Magnified precarity,re-enhanced agency: The COVID-19 pandemic experiences of Filipino migrant workers in different contexts

Abstract

Keywords

magnified precarity re-enhanced agency Filipino migrant workers COVID-19 pandemic

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Adey

Hannam

Sheller

, et al. (2021) Pandemic (im)mobilities. Mobilities 16(1): 1–19.

Agamben

(2005) State of Exception. Trans: Attell K. University of Chicago Press.

Ambrosini

(2023) Moral economy and deservingness in immigration policies. The case of regularisations in Italy. Ethnicities (London) 23(2): 306–330.

Babar

(2020) Migrant workers bear the pandemic’s brunt in the Gulf. Current History 119(821): 343–348.

Berchet

Bijlholt

Ando

(2023) Socio-economic and ethnic health inequalities in COVID-19 outcomes across OECD countries. In: Working Paper for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Working Paper No. 153, 09 March. DOI: 10.1787/6c2a96c9-en.

Bonifacio

(2025) From essential work to social good: Filipino racialized labor and social agency during the COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta, Canada. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 34(2).

Borjas

Cassidy

(2020) The adverse effect of the COVID-19 labor market shock on immigrant employment. Working paper for National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), Working paper no. w27243, May. DOI: 10.3386/w27243.

Chan

Lan

(2022) The politics of sanitization: pandemic crisis, migration and development in Asia-Pacific. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 31(3): 205–224.

Chan

Piper

(2022) Sanitized boundaries, sanitized homes: COVID-19 and the sporadic hyper-precarity of migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 31(3): 270–291.

10.

Choy

(2003) Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Duke University Press.

11.

Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO) (2024) Number of Registered Filipino Emigrants by Year and Country of Destination: 1981-2022. CFO: Dataset. Available at: https://cfo.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Emigrant-1981-2022-AllCountries.xlsx (accessed 08 February 2025).

12.

Constable

(1997) Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Migrant Workers. Cornell University Press.

13.

Famaloan

(2025) In the interstice of health and economy: the discourse of bio-citizenship and the black economy among Filipino domestic migrant workers in Belgium during the COVID-19 pandemic. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 34(2).

14.

Farmer

(2012) Haiti after the Earthquake. Public Affairs.

15.

Fassin

Fourcade

(2021) Exposing and being exposed. In: Fassin

Fourcade

(eds) Pandemic Exposures: Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus. Chicago: Hau Books, pp. 1–18.

16.

Fresnoza-Flot

(ed) (2025) Situated Mixedness: Understanding Migration-Related Intimate Diversity in Belgium. Routledge.

17.

Fresnoza-Flot

Busson

(2025) Nuancing COVID-19 pandemic experiences of vulnerable people: The case of (ir)regular Filipino migrants in Paris. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 34(2).

18.

Gahwi

Walton-Roberts

(2022) Migrant care labour, Covid-19, and the long-term care crisis: achieving solidarity for care providers and recipients. In: Triandafyllidou

(ed) Migration and Pandemics: Spaces of Solidarity and Spaces of Exception. Springer Nature, pp. 105–121.

19.

Galam

Siruno

(2025) Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic in hostile environments: the resilience strategies of Filipino undocumented migrant domestic workers in the UK and The Netherlands. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 34(2).

20.

Guevarra

(2009) Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers. Rutgers University Press.

21.

Hochschild

(1994) The commercial spirit of intimate life and the abduction of feminism: signs from women’s advice books. Theory, Culture & Society 11(2): 1–24.

22.

Horton

(2020) Offline: COVID-19 is not a pandemic. The Lancet 396(10255): 874.

23.

(2020) Intersecting ethnic and native–migrant inequalities in the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 68: 100528.

24.

Iida

Nagasaka

(2025) Re-mobilization of immobilized labor: pandemic concessions to the agricultural sector in Japan. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 34(2).

25.

Lan

(2022) Shifting borders and migrant workers’ im/mobility: The case of Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 31(3): 225–246.

26.

Liu

Ong

Rosenstein

(1991) Dual chain migration: post-1965 Filipino immigration to the United States. International Migration Review 25(3): 487–513.

27.

Lupton

(2022) COVID Societies: Theorizing the Coronavirus Crisis. Routledge.

28.

Macklin

(2022) (In)essential bordering: Canada, COVID, and mobility. In: Triandafyllidou

(ed) Migration and Pandemics: Spaces of Solidarity and Spaces of Exception. Springer Nature, pp. 23–43.

29.

McAuliffe

Oucho

(eds) (2024) World Migration Report 2024. Report for International Organization for Migration (IOM). IOM. Available at: https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/pub2023-047-l-world-migration-report-2024_13.pdf

30.

McAuliffe

Freier

Skeldon , et al. (2022) The great disrupter: COVID-19’s impact on migration, mobility and migrants globally. In: McAuliffe

Triandafyllidou

(eds) World Migration Report 2022. International Organization for Migration (IOM). DOI: 10.1002/wom3.26.

