Filipino home care workers are at the frontlines of assisted living facilities and residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFEs), yet their work has largely been unseen. We attribute this invisibility to the existing elder care crisis in the United States, further exacerbated by COVID-19. Based on quantitative and qualitative data with Filipino workers before and during the COVID-19 crisis, we find that RCFEs have failed to comply with labor standards long before the pandemic where the lack of state regulation denied health and safety protections for home care workers. The racial inequities under COVID-19 via the neoliberal approach to the crisis puts home care workers at more risk. We come to this analysis through Critical Immigration Studies framing Filipino labor migration as it is produced by neoliberalism and Racial Capitalist constructs. Last, while the experiences of Filipino home care workers during the pandemic expose the elder care industry’s exploitation, we find that they are also creating strategies to take care of one another.

Filipino transnational families often hold the histories of stepwise migration carried out by earlier generations. In this article, I argue that considering the transnational family as the unit of analysis for studying stepwise migration can help us understand onward migratory trajectories in two important ways. First, stepwise migratory choices are affected by how past generations within the transnational family have fared in particular locations. Second, transnational families' transmission of stepwise strategies among migrant and nonmigrant family at different points in the migration process offer opportunities for an alternative geographic analysis of care exchange in global households. A 5‐year multisited, longitudinal ethnography between New York City and Metro Manila using family histories of migrant and nonmigrant family members in Filipino transnational families calls attention to the transnational family unit as a repository of information that stepwise migrants use reimagining the sociospatial arrangement of care.

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In this article, we explore the possibilities of Participatory Action Research (PAR) producing ethical and nuanced knowledge that contributes to developing Filipino migrant workers’ capacity for sustainable political organizing. We discuss our projects with Filipino migrant organizations in the U.S. and Canada. We theorize on the potential of PAR with migrants who are part of highly precarious workforces in global cities. Additionally, we, as immigrant women of colour and scholars, highlight the tensions between academic ethos that prioritizes a rapid ‘publish-or-perish’ culture and the ethos of PAR, which puts into place collaborative processes that can be at odds with the ‘tempo’ of academic work. We highlight the tensions between the academic and reproductive labour of PAR, with the latter being seen by many academic institutions as an ‘inconvenience’ impeding productivity.