Drawing on case-studies from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia, International Migration and Sending Countries demonstrates how sending countries are emerging as complex and significant actors in migration politics. It shows how a more nuanced understanding of sending countries' policies towards their emigrants and diasporas is relevant for both academic and public policy debates on issues of migration control and development. In addition, wider issues are considered such as the implications of migrants' cross-border membership, dual allegiances and transnational practices, together with the scope and powers of the state in a period of globalization.
This engaging and timely volume contributes new knowledge to the rapidly emerging field of globalisation and social work. The volume brings together cutting-edge interdisciplinary scholarship from countries such as Australia, Finland, Japan, South Africa, the Philippines and Sweden. It proposes ‘glocalisation’ as a useful concept for re-framing conditions, methodologies and practices for social work in a world perspective. Part I of the volume, 'The Glocalisation of Social Issues', deals with major environmental, social and cultural issues – migration and human rights, environmental problems and gendered violence. Part II, 'Methodological Re-Shaping and Spatial Transgression in Glocalised Social Work', develops an epistemology of situated knowledge and methodologies inspired by art, creative writing and cultural geography, focusing on physical, material and emotional spatial dimensions of relevance to social work. Part III, 'Responses from Social Work as a Glocalised Profession', examines how social work has responded to specific social problems, crises and vulnerabilities in a glocalised world.
Since the 1960s, overseas migration had become a major factor in the economy of the Philippines. It has also profoundly influenced the sense of nationhood of both migrants and nonmigrants. Migrant workers learned to view their home country as part of a plural world of nations, and they shaped a new sort of Filipino identity while appropriating the modernity of the outside world, where at least for a while they operated as insiders. The global nomadism of Filipino workers brought about some fundamental reorientations. It revolutionized Philippine society, reignited a sense of nationhood, imposed new demands on the state, reconfigured the class structure, and transnationalized class and other social relations, even as it deterritorialized the state and impacted the destinations of migrant workers. Philippine foreign policy now takes surprising turns in consideration of migrant workers and Filipinos living abroad. Many tertiary education institutions aim deliberately at the overseas employability of local graduates. And the "Fil-foreign" offspring of unions with partners from other nationalities add a new inflection to Filipino identity.
One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of the Year "A remarkable book...indispensable."--The Boston Globe "A sweeping, deeply reported tale of international migration...DeParle's understanding of migration is refreshingly clear-eyed and nuanced."--The New York Times "This is epic reporting, nonfiction on a whole other level...One of the best books on immigration written in a generation."--Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted The definitive chronicle of our new age of global migration, told through the multi-generational saga of a Filipino family, by a veteran New York Times reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. When Jason DeParle moved into the Manila slums with Tita Comodas and her family three decades ago, he never imagined his reporting on them would span three generations and turn into the defining chronicle of a new age--the age of global migration. In a monumental book that gives new meaning to "immersion journalism," DeParle paints an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family as they endure years of sacrifice and separation, willing themselves out of shantytown poverty into a new global middle class. At the heart of the story is Tita's daughter, Rosalie. Beating the odds, she struggles through nursing school and works her way across the Middle East until a Texas hospital fulfills her dreams with a job offer in the States. Migration is changing the world--reordering politics, economics, and cultures across the globe. With nearly 45 million immigrants in the United States, few issues are as polarizing. But if the politics of immigration is broken, immigration itself--tens of millions of people gathered from every corner of the globe--remains an underappreciated American success. Expertly combining the personal and panoramic, DeParle presents a family saga and a global phenomenon. Restarting her life in Galveston, Rosalie brings her reluctant husband and three young children with whom she has rarely lived. They must learn to become a family, even as they learn a new country. Ordinary and extraordinary at once, their journey is a twenty-first-century classic, rendered in gripping detail.
