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Based on insights from Filipina experiences of domestic work in Paris and Hong Kong, this volume breaks through the polarized thinking and migration-centric policy action on the protection of migrant women domestic workers from abuse to link migrants' rights and victimization with livelihood, migration and development. The book contextualizes agency and rights in the workers' capability to secure a livelihood in the global political economy and is instrumental in making the problem of migrant women workers' empowerment both a migration and development agenda. The volume is essential reading for social scientists, bureaucrats and non-governmental political activists interested in the protection of the rights and livelihoods of migrants. It will also appeal to migration and feminist scholars who have yet to adopt the contribution of critical development studies in the analysis of low-skilled female labour migration.

The paradigm of rights, established throughout the academic, policy and migrant activism arenas, governs the protection of vulnerable migrant workers against abuse. To what extent this approach has achieved social justice for the migrant worker in the current global political economy climate is, however, uncertain. In analyzing the use of rights in migrant activism in Hong Kong, this paper shows the limitation of rights  in the migrant experience at the same time as it shows how a new paradigm based on the Capablities Approach could provide a more appropriate framework from which to achieve social justice for the migrant worker.

The paradigm of rights, established throughout the academic, policy and migrant activism arenas, governs the protection of vulnerable migrant workers against abuse. To what extent this approach has achieved social justice for the migrant worker in the current global political economy climate is, however, uncertain. In analyzing the use of rights in migrant activism in Hong Kong, this paper shows the limitation of rights  in the migrant experience at the same time as it shows how a new paradigm based on the Capablities Approach could provide a more appropriate framework from which to achieve social justice for the migrant worker.

Current analyses of trafficking in unskilled female migrant labor are dominated by the concepts of victimization, agency and rights. So far, however, such concepts have done more to legitimate receiving countries' border control protection than to protect the livelihood needs of these migrant workers. Drawing on the experiences of Filipina domestic workers in Paris and Hong Kong, this paper uses Nussbaum's Capabilities Approach to question the efficacy of the current anti-trafficking discourse [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

While international anti-traffi cking policies have traditionally been confi ned to the protection of women traffi cked for prostitution, in 2000, the UN Traffi cking Protocol also recognized overseas domestic workers (ODWs) as unskilled female labor migrants vulnerable to slavery and similar practices. 2 This was a response not only to the large volume of female labor migration for domestic work identifi ed in recent decades but also to the myriad reports and publications on exploitation by employers and traffi ckers. The traditional anti-traffi cking principle of rescuing, reintegrating and repatriating the victim was thus extended to apply to female ODWs. The effi cacy of this victim-based principle, however, has increasingly been shown to have more relevance in legitimizing increased protection for receiving countries’ borders than for the migrant worker (see Doezema 2000, 2002; also Dewey and Zheng in this volume). Despite more recent advances in foregrounding migrant women’s agency and rights as workers, efforts remain hampered by both increasing inequality within the global economy and tightening immigration policies. From poor countries with very limited livelihood options, these migrant women choose overseas domestic work, often at the expense of their human rights. As migrants, they are outsiders whose rights are superseded by the rights of the sovereign, receiving-state while unenforceable by the sending state (Stasiulis and Bakan 1997 ). The agency-rights approach has thus done little to change the historical course of anti-traffi cking policy.

This chapter proposes to unearth the \"latent\" status of agency within structuralist analyses, identified in the previous chapter. It does so with a view to synthesizing the structuralist and structurationist theories underlying the current analyses of migration for domestic work. I use insights from migrant rights NGOs' activities to illustrate the points of connection, demonstrating that it is at these points where the meaning of agency is embodied by the materialist meanings it holds for FODWs. These insights advance the conceptualization of power-exerting agents to empowered or capable agents. I use them to provide the outline around which assumptions underlying protection based on rights can be more fully informed with protection based on empowerment. As will become apparent in the following chapters, the synthesis between the structuralist and structurationist perspectives importantly provide the analytical paradigm for the study's proposed \"capable agency approach,\" and more importantly, for the FODW's actual, practical empowerment.

It is no less heartbreaking to look back now at my first Sunday in Hong Kong. I was enraged and in tears when I saw congregations of overseas domestic workers in the streets of Central, which was so crowded that many had to sit on newspapers and flattened cardboard boxes on the ground. Why aren't they home? They should be home, I remember thinking over and over again. At that stage, I had already experienced one month with the Filipino domestic worker community in Paris. I had already been informed that they came to, and remain in, France to escape the conditions of poverty in the Philippines: dahil sa hirap ng buhay saatin [the hard life back in our homeland], they had all said.