Jimmy Pacheco and the State of Filipino Caregivers in Israel

Structural discrimination limits Filipino caregivers to being what Margalit describes in her Times feature as transparents: “a community invisible to most Israelis, taking on the work that no one in the society wants to do.” Margalit’s piece then highlights the “byzantine system of barriers” that the Israeli government deploys to keep Filipino caregivers in a state of precarity. They are neither citizens nor residents, and their visas last five years and three months and are very difficulty to renew; they are generally restricted in what region they can work and how many times they can change jobs; they are not allowed to come with immediate family besides siblings; they are required to be on call at all hours; they are not allowed to marry or their visas will be revoked; until 2011, they could not have children and continue to work legally.

And these are only the barriers they face once they arrive and find a job—to even get to that point, caregivers often face a brutal brokerage system that leaves them vulnerable to all manner of violent exploitation and in debt that takes years to pay off. Israeli Supreme Court Justice Isaac Asit termed it a “repugnant phenomenon that could be termed as modern-day slavery.”

These policies and narratives paint a picture of inhumane, systematic exploitation of Filipino people that is astonishing, though not surprising. These forms of exploitation are widespread—Filipino migrant workers encounter abuse worldwide. And they are also not without precedent, as seen here in the United States. The United States subjected the Philippines to an immigration quota of just 50 Filipino people per year from 1934 until World War II. And during that time, two anti-miscegenation bills were brought forth in Washington state that were ultimately blocked thanks to Filipino resistance.

And yet within this exploitative system are compassionate, intimate relationships between Filipino caregivers and their Israeli employers. Filipino caregiver Lourdes Levi will not leave her 96-year-old employer during the conflict in Israel and Gaza. “It’s like a call of responsibility that we need to take for our employer. There’s nobody to take care of them…And even on the other side of your mind, you want to leave and get yourself to safety, deep inside your heart, you are thinking about your employer,” she said to NBC News.

According to Times of Israel, Camille Jesalva canceled her flight to the Philippines to stay with her 95-year-old employer, Nina Hefetz. “I feel like I can’t leave her, like she’s my best friend,” she said. “She trusts me and I trust her. ”

These feel, on one hand, comforting, even triumphant. There is a real narrative here that shows how the relationships between caregiver and employer overcome their conditions, that these caregivers and their elderly employers genuinely care for one another in a way that feels far more than transactional.

The vulnerability that it requires a Filipino caregiver to cultivate a connection with their employer is ultimately what binds them to a brutal system that will endanger them, no matter the interpersonal kindness of their employer.

But this narrative is incomplete, as these real, meaningful relationships also create the conditions for the caregiver to be exploited. “Care exploitation” is a term defined in this piece by Lavender McKittrick-Sweitzer as a way to understand the conditions of essential workers at the height of the pandemic, and I think that it also does well to make sense of the exploitation at work here. McKittrick-Sweitzer writes, “openness makes a caring individual susceptible to exploitation precisely because one is invested in the flourishing of another—affected by another—and so feels the need to aid in their flourishing.” The vulnerability that it requires a Filipino caregiver to cultivate a connection with their employer is ultimately what binds them to a brutal system that will endanger them, no matter the interpersonal kindness of their employer.

And as the Philippines has “actively promoted their export in the global market for domestic, geriatric and family care service,” this care exploitation has beset Filipinos on an international scale and can be entrenched in policy and broader attitudes.

So Pacheco’s story opens out to a much broader one, of a structural refusal to care for those who care for others. It is a lack of care that permeates our laws, props up our economies, and implicates all of us, each of us living in a global community that has come to rely on exploiting not only the labor, but the compassion of vulnerable people.

And yet Robyn Rodriguez, who wrote the book Migrants for Export about Filipino migrant labor, said, “I really leave with sort of a positive note, of migrants organizing transnationally and representing a possibility for maybe something else. I think it’s not all a story of despair.” For as entrenched and widespread as the structural violence is against migrant care workers, so is their resistance.

As we are implicated in those structures of violence, so can we also be enmeshed in communities of care. To combat care exploitation, McKittrick-Sweitzer prescribes solidarity. She writes, “It shouldn’t be surprising that solidarity is the baseline of our responsibility for addressing care exploitation, given that alleviating care exploitation requires being attentive to the well-being and supporting the self-authorship of those we’re standing with.” What this solidarity really, materially looks like is a question that deserves our collective attention and urgency. How can we pay clear attention to systems of oppression, and uplift resistance work that centers those most impacted? What are the stories of resistance and possibility that we can grow into another future?

What solidarity means is that we owe this attention and urgency to the Filipino caregivers mired in brutal systems of oppression; just as we owe it to all who are stuck in systems of oppression; just as we owe it to ourselves.