TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan (Tasat)

TransAsia Sisters Association, Taiwan (TASAT)1 Hsiao-Chuan Hsia (bio) I'm both an activist and researcher. The graduate school I'm teaching at is called the Graduate School for Social Transformation Studies. All the faculty are activists in different sectors, and our goal is to train students to become activists who are grounded in their research. We try to integrate research and praxis. I'm also an organizer of marriage migrants and work closely with various migrant organizations. Therefore, I'm actually wearing two hats in my presentation. My talk will be focused on marriage migration, which is actually a form of forced migration. Parallel to the trend of labor migration, marriage migration has become another significant form of forced migration whereby women from poorer countries migrate to richer countries through cross-border marriages.2 For example, women from Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Cambodia, marry men in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and Australia, through cross-border marriages. Why cross-border marriage migration? It's actually a survival strategy for both men and women. I'm not talking about those who get married to foreign spouses because of their business or studying abroad.3 I'm talking about marriage migration of the disadvantaged class. For the women, they are usually from poorer families from less developed countries. For them, they cannot even afford to become migrant workers. You know how much one pays to be a migrant worker, right? By marrying a foreigner, they actually are getting an opportunity to go abroad and it also gives them hope. They receive money from the husband's family as a dowry and they expect to have a more stable and secure status in the host country. For the men, they are mostly working-class or small farmers who become [End Page 103] socially and economically marginalized in their home countries because of the unequal development in the capitalist countries. The small farmers in many East Asian countries are not like farmers in the United States. They are very small farmers, who don't have much income. For those who stay in the farm or work in small factories, they are seen as people without hope. Even the women who stay in the farm would rather not marry another farmer because it's very hard to make a living on the farm. Because of the welfare crisis, which I will talk about later, the expenses for raising a family are increasing. Making a family with children is really difficult, so it becomes very difficult for the men from the lower class to find women to get married to and have children. I actually have a diagram of how this marriage migration is related to capitalist development.4 I won't have time to go into the details. But in short, it's a result of the crisis of capitalist development globally. But I do want to focus on the reproduction crisis in capitalist development. We all know that in capitalist society, historically, women have been doing free reproductive labor forever. To expand capitalist development, they needed women's labor, so women started to join the labor force increasingly. And then, there has been a welfare crisis because countries are competing with each other, and they try to cut down social expenditures so that the state won't have to be responsible for the family and welfare. What has happened is that a lot of developed countries are importing migrant domestic workers and nurse aids to do reproductive labor and hoping that it will solve the problems of reproduction. However, it's actually a band-aid solution as you can see that the fertility rate is still very low. For example, the country I'm from, Taiwan, has the lowest rate of fertility in the world because raising children has become so expensive that many people don't want to have children. Moreover, although middle-class families can resort to hiring migrant domestic workers, farmers and working-class families cannot afford to hire this type of labor. Consequently, men from working-class and small farming families in the more developed countries follow the flight of capital

Disadvantaged · Economic growth · Forced marriage · Political science · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Gender Studies · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

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