Narratives of International Student Return Migrants in the Philippines: Cultural Adaptation, Career Mobility, and Reintegration Patterns

• In Event: The Many Faces of Return: Problematizing Return Migration

Abstract

Migration and development frameworks usually focus on the economic gains of labor out-migration, particularly on the advantages of remittances and migrant philanthropy to the economy and nation-building of developing countries like the Philippines. State infrastructure on facilitating deployment and managing migration has become sophisticated through time, with the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency emerging as a global model for migration management, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). However, an ILO report (2005) cited return migration as the weakest component of the Philippine migration programme. Government support is largely limited to loan provision, socio-psychological counseling and financial literacy training for repatriated migrants and other types of returnees. One such subgroup of return migrants to the Philippines is composed of Filipino international students who were granted opportunities to study on scholarship in the universities of developed countries. While Filipino international students from abroad have increasingly returned to the Philippines for decades, research has not kept up with the speed at which they have returned. While the brain drain argument has remained unchallenged in migration theorizing, the understudied phenomenon of return migration among Filipino international students potentially suggests a reversal of brain drain to brain gain. Philippine government programs have largely focused on returning labour migrants, both the forced and voluntary ones and even the undocumented ones, but government intervention has yet to include returning students. Like returning professionals (engineers, scientists and teachers), international students who return are high-skilled migrants who bring home human capital, among other types of capital derived from international migration. It is the aim of this paper to uncover the experiences of international students who have returned to the Philippines in terms of cultural adaptation, career mobility, and quality of life during reintegration. Through key informant interviews, this paper aims to provide a qualitative description of the richness of their reintegration experiences and to cull out themes and patterns emerging from these experiences.

Author

• Yellowbelle Duaqui, De La Salle University