In the Filipino imagination, return used to be largely an individual or personal experience. Since the 2000s however, return has increasingly become a core industry that the Philippine state relies on for foreign direct investment. Eric J. Pido's Migrant returns focuses on the three sets of actors involved in this return process: the Philippine state, the various real estate corporations and realtors that make up the transnational real estate industry connecting the United States (and in particular Daly City in California) and the Philippines (specifically Metro Manila and its environs), and finally, the Filipino returnees themselves. For this last set of actors, the book uses a multi-sited ethnographic approach, following a group of Filipino-American men and women who return to the Philippines to buy property, secure their assets in the Philippines, supervise the building of houses on land they had previously purchased, and eventually retire.
A key dimension of this process is the active imagining that occurs alongside the physical act of return. Pido writes that ‘return […] is also governed by the thrust of imaginative laboring’ (p. 11). Imaginings of American middle-class prosperity have been driving high-skilled migration out of the Philippines since 1965, but Pido demonstrates how they are also driving return migration back to the Philippines. This is because a significant proportion of these US-based Filipinos have not been able to enjoy the upward class mobility they had imagined they would when they first arrived in the United States. Pido links the uptick in this return people and capital flow with the 2008 Financial Crisis and the collapse of the US housing market. First-generation Filipino Americans affected by the housing bubble bursting in the United States began to look favourably at investing in property in the Philippines as an alternative means of bolstering their income and stretching their retirement savings.
But Migrant returns plays on the twin valences of the word ‘return’ both as the act of going back home, and also as the profit generated from a particular asset. The focus of the Philippine state used to be trained on the export of its citizenry and the claiming of their financial remittances to bolster the national economy. The state apparatus involved in this labor brokerage function continues to be immense, but Pido brings to our attention a new migrant-focused industry that has developed in the Philippines in the last 20 years. This is the migrant return industry which encourages Filipino overseas migrants to invest much larger amounts of capital back in the Philippines, ostensibly as a retirement option, but primarily to shore up the Philippine economy as it struggles to secure sufficient foreign direct investments from the West and East Asia. Pido coins the useful term ‘balikbayan economy’ to refer to ‘the transnational circulation of diaspora labor and capital between the United States and the Philippines’ (p. 12), and zooms in on the flow of overseas Filipino capital into local property markets in the Philippines (and especially Metro Manila). The highlighting of this latter type of capital flow that is increasingly central to the Philippine state's economic stability is a key strength of the book.
The first chapter focuses on the balikbayan economy transforming Metro Manila. Pido writes about the new high-end building developments targeting Filipino returnees that are cropping up throughout the national capital region, and are a world apart from the slums where most Manila residents live. He notes that returnees find themselves still cut off from the rest of their country even as they are now ‘back’ in the home country. The second chapter (‘The foreign local’) continues this theme, focusing on the history and role of remittances and the institutionalisation of these remittances sent by overseas Filipinos to build and shore up the national economy. The chapter gives a history of the balikbayan programme started in 1973 to entice overseas Filipinos to visit or return and how these initiatives — which included special tax exemptions, the ability to buy land, and retirement investment funds — have forever changed the status of overseas Filipinos in the eyes of locals (p. 55).
Chapter 3 (‘Transnational real estate’) focuses on the ‘transnational circuit of real estate capital’ linking Filipino buyers in the United States with the state and private agents in the Philippines. Pido builds on Anna Tsing's idea of an ‘economy of appearances’ (p. 77) which grounds its investment pitches on the potential for economic growth, not the actual existence of a viable economy just yet. He argues that the Philippines is always in this state of potentiality as the same descriptions of the country and its economy that were written in 1974 are still used in 2020 to try to woo investors. This chapter, which is the strongest in the book, demonstrates how this economy of appearances works in the transnational real estate industry. Returnees want to realise their imagined (but never fully actualised) American Dream, but do so in the Philippines. Using real estate brochures and his observations from attending numerous marketing pitches to potential buyers, Pido is able to show how the real estate industry capitalises on these aspirations to sell ‘the appearance of safety, security, and happiness’ (p. 100) that could be potentially available to returning Filipinos willing to invest in new property developments in Manila. At the same time, Pido documents the concerns these returning Filipinos have — from being cheated by unlicensed agents, to more lifestyle concerns (mosquitoes, sewage, pollution, etc.), that are never fully allayed. The mirage of return and retirement as marking the end of anxiety and struggle is a key theme of the book, and Pido ably demonstrates how this mirage is constructed and perpetuated by the Philippine state and private actors in the industry.
The second part of the book focuses on the stories of those who have already returned. Chapter 4 (‘The balikbayan hotel’) looks at balikbayans as tourists, not as returnees. Balikbayan tourism is inherently contradictory as these Filipinos are neither fully foreigners nor newcomers to the country. They still have family in the Philippines but, at the same time, are seen as foreign; traitors for having given up their citizenship, but also heroes for having made it and for sending money home. This chapter attempts to demonstrate how overseas Filipinos move somewhat fluidly between categories of tourist and returnee, as the process of return is drawn out over years and involves many short trips back to the Philippines as tourists to purchase land, and oversee construction or renovation projects.
Chapter 5 zooms in on the precarity of the homes returnees build outside the mega developments advertised by real estate brokers. Though it is not clear what proportion of returnees build their own houses in existing estates versus buying apartments in mega development projects, Pido highlights the struggles of overseas Filipinos who try to build retirement homes from a distance and with fewer resources than property developers typically expect (p. 145). These houses represent returnees’ last attempts at achieving ‘modernity’, but Pido writes that it is a precarious and largely performative modernity that they are able to grasp. Migrant homes are somewhat improvisational in appearance, as they are often marked by poor workmanship, unexpected costs, and long-distance supervision of the construction process. Chapter 6 (‘Domestic affects’) raises further questions about the Philippine retirement industry at the macro-level, noting the accusations of corruption and financial mismanagement that have dogged the retiree investment funds set up by the state. And thus, there is still the constant fear, even after return, that retirees’ hard-earned investments will be wasted.
The Conclusion ends the book somewhat abruptly, highlighting the structural realignment under way in the Philippines to integrate two industries — tourism and retirement — and transform the country into a global retirement haven through the construction of retirement villages for returning balikbayan retirees, as well as Korean, Chinese, and Japanese investors. The end of the book introduces a new element into the retirement landscape in the Philippines, highlighting the role played by Korean and Japanese investors, but this is only briefly mentioned.
Overall, this book usefully troubles the labels of returnee and retiree within migration studies. Pido notes that many balikbayans continue to go back and forth between the Philippines and the United States where they still have family, and many continue to work even as they take advantage of their tax status as retirees. These tensions coexist with additional tensions balikbayans experience as simultaneously foreign and family in the Philippines. Pido's ability to incorporate an analysis of the role of the Philippine state and transnational real estate brokers in exploiting but also perpetuating this tension, makes Migrant returns a valuable addition to Philippine and diaspora studies.
