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The Philippines is among the most successful migrant-sending nations in the world, both lauded and critiqued for exporting its own citizens to a global labor market. Yasmin Y. Ortiga brings readers beyond this popular image to explore questions often overlooked: What happens when workers who were encouraged to emigrate are suddenly unable to leave?
Stuck at Home examines how the Philippine state and its aspiring migrants negotiated the meaning of immobility amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In this pioneering book, Ortiga studies the narratives that emerged around two groups of Filipino workers: nurses banned from leaving the country and cruise workers who returned home after COVID-19 shut down the travel industry. Ortiga emphasizes the high stakes in telling the "right" story of immobility to a nation built around emigration—one that provides a compelling rationale for who deserves to move and who can be forced to stay.
A gripping account of political interests, frustrated dreams, and an unprecedented crisis, Stuck at Home reveals how migration governance is not only about regulating people's movement, but also defining the meaning and implications of remaining in place.
"Stuck at Home is a remarkable study that offers a rich account of nurses and cruise ship workers whose outmigration was derailed by the global pandemic of COVID-19. This rich study expands our lens of what migration is by establishing immobility to be a constitutive element of both migration experience and governance. It is a must read for scholars of labor and migration." —Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Princeton University
"Stuck at Home is an empirically rich, theoretically sharp and deeply humane account of what a global crisis revealed about the complex relationship between a state and its mobile citizens. Ortiga writes with clarity and intellectual humility.... Stuck at Home is a compelling intervention that reveals the political construction of what it means to 'stay put'—suggesting immobility is not simply the absence of migration, but its contested, state-managed counterpart." —Kerilyn Schewel, Social Forces
"I view this book as an outstanding case study of policy narratives, capturing both the perspectives of the state and the experiences of those affected by its policies. Ortiga, a sociologist, presents a compelling example of policy storytelling that can resonate with policymakers and policy recipients alike, encouraging reflection, recalibration and reconsideration of positions on labour export, return migration and immobility, especially during shocks or interruptions such as a global pandemic." —Exequiel Cabanda, International Migration
Introduction
1. Prelude to the Pandemic: Skilling to Seize International Opportunities
2. An Emergency Measure: Keeping Nurses at Home
3. Windows of Opportunity: Divided Nurses Respond to Their Immobility
4. A Chance to Start Anew: Reskilling Unwanted Service Workers
5. A Long Time to Stay Afloat: Cruise Workers Reclaim Their Work
Conclusion
Appendix: (Field)Work from Home: Methodology
Notes
References
Index