Neoliberal Market Governance of Migrant Domestic Work in Southeast Asia

There are nearly 5 million domestic workers in Southeast Asia, one-quarter of whom are international migrants. Their recruitment, training, deployment and management are carried out primarily by a dyad of private recruitment agencies in sending and receiving countries. Due to the specificity of domestic work and lax regulatory environments, these businesses may operate in grey zones. This paper examines these zones and argues that what would otherwise take the place of the law is the “market”. While there is evidence that all kinds of human mobilities now take on a “growing logic of commodification and exchange” this logic is under-examined, especially in domestic worker migration. This paper unpacks the market authority and market-based decision-making of these recruitment agencies as social relations of power. I mobilize Michel Foucault’s genealogies to fashion a grid of analysis that makes visible the social relations among state apparatuses, civil society and the private sector as relations of power, and as everyday practices of migration governance. I draw from eight months of fieldwork in the two largest sending and two largest receiving countries in the region – the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Southeast Asia is important because this market-led migration regime originated from the region, and has since diffused to other migration corridors in South Asia, the Middle East and the newest sending countries in Africa. In these low-rights contexts, labour standards and social protections take a backseat, as workers are packaged and traded not so much as commodities but as human capital.