The Grey Window of Temporary Reintegration: The Involuntary Return and Crisis-Induced Immobility of Filipino Migrant Workers

Return migration literature over the years has developed a strand of work that focuses on the reintegration of migrants in their home countries. In labor migration, this scholarship has largely centered on the long-term and sustainable return and reintegration of migrant workers, and their potential contributions to local development. In comparison, the question of temporary reintegration has received far less attention, yet is an important avenue for extending current understandings of the complex processes of return and reintegration in international labor migration. This article contributes to this inquiry by considering how temporary reintegration unfolds at the intersection of involuntary return and immobility in the lives of migrant workers. Drawing on the narratives of 45 Filipino cruise workers who were repatriated to the Philippines and were unable to sail during the COVID-19 pandemic, I suggest that temporary reintegration can be understood as a grey window of return—a liminal process in which labor migrants re-work the temporality of their involuntary return and immobility in their home countries as they pursue opportunities for re-migration. I analyze how the landlocked seafarers temporarily re-embedded themselves in the home country by creating provisional, in-the-meantime lives to cope with the pandemic, while positioning themselves in “active waiting” in order to accelerate possibilities for re-migration. The analysis shows the different ways migrants exercise agency and resource mobilization in confronting their involuntary return, negotiating their immobility and re-working their aspirations and intentions to leave amid the structural constraints of a global crisis.