The Mobility Pathways of Migrant Domestic Workers with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
09/30/2020 - The Mobility Pathways of Migrant Domestic Workers with Rhacel Salazar Parreñas
This talk examines the mobility pathways of migrant domestic workers in order to interrogate the possibilities of socio-economic mobility allowed by their migration in a stratified global labor market. Drawing from 85 in-depth interviews conducted with Filipino migrant domestic workers employed in the key destination of the United Arab Emirates, this talk identifies three salient mobility pathways of serial migration, staggered migration and return migration. It revisits our understanding in labor migration studies of the intersections of social and spatial mobility as it first establishes the salience of multi-national migrations, thus disrupting the assumption of the continuous settlement of migrants in any one destination, and second illustrates the social reproduction of poverty for unskilled migrant workers, thus dispelling the notion that migration offers an inevitable path to socio-economic mobility.
