Viewpoint
Today’s hemorrhage
By Juan Mercado
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:56:00 10/28/2008
Filed Under: Migration, Overseas Employment
The context did jolt. Delegates from 151 countries flew into Manila for the Global Forum on Migration Development. Down the road, 3,752 Filipinos stride daily past airport departure gates to seek jobs abroad, 28 times the daily exodus rate chalked up by the first wave of migrants in 1975.
A Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) headcount reveals that 1,005,767 left from January to September this year. The POEA targets 1.3 million job contracts. If signed by year’s end, migrants in 2008 would be 36 times the 1975 record. Yesterday’s trickle is today’s hemorrhage.
This is uncharted territory. We never had a population of 92 million (mid-July estimate). For the first time ever, one out of every 10 Filipinos is abroad. In three out of 10 homes, kids grow up where paychecks substitute for parents. Wedding rings become visas in an “international marriage market that could expand further this decade,” says a Commission on Filipinos Overseas study.
“All the 190 or so sovereign states … are now either points of origin, transit, or destination of migrants—often all three at once,” says the World Migration report. What are the consequences?
“Labor export is dolled-up human trafficking,” cynics here snort. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo chortles about “super-maids.” But did she have a choice?
Money remittances from overseas Filipino workers(OFWs) crested at $14.4 billion in 2007—up from the $1 million sent by migrants in 1975. Recession could cap that inflow to 10 percent of the gross domestic product. Filipinos are the world’s fourth-biggest remitters, after Indians, Chinese and Mexicans.
No country “took off” just on remittances. But the cash lets off steam from pressure-cooker deprivation.
“Hunger in Metro Manila reached a record high of 23 percent,” the poll group Social Weather Stations (SWS) reports. “The proportion of Filipino households in hunger has been in double digits in the past 18 consecutive quarterly SWS national surveys.”
Remittances help households clamber out of poverty, Professor Ernesto Pernia of the University of the Philippines School of Economics reveals. OFW families can spend P1,788 more for education per child as compared with non-OFW households. For healthcare, the elbow room is P668 per head.
Pernia marshaled various studies on Filipino migration at an Ayala forum. Majority of OFWs do not come from the poorest families. “Their remittances can result in higher income inequality.”
Do OFW checks reinforce goofing off? “There is evidence of a decline in labor force participation among remittance recipients—more among females than males.” Children, who used to work, stop working as remittances enable them to go to school. Remittances spur an increase in micro-enterprises for women and self-employment for men.
Richer regions like Metro Manila field more migrants. But OFWs from poorer regions like Western Mindanao share more. “This may contribute to a widening of economic disparities across regions. [Still] they lift the wellbeing of poor households even in lagging regions.”
Oil exports unleashed the “Dutch disease” in Indonesia and some Latin American countries. Cash inflows sapped determination to push tough reforms and improved governance. People were lulled into complacency. “This appears to be happening in the Philippines.”
History works through the family, we’re told. The fabric of the Filipino family is being frayed by long enforced separations, frets the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines president, Archbishop Angel Lagdameo.
About two-thirds of girls were less than seven years of age when their mothers left, Rosemarie Edillon of the Asia Pacific Policy Center (APPC) reports. “Seventeen percent were not yet born when their mothers first left the country.”
The APPC study of 248 families found that “43 percent were not yet born when their fathers left.” Six out of 10 were less than 18 years of age. Yet, a Galilean teacher summed up the most enduring anchor in life in two words: “Our Father…”
The assumption is: “Less time spent with children is compensated with more money that OFW parents send,” Edillon wrote. The findings are more complex. “Only 25 percent considered their relationship with parents as ‘very good’ … Two percent considered it sad.
“OFW children put more premium on time and attention given by their parents. The strain is felt most by young adolescents: 13- to 16-year-olds. Some are “handling more responsibilities in the households that their young minds cannot fully grasp.”
Deliberations at the Global Forum on Migration Development will be relevant. “Reinventing a country beyond borders” is a task that calls for vision. Filipinos ask if today’s leaders, who’ll long be gone before migration ebbs, have been up to the task.
Are Filipinos content with being a one-stop mall for surgeons, pilots, geologists and “super maids”?
“If we are, how do we stretch the limits of our human capital industry?” Pernia asks. Four out of 10 students drop out before finishing primary grades. “If we’re not, what’s the alternative?”
Will future policy responses be relevant to over one million Filipino migrants? They are “wanderers and strangers who live in in-between worlds,” according to Edward Said. “Perennially longing for home, they feel that homecoming is always a possibility, yet never a surety.”
“Neither denizens of their host country nor inhabitants of the land of their birth, they navigate the spaces of their past and present, unsure where their future will be,” says Said. “These men and women reside in the indefinite and shuttle back and forth between promise and certainty.”
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Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com
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