Temporary International Labor Migration and Development in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract Growing migrant worker remittances are regarded as an important and more reliable source of capital to finance development in South and Southeast Asia than international aid and foreign direct investment. International financial institutions (IFIs) have proselytized based on this promise and have represented the feminization of labor migration as injecting more momentum into developmental potential. Many Asian governments have been won over by this promise, establishing labor-export policies to generate overseas earnings. This promise has also colored feminist interventions, especially within international agencies focused on migrant women workers' rights, which emphasize the need to redress labor market disadvantage for migrant domestic workers in particular. Insofar as labor-export programs are based on temporary migration, this study argues that the focus of support for migrant women workers fails to address the systemic disadvantage associated with temporariness.


INTRODUCTION
International migration has been a distinguishing feature of globalization and is held up as providing new opportunities for the development of the Global South. Foreign exchange earnings in the form of migrant worker remittances are critical to this process. For economies of the Global South, remittances are increasingly becoming a more substantial and important source of external funds than official development assistance or foreign direct investment. The migration-development nexus -or, more strictly speaking, the migration-remittances-development nexus -has excited policymakers and researchers alike who regard international labor migration as a catalytic force to drive development, particularly in Asia.
The feminization of international labor migration has underscored this confidence in the development potential of labor migration. Women make up half of those migrating for work, and it is maintained that women migrants are more committed to enhancing familial well-being and community development than men who choose offshore waged work. There is also the impression that for women, paid overseas work can be personally liberating, as they may encounter less restrictive gendered norms and practices than those prevailing in their origin communities, and that this empowerment provides further impetus for women to contribute directly to development (

THE MIGRATION-DEVELOPMENT NARRATIVE
Much of the migration-development narrative draws on policies pursued in the Philippines, where successive governments since the 1970s have promoted labor migration as a strategy for dealing with sustained levels of unemployment and external imbalance. The increase in women's labor migration has underscored this pattern, especially as Sri Lanka and Indonesia have followed the Philippine model. But it has been International Financial Institutions (IFIs), and most notably the World Bank over the course of the 2000s, that have embraced the labor-migration model as a strategy to enable countries of the Global South to become less dependent on official development assistance or foreign direct investment and more economically self-reliant. The case for the migration-development nexus rests on the increasing volume of remittances and on conventional economic arguments that see international labor market liberalization, in terms of winding back employment protections and freeing up international labor migration, as affording opportunities for alternative sources of household income and stimulating national economies.
Yet for all the preoccupation with the promise of migrant worker remittances as a driver of development and as a means of improving women's lives, there is little conclusive evidence to support the proposition. There are two dominant explanations for this failure of remittances to generate development. IFIs identify institutional failings and money transfer practices that frustrate the flow of remittances and diminish funds available for investment. Remedies lie in enhancing and regularizing the flow of remittances. Drawing on empirical field research, a second explanation finds that the primary motivation for migration is not the search for the means to finance development but rather the desire to acquire funds to alleviate familial poverty and/or to pay for particular needs such as healthcare or education. A variant of this argument identifies the limited savings capacity of most migrant workers and proposes that this impediment could be overcome through the mobilization and pooling of individuals' remittances to provide a resource for development (World Bank 2006c;Rosemary Vargas-Lundius, Marcela Villarreal, Guillaume Lanly, and Martha Osorio 2008).
A contrasting explanation, I contend, must focus on the more politically contested and extensively researched issue of labor market disadvantage that shapes most migrant women's employment experience. Labor rights activists, civil society groups, international labor and migrant worker organizations, and feminists have exposed the unfavorable labor market position of women workers employed as foreign domestic guest workers. Labor market vulnerability and low pay restrict these workers' ability to accumulate sufficient funds to invest and affects their capacity to contribute to economic development. Measures to regularize nonstandard forms of paid work and strengthen migrant women workers' employment rights could enhance earnings and savings potential and thus contribute the means to fuel the migration-development nexus.
In different ways, these approaches share a common policy emphasis that focuses on how to strengthen market institutions -one on financial markets, another on resource pooling, and a third on labor markets; and each has sought to influence the labor migration policy agendas of governments promoting women's labor migration. My interest in analyzing these approaches has been aroused because of the ways in which policy preoccupations have played out in a labor migration narrative that is premised on and sanctions temporary labor migration. For advocates of the migration-development nexus, particularly the approach centered on financial institutions, temporary labor migration offers a halfway measure toward global labor market liberalization in the face of pervasive resistance to the free movement of labor. Temporariness is also regarded as being crucial to migrant workers' decisions to remit income. Even within the labor rights discourse, the principal concern has been with contesting labor market disadvantage, and temporariness is often conceded as an inviolable feature of international labor migration. In mapping policies to enhance employment rights, labor rights advocates have appealed to conventional economic arguments that place them on similar conceptual terrain as the migration-development nexus advocates.
These approaches have been critical in debates on the labor migration policies of the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, where the governments have consciously and actively promoted the recruitment of women workers for overseas deployment. While these countries have dedicated considerable institutional resources in engaging overseas employment to spearhead economic development, this study questions the evidence of this promise. I consider the policy measures that have been canvassed to remove the impediments to the migration-development nexus identified by IFIs. I then examine the structural inequities that characterize the labor-export development strategy to argue that accepting temporariness as a condition of international labor migration serves to both (1) hold out the hope that migrant worker remittances can be a developmental catalyst and (2) contribute to institutionalizing the subordinate labor market position of many migrant women workers. In charging migrant women workers with responsibility for contributing to development, this adds another layer to the paid and unpaid work burden that women are expected to bear.

