Negotiating Partial Citizenship under Neoliberalism: Regularization Struggles among Filipino Domestic Workers in France (2008–2012)

This article examines the social and historical conditions of negotiations for expanding migrant domestic workers partial citizenship under neoliberal policies. It uses a case study of Filipino domestic workers struggling for regularization in the Parisian region, 2008–2012. Under Sarkozy's neoliberal immigration policy called chosen immigration, Hortefeux, the then Minister of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Cooperative Development, authorized case-by-case “regularization based on work” in his circular of 7 January 2008. Consequently, led by a coalition of trade unions, sans papiers (undocumented) collectives and migrant support groups, large-scale mobilizations occurred demanding rights-based regularization. Although undocumented Filipino domestic workers remained socially invisible during this campaign, a quiet, small-scale but unprecedented mobilization took place among Filipino sans papières. Based on 10 months of fieldwork, this article shows how the neoliberal tendency in the two policy areas of immigration and personal services opened up the opportunity for Filipino migrant women to have access to the institutional resources of the Private Household Workers (PHW) trade union and to break the deadlock of “double irregularity”, that is, the dispossession of both their residential permit and labor contract. This case depended on the activism of a trade unionist of Filipino origin, a trailblazer who filled the structural hole between Filipino ethnic networks and the local domestic workers’ movement. Among the outcomes are the rising consciousness among Filipinos of the usefulness of learning French, as well as a new narrative that incorporates the struggles of Filipino domestic workers in the PHW trade union history.