Viewpoint
New ports of choice?
By Juan Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:35:00 05/01/2008
Filed Under: Overseas Employment, Migration
The rice and fuel crunch hogs the headlines and evening news for now. But over the long pull, below-the-surface shifts in demography, economics and policy will drive more Filipino and other Asian workers to crisscross the region for new jobs.
Asia has now fielded 54.2 million migrants, a University of Sussex study estimates. Half of these were workers, and “the Philippines sent the largest number.”
Since the mid-1980s, however, growing numbers of migrant have turned inwards, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) points out. “There is now burgeoning international migration within Asia itself.”
Today, a Bhutanese worker is more likely to head for New Delhi or a Filipino might fly to Kuala Lumpur, instead of points beyond. Some countries hire migrants in greater numbers to fill domestic jobs. In Malaysia, Hong Kong and Thailand, the proportion of guest workers exceed 6 percent of their labor forces.
“Developing Asia has the potential to reap big gains from easier migration,” Lea Sumulong and Fan Zhai state in the ADB analysis titled, “Asian Workers on the Move.” But these gains “will not materialize automatically.” Regional cooperation is critical because “an ever larger number of Asian workers (will be) on the move” in the years ahead.
The average migrant mails home to Indonesia or Sri Lanka between $100 and $200 monthly. When added up, these “mites” exceeded $108.1 billion last year—a full third of global send-home remittances. That cascaded into developing Asia homes. Top recipients were China, India and the Philippines.
A study of 17 countries, over a decade, found that migrant remittances whittled the “poverty headcount ratio by 10 percent in Nepal and 6 percent in Bangladesh.” Overseas foreign workers remittances “raise sharply the chances of a Filipino household climbing out of poverty,” writes Ernesto Pernia of the University of the Philippines School of Economics. And the World Bank’s Claudia Martinez and Dean Yang document how neighbors share in fuller cupboards of repaired and repainted guest workers’ families.
Between 1995 and 2000, 4 out of every 10 Asian migrant workers sought jobs within the region. “This is quite different from the situation two decades ago,” Sumulong and Zhai write. The bulk of workers barreled outwards then. “Widening income gaps and divergent demography, within Asia, explain much of this [change].”
The number of elderly people, say, in Taipei or Hong Kong, is rising. This jacks up demand for caregivers. Between 1997 and 2006, for instance, the yearly outflow of Filipina migrant nurses bolted from 5,747 to 13,525.
Sharp declines in fertility also occurred. China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, Taipei and Thailand are working through their “demographic transitions.” Their working age populations will shrink, while those of most South and Southeast Asian countries will expand. “This growing imbalance … is likely to serve as a powerful engine for intra-regional migration over the next two decades,” the report predicts.
“If you have money, even the spirits will turn the mills for you,” a Chinese proverb says. Disparities in income levels are making some Asian countries “important regional poles for labor migration.” Take a middle income labor-receiving country, like Thailand. Its per capita income could be 10 times that of neighboring Burma, a low-income labor-sending country.
The ADB study found three major trends reshaping labor migration policies of Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taipei and Thailand: (a) Ad hoc policies have been replaced by structures to meet long term demand; thus, Singapore has crafted an industry-specific quota system; (b) Entry for skilled workers is facilitated, as the US does; (c) Bilateral agreements to secure cooperation in managing “irregular” migration is multiplying.
Filipinos dub furtive illegal migrants, who duck immigration cops, “tago nang tago” [continually hiding], or TNT. There are at least 2.4 million Asian “TNTs,” the study says. That’s equivalent to six Bruneis.
They are Asia’s version of America’s “wetbacks.” They reveal the “institutional weakness of the present system. [They also mean] there are all-around economic gains to be made from more liberal regimes,” the study asserts.
Singapore estimates that foreign labor contributed 3.2 percentage points to its hefty annual growth rate of 7.8 percent in the 1990s. With the exception of South Korea, most labor receiving countries would “gain in terms of real GDP [gross domestic product] from labor migration liberalization,” ADB simulation models found.
There are, however, significant caveats. “Migration raises vexed social issues,” the study admits. Families crumbling, due to long separation from family heads who work abroad, are just one. A country of nomads “must reinvent itself beyond borders,” The New York Times migration writer Jonathan de Parle wrote.
The study does not factor in consequences from the Middle East’s renewed “geological lottery.” The price of oil has gone through the roof—from $26 a barrel in 2003 to a peak of $120 this month. Gulf countries earned $381 billion last year. And that tidal wave of even depreciated petrodollars is altering everything in its path. That includes labor ports-of-choice.
Migrants in some Middle East countries can exceed 60 percent of the workforce. “The native-born want to enjoy profits and products that immigrant labor makes possible,” the Economist notes. “But they do not want to face the competition immigrants bring.”
“An integrated Asian labor market is yet to emerge,” the ADB study notes. But the fledgling efforts to cooperate and liberalize labor migration “holds great promise for the future.” That promise may yet be aborted as oil alters migration destinations.
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Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com
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