source of financial support. However, the conditions governing the granting of PR appear to the women to be impossibly opaque, and the only clue they have while navigating in the dark relates to their husband’s level of income.13 Dan (a twenty-year-old Vietnamese woman), who at the point of the interview had been commercially matched for about eight months to forty-fiveyear-old Paul, a divorcee with a primary-level education, had become increasingly worried as her husband had been out of a job for several months. He had hardly any savings as his bank account had been emptied out to pay for divorce proceedings, the new marriage, as well as his elderly mother’s hospital fees during an illness. Dan cried when she spoke about feeling “stuck” in terms of her “legal status.” She said she was “very pessimistic” about her future as her social visit pass was expiring soon and she was not sure whether she would be able to renew her long term social visit pass given that Paul was jobless. She was also feeling rather insecure because without PR status, she did

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not have health insurance coverage and could not add her name to the title deed of the small flat that her husband owned. While she realized that taking up paid work was illegal, she had become a babysitter to a one-year-old boy, the son of a neighbor who was working full time as a cosmetics sales assistant. This arrangement, for which she was paid S$500 per month, had started a month ago and was a major source of support for the couple. Dan’s anxieties about her husband’s financial straits and her worries about her own legal status were, therefore, intertwined, and the combined effect was to push her into the zone of illegal work in order to sustain the family. She shared that the other pathway open to her was to leave her husband and marry another Singaporean man (she said that she had “many friends in Singapore” who wanted to “introduce her to other men” as she was “beautiful and smart”) but she rejected this (theoretically legal) option because she had become attached to Paul, believing in the “karma” that bound them together, and thought she might incur Buddha’s punishment if she were to leave Paul for another man as it would not be “a moral thing” to do. In short, weighing her circumstances, Dan decided on the “illegal” pathway of paid work as her only way forward if she were to have a chance to hold on to what she valued as “moral,” and to remain “true” to her own feelings. For migrants caught in the throes of liminal if not desperate circumstances, considerations of legality are only part of the broader social and moral calculus that shapes individual action. Clearly, the way the calculus of decision making worked for Dan demonstrates why juridical status is only one element in migrants’ assessments of desirable futures. While Dan’s actions (undocumented employment as a babysitter) make her vulnerable to being rendered illegal, those actions are chosen out of adherence to what are otherwise morally and socially recognized values in a patriarchal marriage system. By portraying her motives in a way that justifies her economic actions as compatible with marital norms, she engages in what Yue (2012:12) calls “pragmatic complicity” in order to make her own decisions intelligible and justifiable given the migration and gender/sexual regimes in which she is embedded.14 The liminal nature of desperate circumstances was also what drove Lam, a thirty-nine-year-old Vietnamese wife on a social visit pass to risk working illegally. One year into her marriage to a jobless Singaporean who was sexually abusive toward her, Lam approached an NGO for advice on how she could get a divorce. She claimed that her husband gave her no financial support whatsoever and it was a neighbor who ran a food stall and “felt sorry” for her plight

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who allowed Lam to assist with washing dishes and cleaning tables for S$20 a day. With her daily earnings, she was able to provide meals for her husband, his mother, and herself. Lam described her situation as that of a “hard marriage and an unhappy life”: she put food on the table and did all the cooking and cleaning for their own flat and her mother-in-law’s place as well, but despite all her “efforts and contributions to the family,” she was, in her words, treated “like a maid,” a “servant,” with “no voice” of her own. Engaging in illegal work, for Lam, provided her with some respite, but did not fundamentally disentangle her from “legal servitude” (Lan 2007; also cf. Killias 2010). In a subsequent interview, Lam appeared to have changed her mind about seeking a divorce. She had learned from some of her friends, she said, that she might be able to obtain PR if her husband was willing to sponsor her application, and for that sliver of hope, she was prepared to “suffer a little longer” and would “try to be nice to her husband.” Securing residency was of foremost importance to women such as Lam as PR opens up the pathway to important rights, including the right to work. For the right to legal work, Lam—in contradistinction to Dan—was prepared to contemplate sacrificing her feelings and trade short term “suffering” for longer term practical gain. Thus, PR is of crucial importance to the Vietnamese marriage migrant: not only is it the key to legal access to paid work and an independent source of income (to send remittances back to Vietnam, for example, as part of the “act of recognition” of a “filial daughter”; see Yeoh et al. 2013; Chapter 1), but it also is what significantly differentiates a “wife” from a (domestic) worker. Ironically, while the acquisition of PR status is an important marker of the difference between “wife” and “worker” in terms of immigration status, it also puts the two on par in terms of their ability to engage legally in paid employment, thus blurring categorical distinctions even further.

Categorical Instability The “categorize-and-control” migration policies discussed above have the effect of hardening the boundaries between “productive” and “reproductive” work within the broader social imagination. They produce either/or categories that send out strong messages such as “once a worker, never a wife,” or “when a wife, don’t think of becoming a (paid) worker any time soon.” Such dichotomous thinking has become so pervasive that when two Myanmarese work permit holders got married to each other in the middle of their

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respective work contracts in Singapore, their marriage was singularly unusual enough to make the news. In fact, the journalist took pains to explain why the Marriage Restriction Policy did not apply to the marriage of thirty-four-yearold Mr. Myint Zaw Htoo, a technician who lives in a rented public housing flat, and twenty-five-year-old Ms. Ei Ei Mon, a foreign domestic worker living in her employer’s home (The Straits Times, August 22, 2011). The news article clarified that the marriage restriction rules “[did] not apply to the couple from Myanmar because both of them [were] foreigners” (the message seems to be that this was a legally sanctioned marriage that stayed within the rules of the game as no citizen has been “compromised”), and then went on to explain that the happy couple “will not be leaving for a honeymoon,” “are not planning to have children” (the prohibition on pregnancy for Ei continues to prevail as long as she is a foreign domestic worker in Singapore regardless of whether her children have a citizen or noncitizen father), and, in fact, “[are] not even [going] to live together any time soon” (since Ei is required by law to stay with her employer as a live-in maid). What was also indicative of the separation of spheres and the ideational gulf between “worker” and “wife” where lowskilled migrants are concerned was the reaction of Ei’s Singaporean employer. She was “shocked when her maid told her of the wedding,” exclaiming that “I never imagined that foreign domestic workers could get married in Singapore,” but also adding, almost as an afterthought, that “she is a good worker, and as long as she stays on to work for me, I’m happy for her.” In short, the public imagination in Singapore comprehends the figure of the foreign domestic worker only as a worker who performs a range of reproductive work (such as childcare, eldercare, cooking, cleaning, etc.) for her “host family”; that she might actually want to engage in intimate labor in the service of her “own family” is something either quite unimaginable, or if imagined, is somehow associated with the gray zone of illegality. These either/or migration categories quickly become untenable and meaningless when imposed on the rhythms of everyday life governed not so much by legal categorization as by the fluid relationalities of love, care, intimacy, and domestic life. Instead, these policies have the effect of producing illegality as migrants try to slip across categories, sometimes abetted by citizens, including husbands (such as Jim) and neighbors (such as the respective neighbors of Dan and Lam). Indeed, legality can sometimes be situational. Thirty-three-year-old Sang’s husband George (a fifty-two-year-old owner of a hardware business), for example, narrated an incident when he “happened to be around” when Sang, who had an entrepreneurial bent, worked at the stall

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she had set up to sell durians. He had gone to the toilet but on return found his wife surrounded by officers from the MOM who were threatening to take Sang away because she was the holder of a social visit pass which disallowed paid work. George quickly intervened and claimed that the stall was his, and he had simply asked Sang to keep an eye on the stall while he visited the toilet. The officers seemed satisfied and did not pursue the matter further. Liminality in this case allowed Sang to move creatively between being the entrepreneurial businesswoman and the passive wife-helper of her husband in order to sidestep, rather than confront, the full weight of the law. (Il)legality in these circumstances is hence an unstable concept that can be reworked according to the micropolitics of each set of circumstances. These microstrategies exploit a temporary sense of “societal ambiguity” (Coutin 2005:23) in order to cope with liminal conditions; they are important survival tactics in the Singapore context where public sympathy for the foreign wife-turned-“illegal” worker (as well as the foreign worker-turned-“illegal” wife) remains rather limited.15 Collective action or NGO advocacy for less tortuous pathways from wife to worker (or from worker to wife) is only beginning to generate alternative discourses to those of the state.

Conclusion In the context of growing demand within and beyond Asia for flexible female migrant labor in both the (lowly) paid or unpaid categories, “legal” and “illegal” are being produced as unstable categories, as part of the practices and logics of contemporary migration regimes. As we have shown in this chapter, part of the volatility stems from classifying people into binary migration channels which are themselves predicated on fundamentally unstable categories with blurred conceptual boundaries such as “productive work” versus “reproductive work” or “citizen” versus “resident” versus “migrant.” The difficulty in maintaining conceptual clarity further escalates when these categories are used to discipline and control the fluidities of identities, relationalities, and practices in the intimate sphere. This perpetuates, at a fundamental level, jaundiced views that migrant women who have worked before in low-end jobs are not suitable marriage partners, or that those who become wives should confine themselves to the domestic sphere. We have also shown that migrant women (and their husbands) exercise unrelenting ingenuity in carving a path forward for themselves within this liminal space, despite

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awareness of the “risk” and “gamble” that accompany their journey across fraught terrain. Our discussion also reinforces Garcés-Mascareñas’s (2010:83) point that illegality is better explained from “within” the context of migration policy and the local circumstances and contradictions besetting the nation-state than as something external to the system (see Chapter 7). This serves to remind us that a simplistic rationalization of migration processes into “legal” and “illegal” channels, whether to facilitate state control or NGO interventions, may be counterproductive. As Killias (2010:912) has argued, “we need to be cautious about equating ‘legality’ . . . with improved working and living conditions.” Taking the longer view, in a society where challenging “the very grounds on which law and legality are distinguished” (Coutin 2005:23) would find few adherents, our hope, too, is that deepening understanding of “legality” as a social category and a contingent process, and showing how this better understanding can recuperate migrant lives, will point the way forward.

Notes Funding for the research project “State Boundaries, Cultural Politics and Gender Negotiations in International Marriages in Singapore and Malaysia” is provided by the Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund (MOE AcRF Tier 2 Grant No. T208A4103). The authors would also like to gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Arthur Chia, Zhang Juan, Vu Thi Kieu Dung, Gary Lee, Nguyen Thi Thanh Tam, and Miriam Ee. The editors Sara Friedman and Pardis Mahdavi also gave us valuable feedback, which helped us in sharpening our arguments. 1. All ages and time references pertaining to interviewees are given as at the time of the interviews. 2. See also the argument in the Introduction that sending-country restrictions often force migrants into informal migration channels that are more dangerous and put them at greater risk at destination. 3. In her work on how family policies produce societal norms, values, and a Singaporean identity, Teo (2010:351) similarly argues that the constricting force of these policies generates a narrow range of normative meanings available for understanding romance, childcare, or obligations to the elderly. 4. We were not able to meet with the husbands of the other eleven women. Of the thirty-five women, twenty-seven met their husbands through commercial matchmaking agencies or informal agents, while the others met through social networks. 5. This is a gender-neutral policy that applies equally to both male and female work permit holders.

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6. “Underground” means being legally married in Singapore after having successfully changed names and passports (according to one of our key informants, this “illegal” route was quite prevalent at one time, but is apparently no longer possible since the use of fingerprinting in the late 1990s). 7. This is in contrast to the treatment of “foreign talent” (foreigners in the professional and managerial classes) who the governing elite has been anxious to attract and retain as part of a larger basket of strategies to transform Singapore into a “special, exciting, diverse cosmopolitan place” (The Straits Times, August 21, 2006) that will move the city up the rungs of the global cities ladder. 8. The fact that migrant domestic workers also perform reproductive labor, albeit at a (low) wage, is not taken into account by policy makers, although the irony is not lost on the domestic workers themselves. Some observe that the line between being a “maid” and a “wife” is a thin one, differentiated in job scope only by the fact that they do not sleep with the husband (see Yeoh and Huang 2000). 9. This “logic” is repeated with an unwavering consistency. In 2008, another MOM spokesman cautioned, “If the marriage proceeds without approval, the spouse may not be able to obtain residency status in Singapore. This requirement is necessary to send a clear message to foreign workers that they should come here only to work and not with the intention of sinking roots in Singapore” (The New Paper, October 22, 2008). 10. Straightforward success stories were few. One that we came across was that of Joyce, a forty-three-year-old, college-educated Filipina with secretarial qualifications who had worked as a domestic worker in Singapore for fifteen years, and Richard (fortytwo years old), a marketing executive for funeral services who also works as a pianist performing in hotel lobbies. The couple dated for eleven years and had to overcome parental objection before applying to the MOM for permission to marry. The MOM approved their application for marriage within two months, after which Richard proposed to Joyce over the phone (she had ended her contract two months prior so that they could put through the application and had returned to the Philippines to await the outcome; Interviews with Richard and Joyce, August 17, 2010). 11. The documentation required is apparently not trivial. One of the interviewees (Richard) explained that the couple had to submit as part of the application all their educational certificates. He emphasized that the MOM was very insistent on seeing the originals; photocopies were not sufficient. He had to make a trip back to his old school to get his certificates reissued as he had lost them. 12. Most of this information was obtained from conversations with Tammy and Jack on October 15, 2010. On June 13, 2011, we met up with Tammy again and did a recorded interview with her. At that time, she was just visiting Jack because she had stopped working and was living in Indonesia while awaiting reply from the MOM on their application for permission to marry, and fortuitously, during her visit, Jack received the approval letter from MOM. 13. On April 1, 2012, the government introduced the Long-Term Visit Pass Plus (LTVP+) as an enhanced set of benefits for foreign spouses who have not been granted

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PR or citizenship. The LTVP+ is for three years in the first instance and up to five years at each renewal. Holders will receive healthcare subsidies for inpatient services at restructured (government-owned) hospitals and will be allowed to work to supplement the family income if they succeed in obtaining a letter of consent from the MOM. Those issued the letter will not be counted in their employers’ foreign worker quotas but will be considered part of the local workforce. It should, however, be noted that the LTVP+ does not signal a relaxation of the criteria to qualify for a long-term pass. Couples who have at least one Singaporean child from their marriage will be eligible to apply. For those with no children, factors such as the duration of the marriage (three years is seen as a minimum) and the husband’s ability to support a foreign spouse will continue to apply. Dependence on the sponsorship of their husbands remains unchanged (The Straits Times, March 2, 2012; March 6, 2012). 14. We are grateful to Sara Friedman, who helped us see this point. 15. Public opinion in Singapore casts the “foreign brides” phenomenon in a negative light. Marriages contracted with foreign women from less developed countries, especially if commercial intermediaries are involved, are often thought to be pathological (e.g., the large age difference is often used as an indication of the abnormality of the match), if not “fake” (i.e., the motives of the wives in particular are suspect, the view being that these women are exploiting the system in pursuit of residency papers). See Chapter 7 and Chapter 9.

