Filipino Migration to the United Arab Emirates

This important volume empirically explores the lives of migrants experiencing long-term temporariness under temporary labour migration programmes (TLMPs) implemented by a number of governments in the Global South and becoming emerging actors in the social fabric of migrant-receiving countries.

Focusing on the Philippines–United Arab Emirates (UAE) migration corridor over the past 50 years, the book illuminates the dynamic interplay among temporary migration policies, migrants’ lived experiences, and rapid urban development. Chapters concentrate on three key areas – macrostructural aspects of the corridor; migrants’ agency in navigating temporariness; and emerging trends from below – and incorporate policy-oriented and ethnographic analyses. As well as offering policy implications, the book demonstrates how a proportion of Filipino migrants do not merely adapt to the TLMP, but also undergo significant transformations themselves in tandem with the UAE’s economic restructuring and rapid urban development. The Philippines–UAE migration corridor’s role as an evolving experiment supports the broader insights into how large-scale temporary migration flows might unfold in other regions in the future.

The volume ultimately offers a new way of thinking about temporary labour migration as a dynamic, socially embedded process in the contemporary Global South, and will therefore be of use to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of international migration, Asian diaspora studies, and Southeast Asian studies more broadly.

Naomi Hosoda is Professor at the School of Global Social Sciences and Humanities, Nagasaki University, Japan. Her academic background is in anthropology of migrants, and her research interest focuses on cultural normality, family relations, and transnational community, generations and citizenship. Her recent publications, as co-editor, include International labour migration in the Middle East and Asia: Issues of inclusion and exclusion (2019).

Akiko Watanabe is Associate Professor at the Faculty of International Studies, Bunkyo University, Japan. Her areas of research are Southeast Asian studies, anthropology and migration studies. She is the co-editor of Transnational generations in the Arab Gulf states and beyond (2023) and authored two chapters in Asian migrant workers in the Arab Gulf states: The growing foreign population and their lives (2020).

Masako Ishii is Professor at the College of Intercultural Communication, Rikkyo University, Japan. Her main research interest is in area studies of the Philippines, focusing on Muslim societies of the South. She is a contributing co-editor of Asian migrant workers in the Arab Gulf states: The growing foreign population and their lives (2020).