Since the 1980s, labour migration has been increasingly feminized in East and Southeast (hereafter E/SE) Asia.By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than two million women were estimated to be working in the region, accounting for one third of its migrant population. Most female migrants are in reproductive occupations such as domestic work and sex services, in private households and informal commercial sectors. Despite the great need to protect their welfare and human rights, governments of their destination countries view migrants as merely a workforce to meet labour shortages, and ignore protective measures and gender-sensitive policies.Under pressure to increase foreign revenues, labour-source countries encourage their women to migrate and remit their earnings from abroad, but in the face of global competition, governments of source countries have shown little interest in their migrant women’s welfare. In the context of the E/SE Asian countries’ bleak records of human rights practices, non-state actors have assumed increasing importance in advocating migrants’ rights, which they have done through local and transnational networks.
URL : http://www1.bnu.edu.cn/laogong/down/Keiko_Yamanaka_paper.pdf