References Baas, Michiel. 2011. “Learning How to Work the Grey Zone: Issues of Legality and Illegality Among Indian Students in Australia.” In Transnational Migration and Human Security: The Migration-Development-Security Nexus, edited by Thanh-Dam Truong and Desmond Gasper, 169–79. Heidelberg: Springer. Chee, Heng Leng, Brenda S. A. Yeoh, and Rashidah Shuib. 2012. “Circuitous Pathways: Marriage as a Route Toward (Il)legality for Indonesian Migrant Workers in Malaysia.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 21(3):317–44. Constable, Nicole. 2003. “A Transnational Perspective on Divorce and Marriage: Filipina Wives and Workers.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 10(2):163–80. Coutin, Susan Bibler. 1993. Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the US Sanctuary Movement. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ———. 2005. “Contesting Criminality: Illegal Immigration and the Spatialization of Legality.” Theoretical Criminology 9(1):5–33. De Genova, Nicholas P. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31:419–47. Gaetano, Arianne and Brenda S. A. Yeoh. 2010. “Introduction to the Special Issue on Women and Migration.” Globalizing Asia: Gendered Experiences, Agency, and Activism 48(1):1–12.

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Garcés-Mascareñas, Blanca. 2010. “Legal Production of Illegality in a Comparative Perspective: The Cases of Malaysia and Spain.” Asia Europe Journal 8(1):77–89. Jones, Gavin W. 2012. “Marriage Migration in Asia: An Introduction.” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 21(3):287–90. Killias, Olivia. 2010. “ ‘Illegal’ Migration as Resistance: Legality, Morality and Coercion in Indonesian Domestic Worker Migration to Malaysia.” Asian Journal of Social Science 38(6):897–914. Lan, Pei-Chia. 2007. “Legal Servitude and Free Illegality: Migrant ‘Guest’ Workers in Taiwan.” In Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions, edited by Rhacel Salazar Parreñas and Lok C. D. Siu, 253–77. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Menjívar, Cecilia. 2006. “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States.” American Journal of Sociology 111(4): 999–1037. Pieke, Frank N. and Biao Xiang. 2007. Legality and Labour: Chinese Migration, Neoliberalism and the State in the UK and China (Centre on Migration, Policy and Society [COMPAS] Working Paper No. 56). Oxford: University of Oxford. Population in Brief. 2010. http://www.nps.gov.sg/files/news/Population%20in%20Brief %202010.pdf. Retrieved October 12, 2010. Population in Brief. 2011. http://www.singstat.gov.sg/stats/themes/people/popinbrief2011 .pdf. Retrieved September 6, 2012. Singapore Department of Statistics. 2012. Statistics on Marriages and Divorces: Reference Year 2011. http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/popn/smd2011.pdf. Retrieved September 6, 2012. Teo, Youyenn. 2010. “Shaping the Singapore Family, Producing the State and Society.” Economy and Society 39(3):337–59. Yeoh, Brenda S. A. and Shirlena Huang. 2000. “ ‘Home’ and ‘Away’: Foreign Domestic Workers and Negotiations of Diasporic Identity in Singapore.” Women’s Studies International Forum 23(4):413–29. Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Shirlena Huang, and Joaquin Gonzalez. 1999. “Migrant Female Domestic Workers: Debating the Economic, Social and Political Impacts in Singapore.” International Migration Review 33(1):114–36. Yeoh, Brenda S. A., Chee Heng Leng, Thi Kieu Dung Vu, and Yi’En Cheng. 2013. “Between Two Families: The Social Meaning of Remittances for Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Singapore.” Global Networks 13(4):441–58. Yue, Audrey. 2012. “Queer Singapore: A Critical Introduction.” In Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures, edited by Audrey Yue and Jun Zubillaga-Pow, 1–25. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Chapter 9

Regulating Cross-Border Intimacy: Authenticity Paradigms and the Specter of Illegality Among Chinese Marital Immigrants to Taiwan Sara L. Friedman

This chapter examines how authenticity has become the dominant register for evaluating intimacy in cross-border relationships, and it asks what effects authenticity paradigms have on women who move transnationally through marriage. I define “authenticity paradigms” as specific regulatory practices, cultural norms, and forms of knowledge that facilitate state recognition of intimate bonds. In the case of cross-border marriages, authenticity paradigms balance affective labor against instrumentalism: what often becomes recognizable as authentic intimacy derives from a specific model of a caring relationship that is comprehensible and credible to diverse state and societal actors. This linking of intimacy and authenticity, however, creates a narrow vision of domestic relations that often fails to capture the complexities of cross-border unions, thereby widening the gap between state immigration policies and migrants’ own lived experiences.1 Consequently, this gap may encourage immigrants to pursue strategies for maintaining legal status that stray perilously close to a gray zone of illegality whose shifting borders are defined by “inauthentic” migration motives and “sham” marriages. As scholarship in feminist, queer, and migration studies has convincingly demonstrated, intimacy is intensely public: intimate ties and acts are legally

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regulated, publicly worried over, their boundaries of recognition carefully policed (Bernstein and Schaffner 2005; Cohen 2002; Povinelli 2006; Yue 2008). Both within and across nation-states, intimacy operates as a powerful transfer point between individual desires and needs, on the one hand, and public anxieties and aspirations, on the other (Berlant 1997; Canaday 2009; Luibhéid 2002). As my discussion below shows, this public investment in intimate life creates a simultaneous narrowing and expansion of relationships available for national recognition, hardening the boundaries of state-recognized “authentic” marriage while also requiring bureaucrats to evaluate a wide range of relationship practices and ethics that challenge their definitional capacities. If intimacy defines subjects of privilege by distinguishing among populations on the basis of public recognition (Berlant 1997; Puar 2007), then authenticity paradigms expose the very margins that run through national societies, granting some couples normative recognition while denying others the privilege of inclusion.2 Ultimately, I suggest, the bureaucratic and legal procedures that structure this public engagement with intimate life may produce the very kinds of irregular or unconventional intimacy they aim to prevent. Cross-border marriages disrupt national models of heterosexual and familial intimacy by introducing concerns about marital motives that intensify state regulation of immigrants’ intimate lives. As a consequence, marital migrants often struggle to fit their marital relationships and material desires into a recognized model of normative conjugality. The migration life history told to me by Wang Hongning, a Chinese woman who migrated to Taiwan through marriage, offers one such example of this effort to mobilize discourses of authenticity to render intelligible her own migration history, even in the face of marital behaviors that transgressed dominant norms.3 Despite having married and divorced the same man several times over her ten-year sojourn in Taiwan, despite having worked illegally and legally as an immigrant, and despite fleeing to a domestic violence shelter after her abusive husband threatened her very life, Wang nonetheless portrayed her marriage, migration motivations, and personal desires in terms that conformed to heteronormative marital and familial ideals. She repeatedly emphasized her efforts to care for her husband, instill in him practices of frugality and discipline, and improve the couple’s economic security. Wang’s own affirmation of values endorsed by authenticity paradigms and the inability of those values to adequately evaluate or make legible her migration experiences underscore the contradictions produced by state regulation of cross-border intimacy for migrants and state actors alike. In this chapter, I analyze the narratives and experiences of Chinese women

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married to Taiwanese men to interrogate the powerful hold of authenticity discourses and their instability in the face of cross-border intimacies. Marital migrants become schooled in these discourses through their encounters with a bureaucratic apparatus that regularly evaluates their marriages and migration intentions, as well as through everyday interactions with citizens and other immigrants that affirm distinctions between “sham” (jia) and “real” (zhen) marriages. The authenticity paradigms deployed by Taiwanese immigration bureaucrats to regulate cross-border intimate relations reflect a marital economy composed of what appear, at first glance, to be incommensurate elements—a balance sheet that weighs relational investments and care work expectations against material motivations and the desire for naturalized citizenship.4 The coinage of sham versus real through which this economy operates highlights care (zhaogu) as the core value that transforms instrumental exchange into relationship commitment, a transformational process that undergirds several modes of intimate labor discussed in this volume (see Chapters 1, 7, 8). Hence, neither a “hostile worlds” view that firmly divides intimate social bonds from economic transactions nor the equation of modern marriage with love and romance (as opposed to material interests) can adequately capture the complexity and ambivalence of this cross-border marital economy (Adrian 2003; Illouz 2007; Zelizer 2005). Official evaluations of marital intimacy focus on immigrants’ care-based commitment to the work of family and generally disregard emotions: “love” rarely, if at all, enters into the calculus of real versus sham marriage.5 By operating under this particular rubric of marital authenticity, Taiwanese bureaucrats generally accept some degree of instrumentalism in cross-border marriages, but they do not tolerate the explicit exchange of marital status for employment opportunity or naturalized citizenship. Such calculated exchange fundamentally disrupts both romantic ideals of marriage and Taiwan’s contemporary image of itself as a nonimmigrant nation.6 This chapter traces the development of authenticity paradigms and their effects on Chinese spouses resident in Taiwan. Based on two years of nonconsecutive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Taiwan and China between 2003 and 2013, it begins with a brief introduction to the recent history of cross-Strait marriages. It follows with an examination of how state actors construct authenticity paradigms in the course of conducting immigration interviews with Chinese spouses in the control zone of Taiwan’s main international airport, analyzing how those paradigms subsequently permeate Chinese spouses’ everyday lives in Taiwan and their interactions with bureaucrats,

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citizens, and family members. I then describe the experiences of Wang Hongning, whose nearly decade-long marriage—punctuated by the instability of divorce, remarriage, and domestic violence—reveals in powerful detail the limitations of authenticity paradigms founded on the distinction between instrumentality and materialism, on the one hand, and care work and relational investment, on the other. The restricted formulations of intimacy and intentionality that undergird such paradigms expose the obstacles to inclusion and belonging faced by Chinese spouses in Taiwan, obstacles that may encourage some to pursue paths to legal standing that set them on a course of potential illegitimacy and illegality.

Marrying Across the Taiwan Strait Over the past two decades, Taiwan has come to resemble many of its other advanced capitalist neighbors in the region—namely Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Singapore—as it faces population pressures resulting from declining domestic marriage and birth rates, concomitant labor shortages, and a rapidly aging population. Taiwan has moved from supplying low-cost labor and goods in the global economy to becoming a destination for migrant workers from Southeast Asia and immigrant spouses from mainland China and Southeast Asia (see Chapter 7). Recent governments in Taiwan have managed these migration flows by defining most categories of migrants as temporary workers ineligible for permanent residence or naturalization. In fact, since the late 1980s, immigration laws and policies have only recognized a narrowly defined set of family relationships, marriage prime among them, as the legal basis for permanent immigration trajectories leading to naturalized citizenship. But Taiwan’s immigration regime does not treat all marital immigrants equally. Longstanding political tensions between Taiwan and China have meant that Chinese marital immigrants face different laws and policies from all other foreign spouses, and this separate regime imposes harsher restrictions on Chinese spouses both before and after they acquire Taiwanese citizenship. This differential treatment is a legacy of half a century of military and political conflict across the Taiwan Strait following the Communists’ 1949 victory in China’s civil war and the subsequent flight of the Nationalist government to Taiwan. Only in 1987 were ties across the Strait reinstated, and despite the rapid growth in Taiwanese investment in China and greater

