Making foreign women the mother of our nation:the exclusion and assimilation of immigrant women in Taiwan

In: Cheng , I 2013 , ' Making foreign women the mother of our nation : the exclusion and assimilation of immigrant women in Taiwan ' Asian Ethnicity , vol 14 , no. 2 , pp. 157-179 . DOI:10.1080/14631369.2012.759749

Abstract

Citizenship awarding is politicised. Conceiving female marriage migration as a national threat, Taiwan's citizenship legislation is consciously designed and purposefully utilised to achieve exclusion and assimilation. Driven by a nationalistic impetus, it shows how Taiwan imagines itself as a modern, prosperous and homogenous nation and projects upon the immigrant outsiders as a threat to its self-identity. Examined through immigrant women's lived experiences, this citizenship legislation is biased by gender, class and ethnicity. The implementation of the legislation is not only an example of symbolic politics but also banal nationalism realised at grassroots level in the private domain. Immigrant women's lived experiences show that exclusion and assimilation stemmed from banal nationalism is not just an operation of symbolic politics but is also enmeshed with their everyday life.