"Upsides, downsides"
"Upsides, downsides"
It started when President Ferdinand Marcos negotiated with the oil-rich and cash-awash Middle Eastern potentates to hire Filipino workers, engineers included, after the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries hiked the world prices of petroleum.
The Middle East was on a construction binge with the excess dollars earned from their then only tradeable resource—oil. And Imelda Marcos, the peripatetic First Lady, got more and more Middle Eastern strongmen, including Libya’s Ghadaffi, to hire Filipinos, this time to include doctors and nurses.
From a few hundred thousand by the time Marcos left the political scene, the numbers have since ballooned to almost a tenth of the population. And OFWs are everywhere—in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore, even Malaysia.
There is hardly any European Union member state where you will not find Filipinos working, as doctors, nurses or engineers, or even domestic helpers. And in the shipping industry, whether Greek-owned, or ships carrying the Liberian and Panamanian flags of convenience. And the luxury cruise liners of Malaysia’s Genting or Carribean and Mediterranean vessels, or the container ships and oil tankers that ply the high seas.
They are now in Australia and New Zealand, even Papua New Guinea and Palau in the Pacific.
And Africa as well, particularly oil-endowed Nigeria, or the “istan” countries of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Soon, they will work in droves in Russia, as they have begun in Mongolia.
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It is probably only in South America, similarly Catholic like the Philippines, with a work force sufficient if not in excess of labor demand, where the Filipino diaspora is not so evident.
As far back as a century before, when the Americans needed plantation workers in the volcanic fields of their Hawaiian territory, Filipino farmhands were hired. Now Filipinos, from professionals to factory workers, populate the US of A and Canada.
When the OFW phenomenon began, I worried about when the Middle East would stop hiring our countrymen. What happens when the construction boom peters out, I thought.
But no, Filipinos now run the hotels and shopping centers that the Middle East built, even their seaports and their spanking air terminals.
The world, it seems, would never run out of jobs for OFWs. And countries facing a demographic winter, mostly from the developed and over-developed countries, will always need workers. Filipinos, being at the very least bilingual, with conversational proficiency in English, would normally fit the bill.
When I first came to Taiwan as the Philippine representative here in the middle of 2016, there were 120,000 Filipinos working in the factories. Now the number is almost 160,000—an increase of 30 percent in a span of three years.
Last year, some $32 billion were remitted by our bagong bayani to fuel the consumption economy. That’s 1.6-trillion Philippine pesos, some 40 percent of the national expenditure budget this year.
Of course, much of this goes back to foreign countries, because our consumption-driven economy is import-dependent. We import basics such as oil from the Middle East, just as we import clothing from China, Japan, Korea, the EU and the US. Never mind the machinery that we import from Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, for these are investments to induce higher domestic productivity.
Still, could you imagine an economy not propped up by OFW remittances?
Add to this labor-only phenomenon the business process outsourcing industry, the so-named call centers without which there would be no real estate boom we have been experiencing in the last decade.
But even as the benefits to the economy are huge, there are social costs to this diaspora: broken families, wayward children lured into drugs, depression and sometimes insanity, even.
There are threats to the export of labor such as artificial intelligence, which potentially could also negatively affect our BPOs. But that is not universally applicable to all work processes. And the initial cost would be expensive especially to less-capitalized firms.
Will the demographic winter that presently bedevils industrialized countries and which requires them to source labor from overseas cure itself within a generation?
Despite huge subsidies offered by their governments to bear children, many modern couples prefer to be childless, or at most have single progenies. The parental responsibilities which most Filipinos are adaptable to (at least for now) are alien to many foreign couples.
Apart from the social costs which we cannot overlook, there is another downside to the Filipino diaspora that even the creation of a separate Department for Overseas Workers, in the process gouging out the current DOLE cannot solve, and that is brain and brawn drain.
Our hospitals lack doctors and nurses, and this is a bane for both public and private hospitals, more so in the public system which caters to the poor and middle class. We may have legislated universal health care, but that is nothing else but a paper victory or sop for the under-privileged, with PhilHealth’s financial woes on top of the brain drain. Everyone and his mother in the medical profession would rather work abroad for more handsome pay.
Even finishing carpenters and welders, plumbers and woodworkers have become a rarity whether in NCR or the provinces. After a course in TESDA, they would rather work abroad.
And teachers as well. It is bad enough that higher emoluments in the public school system have made private schools scrounging for teachers. Exceptions are Ateneo and De La Salle, and others of their class, where tuition is affordable only to children of the affluent.
The problem would get worse when China with its 1.4-billion population opens up to English teachers and even domestic workers and caregivers.
Upsides, downsides. But as it is, given the state of our economic needs and a huge population that must feed and clothe itself, the Filipino diaspora seems unstoppable, not within my lifetime or my children’s.