Abstract
The Philippines is a popular case study among those interested in international labor migration because of the wide-ranging outflow of Filipinos that leave the country each year, and the active role the Philippine state takes in marketing its citizens as ideal workers – industrious yet docile, educated but pliable – for the globalized world economy. Despite this being common knowledge, Robyn Rodriguez provides new insights about the Philippine government’s migration bureaucracy in her book Migrants for Export.
Rodriguez begins Migrants for Export with a short history of labor migration from the Philippines. She provides a corrective to the popular understanding of the roots of this phenomenon. Most histories of Philippine migration management start with the declaration of martial law in 1972 and then-President Ferdinand Marcos’s 1974 presidential decree that instituted a national labor export program. But Rodriguez shows how the roots of the Philippine neoliberal migration bureaucracy can in fact be traced back to the colonial labor importation system implemented by the United States that channeled thousands of Filipino farm laborers to plantations in Hawaii, Filipino sailors to American ships in the Pacific, and Filipina nurses to hospitals throughout the United States. After gaining its independence in 1946, the Philippine government simply took over this role from its former colonial master but then greatly expanded upon it.
Rodriguez describes this vast government apparatus in fascinating detail, from the Philippines-based government agencies (particularly the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration or POEA) that certify that prospective migrants are authorized and qualified for overseas work, to the labor attachés in overseas embassies who monitor and report on existing and emerging labor market opportunities, to the national training centers that focus on manpower development to increase the international marketability of Filipinos. There is even a unit – the Government Placement Branch – whose function is to assist foreign governments in the direct hiring of Filipino workers for government labor contracts, primarily medical personnel to work in government hospitals (pp. 70–71). Rodriguez’s interviews with officials from these various government units concretely illuminate how this ‘transnational bureaucracy’ works. For instance, one official at the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration tells Rodriguez that part of his job is to curry favor with Philippines-based foreign embassy officials from client countries by sending gifts and attending functions these embassies host, so as to create a good impression of the Philippines and, by extension, Filipino workers (p. 65).
After detailing the state-based practices and policies that constitute labor brokerage, Rodriguez shifts her focus to the government’s construction of the notion of ‘migrant citizenship’ as a tool to facilitate the smooth functioning of its labor brokering strategy. Migrant citizenship involves the active mobilization of Filipinos to seek temporary jobs abroad as foreign guest workers. Labor migrants are celebrated by the Philippine government as loyal, nationalistic heroes, willing to sacrifice their short-term comfort and well-being for the greater good of their families and, by extension, their country. Underpinning this mantle of heroism laid upon migrant workers is the expectation that they will send regular remittances back to their families and thereby bolster the fragile Philippine economy. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Philippine government had mandated these remittances, requiring overseas workers to send back between 50 and 70 percent of their basic salaries to the Philippines via Philippine banks. However, this draconian law was eventually repealed and Rodriguez writes that Marcos’s successors now use more subtle approaches – such as appeals to workers’ sense of familialism and nationalism – to persuade them to remit their savings to the Philippines.
To offset these ‘nationalist duties’ (p. 80), the Philippine government promises its citizens that they carry with them the protection of the Philippine state even as they work abroad. However, as Rodriguez outlines in the case study in Chapter 6, ‘Migrant Workers’ Rights?’, this promise is not always kept. The chapter describes a 2001 wildcat strike involving nearly 700 Filipino workers at a Malaysian-owned garment factory in Brunei. The workers accused factory management of not honoring the terms of their contract with respect to their base wages, overtime rate, and piece-rate. They enlisted their local Philippine embassy officials to assist in negotiating with both the Malaysian management of the factory and the government of Brunei. But the embassy officials agreed to a settlement deal that the workers rejected as unfair. And those workers who opted to be repatriated to the Philippines and initiate a civil claim against their Philippines-based recruitment agencies, found little sympathy from local government bureaucrats. No mention of the strike was raised during a state visit to Brunei by the newly sworn-in Philippine president soon after the strike’s end. Far from blacklisting the Malaysian employer and preventing it from hiring more Filipino workers in the future, the government determined that an amicable settlement had been reached and the matter was officially closed. This case starkly reveals how, in a contest between its migrant citizens who seek protection from the state, and employers who seek compliance and docility not just from their migrant workers but also from their ‘broker,’ the Philippine government seems to choose its clients over its citizens. This is the Faustian bargain that Rodriguez shows is implicit in the neoliberal labor brokerage of commoditized workers for the globalized world economy: that while it can be a tool to strengthen the state’s economy through the remittance of foreign currency, it is predicated on the dilution of the power of the state to protect its citizens (p. 117). In this manner, Rodriguez gives us a searing portrait of state-level labor brokering – its discursive practices and pitfalls.
