Governing Migration,Producing Skills: Emigration and Education in the Philippines

Abstract

This article examines skill as an integral yet understudied aspect of emigration governance. To date, migration studies have mainly focused on how the demand for migrant skills drive people's movements across borders, shaping the conditions for entry into popular destinations in the West. In contrast, less is known as to how skills also shape the way governments manage emigration, pushing would-be migrants to acquire certain capacities well before they leave their countries of origin. Drawing from the case of the Philippines, this article discusses how state agencies have used skills training to dominate specific markets for migrant professionals and demand higher wages for Filipino workers abroad. Yet, this emphasis on skilling has also worsened existing inequalities within the country, creating social problems that state officials are unable to fully address and control. We argue that such issues stem from the private schools and training companies who dominate skills provision for aspiring migrants. Such actors remain largely overlooked in current scholarship, despite their increasing influence on workers’ migration trajectories. This paper highlights the challenges of producing workers for labor markets beyond borders, as well as its implications on how we understand migration governance as a whole.

Introduction

Migration scholars have tended to conflate migrants’ skill with their labor, examining how demands for certain skills drive people's movement across borders and shape the conditions of their work abroad. It is easy to see how the two concepts overlap. Labor is the performance of services, often exchanged for paid wages. Meanwhile, skill is the ability to not only execute such tasks but do so in a manner that improves through time (Attewell 1990; Hagan, Rubén, and Jean-Luc 2015). Yet, in blending these two concepts together, current research provides a somewhat limited view of migration governance in the current global market. A focus on labor has allowed researchers to see how state institutions, brokers, and employers commodify migrants’ work, often in ways that exploit and misrecognize their value within host societies (Eckstein and Peri 2018; Fernandez 2013; Goh, Wee, and Yeoh 2017; Guevarra 2014). Issues of abuse and undocumented labor have led to the increasing regulation and control, where migrants must navigate a complex system of permits and procedures even before leaving their countries of origin. Such controls are especially salient in migration from and within Asia, where source countries have developed the world's most robust systems of emigration governance (Bélanger and Silvey 2020; Lindquist, Xiang, and Yeoh 2012).

However, frequently overlooked is how these workers’ capacities are also learned, assessed, and certified for jobs in other countries (Liu-Farrer, Baas, and Yeoh 2020; Ortiga 2018). This process of skilling can begin well before workers become emigrants, and often continues regardless of whether they are able to leave the country. In this article, we argue that an attention to skills and skilling allows researchers to examine how source countries manage the outmigration of their citizens to jobs abroad.

To date, academic discussions on skill often occur in the context of immigration, where questions of ability and expertise determine migrants’ entry into popular destinations in the West. Scholars have discussed how governments impose their own standards in validating people's credentials, limiting where aspiring migrants are able to move and work (Boucher 2020; Raghuram 2021). Others have shown how assessments of competence and ability are shaped by dominant norms surrounding race, class, and gender. Migrants are deemed either dispensable or essential, depending on who gets to arbitrate the value of their capacities as workers (Liu-Farrer, Baas, and Yeoh 2020). For example, Iskander's (2021) study of migrant construction workers in Qatar reveals how categories of “skilled” and “unskilled” inform state controls over workers’ bodies—the places where they lived and the areas they could occupy in the city. Skill was not just labor transported through international migration. Rather, it was the construction of human capability that determined where workers are moved and how they were treated upon arrival.

In this paper, we highlight how the concept of skill can also be used to regulate and maximize the benefits of emigration. Migration studies have provided only a limited view of how states govern their citizens’ international mobility. Hollifield's (2004) notion of a “migration state” shows how regulating people's cross-border movement can be seen as a central function of the state (Adamson, Chung, and Hollifield 2024). Yet, this concept is largely based on the experiences of Western liberal states, where governments often grapple with the contradictory pressures of economic openness on the one hand and political closure on the other. In extending Hollifield's concept to the Global South, Adamson and Tsourapas (2020) have proposed three types of migration states: nationalizing, developmental, and neoliberal. The Philippines, with its use of labor export as an economic strategy, falls into the category of a developmental migration state (Adamson and Tsourapas 2020: 286, 287). While important, this typology mainly focuses on the link between labor emigration and remittances. In considering the vital role of skill in labor export, we argue that deployment and remittances do not fully capture the ways by which states like the Philippines govern migration.

