Number of Filipinos on Visit Visas Likely To Surge

DUBAI – The largest alliance of Overseas Filipino Workers’ organisations in the Middle East is expecting a surge in the number of Filipino job seekers entering the United Arab Emirates and other Middle East countries on visit visas, in order to avoid huge expenses involved seeking overseas employment.

John Leonard Monterola, Migrante Middle East regional coordinator, said the thousands of retrenched Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) would be forced to use visit visas for entering the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait and other countries in this region.

“This is a natural way out for laid-off workers, their survival instinct that would direct them to do so for their families to survive during this economic crisis,” he stressed.

Monterrola made the remarks following earlier reports in Khaleej Times that a Mobile Re-integration Task Force from Manila has been job-matching and briefing retrenched workers on the possibility of opening their own business at home or shifting to other countries in need of Filipino workers.

“Even if there are thousands of job orders, as earlier declared by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), many Filipino job seekers will be hard pressed and will think twice as they know very well that deployment formalities require huge amount of money,” he said. He added that an aspiring OFWs need at least 50,000 pesos (Dh5,000) or more depending on the position and category of work applied for them to be deployed legally abroad.

“He needs to pay for the processing fees, charges for police and National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) clearances, and the authentication of birth certificates, university diploma and Transcript of Records, which reach nearly Php20,000 (Dh2,000).”

“The processing fees, which is in addition to the one month’s salary authorised by the government as placement fee to the manpower recruitment agency, is burdensome for Filipino job seekers. The higher the salary, the bigger is the amount required to pay for the recruitment fees. Worst, in most cases, the stipulated contractual salary is usually reduced upon arrival at the work site,” he added.

He explained that the huge amount needed to be legally deployed amid poverty and global economic crisis is forcing OFWs to consider visit visa as an entry abroad to gamble their lives and security in the hope of finding jobs.

The regional coordinator of Migrante Middle East said this situation is not only a dilemma not only for Filipino job seekers but also President Arroyo’s administration because it is stuck between deployment regulation and massive sell-out of OFWs abroad.

“President Arroyo issued Administrative Order 247 on December 4, 2008 refocusing the functions of POEA from “regulation to full-blast markets development efforts, the exploration of frontier, fertile job markets for Filipino expatriate workers.”

The case in point, he said, is that of the off-loaded 50 OFWs bound for 
UAE but have been barred from leaving Manila because they have been using visit visas.

“Migrante Middle East urges the Arroyo administration to re-study its “no work visa, no deployment policy”, especially now that it is also imposing a ban on direct hiring in which Filipino workers and their families are strongly resisting. - Lily B. Libo-on, Khaleej Times Online, 8 February 2009

lily@khaleejtimes.com