ABSTRACT
Typifying Eric Wolf’s (1982) proposition, the modalities of capital and labor both press into patterns of global movement, creating new frontiers of accumulation, disrupting local livelihoods, and dispossessing select populations who then form mobile surplus populations. This chapter explores migration and gendered social reproduction in Philippine communities as workers migrate abroad. Several ethnographic cases illustrate the social reproduction of migration along the Philippine–Canada migration corridor, concluding with the example of Tim Hortons, an iconic global food services corporation branded as Canadian. Forced to expand their skill repertoire, migrants must respond to the capriciousness of Canada’s “just-in-time” capital-privileging immigration policies that open and close borders to certain kinds of workers, typically devaluing their skills. For many who gain Canadian citizenship, the desire to obtain permanent residency for eligible family members, and to sponsor the education of relatives remaining in the Philippines, leads to the social reproduction of Philippine migration. It also reveals a major contradiction in the migration-inspired class-improvement projects for many second-generation migrant youths whose parents settled their families in Canada. The concluding section includes a postscript about migrant workers’ exploitation during COVID-19 to expose major flaws yet again in Philippine development policy reliance on labor export and remittances dating back to the 1970s.