THE RESEARCH PROJECT
This research draws on fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2007 in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, and to a lesser extent Greece and Italy. The project commenced with a series of interviews with migrant worker advocacy groups, involving workers from Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Thailand; civil society organizations; and unions involved in organizing efforts among migrant worker communities. I interviewed people from eight organizations in the Philippines, nine in Hong Kong, three in Singapore, three in Greece, and four in Italy. 1 In addition, I collected data from and conducted interviews with researchers in the offices of the multilateral agencies, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Additional data were collected in interviews with small groups of migrant workers in Hong Kong (three groups), the Philippines (two groups), and Singapore (two groups). This semi-structured roundtable discussion established the confidence of participants and enabled follow-up questions and open-ended dialogue. These discussions also led to more substantial semi-structured interviews with sixteen individual migrant workers in Hong Kong, Greece, and Italya method that enabled a greater degree of reflexivity among participants and the researcher. Almost all of the thirty-plus migrant worker participants were or had been engaged as domestic or care workers. 2 Interviews elicited data on workers' rationale for migration, the channels through which employment was organized, their experiences in offshore employment, their connections with fellow migrant workers, their engagement with civil society organizations, the character of familial connections and utilization of remittances, and their attitudes to the regulatory environment in both host and origin countries. Discussions with migrant workers not only highlighted the empowering effects of employment, but also exposed workers' resistance to and some of the shortcomings of the efforts to address labor market disadvantage. The research also pointed to the importance of labor-export strategies as one dimension of neoliberal policy agendas that have shaped global economic restructuring over the last couple of decades.

MIGRANT WOMEN WORKERS: THE WELL FROM WHICH REMITTANCES ARE DRAWN
A distinguishing feature of globalization has been the feminization of international labor migration. More women are migrating independently for work across the occupational spectrum. However, migrant women's employment is overwhelmingly concentrated in low-paid occupations, with women engaged as domestic workers, care workers, and, to a lesser extent, entertainers (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development [OECD] 2008). Most migrant women's work is limited in duration, either because governments of labor-importing countries impose residency restrictions that limit the length of work visas or because migrant workers lack the necessary documentation authorizing residence and the right to work. Such restrictions apply almost universally to women seeking paid work in those occupations designated as low skilled and to women migrant workers from developing countries.
States have played a crucial role in contributing to the definition of the global labor market and the associated feminization of international labor migration. The Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, in particular, have supported women's labor migration, as overseas opportunities for paid work opened up in several destinations -especially in the Middle East, but also in Southeast Asia and East Asia; and, to a lesser extent, in Europe, where governments sanction the employment of migrant women on limited-term contracts to meet particular niche market needs (Nana Oishi 2005). These labor-sending countries are distinguished by the extent to which labor migration is feminized. Women accounted for over 80 percent of Indonesian migrant workers and, until comparatively recently, 75 percent of Sri Lankan migrant workers, with 90 percent of those women employed as domestic workers (Chitrawati Buchori and Mia Amalia 2004;Oishi 2005;United Nations Population Fund [UNFPA] 2006;Michele Gamburd 2010).
The Philippines has placed extraordinary reliance upon remittances as a source of foreign exchange funds, and this reliance has increased over time. 3 Women's labor migration in particular has been a longstanding feature of the Philippines' economic policy agenda, and explicitly so from the mid-1980s (Rhacel Salazar Parreñas 2001;Robyn M. Rodriguez 2002;Oishi 2005;UNFPA 2006). Remittances have been an important factor in allaying the pain of sustained external imbalances, and for some time state officials cast migrant workers as the ''new national heroes'' (Rodriguez 2002), or, according to former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in anticipation of workers' greater role in boosting the economy, as ''investor heroes'' (David B. Katague 2012). The strategy is deeply embedded within the institutional fabric of the Philippines, most obviously in the range of labor institutions that support the recruitment of women to be employed overseas as domestic workers and care workers and, to a lesser extent, entertainers. This strategy is also evident in the focus of an educational system designed to graduate nurses to work overseas, as well as in the political might of the labor recruitment agencies.
In the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, respectively, the governments of Sri Lanka and Indonesia followed the Philippines' development model to promote women working overseas, with labor-export programs concentrated principally on the recruitment of less-educated women for employment as foreign domestic wageworkers. Similar sentiments to those expressed in the Philippines have colored Indonesian government discourse on the important contributions that ''foreign exchange heroines'' make to the national economy (Committee for Asian Women [CAW] 2009). The labor market institutions are not as extensively developed in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, although, following the Philippines' experience, the labor recruiting industries have emerged as influential political forces. 4 The success of labor-export programs is evident in the importance of international labor migration as a source of financial flows for the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. In each of these countries, the amount of remittances far exceeds the value of official development assistance and foreign direct investment. Indeed, this value is true across the Global South and is a crucial consideration in how IFIs envisage the pathway to development. The World Bank (2003, 2006c) advances the position that remittances provide the means for igniting development over and above international aid and the liberalization of international financial markets. The migration-development nexus now forms the centerpiece of the World Bank's development program. Moreover, the World Bank dedicates considerable resources to collating data on remittances and to analyzing the nature of remittance flows. In partnership with sister institutions including the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank promote and help design labor migration policies as export revenue-generating strategies based on remittances for governments in Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, the Southwest Pacific, eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Africa.
