Overseas Filipino Workers: The Making of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora

Abstract

The accelerated migration of Filipino contract workers in the last two decades, comprising at least 10% of the total population, has distinguished the peripheral Philippine formation since the 1970s. Neoliberal globalization has interrupted its decolonizing process. Politically and culturally subordinate to U.S. hegemony, the Philippines remains an inchoate nation, its polity fragmented into ethnic communities. The exported labor of Filipino women and their treatment as serfs or quasislaves offers a laboratory for the critical analysis of the global market and its impact on poor countries. Collective resistance and self-reflection now characterize this emergent diaspora, unique in the history of the Asian-Pacific region. This provides an occasion to interrogate the orthodox theories of diaspora, nationalism, and immigration, especially in a time of the unprecedented financial crisis of global capitalism.