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Lives Lived in “Someone Else's Hands”: Precarity and Profit-making of Migrants and Left-behind Children in the Philippines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2019

Cheryll Alipio Open the ORCID record for Cheryll Alipio [Opens in a new window]
Cheryll Alipio*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology, University of Maryland, College Park; calipio@umd.edu
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Abstract

In the labour brokerage state of systematic recruitment and export for the maximisation of labour, development, and profit, the Philippines continues to simultaneously fashion migrant workers as temporary, yet heroic and sacrificial. As the largest migrant-sending country in Southeast Asia and the third largest remittance recipient in Asia, the Philippines’ discourse of migrants as modern-day heroes and martyrs reveals the interplay of nationalist myths and cultural values, alongside the neoliberal favouring of finance and flexible labour, to craft filial migrants and celebrate mobile, capitalist subjects over migrants’ welfare and well-being. The article explores the contemporaneous institutionalisation of migrant labour and migrants’ institutionalised uncertainty lived every day to investigate how this profound precariousness in the Philippines is perpetuated historically to shape the resilience and realities of migrants and their left-behind children today. Drawing from news reports and films on migrant lives and ethnographic fieldwork in the Philippines, this article considers how the formation and deployment of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) turns from a focus on sustaining the nation to supporting migrant families and developing translocal communities. Through this examination, the paper seeks to uncover who profits and is indebted from the precarity created and sustained by the larger economic system built on transnational labour migration.

Keywords

migrationlabourprecarityresiliencechildrenPhilippines
Type
Article
Information
TRaNS: Trans-Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia , Volume 7 , Special Issue 1: Southeast Asian Trajectories of Labour Mobility , May 2019 , pp. 135 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Institute for East Asian Studies, Sogang University 2019 

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