Negotiating Citizenship: Migrant Women in Canada and the Global System, Daiva K. Stasiulis and Abigail B. Bakan, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005, pp. 233.

Negotiating Citizenship is a thoughtful, well-researched and insightful book concerned with the topical issue of citizenship and contesting citizenship rights within the context of global capitalism. It is a timely and comprehensive piece that interrogates and dissects traditional theories of citizenship, and offers an alternative theoretical perspective on the basis of examining the status and condition of foreign domestic workers and nurses who migrate to Canada from two similar but different regions of the world: the Caribbean and the Phillipines. In creating the context for discussion, the work takes the reader on the journey of these migrant women workers from their home countries in the “Third World” where national labour markets are becoming increasingly unable to absorb surplus labour and where they have been adversely affected by the anti-social structural adjustment policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to the more economically developed Canada where the state encourages them to work without providing them with citizenship rights. By so doing, as the text points out, the Canadian state, which still has primacy under globalization, reinforces the vulnerability of an already vulnerable social group for which migration is a survival strategy.