In their global search for work, Filipinos cross borders both literal and figurative: moving from one country to another, they move across less tangible but no less real lines of social class, race, and national belonging; from “foreign” and “other” into the intimate spaces of homes and hospitals; and, often, from legal citizen to undocumented worker.

As American studies scholar Allan Punzalan Isaac notes in American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), “[T]he concept of immigration (a dominant concern in Asian American studies) is historically and conceptually problematic in reference to Filipinos, who did not necessarily move through borders, but rather, borders continually enfolded them” (38). Further complicating the notion of borders, Filipinos have crossed, with varying ease, the borders of the Spain, Japan and the US under a succession of imperial flags. As national laws respond to global labor flows, Filipinos again find those borders enfolding and ejecting them in a continuous flux of legal and illegal belonging.