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mobility across the Strait in recent decades, to this day the two governments have not agreed on the status of Taiwan.7 China continues to claim the island as a province under its sovereign authority, whereas Taiwan now functions as an independent democratic nation-state that enjoys merely de facto recognition from most members of the international community.8 As a consequence of this unresolved political conflict and China’s refusal to acknowledge Taiwanese sovereignty, the Taiwanese government faced a conundrum when it began to admit certain categories of mainland Chinese into the country in the early 1990s. To classify mainland Chinese as foreigners would incite outrage and possible military action from the PRC, which would view such a decision as a statement of Taiwanese independence. But identifying them as natives was not feasible either, given domestic political opposition and persistent fears that Taiwan would be overrun by mainland immigrants. As a compromise measure, the government created distinct immigration laws and policies that reflected the exceptional status of mainland Chinese in Taiwan as neither foreigners nor natives. This separate immigration regime has produced considerable hardships for Chinese spouses, the largest group of mainland Chinese (other than tourists) eligible to enter Taiwan and generally the only mainland immigrants who enjoy access to Taiwanese citizenship. Although Chinese spouses outnumber other immigrant spouses by a factor of roughly two to one, the two groups have naturalized in equal numbers as a consequence of their disparate immigration policy regimes.9 Foreign spouses become eligible for citizenship after four years in Taiwan, whereas Chinese spouses waited a minimum of eight years until policy revisions in 2009 reduced the wait to six years. And whereas foreign spouses receive residency and legal work rights immediately upon first entry, Chinese spouses faced a delay of two years to residency and two to six years before obtaining work rights. Prior to receiving residency, Chinese spouses were issued temporary visas that had to be extended every six months.10 This insecure, temporary status was redressed only in 2009 when Chinese spouses’ time frames for residency and work rights were revised to match those of foreign marital immigrants. Unlike South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong, which have also experienced an influx of Chinese marital immigrants over the past two decades, Taiwan faces the powerful dilemma of how to respect family reunification and human rights protected under the mantle of democratic governance while simultaneously addressing the pressing sovereignty issues sparked by the entry and naturalization of mainland Chinese in Taiwan.11 Although no longer overtly

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concerned that Chinese spouses are spies entering the country under the cover of marriage, the various governments elected in Taiwan over the past two decades gradually have focused their regulatory efforts on defining the parameters of authentic marriage in response to the diverse scope of crossStrait unions. This scope encompasses “caretaking” marriages between elderly veterans in Taiwan and middle-aged Chinese women (typically divorced or widowed); matches between working-class, disabled, or otherwise disadvantaged Taiwanese men and diverse, but generally less well-educated or financially secure, Chinese women; and, increasingly, more evenly matched couples (in terms of age, education, and class status) who meet in China or abroad and share middle- or upper-middle-class lifestyles, some of whom include Chinese men married to Taiwanese women. In general, Chinese spouses now hail from across the country, from urban and rural areas, and they have varied educational and professional histories and previous marital and migration trajectories. Similarly, Taiwanese spouses come from both mainlander and native Taiwanese backgrounds; they cut across age groups and class sectors; reside across the island; and have their own, often complex, family and marital histories.12 Regardless of this diversity, the vast majority of cross-Strait couples pair a Chinese woman with a Taiwanese man. If the couple chooses to make Taiwan their home (and many do, in accordance with patrilocal residence norms), the Chinese wife’s extended time to citizenship and the requirement that she progress through multiple visa and residency stages make her especially vulnerable to the challenges of this particular kind of cross-border marriage, one that combines often shaky interpersonal foundations and a potentially unstable mixture of intimacy and bureaucratic regulation with an undercurrent of political tension that tars all Chinese spouses with the brush of suspicious marital motives. Different expectations for appropriate gender roles and behavior across the Strait also fuel marital conflict and societal discrimination, particularly when Chinese women are perceived as forceful, direct, and selfinterested, all patently unfeminine traits from the perspective of some Taiwanese (Friedman 2013). In response to bureaucratic and popular anxieties about their marital motives, Chinese spouses often emphasize their commitments to personal and familial productivity, self-discipline and personal development, and privatized caregiving to assert their contributions to Taiwanese society and challenge portrayals that identify them either as interested only in self-enrichment or as burdens on the state. These constructions of the good marital immigrant

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are part of transformations in the role of the family under advanced capitalism that expand the contours of family composition—incorporating foreigners and even same-sex partners, in some countries—while they simultaneously invoke neoliberal definitions of economically productive roles and responsibilities to discipline the conduct of newly recognized family members. These familial transformations also shape the authenticity standards used to adjudicate immigration claims, implicating marital immigrants in a kind of “pragmatic complicity” (Yue 2008:255) through which they discursively endorse authenticity paradigms yet simultaneously undermine their regulatory capacities through their own relationship practices (see also Luibhéid 2013).

Taiwan’s Authenticity Paradigms Chinese spouses encounter the authenticity demands imposed on them by Taiwanese immigration officials when they arrive in the country for the first time. By this point the couple will have already registered their marriage in China and the Taiwanese partner will have verified their marriage certificate in Taiwan, applied for his wife’s entry permit from the National Immigration Agency (NIA), and passed a citizen-spouse interview on home soil. The vast majority of Chinese spouses land at Taoyuan International Airport’s Terminal One after a long day of traveling that typically involves changing planes in Hong Kong or Macau.13 After disembarking in the humid air of what was until recently the airport’s older terminal, they follow the signs toward immigration, but instead of lining up to have their travel documents inspected as do other travelers, they look anxiously around the arrival hall until they spot the long counter marked with a sign indicating mainland arrivals processing. They hand over their travel documents to the NIA bureaucrats who staff the desk and are called behind the counter to be fingerprinted. Once the clerks complete the necessary paperwork, they place it in an envelope which is stacked in the interview queue. Then the Chinese spouse (and her Taiwanese partner, if he has accompanied her on the flight) takes a seat in the rows of plastic chairs off to the side and waits, sometimes for as long as one to two hours, to be called for an interview.14 The border interview enacts the state’s ability to define and evaluate marital authenticity in cross-Strait unions, and as a bureaucratic practice it dates to an initial test period in 2002–2003 before being written into policy in March 2004. Although the goal of the interview is to block the entry of those

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in “sham marriages,” at issue is not the legal status of the marriage itself but instead the couple’s marital intentions.15 As one Border Affairs Corps official argued, the interview investigates whether the couple shares “the subjective intention to jointly create a family and lead a life together” (Interview with author, June 22, 2009). The challenge faced by the border official or immigration bureaucrat, then, is to determine whether a couple truly intends to build a life together or whether their marriage merely utilizes the scaffolding of legal recognition to support nonmarital aims. On the surface, this charge is deceptively simple. But subjective intentions are slippery indeed and especially difficult to evaluate through a formal bureaucratic encounter. Border interviews ultimately rest on what we might term “plausibility”: in a context of ultimate unknowability, they aim to establish a plausible case for admitting or denying entry to an immigrant spouse based on the perceived authenticity of the marriage. In practice, however, interviews rarely determine the “truth” of a couple’s marital intentions. Instead, they forge a framework for governmental adjudication of the authenticity of intimate relations that presumes nation-states have the sovereign power to regulate cross-border flows and citizen composition (Friedman 2010). Although cross-Strait couples and their supporters might contest how “sham” and “real” marriages are defined in this process, by accepting the distinction between the two categories they, too, join with bureaucrats and officials in constructing Taiwanese sovereignty by acknowledging the state’s power to assess the authenticity of cross-border intimacies. The authenticity standards produced and reinforced through border interviews emerge from bureaucrats’ assumptions about social conventions, culturally recognized norms of Chinese marriage, caretaking expectations, and the economic motivations of Chinese spouses. Although initial formulations of sham marriage identified it exclusively with sex work and human smuggling (jia jiehun, zhen mai yin), the authenticity paradigm gradually expanded to encompass a broader range of motives that were understood to outweigh a Chinese spouse’s commitment to the marriage itself. As a consequence, bureaucratic assessments at the border aimed to uncover migration intentions that suggested independent goals divorced from a recognized kinship bond with a citizen. This expansion made authenticity harder to evaluate and required that bureaucrats continually adjust their existing models of marital conventions and proper gendered behavior for “truly” married women. During the course of the airport interviews I observed, interviewers relied on assumptions about conventional Chinese marriage practices to structure

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their questioning. They intentionally switched quickly between topics (to prevent recitation of a memorized narrative) and pursued small details that could be used when comparing the two spouses’ accounts. This approach created a nonlinear concept of marital intimacy that was accessible to an administrative bureaucracy: interviewers did not aim to elicit spouses’ personal understanding of their life together but required them to narrate their marital history through reference to specific benchmarks deemed significant in the liminal, “snapshot” moment of the border interview. In other words, the evaluation of sham versus real in the interview encounter imposed its own cumulative temporality despite the nonlinear nature of interviewers’ questions, a bureaucratic temporality that measured marital authenticity through a sequence of familiarization (how did you meet?), ritualization (how did you register your marriage and celebrate your wedding?), and mutual support (who gave what resources to whom and how?). This expected sequence was often layered over other temporal narratives employed by spouses to explain their cross-border marriages (such as fateful meetings, failed romantic trajectories, or economic crises that left them feeling that life had reached a point of no return), but at times it deviated so dramatically from personal experiences that spouses struggled to narrate their marital histories in terms comprehensible to interviewers. At stake in these encounters was the risk that an immigrant might be perceived as living “out of synch with state-sponsored narratives of belonging and becoming” (Freeman 2010:xv), and thus refused entry and denied the possibility of familial-national inclusion. As interviewers quickly discover, societal norms and standards of marital authenticity shift over time and circumstances, and spouses’ intentions prove notoriously difficult to establish through the airport interview alone. Suspicions of sham marriage might emerge because of the couple’s personal characteristics (a substantial age gap or multiple previous marriages, for instance), an unlikely match between the Chinese spouse and the caretaking expectations she faced, a citizen-husband’s inability to prove his financial stability, or as a result of discrepancies in a couple’s recounting of their wedding or shared life to date. In the absence of definitive evidence—such as a frank admission of collusion, fraudulent documents, or a falsified identity—interviewers who are suspicious about marital intentions typically admit the Chinese spouse but extend her visa for only thirty days and require a second, in-country interview within that time period. Most of the interviews I observed wavered between two poles: the comparatively straightforward and the uncertain but not definitive. Locating cases

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along this spectrum required interviewers regularly to adjust their understanding of what constituted a real marriage and a true commitment to the work of family. In other words, the categories of sham and real were not immutable but came into being in particular moments of discourse shaped by the bureaucratic encounter. The specific characteristics of any given encounter—including the identities of the participants and spouses’ ability to narrate their histories in terms comprehensible to interviewers—created a space where bureaucratic discretion defined authenticity in the moment of face-toface interaction.

Authenticity Misfits Authenticity paradigms may be established at the border, but they move with Chinese spouses throughout Taiwanese society, extending the space of the border into immigrants’ encounters with family members, other citizens, and bureaucrats of all stripes, but especially police and immigration officers. These border crossing reenactments heighten the consequences of “misfits” between authenticity paradigms and immigrants’ own trajectories and motivations, for they extend interminably into the future, determining the outcome of bureaucratic encounters and the success or failure of progress through a complex array of immigration stages. The marital experiences of Wang Hongning, a middle-aged woman from China’s coastal Fujian province, offer powerful insights into the difficulties of fitting cross-border marital economies into a model of authenticity rooted in marital intentions divorced from material interests. Although Wang’s case might seem unusual because she and her husband divorced and remarried each other several times, it nonetheless is representative of many cross-Strait marriages in that it underscores the complex calculus of care and materialism that defines cross-border intimate labor. Moreover, Wang’s experiences also attest to the unintended consequences of yoking intimacy to authenticity, especially when the bureaucratic and legal infrastructure that adjudicates and reinforces specific models of marital intimacy actually encourages immigrants to pursue paths deemed “inauthentic,” even fraudulent. I first met Wang in 2007 at the offices of a Taipei-based NGO that offered classes and support services for Chinese spouses. As we casually chatted one day during a break in the volunteer training class she was attending, Wang admitted that she was currently living in a domestic violence shelter. Although

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she had come to Taiwan seven years prior, she had only reached the first residency stage of the complex immigration sequence faced by Chinese spouses. Confused by this mismatch between the length of Wang’s marriage and her insecure immigration status, I asked whether she would be willing to speak with me about her experiences. She agreed, and we arranged to meet a few days later at a coffee shop not far from the NGO’s offices. As we settled into our seats in the bustling café, Wang looked nervously around the room to reassure herself that our conversation would not be overheard. Appeased by the other patrons’ engaged conversations or the headphone wires snaking down their necks, Wang began to describe how she had been “tricked” into marrying her husband, a working-class, native Taiwanese man nine years her senior. Then a divorcee living in an inland county seat, Wang was introduced to her husband through a matchmaker, and she believed his self-representation as a never-married man looking for a wife. But later, after coming to Taiwan, she learned that her husband had been involved in a longstanding affair with a married woman and had traveled to China at the suggestion of a friend who urged him to “go through the procedures to bring someone over through marriage. [The friend] would introduce him to someone to marry and bring [to Taiwan], to help earn money together. In any case, he was like a human smuggler or something like that (fanzheng jiushi suan rentou haishi zenma yang).” Wang professed ignorance of this contractual arrangement—“All I knew was that we were really getting married”—in order to distance herself from the taint of a sham marriage and to establish her own authentic marital intentions. And, she added, her husband’s trickery was exacerbated by his demand that she first pay the matchmaker’s fee, a substantial sum of RMB20,000 (roughly US$2,400), claiming that he would reimburse her later, which he never did. This initial portrayal of how she came to marry her husband situated their relationship in a sea of disparate motives, some of which involved material interests and contractual practices that “resembled” human smuggling and sham marriage.16 Later in our conversation, however, she described her initial marital intentions very differently. At the time, her restaurant business in China had recently failed and she had few employment opportunities as a woman in her late thirties with only a high school degree. It had become very popular in her hometown to marry a Taiwanese in order to migrate to Taiwan to work and earn money. “At the time I didn’t understand. I just thought that I could start over in a new place; there was no one in Taiwan who knew me. I could go work in a new environment, earn money. I didn’t know I would come to this [sad state].”

