A Closer Look at the Filipino Diaspora

By Manuel `Bong' A. Amora
Inquirer
Posted date: December 12, 2007

Prologue

About 15 years ago, a Filipina school teacher named Tonya worked as a chambermaid for a budget hotel in Taipei and, on her days off, as a baby-sitter for a British couple teaching in a university. Tonya's husband had a technician’s job in more distant Nigeria. They supported four children staying with her retired parents and were saving up in hopes of one day acquiring a pig farm.

Tonya's unfinished house in Northern Mindanao was waiting for funds, but to her it could wait. More important at the moment were her children and her parents – their subsistence assured and the kids' school expenses taken care of. Tonya and her husband are OFWs or Overseas Filipino workers.

Some eight million Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), still citizens of the country, left to seek work abroad, attracted by jobs with salaries that far exceed those in the Philippines. Others left simply because there were no more jobs available in the country. To survive, the Filipino Diaspora became inevitable.

Since then the tragedy of Tonya's scattered family has been multiplied countless times as millions of Filipinos have been forced to leave their homeland for gainful employment. Fully 11 million Global Filipinos are working abroad today – including some three million now permanent residents or citizens of other countries. Note that 11 million is 12 percent of the nation's population of 91.5 million or 30.7 percent of the country's labor force of 35.79 million.

Unemployment in the Philippines hovers above eight percent or about 2.8 million, while underemployment is running at a crushing 25 percent or 8.9 million of the country's workforce. No wonder that `Population below Poverty Line' in the Philippines is 40% of the population – a whopping 36.6 million.

Typical of the big chunk of the country's workforce, Tonya and her husband have to work somewhere else in the world, first to feed hungry mouths and second, for a little flicker of hope of a promising future.

Just what is ‘Diaspora’?

According to the Wikipedia, it means the scattering or dispersion of a group of people to anywhere else in the world. Its history dates back to when the Jews were forcibly expelled and scattered after their captivity in Babylon. As far as one can see, some seven million Jews outside the state of Israel are everywhere in the world today.

In terms of numbers, the Filipino Diaspora at 11 million now outnumbers the original Jewish Diaspora. Each year, the Philippines is sending out more than a million to work abroad through its overseas employment program. Every hour, some 100 migrant workers leave the Philippines. Overseas Filipinos are typically doctors, accountants, IT professionals, engineers, technicians, entertainers, teachers, nurses, seamen, military servicemen, domestic helpers and caregivers.

Professor Belinda Aquino, Director of the Center for Philippines

Studies at the University of Hawaii, says "push" and "pull" explains the Filipino Diaspora.

Sadly, “pushing” Filipinos out of the country is a faltering economy that cannot provide enough jobs, according to Professor Aquino. Another push comes from the wide disparities in a society where there are only a few rich families with world class wealth while a large majority is mired in poverty. To the global Filipino, working outside the country is “greener pasture.” The United States attracts most of the greener pasture-seeking Filipinos but our South East Asian neighbors are fast catching up.

Let’s compare the Philippine per capita income (what the average citizen earns a year) to our neighbors’. Sorted by the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) at Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), the Per Capita Income of the Philippines, according to the International Monetary Fund is US$ 5,365. Thailand is US$ 9,193; Malaysia is US$11,957 - 2.2 times higher than the Philippines’. Hold your breath at how the city-state of Singapore performs – US$ 33,471.

This goes to show how poor we are compared to our neighbors. As a consolation, Vietnam has only US$ 3,393 but it’s fast catching up.

“Pulling” Filipinos abroad meanwhile are demands for educated people like doctors, engineers, nurses, caregivers, and medical technicians. Now that pull has spread further to manual workers, maids, clerks, bartenders, cooks and waitresses. For instance, in under-populated Saudi Arabia are one million Filipino workers – that includes me, my friends and my town mates. Another 500,000 Filipinos are in the other Middle Eastern states – and that includes my town mates, cousins and nieces. Even Filipino entertainers go on extended tours. "Filipinos," says Prof. Aquino, "are all over the place."

A 2001 survey found that 20 percent of Filipinos wanted to leave because, "they saw no hope." That figure rose to 25 percent in 2005. The diaspora then is the direct result to the wave of hopelessness enveloping the country. However, the exodus of workers from the country resulted in what has been referred to as "brain drain." particularly in the health and education sectors. The exodus can also result in underemployment, for example, in cases where doctors undergo retraining to become nurses notwithstanding an increasing number of skilled workers taking on unskilled work overseas.

Economics of a Country

The economic well-being of a country has always been equated with exports that should far outweigh national imports.

