Unprecedented immobility ? The case of stranded Filipino migrant nurses - COMPAS
#Covid-19#migrant#migration#Philippine#coince
▻https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/2020/unprecedented-immobility-the-case-of-stranded-filipino-migrant-nurses
What does the COVID-19 crisis mean for aspiring migrants who are planning to leave home?
What does the COVID-19 crisis mean for #aspiring_migrants who are planning to leave home?
In late April 2020, I decided to document the experiences of aspiring nurse migrants from the Philippines, where the government had imposed a one-month quarantine in many parts of the country. With two colleagues based in Manila, we recruited interviewees through Facebook, and then spoke to Filipino nurses “stranded” in different provinces within the Philippines – all with pending contracts in the UK, Singapore, Germany, and Saudi Arabia.
Initially, we thought that our project would help paint a broader picture of how #COVID-19 creates an “unprecedented” form of immobility for health workers (to borrow the language of so many news reports and pundits in the media). True enough, our interviewees’ stories were marked with the loss of time, money, and opportunity.
Lost time, money, opportunity
Most striking was the case of Mabel in Cebu City. Mabel began to worry about her impending deployment to the UK when the Philippine government cancelled all domestic trips to Manila, where her international flight was scheduled to depart. Her Manila-based agency tried to rebook her flight to leave from Cebu to the UK. Unfortunately, the agency had taken Mabel’s passport when processing her papers, which is a common practice among migration agencies, and there was no courier service that could deliver it to her in time. Eventually, Mabel’s British employers put her contract on hold because the UK had gone on lockdown as well.
As nurses grapple with disrupted plans, recruitment agencies offer limited support. Joshua, a nurse from IloIlo, flew to Manila with all his belongings, only to find out that his next flight to Singapore was postponed indefinitely. His agent refunded his placement fee but provided no advice on what to do next. “All they said was, ‘Umuwi ka nalang’ (Just go home),” Joshua recalled. “I told them that I’m already here. I resigned from my job…Don’t tell me to go home.” With 10 other nurses, Joshua asked the agency to appeal for financial assistance from their employer in Singapore. “We signed a contract. Aren’t we their employees already?” They received no response from either party.
Mabel and Joshua’s futile efforts to get through the closing of both internal and international borders reflects the unique circumstances of the pandemic. However, as we spoke to more interviewees about their interrupted migration journeys, I couldn’t help but wonder: how different is pandemic-related immobility from the other forms of immobility that aspiring nurse migrants have faced in the past?
Pandemic as just another form of immobility?
Again, Mabel’s story is illuminating. Even before she applied to the UK, Mabel was no stranger to cancelled opportunities. In 2015, she applied to work as a nurse in Manitoba, Canada. Yet, after passing the necessary exams, Mabel was told that Manitoba’s policies had changed and her work experiences were no longer regarded to be good enough for immigration. Still hoping for a chance to leave, Mabel applied to an employer in Quebec instead, devoting two years to learn French and prepare for the language exam. However, once again, her application was withdrawn because recruiters decided to prioritize nurses with “more experience.”
One might argue that the barriers to mobility caused by the pandemic is incomparable to the setbacks created by shifting immigration policies. However, in thinking through Mabel’s story and that of our other interviewees, it seems that the emotional distress experienced in both cases are not all that different.
As migration scholars now reflect more deeply on questions of immobility, it might be useful to consider how the experiences of immobility are differentiated. Immobility is not a single thing. How does a virus alter aspiring migrants’ perception about their inability to leave the country? As noted in a previous blog post from Xiao Ma, the COVID-19 pandemic may bring about new regimes of immobility, different from the immigration regimes that have blocked nurses’ plans in the past. It might also lead to more intense moral judgments on those who do eventually leave.
April, a nurse bound for Saudi Arabia, recounted a conversation with a neighbor who found out that she was a “stranded” nurse. Instead of commiserating, the neighbor told April, “Dito ka nalang muna. Kailangan ka ng Pilipinas” (Well you should stay here first. Your country needs you). April said she felt a mixture of annoyance and pity. “I feel sorry for Filipino patients. I do want to serve…But I also need to provide for my family.”
Now, my collaborators and I realized that our ongoing research must also work to differentiate pandemic-related immobility from the barriers that nurse migrants have faced in the past. For our interviewees, the pandemic seems more unpredictable and limits the options they can take. For now, all of our interviewees have been resigned to waiting at home, in the hope of borders opening up once again.
