Shifting employabilities: skilling migrants in the nation of emigration

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how Philippine state agencies sustain its labour-exporting strategies by encouraging aspiring migrants to invest in their own training and education, taking on the responsibility of turning themselves into desirable workers for employers overseas. Based on a document analysis of newspaper articles and Philippine government reports, this paper uses the case of Philippine nursing education to show how the Philippine state alters these discourses of skill when overseas opportunities decline, channelling aspiring migrants sideways to other sectors of the labour market. Discourses of employability justified these career detours to aspiring migrants by assuring them that such experiences will still contribute to their overseas employability and eventually lead to future emigration. This paper shows how the employability agenda allows the migrant-sending state to avoid accountability in a volatile global labour market, thus serving as an ideal tool in the neoliberal production of migrant labour.

KEYWORDS:

• Skill
• nursing
• immobility
• employability
• Philippines

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There is a rich literature on how educational institutions within popular destination countries like Australia also market particular academic degrees as a steppingstone towards permanent residency, despite much uncertainty as to what the local labour market will truly recognise and absorb (See Baas 2019; Robertson 2011).

2 This period also saw the creation of the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995, where the Philippine government made official its mandate to facilitate the deployment of Filipino workers, while ensuring their rights and protection. Guevarra (2006) provides a rich outline of the events that led to this act and its outcomes for Filipina women seeking overseas work.

3 While the Philippine state deploys nurses to more than 50 countries across the world, the US remains the ideal destination for Filipino nurses – a belief strongly informed by the country’s history as a former American colony, but also reinforced by the promise of higher wages and the best possibility of permanent settlement (Choy 2003). As such, the pursuit of nursing degrees in the Philippines has been linked to the opening and closing of opportunities for foreign nurses in the US (Acacio 2011).

4 Eight thousand Philippine pesos is roughly 153 USD (1 USD = 52 Pesos).