1. Foreign Domestic Worker Policy in Canada and the Social Boundaries of Modern Citizenship

Abstract

The social boundaries of citizenship involve relations of exclusion and inclusion within the global economy and specific nation-states. A case study of contemporary Canadian federal policy regarding the recruitment and regulation of foreign domestic workers reveals that, despite postwar trends toward liberalization of immigration policy and general advances made by Canadian workers, citizenship rights for third-world female domestics have declined. This apparently anomalous non-citizenship status can be better understood through an examination of the social relations and discourses that reproduce conditions of bonded servitude for foreign domestics. It is argued that citizenship must be understood as a variable and unequal process shaped by global realities, state intervention, and racialized, gendered discourses. Introduction: A Case Study of Non-Citizenship DISCUSSIONS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY HAVE RECENT raised the thorny question of the rights associated with be*. longing to a particular political community, the nation-state, and the criteria used to define full and equal membership within * This paper is part of a larger study entitled Women of Color, Work and Citizenship: Filipino and West Indian Domestic Workers and Registered Nurses in Toronto, directed by the authors and supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Advisory Research Council of Queen's University. We would like to thank Judith Adler Hellman, Sedef Arat-Koc, George Dei, Patricia Daenzer, Radha Jhappan, Catherine LaGrande, Stephen Newman and George Stubos for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Leonora Angeles for her expert research assistance. Previous versions of this paper were presented to the Groupe de recherche ethnicite et societes (GRES) at the University of Montreal (October 1992), and the Feminist Legal Workshop at the University of Toronto Law School (March 1993).