Saudi-watching, China-watching

The numbers are almost incredible: An estimated 1.5 million Filipinos work in Saudi Arabia, 20,000 of them undocumented or irregular (the preferred terms to “illegal”). That’s equivalent to the total population of the city of Manila.

In the past week, “Saudization” kept coming up on Page 1 news, second only to the coverage of the pork barrel scam.  The front-page photos are mainly of Filipinos deported from Saudi, following Saudization, or a shift in the kingdom’s labor policy to now give priority to its own nationals for jobs.

I wonder, though, if the term should be applied as well to the Philippines in the sense that Saudi has become so much a part of the Filipino mind-set. Saudi was the first target market when, during the Marcos era, the labor ministry went full force into the export of Filipinos. Early on, Saudi became a verb, “mag-Saudi” to mean being deployed as an overseas Filipino worker anywhere in the Middle East. “Katas  ng  Saudi” was another term reflecting our growing dependence on overseas work. Painted on a jeepney, it meant the vehicle was bought from earnings in Saudi, with hopes of generating more income; it also meant a new house, or children finishing college.

It is our dependence on Saudi that makes us so fearful of Saudization. But this Saudization has been bandied about for years. In 2011 I wrote a column about Saudization and how our government started warning about it in 2006, but I got many comments from readers, mainly to the effect that threats of Saudization were aired much, much earlier.

The ones most cynical about Saudization were those who had been deployed to or were actually in Saudi. One of them wrote that the Saudis were too dependent on Filipinos (her language was much less diplomatic) and that Saudization was not going to happen in the next 10 years. Well, it is happening now, two years after I wrote the column, although limited to the illegal workers.

In my 2011 column I speculated that Saudization seemed like a way of negotiating with the Philippines. At that time the Saudi government was proposing a downgrading of salaries for foreign domestic helpers and so Saudization sounded like a “take it or leave it” proposition, meaning if we Filipinos couldn’t agree to the survival wage, then we could just get out of the kingdom.

Political games

What’s happened is that because we have so many Filipinos working overseas, our compatriots have become vulnerable, to be used as pawns in political games. We saw that with Taiwan when its government stopped issuing work permits to Filipinos last year, after a Taiwanese national, a fisherman, was killed by our Coast Guard when his boat entered our territory. The ban on Filipinos was lifted only after we apologized.

Right now it’s the Hong Kong government, with no less than Chief Executive C.Y. Leung now threatening sanctions if our government does not apologize for the incident at Rizal Park three years ago, when a busload of Hong Kong Chinese were taken hostage by a former policeman, and eight were killed during the bungled rescue operations. What the sanctions will be are anyone’s guess, but there are fears that it might involve a ban on new Filipino domestic workers.

Given that we have so many overseas Filipinos, I do worry about our foreign-intelligence capabilities. Are our embassies and consulates sufficiently savvy to monitor the pulse of government officials, and the general public, in their host countries, and to predict moves that might have adverse effects on our workers?

For example, with Hong Kong it seems unlikely that the government there will ban domestic workers, simply because people in Hong Kong are so dependent on those workers for the care of their children and elderly. Sure, there are now large numbers of Nepali and Indonesian workers as well, but there still seems to be a preference for Filipinos, because we’re more comfortable with English, and our domestic workers often have university education, and trained as teachers, caregivers and midwives. Note that there’s also a bit of a love-hate relationship here: People in Hong Kong want us for our competence but are also wary because Filipinos are more assertive.

Foreign intelligence

Foreign intelligence isn’t “spying.” It’s simply being able to read what’s going on in a host country. Sometimes it’s literal “reading,” meaning following the mass media. Just reading the Internet edition of the Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post, I sense ambivalence in Hong Kong about that Rizal Park incident. One columnist and member of the LegCo (Legislative Council), Regina Ip Lau Suk, has even written a piece criticizing the way Hong Kong politicians have been riding on the incident. Her view is that it is unrealistic to demand an apology from the Philippine government. Readers’ responses to her column, or at least those who posted their comments, generally agreed with her. One reader even said he had grown weary of the mass media coverage.

Ip is in favor of taking away the visa-free privilege for Filipinos visiting Hong Kong, which another South China Morning Post columnist, Michael Chugani, criticizes as “racist.” He writes, tongue in cheek: “We can do without the 700,000 Filipino tourists who come here annually. But if we ban Filipino maids, who will clean our toilets?”

We do have a Foreign Service Institute under the Department of Foreign Affairs that trains people who will be assigned in our embassies and consulates. I know the training has been strong on Filipino society and culture, since these personnel will all be “ambassadors” in the sense of promoting goodwill.  Now, how much they are trained to understand foreign cultures, and politics, is another matter, certainly not an easy job.

I reiterate that we’re not talking here about spying but about being sensitive to developments in other countries. “Intelligence” is vital not just for our diplomatic corps but also for our corporations that have investments abroad, including the firms that recruit Filipinos for work abroad. And if we have disaster preparedness programs for typhoons and earthquakes, we also need an early warning system to be able to respond to overseas Filipinos being put in harm’s way.

We can extend that to say that with so many Filipinos having relatives or friends working overseas, we all need to be more aware of international developments, especially in the countries where we have relatives deployed.

Speaking as an academician, I hope to see programs in our universities that can help produce more specialists in the politics and culture of particular countries or regions, with Filipinos who have lived abroad as resource persons. I’ve had many interesting conversations with overseas Filipinos talking about how they learned to adjust to local cultures, including rich descriptions of the differences between Hong Kong Chinese and Singaporean Chinese, between Qatar and Dubai, between “Kano” (Americans) and Canadians. Many have also become quite knowledgeable about politics in their host countries.

Which takes us back to our diplomatic corps: Do they give enough time to listen to the Filipinos entrusted to their care?

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