Robyn Rodriguez,
"Domestic Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the Philippines"
(page 3 of 8)
Domestic Debates: Contesting Women Migrants' Absence from Home(land)
Since 1974, when labor export was first institutionalized by the
Philippine government as a developmental policy, it has benefited
politically by providing jobs to its citizens and economically through
the remittances sent by both men and women migrants earned from
employment abroad.
By the late 1980s, Filipina international migration began to
significantly increase, and by the early 1990s, it rivaled the migration
of Filipino men. A majority of these women worked as domestic workers
and entertainers. Women's migration from the Philippines, however, is
hardly a new phenomenon as they have migrated, most notably as nurses,
since the turn of the 20th century.[11]
Moreover, internal migration
(i.e. rural-urban) has been a key feature of Philippine women's
employment since the 1960s.[12]
Yet, it was only during the 1990s, as women's migration increased in
numbers that began to surpass men, and as a greater proportion of women
migrants were being deployed to work as entertainers and domestic
workers, that anxieties about the migration of women began to emerge and
become increasingly widespread in the Philippines. Civil society actors
were especially key in inciting and circulating concerns about women's
international migration in the broader public, questioning to what
extent out-migration was not only detrimental to the women themselves
but to the country as a whole.
Indeed, the highly publicized death of Filipina migrant worker
Maricris Sioson in 1991 was important in initially setting off public
discussions about women's out-migration from the Philippines. Sioson, a
22-year old woman who had worked as an entertainer in Japan, returned to
the Philippines dead.Though a Japanese hospital concluded that Sioson
had died from Hepatitis, it was a conclusion her family did not believe.
A second autopsy performed by the Philippines' National Bureau of
Investigation (NBI) revealed that Sioson had died from traumatic head
injuries. In addition, the NBI found stab wounds and cuts in Sioson's
vagina.[13]
The conflicting medical reports generated a flurry of news reports.
While media response to Sioson's murder focused exclusively on the
details of the case, or detailed other women migrants' victimization at
the hands of unscrupulous labor recruiters and exploitative employers,
some civil society actors, particularly national polling institutes,
focused less on sensationalized accounts of women's victimization.
Instead, they drew on social scientific methods to analyze broad
patterns of women's migration examining not only its impact on
individual women, but on their families and Philippine society at large.
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