This is an article I read about current economic and social status of the country. We already know this. But what really hits me is that the writer is a foreigner which only implies that other parts of the world also knows our plight. What the heck is our gov’t doing?
———————————————————————————-
The country’s prime export is people.
But is migration a real
development strategy?
By George Wehrfritz and Marites Vitug
Newsweek
International
Oct. 4 issue - Galicano Solares lives beneath a highway
overpass in a dank Manila slum. His on-again, off-again construction job pays
$4 a day, considerably more than he earned in the gold mines of Bicol before
he moved to the city in the late 1980s. Yet he can’t afford to educate his
three children-now under the care of relatives in the countryside-let alone
build the middle-class future of their dreams. But the 37-year-old with a
stubbly chin and sweat stains on his T shirt has one advantage over others in
the
squatter settlement: his wife is a domestic helper in Saudi
Arabia. "If there’s an emergency, we call her," he says, "like when one of our children had a fever
recently and we needed money for medicine."
That story of
economic struggle, multiplied thousands of times over, is the story of the Philippines. Despite the wave
of industrial development that has swept much of East
Asia in recent decades,
the country of 80 million remains extremely poor, mismanaged and still
predominantly agrarian. But the Philippines does play a visible
role in the global economy, thanks largely to a single export commodity-its
people. According to the government, 1 million Filipinos will go abroad as
contract workers this year, the biggest exodus ever. "The Philippines has already
surpassed Mexico as the largest
source of migrant labor in the world," says Manolo I. Abella, a migration
specialist at the International Labour Office
in Geneva. In all, about 8
million Filipinos-an astounding one tenth of the country’s citizens-currently
work overseas to support families back home. They remit more than $7 billion
annually, according to the government, but that’s only official transfers. A
recent Asian Development Bank report put the real figure in the $14 billion
to $21 billion range-a sum that dwarfs both foreign direct investment and aid
flowing into the country, and
amounts to 32 percent of GNP.
In the
past, the Philippines was shamed by its
inability to create enough good jobs to keep its people at home. But hard
economic reality-a 14 percent unemployment rate and one of the highest
poverty indexes in the world (nearly half the population subsists on less
than $2 a day)-has shifted the sentiment. Today, in a move that countries
like Indonesia and Bangladesh are likely to
emulate, the government takes the position that,
like it or not, the overseas
workers constitute the nation’s biggest comparative advantage in an
increasingly borderless world. And so Manila makes it easy for its citizens
to emigrate, and works hard, through its embassies, to see that their rights
as foreign workers are protected. When extremists took a Filipino
truck-driver hostage in Iraq recently,
for example, Manila agreed to withdraw
its contingent of soldiers there to win his release.
Unlike much
of East
Asia, where plummeting
fertility rates are the norm, the Philippines could see its
population balloon to 130 million by 2050. Experts say the country would
explode if the flow of migrants were halted. "I’ve always viewed [overseas
employment] as a safety valve," Labor and Employment Secretary Patricia A.
Sto. Tomas told NEWSWEEK. "If you prevent them from going to Hong
Kong or Saudi
Arabia, you might have a
revolution on your hands." That risk, combined with official helplessness to
fix the
local economy, has forced Manila to reconsider
migration in a fundamental way. Its new-and more controversial-position: "Our
traits as a people lend ourselves well to being part of the [global] service
industry," says Tomas. "Perhaps that is what globalization means to
us."
Labor migration is as old as the nation-state. Millions of Irish
fled a devastating potato famine between 1846 and 1848, Chinese fanned out
across Southeast
Asia for similar reasons
in the 19th century and India suffered
a postcolonial brain drain that has only recently begun to reverse
itself. Yet both the volume of today’s labor outflow from the Philippines, and the extent
to which Manila facilitates it, are
unique. In a system that has evolved since strongman Ferdinand Marcos
dispatched crews to work Saudi Arabian oilfields in the 1970s, the government
licenses workers heading overseas, collects fees for each departure,
regulates a mushrooming labor-brokerage industry and tasks its diplomats to
protect a burgeoning expatriate work force based on 56 bilateral treaties
with host nations around the world.
Unlike Mexico, where the vast
majority of departing migrants head for a single country (the United
States) illegally,
Filipinos find themselves welcomed around the world as contract employees,
both semiskilled and professional. They’re laying pipelines in Siberia, mining diamonds
in Angola and sailing ships
in all the world’s oceans. They clean thousands of homes a day from Hong
Kong to Dubai to London; Bahrain’s prime
minister
employs some 50 Filipinos in his own household, and is said to
have developed such a fondness for the woman who manages them all that he
sends her home to the Philippines on vacation each
year accompanied by a bodyguard.
But some experts worry that the
trend will, in the long run, hurt
the Philippines more than help.