The advocacy of migration-remittances programs is not simply regarded as supplementing capital provided through official aid or foreign direct investment. The World Bank looks upon remittances as ''shoulder[ing] an increasing percentage of local development needs'' (Sanket Mohapatra and Dilip Ratha 2010: 316; see also Dilip Ratha [2009]). The export of labor and the generation of remittances is argued to provide the means for countries in the Global South to become more economically self-reliant and less dependent upon assistance from advanced industrial economies, sentiments endorsed within the Group of Eight (2004) and outlined in the G8 Action Plan 2004 and coordinated through the European Commission with OECD and IOM support (Bimal Ghosh 2006;IOM 2006;OECD 2006).
The idea of the migration-remittance-development nexus was canvassed as a counter to arguments that regarded the increased international labor migration of the 1990s as being economically detrimental (Ninna Nyberg Sørensen, Nicholas Van Hear, and Poul Engberg-Pedersen 2003). Conventional economic theory provides conceptual backing to the logic of the migration-development nexus, and this is reinforced by the so-called new economics of labor migration (J. Edward Taylor 1999). Building on the international migration and household theory of Douglas S. Massey (1990), the conventional perspective is extended to consider individual migration as a risk-minimizing or altruistic strategy aimed at enhancing familial economic welfare through income remittances. Rather than generating costs for origin and host countries, labor migration is considered to engender macroeconomic benefits, in terms of the more efficient deployment of wageworkers who escape unemployment and underemployment in the Global South to work in the Global North.
The economic benefits of labor migration and remittances, vis-à-vis official development assistance, also follow from individual's active engagement in their own development, displacing third parties such as aid agencies and local bureaucrats, for instance, to ensure that funds are directly invested in meeting immediate needs. Remittances, as a growing source of export revenue, can reduce external imbalances, provide a more stable source of external funds than is generally the case with official development assistance or foreign direct investment, enhance national economic stability and even manifest as a counter-cyclical force, and increase the borrowing potential of the recipient nation and thus strengthen national economic planning (Dilip Ratha 2003; World Bank 2006c; Dilip Ratha, Sanket Mohapatra, and Ani Silwal 2009).
The economic logic of the migration-development nexus has also appealed to those engaged with analyzing the feminization of international labor migration. United Nations (UN) agencies specifically concerned with promoting the position of women have added their voices to the newfound confidence in the development potential of labor migration and the role that women can play in development (UNDP 2005;UN-INSTRAW 2006). The 2006 UN report, State of the World Population, explicitly held out international migration as engendering a ''passage of hope'' for women (UNFPA 2006). This was reiterated in the Human Development Report 2009: Overcoming Barriers: Human Mobility and Development (UNDP 2009), and IOM is also actively engaged in supporting measures to engage women in the development potential of migration (2006).
IFIs argue that migrant women workers can inject more momentum into development. Noting the importance of ''more women . . . migrating as independent wage earners,'' the World Bank regards women as being more altruistic in their motivation for migrating away from their families for work (2006c: 28). 5 The World Bank regards women as demonstrating greater responsibility in meeting family expectations and being more purposeful in repatriating savings by dedicating remittances to particular expenditures, such as health and education (World Bank 2006c). 6 Studies that account for gender maintain that migrant women workers tend to remit a larger proportion of their income than migrant men (Carlota Ramírez, Mar García Domínguez, and Julia Míguez Morais 2005;UNFPA 2006). 7 The World Bank also advocates women's engagement in market economies through international labor migration as a pathway to empowerment (2006c, 2010). Feminist-informed reflections have further boosted this idea, arguing that overseas employment can broaden women's life experiences, boost women's self-confidence, and be empowering (Oishi 2005;Ramírez, Domínguez, and Morais 2005;Keiko Yamanaka and Nicola Piper 2005;UNFPA 2006). 8 With financial resources and enhanced personal confidence, women can become active agents for change in their own and their families' lives as well as in local communities; and through their involvement in civil society organizations, women can contest practices that frustrate good governance and sound macroeconomic policies (IOM 2005;Yamanaka and Piper 2005;Ghosh 2006).

THE MIGRATION-DEVELOPMENT NEXUS: AN UNCERTAIN PROPOSITION?
