鄉關何處：跨界遷移、女性移民、與社會工作(II)

This is a two-year research project that aims to compare transnational marriage immigrant women in Taiwan and Chinese immigrant women in Australia, who under the constraint and oppression of social structure, strive to balance care and work in everyday life and to construct subjectivity. Discussion presented in this paper draws data from in-depth interviews with 25 Chinese immigrant women who live in Melbourne and 17 transnational marriage women who live in Taiwan. This paper uses feminist intersectionality theory to investigate how these Chinese immigrant women in Australia and transnational marriage women in Taiwan undergoing the experiences of gender, race, class, and culture oppression during cross-border migration and how these experiences of career development lead to different gender role practice. All Chinese immigrant women participants are first generation immigrants and mainly from Taiwan, Hong-Kong, China and Malaysia. They migrated to Australia as skilled or investment immigrants or with their families. Of these 25 participants, 20 obtained their bachelor or postgraduate degree in their home country or in Australia. All of them had professional career and full employed. These Chinese immigrant women are highly educated but lose their career and become unpaid caregiver right after migration. Language is a barrier for entering the labor market, but structural factors such as education system (i.e. children under 12 years old cannot be at home alone) and labor market regulation (i.e. need a reference from the previous workplace for labor market entry) are critical. Additionally, a lack of personal supports from families also influences their possibilities to enter the labor market. In addition to downward social mobility, the astronant family is also a common phenomenon among these Chinese immigrant families, especially those investment immigrants from China. Even they strive to balance care and work in everyday life and to maintain their long-distance marital relation, return migration is still not a choice for them. There is a significant difference between ethnic groups in regard to the influence of saving-face culture on the decision-making of return migration. For those immigrant women from China, they often refer to the saving-face culture, but others are not. All participants mention the difference between Australian and Chinese society in terms of gender role, individual subjectivity, and respect for the privacy of others. The longer immigration to Australia, the less accept to Chinese culture. Australian welfare system plays an important role on the decision-making of non-return migration.