Domestic Debates: Constructions of Gendered Migration from the Philippines

Eventually, however, the state was compelled to respond to the growing protests against Contemplacion’s hanging, which were expanding far beyond the Philippines. It is perhaps precisely because the “domestic debates” spilled over into the international area, with the globalization of migrants’ protests, that the state felt obliged to finally act.

Republic Act 8042 (RA8042), passed very soon after the execution of Flor Contemplacion, was a watershed insofar as it mandated many policies very specifically related to better protecting women migrants. Significantly, RA8042 appears to directly incorporate the sorts of reforms advocated in SWS documents over the years. For instance, it states in RA8042 that, “The State recognizes that the ultimate protection to all migrant workers is the possession of skills. Pursuant to this and as soon as practicable, the government shall deploy and/or allow the deployment only to skilled Filipino workers.”¹ For domestic workers, who the state officially categorizes as “vulnerable workers,” this has meant mandatory training programs prior to deployment overseas. In addition to skills training, the state also expanded its worker education programs, attempting to better disseminate “information of labor and employment conditions, migration realities and other facts, and adherence of particular countries to international standards on human and workers’ rights which will adequately prepare individuals into making informed and intelligent decisions about overseas employment.”² Post-deployment, in countries of destination, RA8042 mandates government services on-site that offer additional training and skills upgrading programs. Moreover, the state provides legal and welfare services for migrant workers in distress. Because the state has officially incorporated a “gender sensitive” approach to migration policy, it means that all of these programs attempt to address the specific problems faced by migrant women.

Interviews of migration officials several years after RA8042 was passed, however, reveal how migration reform is ultimately less about the regulation of women’s migration, but more about the regulation of women migrants themselves.³ Interestingly, the ways bureaucrats and other state officials attempt to regulate migrant women echo the very same gendered ideas that the public and migrant advocates deployed in their calls for migration reform.

A migration official in the POEA explains the purpose of women workers’ training, as well as their education through the PDOS, “Our concern is that often these workers do not send money to the Philippines or don’t try to take care of family problems at home. These kinds of seminars emphasize workers’ responsibilities to their families.” Yet another migration official, a very high-ranking official of the POEA in fact, explains that the state must provide domestic workers and entertainers specific kinds of programs because, “There are lots of social costs when a mother or elder sister is missing.”

For these officials, state migration programs are aimed at orienting women migrants toward the Philippines to actively cultivate their sense of familial responsibility. The assumption is that women are not already orienting themselves to their families’ needs. As a consequence, families suffer a number of “social costs.” If the public and migrant advocates pointed to increasing problems in migrant women’s family lives as a means of calling for migration reform, the bureaucrats attempt to address these problems by trying to inculcate certain kinds of family values amongst migrant women.

Indeed, if civil society actors ultimately called for the state to assume better (paternal) custody of migrant women, it was clear in my other interviews of officials that these gendered understandings about state-citizen relations characterized their own views. In an interview with a high-ranking migration official, who began to weep profusely during the course of our discussion, she states:

We really need to take care of them. When I see the DH [domestic helpers] and the OPAs [overseas performing artists], I just cry. They’re so innocent … I really hope things change for them. We really have to reach out to them, to give them self-respect and confidence … you know, when we are on the airplane or in the airport traveling, when we have them next to us, deep inside we’re ashamed.

Here the official uses what can be characterized as familial language in describing the state’s role in regulating women’s migration. The state, in her words, must “take care of” domestic workers and entertainers because they are “innocent.” By doing so, she suggests, the state will not only equip them with the ability to better negotiate the challenges of working overseas, but also that the state may be able to deal with the deep-seated sense of nationalist shame women’s migration produces.

1. Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995. Mandaluyong City, Philippines: Philippine Overseas Employment Administration,1995. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]
3. In Tyner’s study of policies specifically regulating Filipina entertainers’ migration from the Philippines he makes a similar argument about the state’s role in regulating women migrants. He argues that state policies have addressed women’s migration as entertainers, “not within the sites of employment, but rather within the internal character of migrant women.” That is, women’s exploitation as entertainers is understood not as a consequence of abusive employers, but rather as result of women migrants’ own moral deficiency (Tyner 1997). My aim here, however, is to highlight how specific civil society actors are critically implicated in the state’s policies. [↩]