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The first few months of Wang’s life in Taiwan in 2000 were marked by the features she described above: her husband’s infidelity as he continued his affair and her own participation in undocumented labor as she struggled to earn money without a work permit. Wang claimed that her husband gradually grew invested in their marriage and came to appreciate her skills as a homemaker, a sign of her success in “improving” him through her intimate labor in the marriage. And yet, she periodically returned from work to find that he had packed up their apartment and disappeared with his lover. Unwilling to continue such an unstable relationship or abandon her husband for an underground, undocumented existence, Wang filed for divorce only three short months after first arriving in Taiwan. Although she was supposed to leave the country within ten days of finalizing the divorce, Wang remained in Taiwan, working illegally and moving from job to job to elude the police. Her husband repeatedly sought her out and urged her to give him another chance, and the day before her visa was to expire, she finally agreed to remarry him. She then promptly returned to China to await his completion of the paperwork necessary to bring her back to Taiwan. Thus began a cycle of divorce and remarriage that would continue for six years, punctuated by her husband’s resumption of his affair and later pleading with her to forgive him, and his increasingly abusive treatment. Thinking back over this period, Wang mused aloud, “I don’t know how to explain it. In the six years that I’ve been with him, we’ve divorced twice and married three times. So only last year did I receive kin-based residency.” The couple divorced again in 2002, and Wang moved back to China, convinced that the marriage was over. Once again, however, her husband called and visited, incessantly pleading with her to marry him. When she finally agreed in September 2003, she found that it was much more difficult to process the paperwork for her return, the authenticity of their marriage now arousing suspicion in bureaucratic circles. Only at the end of the year was she granted permission to reenter Taiwan, and her immigration clock began anew. Throughout her narrative, Wang portrayed herself as a dedicated, hardworking wife committed to setting her husband on a path to fiscal discipline, a regular work schedule, and planning for the future. By appealing to these traits as well as her own participation in nonsexual labor (with or without a work permit), Wang emphasized her contributions to Taiwanese society and commitment to her marriage, difficult as the relationship had been. In so doing, she also distinguished herself from Chinese wives in openly “sham” marriages, such as a woman she had recently met at the shelter who was about

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to be evicted after residing there for only one month. This woman had come to Taiwan through marriage to a disabled man, but she quickly abandoned him and earned money by eating and drinking with other men, playing mahjong, and presumably providing sexual services. Although angered by this woman’s public flouting of marital norms, Wang ultimately decided not to report her to the immigration authorities for she recognized basic similarities in their migration motives. “Actually, those who arrange a sham marriage want to come over to make money,” Wang explained, just as she had initially. At issue was how this woman earned her money and the openness with which she did so, even when living in the shelter. Although both women shared experiences of undocumented labor while pursuing material goals, Wang distinguished herself both morally—she had performed “clean” work as a house cleaner and janitor, in restaurants and shops—and in terms of her commitment to her marriage. Unlike the woman at the shelter, Wang stayed with her husband until his abuse threatened her very life and she continued to express concern about his well-being even after she moved to the shelter. These comparisons show how fuzzy, indeed, is the line separating real from sham unions, and how an authenticity paradigm that presumes clear distinctions between legal and illegal behavior or sincere and insincere intentions fails to capture the complex negotiations made within cross-border marriages and among marital immigrants themselves (Chao 2010; Chu 2010; Freeman 2011; Navaro-Yashin 2003).

“Sham” Domestic Violence Taiwan limits eligibility for permanent residence and naturalization to immigrants who are bonded to a citizen through kinship, making cross-border marriage a site of intense investment and anxiety for immigrants who have entered Taiwan through a marital relationship. Gaining entry to the country is only the first step in a long immigration process, however, especially so for Chinese spouses whose longer wait to citizenship increases the possibility that marital conflict or death of the citizen spouse might derail their pursuit of formal recognition. If their marital bond breaks down, any methods Chinese spouses utilize to remain in the country without kin-dependent status subject them to intense state monitoring and the threat of deportation. For those who experience domestic abuse, suspicions about the validity of their domestic violence claims and the methods they adopt to protect themselves may, in

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fact, expose them to accusations of inauthentic marital motives and illegitimate immigration goals (Chen 2010; Friedman 2012). As a result, by availing themselves of legal resources such as court-issued protection orders that empower them to reside separately from their abusive citizen-partner, immigrant spouses potentially enter a gray zone of migrant illegality created by detachment from a recognized kinship tie. Unlike media portrayals of “savvy” Chinese spouses who used domestic violence protections to their own advantage, Wang Hongning’s narrative of her own experience of domestic abuse underscored the important role of Taiwanese service providers in educating her about such protections. As her husband’s behavior moved from verbal attacks to beatings, Wang struggled with how to respond to his violent treatment. When she fled the house, he reported her as missing to the local police, adding a black mark to her immigration record that made it more difficult for her to extend her visa. Unaware of social services available to aid battered women, Wang struggled to get by until a fortuitous encounter with a social worker educated her about the resources provided by the domestic violence office of her local government. After Wang ended up in the emergency room following an especially brutal attack during which her husband nearly strangled her to death, her social worker helped her apply for a protection order and relocate to a shelter, the very place Wang was living when we first met. Wang claimed that it was only after she entered the shelter that she learned from her social worker how useful the protection order would be.17 “Before I didn’t know [about protection orders],” Wang continued, “when I first entered [the shelter] I didn’t want to apply for one because I feared that it would be bad for him [her husband], that he would have to go to court and it would be embarrassing. I still worried about him.” But immigration bureaucrats required a court-issued protection order as proof of domestic violence, and only with a protection order was a Chinese spouse temporarily freed from the requirement that she reside together with her citizen-husband or that he serve as her guarantor when she applied to extend documents or progress to the next immigration stage. Protection orders were not issued for an indefinite period, however, and Wang knew that hers would expire four months before she had to renew her current residency status, meaning she ultimately would have to return to her husband if she wanted to maintain legal standing in Taiwan. At issue in concerns about “sham” domestic violence was not only that an immigrant spouse might have faked or provoked abuse in order to obtain a

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protection order, but also that the protection order then enabled her to acquire (at least temporarily) an independent immigration status distinct from the kinship relationship on which her original migration was based. Because Wang’s legal standing in Taiwan was tied to her marriage, leaving the marriage— even due to abuse, even temporarily—placed her motives under a shadow of suspicion that became ever harder to shake, especially when she openly desired to earn money and live independently. Her ideal was a simple life—a place to live, a job to support herself, the opportunity to study and learn new skills—but most important, a life in which she did not need to rely on her husband for legal residence. For immigrant spouses who had not yet obtained Taiwanese citizenship, this final element was virtually impossible to achieve without a protection order. In other words, bureaucratic demands that a protection order serve as “evidence” of domestic abuse engendered state suspicion of migrants’ intentions when they secured such documentation, thereby producing the very threat of being rendered illegal. Wang confessed that her social worker had strategized with her about how to resolve the four-month gap between the expiration of her protection order and renewal of her residency status: “My social worker told me, you can go find him and talk. See how your husband responds. If he says something [abusive] to you or hits you, you can record it, collect more evidence and extend the protection order again. And then you don’t need to pay attention to him.” With a protection order, Wang would be able to process her residency extension herself, buying herself two years’ time before she would require her husband’s help to progress to the next residency stage. Like the pregnant foreign domestic workers discussed by Constable (Chapter 4) who often learned of asylum protections from Hong Kong civil servants, hospital staff, or social workers, Wang arrived at this solution through the aid of her social worker. Over the next few months following our initial conversation, Wang moved out of the shelter and into her own place, and began working at a small food shop not far from the Taipei train station. When I saw her again in July 2008, she had recently returned from China. Initially she had moved back in with her husband (since her protection order expired in May), but he quickly became verbally abusive and threatened to beat her again, sending her fleeing to a new shelter. Faced with the dilemma of how to renew her residency status in September, she was considering applying for a new protection order, although she needed proof of her husband’s abuse for the application to succeed. As we spoke, she looked nervously at her phone, waiting for a call from a friend who had promised to lend her a tape recorder so that she could record

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her next conversation with her husband as proof of his abusive treatment. A more effective option, although Wang did not admit it openly, was to move back home and let him beat her, after which she could file police and medical reports to document the abuse. Both options fell in the gray area of potentially “sham” domestic violence incited by an immigrant spouse in order to obtain the flexibility provided by a protection order (Chao 2004:81–84). By the same token, both were recognized strategies for women who had few other means to remain legally in Taiwan while protecting themselves from further abuse. Here we see the consequences of the humanitarian shaping of migration policies around what Miriam Ticktin (2011) terms “a regime of care,” requiring individuals to formulate their migration strategies through claims to suffering and gendered violence. When they availed themselves of these strategies in response to abuse from their citizen spouse, Chinese wives acquired an exceptional, non-kin-dependent status that required them to justify their need to remain in Taiwan once their marriage had dissolved in the face of violence.

A Surprising Resolution After our 2008 meeting, I did not see Wang again for three years. When I contacted her in the summer of 2011, we agreed to meet at a local restaurant in the northeastern suburb of Taipei where she now lived, and the first thing I noticed upon greeting Wang was that she was plumper and seemed more at peace with herself. Reaching into her purse, Wang surprised me by pulling out her Taiwan ID card and announcing that she was now a Taiwan citizen. Not long after our last encounter, she explained, she had become eligible for extended residency (the final stage before citizenship), and although her protection order had expired, her social worker had agreed to serve as her guarantor and the application was approved. Wang’s experience was the first and only one I had heard of where the NIA granted a change in residency status to someone with an expired protection order and a nonkin guarantor. To this day, I do not know whether it was an exceptional case, since very few social workers are willing to serve as a guarantor for a Chinese spouse, or whether it harkened a potential change in policy.18 Intrigued, I leaned forward to keep my voice low and asked Wang how, in the end, she had managed to obtain citizenship, since I was doubtful that the NIA would issue citizenship to a Chinese spouse who lacked a kin guarantor.

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Within a year of receiving extended residency, Wang explained, policy changes reduced the overall time to citizenship from eight years to six, and the delays imposed by her past divorces disappeared. She became eligible for citizenship immediately once the reforms were implemented in August 2009, and she submitted her application a month later. At this point, however, her past marital conflicts resurfaced to delay the process yet again. In her initial telling of the tale, Wang noted briefly that her husband had agreed to sign off on her application and accompany her to file for citizenship, but after they submitted the paperwork, the NIA’s special investigation division summoned him for an interview. At issue was an earlier police record that documented her as missing, the result of her husband’s complaint to the local police after one of their many fights. Her husband was interviewed two or three times by NIA investigators, she thought, before he convinced them that she had not run off and abandoned the marriage but had moved to a shelter after he beat her. The investigation dragged on for over two months, and only in January 2010 did she finally receive her citizenship papers. But Wang’s initial recounting glossed over key moments in this delicate process, such as how she had convinced her husband to support her citizenship application in the first place. When I gently inquired about how Wang had managed to change his stance given their history of marital conflict, she first explained that she simply had used the money he owed her as a bargaining chip: over the years, she had helped him purchase a new taxi and cover other expenses, money that added up to nearly NT$300,000 (almost US$10,000). He had offered to compensate her with his retirement funds, but she was willing to wipe the slate clean—that is, if he would support her citizenship application. Even at this point he had tried to woo her back home, and she had replied that she would return only if he repaid her the full sum he owed. Wang set this condition knowing that he lacked the resources to do so; as a result, she convinced him to step forward with his juridical status as her legal citizen-husband so that they could process her citizenship application. This explanation clearly portrayed Wang’s successful acquisition of Taiwanese citizenship as an exchange of money for legal status. Yet, she did not see herself as engaging in behaviors similar to those she previously identified with “sham” spouses, for in her eyes, her exchange practices reflected a history of “clean” labor and authentic marital intentions. Unlike other women, she had been committed to her marriage (regardless of her original motives), and she had struggled to improve her husband’s behavior to make him a healthier,

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more productive member of society. Once he began to abuse her, however, she could no longer envision a viable future together with him, nor could she imagine returning to China given her age and lack of sufficient resources to start anew. Although Wang used the support of a protection order and her social worker to advance through the various residency stages, ultimately she had no choice but to turn to her husband when the time came to apply for citizenship. And at this point her migration trajectory entered a gray area of potential illegality defined by the specific bureaucratic configuration of marital authenticity that served as the basis for her citizenship claim. It was precisely at the moment of citizenship acquisition that her cross-border marriage most clearly intersected with instrumental motives and calculated exchange, confirming De Genova’s portrayal of “illegality” as “a social relation that is fundamentally inseparable from citizenship” (2002:422). As we rose to leave the restaurant so that Wang would not be late for work, she tucked her arm through mine and casually offered a different explanation for why her husband had been willing to support her application for citizenship: “He was remorseful and felt sorry for me,” she added. “Things had dragged on for so many years and he hadn’t been able to support me, leaving me to struggle to earn money.” With this casual remark, Wang resituated their relationship as an authentic marriage defined by heteronormative gender roles (male provider and female caregiver) and mutual commitment. Her explanation included emotional investments that did not preclude material interests, reaffirming the tensions at the heart of cross-border intimacy that make bureaucratic evaluations of marital authenticity so contested. As a final statement of this complexity, Wang admitted that even though she divorced her husband shortly after becoming a citizen, she still worried about him and prayed for his safety.

