Looking through the OFW diaspora

By Herbert Vego

OF the 2.19 million Filipinos now working abroad, 97.9% are contract workers. As noted by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), their primary motive is to secure higher income, better career opportunities, and improved living standards for their families. They are driven out by limited, low-paying local job options.

An average of 7,000 Filipinos fly out of the Philippines daily to work or settle abroad, according to the Bureau of Immigration (BI).

As a grade-school child in the 1950s, I would often brag to my classmates about how rich our old relatives in the United States were. I told them about our late Lolo Pete in New York City who had been sending us a monthly package full of chocolate, milk, canned meat, toys, candies and clothes.

Unlike some of my cousins, however, I never wished to replicate my granddad’s foreign adventure. I just thought of earning good grades in school; and the future would take care of itself.

I was already a college sophomore in Manila when Lolo Pete and his wife came home for a short vacation. He wanted to do something lasting for us but there was nothing I asked for. It was only my cousin Merla, a Medical Technology student at Centro Escolar University, who asked him to help her land a job in the United States after graduation.

Since then, Merla has become one of the millions of Filipinos who have gone abroad for “greener pastures.”  In fact, she has already retired and is now enjoying the fruits of her labor with her Filipino husband, children and grandchildren in New York.

Many other cousins, nephews and nieces of mine have spread out to the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Singapore.

It was during the time of former Ferdinand Edralin Marcos Sr. that migration of Filipino workers abroad perked with the implementation of his Balikbayan Program in 1973. It benefited the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) by fostering a connection to the Philippines through incentives like tax-exempt shopping of up to US$1,500 at Duty Free Philippines and visa-free entry for foreign passport holders. It encouraged them to send remittances, fueling national development.

My own son Norbert, a nurse, has worked in Abu Dhabi, Canada and New York.

He would have loved to continue working in a Philippine hospital but changed his mind because nurses in the Philippines were among the lowest-paid professionals.

Looking back, I realize why I intentionally chose to stay behind: As a journalist, I had hoped to play a role in this nation, for which our heroes had fought and died in various struggles against the Spanish, the Japanese and the American invaders. To escape to a foreign soil, I thought, would be tantamount to desertion.

At age 76, I don’t think so anymore. The world has become so small – 16 hours by plane to the other side – that anybody can claim to be a citizen of the world. Anybody can talk and write to anybody anywhere in real time through the cellular phone and be a “netizen.”

On each square meter in the world stand people of different ethnicities and identities. Therefore, each square meter is a microcosm of the world.

And so, the Filipino diaspora or dispersal of Philippine populations is an understandable destiny of a people trying to make both ends meet through skills that fit and fill the labor market abroad.

By sending a monthly allotment to their families here, our borderless workers enable their kids to study in the best local schools and prosper later, hopefully without leaving our native land.