Re-Creating Mutual Belonging: Filipino Labour Migrants' Local and Transnational Practices Between Finland and the Philippines

This paper demonstrates the unequal embeddedness of transnational Filipino labour migrants in the Finnish and Filipino society.  My study of Filipino labour migrants’ working and living conditions in Finland explored the migrants’ adaptation strategies in their efforts to become integrated in the Finnish society and in staying in touch with the ones left behind. The analysis showed how the integration of Filipino labour migrants to their new host society is influenced by their adaptation strategies, such as of the migrants’ local and transnational practices and contacts. The active participation in sociocultural and religious practices helps the Filipinos to find their way of being in Finland without losing their contacts to the Philippines. The migrants’ adaptive strategies strengthens the Filipinos ethnic identity and in its turn their ethnic belonging to an ethnic minority community in Finland as well as to a transnational community. These two communities should not be perceived as two opposites but as dual sites of mutual belonging consisting of a hybridity of transnational and ethnic collective identities. At the same time, the migrants’ opportunities to become familiar with the Finnish society and to learn the Finnish language have been vague. There is a risk of segregation from the Finnish society if the Filipinos do not become familiar with the Finnish society and language. The research material consisted of open-ended interviews conducted among twenty Filipino cooks, nurses and cleaners and of memos based on ethnographic observations.