“Foreign Brides” Meet Ethnic Politics in Taiwan

Abstract

A great number of women from China, Vietnam, and Indonesia recently arrived in Taiwan to marry men of lower social strata. Such an unusual pattern of migration has stimulated debates about the status and the citizenship of the new arrivals. This study analyzes Taiwanese responses toward these marriage migrants by using a national survey conducted in 2004. Three aspects of restrictive attitudes were tapped concerning these newcomers: (1) rights to work; (2) access to public health insurance; and (3) full citizenship. Immigrants from China were most opposed, compared to women with other origins (Southeast Asia, Japan, Europe, and the US). The seemingly unrelated regression estimation regression results do not support the split labor market hypotheses, as marriage migrants do not appear to be economic threats toward members of the lower classes. In contrast, ethnic nationalism plays a key role in determining the natives’ restrictive attitudes. The case of Taiwan represents a special genre, where ethnic politics selectively arouses the social rejection of women immigrants of certain origins.

Trading Youth for Citizenship? The Spousal Age Gap in Cross‐Border Marriages

“…In fact, Russian and Ukrainian women were, on average, 11 years younger than their American husbands. A similar pattern is also found in cross‐border marriages in East Asia (Jones and Shen ; Tsai ), Italy (Guetto and Azzolini ), and Sweden (Gustafson and Fransson ; Elwert ). These studies highlight a resource—youth—that women exchange in cross‐border marriages.…”

“Daddies,” “Cougars,” and Their Partners Past Midlife: Gender Attitudes and Relationship and Sexual Well-Being among Older Adults in Age-Heterogenous Partnerships

“…This strongly suggests that nationality is being exchanged for youth, and in gendered ways (see also Levchenko and Solheim 2013). Similar results about age gaps between citizen men and immigrant women are evident in Sweden (Elwert 2016;Gustafson and Fransson 2015), Italy (Guetto and Azzolini 2015), and Taiwan (Tsai 2011), particularly between citizen men and immigrant women from low-and middle-income countries (Niedomysl, Östh, and van Ham 2010).…”

Reality or pretense? Renouncing nationality and organized hypocrisy of the sovereignty of Taiwan

“…Other studies also point out that the stress on reproduction and motherhood is a case of biopolitics, which marks the bodies of migrant spouses as an ethnic boundary between the host state and migrant outsiders (Lan, 2008;Chen, 2009; Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989: 7). In sum, various studies allude to the selectiveness of Taiwan's sovereignty as embedded in the naturalization legislation, reflecting biases of patriarchy, sexism, nationalism and classism (Wang, 2008(Wang, , 2011Sheu, 2007;Tsai, 2011;Yang and Lee, 2009;Cheng, 2013).…”