Good Help is Hard to Find: The Differentiated Mobilisation of Migrant Social Capital among Filipino Domestic Workers

Abstract

Migrant social capital can reduce the costs and risks of migration and thereby increase the likelihood of cumulative migration among network members. However, several ethnographic studies of transnational migrant networks have highlighted repeated and regular instances of current migrants refusing to provide migration assistance to network contacts in the home country. Extending this nascent body of research, this article proposes a multi-factor framework at the individual, dyad, network, job, market and country levels that influences current migrants' helping decisions, particularly when it comes to labour migration assistance. This framework is constructed using interview data from 95 Filipino migrant domestic workers in the Philippines, Singapore and Hong Kong. These interviews showcase the dynamic and differentiated nature of migrant social-capital mobilisation in terms of the volume, type and conditionality of the assistance provided.