It's worth mentioning that the present Philippine exports are semi-conductors, electronic components, garments, copper products, sugar, coconut oil, fruits, and most importantly or most ironically, “labor in warm human bodies.”

Note that timber, yes, the once mighty timber & lumber products from the Philippines, is no longer included in the export list. And our coconut oil exports have dwindled significantly because of palm oil competition while our sugar exports are threatened by competition worldwide. Soon they will become endangered species.

What's left as our significant exports are semi-conductors and electronic components – not “finished products” but second level “raw materials.” Take away the Philippine Export Processing & Special Economic Zones, where the semi-conductors and electronics are manufactured, and we will end up poorer than the proverbial Timbuktu. And the unemployment rate, with the poverty line, will soar even more!

If Atlas Mining in Cebu (now called Carmen Copper Corp) did not resurrect – copper as a Philippine product would join the de-listed items.

Neither are there improvements on the horizon. The Asian Development Bank has reported that, despite a 5.6 percent Philippines' growth rate projected for 2007 (now reaching 7.0%), "job creation is inadequate to make a meaningful dent in unemployment and underemployment."

What happened to the Philippines following the Diaspora?

As said earlier, pushing Filipinos out of the country is a faltering national economy that cannot provide enough jobs. A lot of Filipinos may not know it because paradoxically, the faltering' Philippine economy is being saved at present by OFWs, such that the country is now highly dependent on dollar remittances from the same diaspora.

Ranking fourth in 2006, Overseas Filipino Workers sent back to the home country some US$ 14.6 Billion in remittances. Topping the list is India at US$24.5 billion, followed by Mexico at US$ 24.2 billion, China at US$ 21.0 billion, the Philippines at US$ 14.6 billion and Russia at US$ 13.7 billion.

The US$ 14.6 billion are official remittances that passed through Philippine banks in 2006. A good 50% more are moneys that are hand-carried (paki-padala) or mailed in from abroad without showing up in bank or tax records. That makes it a whopping total of US$22 billion! Compare that to the country's 2006 budget of US$ 17.6 billion; dollar inflow from Diaspora exceeded the national budget by 25%!

Again, we may have not noticed that the Filipino Diaspora's remittances have now logged as the largest source of foreign income, far surpassing the annual average of US$ 2.5 billion foreign direct investment in the country. Note also that the OFW remittances represent a huge chunk of 13.5% to 14.5% of the Philippines GDP, the largest in proportion to the domestic economy among the other five countries mentioned above. WOW!

Isn’t that worth giving a big thanks to the OFWs?

The New Heroes

In the last forty years, the Philippine national economy has been increasingly fueled by these remittances of the Filipino Diaspora. OFWs represent the rhetorical bagong bayani or "new heroes" of the Philippines, signified by the growing abundance of its national labor abroad. That's in the words of our former President Fidel Ramos.

Bayani? Totoo kaya? (Can it be true?) Let’s see.

Send them home and the number of unemployed & under-employed Filipino workforce would balloon to some 19.7 million. Not only that. The yearly US$ 22 billion remittances will be lost. It could mean the Philippine peso plummeting to probably PhP 80 to a US Dollar. I can no longer imagine how much a liter of gasoline would be, and the domino effects thereafter!

After India, Mexico and China, the Philippines is also the fourth largest exporter of hot-bodied labor in the world. One out of eight Filipinos is an OFW, working in some 194 countries and territories and a good number of them plying the globe’s high seas.

Since the seventies, Filipino bodies have been the top Philippine export, and their corpses (about five or six return in coffins daily) are becoming a serious item in the import ledger. In the early 1990s, women comprised 55 percent of overseas foreign workers. Today, some 67 percent of Philippine overseas workers are women, outnumbering the men.

Issues and Concerns

At last Tonya returned home, but as cargo in a wooden crate. Two weeks before, she leapt from the 8th floor of her apartment building after having been brutally raped. A month before the incident, she was frantic to go home but couldn't. Her employer withheld her passport and wouldn't listen to her pleas.

She needed to come home - her husband had just been released from kidnapping in Nigeria. Tortured, shocked and confused, her husband was able to return home with the help of others, but penniless, his mind troubled.

Tonya had finally come home for good. Sadly, her husband couldn't even understand why there was a wake in his own home. Shattered future …tales of broken dreams…

Of course, Tonya and her husband are players in a fictional story. But the story is based on actual occurrences in the lives of OFWs. The point is, although the dispersed Filipinos are earning far more than they would at home, life is often not easy.

Many overseas Filipino workers, both blue collar and white collar, face many difficulties abroad. These include illegal recruitment, mysterious deaths, racial profiling, discrimination and kidnapping. In some countries, such as in Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Middle Eastern countries including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon, many OFWs have reported that their pay was withheld, while others have had their documents confiscated or hidden.

