Reintegration Infrastructure for Whom? Philippine Reintegration Governance in Retrospect and in Prospect

Abstract

Recently, the Philippines’ migrant reintegration program has gained some renewed attention. In this article, we draw from the infrastructural lens often used in migration studies to foreground the ways in which key reintegration policies and regulation practices have been conceptualized and enacted over the past decades. Adopting the view that policies and ways of implementation are never static nor inert, we highlight two emerging developments in the field of Philippine reintegration. First, we trace and examine the shifting contours of an emerging infrastructure for migrant reintegration in the Philippines. Second, we situate reintegration policies alongside the more familiar, diaspora strategies. We do this to reveal what we contend as the growing classed nature of reintegration, whereby state's biases of the balikbayan (returnee from the diaspora) as more deserving than the migrant worker could effectively foreclose more nuanced policy and programs attendant to the differing needs of various returnees.