Migrant Domestic Workers as ‘Agents’ of Development in Asia

Abstract

Temporary contract migration represents the predominant form of legal migration policy in Asia. With its rationale of the filling of jobs and provision of income-generating opportunities, it is linked to the migration–development nexus debate. This paper focuses on the impact of migrants’ agency as development actors within a transnational sphere. The mainstream migration–development nexus debate and policy prescriptions imagine diaspora groups as the ideal conduit for grassroots-driven development initiatives. While ‘diaspora group-led’ initiatives assume long-term, if not permanent, migration, temporary migration creates a dynamic that is fundamentally distinct. Temporality of migration, as mandated by bilateral agreements and promoted by global institutions in Asia, shapes migrant agency and migrants’ development aspirations in essentially different ways, but temporary contract migrants are nevertheless constructed as the ‘agents of development’ at the macro level of politics and policies, while receiving limited research attention. This paper analyses temporality, migrant agency and the migration–development nexus debate in relation to female domestic workers who epitomise the feminisation of migration and constitute the largest number of newly hired migrants in many key source countries in Southeast Asia. This introduces a gender dimension to our discussion of temporary migration in its link to migrants’ developmental agency.

Temporariness and Post-Migration Adaptation of Older Migrants: The Case of Chinese Grandparenting Migrants in Singapore

“…It is, therefore, crucial to use temporariness as a central analytic lens to understand older temporary migrants' motivations, needs, and experiences of post-migration adaptation. Diverging from previous conceptualization of temporariness (Aksakal & Schmidt-Verkerk, 2015;Basok 2004;Dauvergne and Marsden 2014;Hari, 2014;Lee and Piper 2017;Stevens 2019), this article considered both the objective and subjective dimensions of temporariness. As our findings reveal, temporariness is not static but dynamic, with objective and subjective temporariness dynamically shaping each other, and older temporary migrants' objective temporariness shaped their subjective temporariness, which subsequently affected the extent and ways they would (intention) and could (ability) adapt to the new environment.…”

“…Although the scholarship on temporary migrants is burgeoning, extant studies in this area have typically focused on young temporary workers (Bauböck 2011), such as international students, graduate workers, working holiday makers (Robertson 2014), skilled migrants (Mayes 2017; Khoo, Hugo, and McDonald 2008), domestic workers (Lee and Piper 2017), guest workers (Griffith and Gleeson 2017), and refugees and asylum-seekers (Griffiths 2014). Until the recent emergence of research on transnational grandparents (Plaza 2000; Treas and Mazumdar 2002; Zhou 2012; King et al 2014; Tiaynen-Quadir 2016; Zickgraf 2017; Chiu and Ho 2020; Ho and Chiu 2020; Nedelcu and Wyss 2020), the situation of older temporary migrants has received scant attention.…”

“…By using temporariness as a disciplinary practice, migrant-receiving states have created different temporary migration programs and categories to regulate and control migratory flows and volume, as well as to select suitable targets to meet their specific purposes, such as filling labor shortages (Robertson 2014). In other words, people become temporary migrants when they are granted such legal status by the host state; and therefore, previous studies have mostly emphasized the objective dimension of temporariness experienced by temporary migrants (e.g., Aksakal & Schmidt-Verkerk, 2015;Basok 2004;Dauvergne and Marsden 2014;Hari, 2014;Lee and Piper 2017;Stevens 2019). However, temporary migrants may have different reasons for entering the temporary migration stream.…”

Rethinking the migration-development nexus in the post-COVID-19 era

“…In the migration-led development model, origin countries tend to regard migrant workers as development agents and to view migrating for overseas work as a major way for people to improve their economic livelihoods ( Lee and Piper, 2017 ). However, there is a lack of “a way out” from this “development” strategy and millions are made “temporary” workers perennially.…”

Bilateral labor agreements as migration governance tools: An analysis from a gender lens

“…BLMAs do not seem to pay heed to the gendered challenges of women migrant workers by providing specific provisions, consequently producing gendered outcomes . Even when BLMAs include gender, they contribute to further entrenching gender inequalities by channelling women into the feminized occupations, such as caregivers, cleaners, customer service workers, salesclerks, and entertainers, which are typically considered "low skilled" (proxy for low waged), with high levels of precarity, and low levels of social protection, often in sectors without consistent collective bargaining rights (Lee and Piper, 2017). UN Women (2017) stresses that "gender is not interchangeable with women.…”