Filipinas have reported on several cases of sexual abuse by employers, while thousands of Filipina women travel abroad for domestic work, only to be tricked by their foreign employers into sexual slavery. Furthermore, some of these workers, who are mostly domestic helpers, are abused, or even murdered.

Other problems include the risk of involvement in a conflict, such as those in Lebanon, Iraq and Nigeria. About 30,000 Filipinos were trapped between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas in the fighting in Lebanon. Luckily, they suffered little in the Hezbollah rocket attacks. But luck will surely run out, maybe next time there will be no escape.

To Conclude

The Philippine peso today has become one of the strongest currencies in Southeast Asia, second only to the Malaysian ringgit. The monthly dollar inflows from the Diaspora have made the peso Asia's best performing currency this year, up nearly 33 percent against the dollar based on the 2007 vs. 2005 figures.

In September of 2005 one dollar got 56 pesos, but now it buys about 42. Many remittances into the Philippines still come from the U.S., but there are also significant flows from countries that have a dollar peg, such as Hong Kong, the Gulf States and other South East Asian countries.

But there are both good and bad effects of the strong peso.

In effect, at almost US$ 100 per barrel of crude, we spent less pesos for the dollars paid for the 350,000 barrels of petrol oil imported everyday. That greatly helped to dampen the rise in gasoline pump price.

Finance Secretary Margarito Teves says that the strong currency also helps the economy overall. "The government has a large stock of debt. For every peso of appreciation, the government saves about P 4.5 to P 5 billion ($100 million) in interest payments…The strong peso would generally have a net favorable effect on the Philippines because by and large the stack of debt has really a tremendous effect on the Philippines' situation."

According to the Manila Bulletin, July 5, 2007 issue, "the Department of Finance (DoF) said that because of the strong local currency, the government saved P20 Billion from interest payments in the first half of 2007. Based on DoF documents, the National Government spent P129 Billion in interest expense for the January-June period, better than the program of P149.9 billion.”

For the second quarter the government programmed interest payments of P55.60 billion, and P12.11 billion for the month of June alone. The full-year program for interest expenses is P303.23 billion.

Note that government's interest expenses are the second biggest item in the national budget. The DoF said government will save about P40 billion in interest payments this year. Last year the DoF reported P30 billion as interest savings on past loans and about P18 billion from its debt exchange program.

Bureau of Treasury numbers say that the government paid P310.1 billion in interest payments last year, way below the program of P340 billion because of lower rates and peso appreciation. DoF officials said, “the government will continue to pay lower interest payments in the next three years until it drops to below P200 billion by 2010. The government's expected outstanding debt this year is P3.924 trillion, or 58.3 percent of gross domestic product."

But the strong peso hurts the very people who help prop it up.

Cynthia Telles heads the Mission for Migrant Workers Hong Kong, said: "People are being punished twice. First is that they are forced into leaving their families behind. Second is that while they work so hard, the amount of money that they get seems to be getting smaller and smaller, while they work harder and harder overseas."

That’s a big blow to overseas Philippine workers, many of whom take jobs as domestic helpers. Tonya, the teacher turned chambermaid, made the equivalent of about US$450 a month. In peso terms, she would now be earning P18,900, down from about P 25,200 two years ago. She used to send P18,000 a month home, but the weaker dollar and higher living costs in Taipei have cut that to P10,000.

Today "the value of our salary is not enough anymore to sustain our lives," most OFWs say. "The reason why we are working abroad is to be able to earn something to improve the economic conditions of our families. But the problem is, under this present condition, OFWs are now suffocated with all these financial difficulties. Now, living is shrinking."

The government acknowledges that overseas workers suffer from the strong peso. That means fewer pesos to help their families. But no immediate relief from the strong peso is in sight for them. But the OFWs have to support families back home, and they have to remit regardless of what the level of the peso is. That, again, is biting the bullet…hard.

Quo vadis, Pinoy? There’s still no other way but the Filipino

Diaspora.

Bong Amora is an OFW who’s been working in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for 14 years. He is at present the Secretary General of OFW Congress-Riyadh, a group of community organizations advocating OFW issues and concerns. He’s also the current President of both the Kalipunang Kaakabay ng Manggagawang Pilipino sa Ibayong Dagat (KAKAMPI-KSA), that oversees the plight and rights of OFWs in the Industrial Area of Riyadh, and Nasipitnon-KSA, International, a hometown organization based in Saudi Arabia.

He’s also one of those who worked for the creation of an OFW-led national political party named Partidong Pangdaigdigang Pilipino - A Worldwide Filipino Alliance.