About E San Juan JrDr. E. San Juan, Jr. was recently Fulbright professor of American Studies at Leuven University, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. He directs the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut and serves as co-director of the Board of Directors, Philippine Forum, New York. Among his recent books are BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Palgrave), RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press), and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell U Press). He will be a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy this Fall 2006.
Overseas Filipino Workers: The Emergence of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora
The Philippines is not exceptional in its role of providing a large reserve army of cheap labor to global capitalism. Other countries such as India, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand, and other strapped “third-world” hinterlands also serve as reservoirs of relatively cheap labor power. About 200 million migrant workers from the underdeveloped zones of the periphery, what globalization experts call “the global South,” sent $150 billion to their home countries–nearly twice what those poor nations received in terms of aid from the rich governments of the “North.” In 2004, Mexico enjoyed $17 billion in remittances, a total equal to the value of its oil trade, while India received $14 billion, an amount larger than the revenue earned by its flourishing software industry. But these funds are mainly spent on consumables; they are not used for large-scale investment or long-term job creation in local industry and agriculture. Those countries remain poor, without jobs and adequate social services for millions. Moreover, they are vulnerable to the punishing emergencies of a crises-prone system of accumulation, as proved by the cases of Somalia, the Philippines, and others hit by post-9/11 strictures on money-transferring and hiring (Africa 2009). And so, despite this influx of wealth, according to World Policy scholars Benjamin Pauker and Michele Wucker, in exchange for those transfers, Mexico, the Philippines and other nations “pay an inestimable human cost, one that will become only more onerous with time… [Unless those nations concentrate their efforts in developing their own economies] remittances will continue to be part of the very reason workers leave in the first place: a vicious economic trap that condemns people to emigrate in order to survive, even as their exodus deprives home economies of the workforce that might make it possible for others to remain” (2005, 68-69). Official evaluations of this labor marketing tend to stress its apparent benefit in increasing household consumption and in solving fiscal and trade deficits while underplaying the exorbitant social costs–break-up of families, drugs, long-term dependence on labor-market funding, and other expenditures that erode sovereignty and the unquantifiable loss of “national integrity.”
Culture wars are being conducted by other means through the transport and exchange of bodies of color in the international bazaars. And the scaling of bodies proceeds according to corporeal differences (sex, race, age, physical capacity, etc.). Other diasporas—in addition to the historic ones of the Jews, Africans, Chinese, Irish, Palestinians, and others—are in the making. The editors of The South Atlantic Quarterly special issue on “diaspora and immigration” celebrate the political and cultural experiences of these nomadic cohorts who can “teach us how to think about our destiny and how to articulate the unity of science with the diversity of knowledge as we confront the politics of difference” (Mudimbe and Engel 1999, 6). Unity, diversity, politics of difference—the contours and direction of diasporas are conceived as the arena of conflict among disparate philosophical/ideological standpoints. Contesting the European discourse on modernity and pleading for the “inescapability and legitimate value of mutation, hybridity, and intermixture,” Paul Gilroy (1993, 223) has drawn up the trope of the “Black Atlantic” on the basis of the “temporal and ontological rupture of the middle passage.” Neither the Jewish nor the African diasporas can, of course, be held up as inviolable archetypes if we want to pursue an “infinite process of identity construction” (see, e.g., Brah 1995). My interest here is historically focused: to inquire into how the specific geopolitical contingencies of the Filipino diaspora-in-the-making can problematize this axiomatic of multiple identity-creation in the context of “third world” principles of national emancipation, given the persistent neocolonial, not postcolonial, predicament of the Philippines today (San Juan 1996).
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