The evidence that migrant remittances are a catalytic force for economic development is far from unequivocal: remittance data do not capture transfers effected through informal channels, and the increased magnitude of remittances can be partly attributed to efforts to regularize the flow of transfers. The macroeconomic data do not present a universally consistent picture of the relationship between remittance flows and investment in economies in the Global South (Richard H. Adams Jr. and John Page 2005). Advocates of the migration-development nexus acknowledge that the impact of remittances on development is extremely varied. Other research that examines remittance-receiving countries calls into question the notion that remittances contribute to economic growth and suggests that remittances may even have perverse effects (Adolfo Barajas, Ralph Chami, Connel Fullenkamp, Michael Gapen, and Peter Montiel 2009). An evaluation of the most recent World Bank data for developing countries also does not reveal any consistent or uniform patterns in trends in remittance flows, gross fixed-capital formation, and gross domestic product. Nor is there clear evidence that remittances have provided impetus for development in the Philippine, Sri Lankan, or Indonesian economies. 9 There is probably greater cause for caution in embracing the argument that women's migration will strengthen the momentum of the migration-remittance-development nexus, notwithstanding the fact that World Bank remittance data do not permit measurement of the influence that gender has on remittance flows. Research on the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Indonesia emphasizes that the principal reason women seek overseas employment is to obtain the means to pay for day-to-day familial needs, to alleviate poverty and meet healthcare and education costs, not to obtain the means to fund economic development (Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah 2002;Michele Gamburd 2003UN-INSTRAW 2006; Institute of Policy Studies and IOM 2008; Moshe Semyonov and Anastasia Gorodzeisky 2008; Regional HIV and Development Programme for Asia and the Pacific 2008). The Sri Lankan government's radical revision of its labor migration program in 2009, which shifted the focus to skilled men's labor migration, was made in light of the recognition that migrant women workers directed most of their earnings to meeting the costs of survival and invested virtually nothing in business (Tilani Jayawardena 2009). In general, women's earnings do not provide the means for investment in productive ventures. Reflecting on their experiences during the 1997 Asian economic crisis, women I interviewed indicated that poverty alleviation and healthcare and educational costs became even more critical in shaping decisions to migrate. Efforts by the Philippine, Sri Lankan and Indonesian governments to increase labor exports in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis underscore this impression. 10 This is not to argue that migrant remittances do not have positive economic effects. Remittances can stimulate local economies by financing improvements in the housing stock, but this should not be exaggerated. Upgrading housing is not uncommonly linked with the families of migrant workers wanting to display physical evidence of the status derived from offshore earnings, but, as some workers informed me, ostentatious displays of wealth can constitute an enduring drain on household resources because of the costs associated with the upkeep and maintenance of the house. Interviewees explained that it was not infrequently the case that women returning to their family home would do so with household durable goods purchased in the host country they were leaving (Setiadi Sukamdi, Agus Indiyanto, Abdul Haris, and Irwan Abdullah 2001). Moreover, while overseas earnings increase the financial means to expand household consumption, it is not necessarily the case that there will be positive consumption multiplier effects. Interviewees identified a range of opportunity costs. Instances of husbands relying on remittances and abandoning employment or becoming less economically responsible with increased alcohol intake were not uncommon.

COUNTERING THE OBSTACLES TO THE EFFICACY OF THE MIGRATION-DEVELOPMENT NEXUS
The lack of evidence of a robust association between remittances and development has not dissuaded IFIs of the promise of the nexus, and they have concentrated on identifying and promoting measures to remove some of the impediments regarded as responsible for reducing the full force of migrant earnings. On the one hand, existing arrangements that facilitate the transmission of money are held to reflect market failure in two principal ways. The first is associated with the limited reach of formal financial institutional arrangements and the high volume of remittances transmitted through informal channels. These are held to be costly and highly risky, and the World Bank and IMF have devoted considerable resources to encouraging migrant workers to use formal money transfer channels, to ''bank the unbanked'' and ensure that funds reach their destination (World Bank 2007). 11 The second concern has been with the lack of competition in the remittances transfer industry, monopolized by high-charging money transfer companies. In Southeast and South Asia, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have sought to foster increased competition by engaging commercial banks to enter the industry and pressuring governments to remove regulatory barriers to entry policies (ADB 2004;World Bank 2006c. IFIs see further advantage in channeling remittances through formal channels insofar as providing a better accounting of the value of remittance flows gives state authorities a more accurate estimate of exchange earnings and thus a clearer sense of the external balance position of their economies. This would provide governments and businesses with a better reckoning of their capacity to service international debt and, crucially, justify securitizing loans against future remittance flows (Ralph Chami, Connel Fullenkamp, and Samir Jahjah 2003).
A further obstacle that is seen to frustrate the migration-development nexus is the limited capacity of individual, low-paid workers to accrue sufficient savings to make consequential investments in development. This has prompted some proponents of the migration-development nexus to promote measures that enable individual remittances to be consolidated into a pool for investment (ADB 2006;World Bank 2006c). The Asian Migrant Centre in Hong Kong won international funding to establish reintegration programs that linked efforts to marshal savings to fund homebased enterprises with retraining schemes designed to develop new skills and business acumen to better equip returning workers to initiate continuing employment opportunities. These efforts have been praised by some migrant worker support groups, including feminist-informed studies (Katherine Gibson, Lisa Law, and Deirdre McKay 2001;Asian Migrant Centre n.d.).
