Trends in the Asian Migration Map

Rex Varona
Executive Director
Asian Migrant Centre, Hong Kong

There are about 15 million Asian migrant workers. Filipinos comprise the second biggest group of migrant workers, next to Mexicans, and they are in 130 countries.

The problem about migration is that no one is sure about the exact numbers, not even governments. I think the Philippines is one of the more reliable sources of statistics, but if you go to India they don't even know how many people have gone out of the country. Half of migrant workers, we assume, are undocumented.

The Middle East is one of the biggest importing countries, and Thailand is a big importer and exporter of labour. It has the biggest group of migrants in Taiwan.

How did this come about? Why 15 million? There were waves of migration. It is a natural phenomenon. How did trade in mass human labour come about? The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency says that labour migration is actually the third biggest industry in the world, third after arms and drugs.

Migration started with waves in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. But in the 70's it became very pronounced because of the boom in the Middle East, that is basically why there are many Filipino men in the Middle East. And of course because of that, they need domestic helpers and some other female stereotypical workers, that's why you also have a lot of South Asian (Sri Lankan, Indian) women working in the Middle East working as domestic workers.

The 80s was the era of the boom of the newly industrialised countries (NICs): the dragon economies of Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan, that's why people began to flock to these areas in the early 1980s. The impact of high economic growth was that of course, women had to be liberated from the homes and be mobilised into the mainstream labour force. That is why if you look at the pattern of the importation of labour in the 1980s, it was basically domestic help services.

Japan and Korea do not admit that they have unskilled labour migration. They say they don't accept domestic helpers, but in fact there are a lot of undocumented domestic help services.

After this era was the period of consolidation of the 1990s -- economic restructuring. The pattern still continued except that this was also the era of the termination of some of the workers, because after you import so many, the economy adjusts itself and once you don't feel the need for the labourers, you kick them out.

This was the period when many receiving countries in Asia formulated a lot of tough rules for migration because here they were realising when their economies were consolidating that migrants were only good as cheap labour. Once migrants began to assert some human rights as a component of their work, that is another thing.

From this era you can see the divide between the concept of migration in the West, and that in Asia. In Europe and America, they do give residency, they give some kind of arrangement where the migrants, after certain number of years working in their countries, will be able to live as citizens. In Asia, there is no country that does that.

Migration in Asia is very much an importation of tools. They import people as tools who can clean, but they can never become integrated into society or ask their families to join them, because that would require social services.

There is no job security for Asian migrants. Their stay in foreign countries is very tenuous. There were about a million Asian workers in Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Malaysia who lost their jobs as a result of the 1997 Asian crisis.

(Excerpts from remarks delivered at the seminar 'On the Philippine Migration Trail: Migration and Reproductive Health', February 2001, Bangkok, Thailand)

Rex Varona Executive Director Asian Migrant Centre, Hong Kong www.asian-migrants.org