CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Salvana, Ian |
|---|---|
| Title | Mobility as capability: Intermediary discourses on the state of labor migration in the Philippines |
| Summary | Massive labor migration in the Philippines has been persistent for more than 40 years. This has been mainly provoked by the country’s weak economy, continually suffering from insufficient regular jobs, work compensation packages and policies that ought to provide and protect the welfare of laborers. However, in most cases, migrants escape precarious work only to end up in more precarity, endangering their lives. What’s more alarming is the case for undocumented or irregular Filipino migrants, whose experiences of abuses are more difficult to be heard than regular migrants, and whose rights are most often neglected. Because of the killings of migrant OFWs in the 1990s, Migrante International was conceived as an intermediary pushing for migrant rights and welfare, handling thousands of cases of abuse and advocating for socio-economic reforms in the Philippines. As such, Migrante continuously produces political remittances representing migrants’ voices through its statements online, subsequently constructing the migration problem back home. I probe this construction, including the framing of the capability of movement among undocumented migrants through intermediary discourses of Migrante. Specifically, I look at (1) how intermediary discourses conceptualize the migration problem through framing mobility as capability among Filipino migrants and (2) how such discourses serve as political remittances in the process of democratization back home. I first assess the persistence of the labor export policy in the Philippines, reconstruct the moral argument for migration and analyze Migrante’s discourses using Sen’s and Foucault’s thoughts. I then empirically argue that the migration problem in the Philippines is characterized by lack of health and social security, insufficient policy, logistic and financial aid, migrant rights use and abuse and anti-immigration sentiments and movements in OFWs’ host countries. This is further fueled by government neglect towards stemming and resolving the root problems of migration, attacks on OFW critics and migrant rights activists and disregard for respecting the fundamental democratic experience of the Filipino people. I also claim that Migrante’s discourses serve as political remittances of migrants’ needs and interests, which challenge the participatory system of whatever form of democracy present in the country. Its disposition as progressive and humanitarian also establishes its subject positions as a moral actor interested in truth games concerning the migration problem, heavily shaped by government policies and strategies back home. |
| Supervisor | Moles, Andres Velasquez |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/salvana_ian-derf.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University