However, the experience of such ventures does not necessarily instill confidence in their effectiveness. Members of the Filipino Migrant Workers Union in Hong Kong reported to me in 2003 that they had withdrawn their support for one program because of alleged misappropriation of funds. The limitations of such schemes may in fact be deeply structural. Kathleen Weekley (2006), for example, contends that the very forces that impel recourse to overseas paid work frustrate the establishment of viable social enterprises in the Philippines (see also Hein de Haas [2007]). 12 The dedication of national resources to promoting the labor-export industry is at the expense of support for national economic ventures and could reinforce the nonviability of domestic enterprises. There are multiple ways in which employment rights are restricted to institutionalize labor market disadvantage, and this is critical in any consideration of the capacity of migrant workers to fund development. IFIs acknowledge labor market disadvantage, although this is largely considered a ''moral concern,'' usually with respect to women entrapped in sex work or trafficking (World Bank 2006c). Initiatives that could reduce disadvantage and counter the lack of labor market freedoms are dismissed as being too politically sensitive. 14 The World Bank's reflection on the employment position of migrant women workers is extraordinarily dismissive. Labor and migrant worker advocacy groups, feminist critics, and policymakers have exposed the extent of this dismissal and have documented the range of disadvantages that confront women, in particular those employed as domestic and care workers. In the case of Asian workers (the focus of this analysis), most employment is organized through labor recruitment and placement agencies -although there is also considerable irregular migration, especially out of Indonesia and the Philippines. The market power of recruitment and placement agencies and host country quotas on the number of authorized entry permits increase the costs of finding paid work. Temporary work permits that tie workers to a particular employer are in effect contracts of indenture (Verité 2005;Shu-Ju Ada Cheng 2006;Pei-Chia Lan 2006). The severe restrictions on migrant workers' employment and civil rights -especially in the Middle East, but also in Singaporedifferentially disadvantage women because they compound the physically isolating circumstances of most women's occupations, making women more subject to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse (UN 2004;Margaret L. Satterthwaite 2005;UNDP 2005;Nicola Piper 2008b). The ability of women to seek redress from abusive employers is limited because of their employment circumstances. Workers lodging a complaint against an employer may be dismissed, and the opportunity to exercise legal rights may be circumscribed because dismissal raises the prospect of deportation before a complaint is heard. 15 In highlighting the nature and extent of labor market disadvantage and investing considerable energy in organizing and campaigning to improve migrant women workers' employment rights, migrant worker organizations have brought considerable pressure to bear on governments to pursue measures to correct some of the disadvantage. ILO, IOM, and the United Nations Development Fund for Women have advanced these processes, pressing governments to pursue a range of initiatives to afford some degree of protection for their citizens working overseas and support a range of empowerment programs (UNIFEM n.d.). These governments have also been concerned that a failure to act could discourage interest in overseas employment and thus undermine labor-export strategy. Pre-departure programs designed to acquaint migrant workers with their employment rights as well as familiarize workers with their responsibilities and the cultural contexts in which they will be working are mandated in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia (Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility [CARAM] Asia 2011). Diplomatic missions now have labor attachés, and governments provide some financial support for shelters to afford some protection for workers fleeing abuses. The laborexport governments have also sought to negotiate bilateral agreements with governments of destination countries that set out terms of engagement through standard model employment contracts. Efforts to regularize the position of the many undocumented migrant workers, such as in Malaysia and in some Gulf States, have figured prominently in these endeavors, albeit mostly unsuccessfully (OECD 2008).
For the most part, my interviews revealed that migrant worker organizations have been principally concerned with reducing labor market disadvantage because of the impact it has on women's personal and material well-being, and not because it restricts the extent to which women can contribute to the development project. However, while there have been some improvements in employment arrangements, progress has been slow in getting host nations to recognize domestic and care work as occupations that warrant regulation and standardized conditions of employment.
Racial, national, and ethnic stereotyping are defining features of the global labor market; and insofar as this shapes employment preferences and practices, the highly segmented nature of domestic and care work has frustrated efforts to establish common labor standards (Verité 2005). My research provides evidence that the higher status of Filipina workers and the more robust organizing tradition within Filipina migrant communities explains their labor market status in relation to their counterparts from Thailand, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka. Filipina workers generally enjoy better conditions of employment and are remunerated more highly than Thai and Indonesian domestic workers, who in turn are more highly regarded and rewarded than Sri Lankan workers.
These differences also reflect a further structural impediment to addressing labor market disadvantage: labor-export countries compete with one another to secure market share. 16 Labor recruitment agencies in Indonesia, for example, have established training programs that include language skills designed to enhance the marketability of Indonesian domestic and care workers vis-à-vis Filipina workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan (Lan 2006). The competitive drive to capture market share is also evident in the efforts of labor-export countries to move up the labor-value chain by promoting the employment of more skilled migrant women workers. Indonesia is following the lead of the Philippines in supporting the training and overseas employment of nurses. 17 Sri Lanka negotiated a similar agreement with Libya (Asian Tribune 2008). International competition severely constrains the efforts of labor-export countries to pressure host countries to adopt and police minimum labor standards and protections for migrant workers, particularly since most host countries have not ratified the UN or ILO migrant worker conventions. Labor-export countries' regular threats to block the passage of workers to destination countries have limited effect because there are other sources of labor that labor-import countries are only too keen to draw on, and because migration channels enable irregular migration (Bilaterals.org 2009). 18 Yet, notwithstanding these various endeavors, a crucial ingredient in the making of migrant domestic and care workers' labor market disadvantagenamely, the overwhelming tendency for terms of employment contracts to be limited in tenure -has very rarely been challenged. Temporariness is essential in understanding the dynamics of the migration-development nexus.

