Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity
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Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity
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| ISBN-13: | 9780822373124 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/22/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 12 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Migrant Returns
Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity
By Eric J. Pido
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2017 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6353-8
CHAPTER 1
The Balikbayan Economy >> Filipino Americans and the Contemporary Transformation of Manila
Often, thinkers writing on international migration, even some employing a transnational lens, produce conceptualizations of movement that are fundamentally unidirectional. This envisioning of migration, travel, and economic trade subsequently creates a framework that perceives "receiving" countries as the sole beneficiaries of exploited "sending" countries. Scholars are beginning to develop a notion of transnational urbanism to trace the materiality of social change produced by patterns of transnationalism in order to offset this bifurcating framework (M. Smith 2001). The aim of this chapter is to map a particular economy produced by the multidirectional circulation of migration and financial investments, in this particular case, Filipinos visiting or resettling in the Philippines and the material capital that they bring and spend.
These "returns" are enabled by an assemblage of state-designed policies, international payment systems, and multinational corporate interests, which are together transforming the urban landscape of Manila and the everyday lives of those inhabiting it. The material and affectual transformations occurring throughout the National Capital Region (NCR) and other expanding regions throughout the globe complicate and unsettle the view that receiving countries are on the winning end of market interests and globalization. In many ways, the crises around economic development and local labor shortages are actually reproduced by the state governments that are sending multitudes of laborers abroad.
The balikbayan economy, in which the circulation of foreign investments and large-scale property developments play a key role, maps contemporary forms of transnationalism and globalization that intertwine Filipinos in the United States together with those living in the Philippines in material ways. This economy relies on the intensive exploitation of emigrant Filipino labor and capital to meet a demand for lifestyles of increased luxury supplied by multiple forms of foreign investment. Significantly, the foundational framework constituting this economy was set in motion more than three decades ago. Through the ingenuity of contemporary corporate investors and property developers, policies originally legislated in the 1970s have been reconfigured to enable flows of returning Filipinos, balikbayans who are increasingly becoming new investors in the country's real estate economy, to become crucial actors in the contemporary transformation of Metro Manila.
Investments made by balikbayans have been integral to creating a new market for property developers to lease or sell their real estate products in the emergent balikbayan economy. For example, 40 percent of the high-end properties in the Timberland Heights of San Mateo, Rizal, were purchased by Filipinos based in the United States (Salazar 2008). Furthermore, Philippine banks have started offering twenty-five-year mortgages for the first time. Several real estate agents even mentioned that balikbayans were seen as a particularly safe bet. "Alam mo [you know], banks prefer balikbayans. They are more eager to do business with balikbayans than even Filipinos here," one agent told me. A real estate agent who showed me a condominium in Fort Bonifacio Global City, one of the most elite residential neighborhoods in Metro Manila, explained, "Banks know that balikbayans want to return. Many of them have to return. When they return, banks think to themselves, where will they live? Of course they are going to want to make sure that they and their families have a good place to live. So banks will quickly give loans to balikbayans as long as they can prove that they can afford the amortization of their homes."
More recently, the country's remittance-fueled economy and subsequent rapid development have become cyclically propelled by a new imperative. Filipinos not only are simply visiting or sending remittances to the Philippines but for various reasons are now seriously entertaining the possibility of returning and staying. Seen by most property developers in the Philippines as the market with the highest buying potential and no longer simply a source of remittance income, balikbayans have become the target for an glut of high-priced residential and business investments emerging throughout and around Metro Manila. Understood through the context of Filipino migration since 1965, however, what appears to be a contemporary innovation is much more complicated, mirroring Luis Francia's (2001) observation of his own experience of transmigration as "the inevitable corollary to a theorem that had already been set" (184).
Integral to this process are the ways in which state institutions, and the policies they enact, coincide with the Filipinos living and working abroad, either permanently or temporarily. These Filipinos are increasingly encouraged in a myriad of ways to invest a portion of their wages, earnings that are substantially more than what Filipinos are making while working in the Philippines, in high-priced property throughout and around Metro Manila. In turn, a number of foreign corporate investors, who have been paying close attention to this growing trend, have chosen to take a calculated risk on these potential future streams of capital infusion and have continued to back the development of numerous retail and commercial centers. Such spaces are made possible through their interlinkage, both physical and ideological, with the residential property market and the balikbayan economy.
The dependency on foreign investment capital to drive urban development has subsequently led to the creation of a unique landscape: the entire NCR is now composed of highly segregated, multipurpose enclaves sewn together by an eroding transportation infrastructure and a vast network of informal settlements and economies. These property developments are perpetually being built, creating a world alongside the everyday people who continue to inhabit, service, and sustain them. Balikbayans return to a Metro Manila that has become extremely segregated, both economically and socially, and are continually reconciling themselves to a homeland whose transformation they have helped to produce.