Immobility among migration scholars
More broadly, perhaps this is also a time to reflect on our own immobility as scholars whose travels for field work and conferences have been put on hold. Having the university shut down and international activity frozen is truly unprecedented. However, in some ways, many scholars have long experienced other forms of immobility as well.
While the COVID-19 crisis had forced me to cancel two conferences in the last two months, one of my Manila-based collaborators has never attended an academic event beyond Asia because his applications for tourist visas have always been rejected (twice by the Canadian embassy, once by the US embassy). Another friend, a Filipino PhD student, had to wait two months for approval to conduct research in Lebanon, prompting her to write a “back-up proposal” for her dissertation in case her visa application was declined.
Browsing through social media, it is interesting for me to observe an increasing number of American and British scholars ruminating on their current “immobility.” Living in this moment of pandemic, I can understand that it is tempting to think of our current constraints as exceptional. However, we also need to pause and consider how immobility is not a new experience for many others.
#immobilité #Philippines #infirmières #migrations #fermeture_des_frontières #travailleurs_étrangers #futurs_migrants
@sinehebdo —> nouveau mot
#aspiring_migrants (qui peut ressembler un peu à #candidats_à_l'émigration qu’on a déjà, mais c’est pas tout à fait cela quand même... #futurs_migrants ?)
#vocabulaire #mots #terminologie #agences #contrat #travail #coronavirus #stranded #blocage
Les chercheurs distinguent les personnes qui asiprent à migrer, c’est-à-dire qui déclare la volonté de partir, des personnes qui ont entamé des démarches effectives pour partir au cours des dernières semaines (demande de visa, envoi de CV, demande d’un crédit bancaire, etc.). Les enquêtes montrent que la différence entre les deux groupes est quantitativement très importante.
Nouveau mot ajouté à la discussion sur le #vocabulaire pour décrire #migrants et #réfugiés, là :
►http://seenthis.net/messages/414225
Migration: the riddle of Europe’s shadow population
Lennys — not her real name — is part of a shadow population living in Europe that predates the arrival of several million people on the continent in the past few years, amid war and chaos in regions of the Middle East and Africa. That influx, which has fuelled Eurosceptic nativism, has if anything complicated the fate of Lennys and other irregular migrants.
Now she is using a service set up by the Barcelona local administration to help naturalise irregular migrants and bring them in from the margins of society. She is baffled by the anti-immigrant rhetoric of politicians who suggest people like her prefer living in the legal twilight, without access to many services — or official protection.❞
The fate of Lennys and other irregulars is likely to take an ever more central role in Europe’s deepening disputes on migration. They are a diverse group: many arrived legally, as Lennys did, on holiday, work or family visas that have since expired or become invalid because of changes in personal circumstances. Others came clandestinely and have never had any legal right to stay.
The most scrutinised, and frequently demonised, cohort consists of asylum seekers whose claims have failed. Their numbers are growing as the cases from the surge in migrant arrivals in the EU in 2015 and 2016 — when more than 2.5m people applied for asylum in the bloc — work their way through the process of decisions and appeals. Almost half of first instance claims failed between 2015 and 2017, but many of those who are rejected cannot be returned to their home countries easily — or even at all.
The question of what to do about rejected asylum applicants and the rest of Europe’s shadow population is one that many governments avoid. Bouts of hostile rhetoric and unrealistic targets — such as the Italian government’s pledge this year to expel half a million irregular migrants — mask a structural failure to deal with the practicalities.
Many governments have sought to deny irregular migrants services and expel them — policies that can create their own steep human costs. But authorities in a growing number of cities from Barcelona to Brussels have concluded that the combination of hostile attitudes and bureaucratic neglect is destructive.
These cities are at the frontline of dealing with irregular status residents from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. Local authorities have, to varying degrees, brought these populations into the system by offering them services such as healthcare, language courses and even legal help.
The argument is part humanitarian but also pragmatic. It could help prevent public health threats, crime, exploitative employment practices — and the kind of ghettoisation that can tear communities apart.
“If we provide ways for people to find their path in our city . . . afterwards probably they will get regularisation and will get their papers correct,” says Ramon Sanahuja, director of immigration at the city council in Barcelona. “It’s better for everybody.”
The size of Europe’s shadow population is unknown — but generally reckoned by experts to be significant and growing. The most comprehensive effort to measure it was through an EU funded project called Clandestino, which estimated the number of irregular migrants at between 1.9m and 3.8m in 2008 — a figure notable for both its wide margin of error and the lack of updates to it since, despite the influx after 2015.