TEMPORARY LABOR MIGRATION: THE ESSENTIAL INGREDIENT IN THE MIGRATION-DEVELOPMENT NEXUS
A defining feature of the feminization of labor migration from the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka is that employment opportunities in destination countries are invariably temporary in nature. Without exception, governments hosting migrant workers throughout the Middle East and Southeast and East Asia restrict the duration of work and residence visas for all low-paid occupations in which most migrant women workers are employed. Employment contracts awarded to women engaged in domestic work are generally restricted to two to three years. Some governments provide the opportunity for contracts to be renewed onshore, while others require contracts to be renewed in the workers' country of origin. The possibility of contract extensions and renewals can enable temporary workers to be engaged in continuous overseas employment, often with the same employer, for many years. A recent challenge to the legal force of Hong Kong's labor migration laws restricting foreign domestic workers' residence rights revealed that there were approximately 117,000 foreign domestic workers who had resided in Hong Kong for more than seven years (Austin Chiu and Stuart Lau 2012). While the initial court judgment hearing found in favor of the applicant, the government's successful appeal affirmed its constitutional right to expel migrant workers without employment contracts. Continuity of residence through successive employment contracts does not erase the ever-present threat of expulsion.
Paradoxically, the World Bank does not regard temporariness as being a major impediment to the migration-development nexus and sees no reason for intervention (World Bank 2006c). On the contrary, temporariness is considered the crucial catalyst in the nexus because temporary employment status is critical to maintaining the flow of remittances. The impulses that drive workers to remit income would likely disappear with the opportunity for resettlement. Resettlement would permit family reunion, removing a principal motivation for remitting income (Elizabeth Grieco 2004). Moreover, the longer a migrant worker resides in the host country the greater is the tendency for remittances to decline (OECD 2009). 19 The potential for ''remittance decay'' weakens the remittance-developmental force of labor migration, and increasing the number of migrant workers is the only real countervailing force.
While it is not explicitly acknowledged in the new economics of labor migration literature, temporariness is key to the migration-development nexus. The World Bank's support for temporary labor migration is not simply based on the contention that temporary migrant work opens up employment opportunities that would not otherwise be available. Nor is it simply moved by the political consideration that some degree of labor market liberalization is better than none because the World Bank supports other similar measures to encourage temporary overseas employment. 20 Remittance flows are the paramount concern of the World Bank, and temporariness is crucial in underscoring the momentum of these flows. My conversations with migrant workers highlighted that, even though they had enduring employment histories working in Hong Kong or the Middle East, family connections and the knowledge that they would eventually return to their home country remained the overriding consideration for remitting income.
Successive Philippine, Sri Lankan, and Indonesian governments have promoted temporary migrant worker programs on the same grounds that an enduring connection with the home country is essential to the contribution that migrant workers can make to its economy. While these governments have responded to pressures from migrant worker and labor activists, civil society organizations, and international agencies campaigning for measures to stop the abuse of workers (Yamanaka and Piper 2005), government action has not challenged temporariness. Initiatives to regularize the movement of migrant workers within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations underscore this (Nicola Piper 2010).
A similar predisposition is evident in the labor rights discourse, which accepts temporariness as an inviolable feature of labor migration programs involving low-skilled workers. While improvements in the terms and conditions of employment for temporary migrant workers, rather than remittances issues, are the principal preoccupation of labor rights advocates, some adopt a similar logic to the World Bank in their approach to temporariness. Martin Ruhs and Philip Martin (2008), for example, argue that a labor-importing country's migrant worker policy has to strike a balance between meeting the demand for low-skilled workers and the perceived corrosive effects of labor migration on the nation's employment standards and social cohesion. They argue that restrictions on employment rights, and the associated restrictions on civil and human rights, are the trade-off that is made when the number of migrant worker permits issued is increased (compare World Bank [2006c]). Daniel A. Bell and Nicola Piper (2005) make a similar argument in contending that some qualification or circumscribing of migrant worker rights, vis-à-vis national workers, can be justified on moral grounds if workers decide that there are positive gains to be had from migrating for work. Others who advocate enhancing the rights of migrant workers also generally concede that temporariness is a price that must be paid for accepting the opportunities that become available with international labor migration, although some maintain that there is potential to push further on worker rights (Graeme Hugo 2009).
Expressed in a language more familiar to conventional economists, this argument is no different from the standard welfare economics proposition: aggregate economic welfare is maximized as migrant workers who might not otherwise be gainfully employed gain access to work and an income, albeit on inferior terms and conditions to what is acceptable for the citizens of the labor-importing country. This labor rights approach is little different from the World Bank's instrumentalist approach: the price that migrant workers must pay for the opportunity to obtain work in the global labor market is the restriction of their rights.
One canvassed solution to this dilemma is to provide greater continuity of employment while simultaneously cementing migrant workers' bonds to their home country. Arrangements that allow workers to negotiate a succession of employment contracts to establish a pattern of circular labor migration are advocated as one means of extending the employment of low-paid migrant workers in a way that does not compromise the sovereignty of labor-importing countries (Graeme Hugo 2003). Such arrangements provide an institutional framework for enabling successive employment contracts that include measures to regularize and mandate income remittances and thus overcome the tendency for remittance decay (Steven Vertovec 2007), which is entirely consistent with the World Bank's qualified labor migration liberalization strategy.
