Abstract
Yasmin Ortiga’s Stuck at Home: Pandemic Immobilities in the Nation of Emigration offers a timely and conceptually sharp intervention into migration studies by shifting attention away from movement and towards its less prominent counterpart: immobility. Focusing on the Philippines, one of the world’s top labour-exporting states, Ortiga examines what happens when migration is abruptly halted, as it was during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ortiga’s analysis operates across multiple scales, showing how immobility is produced and managed through the interplay of global labour demand, national priorities and migrants’ own strategies and recalibrations. The collapse of the global tourism industry, for instance, rendered Filipino cruise workers unable to remigrate, while continued demand for nurses in destination countries was in tension with the Philippine state’s decision to restrict their departure.
The book centres on two groups of Filipino workers who were rendered immobile during the pandemic: nurses prevented by the state from leaving and cruise ship workers forced to return home and who found themselves unable to remigrate as the global tourism industry collapsed. However, while both groups were ‘stuck’, the mechanisms producing their immobility, and the meanings attached to it, were different. This comparative framing is one of the book’s key strengths, enabling Ortiga to develop a systematic understanding of how immobility is produced through state and market dynamics.
Ortiga shows that emigration regulation is not a straightforward neutral or technical process, but one that depends on the sending state’s ability to make its policies legible and acceptable to its own citizens. This was especially evident in the tensions surrounding the Philippine state’s dual role as a labour broker that encouraged citizens to invest in migration-oriented skills and as the authority that later prevented them from leaving, particularly in the case of nurses. Ortiga demonstrates how the state mobilised and reworked existing tropes, most notably the figure of the migrant as ‘hero’, which in pre-pandemic times was tied to overseas employment and remittance-sending and was redefined during the pandemic to mean staying put and serving the nation. While migrant nurses were frustrated by the state’s decision to ban their deployment abroad, the policy was widely supported by the Filipino public, who viewed it as necessary to address domestic healthcare shortages.
At the same time, Ortiga discusses how migrants themselves actively engaged with and appropriated these narratives, as seen in the way stranded cruise workers invoked their status as ‘heroes’ to demand greater state support. Nurses did not respond uniformly to the deployment ban: some used the period to accumulate local experience in the hope of strengthening future migration prospects, others continued to campaign for its lifting, while some disengaged altogether.
Further, the book’s analysis of return migration reveals that returning home does not necessarily mark the end of migrant precarity; it often marks the beginning of new forms of uncertainty, unemployment and marginalisation. Ortiga shows how the Philippine government’s emphasis on entrepreneurship as the ideal outcome of return migration fails to account for the realities faced by many workers, particularly those in low-status service occupations. By privileging a narrow vision of the ‘successful returnee’, such policies risk reproducing existing inequalities. This critique resonates with broader discussions of neoliberal governance and responsibilisation, while remaining firmly grounded in the specificities of the Philippine context.
Methodologically, Stuck at Home reflects both the constraints and possibilities of conducting research during a global crisis. Ortiga and her collaborators relied on tools such as social media, messaging platforms and remote interviews while drawing heavily on personal and professional networks to access participants. Rather than presenting these limitations as purely technical challenges, the book foregrounds the relational labour that underpinned the research process. This emphasis on networks, trust and collaboration is a valuable reminder of the social infrastructures that make qualitative research possible, particularly under conditions of restricted mobility. Ortiga is attentive to the ethical complexities of representing participants’ experiences of loss, frustration and abandonment. The book strikes a careful balance between foregrounding individual narratives and situating them within broader structural dynamics, allowing readers to appreciate both the emotional intensity of these experiences and their political significance.
If there are lingering questions, they relate less to the strength of Ortiga’s argument than to its potential extensions. For instance, the book establishes that migration governance cannot be understood solely through destination-country politics because origin-country publics have their own moral frameworks and stakes in regulating mobility. This raises questions about how such sentiments are distributed across different social groups and in relation to different types of migration, and how they might shift over time.
Overall, Stuck at Home is a compelling and carefully argued contribution that enriches our understanding of migration as a process. By centring immobility, Ortiga offers a nuanced account of how movement and its suspension are governed, narrated and experienced.
