Abstract
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez’s Migrants for Export is a critical assessment of the bureaucratic processes and policy implementations by which the Philippine state has established itself as a labor brokerage state on a transnational scale. In the introductory chapter, “Neoliberalism and the Philippine Labor Brokerage State,” Rodriguez analyzes the Philippine state’s current dominance in labor brokerage in the context of the neoliberal restructuring of the Philippine economy tied to the international rise of neoliberal governmentality. The first substantive chapter, “The Emergence of Labor Brokerage: U.S. Colonial Legacies in the Philippines,” expands this analysis by historicizing the U.S. colonial labor system’s role in creating various programs for the training, recruitment, and employment of Filipino workers in the United States, which subsequently established an institutional framework for the post-colonial Philippine economy, nation-building, and citizenship organized around the out-migration. The author identifies, for example, the historical significance of the pensionado program of the early twentieth century in facilitating the recruitment of young Filipinos from elite families for training in the nursing profession, followed by the Exchange Visitor Program (EVP) of the U.S. government started in 1948 to promote the employment of thousands of Filipinos in the United States, particularly in medical fields.
The second chapter offers an unprecedented perspective on the multiple departments, offices, and agencies of the Philippine state — both at home and abroad — that constitute what Rodriguez calls the government’s migration bureaucracy. Rich details reveal the specific ways in which the state’s dense network of foreign site offices, embassies, and consulates identify opportunities overseas for placing migrant workers by monitoring trends in international trade and investment and assessing potential demands for migrant labor. Rodriguez shows how the Philippine government’s desk offices and migration agencies in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the Americas appraise economic shifts and provide updates on new employment categories and visa policies abroad. This bureaucracy also guides the Philippine state to formulate and negotiate bilateral labor placement treaties with labor importing countries. This migration bureaucracy, Rodriguez argues further, is to be understood both as a complex of statecraft oriented toward managing, approving, and mediating workers’ overseas employment, and as a discursive site from which to affirm the state’s legitimacy over migrants and to bring the populace under its disciplinary apparatus. By mandating specialized training, a multi-step certification process, and numerous other migration-related prerequisites, the state establishes itself as the primary authenticator of migrants’ employment applications and overseas contracts. This analysis of the migration bureaucracy is expanded in the following chapter, “Able Minds, Able Hands: Marketing Philippine Workers,” where Rodriguez develops the idea of labor diplomacy to theorize the Philippine government’s involvement in formal negotiations at the state-level with labor-importing countries to promote Filipino workers’ employment via bilateral agreements and to offer proposals for new modes of migrant labor incorporation in emerging market segments (such as the military or special economic zones in labor importing countries). Like the rest of the book, this chapter’s strength derives from the detailed accounts of exactly how the state orchestrates the brokering of labor through its everyday operations in the Philippines and overseas. Rodriguez’s many examples—such as the state’s strategy of direct mailing of brochures to foreign government agencies or the description of special labor expos at international conference venues where target audiences of foreign delegates or business tourists are likely to be present — offer critical insights into the state’s routinized labor promotion practices as part of its state-level labor diplomacy.
Next, “New National Heroes: Patriotism and Citizenship Reconfigured” takes up the question of how the Philippine state has re-shaped the meaning of national belonging and citizenship through the normalization of labor migration. Rodriguez discusses in vivid detail the state’s commemorative celebrations, welcome rituals, and festive occasions at home and abroad, designed to validate the migrant worker as a self-sacrificing hero, as an investor with a stake in national development. Rodriguez shows that this discourse of migrant citizenship emphasizes the significance of staying connected with the family and nation via regular remittances and participation in state-regulated investment schemes. This enables the state to ensure a steady inflow of foreign exchange and to mediate, as an advisor and manager, between migrant workers and their remittance-receiving families. The state thus carves out for itself, beyond the formal sphere of the economy, an extended domain of disciplinary influence lodged within the more private affairs of its citizens.
The centrality of gender in the discourse on migrant citizenship is analyzed in-depth in the next chapter, “The Philippine Domestic: Gendered Labor, Family, and the Nation-State.” In this section of the book, Rodriguez assesses the state’s influence in facilitating women’s employment in highly gendered, racialized, and often sexualized occupations and the simultaneous castigation of female migrants as deviant mothers or docile women in need of the paternalistic state’s protections and guidance against the dangers of overseas work. The author’s ethnographic data demonstrate how the state’s so-called training programs — such as the pre-departure orientation sessions meant to professionalize and thus protect female migrants from exploitation — encourage, in substance, women’s subordination to their overseas employers and ultimately reproduce highly gendered norms of citizenship. By emphasizing a good work ethic of compliance towards overseas employers along with the recommendation of leading frugal lifestyles devoid of luxury, consumption, or sexual excesses, the state-sanctioned training programs seek to maximize remittances and loyalty for the family and nation, and in the process regulate the bodies and lives of female migrants.
The last chapter, “Migrant Workers’ Rights? Regulating Remittances and Repatriation,” illustrates the contradictions embedded in the Philippine state’s dual role as a labor brokerage state highly invested in maximizing out-migration for remittances and as the protector of migrants’ rights and well-being overseas. Rodriguez shows that, although the Philippine state organizes elaborate official visits of Philippine heads of state and stages these events as exalted occasions to publicly acknowledge migrant workers’ contributions, an overall assessment of the same state’s attempts at resolving labor disputes between foreign governments and migrants exposes the labor brokerage state’s high priority of sustaining diplomatic and economic ties with labor-importing client-states. The details of a case involving a Filipino workers’ strike and demands for higher wages in Brunei reveal, for example, how the Philippine state’s interventions on behalf of its citizens were executed by a set of placating compromises and settlements that ultimately privileged the labor-importing country’s policies and needs against migrant workers’ demands. Furthermore, migrants who chose the option of returning to the Philippines to pursue the state’s much-publicized grievance process to claim back wages, found themselves in the middle of a lengthy, confusing, and demoralizing bureaucratic process.
In the book’s conclusion, “The Globalization of the Labor Brokerage State,” Rodriguez discusses how the Philippine state’s labor brokering model is fast becoming transnationalized, as other migrant-sending countries try to emulate and adopt this model in consultation with the Philippines. This chapter also juxtaposes a more progressive expression of transnationalism in the global politics of migration, that is, the work of Migrante International, an organization focused on migrants’ rights and labor advocacy. We learn that with an international network of member groups, Migrante International has been mobilizing a transnational movement to protect migrant workers’ rights in the context of individual nation-states’ political sovereignty, where labor entitlements and overall rights are almost entirely associated with citizenship or comparable forms of legal membership. Rodriguez suggests that organizations such as these employ a counter hegemonic approach towards safeguarding migrants’ rights: they privilege the conceptualization of workers’ protections and labor entitlements based on the migrants’ lived experiences as opposed to the labor policies determined by labor-importing countries’ agendas or the labor-brokerage state’s administrative system.
Rodriguez’s work on the Philippine state’s labor brokerage role makes major contributions to the migration literature. This book shows with persuasive clarity how the Philippines orchestrates its labor brokerage work by being involved in monitoring overseas employment trends, negotiating placements abroad, advising foreign states and employers on the advantages of hiring Filipino migrants, and preparing Philippine nationals for migration. This book also reveals how the responsibility of safeguarding the rights of citizens working abroad is increasingly being shifted to labor-sending states like the Philippines. Although not its central focus, this book opens up the issue of Third World debt and debt servicing being linked to the remittances of migrant workers in general, and as migration becomes increasingly feminized, the contributions of women in particular.