Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Exequiel Camarig Cabanda, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted a global exchange of migrant labor, as efforts to control the virus close national borders and bring international travel to a halt. While media reports highlight how such disruptions affect the nations that receive migrant workers, we know less about the places that actually produce and supply these workers to the world. In this webinar, Yasmin Ortiga and Karen Liao examine how the pandemic upsets two extreme ends of the Philippines’ labor-export system: the deployment of migrant workers to employers in other countries and the repatriation and reintegration of those who had been forced to return home. They focus specifically on the experiences of two groups of Filipino workers at both of these ends: 1) aspiring nurse migrants unable to leave the country due to border closures and a state deployment ban on health workers; and 2) returning service workers who had lost their jobs in the cruise industry. In comparing the two groups, Ortiga and Liao discuss how acute disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic do not only produce sudden population movements but also the abrupt imposition of prolonged immobility that can be equally disruptive.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Yasmin Y. Ortiga is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University. She studies how the social construction of “skill” shapes people’s migration trajectories, changing institutions within both the countries that send migrants, as well as those that receive them. She recently published the book, Emigration, Employability, and Higher Education in the Philippines (Routledge). Her work has also been published in Global Networks, Social Science and Medicine, and Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. 

Karen Anne S. Liao is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography of the National University of Singapore. She is interested in the social and political geographies of migration in Asia, and is currently studying labour migrant repatriation and return during crises and emergencies. She has previously conducted research on Filipino highly skilled and professional migrants in Singapore, and has published in Geoforum and Migrations Société.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.