Despite these insights, Migrants for Export is not flawless. In her focus on the role of the Philippine state in the various facets of migration management (the mobilization, authorization, regulation, marketing, recruitment, and placement of migrants), Rodriguez at times overstates the government’s power and importance. Certainly when the national policy on labor exportation was first implemented in the 1970s, the actions of the Philippine state were integral to the policy’s success. But now, 40 years later, out-migration from the Philippines is very much a tripartite affair, encouraged not only by the government but also by for-profit private recruitment agencies and the ‘culture of migration’ (Asis, 2006) that exists (independent of the state) among Filipino citizens.
There are now more than 1000 private recruitment agencies licensed by the government to match prospective migrants with overseas employers. 1 These for-profit agencies handle the vast majority of all recruitment and placement of Filipino workers overseas. In contrast, the Government Placement Branch placed just 3192 Filipinos overseas in 2009, a miniscule fraction of the more than one million Filipinos who found work overseas that year (POEA, 2010, p. 11). This statistic contradicts the outsize role that Rodriguez gives the Philippine government in the placement of its migrant citizens. Certainly government-to-government recruitment and placement does occur but the Philippine government has in fact tried to limit its involvement in the direct recruitment, placement, and even training of workers overseas – leaving these functions to the private sector – so as to not give the impression that it is actively involved in the commoditization and export of its people (Tyner, 2009).
Tied to the issue of the private sector’s facilitation of out-migration from the Philippines is the role of the black market in supporting irregular migration and subverting the government’s authority to control migration. Undocumented migration out of the Philippines through its southern island of Mindanao to Malaysia and Brunei is an ongoing problem that the government has yet to resolve (Asis, 2004). There is also a thriving marriage market in the Philippines with local women agreeing to marry foreigners for a lucrative bride price paid to their families (Martin et al., 2004). The human trafficking of Filipinas to Japan, Korea, and Taiwan for sexual exploitation and non-sex work is another area of concern that has been garnering greater attention from policymakers and researchers in recent years (Piper, 2005). Finally, it is also possible for prospective migrants who do not possess the prerequisite human capital qualifications for overseas jobs to purchase these qualifications to circumvent government restrictions (Asis, 2004). Rodriguez herself alludes to these under-the-table tactics when one of her interviewees, a prospective migrant, confesses that he could have bought a ‘fake certificate’ of his educational qualifications to secure a job in the United States (p. 44). Taken together, these back channels for leaving the Philippines highlight the gap that exists between migration policy goals and reality despite the Philippines’ entrenched migration bureaucracy. Rodriguez’s discussion of the authorization power of the Philippine state to verify and certify prospective migrants before they are allowed to leave the country neglects to fully address this gap.
The devolution of traditional government functions to the private sector or to private individuals is part and parcel of classical neoliberalism. And Rodriguez rightly highlights this in her book. But the ins and outs of the relationship between government and the private sector in the mobilization of Filipino migrants – how they interact with and, often, undercut one other – warrants greater attention. An investigation of this relationship would provide a more comprehensive (and realistic) depiction of the labor brokerage state and make Migrants for Export an even richer book than it already is.