WELL, IT was just a reprieve. Nobody said it was going to be permanent. And so the executions of the Filipino drug mules will take place today anyway.
Your heart bleeds for the kin of the condemned, especially the mothers. That was a heart-tugging picture the other day of Basilisa Ordinario holding up a placard begging the Chinese government to reconsider. Her placard reads, “Respect right to life, call off execution!” with the picture of her daughter, Sally, alongside it. Sally is beaming before the world, a remembrance of happier days when the world still spread out before her, full of possibility, full of life. Alas, all of that is gone now. Her world ends today. Her life ends today.
The Chinese Embassy has begged for understanding. This is just the way things are done in their country, and it is not without justice, it is not without compassion. And true enough, from a perfectly rational viewpoint, one can always rewrite Basilisa’s placard to read, “Respect right to life, don’t push drugs!” True enough, from a perfectly rational viewpoint, one can always say that being used as a pawn in that infernal trade does not free one from blame or the need to pay for the crime. But emotion has a way of drowning out reason in the flurry, or fury, of the present. Executions have a way of banishing past and future, right and wrong, and directing everyone’s gaze only on a life about to be snuffed.
I don’t know that government can do much more than what it has already done. But I do believe that government can do so much more to serve its people, particularly the mass of them that continues to stream forth to other lands, and to lessen, if not entirely prevent, the number of them falling into desperate straits.
I believe it’s time we created an entire department to deal with OFW concerns. It’s time we elevated the various offices currently dealing with OFW concerns under the labor and foreign affairs departments into a separate entity headed by its own secretary.
It’s not just the execution of the drug mules that suggests the need for that, alarming as it is to us, heart-rending as it is to us. The events in the Middle East have done so too. The first quarter of the year alone has driven home the plight of the OFWs as a result of the political upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. That does not include the earthquakes that have visited New Zealand and Japan, which reminded us again how scattered we are across the universe. Something happens in some part of the world, natural or man-made, we have to worry about how it affects the lives of Filipinos living there.
I agree that you may not create a department based on a passing concern, however pressing, you may do so only on the basis of a permanent one. Labor is a permanent concern, foreign affairs are a permanent concern, education, defense and peace and order are permanent concerns. Overseas work is not, or at least not as we would like it to be. And you may not create a department to deal with a concern that can be subsumed by the other departments. OFWs are workers, and so their concerns fall under labor. Where they create a diplomatic stir, their concerns fall under foreign affairs.
Those arguments are refuted by today’s realities. The sheer size of the OFWs, or the sheer scale of the Diaspora, must suggest that putting OFW concerns under labor is wagging the dog with the tail. OFWs haven’t just become the number one priority of labor, they have overstepped the bounds of labor. They are a universe unto itself.
You don’t need to look very far to see how badly we need a separate department to deal with emergencies abroad. Only recently we sent a couple of people, neither of whom has to do with labor and foreign affairs, to do just that. These were Vice President Jojo Binay and Private Citizen Mar Roxas. The first at least got a temporary reprieve for the condemned, the second got nothing. The Taiwanese later agreed to lift the ban on Filipino workers after a prominent Chinese-Filipino, James Dy, went on to re-appeal Roxas’ appeal. Not surprisingly, Roxas claimed the credit. But the point is that OFW concerns are now far too huge to relegate to the other departments.
Doubtless Binay’s and Roxas’ missions had to do with emergencies. But OFW concerns have now become permanent emergencies. At the very least that is so because the world is in turmoil, and there are few spots in that world where Filipinos are not trying to survive. Syria has followed in the wake of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, as other Middle East countries are bound to do as versions of people power rock their shores. I don’t buy the knee-jerk reaction of the organizations working with migrant labor to criticize government for failing to extend a helping hand to the beleaguered OFWs in the war-torn countries. But I do buy the need to attend to the OFWs far better than they have been attended to in the past as their contribution to keeping us afloat—“modern-day heroes,” we call them—bids us do. Mahiya-hiya naman tayo.
At the very most, that is because the OFWs themselves have become a permanent emergency. Conceived to supplement local employment, overseas work has become the main source of employment for the country today. That is the source of hope for a better life, realizable or not, for the poorest of the poor. The stories, at once horrifying and amusing, at once adventurous and dolorous, about the ingenuity of OFWs in managing to live abroad as illegal aliens, or in managing to get back on their feet amid war, amid deportations, amid prosecution, short of execution, testify to how much of a permanent emergency they have become.
Give them an office or their own.
Give them a home of their own.