Remittance inflows have increased considerably as the number of overseas Filipinos (OFs) and overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) has grown and shifted towards more skilled jobs. After exports of goods and services, remittances have become the second largest source of foreign exchange for the Philippines. This paper examines both the short-run and long-run relationships between remittances and a set of macroeconomic variables that have been hypothesised in the literature as the major factors that determine migrant remittances. We hypothesise a positive relationship between remittances and foreign income. Following earlier literature, we also test the significance of economic activity of the home country, domestic prices, exchange rate and the home and host country’s interest rate differentials. In addition, we also consider the effects on remittances of the rates of unemployment in the remittance-receiving (Philippines) and sending (United States) countries and world oil prices. We check for unit roots and cointegration among the relevant variables and estimate an error correction model with time varying parameters (TVP) to examine the macroeconomic determinants of migrant remittances from the United States to the Philippines over the period January 1989 to March 2008.
In the media and in a dominating discourse among INGOs and NGOs, the central districts in Nepal are presented as severely affected by human trafficking to Mumbai’s red light area. On the women’s return to Nepal, it is claimed that they are excluded from their families and from their village because of the stigma associated with sex work. They are represented as victimized “trafficking survivors” in need of rehabilitation. The red light area is imagined as a place of sexual exploitation and contamination. During a 15-month period, I conducted fieldwork in one of these districts, Sindhupalchowk, as well as in the red light area in Mumbai. It emerged that from the women’s and the villagers’ perspective, the situation was quite different. In stark contrast to the dominating discourse, the women who had migrated and worked with sex work returned after several years to stay more permanently in the village. They were described as “draped in gold” at their return and Mumbai was imagined as a place of wealth and nourishment. There was a transnational social space that connects the village and Mumbai with networks of relations through which ideas, practises and resources were exchanged, organized and transformed. In this paper I will explore the dynamics between the images of these places and the women as migrants, and the activities in the transnational social space that connects these places and its implications for the process of women’s return. Three case studies of women’s lived life at the return will be presented.
key words:
human trafficking/ migration for sex work /images of place /transnational space
Sri Lanka on the move: The economics of Diasporas and migrants
by
Sasini T. K. Kulatunga, Rajith W. D. Lakshman and T. S. Liyanaarachchi
International mobility of Sri Lankan people has been mainly attributed to political reasons. This angle of looking at migration was strengthened by the 26 year civil war in the country. With the end of the war May 2009, however, there is more room now to look at migration and its impacts on the country in other lenses. In this light there is a case for looking at migration and its economics implications through an economic lens in the history of Sri Lanka, which we do here.
Clearly the migration flows from Sri Lanka can roughly be divided into two strands albeit with a substantial grey area. First strand involves the migrant workers who migrated due to economic reasons seeking employment mainly in the Middle Eastern countries. Much of the debate about this group had to do with economics. Second strand is about the permanent migrants. As Tamil refugees were any discussion about this group often becomes political. However, as we argue here economic issues are also relevant for such a discussion. For instance remittances, investment/consumption division, labor relations are all important issues with clear economic flavor.
The paper also looks at the institutions that foster migration within Sri Lanka. This can be formal/informal, government/private, legal/illegal, etc. Clearly the politics of these institutions cannot be precluded from this discussion. However, the angle of this paper, allow us to shed more light on the economics subsumed within the politics of these institutions.
Previous studies have found that immigrant and minoritized women have a propensity to be channeled into “secondary” employment, and they tend to stay in it through their working career. These studies also found that immigrant women have higher unemployment rates than Canadian-born women and that Chinese immigrant women are susceptible to underemployment or unemployment. Recent studies on Chinese immigrant women have found an increasing prevalence of transnational practices amongst Chinese immigrant families. A survey conducted in the Richmond area of Vancouver in the 1990s, for example, found that 40% of the Chinese from Hong Kong lived in transnational arrangements (SUCCESS, 1991). There is a growing literature that addresses globalization and the transnational migration of Chinese immigrants, and this literature focuses particularly on gender differences (Man 2002, 2006; Kobayashi, Preston, and Man 2006).
This paper comes out of research projects funded by a SSHRC Small Grant (2005-06) and an Atkinson Minor Research Grant (2004-05) at York University. It is based on data collected from in depth interviews with Chinese women professionals who have immigrated to Canada in recent years. Specifically, the paper examines how women’s difficulties in the labour market impact gender relations and household arrangements. It demonstrates that individual immigrant adopts transnational migration practices as a response to gendered and racialized institutional processes in the new country in the context of globalization and economic restructuring, and contends that Chinese immigrant women’s work and its contradictory nature is paramount in the social construction of transnational families and communities.
This paper is an anthropological study of lives of Northern Thai female immigrants in the Thai-Malaysian border towns. These women’s lives are shaped and constrained by their marital and legal status, and this in turn impacts their livelihood. In the mid-1990s, intermarriage or informal marital relationships between Northern Thai women and Malaysian Chinese males became more visible as the number of sex-workers recruited from Northern Thailand rapidly increased in the Thai border towns. These women’s livelihood, based upon informal cross-border markets, is deeply affected by their marital and citizenship status. Informal marital relationships may offer upward social mobility by gaining economic opportunities across the border, but their informal legal status also put them on fragile ground. This paper will examine how Northern Thai women address problems of marital and citizenship status in their efforts to sustain their precarious livelihood.
Migrant workers from the Philippines are ubiquitous to global capitalism, with nearly 10 percent of the population employed in almost two hundred countries. In a visit to the United States in 2003, former Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo even referred to herself as not only the head of state but also “the CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of eight million Filipinos who live and work abroad.”
Drawing on ethnographic research of the Philippine government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, this paper investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what the author calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad. Filipino men and women fill a range of jobs around the globe, including domestic work, construction, and engineering, and they have even worked in the Middle East to support U.S. military operations. At the same time, the state redefines nationalism to normalize its citizens to migration while fostering their ties to the Philippines. Those who leave the country to work and send their wages to their families at home are treated as new national heroes. The author examines the instutional and discursive mechanisms by which Philippine migrants are "brokered."
Remittance inflows have increased considerably as the number of overseas Filipinos (OFs) and overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) has grown and shifted towards more skilled jobs. After exports of goods and services, remittances have become the second largest source of foreign exchange for the Philippines. This paper examines both the short-run and long-run relationships between remittances and a set of macroeconomic variables that have been hypothesised in the literature as the major factors that determine migrant remittances. We hypothesise a positive relationship between remittances and foreign income. Following earlier literature, we also test the significance of economic activity of the home country, domestic prices, exchange rate and the home and host country’s interest rate differentials. In addition, we also consider the effects on remittances of the rates of unemployment in the remittance-receiving (Philippines) and sending (United States) countries and world oil prices. We check for unit roots and cointegration among the relevant variables and estimate an error correction model with time varying parameters (TVP) to examine the macroeconomic determinants of migrant remittances from the United States to the Philippines over the period January 1989 to March 2008.
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