77 social discourses on Filipino women migrants     Chiho Ogaya Since the introduction of the overseas employment policy by the Philippine government in 1974, the practice of ‘mag-abroad’ or ‘working abroad’ has become socially diffused. In this essay, I explore some ways in which Philippine society has positioned Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) as ‘heroes’ who bring money into the Philippines while simultaneously casting migration as a ‘social problem’. The latter discourse has become particularly significant since the feminization of migration in the 1980s. Some NGOs have actively circulated this discourse of migration as ‘social problem’. They argue that overseas employment is economically necessary, but socially unnecessary, and that the government is not fulfilling its responsibility as it is failing to create domestic job opportunities. Some of these concerns were expressed at the conference ‘Social cost of overseas migration’, organized jointly by Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) and the Philippine Migrant Rights Watch (PMRW – a coalition of migration-related NGOs in the Philippines), in December 2001. The ‘negative effects’ of migration that were identified were often related to the family. These included disruption of family relationships, marital infidelity, delinquency of children, early marriage among migrant children, and increasing income inequalities in sending communities between migrant and non-migrant families. The Episcopal Commission on Migrants and Itinerant People (ECMI – one of the members of PMRW) suggested in one of its leaflets that: ‘the absence of the mother is felt more than the fathers’, ‘why? Because mothers are the normal point of reference for children in situations which requires consultationy.’ (ECMI nondated: 23). Regardless of the fact that official data on marital status of overseas workers are not available and that the limited evidence available suggests that there are more single than married migrant Filipina women, social discourses concerning women’s migration tend to be connected with women’s role as mothers. In other words, the most sensational social cost of migration, ‘Disruption of the Family’, is always referred to through the absence of the mother and the destruction of gender norms. Women’ s migration is identified as being more problematic for families than that of men (Asis, 1995: 20). This discourse contrasts with the 1980 s, when many studies on male ‘solo’ migrants feminist review 77 2004 (180–182) c 2004 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/04 $15 www.feminist-review.com 180