The central question this book has explored is how language is embedded in the labor migration infrastructure that produces transnational Filipino domestic workers (FDWs) and conditions and regulates their mobility. In examining how language is embedded in the labor migration infrastructure, this book contributes to unpacking the role of language in what has been called ‘the black box of migration’ (Lindquist et al., 2012). I have argued that scripts – templates of language practices that indexically link ways of speaking to ways of being and that are differentially convertible to other forms of capital – can serve as starting points for unpacking and understanding the intricate web of practices of different actors at various nodes of the infrastructure of labor migration. I have shown how the regulation of worker mobility in a regime of government-sponsored labor migration has engendered both the multiplication and the multiplicity of scripts as actors at various nodes of the labor migration infrastructure produce particular types of mobile workers, and market and legitimize the linguistic resources of these workers, as well as differentiate and position themselves.

Language and Labor Migration

In tracing the networks of social actors, processes and practices that constitute the infrastructure of government-sponsored labor migration, this book has highlighted the need to understand how language and, in particular, scripts are interwoven into the practice of labor brokering. Labor brokers configure would-be migrants into specific types of mobile, laboring bodies. As has been shown in this book, both state and non-state actors can act as labor brokers who regulate, mediate and produce the supply of and demand for workers in labor markets. This highlights ‘the uneasy distinctions between state and market, formal and informal...’ (Lindquist et al., 2012: 8); these uneasy distinctions are at the root of the tensions between pride and profit (Duchêne & Heller, 2012b) that animate the scripts produced by the state (Chapters 2 and 3), transnational maid agencies (Chapter 4) and even by the FDWs themselves (Chapter 5).