Conclusion In 2009, the recently elected pro-China administration of President Ma Yingjeou enacted sweeping changes to the policies regulating Chinese spouses in Taiwan, adding certain exceptions for abused spouses. Prior to these revisions, the only outlet for a Chinese spouse who wanted to leave an abusive marriage and remain legally in Taiwan was to divorce her citizen-husband and obtain legal custody of a minor birth child. In August 2009, these requirements were loosened to remove the requirement of child custody: a Chinese

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spouse with minor birth children who divorced because of documented domestic violence could now maintain residency in Taiwan and continue to progress toward citizenship, regardless of whether she had obtained legal custody. Yet these policy changes offered no window of opportunity for nonprocreative women such as Wang Hongning, whose lack of a recognized kinship tie to a citizen outweighed their experiences of domestic abuse. These women had no choice but to remain in an abusive marriage or, if they divorced, to leave the country. As a result, even reformed policies encouraged women such as Wang to seek out strategies for extending protection orders or forging overtly transactional arrangements with their citizen-spouse, lest they become undocumented and risk deportation to China. Because Taiwan’s authenticity paradigm rests so heavily on evaluations of marital intentions and commitment to a shared future, childbearing stands as a sign of an immigrant’s investment in the marriage itself, both through its indexing of sexual intimacy and through its synecdochic relation to the nation via the reproductive, intergenerational family. Given this formulation, nonprocreative Chinese spouses must rely on other signifiers of intimacy to establish the authenticity of their marital intentions and the value of a family based solely on a single-generation, conjugal unit. Wang, for instance, invoked her efforts to make her husband a more disciplined producer and consumer and to create a welcoming home environment for him as evidence of her marital labor and commitment to the relationship. In addition to disrupting the association of cross-border marital motives purely with financial gain, Wang’s statement also positioned her as someone who contributed to society instead of simply draining its resources. Her appeals to personal and familial productivity, self-discipline, and the value of a private domestic sphere mobilized normative visions of heterosexual marriage and family to create an alternative, nonprocreative basis for claiming inclusion in and commitment to the nation. The success of such claims, however, depended on the policy regime that regulated Wang’s access to legal status and the authenticity paradigms deployed to evaluate her at each stage of the process. Authenticity paradigms expose the vexed role of immigration for states struggling to assert sovereignty and ensure national reproduction. By regulating immigration flows, states simultaneously claim sovereign status and shape the contours of the nation. But immigrants also challenge state regulatory systems through their own relationship practices, desires, and modes of intimacy. Encounters between state actors and immigrants transform both parties, as bureaucrats find themselves having to adjust authenticity paradigms

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to changing marital norms and expectations, and immigrants learn to justify their own intimate choices in terms of normative heterosexual support and individual productivity, generating new migrant subjectivities in the process. The outcomes for both are by no means equal, of course; immigrants such as Wang Hongning often have no choice but to conform to regulatory norms in order to acquire secure residency or citizenship status. Yet the fluidity of these encounters and the interstitial figures they produce attest to the difficulties of creating coherent immigration regimes in an increasingly mobile Asia, where migration flows transform the substance and practice of intimacy as they create new possibilities for migrant futures.

Notes I thank Julie Chu, Lessie Jo Frazier, and Pardis Mahdavi for their helpful comments on this chapter. The research on which the chapter is based was funded by the National Science Foundation (#BCS-0612679), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange. I am grateful to the many Chinese immigrants and their family members who opened their lives to me, as well as to the Taiwanese officials, bureaucrats, social service providers, and activists who generously shared their views and experiences. 1. Authenticity functions in border regulation much as it does in racial classifications and politics, where it renders identity through objectifying, even dehumanizing individuals, making them into “simply somatic extensions of social scripts, embodiments of predetermined dialogue” (Jackson 2005:17, 14–15). The reliance on authenticity as the primary mode of border regulation objectifies border crossers themselves, ossifying their diverse motivations and investments and foreclosing recognition of the many forms that domestic relations forged across borders may take. 2. My argument here builds on a body of scholarship in queer studies that shows how same-sex migration policies and national security paradigms domesticate homosexuality by constructing homonormative “good” queers deemed acceptable for inclusion in the heteronormative nation. Juxtaposed to domesticated “good” queers are those whose sexual and intimate lives are rendered unintelligible by such policies and, hence, who are excluded from national recognition and even basic human rights protections (Puar 2007; Yue 2008). 3. All personal names used in this chapter are pseudonyms. 4. Questions of authenticity in intimate relations have been studied by those working with sex workers who have introduced theories of “bounded authenticity” and of emotional labor as “performances” (Bernstein 2007; Brennan 2004; Hoang 2010). Others trace the role of authenticity in the historical development of companionate marriage and the place of romantic intimacy in diverse relationships and encounters (Giddens 1992; Padilla et al. 2008).

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5. In bureaucratic evaluations of cross-border marriages, there is comparatively little attention paid to emotions as signs of the “real.” Brennan’s (2004) query, “What’s love got to do with it?,” may be as aptly put to marital migrants as to Dominican sex workers (but see Lan 2008). 6. Another way of interpreting the threat of calculated exchange is that it fundamentally undermines the promise of mutual recognition made possible by sincerity (Jackson 2005): commodified intimacy is deemed inherently insincere and thus threatening not only to ideals of marriage but also to interpersonal engagement more generally, even in the inherently unstable encounter between a Taiwanese border officer and a Chinese immigrant. 7. Today more than one million Taiwanese reside in the mainland as investors, employees, students, and family dependents. With the two countries’ signing of an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement in 2010, more Chinese are now eligible to move temporarily to Taiwan for work and study. To date, however, it is still much easier for Taiwanese to travel to China than the inverse, even with Taiwan’s opening up to Chinese tourists in 2009. Hence, Chinese spouses constitute the vast majority of mainland Chinese living in Taiwan. 8. From 1949 until 1971, the Nationalist government on Taiwan (the Republic of China, or ROC) retained its United Nations seat and was recognized as the legitimate government of all of China. As Cold War tensions waned and the likelihood that the Nationalists would retake the mainland grew more distant, this fiction became harder to sustain. After the UN seat was given to the PRC in 1971, many countries began to switch their diplomatic recognition from the ROC to the PRC. Today, a mere twenty-one countries plus the Vatican officially recognize Taiwan as a sovereign state, and most of these are small, economically and politically marginalized nations in Africa, Central America, and Oceania. 9. By the end of 2013, 315,905 Chinese spouses had applied for entry to Taiwan and 106,604 had become Taiwanese citizens. Although half as many foreign spouses had entered Taiwan by that date, roughly the same number, 106,397, had already naturalized, a result of their shorter wait time to citizenship (Taiwan National Immigration Agency and Department of Household Registration 2014). 10. The system in place prior to 2004 allocated residency through a quota system, and nonresident Chinese spouses were required to leave the country every three to six months in order to renew their documents. As a result, in the 1990s and early 2000s, some spent up to six years traversing the Taiwan Strait before being granted residency status. 11. Newendorp (2008) documents a similar level of societal anxiety about mainland Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong, but this anxiety is not tied to sovereignty concerns in the same way. As of 1997, Hong Kong became a special administrative region of the PRC and officially was incorporated under PRC sovereignty. Freeman’s (2011) excellent study illustrates the vexed place of Korean Chinese spouses in the South Korean government’s efforts to reproduce an idealized Korean nation, but at issue is the definition of

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Koreanness and not the impact of these migrant spouses on the country’s sovereign status. 12. Mainlanders refers to those who fled to Taiwan with the Nationalist government and military in the late 1940s and whose families hail from across China. Taiwanese originated from Fujian province across the Strait and have roots in Taiwan dating back to the seventeenth century. Despite assumptions that it is mainlanders and their descendants who are marrying Chinese today, in fact Taiwanese men (and some women) feature in equal, if not greater, numbers. 13. The following discussion of airport interviews builds on Friedman (2010). My analysis is based on observations of airport interviews conducted over several months in 2008 and 2009. 14. Foreign spouses from Southeast Asian countries are interviewed together with their Taiwanese husbands at Taiwan’s de facto consular offices in their home countries. Because Taiwan cannot establish official government offices in China, it must wait until Chinese spouses arrive at the border to conduct the interview. 15. In other words, Taiwanese bureaucrats pay lip service to the legal efficacy of China’s marriage registration process, which couples must complete before the Chinese spouse is eligible for an entry permit. 16. The term human smuggling is used widely in accounts of Chinese, especially Fujianese, who enlist the services of brokers to move illicitly across borders (Chu 2010). These arrangements do not themselves constitute trafficking, although they may result in trafficking-like situations if migrants subsequently are forced into exploitative, unfree conditions of labor. 17. Distrust of Chinese spouses’ domestic violence claims permeated social work and legal circles as well. On several occasions, social workers cautioned me not to trust how Chinese spouses portrayed their own circumstances, arguing that many exaggerated or misrepresented their abuse. See also Chen (2010). 18. I have discussed Wang’s experience with other academics and legal professionals, none of whom knew of similar cases. All affirmed the difficulties Chinese spouses faced when seeking to change their guarantor, especially when they desired to progress to a more secure immigration stage. For the specific obstacles faced by those who encounter domestic violence, see Chen (2010).

References Adrian, Bonnie. 2003. Framing the Bride: Globalizing Beauty and Romance in Taiwan’s Bridal Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berlant, Lauren. 1997. The Queen of American Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2007. Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Bernstein, Elizabeth and Laurie Schaffner, eds. 2005. Regulating Sex: The Politics of Intimacy and Identity. New York: Routledge. Brennan, Denise. 2004. What’s Love Got to Do with It? Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Canaday, Margot. 2009. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in TwentiethCentury America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chao, Yen-ning. 2004. “Xiandaixing xiangxiang yu guojing guanli de chongtu: Yi Zhongguo hunyin yimin nüxing wei yanjiu anli” (Imagined Modernities, Transnational Migration, and Border Control: A Case Study of Taiwan’s “Mainland Brides”). Taiwan Shehuixue Kan 32:59–102. ———. 2010. “Kuajing muzhi gongmin shenfen: Bianqian zhong de zhongguo minbei guojing bianqu daode jingji” (Transnational Maternal Citizenship: Changing Moral Economy on State Margins). Taiwan Shehuixue Kan 44:155–212. Chen, Yi. 2010. “Zaoshou hunyin baoli nüxing dalu pei’ou de qiuzhu kunjing yu shengcun zhi dao” (Help-Seeking Predicaments and Paths to Survival for Female Mainland Spouses Who Suffer Marital Violence). MA thesis, Department of Social Welfare, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan. Chu, Julie Y. 2010. Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cohen, Jean L. 2002. Regulating Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. De Genova, Nicholas P. 2002. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31:419–47. Freeman, Caren. 2011. Making and Faking Kinship: Marriage and Labor Migration Between China and South Korea. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Freeman, Elizabeth. 2010. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Friedman, Sara L. 2010. “Determining ‘Truth’ at the Border: Immigration Interviews, Chinese Marital Migrants, and Taiwan’s Sovereignty Dilemmas.” Citizenship Studies 14(2):167–83. ———. 2012. “Adjudicating the Intersection of Marital Immigration, Domestic Violence, and Spousal Murder: China-Taiwan Marriages and Competing Legal Domains.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 19(1):221–55. ———. 2013. “Mobilizing Gender in Cross-Strait Marriages: Patrilineal Tensions, Care Work Expectations, and a Dependency Model of Marital Immigration.” In Mobile Horizons: Dynamics Across the Taiwan Strait, edited by Wen-hsin Yeh, 147–77. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California. Giddens, Anthony. 1992. The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hoang, Kimberly Kay. 2010. “Economies of Emotion, Familiarity, Fantasy, and Desire: Emotional Labor in Ho Chi Minh City’s Sex Industry.” Sexualities 13(2):255–72.

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Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Jackson, John L., Jr. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lan, Pei-Chia. 2008. “Migrant Women’s Bodies as Boundary Markers: Reproductive Crisis and Sexual Control in the Ethnic Frontiers of Taiwan.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33(4):833–61. Luibhéid, Eithne. 2002. Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2013. Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2003. “Legal/Illegal Counterpoints: Subjecthood and Subjectivity in an Unrecognized State.” In Human Rights in Global Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements, edited by Richard Ashby Wilson and Jon P. Mitchell, 71–92. London and New York: Routledge. Newendorp, Nicole DeJong. 2008. Uneasy Reunions: Immigration, Citizenship, and Family Life in Post-1997 Hong Kong. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Padilla, Mark B., Jennifer S. Hirsch, Miguel Muñoz-Laboy, Robert Sember, and Richard G. Parker, eds. 2008. Love and Globalization: Transformations of Intimacy in the Contemporary World. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2006. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taiwan National Immigration Agency and Department of Household Registration. 2014. Number of Foreign and Mainland Spouses in Each County and City by Documented Status, 1987–2013. http://www.immigration.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=1247109&ctNode =29699&mp=1. Retrieved September 21, 2014. Ticktin, Miriam. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press. Yue, Audrey. 2008. “Same-Sex Migration in Australia: From Interdependency to Intimacy.” GLQ 14(2–3):239–62. Zelizer, Viviana A. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Contributors

Heng Leng Chee is Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Nicole Constable is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh, United States. Sara L. Friedman is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Indiana University, United States. Hsiao-Chuan Hsia is Professor in the Graduate Institute of Social Transformation Studies at Shih Hsin University, Taiwan. Mark Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. Hyun Mee Kim is Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Yonsei University, South Korea. Pardis Mahdavi is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Pomona College, United States. Filippo Osella is Reader in Anthropology at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Nobue Suzuki is Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Chiba University, Japan. Christoph Wilcke is Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Transparency International. Brenda S. A. Yeoh is Professor in the Department of Geography at National University of Singapore.

