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Towards Transnational Citizenship Learning: Chinese Birth Tourism in Global Migration

Mon, April 15, 1:30 to 3:00pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Seacliff D

Proposal

Purpose

In the past decade, Canada and the United States have witnessed the largest number of entrants for birth tourism in their history. Since 2008, when the United States opened its borders to individual Chinese tourists, a flood of Chinese expectant mothers has travelled to the US to give birth and help their children gain US citizenship. In 2014, Chinese birth tourism in the US reached 60,000 births. Meanwhile, small maternity hotels in Canada have hosted hundreds of Chinese migrant mothers. In 2015, Postmedia reported that 295 of the 1,938 babies born at Richmond Hospital in British Columbia were born to foreign Chinese mothers. After giving birth, these mothers return to raise their anchor babies in China.

This emerging phenomenon has resulted in a significant challenge and a serious debate globally. Chinese migrant mothers, as an embodiment of race, gender, and class, have played a critical role in global and transnational migration. These Chinese women with tourist visas spend a large amount of money to live in a Chinese-owned maternity hotel for three to six months, covering the delivery and time spent afterward. Maternity hotels across Canada and the US host thousands of Chinese birth tourist mothers each year. Learning becomes a key factor for these mothers in practising birth tourism. Local communities, hospitals, and organizations all provide teaching and learning activities for the mothers to learn how to become mothers. The purpose of this paper is to explore how Chinese birth tourist mothers learn “citizenship” through their practice of birth tourism transnationally.

This study contributes to the conference theme: Education for Sustainability. While examining the informal citizenship learning practice among Chinese birth tourist mothers, this paper contributes to a better understanding of what constitutes “citizenship learning” in the larger global and transnational context for the purpose of sustainability. It also contributes toward creating sustainable educational implications for better recognizing migrant mothers’ learning experience.

Theoretical Framework and Significance

While scholars have discussed the legal dimensions of “birth tourism” and the “stealing of American/Canadian citizenship” (Feere, 2010), limited information exists regarding the transnational citizenship learning practice in Chinese birth tourism. This study explores two research questions: (1) how transnational citizenship learning takes place in community-based locations, medical clinics, or public and private spaces in Canada and the US; (2) how Chinese birth tourist mothers understand the notion of “citizenship,” construct identities and learn mothering and citizenship in a transnational context. This paper enhances our understanding of global transnational migration by expanding our knowledge of the Chinese birth tourists’ transnational citizenship learning practice.

This paper makes two significant contributions. First, through studies of transnational migration and return (Guo, 2016), this paper contributes to the much-needed study of transnational birth tourism. The practice of birth tourism refers to women emigrating or travelling during pregnancy, giving birth, and mothering their babies and children. The study addresses the issue by considering the different lived experiences of Chinese birth tourists, including their return to China, and by probing tensions between state power and transnational subjects through the practice of birth tourism by Chinese migrant mothers. It understands Chinese migrants as products and active agents of globalization and transnational migration.

Second, this paper fills a major lacuna in the theories of “transnational citizenship learning”. Research on “transnational citizenship learning” is still in short supply. Transnational Citizenship is a puzzling concept if we think about citizenship as a relationship between an individual, a state and the other citizens of that state (Bauböck, 2017). Studies on transnational migration criticize the view of a linear project of emigration from the home country to the host country, in which “membership to one nation is superseded by belonging and acculturation to a new one” (Erel & Lutz, 2012, p. 409). This paper explores the dynamic relations between individuals, the state, and the agents through the global business of birth tourism. By taking a transnational and a comparative perspective (Chia & Neoh, 2017), the notion of citizenship becomes fluid, dynamic and mixed. Citizenship learning in this perspective could involve practices outside the boundary of the classroom, and it could be located in a variety of places, such as local communities, social service programs, public and private spaces, as well as cyber spaces. This paper not only reconceptualizes the notion of “citizenship” and theorizes “transnational citizenship learning,” but also provides policy-related recommendations in relation to birth tourism for governments, health providers, social service and learning organizations in Canada and the US.

Methodology and Data Collection

Methodologically, this study applies a critical ethnography to explore the everyday transnational citizenship learning experience in Chinese birth tourism. Critical ethnography, which differs from traditional ethnography in emphasizing the social conditions of people’s daily life as “the foundation for inquiry,” enables the examination of institutions, regimes of knowledge and social practices that “limit choices, constrain meaning, and denigrate identities and communities” (Madison, 2005, p. 5). Critical ethnography provides me with a critical perspective of going beyond a simple examination of how Chinese birth tourists experience transnational citizenship learning, to a deeper problematization of the interactions between nationalism, ethnicity, identity and learning.

This ethnographic research was conducted in two sites in Vancouver (Canada) and Los Angeles (USA). I collected data through document research, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic observations. The main objective of this study is to explore the citizenship learning, transnational relations, culture, and identity of Chinese birth tourists in Canada and the US. I interviewed 14 Chinese birth tourist mothers (seven in each country) to explore their experience of birth tourism. Based on the interview data, I compared transnational citizenship learning between the two cities to generate global migration and citizenship studies. I find that transnational citizenship learning in Chinese birth tourism is not only a process of re-constructing identities across borders, but also it is socially organized by the state, different local agents, and individuals.

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