However, representing labor migration and the limitations on employment and other rights as striking some sort of balance, or translating this into the economic language of an optimizing outcome, is somewhat specious. The choices that Bell and Piper (2005) see individuals exercising are circumscribed and ignore the structural conditions that impel labor migration. They also overlook the severe restrictions that institutionalize labor market disadvantage and limit human rights. Employers can impose onerous restrictions on the rights of workers to communicate with family and friends and restrict any break from work (Ray Jureidini 2004;Sabika al-Najjar 2004;Rima Sabban 2004). 21 Such restrictions distinguish the lot of migrant women's waged work from migrant men's, and this can have profound implications. The denial of liberty, being subject to compulsory pregnancy and other medical tests, and restrictions on interacting with family and friends can have devastating consequences for an individual's mental health and physical well-being (Regional HIV and Development Programme for Asia and the Pacific 2008). The shortcomings in the ''striking-a-balance'' argument should be evident in the frequency of reports of migrant women being subject to psychological, physical, and sexual abuse, concerns that regularly erupt and rouse the governments of labor-export countries to lobby labor-employing countries to afford more protection for migrant workers.
The equally important, if not more poignant, illustration of the consequences of the suppression of migrant women workers' human rights is the high mortality among domestic workers. The reported rate of deaths among domestic workers in Singapore is, at face value, inexplicably high for an occupation that in any other context could not be characterized as one with a high rate of occupational and safety concerns (Human Rights Watch [HRW] 2005[HRW] , 2008. 22 Deaths are attributed to working in high-rise buildings and the risks in hanging out washing or cleaning external windows and to suicide. 23 While we can only speculate as to the substantive causes of these deaths, the isolation of workers and their separation from families and other support networks must surely be considered contributing factors.

CHALLENGING MIGRANT WORKERS' LABOR MARKET DISADVANTAGE
The many Filipina, Sri Lankan, and Indonesian women who have migrated temporarily for work confront institutionalized restrictions on employment rights as well as profound curbs on the exercise of their human rights. How these restrictions are best redressed has prompted some imaginative thinking among those who give voice to a rights-based discourse. Some advocate extending the reach of migrant workers' rights within the frame of temporariness, by consolidating and building on international labor standards as well as introducing new elements that could include the portability of some rights, such as social security and health benefits (Nicola Piper 2008a;Hugo 2009). But, again, there is a tendency for the labor rights discourse to step back from supporting mechanisms that would facilitate the transition from temporary work programs to permanent residence and provide comparable paid work and civil society entitlements as enjoyed by citizens of the host nation. Instead, the focus remains on regularizing labor migration by emphasizing the need to promote ''the orderly admission and return of workers'' (ILO 2004: 118). 24 However, there is a discernible shift in thinking among organizations advocating migrant worker rights as part of a human rights agenda. This has been articulated through the People's Global Action on Migration, Development and Human Rights forum (2009;Piper 2010;Raúl Delgado Wise, Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, and Rubén Puentes 2010;Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing [WIEGO] n.d.). This new agenda is evident in the recently endorsed ILO instrument for the regulation of paid domestic work, ''The Convention Concerning Decent Work for Domestic Workers (C189),'' which seeks to bring paid domestic work into line with international labor standards (ILO 2010(ILO , 2011b. 25 The Convention canvasses the extension of employment rights to an occupation dominated by women, and especially by migrant women, and it is premised on moving beyond a narrow conception of labor rights to afford workers the human rights of ''autonomy, dignity and security . . . social protection . . . [and to set standards that] address the inequalities and multiple forms of discrimination that many domestic workers face'' (ILO 2010: 14;2011b). The Convention stipulates the need to specify the terms and conditions of contracts and mandates work-free days. In bringing domestic workers under the protections afforded by the various UN and ILO migrant worker and antidiscrimination conventions, the Convention could lead to some measures that would reconcile work and family responsibilities to enable the right to a family life (Catherine Hein 2005;Piper 2008b;ILO 2011aILO , 2011b. If supported by labor-receiving countries, this could help alleviate some of the worst features of migrant women's domestic and care work. However, because the Convention endorses the right of host countries to engage migrant workers on temporary contracts, many of the systemic disadvantages associated with temporariness will likely persist.
CONCLUSION I have argued that migrant women workers' labor market disadvantage is an obvious corollary of the continuing defense of temporary labor migration. In arguing this, I am not suggesting that migrant women workers should be conceived as victims, a tendency that has colored some of the debate on sex work vis-à-vis trafficking. But, notwithstanding the robust communities of migrant workers that support women's presence in host countries and the various campaigns and struggles to improve women workers' rights that demonstrate the exercise of women's agency, it is essential not to ignore the structural and systemic forces that frame migrant women's waged work. The critical factor has been and continues to be the instrumentalist approach towards labor migration among the governments of labor-export countries and, crucially, among IFIs in advocating temporary labor migration as principally an export revenue-generating strategy.
Temporariness is the essential ingredient in the migration-development nexus because temporariness is the most assured means of maintaining the flow of remittances. For the countries of the Global South, the immediate imperative that has provoked labor-export policies has been the objective of alleviating external imbalances. For IFIs, labor-export strategy is as much about promoting remittance flows as a substitute for other sources of funds and for relieving international agencies and the international community more generally from the responsibility for addressing the inequities in the distribution of global wealth and opportunities.
