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Women in Motion: Globalization, State Policies, and Labor Migration in Asia by Nana Oishi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, 238 pp., $57.95 hardcover, $22.95 paper.
Heather Dell
At the very moment when struggling families are working longer hours to make ends meet and need more access to affordable child care and elder care, medium- and high-income nations have reduced funding and cut programs. For some middle-class families, domestic-worker migration has emerged as a difficult but key solution. At the top of the class spectrum, the newly wealthy see employing migrant domestic workers as symbols of conspicuous consumption. In a welcome study of migrant domestic workers, Nana Oishi offers us a rare contextual integration of analysis at the international, state, society, and individual level, not only of the sending and receiving countries, but also of those that resist allowing women workers to labor overseas, regardless of need.
Oishi conducted fieldwork in nine Asian countries, with supplemental data from other locations, a breathtaking endeavor. The book mainly focuses on the guest worker-receiving countries of Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Gulf States of Kuwait and United Arab Emirates; the sending countries of Sri Lanka and the Philippines; and the comparatively nonsending Bangladesh. Oishi demonstrates that male migrants tend to come from low-income countries, while women originate from somewhat better-off countries that have a history of paid female labor and education. Due to economic destabilization under neoliberal globalization, women may find that...