In this article, we highlight the Philippines as an example of how source countries can incorporate skills training into their migration policies, enabling a postsecondary education system geared toward the needs of foreign employers. However, we also show how the emphasis on skilling led to the rapid growth of a for-profit training industry that government agencies eventually failed to manage and control. Focusing on the case of nursing and seafaring, we discuss how this lack of regulation can have serious implications for source countries seeking to use emigration as a development strategy, as well as the global industries that have come to rely on nations like the Philippines for their labor needs. Such issues are an understudied yet integral aspect of migration governance as a whole.

Securing a Share of the Migrant Labor Market

Academic discussions have often portrayed the emigration of skilled professionals as a loss for the source nation. Migrants are either pushed out by a lack of opportunities within the domestic labor market or pulled away by the promise of higher wages abroad. Underlying this popular narrative is the assumption that sending states invest in their citizens’ professional training, only to lose such important skills once migrants are lured away by wealthier nations (Brissett 2019; Kapur and McHale 2005). In contrast, the Philippines has taken a completely different approach to the outmigration of skilled workers. While already well known for using migrant remittances as a development strategy, the Philippine state also enabled the deliberate skilling of Filipino students for jobs outside the country (Ortiga 2018; Tan 2009). Local colleges and universities have actively altered academic programs in line with the supposed needs of foreign employers, purposely marketing specific degrees as a steppingstone to overseas work (Cabanda 2017; Ortiga 2017).

On the surface, this approach can be seen as a means of stemming the adverse effects of skilled migration. By encouraging the training of specific professions, the Philippines can produce a larger pool of skilled workers to address both local and international needs (De Haas 2005; Abarcar and Theoharides 2024). However, this practice also has clear benefits for the country's labor export policies. When it came to navigating a global market for nursing and seafaring skills, educating Filipino students for “export” was not merely an attempt to replenish a supply of professionals in these fields. Rather, skilling policies and practices were a key part of securing the Philippines’ status as the primary source for migrant nurses and seafarers in the world.

In the case of nursing, Philippine state officials sought to ensure that Filipino nurses would continue to have an advantage over other nationalities. The new millennium had seen the rise of new source countries for migrant nurses, such as Vietnam and Indonesia. To maintain its share of the healthcare labor market, Philippine state agencies turned to local colleges and universities to enhance the employability of Filipino nursing graduates. This rush to produce “globally competitive” Filipino nurses quickly led to a bloated curriculum, as school owners added a wide range of electives to bolster their students’ appeal to foreign employers (Ortiga 2014). While the history of Filipino nurse migration can be traced back to the American colonial period, contemporary nurse migrants move to dozens of nations across the world (Choy 2003; Yeates and Pillinger 2019). Philippine nursing schools have shifted their instruction strategies along with this change, offering courses in geriatrics and nursing informatics to bolster their student's employability in different markets. As one nurse educator argued, “We tried to revise and revise the curriculum in such a way that the competencies of our graduates are not limited to the Philippine healthcare system…Any hospital, in any setting, anywhere in the world. That's where our graduates are being sent.” (Ortiga 2018).

In seafaring, Filipino students also aim to enter the global labor market, mostly driven by the promise of higher wages. Nobody goes into maritime education aiming to work in the domestic sector (Galam 2018a). Seafaring positions being very hierarchical, seafarers need to do further training and pass exams to obtain the necessary license to assume a higher position. For many decades, the Philippines has been a major supplier of labor for the global maritime industry, with Filipinos comprising at least 25% of seafarers across the world (UNCTAD 2021). Such dominance is due to the cooperation and collaboration between and among state, non-state, and international shipping actors (Galam 2022). Until the early 2000s, the Philippines focused mainly on filling lower positions (ratings) of the seafaring labor market. This cohered with the racial segmentation of shipboard positions, that is, the senior positions were occupied by seafarers from the country of the ship owners or employers (McKay 2007). Eventually, a predicted global shortage of senior seafarer officers (captains, chief mate, chief engineers and first engineer) combined with the higher cost of employing officers from the Global North made the Philippines an important source of officers as well. International employers and shipping associations worked with Philippine maritime higher education institutions (MHEIs) to educate and train future officers (Galam 2022). Such training also implicitly taught certain predispositions that encouraged Filipino seafarers to act as compliant workers (Galam 2019). This deliberate strategy of shifting local professional education in line with the needs of the global shipping industry made the Philippines the biggest source country for both officers and ratings.