This strategy to shift responsibility for igniting development is about promoting a neoliberal program of economic self-reliance, which incorporates migrant workers into the Global South's engagement in global market processes. The nations of the Global South are charged with the responsibility for fostering development; and, insofar as this responsibility is prosecuted through temporary labor migration programs, it is poor people who are ultimately charged with the responsibility for securing the economic position of the Global South in the global economy, as Don Marut (2008) has argued with respect to Indonesia.
In the cases of the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia, the strategy is predicated on calling upon women to take the lead in the development agenda, engendering responsibility for generating the means to fund investment in this development. Yet, the argument advanced here highlights the institutional and structural forces that shape international labor market disadvantage and that restrict the ability of workers to accumulate the means to provide the impetus that the migration-development nexus promises. However much the opportunity to migrate for work can be an empowering process, the promise of migration has to be qualified because temporary migration programs come at considerable personal cost to migrant women workers, disrupting familial and community life and adding a further load to women's waged and unwaged working life. Complementing the focus on labor-rights with principles articulated in human rights discourse helps extend the reach of migrant worker activists' and civil society supporters' endeavors to combat labor market disadvantage. But it is also essential to move beyond the dominant economic standpoint that regards the promise of labor migration as the new hope for securing the health and well-being of the Global South. In so doing, we are compelled to question the asymmetry in the market liberalization agenda that enables the unfettered mobility of capital while restricting the rights of migrant workers and that charges migrant women workers with the responsibility for combating the failure of global neoliberal economic programs. In my discussions with young Indonesian domestic workers employed in Singapore, several intimated that the relative personal freedom that they were experiencing as domestic workers would make their return to traditional roles as wives and daughtersin-law quite a challenge. There is considerable effort being undertaken by a number of migrant women workers' advocacy groups and other civil society organizations, including UNIFEM, ILO, and IOM, to promote programs toward deepening and institutionalizing migrant women's empowerment (UNIFEM n.d.). 9 The World Bank-published data sets for each of these countries over the period 1990-2008 do not demonstrate a robust association between remittances and other key economic indicators. 10 Indeed, the 2008 global financial crisis appears to have had a perverse effect on remittance flows: some families forwarded money to members working overseas as their earnings were cut, which has been noted with respect to Mexican workers in the United States and the Indian and Philippine governments establishing income relief programs (Tom Braithwaite 2009;Roel Landingin 2009;Sarah O'Connor 2009;James Lamont 2010). 11 It is not always the case that formal channels are less expensive or a more effective measure for transferring money to family. My research among Filipino workers in Athens indicated that there was greater reliance upon informal networks, mostly friends, to remit money because this was more convenient and because there was a belief that the less government and immigration officials know about workers' financial affairs, the better. Research on remittance patterns among Bangladeshi workers suggests that informal money transfer channels are quicker and often less expensive than formal channels (Md. Mizanur Rahman and Lian Kwen Fee 2005). 12 My meetings with migrant workers and civil society groups revealed a number of reintegration programs being promoted in Hong Kong and Singapore that prepared women workers for their return through training in a range of occupational skillssuch as computing, accounting, and dressmaking, as well as financial management and business management more generally. Many of the schemes, however, tend to concentrate on engaging women in occupations traditionally dominated by women and characterized by low pay and poor conditions. 13 There is increased consideration of the opportunity costs of the reliance on expanding labor exports for other sectors of the Philippines and the Indonesian economies (Ernesto M. Pernia 2007; William Pesek 2012; Yonatri Rilmania 2011). 14 Amazingly, the World Bank recognizes the exercise and abuse of market power by recruitment agencies, resulting in workers incurring substantial costs, but it fails to argue for greater and effective regulation of recruitment and labor placement industries. The World Bank contends that regulations to govern recruitment would place labor-export countries at a competitive disadvantage, which is in contrast to the efforts of the Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems and IMF to establish a voluntary code of principles for remittance service providers (World Bank 2006c). 15 Such cases expose one of the fundamental flaws in the World Bank's argument that there is cause for specific regulations to protect at-risk workers, those that have been trafficked or are undocumented, as distinct from comprehensive labor and human rights laws that would provide greater protection for all migrant workers. 16 The competition is intensifying as countries in the region that have hitherto restricted the migration of women workers, such as Bangladesh and Nepal, are lifting restrictions, and as other countries, such as Vietnam and China, are promoting labor migration as an export-revenue-earning strategy. 17 Marking its first foray into placing workers in the international healthcare labor market, the Indonesian government negotiated under the terms of the Japan-Indonesia Economic Partnership Agreement to provide a trial deployment of nurses and nurse aid healthcare workers to work in aged care facilities in Japan (David Adam Stott 2008). 18 The ability of labor-export countries to restrict the flow of workers to those countries in which labor abuses are rife has been further frustrated by their inability to stop the migration of undocumented workers to these countries (Peter Alford 2010; Ismira Lutfia and Camelia Pasandaran 2010). 19 The World Bank notes that ''the marginal propensity to remit income tends to decline with the length of a migrant's stay in a host country, and ties with the home country weaken over time' ' (2006c: 93). Similarly, Elke Holst, Andrea Schäfer, and Mechthild Schrooten's (2012) analysis of migrant remittances in Germany shows that the structure of transnational networks and the attainment of German citizenship have a major impact on the amount remitted, and the results differ between women and men migrants. 20