Here’s the thing: Migration is a permanent phenomenon. As UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the Second Global Forum on Migration and Development on Wednesday, “with or without an economic crisis, the underlying forces that have led 200 million people to cross international borders in pursuit of a better life will not disappear.”

In a time of great economic turmoil, however, it can also be a lifeline. “Migration can and should be a tool to help lift us out of this economic crisis,” Ban told some 800 delegates from 163 countries, gathered in the Manila forum.

This is a message to which the administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will be more than ordinarily receptive.

Ban did not provide specifics, but Foreign Secretary Alberto Romulo did. Last year, Romulo told the forum, some 200 million migrants worldwide sent back to their home countries about $240 billion.

Ban, only the third UN secretary general to visit the Philippines, said migration makes “economies more efficient, even when they are not growing, by ensuring that the right skills can reach the right places at the right time.”

The Philippines has certainly benefited from its floating population of roughly eight million workers overseas. Billions of dollars remitted by overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have helped raise the country’s gross national product, the standard of living in OFW-heavy provinces and the ordinary Filipino’s awareness about work opportunities abroad.

But there is nothing permanent, or there shouldn’t be, about the country’s deployment of OFWs. As a nation, we must prepare for a time—indeed we must build a future—when labor export will not be a centerpiece of our economic strategy.

This is not to say that we should impose limits on outbound migration. We see the wisdom in Ban’s remarks, issued in a press briefing: “Rather than limit [migration] through national legislation or framework, it is beneficial for everyone to have overall exchanges and cooperation on human mobility to support favorable conditions that are acceptable and accommodating for migration. Too much restriction will increase migration through illegal channels which causes more problems in integration and in social and economic fields.”

Considering that hundreds of thousands leave the country for the proverbial greener pasture abroad, we must make the cause of “cooperation on human mobility” our own.

We do not want a single Filipino to fall victim to unscrupulous recruiters or cruel employers; it is in our deepest national interest that we enter into “overall exchanges” with host countries, allowing us to ensure a minimum level of “favorable conditions” for our workers.

It is also in our deepest national interest to make sure that, to use Ban’s optimistic framework, the “right skills” of Filipino workers “reach the right places at the right time.” There is no gainsaying the experience and expertise our workers learn abroad, which they can then place, eventually, at the country’s disposal.

But the social and personal costs of migration are well documented. The heaviest burden is perhaps that of suffering even the temporary loss of some of the country’s best and brightest, who leave the country not so much in pursuit of a better future but because they find they have no future here at home. In education, for instance, some very good teachers have decided to stay behind. But others, equally good, have left the Philippine educational system to teach English in Texas or Physics in New York. The full benefit of their experience and expertise goes to their American students, not to Filipino pupils. Understood from that perspective, the value of the remittances they make, while substantial and significant, pales in comparison.

Much needs to be done at home, not only on the economic front (such as ensuring progressively higher pay for qualified teachers) but in governance too. (The culture of corruption is an enormous disincentive.)

That was what was missing in Ban’s opening address: A recognition that, while we must lower more barriers to encourage mobility in an increasingly global economy, each country must work to make migration less necessary. Some of the greenest pastures must be found at home.