Filipinos working abroad, known as Overseas Filipino Workers, regularly send cash remittances and in-kind gifts (for example, cosmetics, vitamins, clothing) to family in the Philippines. These gifts are not subject to customs duties because, like cash, they contribute to the Philippine economy and provide family members with needed goods. However, because state economic policies have failed to adequately meet citizens’ subsistence requirements, Philippine gift recipients and entrepreneurs in Baguio, northern Philippines, for example, operationalise this transnational flow of goods by diverting selected gifted products into grey spaces of public market trade – transactions that straddle informal/formal and gift/commodity practice and that are sometimes extralegal in nature. Baguio residents who cannot use the gifted goods they receive, for example, may sell or exchange them in commodity transactions at public market stores. Entrepreneurs, in turn, nurture good customer relations by gifting income from these sales, as well as goods, to community welfare initiatives. Simultaneously, depending upon the government’s agenda, officials variably permit or restrict the tax-free import and sale of gifted goods. Given that overseas cash remittances and in-kind gifts continue to support the Philippine economy, I argue that government and entrepreneurs are complicit in using informality as an urban organizing logic when this practice is to their respective advantage.
Operation ‘Bring Them Home’: learning from the large-scale repatriation of overseas Filipino workers in times of crisis