31.

Mezzadra

Neilson

(2012) Between inclusion and exclusion: on the topology of global space and borders. Theory, Culture & Society 29(4–5): 58–75.

32.

Nagasaka

Fresnoza-Flot

(eds) (2015) Mobile Childhoods in Filipino Transnational Families: Migrant Children with Similar Roots in Different Routes. Palgrave Macmillan.

33.

Narotzky

(2021) Agricultural day labor in Spain: the logics of (pandemic) capitalism. In: Fassin

Fourcade

(eds) Pandemic Exposures: Economy and Society in the Time of Coronavirus. Hau Books, pp. 247–274.

34.

National Statistics Office (NSO) (1997) Philippine Yearbook (Volume 14). NSO.

35.

Neiburg

Joseph

(2021) Searching for life in times of pandemic. In: Fassin

Fourcade

(eds) Pandemic Exposures: Economy and Society in the Time of the Coronavirus. Hau Books, pp. 321–342.

36.

Ono

(2025) Invisibility of Filipino migrant women in rural Japan during the pandemic. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 34(2).

37.

Ortner

(1995) Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal. Comparative Studies in Society and History 37(1): 173–193, Available at: https://www-jstor-org-443.web.bisu.edu.cn/stable/179382

38.

Ortner

(1997) Making Gender: The Politics and Erotics of Culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

39.

Parreñas

(2015) Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work. 2nd edition. Stanford University Press.

40.

Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) (n.d.) Deployed overseas Filipino workers by country/destination (Total): 2016 vs 2015. Dataset, POEA. Available at: https://dmw.gov.ph/archives/ofwstat/compendium/2015-2016_OES_2.pdf (accessed 08 February 2025).

41.

Portes

Walton

(1981) Labor, Class and the International System. Academic Press.

42.

Ramraj

Little

(2021) A short history and thematic overview. In: Ramraj

(ed) Covid-19 in Asia: Law and Policy Contexts. Oxford University Press, pp. 3–26.

43.

Richardson

Pettigrew

(2022) Migrant agricultural workers: a comparative analysis of both policy and COVID-19 response in Thailand, Italy, and Canada. SN Social Sciences 2: 227–236.

44.

Rosińska

Pellerito

(2022) Pandemic shock absorbers: domestic workers’ activism at the intersection of immigrants’ and workers’ rights. In: Triandafyllidou

(ed) Migration and Pandemics: Spaces of Solidarity and Spaces of Exception. Springer Nature, pp. 123–144.

45.

Schierup

Ålund Remeso

(2013) A global migrant precariat: labour, citizenship and space for civil society. In: Primer Seminario Internacional de Estudios Críticos del Desarollo. Crisis, Desarollo y Trabajo. University of Zacatecas, 14–15 February 2013. Available at: https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:902080/FULLTEXT01.pdf

46.

Standing

(2011) The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. Bloomsbury Academic.

47.

Standing

(2016) The precariat, class and progressive politics: a response. Global Labour Journal 7(2): 189–200.

48.

Takahata

(2024) 在日フィリピン人社会: 1980∼2020 年代の結婚移民と日系人 [Filipinos in Japan: Marriage Migrants and Nikkeijin in the 1980s and 2020s]. University of Nagoya Press. [In Japanese].

49.

Toring

JRJ

(2025) Filipino technical interns and specified skilled workers in Japan during the COVID-19 pandemic: Oblivious, upward, suspended and rebooted (im)mobilities. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 34(2).

50.

Triandafyllidou

(2022) Spaces of solidarity and spaces of exception: migration and membership during pandemic times. In: Triandafyllidou

(ed) Migration and Pandemics: Spaces of Solidarity and Spaces of Exception. Springer Nature, pp. 3–21.

51.

Triandafyllidou

Yeoh

BSA

(2023) Sustainability and resilience in migration governance for a post-pandemic world. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies 21(1): 1–14.

52.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA) (n.d.) 14.9 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/desa/149-million-excess-deaths-associated-covid-19-pandemic-2020-and-2021

53.

Wahab

(2020) The outbreak of Covid-19 in Malaysia: pushing migrant workers at the margin. Social Sciences & Humanities Open 2(1): 100073.

54.

Qian

Wilkes

(2021) Anti-Asian discrimination and the Asian-white mental health gap during COVID-19. Ethnic and Racial Studies 44(5): 819–835.

55.

Xiang

Lindquist

(2014) Migration infrastructure. International Migration Review 48(1_suppl): 122–148.

56.

Yellow Horse

(2021) Anti-Asian racism, xenophobia and Asian American health during COVID-19. In: Lupton

Willis

(eds) The COVID-19 Crisis: Social Perspectives. Routledge, pp. 195–206.