There has been an undisputed increase in the importance of migration over the past decades. It is one of the effects of an increasingly globalized world, where capitalism and free trade are gaining prominence. Migration in East and Southeast Asia aims to bring migration-related problems in Asia to the forefront. The first part of the book deals with migration in Greater China, a region influenced by Confucianism. The 'three Chinas' used to have a close connection in the past, and presently share much similarity. The Hong Kongese and Taiwanese societies are based on migration from Mainland China. However, each society has endured significant social, economic, and political changes. The second part of the book offers a closer look at migration flows in Southeast Asia. Most of the intra-ASEAN migration involves low-skilled labor for construction, agriculture, and domestic work. This book hopes to offer valuable insights into various topics related to migration in the region.
In Migrant Returns Eric J. Pido examines the complicated relationship among the Philippine economy, Manila’s urban development, and balikbayans—Filipino migrants visiting or returning to their homeland—to reconceptualize migration as a process of connectivity. Focusing on the experiences of balikbayans returning to Manila from California, Pido shows how Philippine economic and labor policies have created an economy reliant upon property speculation, financial remittances, and the affective labor of Filipinos living abroad. As the initial generation of post-1965 Filipino migrants begin to age, they are encouraged to retire in their homeland through various state-sponsored incentives. Yet, once they arrive, balikbayans often find themselves in the paradoxical position of being neither foreign nor local. They must reconcile their memories of their Filipino upbringing with American conceptions of security, sociality, modernity, and class as their homecoming comes into collision with the Philippines’ deep economic and social inequality. Tracing the complexity of balikbayan migration, Pido shows that rather than being a unidirectional event marking the end of a journey, migration is a multidirectional and continuous process that results in ambivalence, anxiety, relief, and difficulty.
Migrant workers from the Philippines are ubiquitous to global capitalism, with nearly 10 percent of the population employed in almost two hundred countries. In a visit to the United States in 2003, Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo even referred to herself as not only the head of state but also “the CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of eight million Filipinos who live and work abroad.†Robyn Magalit Rodriguez investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what she calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad. Filipino men and women fill a range of jobs around the globe, including domestic work, construction, and engineering, and they have even worked in the Middle East to support U.S. military operations. At the same time, the state redefines nationalism to normalize its citizens to migration while fostering their ties to the Philippines. Those who leave the country to work and send their wages to their families at home are treated as new national heroes. Drawing on ethnographic research of the Philippine government's migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, Rodriguez presents a new analysis of neoliberal globalization and its consequences for nation-state formation.
After twenty (20) years of being a migrant worker, the author sits down to reflect and write some of his observations in the lives of the Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW's) and the lessons learned along the way. This book is dedicated to the over 10 million Filipinos living outside the Philippines and their many loved ones left behind. Get a first-hand account of: Why Filipinos choose this unique life: What struggles they face at home and abroadHow they make the most of the benefitsWhen it is time to come home for go
Contract workers from the Philippines make up one of the world's largest movements of temporary labor migrants. Deirdre McKay follows Filipino migrants from one rural community to work sites overseas and then home again. Focusing on the experiences of individuals, McKay interrogates current approaches to globalization, multi-sited research, subjectivity, and the village itself. She shows that rather than weakening village ties, temporary labor migration gives the village a new global dimension created in and through the relationships, imaginations, and faith of its members in its potential as a site for a better future.
In a globalized economy that is heavily sustained by the labor of immigrants, why are certain nations defined as "ideal" labor resources and why do certain groups dominate a particular labor force? The Philippines has emerged as a lucrative source of labor for countries around the world. In Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes Anna Romina Guevarra focuses on the Philippines—which views itself as the "home of the great Filipino worker"—and the multilevel brokering process that manages and sends workers worldwide. She unravels the transnational production of Filipinos as ideal migrant workers by the state and explores how race, color, class, and gender operate. The experience of Filipino nurses and domestic workers—two of the country's prized exports—is at the core of the research, which utilizes interviews with employees at labor brokering agencies, state officials from governmental organizations in the Philippines, and nurses working in the United States. Guevarra's multisited ethnography reveals the disciplinary power that state and employment agencies exercise over care workers—managing migration and garnering wages—to govern social conduct, and brings this isolated yet widespread social problem to life.
