Announcements

1. Announcements • Presentation on Wed – Tadiar’s “Filipinas Living in a Time of War” • Jacky • Jessica • Bryan • Please email 2 pg summary by 6pm on Tues • Points that you will be presenting to the class • Keep summary to minimum • Remember to relate to larger questions & themes of course as well as to other texts of the class • Papers back @ end of class • Office hours = Wed (8/28 & 9/4) 12 to 1 – send email for confirmation • Study guides for final exam distributed Wed

2. The Labor brokerage State Preparing Migrants for Export

3. Liberalism • What ideas & images do we associate with the term “liberal”? • Liberalism’s Enlightenment roots • Original Anglo-Saxon meaning = “free men” versus those conscripted in social hierarchy • Anti-absolute monarchy & feudalism = liberal-democracy and proto-capitalism • Locke’s commonwealth = individual + market freedom “The problems of political domination, exclusion, and inequality within liberalism are deepened dramatically when we consider the record of liberal-democratic nation-states founded in racial slavery and colonial expansion” (Nikhil Pak Singh)

4. neoliberalism • Liberalism in the post-Cold War New World Order: • assumption that the free market automatically leads to civic order and economic prosperity • freedom to accumulate will guarantee all other freedoms • Consequences of neoliberalism: • Removal of economic regulations • Market options for social welfare programs. Ex. Privatized health care • Attacks on unionization. Ex. Right to work states • Simultaneous shrinking of the state and redefinition of citizenship and rights (xvii)

5. The neocolony & neoliberalism • “For the Philippines neoliberal strategies of the state have long been shaped by its status as a neocolony of the United States” (xvii) • What is neocolonialism? • informal vs formal control • extraction vs association • American exceptionalism and benevolent assimilation • Philippines as transitional case study between old world colonization (Spain) and new world order neocolonization (US)

6. Questions • How does Robyn Rodriguez define a “labor brokerage state”? • What US colonial legacies enabled the Philippines to transform itself into a labor brokerage state? • How does the Philippine state draw on racialized and gendered logics to market its citizens as ideal workers in the global economy?

7. Labor Brokerage State • “a neoliberal strategy that is comprised of institutional and discursive practices through which the Philippine state mobilizes its citizens and sends them abroad to work for employers through the world while generating a ‘profit’ from the remittances that migrants send back to their families and love ones remaining in the Philippines” (x) • Negotiating with receiving countries • Formalization of migration • Ensuring temporary, flexible and disciplined labor

8. Colonial legacies • 1898 • Philippine revolution • Spanish American War • Treaty of Paris • 1900-1930s – Pensionados & Manongs • 1934 Tydings McDuffie Act • Military Bases Agreement & EVP (7) • 1950s – IMF loans to Philippines • 1972 – Declaration of Martial law (11) • 1980s – SAPs and foreign debt worsen • 1986 – People Power • 2000 – Ramos, SOFA & VFA • 2001 – People Power II & GMA

9. Migration bureacracy • “authorization” as key to Filipino mobility • Passport as token of national belonging vs guarantee of mobility • Philippine state as researcher and manager of visa regimes • Skills training = professionalization and protection or exploitation? • Documentary processing • Proof of Philippine govt’s modernization & efficiency • Practice of monitoring and disciplining • “’international borders serve to maintain global inequality’” (47)

10. Marketing people • Institutional vs discursive practices of labor brokerage • Labor diplomacy + marketing of migrants for export • Reliance on racialized & gendered scripts • Filipina nurse – essentialist assumptions of Filipina femininity (61) • Filipino seafarers – colonialism as advantage (63) • National difference marks labor skills = national hierarchy of laborers

11. Bagongbayani • Discursive tactics of regulation  migrant citizenship • “the sense that membership in the Philippines is increasingly construed as actually requiring employment overseas” (79) • Neoliberal conception of citizenship  rights to protection & social welfare vs rights of mobility & accumulation • Balikbayan(81) • Marcos’s regime • Overseas support • Required remittances • bagongbayani(84) • Aquino Presidency • Neoliberal turn • Religious iconography • OCW  OFW  OFI (88)

12. The international domestic • Filipina overseas worker = bagongbayani& source of national shame. • Ex. MaricrisSioson • Conflict between patriarchal Philippine nationalism and Philippine participation in neoliberal global capitalism • Resolution  paternal state & moral education/values • Education & decision-making takes responsibility from state and puts it on individual women • Self-policing and re-enforcing of heteropatriarchal norms

13. migrant citizenship’s contradictions • May 2001 – Filipina garment workers strike • Malaysian-owned factory • Under Brunei jurisdiction • Contracted by US-based companies • Negotiated by private Philippine-based recruitment agencies • “Protected” by Philippine government  repatriation • “Nationalism and citizenship have become the modalities through which the labor brokerage state mobilizes people to work as low-wage, temporary, gendered, and racialized laborers globally and secures their persistent relations to the nation-state” (143)

14. Anticapitalist transnational citizenship Ex. Migrante International: • Global network linking diaspora and country of origin • Dynamic use of electoral politics & radical social movements • Redefining citizenship from bottom up  migration & remittances vs justice & accountability • Place consciousness • Emphasis on workers’ dignity & respect How can we radically revision citizenship so that it is not based on a nation-state defined by capitalist logic?