Exporting People: The Philippines and Contract Labor in Palau

Abstract

Long before reified notions of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands gained acceptance, seafaring peoples traveled and traded across areas that are today seen as bounded regional configurations. Interpretations of "differentness" were by no means tantamount to contemporary notions of "foreign." The emergence of colonial regimes, nation states, wage labor, and plantation agriculture has for well over a century contributed to the movement of "settler" populations to numerous Pacific islands (Denoon 1997). During the nineteenth century, for example, marine produce such as turtleshell and bêche-de-mer was collected from Micronesia by ships based in Manila, where trade with China flourished. Ship crews composed of "manilamen" as well as individuals from other parts of Asia and the Pacific regularly visited Micronesian islands including Palau, and in several instances assisted western traders in establishing land-based operations for curing and commercial agricultural production (Hezel 1983). While the presence of Filipino contract workers in Palau today may be seen as a continuation of these linkages, or yet another wave of Asian migration into the Pacific region (Connell 1990), a number of distinctive elements are present in the contemporary movement of Filipinos to Koror and beyond. These distinctive characteristics raise important public policy issues as Palau looks toward the future.To a far greater extent than any other independent Pacific Island nation, Palau has explicitly embraced the notion that "guest workers" are a critical ingredient of its national economic and social development strategy. Unlike other Pacific islands with significant populations of Asian ancestry such as Fiji and Hawai'i, the overwhelming majority of Filipinos in Palau were born and raised in the Philippines, giving rise to a seemingly plural society marked by largely separate communities within the same 359

Associations Freely Chosen: New Geopolitics in the North Pacific

“…Despite a rapidly expanding economy over the past two decades, there is an increasing dependence on foreign guest workers in Palau (including approximately 4,000 Filipino workers and approximately 1,000 Chinese workers). Of the approximately 5,000 non-Palauan workers in Palau, some 75 per cent are from the nearby Philippines, suggesting a level of self-imposed dependency on guest workers that is unknown in other Pacific Island nations (Alegado and Finin 2000). If China were to convince the Philippine government to reduce the number of overseas Filipino workers deployed to Palau, this contraction of the labour force could potentially be highly disruptive to Palau's tourism industry.…”