The dominance of Filipino professionals in the global nursing and seafaring industry reveals how governing labor migration goes well beyond facilitating people's departure for jobs abroad. Skill is not simply a part of migrants’ labor power, commodified and exported to maximize workers’ future remittances. Rather, the process of skilling itself is an integral part of migrant-sending states’ efforts to secure existing overseas markets—whether it be in edging out potential competition or assuring employers of worker quality and trust. In this process, the usual state institutions that dominate studies on migration governance play less of a prominent role. The Department of Migrant Workers (formerly the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration) promotes Filipino skills to foreign employers and facilitates the outmigration of workers abroad. However, this agency has no control over the way these skills are actually taught and assessed. The Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA) approves the curricula and permits of training centers that grant the tech-voc certificates often required for outgoing migrants. Yet, TESDA's mandate is mainly driven toward domestic needs and does not cover professional education. Rather, the Philippines’ capacity to deploy skilled professionals in highly regulated fields like nursing and seafaring relies on the country's colleges and universities—actors who have been relatively invisible in scholarship on migration governance.

Struggling to Regulate a Skilling Industry

The deliberate training and education of future migrant workers had bolstered the Philippines’ reputation as a reliable supplier of particular types of migrant skill. Yet, as skilling became more intertwined with the prospect of emigration, the country also saw the rapid growth of a skilling industry targeted at aspiring migrants. Philippine postsecondary education is mostly operated by private institutions (Yee 2024). Hence, most Filipino high school graduates are likely to enter schools and training centers run by either private corporations or family-owned businesses. Unlike actors in a typical migration industry, these education institutions can sell their programs to aspiring migrants and collect a profit regardless of whether their graduates eventually leave the country.

The “boom” of both nursing and maritime education serves as two examples of the problems that result from this education system. To date, there remains wide variability in the quality of Philippine higher education, with many institutions providing substandard training. While the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) has the mandate to regulate the country's many private institutions, state agencies maintain a “free enterprise” policy that allows private actors to offer academic degrees, then relies on market forces to “determine the sustainability or demise” of these programs (Commission of Higher Education 2017: 1–2). In other words, Filipino students and their families are largely left to make informed decisions as to which institution will provide quality training worth their hard-earned money. However, private school owners are less concerned as to whether their students truly become future migrants and state agencies are disinclined to closely monitor their course offerings. The problems of this approach were immediately apparent in the case of nursing and seafaring.

In the early 2000s, enrolment in Philippine nursing programs grew exponentially, reaching a peak of 461,800 students in 2006. State officials initially supported this expansion, seeking an active response to aggressive recruitment in popular destinations like the United States (Abarcar and Theoharides 2024; Ortiga 2018). However, substandard education soon became rampant, as local media reported numerous cases of schools without functioning laboratories, affiliated hospitals, and qualified faculty (Ortiga 2017). The ballooning number of nursing graduates eventually pushed the Commission on Higher Education to ban the creation of new nursing programs and close “low-performing” schools—a task that became even more urgent when nursing demand from the United States and United Kingdom waned after 2006. Still, private school owners leaned on their political contacts and filed restraining orders in Philippine courts to keep their programs open (Manila Bulletin 2013).