Building Inequality
Metro Manila is more accurately a conglomeration of districts, cities, and municipalities rather than a single geographically distinct urban center. Originally four larger cities (Manila, Pasay, Caloocan, and Quezon City) and thirteen municipalities, eight of these municipalities have been chartered as cities in recent years, collectively occupying a total area of 63,600 hectares with a population just over 11.5 million (National Statistics Office 2007). By signing Presidential Decree 921 in 1976, Ferdinand Marcos attempted to capture the region's economic production by knitting together circulating networks of various industries and continual flows of internal and international migration within and around the region by formalizing the creation of the NCR. Since then, Metro Manila has consistently outperformed other regions in the archipelago from an economic perspective; its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) is twice the national average. Together with the CALABARZON (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal, and Quezon) economic region, Metro Manila accounts for more than half of the country's total GDP (NSCB 2003). This disproportionately high rate of economic production perpetuates the persistent problem of overpopulation in the city. While Metro Manila constitutes only 0.2 percent of the country's total landmass, almost 13 percent of the country's total population, compounded each year by a growth rate of 2.8 percent, has come to situate itself in the region's densely compacted and dynamically structured space. Historical patterns of urbanization and concentrated economic activity have made the struggle for land and space an undeniable force driving urban transformation in Metro Manila.
Centuries of colonial occupation by several regimes and irreparable damage incurred during World War II in multiple waves of bombing by both the imperial Japanese and U.S. forces, followed by decades of financial mismanagement in state and private interventions into the implementation of urban plans, have shaped Metro Manila into the palimpsest of urbanization that exists today. Scattered remnants of its prewar architectural past are almost completely lost within the entanglement of gated industrial buildings, a variety of makeshift and fortified homes, and a vast landscape of protruding high-rises and malls. Taken as a whole, the city's geography is dizzying. To this day, the patterns of urbanization throughout the megacity are largely driven by the intensive stratification of economic production and the evolving social divisions already set in motion centuries earlier during Spanish rule.
Manila City did not become the center of cosmopolitan culture in the region until after the turn of the twentieth century. After the end of Spanish colonial rule, the walls of the fortress-city of Intramuros that separated Spanish colonials from both the ethnic Chinese entrepreneurial class, ensconced in what is today called Binondo, and the scattered indigenous Filipinos laboring class became irrelevant (Reed 1993; Doeppers 1984). Even before this transition, the vast majority of land was owned by an elite class of wealthy and educated Filipino mestizo families. Even after the Spanish colonial government and its ecclesiastical proxy had mostly disappeared, the legacies of feudal landownership and the societal hierarchies it created refused to dissipate. Much later, a census surveying the inhabitants of the Philippines in 1938 showed that only 4 percent of the entire population of Manila were landowners. In Makati this percentage was even lower, at 1 percent, while the more rural populations of Las Pinas, Taguig, and San Juan had a much higher rate of land ownership, at 20 percent (Magno-Ballesteros 2000a).
During the transition from Spanish colonial rule, a national design for the planning of towns and cities was largely absent. Rather, the implementation of city planning was left to the authority of smaller units: local councils or remaining Spanish friars who were capable of developing particular tracts of land. This energy was focused on building amenities for the colonial and business elite, such as the city's original suburban neighborhoods (Ocampo 1995). As such, far less attention was paid to expanding the infrastructure for sanitation, irrigation systems, or housing to serve the wider population. These early tendencies in land ownership and land use provided the primary sketches for the incongruous shape cast by the immense disparity in wealth in Metro Manila today.
The obstacles restricting the implementation of any city planning were due, in large part, to the deeply entrenched web of elite families who continue to control most of the politics around the city and beyond. Having so cleverly maneuvered themselves into the most elite strata during centuries of Spanish rule, these primarily agricultural elites refused to relinquish any of their wealth and property, or the control that these attainments imbued them with, under the newly fashioned American colonial banner. Realizing that the successful overthrow of the Spanish did not occur in Manila Bay but through waves of Filipino insurrections subsidized and sometimes led by these elite families, the American colonial government knew that its success would depend on its ability to compromise and work in concert with the interests of the mestizo elite (see McCoy 2009).
Cleverly, American colonials enacted a number of changes that effectively created new opportunities for the mestizo elite to expand their wealth and further consolidate their control. When the new American colonial government expropriated 400,000 acres of rich agricultural land once owned by the Catholic Church and the Spanish friars, it passed most of this land into the hands of the elite. Not only would the landholding families benefit from the labor and trade in goods and resources produced by these new properties, but Americans would also benefit from the consolidation in landownership (see Anderson 1998). The mutual benefits extending from this relationship were further enabled by the passage of the Payne–Aldrich Act in 1909. An early precedent to agreements liberalizing trade today, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), this early legislation eased trading between the two countries by removing duties while increasing incentives, which once again chiefly benefited the Filipino elite (see Hawes 1987).
