Today is International Migrants Day, a great time to honor our overseas Filipino workers.

The United Nations General Assembly proclaimed December 18 as International Migrants Day on December 10, 2000, when the world body adopted the “International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families”.

In the Philippines, migrant workers or overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are hailed as the country’s “new heroes” by the government. But the reasons are different from what affected families and OFWs themselves think. The Philippine government is addicted to dollar remittances of our OFWs and authorities always look forward to the billions of dollars sent by OFWs each month to save the Philippine economy. 

Yes, OFWs save the Philippines from total economic ruin. Their remittances compensate for the profligate spending of the very rich and top government officials. Just imagine how many hours of labor OFWs had to go through to earn the equivalent of P1,500,000 which President Arroyo and her party spend this year in high-class restaurants in the United States. Add to this the huge and piling foreign debt, the billions repatriated by multinationals and portfolio investors. Our agrarian economy cannot produce as much dollars as our OFWs so the policy of labor export is essential to maintaining the decrepit economic system our government is ironically totally proud of. 

Labor export sounds bad but it exists in reality. The government encourages labor export as a way out of poverty for millions that Philippine industry and agriculture cannot employ. Meanwhile, the corrupt and inept government “earns” dollars even as OFWs suffer from lack of adequate protection of their rights as migrants and as workers in places they live and work.  The government also imposes all sorts of taxes and levies on OFWs from the very moment they start the ball rolling in their quest to find decent job away from the country.

While governments worldwide last year unveiled social safety nets for their citizens in the face of the global economic crisis, anti-migrant policies and ideologies became popular. Instead of putting the blaming on capitalist malpractices that cause hardships for all workers, right-wing parties across the world have blamed migrant workers, including OFWs, for supposedly “stealing” jobs from nationals of host countries. This is on top of the substandard working conditions and inferior policies that migrant workers had to contend with in the first place. The Philippine government, which invented the term “new heroes” to describe OFWs, has not done enough to provide protection and care for OFWs.

For the past few years of economic downturn, our OFWs had to work and shuffle two or three jobs in a day to earn the same amount they earned before. If we hear that more and more Americans and other Westerners lose jobs and find it hard to get new ones, just imagine what our OFWs and other migrants go through.

Garry Martinez, chair of the OFW alliance Migrante International, said in a statement today that at least 300 OFWs urgently need immediate repatriation, as we celebrate International Migrants Day. “They include 89 caregivers who are victims of gross contract violations in Saudi Arabia; 51 female runaway domestic helpers at the Doha deportation center; 50 male detainees at the Jeddah deportation center; and 17 OFWs languishing in jail for crimes that they did not commit.” (By the way, this is the same Migrante which Comelec disqualified from joining the 2010 partylist elections.)

According to the Asia Pacific Mission for Migrants, a Hong Kong-based NGO, the “Asia-Pacific region including the Middle East is already a major source of migrant workers around the world and also a major destination. In 2005, the combined number of migrant workers from China, India and the Philippines was 62 million of the 214 million migrant workers worldwide. Intra-regional flows of migrants is also high in Asia-Pacific as Indonesians going to Malaysia, influx of Filipinos to countries in the Middles East or Burmese refugees in Thailand indicate.”

APMM says that “migrant workers in the region are now experiencing more hardships as their labour, cival, social and political rights are subjected to attacks” and enumerated the challenges that migrants face today:

  • South Korea, which has more than a million foreign residents, has copied the example of Taiwan by dropping the free board and lodging in the employment contracts of foreign workers under its Employment Permit System. The government has also intensified crackdowns against undocumented migrant workers and leaders of organizations and unions of migrants have been systematically arrested and deported to weaken the organized ranks of migrants.
  • In Macau, the government has implemented a six-month re-entry ban for those who could not finish their contracts. A similar policy exists in Arab countries.
  • Countries in the Middle East have cut down the numbers of its foreign workers partly to appease its local populace and because it is also affected by the crisis. Many cases of abuses against migrants, especially in Saudi Arabia, remain to be unresolved oftentimes with the aggrieved migrant workers the ones landing in jail or even sentenced to death.
  • The Hong Kong government, meanwhile, has stubbornly refused to include foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in its proposal for a statutory minimum wage and has continued its misinformation campaign so the HK public will accept such an unjust and discriminatory decision. FDWs’ wage in Hong Kong is still very much tightly-bound in the unjust, arbitrary and un-transparent Minimum Allowable Wage (MAW).

Eni Lestari, leader of the International Migrants Alliance, meanwhile said that “Migrant workers form a major bulk of cheap labour that transnational and multinational companies exploit for their superprofits. In the increasingly constricting job market for unskilled and semi-skilled workers where majority of the migrants are found, capitalists are ensured of a supply of cheaper and cheaper labourers as sending countries fiercely compete with each other for a market for their exported workers.”

Lestari laments that “Labor exporting countries [like the Philippines] are more aggressive now in sending off their workers to work in “3D jobs” (dirty, dangerous, difficult). Migrant workers are even sent in war-torn areas like Iraq where US companies are now reaping the gains of the US’ ‘war on terror’”.

So today, in commemoration of International Migrants Day, if you have a relative who is working and toiling abroad, find time to tell him or her, “thank you” and lend support when we hear them raise their voices and their fists to fight this obscene setup of labor export, migrant slavery and predatory policies of governments such as the Philippines. When OFWs say, “pinaghirapan namin ito” (We worked really hard for this), trust them that they meant every word.

The least we could do is to tell our government to honor the heroes they have proclaimed. And by honor, I mean government must protect and not prey on them. For the rest of us and for our own sake, can we please bring some change in this world to put an end to this migration madness?