The Philippine nation-state often gets world attention only when calamities—such as the recent typhoon Ondoy’s unprecedented flooding of metropolitan Manila, with thousands of homes destroyed and several hundreds killed, due to government neglect; or the nearly 100,000 refugees created by the Arroyo regime’s indiscriminate bombing campaign against the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front—hit the headlines.

So what else is new? Meanwhile, news about the plight of twenty Filipina domestics abused as sex slaves in Saudi Arabia by Abu Khalid (Ellao 2009), or the brutalization of several hundred Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) illegally detained in middle-Eastern jails, hardly merit public attention. A review of the political economy of the Philippines and its historical context might shed light on this strand in the global phenomenon of  200 million people (according to UN estimates) migrating for work outside their impoverished native lands, “spurring heated debates over national identity and border security, and generating suspicion, fear and hatred of the ‘other’ “ (Bencivenni 2008, 1).

This phenomenon concretely evinces what Samir Amin calls “polarization on a world-scale, … the most violent permanent manifestation  of the  capital-labour contradiction  in the history of the expansion of capitalism” (2003, 25)

Three thousand four hundred Filipinos leave daily for work abroad, over a million a year, to join the nearly ten million Filipinos (out of 90 million) already out of the Philippines, scattered around the world. It is the largest global diaspora of migrant labor next to Mexico, the highest exporter of labor in Southeast Asia relative to population size.

By now, for many, this unprecedented daily occurrence of departures is a paltry news item.  The facts when repeated sound now to be more a matter of bad taste or inept mannerism than a banality:  of the ten million OFWs, 75% of them are women, chiefly as domestics and semi-skilled contract workers, in 197 different countries. Over four million more leave, without proper/legal travel and work permits, for unknown destinations. About 3-5 coffins of these OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) arrive at the Manila International Airport every day. Obviously, the reason is not for adventure or tourism,  or even for an exciting, less constrained life (Pagaduan 2006). Frankly, it is for livelihood (any income-generating work, including “sex work”) and a materially improved future.

Tell-Tale Signs and Symptoms

After a visit to the United Nations in 2006, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo met some OFWs at the Waldorf Astoria Towers in Manhattan, New York, to thank them for their remittance. Almost every Filipino now knows that OFWs contribute more than enough to relieve the government of the onerous foreign debt payments to the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (WB/IMF)  and financial consortiums.

In 1998 alone, according to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 755,000 Filipinos found work abroad, sending home a total of P7.5 billion; in the last three years, their annual remittance averaged $5 billion (Tujan 2007). Throughout the 1990s, the average total of migrant workers is about a million a year; they remit over 5 percent of the national GNP, not counting the millions of pesos collected by the Philippine government in myriad taxes and fees.

I am pleased and honored to congratulate the alumni of the Philippine Studies Program at this time when so many events here and in the Philippines—disasters, crises, emergencies–are forcing us to think what we should do to advance social justice and equality, to make another world possible, a better world if possible. Our diverse responses will decide the direction of our lives and perhaps the future of our community.

——-

OVERSEAS FILIPINOS DISPLACED, CROSSING OVER, MOVING ON: RETURNING FROM THE DIASPORA, REDISCOVERING THE HOMELAND *

…my adored land, region of the sun caressed, Pearl of the Orient Sea, our Eden lost…

–JOSE RIZAL, “Mi Ultimo Adios”

I am pleased and honored to congratulate the alumni of the Philippine Studies Program (sponsored by the Philippines Forum, New York, USA) at this time when so many events here and in the Philippines—disasters, crises, emergencies–are forcing us to think what we should do to advance social justice and equality, to make another world possible, a better world if possible.

Our diverse responses will decide the direction of our lives and perhaps the future of our community. It confirms my belief that experience and social practice, not mere ideas, can precipitate change. But of course, without thought and critical reflection, we will surely leave ourselves open to the encroachment of the corporate media—FOX, DisneyWorld, MTV, the infinite glamour of images, shopping malls, commodity fetishism all around—until we have become robotized consumers of the globalized transnational market.  In the spirit of collaborative exchange, I offer the following comments to provoke thought and critical reflection. What’s the end in view? To make a better world if possible.

I.

In October 1997, I was invited to speak at the FIND (Filipino InterCollegiate Networking Dialogue) at SUNY Binghamton; the theme of the two-days conference was: “Re-examining the Filipino Diaspora.” Many students I met in passing were seriously disturbed by the image of Filipinos  around the world shown as “domestics” and “servants,” if not mail-order brides, prostitutes, etc. But, on the whole, the more than a thousand delegates were more seriously engaged in exploring how to achieve “success,” or “agency” in the trendy postmodernist lexicon. They were saturated with readings about the excess or “spectral presences” of Overseas Filipinos and the “shamelessness” of the balikbayans. No wonder, the FIND Conference could not “find” a feasible direction for common action, with the Fil-Ams generally conditioned still by the decades-long neoconservative indoctrination of the Reagan and Bush regimes.

This generation of Fil-Ams, all born after the end of the Vietnam War, differ from the generation I was acquainted with. They were politicized in the mid-sixties and seventies, learning mass politics in the activities of the anti-martial law organizations, the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), and other inter-ethnic coalitions. They supported the Manongs (such as Philip Vera Cruz) at the forefront of the farm workers’ union struggles in California and  the ILWU struggles in Seattle, Hawaii, and elsewhere. While teaching in California and Connecticut, I was politicized by the Civil Rights struggles in the late Sixties and early Seventies, as well as the national-democratic struggle in the Philippines, together with these young Fil-Ams who discovered Bulosan and Bonifacio, who visited the Philippines on their own or in small groups to affiliate with the Kabataang Makabayan and other progressive sectors during the First Quarter Storm, before the declaration of martial law and after.