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Index

abortion, 101 absconding: and domestic workers in Arab countries, 80, 137; estimated rate of, 156n5; and freelancing, 144–46, 152; and migration “morality talk,” 54; and stateless children in Kuwait, 83; and worker sponsorship systems, 142 Abu Dhabi, 54, 85 abuse of migrants: domestic violence and abuse, 107, 139, 207, 209, 215–16, 218–21, 224, 227nn17–18; and migrant wives in Singapore, 198–99; and Saudi domestic workers, 138–39, 140–43; sexual abuse, 142, 147, 151; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 160; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 92–93, 93–95, 96–99, 100– 102, 102–7, 108–9 activism: and domestic workers, 93, 143, 154; and migration reform efforts, 89–90, 138; and migration scholarship, 6, 110n, 225n; and support for migrant families, 8. See also advocacy for migrant workers adoption, 79, 82–83, 88–89, 101 adultery, 54, 83, 217 advertising, 29 advocacy for migrant workers: and absconding, 156n5; and Arab countries, 156n6; and foreign brides, 172; and migration reform pressures, 154; and “no borders” movement, 17n3; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 201; and stateless children in Kuwait, 89; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 160, 178. See also activism affective ties, 151 agency of migrants: and challenges faced by migrants, 8; and children of migrant workers, 115; and context of migration policy, 3;

and freelancing, 144, 151–52; new forms of, 1; and state-migrant encounters, 6; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 109 aging populations, 28 amahs (servant girls), 190 Anderson, Bridget, 10 Ansari, K. M., 46 antitrafficking laws, 153 Arab countries. See specific countries arranged marriages, 36, 50–52 Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants, 154 asylum claims: and domestic workers, 220; and refugee status, 99, 100–101, 103; and social support, 104–5; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 16, 93–94, 103, 109, 110n4 authenticity paradigms: and border regulation, 225n1; bounded authenticity, 225n4; and intimacy in cross-border relationships, 206–9; and “misfits,” 215–18; and sham domestic violence, 219; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 211–12, 212–15, 222–23, 224 Baas, Michiel, 187 babysitting services, 104 Bahrain, 11, 51 balik Islam, 148 Bangladesh and Bangladeshi migrants: and construction labor, 13; and cross-border marriages, 14; in Hong Kong, 93; and intra-Asian migration, 11–14; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 72 Basic Consumer Law (Korea), 31 Benhabib, Seyla, 7–8 bidoun, 72, 74, 78–79, 82, 89. See also statelessness biopower, 75

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birth rates, 28 black market for migrant labor, 178. See also freelancing; illegality; informal economy and employment blue-collar migrants, 168, 179 Border Affairs Corps (Taiwan), 213 border interviews, 208, 212–15, 227n14 Boris, Eileen, 135–36 bounded authenticity, 225n4 Bourdieu, Pierre, 155 Brennan, Denise, 226n5 British colonialism, 13 brokers of migrant labor: and context of migration policy, 4; and human smuggling, 213, 216, 227n16; and international marriages in Korea, 26–27, 29–31, 33, 35, 36– 37; and research data, 43n1; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 175–77 Buddhism, 198 bureaucracy: and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 16, 207–8, 217; and categorization of migrants, 3; and China’s marriage registration system, 227n15; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 94–95; and evaluation of cross-border marriages, 226n5; and obstacles to residency, 118; and sham domestic violence, 219–20; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 186; and statemigrant encounters, 4–6; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 174–75, 211, 212–15, 223, 224–25, 225n; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 103 Burma, 14 Cambodia, 14 Canada, 6, 118 capitalist economics: and anxiety related to migrant laborers, 169–71; and exploitation of labor, 17n3; and flexible citizenship, 2; impact on family structure, 212; and Japan’s economic growth, 120; and labor migration, 58–59; and neoliberalism, 5, 58, 117–18; and reproduction crisis in Taiwan, 161–63, 162; and Taiwan’s economic growth, 165 care (zhaogu), 208 care deficits, 12 caretaking marriages, 211 caste-based hierarchies, 57 Castells, Manuel, 75–76

categorization of migrant laborers, 11, 199–201 celibacy requirements for migrant laborers, 77 Central Provident Fund (CPF), 197 Centre for Migrant Advocacy, 154, 156n5 Chee, Heng Leng, 16 Cheng, Sealing, 38 children of migrants: child custody issues, 223–24; citizenship laws, 16; citizenship status of Japanese-Filipino youth, 113–17, 117–19, 119–20, 120–23, 123–27, 127–30; and disenfranchisement of immigrant laborers, 11; and foreign bride recruitment, 41; and stateless children in Kuwait, 74–77, 78–79, 82–85, 86–88, 89–90 Chin, Christine, 2 China and Chinese migrants: and acquisition of citizenship, 215–18; and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 212–15, 215–18, 225n1, 225n4, 226n6; and border interviews, 208, 212–15, 227n14; and crossborder marriages, 14; and economic agreements, 226n7; ethnic Korean minority, 28; and intimate labor migration, 7; and intra-Asian migrations, 12–13; and mainlanders, 227n12; number of migrants, 226n9; and residency quotas, 226n10; and sham domestic violence, 218–21; social anxiety regarding, 226n11; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 165, 170; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 207–9, 209–12, 223–25 Chosonjok, 28 Christianity, 51 citizenship: and children of migrant workers, 16; and foreign bride recruitment, 26, 40; of Japanese-Filipino youth, 113–17, 117– 19, 119–20, 120–23, 123–27, 127–30; market-citizenship dilemma, 186; and migrant illegality in Singapore, 184–86, 188, 189, 191–96, 197, 200, 201, 204; and migration reform pressures, 154; and stateless children in Kuwait, 74–77, 78–79, 82–85, 86–88, 89–90; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 161, 164, 166–67, 168–69, 169–71, 172–75, 178–80; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 221–22; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 94–95, 109 Civil Code (Japan), 121, 126

Index civil society, 89–90 clash of cultures, 47 class tensions and conflict: and citizenship of Japanese-Filipino youth, 119; and international marriages in Korea, 38; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 50, 57, 62; and migrant wives in Singapore, 192–93; and migration reform pressures, 154; and patriarchal social structure, 17n4; and reproduction crises, 163; and state-migrant encounters, 2; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 171–72 collective action, 154, 201. See also activism Colombo Process, 156n7 commodification of migrant labor, 31, 35, 226n6 community organizations, 57 Complex of Social Care Homes, 88 confinement of migrant workers, 138, 141– 43, 144 conjugal intimacy, 58, 206–7 connected lives approach, 2 Constable, Nicole, 8, 15–16 construction labor, 13 consumerism, 31, 59, 60, 62 coolies, 13 correspondence marriages, 33 Council of Labor Affairs (CLA), 168, 175, 177 counseling, 57 Coutin, Susan, 94–95, 186 criminalization of migrants, 180. See also illegality; informal economy and employment cross-border marriages, 14, 16, 26–27. See also marriage migration cross-border mobility, 3, 4, 7, 8–9, 12 cultural assimilation: citizenship of JapaneseFilipino youth, 119, 129–30; cultural capital, 129; and foreign bride recruitment, 31, 35, 42; and international marriages in Korea, 26–27; and remittances, 38–40. See also language skills and barriers Dammam, Saudi Arabia, 50 debt, 34, 60, 176, 222 De Certeau, Michel, 92 De Genova, Nicholas P., 109, 110n3, 178, 222 Degree Law 82 (Kuwait), 72–73, 88–89. See also Family Nursing Law (Kuwait) demographic trends: and changing gender

235

norms, 154; feminization of intra-Asia migration, 13–14, 185; and foreign bride recruitment, 28; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 123; marriage trends in Singapore, 188–89; and state-migrant encounters, 2 Department of Family Nursing, 71 dependents of migrant workers, 136. See also children of migrants deportation: and domestic workers in Arab countries, 137; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 73, 76–77; and migrant illegality in Singapore, 184, 187, 191–92; and need for labor reforms, 153; and sham domestic violence, 218; and stateless children in Kuwait, 80– 81, 84, 86; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 160, 166, 172–74; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 175, 224; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 94, 99, 102– 3, 107–9; and worker sponsorship systems, 141 descent-based nationality, 128 development policy, 165 Devika, J., 58, 63n disaffection of workers, 149–52, 155 discrimination against migrants, 7, 104, 105, 178 disenfranchisement of immigrant laborers, 11 divorce: and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 207, 209, 215–17; and Filipina mothers in Japan, 123–24; and international marriages in Korea, 28–29; and intraAsian migration patterns, 14; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 126; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 50–51; and migrant wives in Singapore, 198–99; and migration “morality talk,” 53; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 196, 197–99; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 173–74, 211, 213, 222–23, 223–24 Doha, Qatar, 50 domestic violence and abuse: and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 207, 209; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 139, 215–16; sham domestic violence, 218–21, 227n17; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 161, 173; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 224; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 107

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domestic workers and labor: and absconding, 156n5; and abuse in intimate environments, 138–39; and challenges faced by migrants, 9–11; and context of migration policy, 2–3; and disaffection of workers, 149–52; “domestic helpers,” 165; and freelancing, 143–46, 146–49; and Hong Kong residency laws, 92, 93–95, 96–99, 100–101, 102–4, 107, 108; and international marriages in Korea, 35; and intra-Asian migration patterns, 12–14; labor contracts in Arab countries, 156n4; and Malayali modernity, 58, 60–61; and migrant laborers in Kuwait, 73; and migrant labor systems in Arab countries, 135–38, 140–43, 153–55, 156n3; and migration trends, 25–27; and programs granting residency, 118; and reform efforts, 156n8; and remittances, 38, 42; and reproductive labor in Singapore, 203n8; and sham domestic violence, 220; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 190–94, 196, 199, 200, 201, 203n10; and stateless children in Kuwait, 80–81; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 160–61, 163, 164–65, 167–69, 173, 175–78, 180; and withholding of wages, 1, 80, 81, 140, 156n2; and women’s organizations, 156n8 Dresch, Paul, 76 dual citizenship, 78, 121, 122–23 Dubai, 1–2, 4, 50, 83, 85, 149 Duneier, Mitch, 75, 76 Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, 226n7 economic environment of labor migration: and “connected lives” approach, 2; economic benefits of migrant labor, 108–9, 136; economic crises, 129; impact of liberalization, 60; and international marriage, 35–38; and intra-Asian migration trends, 11. See also remittances education: and Chinese rural/urban divide, 119; citizenship of Japanese-Filipino youth, 129–30; and growth of migration flows, 4; and international marriages in Korea, 30; and intra-Asian migration patterns, 12; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 122, 124–25; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 72, 86– 87; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 48, 49, 52, 59, 60; and migrant

illegality in Singapore, 185; and stateless children in Kuwait, 85, 87, 101; and stereotypes of migrant laborers, 46–47 effective statelessness, 119, 129 elder care, 164 El Salvador, 187 employment contracts: in Arab countries, 156n4; and celibacy clauses, 77; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 136–38; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 93– 94, 96–98, 100, 101; and domestic workers in Kuwait, 81; and freelancing, 144, 147– 49, 150; and Hong Kong’s “two week” rule, 109; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 49; and minimum wages in Hong Kong, 110n2; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 186, 189, 194, 200, 203n10; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 165, 168, 176–77; and worker sponsorship systems, 140–42 Employment Ordinance (Hong Kong), 97–98 Employment Services Act (Taiwan), 165 entertainer visas, 120 entrepreneurship of migrants, 200–201 Entry/Exit and Immigration Law (Taiwan), 180n1 “essential statelessness,” 9 ethical issues, 48 Ethiopian migrants, 140, 143 ethnicity of migrants, 114, 119, 128 European migration, 9 exit visas, 141 exploitation of migrants, 175–78. See also abuse of migrants extramarital relations, 54, 83, 217 false identity papers, 192 familial roles, 9 Family Nursing Law (Kuwait), 88–89 family structure: and challenges faced by migrants, 8–9; and global migration, 117–19; and impact of marriage migration policy, 202n3; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 113, 126–27; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 73, 74; and Malayali modernity, 60– 61; and restrictions on immigrant rights, 114 feminist scholarship, 9, 136, 206 feminization of intra-Asia migration, 13–14, 185

Index fertility rates, 12, 193 feudalism, 34 Filipina migrants: and context of migration policy, 3; and freelancing, 144–45, 150; and international marriages in Korea, 37, 38– 39; and intra-Asian migration patterns, 14; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 114– 15, 128–29; and migrant wives in Singapore, 190; and multicultural families in Korea, 43n3; and nationality laws, 120–23; and obstacles to residency, 118; and remittances, 43n4; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 191, 193–94, 203n10; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 161, 168, 180n5; and worker sponsorship systems, 140, 142 film, 52–53 fingerprinting of migrants, 195, 203n6, 212 flexible citizenship, 2–3, 123, 130 fluidity of state-migrant encounters, 3 foreign domestic workers (FDWs): and migrant wives in Singapore, 190–91; and torture claims, 93–95, 96–99, 102, 103–5, 107, 108–9. See also domestic workers and labor foreign matter/foreign bodies, 76 foreign national status, 129–30, 179 foreign spouses: and gender ideologies, 31– 35; and public opinion in Singapore, 204n15; and remittances, 26–27, 31–35, 35–38, 38–40, 40–41; and Singapore’s Long-Term Visit Passes, 203n13; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 189, 196; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 165–67, 170, 172, 180n2. See also marriage migration foreign talent, 203n7 Foucault, Michel, 75, 186 foundlings, 71–73, 76, 86–88 France, 6 freelancing, 7, 143–46, 146–49, 150–52, 153, 155 Friedman, Sara, 16, 153, 173 Garcés-Mascareñas, Blanca, 10, 76, 77, 186– 87, 202 gender roles and norms: and citizenship of Japanese-Filipino youth, 119; and feminization of intra-Asia migration, 13–14, 185; and foreign bride recruitment, 29, 30–31,