Eventually, the poor preparation of Filipino nursing graduates became evident in the country's nursing board examinations, as passing rates plummeted in the latter half of the 2000s (Abarcar and Theoharides 2024). Pressures to obtain a nursing license then led to the rise of another lucrative industry—this time geared toward offering “review classes” for nurses taking the board exams. As profits in this industry relied on students’ ability to pass the board exams, cheating among both review centers and students became an inevitable problem. In 2006, the owners of a private review center were accused of bribing state officials to obtain a copy of questions for the nursing board examination. Immediately, the United States-based Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools announced that it would not accept Filipino nurses with 2006 licenses if they did not retake the board exams (Cabreza and Salaverria 2007). Despite protests from nursing graduates and their families, most of the 42,000 examinees were forced to retake the nursing board exam, including the 17,000 nurses who had already passed the test (Manongdo et al. 2006). It seemed that efforts to capitalize on skilling for “export” had simply led to a crowded market for nursing skills, where aspiring migrants took on all the risk of investing in degrees of varying quality. Even worse, the threat of rampant cheating compromised the Philippines’ standing among nations that imported Filipino nurse labor (Ortiga 2025).

Substandard training and certification became a pressing issue for aspiring seafarers as well. Philippine maritime schools have long struggled to comply with the Standards of Training, Certification, and Watchkeeping for Seafarers (STCW) Convention, a global governance mechanism that grants legitimacy and recognition to Filipino seafarers’ skills. Non-compliance to the STCW Convention has serious consequences for Philippine labor migration and its governance. For years, despite questions about its compliance, the Philippines was allowed to continue supplying seafarers because of how reliant global shipping is on Filipino crew. But its legitimacy—synonymous with compliance to the STCW Convention—to supply seafarer officers to the European market came under scrutiny. Acting independently of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the European Commission (EC), through its European Maritime Safety Agency (EMSA), identified numerous fundamental problems in the Philippines’ maritime administration, education, training, and certification system. The last inspection, in 2020, for example, highlighted problems in areas such as program and course design, review and approval, monitoring, supervision and evaluation of training and assessment; and examination and assessment of competence (MARINA 2022). The EC threatened to no longer recognize the certificates of competency (CoCs) of Filipino masters and officers—compromising the employment of 50,000 Filipino seafarers working onboard ships flagged under the European Union (EU). An EC derecognition also raised the specter of other countries following the lead of the EU in no longer employing Filipino seafarer officers on their ships. Furthermore, an EC-delisting would also put into question the Philippines’ continued inclusion in IMO's Whitelist of compliant countries, which would undermine the credibility of the global governance of seafarers’ competence.

To avoid EC derecognition, Philippine state officials needed to prove that the government would be able to regulate maritime schools. In 2012, then President Benigno Aquino III issued Executive Order (EO) 75 which initiated the creation of a single maritime authority that would have sole jurisdiction over Philippine compliance to the STCW Convention. The absence of this single maritime authority was a major issue identified in EMSA's early inspections. This shows that Filipino seafarers’ qualifications and competence, and their recognition, are embedded within the broader governance of the country's compliance to the STCW Convention. The Philippines needed to demonstrate that it had the infrastructure and competence to administer the education, training, and certification of Filipino maritime professionals according to the minimum standards set forth in the STCW Convention. A significant part of its compliance efforts is the implementation of stricter policies to regulate MHEIs. As a result, the Philippines has reduced the number of MHEIs in the last ten years, from almost 120 institutions in 1994 to 83 (75 of which are private) in 2023 (CHED 2024). State agencies also imposed measures to control the number of students an MHEI can accept. Student numbers have significantly dropped from an intake of 161,229 in 2014 to 86,114 in 2019 (CHED 2020a, 2020b). In March 2023, the EC decided to continue recognizing the CoCs of Filipino masters and officers.

The issues facing nursing and maritime education reveal how governing emigration may involve a wider diversity of actors and institutions within the sending state—many of which may not have direct connections to the Philippines’ labor migration agencies. The growing presence of actors, such as private schools and review centers, also leads to new challenges for the sending state. While the Philippines is widely regarded as a model for migration management, the regulation of education institutions and the skilling industry falls well beyond the mandate of the country's labor agencies. Hence, addressing issues of training quality and skills involve engagement with other branches of the Philippine government and the private sector. In the case of the global maritime industry, Filipino seafarers’ qualifications and competence involves compliance to supranational bodies such as the STCW Convention. Failure to regulate skills providers within the country can compromise the careers of all migrants in an entire industry or sector, regardless of whether an individual obtained good training and education.

