Overseas Filipino workers as elite labor

clipped from bibingka.com Distinctive among the huddled masses of global economic migration, overseas Filipinos represent the elite, high end of the labor market. They are generally well-educated and usually accomplished speakers of English. But like other itinerant workers, they lack opportunities in the dysfunctional Philippine economy. So women with college degrees serve as maids in Tokyo and Hongkong... Semi-skilled laborers toil in Kuwait while Filipino seamen ply the oceans on the world's ships. Filipino business graduates dominate the mid-level management ranks of many multinational corporations in Southeast Asia, earning wages they couldn't dream of at home.1 As "foreign" sources of "aid," overseas Filipinos come to occupy ambiguous positions. Neither inside nor wholly outside the nation-state, they hover on the edges of its consciousness. They take on the semblance of spectral presence whose labor takes place somewhere else but whose effects command, through money, a place in the nation-state.