ABSTRACT
The Philippines is one of the largest exporters of labour in the global economy, with an estimated 9.5 million Filipino migrant workers living and working overseas (around 10% of the population).1 Although Indonesian migrant workers ‘only’ comprise an estimated 4.3 million (1.7% of the population), the figure is sharply increasing, with around half a million new migrant workers leaving their home country every year, and Indonesia is therefore expected to be a major player in labour exports. Although introduced as a temporary measure to ease unemployment, the labour-exporting policies of developing countries like the Philippines and Indonesia have now become an integral part of the global economy and are therefore not likely to change. Remittances constitute a major part these countries’ economies – in 2010, an estimated US$21 billion for the Philippines, and US$8.2 billion for Indonesia – and the rise of the migrant worker, discursively constructed by his/her government as an ‘empowered individual’ who can choose to become, or not to become, a migrant worker, has become an important embodiment of globalisation in Asia (Tyner, 2004). Policy makers and recruitment agencies have framed labour migration as a win-win situation simultaneously
addressing the labour shortage in developed countries and poverty and unemployment in developing countries (Pratt, 2012). However, what the official policies on labour migration fail to address is the pain and suffering experienced by migrant parents and their children (Parreñas, 2005), caused both by “the destructiveness of distance” (Pratt, 2012, p. 46) and by the discrimination, exploitation and abuse experienced by shockingly large numbers of migrant workers (Chiu, 2005; Constable, 2007; Bales, 2012). What many experience when they immigrate is that the “gains in earning power are diffused by loss in racial and class status” (Parreñas, 2008a, p. 172). Thus, poor migrant workers may escape the social constraints they have lived under at home, but only to confront a different set of racialised gender and class constraints in Hong Kong and other Asian and Middle Eastern economies to which they immigrate.
