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How the Philippines transformed itself into the world’s leading labor brokerage state

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what she calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad. Drawing on ethnographic research of the Philippine government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, Rodriguez presents a new analysis of neoliberal globalization and its consequences for nation-state formation.

Focusing on the state as organizer of migrations makes legible a reality that often remains veiled in the more common attention on migrants and their households. Robyn Magalit Rodriguez shows us the strong articulation of a business and a political logic in the Philippino state’s organized export of workers. Maintaining the loyalty of its annual average million plus exported workers becomes critical for the state’s business side of these exports. Through her study of the extreme case that is the Philippines, Rodriguez makes a major contribution to our understanding of a range of small and big puzzles in the migration literature.

—Saskia Sassen, author of Territory, Authority, Rights