Domestic Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the Philippines

Vulnerable Women and the Paternal State

If the SWS survey constituted and reflected gendered notions of women’s labor in families and constructions of Philippine nationalism in a global context, it also produced gendered understandings of the state’s relationship and responsibilities toward women migrants. Returning to the 1994 “Public Attitudes” survey report, it states:

[T]he character of female emigration has changed. There are many more young and single women, originating from further flung Philippine provinces. Hired as housemaids, singers and dancers, these women work at jobs that are inherently difficult, dangerous and are unprotected by labor law in many receiving countries.¹

In this quote, migrant women are characterized as innocent, young and nubile. The report appears to suggest that because the profile of migrant women is younger and more rural than previous cohorts, they have less control over their migration decisions because they lack experience and skills.

Migrant-serving NGOs produced similar constructions of women migrants. Amongst the conclusions SENTRO makes in its study of migrant women is that they suffer from “values disorientation.” They suggest that the “adverse effects on the migrant workers and his/her family can be minimized if they have the necessary skills and competencies to deal with the challenges and situations they are confronted with.”² Despite the seeming gender neutrality (he/she) of this recommendation for reform, SENTRO was quite specific in other parts of this report (which I cite earlier in this article) that migrant women were the ones who suffered from “values disorientation.”

In a study included in WID’s published collection of research on women’s migration, a similar observation is made by one researcher. The study notes that women migrating as domestic workers overlook the psychological costs their work overseas have for their children. Instead they chose to “advance a rationalization by entertaining the emotional pain by those grandiose visualizations of material things at that moment (similar to applying an emotional band-aid over a deep emotional wound).”³

These constructions of Filipina migrants are aimed at compelling the state to respond with migration reform. They rely, however, on specific gendered logics. Because women choosing employment abroad do so either out of youthful and/or rural ignorance or as a consequence of deficiencies in their values systems, they ultimately require intervention by the paternal state to prevent them from harming their families and the nation.⁴ Whether women lack moral gumption or are simply infantile, the state must assume better paternal custody over them. It must control its innocent, if sometimes wayward, daughters.

State actors, however, were initially ambivalent about the domestic debates produced and circulated by civil society actors and continued to be fairly ambivalent when the Flor Contemplacion case first erupted in public protests. A policy analysis produced by the Department of Labor and Employment, in response to the initial news about Contemplacion’s imminent hanging, states:

It is the exception to the norm that makes the news, and in recent days we have been flooded with media accounts of the travails of some of our overseas workers. But the truth is that only a very few—less than one thousand—of all our migrant workers ever get into trouble. The great majority are an unalloyed benefit both to their host countries and to their homeland.⁵

Here, the state characterizes Contemplacion’s case, and other similar cases, as anomalous and not a consequence of inherent problems with women’s out-migration. Moreover, state officials believed that communist insurgency would have a greater impact on the Philippines:

At present the country is reeling from the political fallout of the Flor Contemplacion case…. Against these headaches, however, there is one major political benefit that is well-nigh uncalculable. And this is that overseas employment—in mopping up part of our labor surplus—provides for greater political and social stability in the country. One study of the effect of the OCW program on the Communist insurgency notes that the program has deprived the movement of many recruits. And the misery index, which the insurgents count on, has been immeasurably affected by the remittances of OCWs to their families and their communities.³

Here the state takes a very different understanding of the Filipino family and national stability. Whereas for civil society actors, Filipino families, and the nation more broadly, are destabilized by the absence of women, for the state, the presence of remittances in the family is what secures the nation’s stability. Families are the nation’s bulwarks against the threat of communism.

1. Ma. Alcestis Abrera-Mangahas, “Public Attitudes Towards Female Overseas Workers: Implications for Philippine Migration Policy.” [↩]
2. Beltran, Ruby Palma and Aurora Javat De Dios. 1992. “Filipino Women Overseas Contract Workers … At What Cost?” [↩]
3. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
4. Young offers an interesting argument about the paternal state with specific reference to President George W. Bush and his actions post-9/11. Her definition of the paternal state, however is can be applicable here (Young 2003). [↩]
5. Department of Labor and Employment, “White Paper on Overseas Employment.” Department of Labor and Employment, Republic of the Philippines, Philippines, 1995. [↩]