UC professor talks about Filipino migration

Robyn Rodriguez, an associate professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Davis, gave a seminar on Wednesday night as part of a series of talks in the Sociology Department this year. She spoke to an audience of about 20 people in Mergenthaler Hall on her 2010 book, “Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World.”

Ho-Fung Hung, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, organized the event.

“The active export of labor is becoming a strategy in which more and more developing states are engaging. To fail to examine policies and politics of emigration is to fail to fully understand how the future dynamics of immigration to this country,” Rodriguez said.

One such state that is purposefully exporting laborers in order to collect remittances from its emigrants is the Philippines, which Rodriguez has focused on in her research.

Remittances are the funds that migrants of developing countries often send back to their families in order to pay for basic needs and services such as food, clothing, healthcare and education.

“I attribute the globalization of Filipino labor to what I call the Philippine labor brokerage state. I look at the profound transformations international migration has had in a sending country, and indeed I find that the Philippines, as a labor brokerage state has actually become a key determinant of Filipino emigration,” Rodriguez said.

The Philippine government is an active proponent of its people’s labor migration because the government depends on remittances to move the country toward economic stability. According to Rodriguez, the state incentivizes Filipinos’ emigration as part of its neoliberal strategy.

“In the 1980s the Philippines introduced numerous structural adjustment policies that would ultimately produce multiple forms of displacement. Neoliberal reforms have continued apace and the Philippines continues to be saddled by debt and therefore needs continued influxes of foreign exchange,” Rodriguez said.

The Philippines ranks 12th in population but third in the volume of 2013 remittance earnings, bringing in a total of $26 billion, all from exported workers. According to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), 1.8 million Filipinos left the Philippines as labor migrants in 2012, averaging almost 5,000 migrants per day.

Rodriguez’s methods involved interviews with people involved in all aspects of Filipino migration.

“I conducted a total of nineteen in-depth interviews with officials and bureaucrats in different migration agencies. These state representatives included a few high-ranking officials as well as mid-level bureaucrats of the different agencies involved in mobilizing migrants for export. I also interviewed both prospective and return migrants to understand their experiences of bureaucratic processes of out-migration,” Rodriguez said.

Her research showed that there are four major functions of the institution of labor brokerage: government authorization, training through government programs, marketing strategies to attract citizens to migrate and bilateral agreements between the Philippines and the states that receive their migrants. Rodriguez’s presentation included a list of the top 10 receiving states of Filipino migrants, most of which are in Asia or the Middle East.

“Primarily it’s destination countries that are setting the terms. They decide where they want foreign workers to be slotted in. There is a role that the Philippine state plays in the process. No [migration] recruitment agency can rival the [Philippines] in terms of their reach and global scope,” Rodriguez said.

According to Rodriguez, many Filipinos who migrate to work in Asia or the Middle East see that journey as a step toward immigration to the U.S., the U.K. or Australia.

“There’s this firm belief that circuitous bouts around the world will get them to the U.S. Some people have been able to accumulate visas so that their eligibility to come into the U.S. is greater. They try their luck,” Rodriguez said.

“I thought it was great. There were good questions and discussions,” Hung said.

Other attendees agreed that they thought Rodriguez’s talk was engaging.

“I’ve read some of the migration literature, and it’s interesting, but my closer connection to the lecture would be in terms of the labor aspect of it. Unpacking the idea of the state is interesting because we often talk about it as an abstract actor. [Rodriguez’s] work really goes through exactly how the processes work and who the actors are,” Smriti Upadhyay, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, said.

“I read [Rodriguez’s] book and liked it very much because it takes the migration labor issue from various perspectives. There is a chapter on the gender and family perspective. My work is on gender and family in China, so I found it interesting. It’s inspiring to me, and I think that she did her analysis very well. It was illuminating. I learned a lot,” Yige Dong, another Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology, said.

Rodriguez will release “Asian America,” her second book,  co-written by her colleague Pawan Dhingra, next month.