While labor migration does serve as an economic stopgap, it’s not a good
development model. That’s especially true when a country starts losing its
best and its brightest workers. Although the stereotypical Filipino migrant
is a nanny in Hong
Kong, the largest
group of new recruits falls under the category "professional and
technical
worker," which includes engineers, pilots, physicians and nurses.
In 2002 they accounted for 35 percent of all departures-and many social
workers fear their flight will bring down the country’s medical system, erode
its technology base and, in the end, ruin any chance the Philippines has of becoming
a modern, industrialized country. "One of the defining characteristics of the
Philippine middle class," says a senior Western economist in Manila, "is that they all
want to get out."
The reason is simple: low pay. Lilian Bayot, a
29-year-old nurse with the Red Cross in Manila, earns $3,000 a
year, which she says is "not enough to support my family." So she is now
awaiting a visa to work in the United States. She plans to settle in Florida, where she’s got a
pending job offer that will pay her $40,000 a year. And she’ll become
eligible for a green card within months. According to a global salary study
done in 2002, the average Filipino nurse earned just $139 a month at home
compared with $650 in Singapore, $982 in Saudi
Arabia and $1,666 in the United
Kingdom. Nurses now
leave the Philippines at three times the
rate at which they matriculate and enter the work force.
Top
college grads face the same salary problem. Last March a
28-year-old medical-school graduate named Elmer Reyes Jacinto stirred a
national outcry when he topped the annual medical board exams (besting 947
other successful test takers) only to announce his intention to move to New
York to
become a nurse. He has since changed his mind-opting instead for a nursing
job in Florida. "It’s hypocritical
when I say it’s not economic," says Jacinto. "But it’s more than that. I see
a brighter future for myself there than here." Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan, vice
chancellor for research at the University of the Philippines in Manila, sees that as a
troubling portent. "Sadly, this is no longer brain drain, but more
appropriately, brain hemorrhage," he says. "Very soon the Philippines will be bled
dry."
Labor migration also has a social cost. Experts say that
overseas employment is exacerbating social problems in the Philippines,
including juvenile delinquency and marital breakups. According to one study,
a typical domestic worker in Saudi
Arabia will remit the bulk
of her $200 monthly salary to her husband, who uses the money to buy consumer
products for the children and to support extended family members looking
for
handouts. The husband often can’t or won’t find work. Worse, says Florence May Cortina, who
heads a help center for migrant workers in Quezon
City near Metro
Manila, the overseas worker is often shocked to learn "there is no savings"
when she returns. Another study declares the kids of migrants "emotional
orphans" more likely to commit crime, take drugs or have children out of
wedlock.
A decade ago, when Fidel Ramos ran the Philippines and the country
looked set to become Asia’s newest
manufacturing center, officials spoke optimistically of bringing overseas
workers home. Their logic: professionals and semiskilled Filipinos with
savings in their pockets could spur development by starting small companies.
"We were riding a wave of growth," says Cielito Habito, Economic Planning
secretary under Ramos. "There was a sense that they had something to come
home to." But the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis sent the country into a
prolonged tailspin, and it hasn’t yet recovered. Habito views outmigration as
a necessary evil, saying: "Some people have begun to argue that this is part
of our natural role in the world. Frankly, I’m ambivalent about
that."
Fernando Aldaba, an economist at Ateneo de Manila University,
argues that the government is using remittance payments to mask its
economic-policy failures. He asserts that to create new and better jobs,
Manila must streamline the economy, attract foreign investment,
encourage entrepreneurship and find ways to make household members
more productive-none of which is happening with any great haste today.
"People leave because of lack of opportunities," he concludes. "The
government shouldn’t be let off the hook."
Migration proponents
insist the situation isn’t quite so dire. Labor outflow, they argue, equips
Filipinos with skills, know-how and capital. They eventually return home and
carry the national economy forward-much like the expatriate Irish did in
their homeland in the 1990s. Pessimists point to Lebanon, where remittances
from overseas have propped up a
dysfunctional state. As Filipinos add to
their achievements overseas, it’s only a matter of time before the government
will face the same question once posed to Indian Prime Minister Indira
Gandhi: How is it that Indians succeed everywhere but in their home
country?
That’s irrelevant to Galicano Solares. When his wife returns
from her second two-year stint in Saudi
Arabia next February, he
hopes to be able to surprise her with news that he, too, will make such a
journey. "I’ve already prepared my passport," he says. "I want to work as a
ship’s repairman in Jamaica." Then they will
typify the new middle-class family: Mom in the Middle
East, Dad in the Caribbean, three kids at home
studying to become engineers and nurses so they, too, might someday venture
abroad. That’s better than living under a freeway, to be sure. But is it the
best Manila can offer? For now,
the answer is yes.
(c) 2005 Newsweek,
Inc.
