Stuck at Home
The Philippines is among the most successful migrant-sending nations in the world, both lauded and critiqued for exporting its own citizens to a global labor market. Yasmin Y. Ortiga brings readers beyond this popular image to explore questions often overlooked: What happens when workers who were encouraged to emigrate are suddenly unable to leave?
Stuck at Home examines how the Philippine state and its aspiring migrants negotiated the meaning of immobility amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In this pioneering book, Ortiga studies the narratives that emerged around two groups of Filipino workers: nurses banned from leaving the country and cruise workers who returned home after COVID-19 shut down the travel industry. Ortiga emphasizes the high stakes in telling the "right" story of immobility to a nation built around emigration—one that provides a compelling rationale for who deserves to move and who can be forced to stay.
A gripping account of political interests, frustrated dreams, and an unprecedented crisis, Stuck at Home reveals how migration governance is not only about regulating people's movement, but also defining the meaning and implications of remaining in place.
—Natasha Iskander, New York University
"Stuck at Home is a remarkable study that offers a rich account of nurses and cruise ship workers whose outmigration was derailed by the global pandemic of COVID-19. This rich study expands our lens of what migration is by establishing immobility to be a constitutive element of both migration experience and governance. It is a must read for scholars of labor and migration."
—Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Princeton University
