“Greetings from Vordingborg, Denmark,” a friend’s email read. “Will be here until end of the month. Attended Mass yesterday. And guess what? About 90 percent of churchgoers were au pair girls [domestics] from the Philippines. Chatted with Father Patrick, an Irish priest,” she added. “He served at the Redemptorist Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Cebu for over 20 years. Also worked in Dumaguete. You know him?”
Sorry. Never met the padre. But many appreciate the Redemptorists’ work here. The email, however, raises a festering issue: Are today’s “leaders”—Gloria, Erap, Joe de V, Nograles, Manny, the lot—relevant to Filipinos dashing for exits?
About 1.1 million left last year. That rate can “fill six Boeing 747s a day.” Many won’t return. We were the heftiest group in the 54.2 million migrant workers that Asia fielded, the University of Sussex estimates.
Tracking migrants is now a fulltime cottage industry. The National Statistical Coordination Board maintains a migration data base. A commission on migrant workers has been crafted by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines. OFW Consortium whips up media features.
Overseas Filipino workers’ (OFWs’) “padala” [cash remittances] account for 14 percent of the gross domestic product. Yet, no country has broken free of poverty just by remittances. The New York Times’ Jason Deparle cautions: “Migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: its civil religion.”
Even before youngsters graduate, they already plan to scram, Scalabrini Migration Center studies reveal. “TV novellas plumb migrants’ loneliness. Politicians court their votes. Real estate salesmen bury them in condominium brochures,” a summary blog notes.
“Across the archipelago, stories of rags-to-riches compete with stories of rags-to-rags. New malls define the landscape. So do left-behind kids. Gain and loss are so thoroughly joined that the logo of the migrant welfare agency shows the sun doing battle with the rain. Local idiom stresses the uncertainty of the migrant’s lot. An OFW does not say he is off to make his fortune. He says: ‘I am going to try my luck.’”
Padala “raise sharply [the] chances of a Filipino household climbing out of poverty,” Ernesto Pernia of the University of the Philippines School of Economics documented. Cupboards are fuller. Kids get tuition and homes are repaired.
Medicine also becomes available. This is crucial in a country with towns like Pintuyan, Southern Leyte. It has a hospital without nurses, medical technicians, X-ray films, medicine, linens, etc. The only doctor is the director. And she heroically scrounges for funds to provide the barest service.
Padala cushion the impact in OFW homes as food and fuel prices bolt. Today’s inflation slashes more deeply in homes without an OFW. This gap is new too. It also stokes the itch to migrate.
But does corrosive lack of confidence in current leaders spur the exodus? Do today’s “presidentiables” offer hope, would-be migrants ask. Most won’t wait until 2010 to find out. They’re voting now with their feet. “Plenty sits still,” the old axiom goes. “But hunger is a wanderer.”
“The situation of the Filipino poor is of such magnitude that Ms Arroyo’s doles (rice, scholarships, power, etc.) trivializes it,” sociologist Randy David writes. If shoddily crafted, “a social program soon runs out of money, or out of law.” Convicted for plunder, Joseph “Erap” Estrada insists the main issue is corruption. And he peddles his underwhelming sons to lead the opposition’s senatorial list.
Rep. Jose de Venecia can’t figure out why nobody RSVP’d to his “moral revolution” call. Ping Lacson, plastered on a billboard endorsing a facial center, “may have nothing to do with 2010 elections and everything to do with an oversize ego,” wrote the Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Pat Evangelista. Can they restore confidence—and ultimately hope? Would you “buy a second-hand car from these guys”?
Demographics, meanwhile, are recasting labor demands. Birth rates in industrial countries are skidding below replacement levels. “For a civilization obsessed with sex, this is remarkable,” National Intelligence Council’s Herbert Meyer told the Davos Forum.
In 30 years there’ll be 70 to 80 million fewer Europeans. Japan may lose up to 60 million people. You either import workers, many of whom resist cultural integration, as Europe does. Or shut down schools and hospitals, as Japan prefers. “Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with such demographics.”
A renewed “geological lottery,” meanwhile, sent oil prices from $26 a barrel in 2003 to $139 this month. It could crest to $150 by July. Wealth is being massively transferred. “Perhaps half a trillion dollars will land in OPEC coffers—more than at any time since the boom of the 1970s and 1980s,” Businessweek notes.
Migrants in some Middle East nations 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.”
Such wealth will overhaul migration patterns. Will this abort the emerging trend for migrants heading for ports within the region, as the Asian Development Bank found? Filipino migrants will find themselves caught, willy-nilly, in these turbulent changes, as clueless “capos” grandstand.
When the first postwar migrants left, few foresaw we’d become a country of nomads. But that’s what we are today. And that’s what we’ll be in the near future. The ultimate resource is the Filipino’s resilience, humor and faith. More than ever, the old saying holds: “Bloom wherever you’re planted.”
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Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com