237

42; and freelancing, 146; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 72; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 49, 56, 59; and migrant laborers in Kuwait, 79; and migration patterns, 17nn6–7; and migration reform pressures, 154; and moral panics regarding migrants, 7; and nightlife businesses, 120; and patriarchal social structure, 17n4; and privacy rights, 16; and remittances, 31–35; and Saudi domestic workers, 138, 146, 149–51, 153–54; and Singapore migration policies, 202n5; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 211, 222; and trends in labor migration, 13–14 globalization: and children of migrant workers, 113, 117–19; and deportable noncitizens, 109; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 136; and economic crisis of 2008, 129; and “essential statelessness,” 9; and international marriages in Korea, 38– 40; and international policy pressures, 6; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 115; and Malayali modernity, 58–59, 62; and migration “morality talk,” 54; and migration trends, 25; and reproduction crises, 161–64, 162; and sex work, 2; and Singapore’s migration system, 190, 203n7; and state-migrant encounters, 6; and state production of migrant illegality, 16, 161– 63, 162, 165, 167, 169–71, 179–80; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 169–71; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 209; and wealth inequality in Hong Kong, 106 global talent, 2 Group 29, 89 Guatemala, 187 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 49 Gulf region, 13, 49–50 Gulf states, 47, 138 health benefits, 98, 101, 198, 204n14 health status of migrants, 53, 57, 172–73 heteronormativity, 58, 207, 223, 225n2 Hindu communities, 50 HIV, 53, 57, 172–73 home-based activities, 59 homophobia, 56–57 homosexuality, 225n2 homosocial intimacy, 61

238

Index

Hong Kong: and cross-border marriages, 14; and gender trends in labor migration, 13, 14; and human trafficking issues, 12; and intra-Asian migrations, 11; and migrant laborers in Kuwait, 88; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 209, 210, 226n11; and torture claims of migrant mothers, 92–93, 93–95, 96–99, 100–102, 102–7, 108–9; two-week rule, 98, 109 Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, 95 “hostile worlds” view, 208 household registration system (China), 119 housing of migrant workers, 95, 104–5, 146, 168 Hsia, Hsiao-huan, 6, 16, 171 Hugo, Graeme, 14 humanitarianism and human rights, 89, 90, 113–14, 152, 186 Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME), 196 Human Line, 89, 90 Human Rights Watch, 138, 144, 150 human smuggling, 213, 216, 227n16 human trafficking, 12, 153, 213, 216, 227n16 identification cards, 221 illegality: and challenges faced by migrants, 9–11; De Genova on, 110n3; and migrant wives in Singapore, 184–88, 193–94, 193– 96, 197, 198, 201–2; as result of migration policy, 16; state production of migrant illegality, 160–64, 171–78, 178–80; stigma associated with, 189–90; and Taiwanese migration policy, 212–15, 217–18, 219–20, 223; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 94– 95, 98–99, 104–7, 108–9, 110n3; and underground marriages, 203n6 illegitimate children, 73, 94, 104, 122, 124 illicit economy, 9–10, 76 Immigration and Checkpoint Authority (Singapore), 195 Immigration Department (Hong Kong), 102, 103 Immigration Policy Guidelines (Taiwan), 170 imprisonment of migrants: and children of imprisoned mothers, 81; and freelance work, 148; and illegal migration, 83–85; and illegal work, 107, 109; and migration reform efforts, 153; and pregnancy, 73, 101–2

India and Indian migrants: and cross-border marriages, 14; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 93; and gender trends in labor migration, 13; and history of intra-Asia migration, 13; and intimate labor migration, 7; and migrant laborers in Kuwait, 79, 90; and worker sponsorship systems, 140 Indonesia and Indonesian migrants: and construction labor, 13; and cross-border marriages, 14; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 93, 98, 100; and gender trends in labor migration, 13; and intraAsian migrations, 12; and migrant remittances, 12; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 161, 165, 180n5; and 3D sector labor, 165; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 102, 107; and worker sponsorship systems, 140 industrialization, 11 infidelity, 54, 83, 217 inflation, 53, 60 informal economy and employment: and challenges faced by migrants, 9–11; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 137– 38; incorporation into formal economy, 75–76; influence of migration policy on, 1; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 125; and migration “morality talk,” 54; and stateless children in Kuwait, 85; and statemigrant encounters, 4. See also freelancing; illegality informal migration, 1, 202n2 infrastructure projects, 164 integration programs, 129 International Labor Organization (ILO), 90 international law, 153–54, 156n7 International Organization for Migration, 90 international organizations, 89–90, 114. See also nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) international policy pressures, 6 international politics, 209–10 International Social Service (ISS), 102 interregional mobility, 13 intimacy: and agency of migrants, 6; influence of immigration policy on, 2–3, 5, 7–11; and patriarchal gender roles, 17n4; and remittances, 26–27, 31–35, 35–38, 38– 40, 40–41, 41–43; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 206–9, 211, 213–14,

Index 216–17, 223, 224–25, 225n2, 225n4, 225n6. See also intimate labor intimate labor: and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 208, 215, 217; and citizenship of Japanese-Filipino youth, 114–15, 117, 120; and context of migration policy, 2–3; definitions of, 91n2, 135–36; and disaffected workers, 149, 151; and international marriages in Korea, 28–31, 38–40, 40–41; and intimate lives of migrants, 7–8; and intraAsian migration patterns, 12, 14, 25–27; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 75; and migrant illegality, 10; and migrant wives in Singapore, 200; and remittances, 35–38, 41–43; and Saudi migrant labor system, 135–38, 155; and Saudi sponsorship system, 141; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 161; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 93, 95, 96–99 intra-Asian migrants, 11–15. See also specific countries irregularity, 16–17, 109, 162 Islam, 77, 148 Japan and Japanese migrants: citizenship of Japanese-Filipino youth, 113–17, 117–19, 119–20, 120–23, 123–27, 127–30; and cross-border marriages, 14; and foreign bride recruitment, 26; and gender trends in labor migration, 13; and history of intra-Asia migration, 13; and human trafficking issues, 12; and intra-Asian migrations, 11; and migrant laborers in Kuwait, 88; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 209, 210 Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE), 129 Java, 100 Johnson, Mark, 16 Jordan, 135, 138, 140–41, 142, 153, 156n4 Jordanian Women’s Union, 156n8 jus sanguinis principle, 78, 121, 123, 128–29, 169–70 jus soli principle, 78 kafala system, 49, 137, 175 kamam (lust), 58, 61 Kerala, India: and labor migration to Gulf states, 15; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 46–48, 49–50, 50–52; and

239

Malayali modernity, 58–59, 60–61, 62–63; and migration “morality talk,” 52–54; and sexual “excesses” of migrants, 55–57 Kerala Monitor, 46, 56 Kerber, Linda, 9, 119, 127–28 Killias, Olivia, 202 Kim, Hyun Mee, 15 kinship ties, 138–39, 151, 213, 217–21, 224 kokusaika (internationalization), 114 Kolkata, India, 50 koseki, 124 Kozhikode, India, 50, 53–55, 60–61 Kuwait: and citizenship laws, 78–79; domestic workers in, 135, 137; and evolution of migration and citizenship law, 88–90; and freelancing, 145–46; and gender trends in labor migration, 14; and human trafficking, 12, 153; and intra-Asian migrations, 11; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 51; and migration policy, 74–77; and royal foundlings, 85–88; and sponsorship systems, 156n3; and stateless children, 79– 85; state-run orphanage, 71–74; and worker sponsorship systems, 141, 142 Kuwaiti Nationality Law, 78 Kuwait Institute for Human Rights, 89 kyosei (living together of people with differences), 114 labor shortages, 11, 108, 209 Labor Standards Law (Taiwan), 175 land prices, 60 language skills and barriers: citizenship of Japanese-Filipino youth, 128–30; and foreign bride recruitment, 38–39; and international marriages in Korea, 30; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 118–19, 122, 125, 127; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 78; and Malayali migrants, 63n1; and stateless children in Kuwait, 87; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 173 Laos, 14 Lebanon, 135, 140, 141–42 left-behind migrant families, 53, 118. See also children of migrants legal assistance, 90 legal exclusion of migrants, 9 legal paradoxes, 76–77 less developed countries, 171 liminal legality, 187, 201

240

Index

Live-In Caregiver Program (Canada), 118 Long-Term Visit Pass, 197 Long-Term Visit Pass Plus, 203n13 Longva, Anh Nga, 136–37, 154 low-skilled labor, 200 Mahdavi, Pardis, 8, 15, 153 mail-order brides, 33. See also marriage migration mainlanders, 211, 227n12 Malayali immigrants: and ambivalent modernities, 60–61; and Kerala modernity, 58– 60, 62; and labor migration to Gulf states, 15, 49, 51; and moral panics about migration trends, 46–49, 52, 54, 63; and sexual behaviors of migrants, 57 Malaysia, 12, 13, 76, 184, 189 Manalansan, Martin, 149 manual labor, 52 Marcos, Ferdinand, 120 market for migrant labor, 186, 190, 201 marriage brokers, 26–27, 29–31, 33, 35–37, 43n1 marriage migration: brokers of, 26–27, 29– 31, 33, 35–37, 43n1; and Chinese marital immigrants, 206–9, 209–12, 212–15, 215– 18, 218–21, 221–23, 223–25; citizenship of Japanese-Filipino youth, 113–14, 121–22, 123–24, 126; cross-border marriage trends, 14–15; and Kuwaiti orphans, 91n1; and labor migration, 10–11; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 50–52; and marriage contracts, 30–31, 189, 204, 216; and physical abuse, 43n2, 107, 139, 207, 209, 215–16, 217, 218–21, 224, 227nn17– 18; and Singapore’s migration system, 184– 88, 188–90, 190–96, 197–99, 199–201, 201–2; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 160–63, 165–67, 168–69, 169–71, 172–75, 179–80, 180n2; underground marriages, 203n6; wife/worker paradox, 185 Marriage Registration Policy (Singapore), 189 Marriage Restriction Policy (Singapore), 192, 200 matchmaking business, 39, 41, 202n4, 216. See also marriage brokers maternity leave and benefits, 97–98, 101 Ma Ying-jeou, 223

Mazzarella, William, 63 media, 153 medical screening of migrants, 172–73, 192 Menjívar, Cecilia, 187 men’s clubs, 54 middle-class hegemony, 62–63 Middle East, 16, 138. See also specific countries migrant care workers, 164, 165 Migrante International, 154 migrant welfare workers, 164 migration studies, 206 migration trends, 4, 58–59, 75. See also demographic trends minimum wage levels, 110n2 Ministerial Order 97 (Kuwait), 72–73 Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Taiwan), 171 Ministry of Interior (Taiwan), 170 Ministry of Manpower (Singapore), 184–85, 188, 192–96, 201, 203nn9–13 Ministry of Population (Kuwait), 78 Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor (Kuwait), 88 morality issues: and Chinese marriage migrants, 218; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 52–55; and migrant wives in Singapore, 198; migration “morality talk,” 52–54; “moral panics” about migrants, 7, 46–49, 52, 54, 62–63, 169–71, 179–80 multiculturalism, 26, 28–31, 38–40 National Immigration Agency (Taiwan), 170, 171, 174–75, 212, 221–22 nationalism, 226n11 nationality laws, 15, 31, 115–17, 121, 122–23, 170. See also citizenship naturalization processes, 171, 209–10, 218, 226n9 neoliberal capitalism, 5, 58–59, 117–18, 165, 212 Nepal and Nepali immigrants, 11–12, 13, 83– 84, 140 New Conditions of Stay (Hong Kong), 98 Newendorp, Nicole DeJong, 226n11 The New Paper, 193 Ng Eng Hen, 192 nightlife industry, 120, 128 no borders movement, 17n3 noncitizen nationals, 119

Index nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): and challenges faced by migrants, 8; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 138; and human trafficking, 153; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 190, 194, 196, 198–99, 201; and stateless children in Kuwait, 79, 85, 89; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 107; and women’s services, 215–16 North American migration, 9 nursing, 164–65 oil economy, 13 Olwig, Karen, 118 orientalist attitudes, 37 orphans, 41, 71, 77, 79–81, 85–86, 89, 91n1, 91n3 Osella, Filippo, 15 Otherness, 48, 169 overseas Filipino worker (OFW), 1 overstayers, 93–94, 98–99, 109, 171, 174, 186, 191 Parreñas, Rhacel, 135–36 passports: and definitions of nationality, 119; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 100; and freelancing, 146, 147–48; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 74; and statelessness, 79, 82, 90, 127–28; and “underground” marriage in Singapore, 203n6; and worker sponsorship systems, 141–42 paternity of children, 121, 124, 126, 128 pathologizing migrants, 46–47, 63 patriarchal family structure, 17n4, 34, 138– 39, 164 patrilineal descent, 78, 79, 170 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 184 permanent residency (PR): bureaucratic obstacles to, 118; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 136; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 94; and Hong Kong residency laws, 108; and migrant illegality in Singapore, 184–85, 189, 192, 196–98, 199, 203n9; and Singapore’s Long-Term Visit Passes, 204n13; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 166, 168–69, 170, 172; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 173, 209 Persian Gulf countries, 15. See also specific countries personal networks, 96

