Broken hearts and broken homes -Stop forced migration of Filipino labor!

By Belarmino Dabalos Saguing

Rome, Italy 15 April 2015

The majority of people thaught that the Filipino migration exists because our nation is a nation of adventurers. This is reflected by a comment by an Embassy official in Rome a few years back: “Talagang mga adbenturero lang ang mga Pinoy kaya nagkalat na sila sa lahat ng sulok ng mundo”. This is a lie. He must be grossly mis-informed or just a plain ignorant of the facts.

Filipino migrant workers exists because they are refugees. They leave the country in search for an alternative means to make their family survive, something the Philippines, under the contemporary condition, is not in condition to offer to a big slice of its population. There is unemployment or underemployment, poverty, and as a result, hunger. So, they, having no better alternative left in the country, has to grit their teeth. The luckier ones who could afford or able to raise the required money leave for abroad. Their number, has reached almost 12 million or around 10 percent of the county’s total population representing more or less 20 percent of the total labor force of the country. They have sent a conservative estimate of remittances amounting around $ 22 billion last year, and, despite the global financial crisis, this remittances are expected to increase this year.

Good for the nation? Perhaps to the State, yes. The BSP has remarked that these remittances sent by the migrant workers is a big factor that saved the Philippines from the total financial collapse suffered by some countries and helped in the development of the country. In fact, our government is one of the biggest proponent of using migration as a tool for development.

But not to the migrant workers’ families. The Filipino migrant workers and their family was not touched by the ‘progress in the development of the country’. They are instead became the sacrificial lamb with their broken hearts and broken homes which is the negative effect of forced separation. The so called economic salvation was paid for by enslavement, rapes and maltreatment of many Ofws in the Middle East and elsewhere, and many broken homes in the country. They have literally paid for it with their blood, sweat and tears, while unscrupulous people covet their funds, turned them into commodities for sale while the government just consider them as ‘tools for development’ and closed their eyes to the sufferings of the Ofws abroad and their family at home.

But what really is needed to stop this bleeding out of our labor force?

It is not simple because the root lies in the negligence of the powers be. Their love for easy profit. the ruling class love of money and power. Instead of the creation of basic industries to give the workers jobs that would give salaries to make them live decently, the powers be considered importation because it creates easier profits for the compradors. Instead of just agrarian reforms, they created sham reforms that favour the big landlords who dominates the politics of the country.

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