A more contemporaneous, though also imprecise, metric comes from comparing the numbers of people ordered to leave the EU each year with the numbers who actually went. Between 2008 and 2017, more than 5m non-EU citizens were instructed to leave the bloc. About 2m returned to countries outside it, according to official data.
While the two sets of numbers do not map exactly — people don’t necessarily leave in the same year they are ordered to do so — the figures do suggest several million people may have joined Europe’s shadow population in the past decade or so. The cohort is likely to swell further as a glut of final appeals from asylum cases lodged since 2015 comes through.
“The volume of people who are in limbo in the EU will only grow, so it’s really problematic,” says Hanne Beirens, associate director at Migration Policy Institute Europe, a think-tank. “While the rhetoric at a national level will be ‘These people cannot stay’, at a local community level these people need to survive.”
Barcelona: cities seek practical solutions to ease migrant lives
Barcelona’s pragmatic approach to irregular migration echoes its history as a hub for trade and movement of people across the Mediterranean Sea.
It is one of 11 cities from 10 European countries involved in a two-year project on the best ways to provide services to irregular status migrants. Other participants in the initiative — set up last year by Oxford university’s Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society — include Athens, Frankfurt, Ghent, Gothenburg, Lisbon, Oslo, Stockholm and Utrecht.
A report for the group, published last year, highlights the restrictions faced by undocumented migrants in accessing services across the EU. They were able to receive only emergency healthcare in six countries, while in a further 12 they were generally excluded from primary and secondary care services.
Some cities have made special efforts to offer help in ways that they argue also benefit the community, the report said. Rotterdam asked midwives, doctors, and schools to refer children for vaccinations, in case their parents were afraid to reveal their immigration status.
The impact of some of these policies has still to be demonstrated. Ramon Sanahuja, director of immigration at the city council in Barcelona, says authorities there had an “intuition” their approach brought benefits, but he admits they need to do a cost-benefit analysis. As to the potential for the scheme to be exploited by anti-immigrant groups, he says Europe needs “brave politicians who explain how the world works and that the system is complicated”.
“A lot of people in Barcelona are part of the system — they have [for example] a cleaning lady from Honduras who they pay €10 per hour under the counter,” he says. “Someone has to explain this, that everything is related.” Michael Peel
▻https://www.ft.com/content/58f2f7f8-c7c1-11e8-ba8f-ee390057b8c9?segmentid=acee4131-99c2-09d3-a635-873e61754
#naturalisation #villes-refuge #ville-refuge #citoyenneté #sans-papiers #migrerrance #régularisation #statistiques #chiffres #Europe #Etat-nation #limbe #pragmatisme #Barcelone
cc @isskein
–----
Au niveau de la #terminologie (#mots, #vocabulaire), pour @sinehebdo:
Belgian policy towards irregular migrants and undocumented workers has stiffened under the current government, which includes the hardline Flemish nationalist NVA party. It has prioritised the expulsion of “transmigrants”— the term used for people that have travelled to Europe, often via north Africa and the Mediterranean and that are seeking to move on from Belgium to other countries, notably the UK. Several hundred live rough in and around Brussels’ Gare du Nord.
–-> #transmigrants
City Initiative on Migrants with Irregular Status in Europe (#C-MISE)
A knowledge-exchange project, facilitated by the Global Exchange on Migration and Diversity, C-MISE supports a working group of nine European cities, meeting over a two year period, to achieve four aims:
Build a stronger body of evidence on city practices in relation to migrants with irregular immigration status
Share learning on policy and practices in relation to service provision to adults and children
Develop and disseminate guidance material on key areas of service provision, including four short videos, relevant to municipalities across Europe
Develop a shared, city perspective on ways in which irregular migrants could be mainstreamed into EU policy agendas
The working group, which had its first meeting in Utrecht, in June 2017, is comprised of the following cities from eight European countries: Athens, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Ghent, Gothenburg, Lisbon, Oslo, Stockholm and Utrecht (Chair). The cities of Helsinki and Zurich are Associate members.
▻https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/project/city-initiative-on-irregular-migrants-in-europe-c-mis
Et leur #rapport:
▻https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/City-Initiative-on-Migrants-with-Irregular-Status-in-Europe-CMISE-repor
Le mot #transmigrants existait déjà :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/556723
▻https://seenthis.net/messages/448157
Plusieurs articles abordent la question du #vocabulaire. Faut-il les appeler #migrants #réfugiés #sans-papiers #demandeurs_d_asile #exilés ? Compilation ici :
►https://seenthis.net/messages/414225