Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration

On the same day that reporter Jeffrey Kaye visited the Tondo hospital in northwest Manila, members of an employees association wearing hospital uniforms rallied in the outside courtyard demanding pay raises. The nurses at the hospital took home about $261 a month, while in the United States, nurses earn, on average, more than fifteen times that rate of pay. Between 2000 and 2007, nearly 78,000 qualified nurses left the Philippines to work abroad: each year the Philippine president hands out Bagong Bayani ("modern-day heroes") awards to the country's "outstanding and exemplary" migrant workers. Migrant labor accounts for the Philippines' second largest source of export revenue and they ship out nurses like another country might export textiles. Nurses in the Philippines, farmers in Senegal, Dominican factory workers in rural Pennsylvania, even Indian software engineers working in California—all are pieces of a larger system Kaye calls "coyote capitalism." Coyote capitalism is the ide