Gendered Border Regimes and Displacements: The Case of Filipina Sex Workers in Asia

Serial Labor Migration: Precarity and Itinerancy among Filipino and Indonesian Domestic Workers

“…Although our analysis focuses on migrant Filipino and Indonesian domestic workers, the structural conditions that propel serial labor migration are shared by other low-skilled migrant workers. These include, for example, migrant domestic workers from Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, and Myanmar (Yeoh and Huang 2010; Mahdavi 2011; Pande 2012; Fernandez 2013); as described earlier, South Asian construction workers (Gardner 2010; Buckley 2012); and lastly, migrant sex workers of various nationalities who migrate informally throughout Asia on tourist visas (Chin 2013; Hwang 2018). These other groups of serial labor migrants invite comparison, particularly in terms of how gender distinguishes the experiences of seriality for a predominantly female group of workers such as domestic workers versus a male group of workers such as construction workers.…”

“…Like circular migrants from Mexico to the United States (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016), they aspire to eventually return to their origin country and accordingly invest their earnings back home (Eckstein and Najam 2013). Yet as Hwang (2018) illustrates for Filipino migrant sex workers, the challenge of fulfilling the material goals of migration, combined with debt, the cost of everyday living expenses, and a dormant origin country economy that offers limited opportunities for income earning, could delay or shorten their return and prompt them to engage in recurrent migrations abroad.…”

“…Discussions of circular migration have contributed to seeing the recurrent nature of labor migration sojourns, but they do not capture the geographic scope or spatial complexity of contemporary cross-border migrations (for a review, see Skeldon 2016). Circular migration is premised on the repetition of movement between a specific sending and receiving country, or a seasonal flow between a rural and urban region within a country; but most migrant temporary contract workers, whether from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, or the Philippines, are now likely to migrate to more than one destination in the course of their labor migration (ILO 2004; Hwang 2018; Asis and Agunias 2012; Chin 2013). Some migrants aspire to eventually reach a destination that allows permanent settlement, in the process engaging in what the IOM describes as “step migration,” meaning “mobility from an original residence to first one and then another destination, e.g.…”

Infrastructure of mobility: navigating borders, cities and markets

“…From the perspective of the state, migrants can become 'illegal' in numerous ways that depend on the distinct policies of sending and receiving countries. For instance, a Filipino worker who leaves the Philippines as a tourist but obtains a work permit upon arrival in a destination country is considered an 'undocumented worker' by the Philippine government but not by the government of the destination country (Asis and Battistella 2018;Hwang 2018). Migrants are also considered undocumented if they clandestinely cross international borders without documents and bypass border inspection (Donato and Armenta 2011); sponsored temporary labour migrants become 'illegal' if they away from their sponsor-employers and violate the condition of their contract work visas (Killias 2010;Lan 2007;Parreñas et al 2018).…”

“…While these conceptualizations inform my analysis, they do not fully capture the experiences of migrant sex workers who cross borders with a valid tourist status but become 'illegal' migrants by engaging in income-generating activities. While they may be described as 'semi-compliant', by contravening the conditions of their tourist visa, these migrant sex workers face arrest, imprisonment, deportation, and a travel ban because the receiving states regard them as 'illegal' migrants (Hwang 2018;Lee 2007). Simply put, states do not see a middle ground when they mete out punishment to those who violate migration laws and policies.…”