Masako Ishii – författare

This important volume empirically explores the lives of migrants experiencing long-term temporariness under temporary labour migration programmes (TLMPs) implemented by a number of governments in the Global South and becoming emerging actors in the social fabric of migrant-receiving countries.Focusing on the Philippines–United Arab Emirates (UAE) migration corridor over the past 50 years, the book illuminates the dynamic interplay among temporary migration policies, migrants’ lived experiences, and rapid urban development. Chapters concentrate on three key areas – macrostructural aspects of the corridor; migrants’ agency in navigating temporariness; and emerging trends from below – and incorporate policy-oriented and ethnographic analyses. As well as offering policy implications, the book demonstrates how a proportion of Filipino migrants do not merely adapt to the TLMP, but also undergo significant transformations themselves in tandem with the UAE’s economic restructuring and rapid urban development. The Philippines–UAE migration corridor’s role as an evolving experiment supports the broader insights into how large-scale temporary migration flows might unfold in other regions in the future.The volume ultimately offers a new way of thinking about temporary labour migration as a dynamic, socially embedded process in the contemporary Global South, and will therefore be of use to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of international migration, Asian diaspora studies, and Southeast Asian studies more broadly.

Asian Migrant Workers in the Arab Gulf States (edited by Masako Ishii, Naomi Hosoda, Masaki Matsuo and Koji Horinuki) examines how nationals and migrants construct new relationships in the segregated socioeconomic spaces of the region (namely, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates). Instead of assuming that segregation is disadvantageous for migrant workers, it emphasizes multiple aspects and presents various voices. In this way, the book tries to unfold the region’s segregated socioeconomic space, as well as its new forms of networking and connectedness, in order to understand how the various peoples coexist: a situation that often entails conflict and discrepancies between expectations and reality.

The discourse on migration outcomes in the West has largely been dominated by issues of integration, but it is more relevant to view immigration in non-Western societies in relation to practices of exclusion and inclusion.