Pauline Gardiner Barber

Agency in Philippine women's labour migration and provisional diaspora

Abstract This paper adopts a transnational, ethnographic vantage point in examining cultural politics, gender, and class relations in the provisional Philippine diaspora constituted through womens labour migration. Emphasis is placed on womens agency and how their experiences are embedded in layers of economic and social support flowing from and to female kin. Cultural capital is acquired from the migration experience, but domestic service migrants remain subject to what Bourdieu calls symbolic violence, both in their places of work and through conventions of Philippine femininity. Diaspora formed by the potentially permanent migration of Philippine women to Canada is fraught with tensions from Philippine familial expectations and, in this sense it remains provisional.

The Ideal Immigrant? Gendered class subjects in Philippine–Canada migration

Abstract Drawing upon transnational multi-sited research analysing sending and receiving aspects of migration flows and the shifting priorities of neoliberal citizenship regimes, this article highlights the class complexity of Philippine gendered migration pathways to Canada. Migrant agency and class complexity are linked to neoliberal immigration and labour export policies that privilege the acquisition of capital serving the interests of sending and receiving countries. Sometimes this benefits elite migrants but it also exacerbates gendered class cleavages between migrants and within Philippine society. The histories of Philippine internal and overseas migration have contributed to a culture of migration whereby Filipinos exhibit flexibility to draw advantage from subtle shifts in Canadian immigration policy. The paper concludes that Filipinos may well represent the ideal immigrant but there are personal, social, and political consequences for migrants and the nation.Drawing upon transnational multi-sited research analysing sending and receiving aspects of migration flows and the shifting priorities of neoliberal citizenship regimes, this article highlights the class complexity of Philippine gendered migration pathways to Canada. Migrant agency and class complexity are linked to neoliberal immigration and labour export policies that privilege the acquisition of capital serving the interests of sending and receiving countries. Sometimes this benefits elite migrants but it also exacerbates gendered class cleavages between migrants and within Philippine society. The histories of Philippine internal and overseas migration have contributed to a culture of migration whereby Filipinos exhibit flexibility to draw advantage from subtle shifts in Canadian immigration policy. The paper concludes that Filipinos may well represent the ideal immigrant but there are personal, social, and political consequences for migrants and the nation.

Mobility and cosmopolitanism: complicating the interaction between aspiration and practice

Within the interdisciplinary literature on cosmopolitanism, one particularly important distinction stands out as a recurring motif. Specifically, scholars have been concerned to distinguish between cosmopolitanism as a set of mundane practices and/or competences on the one hand and cosmopolitanism as a cultivated form of consciousness or moral aspiration on the other. For anthropologists, this distinction between aspiration and practice is often rendered ambiguous across the diverse expressions of cosmopolitanism that they encounter ‘on the ground’. This special issue therefore brings together five contributions from anthropologists who are reporting on encounters and aspirations that reveal different forms of spatial mobility, scales of commitment or risk, and are often transient, ambivalent and precarious. These are circumstances in which cosmopolitanism emerges as uneven and partial rather than as a comprehensive or unequivocal transformation of practice and outlook.

Why Networks Matter and How They Work? The Role of Social Networks in Attracting and Retaining Immigrants in Small Cities

Drawing from over 50 semi-structured interviews performed in three small cities (Charlottetown, Moncton, and St. John’s) and one larger comparator city (Halifax) of the Atlantic Provinces, this chapter addresses social networks from multidisciplinary angles. We see that immigrants hold complex understandings of the meanings of multiculturalism. However, variations emerge relative to perceptions of ‘community’, its value and purpose. While some participants report having strong and positive relationships with kin and other immigrants from their ethno cultural associations, others spoke positively about broader ‘Canadian’ social networks. For younger participants, the idea of maintaining ‘traditions’, for example, through marriage to someone with a common ethno cultural heritage, is a matter of some ambivalence. But variations occur relative to the size of the city and its immigrant populations, as confirmed also by comparisons with a similar sample of respondents from Halifax. However, broadly speaking, universal principles such as honesty and respect are seen as the basis for positive social relations, more so than shared culturally based values. Not surprisingly, the data from this project also reveal notable variation in the types of networks used and, often, how they are deployed based on gender with women’s culturally assigned roles in terms of social reproduction having an impact and, for example, tending to produce ‘broader’ rather than ‘denser’ networks.

Migration, Temporality and Capitalism: A Brief Introduction

This introduction highlights the world of capitalist change to suggest migration has been shaped by forms of capital accumulation in distinct eras and through various disjunctures of time. The chapter offers the optic of discrepant temporalities to highlight the inconsistencies and disjunctive time scales in the lives of migrants as they contend with changing regimes of labor, security, family and citizenship under different phases of capitalist transformation, both in the past and in the present. An exclusive emphasis upon migration and time is a relatively new arena in migration scholarship. While temporal reckoning has long fascinated anthropologists, few studies have sought to confront the centrality of how capitalism manipulates time in the production of global inequalities, both historically and in the contemporary world, most recently under neoliberalist policy regimes. Our work here therefore enters into current discussions of temporality as a feature of migrant experience to offer a theoretically robust and ethnographically informed investigation of migration and temporality set within an overall framework defined by the political economy of capitalism.

The Entanglements of Neoliberal Temporalities and Class Politics in Philippine Migration to Canada

As Marx proposed, capitalism has long relied on the exploitation of mobile surplus populations. Working from an historical political economy perspective, this chapter examines the temporalities associated with labor migration and class politics in the case of Philippine migration to Canada. Ethnographic research in Canada and the Philippines, known for global labor export and now Canada’s top source country, juxtaposes the transnational entanglements of neoliberalism as each country enacts policies to facilitate employers’ timely access to deskilled workers. The chapter analyzes the unfolding of policies to consider the class implications for workers in both countries. Several threads of neoliberalism’s contrasting temporalities shape the chapter’s argument relating on the one hand to the immediacy implied in Canada’s ‘just-in-time’ immigration system versus Filipinos’ protracted waiting in ‘migration time’, and on the other hand to how neoliberal fixation on the present circumscribes the political agency of migrant Filipinos and working class Canadians. Instead of resolving class disparities—the ideological promise of neoliberalism—migration exacerbates class polarities in both countries. To highlight the political connotations of migration and labor export, the chapter also contrasts the layers of meanings associated with EDSA, a major site of revolutionary action. It is proximate to this very same site that Filipinos migrating abroad must present themselves to the Philippines Overseas Employment Agency in order to obtain official exit visas prior to departing from the country. Here also is located one of the ethnographic venues where one particular group of migrants, discussed in the chapter, assembles to receive additional optional training while waiting for deployment to work in Quebec, Canada. These migrants-in-waiting embody just-in-time migration.