241

perverse integration, 75–76 Peutz, Nathalie, 178 Philippine Family Code, 123–24 Philippines: citizenship of Japanese-Filipino youth, 113–17, 117–19, 119–20, 120–23, 123–27, 127–30; and construction labor, 13; and cross-border marriages, 14; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 98; Embassy in Kuwait, 79; and foreign bride recruitment, 37, 43n4; and gender trends in labor migration, 13–14; and intimate labor migration, 7; and intra-Asian migrations, 12; migrant labor from, 93, 140; and migrant remittances, 12; and nationality laws, 120–21; and protectionist policies, 4, 17n1; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 180n5; and 3D sector labor, 165; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 107. See also Filipina migrants physical abuse, 43n2, 142 Pieke, Frank N., 186 plantation economies, 13 political context of migrant labor, 74, 136, 209–10 population trends, 28. See also demographic trends postliberalization, 62 pragmatic complicity, 198–99, 212 Pratt, Geraldine, 118 pregnancy: and domestic workers in Kuwait, 80–81; and Hong Kong’s migration system, 92; and Islamic law, 74; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 76–77; maternity leave and benefits, 97–98, 101; and migrant illegality, 11; and migrant wives in Singapore, 191– 92, 194, 200; prohibitions against, 192, 200; and sexual “excesses” of migrants, 56; and sham domestic violence, 220; and stateless children in Kuwait, 82–84, 86; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 166; testing requirements for migrant workers, 97; and torture claims, 16, 93–94, 97–99, 101, 103, 109 premam (romantic love), 58, 61 privacy, 135, 138–39. See also intimacy proactive vs. reactive policies, 166–67, 167– 69, 178 protectionist policies, 4, 5, 17nn1–2 protection orders, 173, 219–21, 223–24 public morality, 143

242

Index

public officials, 174–75 public opinion, 204n15 Pusong Mamon Task Force, 156n5 Qatar, 149 queer theory, 206, 225n2 queuing jobs, 105–7 quota systems, 166, 177, 204n13, 226n10 race issues, 170, 225n1 rape, 73, 84, 142 Ras Al Khaimah (RAK), 83–84 reciprocity, 61 recognizance, 93–94, 99, 103 refugees, 103 regime of care, 221 registration of marriages, 184, 188, 192, 194, 196, 212, 214, 227n15 Regulations on the International Marriage Brokerage Act (Korea), 30 regulatory role of states, 5 religion of migrants, 51, 125, 148 religious education, 87 religious law, 77 religious organizations, 57 remittances: and children of migrant workers, 118, 125; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 98; and foreign bride recruitment in Korea, 25–27, 31–35, 35–38, 38–40, 40–41, 43n2, 43n4; and intra-Asian migration patterns, 12, 13; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 127, 131n4; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 49, 57, 59, 61, 63; and migrant wives in Singapore, 199; and Taiwanese reproductive workers, 176; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 176; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 107 reproduction crises, 161–63, 162 reproduction migration, 26–27 reproductive labor: domestic labor vs., 203n8; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 137; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 93–94; and foreign bride recruitment, 42–43; and international marriages in Korea, 31; and migrant illegality, 11; and migration trends, 25; and remittances, 27; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 190, 191–92; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 161–63, 162, 164– 66, 171, 179

residency status: and Hong Kong residency laws, 108; and kafala system, 49; and migrant illegality in Singapore, 184–85, 189, 192, 196–98, 199, 203n9; and Saudi migrant labor system, 136–38, 141, 143, 145– 46, 147–48; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 166, 168–69, 170, 172–74, 178; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 209, 210–11, 216–17, 218–20, 221–23, 223–25, 226n10. See also permanent residency (PR) Resnik, Judith, 7–8 returnee status, 129–30 rights claims, 113 Robinson, Kathryn, 42 romantic relationships, 98–99 runaways, 160, 169, 175, 176–78, 191. See also absconding rural/urban divide, 28, 119, 129, 163 salaries. See wages and salaries of migrant laborers same-sex marriage, 225n2 sans papiers movement, 6. See also undocumented workers Saudi Arabia: and disaffection of workers, 149–52; domestic labor system in, 135–38; and freelancing, 143–46, 146–49; and household privacy and morality, 138–39; and human trafficking issues, 12; and intra-Asian migrations, 11; prospects for change, 153–55; and sponsorship systems, 156n3; and worker sponsorship system, 140–43 scarcity of labor, 190 security deposits, 191 service labor, 25 sexism, 170 sex scandals, 53, 54–55 sexual abuse, 142, 147, 151 sexual norms, 7, 47, 52–55, 55–57, 121 sex work: and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 218, 225n4; and context of migration policy, 1–2; and evaluation of cross-border marriages, 226n5; and intra-Asian migration patterns, 12, 13; and migrant illegality, 10; and migration “morality talk,” 54; and sex tourism, 120; and sham marriages, 213; and state-migrant encounters, 3; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 105 sham domestic violence, 218–21, 227n17

Index sham marriages, 168–69, 206, 208, 213–15, 216–18, 222 sharia-based laws, 77 short-term social visit passes, 185, 197 Singapore: and categorization of migrants, 199–201; and context of migration policy, 184–88, 188–90, 201–2; and cross-border marriages, 14; and gender trends in labor migration, 13; and human trafficking issues, 12; and pregnancy testing requirements, 97; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 209; and wife-to-worker scenario, 197–99; and worker-to-wife scenario, 190–96 skilled migrant labor, 190, 192 sneham (hierarchical care for dependents), 58, 61 social capital, 85 social justice, 17n3 social mobility, 2 social networks, 96, 151, 154, 189–90 social problems associated with migrants, 179 social visit passes, 185, 201 social welfare, 178, 179–80 Social Welfare Department (Hong Kong), 103–4 Southeast Asia, 13, 227. See also specific countries South India, 47 South Korea: and construction labor, 13; and cross-border marriages, 14; and foreign bride recruitment, 26–27; and gender trends in labor migration, 13; and history of intra-Asia migration, 13; and intraAsian migrations, 11; and multiculturalism, 28–31; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 209–10, 226n11 sovereignty, 210, 213, 224, 225n4, 226n5, 226n8, 226n11 Spain, 76 Spijkerboer, Thomas, 17n4 sponsorship of migrants: and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 227n18; and children of migrant workers, 118; and disaffection of workers, 150–52; and domestic violence, 219; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 135–37, 140–43, 156n3; and freelancing, 144–46, 155; and gender regimes, 154; and Malayali immigrants in

243

Gulf countries, 49; proposed reforms, 153; and Singapore’s migration policy, 194, 197, 199, 204n13; and stateless children in Kuwait, 83; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 177; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 221–22; and worker sponsorship systems, 140–43 spousal visas, 169, 175 Sri Lankan migrants: and construction labor, 13; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 93; and freelancing, 152; and gender trends in labor migration, 13; and intimate labor migration, 7; and intimate lives of migrants, 7; and intra-Asian migration patterns, 13; and Kuwaiti foundlings, 72; and migrant wives in Singapore, 190; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 190; and worker sponsorship systems, 140 State Boundaries, Cultural Politics and Gender Negotiations in International Marriages in Singapore and Malaysia (project), 189 statelessness: and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 94; effective statelessness, 119, 129; essential statelessness, 9; and illegal pregnancies, 15; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 123, 127–28; and Kuwaiti nationality laws, 72–73, 74–77, 78–79, 79–85, 89–90 state-society relationship, 188 stereotypes, 7, 46–47, 52–53, 57, 174 The Straits Times, 192, 200 structural violence, 175 suicide, 28, 54–55, 60, 73 surveillance of migrant workers, 192 Suzuki, Nobue, 8, 16 Taiwan: and capitalist globalization, 169–71; and cross-border marriages, 14, 209–12; and foreign bride recruitment, 26; and gender trends in labor migration, 13; and human trafficking issues, 12; and intraAsian migrations, 11; proactive vs. reactive policies and actions, 166–67, 167–69; state policies on reproductive labor, 164–66; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 160– 64, 171–78, 178–80 takas (escapees), 144–45, 151. See also absconding; freelancing Taoyuan International Airport, 212

244

Index

tax systems, 179–80 temporal restrictions on migrants, 186, 194 temporary visas, 11, 209 Teo, Youyenn, 202n3 Thailand and Thai migrants: and construction labor, 13; and cross-border marriages, 14; and dangerous labor, 165; and migrant wives in Singapore, 190; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 173 3D sectors, 165 Ticktin, Miriam, 221 torture claims: definitions of torture, 110n5; and intimate lives of domestic workers, 96–99, 100–102; legal context of, 92–93, 93–95; migration policy as source of, 108– 9; motivations for, 102–7 traditionalism, 31 TransAsia Sisters Association of Taiwan (TASAT), 172 transience, 191 Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), 196 transnational capital flows, 25 two-week rule (Hong Kong), 98, 109 UAE Psychological Association, 46 uncertain legality, 187 undesirable migrants, 178 undocumented workers: and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 217–18; and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 94–95, 99; and economic benefits of migrant labor, 108–9; and migrant activism, 6; overstayers in Hong Kong, 93–94, 98–99, 109; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 198; and stateless children in Kuwait, 85; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 160, 161, 171–74, 175, 178–79; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 224; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 104–6, 108 United Arab Emirates, 11, 12, 83 United Nations, 51, 226n8 United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, 93, 103, 110n5 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 93 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 78, 93, 103 United States, 6, 153 unpaid labor, 35, 136, 151, 161, 191, 201

unskilled labor, 190, 192 urban populations, 29 Valiyagramam, India, 50–51 van Walsum, Sarah K., 17n4 Vietnam and Vietnamese migrants: and cross-border marriages, 14; and foreign bride recruitment, 29, 32, 37, 43n4; and intimate labor migration, 7; and intra-Asian migrations, 12; and migrant wives in Singapore, 189, 197–99; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 160, 165, 169, 174–75; and 3D sector labor, 165 visas: and authenticity paradigms in Taiwan, 214, 217; and domestic workers in Arab countries, 136; and domestic workers in Kuwait, 81; entertainer visas, 120; and freelancing, 145; and Gulf states migration policy, 51; and the informal economy, 1; and Japanese-Filipino youth in Japan, 122; and migrant illegality, 11; and Saudi sponsorship system, 136–37; and sham domestic violence, 219; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 186; and statelessness, 128; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 169, 171–73; and Taiwan’s marriage migration system, 175, 210–11; and torture claims in Hong Kong, 93–95, 96, 98–99, 104–5, 109; and worker sponsorship systems, 140–41. See also work permits voluntary associations, 151, 154 wages and salaries of migrant laborers: and domestic workers in Hong Kong, 98; economic benefits of migrant labor, 108–9; and freelancing, 144–45, 148; and Malayali immigrants in Gulf countries, 51–52; and migrant illegality in Singapore, 185, 193, 201, 203n8; minimum wage in Hong Kong, 110n2; and protectionist migration policies, 17n2; and recruitment fees, 98; and remittances, 35–38, 40–41; and reproductive vs. domestic labor, 203n8; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 185, 193; and Taiwan’s labor migration system, 176, 179; withholding of, 1, 80–81, 140, 156n2; and worker sponsorship systems, 140–41, 143 Wang, Frank T. Y., 164, 171 wards of the state, 88

Index wasta (social capital), 85 “weak weapons” of migrants, 155 wealth inequality, 11–12 West Africa, 47 West Asia, 48 Westernization, 54 Wilcke, Christoph, 16 Willen, Sarah, 95 withholding of wages, 1, 80, 81, 140, 156n2 women’s organizations, 156n8 women’s shelters, 79, 207, 215–16, 217–18, 219–20, 222 working-class migrants, 62 work permits: and authenticity paradigms in

245

Taiwan, 217; and Filipina mothers in Japan, 120; and gender neutrality, 202n5; and Singapore’s marriage migration policy, 184, 189, 191–92, 194–96, 199–200. See also visas xenophobia, 170, 179–80 Xiang, Biao, 186 Yeoh, Brenda, 16 yetim, 71–72. See also foundlings Yue, Audrey, 198 Zelizer, Viviana, 2

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Acknowledgments

Our collaboration began when we were both fellows at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and we are grateful to the Center for the opportunity to engage deeply with the questions that have inspired this volume. We express deep thanks to the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program (BCS1063461), and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for supporting the conference out of which this volume developed. Nadia Gilardoni provided expert coordination for the conference, and Jessica Chelekis and Jena Hanes skillfully managed travel arrangements and funding. This volume has benefited in multiple ways from the insights and contributions of interlocutors who were not able to contribute chapters, including Dovelyn Agunias, Attiya Ahmad, Maruja Asis, Ramon Bultron, Sealing Cheng, Irene Fernandez, Ruri Ito, Julia O’Connell Davidson, Svati Shah, Rachel Silvey, and Ashwini Sukthankar. We are especially grateful to Rachel Silvey for organizing a workshop at the University of Toronto where several contributors presented revised chapters. Tania Murray Li and Joshua Barker offered valuable comments on an early draft of the introduction that helped us sharpen our arguments and clarify the focus of the volume. Lessie Jo Frazier and Nicole Constable provided important feedback on later drafts of the introduction, and A. Caitlin Lester expertly edited the full manuscript. We are deeply grateful to our editor, Peter Agree, for his enthusiastic support at all stages of this project and his commitment to seeing the volume through to completion. Amanda Ruffner and Erica Ginsburg expertly guided us through the publication process, responding with good cheer to our many queries. Last, but of course not least, we thank our families for their love and patience while we worked across time zones and continents to bring this project to fruition.