What about contemporary neoliberal globalization is giving rise to new forms of emigration and immigration? How do class inequalities, processes of racialization, nation-building projects, and gendered hierarchies enable or constrain some forms of mobility over others? In what ways are the ideas of belonging, rights and citizenship contested and reconfigured with increased border crossings?  These are amongst the core set of questions that drive Robyn Magalit Rodriguez’s research and teaching.

In her first book, "Migrants for Export:  How the Philippine Brokers Labor to the World" (Spring 2010, University of Minnesota Press), Rodriguez examines the Philippines’ emergence as one of the top labor-exporting countries in the world. The Philippine state deploys workers to the furthest corners of the planet and earns billions of dollars from its citizens’ remittances.

Based on ethnographic research of the Philippines' transnational migration apparatus as well as interviews with various bureaucrats, officials and migrants themselves, Rodriguez argues that the Philippines is a "labor brokerage state" that mobilizes, exports and regulates gendered and racialized Philippine workers for labor markets world-wide. Exporting labor is a neoliberal strategy by which Philippine development has become the burden and responsibility of the states’ worker-citizens. As a labor brokerage state Philippines has reconstructed notions of nationalism and citizenship to normalize out-migration while simultaneously fostering migrants’ ties to the homeland.

In other publications, Rodriguez explores how Philippine migrants engage in counterhegemonic political mobilizations transnationally. She explores the ways migrants make claims to rights and belonging undermine the state’s project of labor brokerage.

Currently, Rodriguez working on a second book manuscript entitled, "In Lady Liberty's Shadow: Immigration and Belonging in New Jersey after 9/11" This book examines the localization of homeland security politics with a focus on municipal struggles over immigration across the state of New Jersey.