Longtime Filipino Sojourners’ Relationships in the Arab Gulf States

• In Event: Formation of Neo-Plural Societies as Emerging Migration Regimes

Abstract

This paper looks into the integration and social dynamics of long-term migrants in neo-plural societies. Using the experiences of long-term Filipino migrants in two Arab Gulf States (AGS), United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), the study looks into intermarriages of Filipino migrants to individuals of different cultural and national backgrounds in these settings.

Unlike US and Australia, migrant workers in the AGS could not attain citizenship no matter how long they stay. Migrant workers have to leave AGS countries once they lose their jobs and move from one country to another, transforming them into long-time sojourners. The nature of their circumstances lead migrant workers to stand by their nationalities, and eventual constricted familial ties, vis-a-vis the society’s eventual segmentation of citizens and non-citizens.

The intermarriage of Filipinos to individuals of other nationalities and faiths exhibit this dynamic. In the neo-plural societies of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, one can rarely find meso-macro level of network—whereas macro level are equivalent to connections of nationality, and micro level are that of familial ties—since the UAE is predominantly cosmopolitan yet segmentalized, while Saudi Arabia allows no social gatherings in the public sphere. Thus even one may expect that the intermarriage may be a symbolic representation for integration in the AGS, this may be true to certain class, yet for other class they need to go through various negotiation attributed by gender and familial duties in order to overcome this segregation of nationality in these neo-plural societies.

Author

• Akiko Watanabe, Bunkyo University