After the country was granted independence from the United States in 1946, favorable trade agreements between the Filipino landholding elite and American corporations continued. However, the unrestricted flow of trade came with a price. To pay off the debts accrued through the tax-free trade of exported and imported goods, elite Filipinos redirected the rehabilitation assistance funds. This aid was originally provided to the Philippines to repair the catastrophic losses suffered by the country's infrastructure during the Japanese occupation in World War II and, more specifically, the destruction caused by U.S. bombing during the war. Economic disparities throughout the rest of the country produced and deepened fissures within the larger state apparatus, paralyzing a number of attempts to promote governmental centralization and economic regulation. Another set of neocolonial economic policies directed by the U.S. administration gave tax advantages and further subsidies to Filipino corporations and entrepreneurs who invested in expanding the domestic market for foreign investment. Therefore, the postwar years were marked by a clear focus on the development of industrial manufacturing in and around Metro Manila (see de Dios and Hutchcroft 2003).
During the same period, the Philippine Congress voted to make Quezon City, the municipality that former president Manuel Quezon had hoped would one day replace Manila as the country's new capital, the epicenter of government. An increasing flow of internal migration by middle- and lower-class Filipinos moving to Manila City and its surroundings led to the exodus of elite Filipino mestizos to Quezon City. During the 1950s the subsequent flight of these elite families led to the expansion of the Quezon City suburbs of Quezon and Makati. At the same time, outlying suburbs like the Parañaque (to the southwest), Mandaluyong (adjacent to Makati), and San Juan (just north of Mandaluyong) were developed for manufacturing and business use (see Caoili 1999). The development of these suburbs was further enabled by policies that sought a decentralization of planning authority, such as the Local Autonomy Act of 1959 (Republic Act No. 2264), which granted local and municipal governments great fiscal, planning, and regulatory powers. Predictably, this act tended to benefit the landholding elite since local governments were not vested with the powers to tax municipal residents, and the necessary finances were still under the authority of the state government. Thus, property development and the construction of urban infrastructure was left to the control of private developers (see Magno-Ballesteros 2000b).
Hoping to benefit from the growing political capital in Metro Manila, several families, such as the Ortigas and Aranetas, began establishing elite suburbs to the north of Manila City. Families who moved to these suburbs were within earshot of the political and business happenings in Quezon City but far enough away to escape the unsettling growth of the middle- and lower-class settlements mushrooming throughout the inner city of Manila. While the early trend of urbanization during this period began to move rapidly northward, the Ayala Corporation, possessing tremendous foresight, laid out plans to make the marshlands of Makati into the financial center of Metro Manila. Moving away from investments in agriculture or manufacturing, Ayala wanted Makati to capitalize on the emergence of the financial and service industries. By the 1950s the corporation had developed more than 2,200 acres of property holdings (more than 50 percent of Makati's land area) that it had been accumulating since the 1930s into a mixture of financial, commercial, and residential subdivisions. It was to be the first truly large-scale multipurpose real estate development in all of Southeast Asia. Eventually Makati became the core of this elite suburbanization.
The uneasy period marked by the transition between Marcos and his successors dramatically affected spatial change throughout Metro Manila. The former dictator's decades of political maneuvering and coercion had left the country near financial collapse. A number of external factors coincided with Marcos's obvious desire to maintain his presidency and wealth. These dynamics caused the president to adopt an aggressive policy of overseas borrowing, which left the country in the deepest recession it had experienced since the postwar period.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Abbreviations viiPreface ix
Introduction. An Ethnography of Return 1
Part I: Departures
1. The Balikbayan Economy: Filipino Americans and the Contemporary Transformation of Manila 29
2. The Foreign Local: Balikbayans, Overseas Filipino Workers,and the Return Economy 49
3. Transnational Real Estate: Selling the American Dream in the Philippines 72
Part II. Returns
4. The Balikbayan Hotel: Touristic Performance in Manila and the Anxiety of Return 115
5. The Balikbayan House: The Precarity of Return Migrant Homes 131
6. Domestic Affects: The Philippine Retirement Authority, Retiree Visas, and the National Discourse of Homecoming 148
Conclusion: Retirement Landscapes and the Geography of Exception 163
Epilogue 179
Notes 187
References 197
Index 209
What People are Saying About This
"Migrant Returns is an important book and especially timely given its analysis of our current global moment, the contemporary Philippines, and the history of migrations between the United States and the Philippines. It could easily become a standard reference for the history of neoliberal migrancy in the early twenty-first century."
"While the balikbayan—or return migrant—has been a staple figure in Filipino government policies, movies, television shows, and other venues of the popular imagination, no work has fully rendered the multiple dimensions of migrant return. Nuanced and trenchantly argued, Migrant Returns is an outstanding ethnographic opus that will make a major contribution to scholarship in Asian American studies, Asian studies, migration and diaspora studies, and globalization."