Governing hope: a political economy of recruitment and settlement in Philippine–Canada migration

Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic and qualitative research conducted between 2010 and 2025 with aspiring migrants, migrant workers, recruiters, settlement practitioners, and state representatives, this paper extends scholarship on migration industries by demonstrating how hope itself is mobilized as a productive force, linking migration governance to the reproduction of precarious labor across sending and receiving states. More precisely, we argue that labor recruitment, pre-departure orientation, and settlement services function, not as discrete interventions, but as structurally co-constituting and interconnected components of migration governance. Although rarely formally coordinated, they operate through shared institutional logics responsive to the interests of both state and capital. Priming migrants for the possibility of permanent residency while preparing them for labor market incorporation characterized by de-skilling, occupational downgrading, and precarious employment, these services cultivate and recalibrate migrant hope, and in so doing, reproduce labor market stratification while simultaneously obscuring the contradictions inherent in Canada's immigration system.