The Live-In Caregiver Program (LCP) makes available the possibility of Canadian permanent residency to temporary foreign domestic workers. Since the 1980’s a large portion of Live-In Caregivers are Filipina migrant women who enter Canada as temporary workers (Walia 2010, 76). Many of these women work as nannies, raising the children of affluent Canadians, while their immediate family responsibilities remain in the Philippines. Convinced by the promise of opportunity and better futures coveted by nations like Canada, temporary domestic workers find themselves in vulnerable positions, constrained by the policies of the immigrant they are susceptible to the abuse and exploitation their employer and the Canadian State, more generally. According to the Philippines Women’s Centre of BC caregivers endure “unpaid or excessive work hours, additional job responsibilities, an expectation to be on call at all times, forced confiscation of travel documents, gross violations of privacy, and sexual harassments and assault (Walia 2010, 76).
Queering the Family:
My usage of queer, is intended to contest what is typically considered to be normal and remove queer from its usual identificatory function; queer is not simply isolated to the L, G, B, or T. From Cathy Cohen’s expansion of the term queer to “unpack and politicize the very idea of normal” (as cited in Catungal, 2017). Therefore, the Filipinx caregiver is a queer subject as her experience of heterosexuality is not considered to be normative. Her queerness allows us to (re)think the normalcy of family—and their associated intimacies, desires, social lives and forms that are called up and performed when familial categories are invoked (Catungal, 2017)—at a local level while simultaneously situating ourselves in consideration with a broader global context. Prompting us to reflect upon the intersections of the local and global spatiality, and queerness allowing us to locate the fissures within normative categories of family and citizenship in a neoliberal context.
Canadian Complicity in Projects of Neoliberalism:
Since the 1980s, Canada has shown a strong preference for sourcing live-in caregivers particularly from the Philippines (Khan 2009, 29). To be more specific, approximately ninety-two percent of LCP registrants in Vancouver were from the Philippines (Pratt, 2012). Canada has taken advantage of the racialized and gendered patterns of LCP recruitment, and utilizes to its benefit the devastating unemployment and poverty rates and labour-export policy of the Philippines (Khan 2009, 29). In addition, persistent stereotypes within Canada which portray Filipino women as obedient, nurturing and complacent posit them as ideal domestic workers (Khan 2009, 29). Scholar Geraldine Pratt remarks on a recruit which states that “domestic workers leaving their children in the Philippines makes the very best nannies because they miss their children so much that they have no choice but to redirect their affections to Canadian children” (Pratt 1997; 2009). Like other wealthy nations, caregiving is a salient feature of the Canadian neoliberal economy. That is, programs like the LCP might be considered the inverse of the transnational phenomenon of outsourcing (Walia 2010, 77). Asymmetric power relations between the Philippines and Canada work to Canada’s benefit—this process is embodied by Filipinx caregivers. Crucially, Filipinx caregivers and their families are sacrificed to ensure the maintenance of the Canadian nuclear family; in the eyes of the state they come to mean a supply of cheap labour that can address, for example, the domestic labour issues (Walia 2010, 77).
Transnational Family:
Canadian nuclear family necessitates a home, in which the home becomes the localized space of correspondence between its members. It is stationary location, that rarely changes and is adorned with meanings, norms and responsibilities. Filipina caregivers come to exist in these spaces, in an artificial home as “not-yet-but-likely-citizens” and whose acceptance is wholly dependent on their ability to maintain the normative Canadian family (Pratt, 2009). In this framework the maintenance and social reproduction of the Canadian nuclear family is predicated on the help of the caregiver and everything she must give-up. Her presence in Vancouver and eventually, her acceptance within citizen is contingent on her capacity to care for, in an intimate motherly manner, for children that are not her own. It is, the Filipina mothers’ presence within the confines of walls that the maternal rolls of these mothers because queer—where the local swiftly slips into the global which collapses the borders of Canada while still being dependent on them. The transnational dynamic of Filipina caregivers means that they occupy and perform maternal roles and responsibilities at both local and global levels. They are transplanted from their homes, and as outsiders placed into families through artificial maternal role to care for and raise the children of affluent Canadians while biological parentage avoids the domestic duties and may instead be productive citizens of the state. At the same time, caregivers must still financially and emotionally provide for and raise their children but from a distance.
Concluding Thoughts:
With this in consideration, I suggest that the examination of Filipinx caregivers within the local context Vancouver offers a valuable entry point to interrogate neoliberal projects and mechanisms that are sustained by programs such as the LCP, and to consider these projects in relation to citizenship and the construction of the Canadian “family.” Contrary to popular depictions of Canada as a benevolent arbiter of human rights, the state continues to be engaged with abusive immigration policies used to exploit the Global South. Moreover, temporary migrant workers have come to constitute a hidden disposable workforce to the benefit of the Canadian populations (Walia 2010, 71). The Live-In Caregiver Programme (LCP) exemplifies the ways in which foreign domestic caregivers endure excessive exploitation via an exclusionary promise of inclusion and citizenship. Moreover, I posit that the experiences of Filipinx women in Canada queer of the normative heterosexual ‘family’ via transnational means— which ultimately links the local spaces of Vancouver to the spaces outside its borders.
Works Cited:
Catungal, J. (2017). Toward queer(er) futures: proliferating the “sexual” in filipinx canadian sexuality studies. Pre-publication copy.
Pratt, G. (2009). Circulating sadness: Witnessing filipina mothers’ stories of family separation. Gender, Place & Culture, 16(1), 3-22.
Pratt, G. (2012). Enterprising women, failing children: living within the contradictions of neo(liberalism). In Families Apart Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love (pp. 1-40). University of Minnesota Press.
Khan, S. A. (2009). From labour of love to decent work: Protecting the human rights of migrant caregivers in canada. Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 24(1), 23-45.
Walia, H. (2010). Transient servitude: Migrant labour in canada and the apartheid of citizenship. Race & Class, 52(1), 71-84.