Given that Philippine tertiary education remains mostly private, individuals and their families pay the cost of skilling themselves for jobs they do not yet have, but bear the risks of not doing so with a reliable provider. In our own work, we have documented how the poor regulation of private schools worsens inequalities within the country, creating problems such as the exploitation of aspiring migrants and a rising number of graduates who are unable to pass the national board exams for nursing and maritime engineering. Simply put, the Philippines’ inability to regulate private colleges and universities within the country will compromise both the employment and employability of Filipino workers overseas.

Looking Toward the Future: Migration Governance in a Competition for Skills

The last 50 years of the Philippines’ labor migration system has revealed a completely different perspective of the outmigration of skilled workers. To date, discourse on migrant professionals continues to portray emigration as a loss for the sending state, a theme that drives the popular narrative of “brain drain.” In contrast, the Philippine case has shown how the production of skills can be a key part of emigration governance. Far from merely deploying migrant labor, the Philippine government has enabled a skilling industry driven toward training young Filipinos for a global market. This paper shows how an attention to skilling expands what would otherwise be a narrow view of how states govern labor migration. In the Philippines, state agencies use local educational institutions to secure the country's status as the world's primary source for skilled nurses and seafarers. Yet, in doing so, government officials often fail to control the private schools and companies that dominate postsecondary education, negatively impacting aspiring migrants and their families.

As scholars who have followed the experiences of Filipino nursing and maritime graduates, we believe that the promise and pitfalls of skilling for “export” will become even more integral to the global market for migrant labor. At present, private schools and training institutions have become more integrated to the migration industry, redefining the circumstances of migrants’ departure to jobs overseas. Foreign governments and employers have taken to recruiting future nurses directly from nursing schools, offering scholarships that bond them to a contract of service in hospitals overseas. Such practices raise important questions about the content of Philippine nursing curriculum and the purpose that higher education should serve in a country that also suffers from a high need of healthcare workers (Ortiga 2014). Meanwhile, pervasive concerns on the quality of maritime education have encouraged shipping companies to set up their own schools within the Philippines, along with sponsorship programs funding the maritime education of selected students. These students must work for their sponsors for 5 years (Galam 2018b) and go through a career development program to become captains or chief engineers (Pia 2017). All of these activities are geared toward creating a direct pipeline of skilled and competent future masters and senior officers.

What will these changes mean for how migration scholars understand the global labor market? The Philippines’ dilemma in skilling for export is significant in two ways. First, the Philippines has long been regarded as a “model” for labor export and international organizations have used its policies in guiding other source countries seeking to use emigration as a development strategy (De Haas 2005). The country's struggles in regulating its local universities serve as a cautionary tale of what happens when nations produce graduates for labor markets beyond borders. Recognizing these issues is integral to developing deeper knowledge on the relationship between migration and development—specifically, the sacrifices that aspiring migrants make amid the drive to increase remittances (Asis, Piper, and Raghuram 2010). Second, the Philippine case shows how local issues in professional education can have severe implications for global industries that have come to rely on migrant labor. As the world's major source for migrant nurses and seafarers, seemingly domestic problems of teaching and learning can disrupt essential industries well beyond national borders. The validity and legitimacy of migrants’ skills relies on a state's capacity to regulate an education industry which is mainly driven to profit from aspiring migrants. Filipino nursing graduates must pass international exams and assessments to be eligible for clinical practice. Meanwhile, Filipino seafarers rely on their country's compliance with global regulatory mechanisms, specifically the STCW Convention. Regulating the production of skills goes well beyond the purview of the newly created Department of Migrant Workers. Presently, it is still difficult to determine how the country's educational institutions will respond to new demands in the global labor market. Nevertheless, the Philippine case highlights the need to look beyond recruitment and deployment in understanding how states govern emigration.