PRESIDENT Duterte met with the Filipino community in Bangkok, Thailand, last Thursday and spoke of his wish that the time will come when Filipinos do not have to leave the country to find work. “Ang dream ko sa Pilipinas – hindi ko na maabot yan pero sisimulan ko – in 10 years hindi na kayo lalabas ng bansa,” he said.
It is a dream shared by Filipino families who have long felt the loneliness of separation – growing children missing the love and care of their parents; parents, especially mothers, unable to guide their children in their early years when they most need parental guidance; some separated couples breaking up in the face of loneliness in a far country.
There are today an estimated 10 million Filipinos working and living abroad, more than half in the Middle East, notably in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Qatar. Many others are in East Asia – principally Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan – and in Southeast Asia, especially Singapore and Malaysia. The United States is home to hundreds of thousands of Filipinos, many of them undocumented. Filipinos are in all countries of the world, except North Korea, according to one report.
The earliest migrants to the US in the 1940s were mostly members of the US armed forces, professionals, and relatives of earlier migrants. By the 1970s and 1990s, Filipino migrant workers were mostly production, construction, transport, and equipment workers and operators, merchant seamen, and in services. Today, Filipinos workers range from low-skilled domestics to doctors, nurses, engineers, and other professionals. About half overseas Filipino workers today are women.
To be sure, there is a strong demand for Filipino workers in many countries because of their ability to speak English, their comparatively high level of education, their reputation for getting things done and having good work relationships with their employers, and their ability to get along well with other people in their communities. They are valued as regular church goers in the US and in Europe.
But too many Filipinos today leave the country because there are few good work opportunities in the Philippines. This was what President Duterte had in mind when he said his dream is that someday Filipinos will not need to go abroad to find work.
He may have been over-optimistic when he set a timetable of 10 years for his dream to be realized, but if he and the other officials of government begin now, the dream of overseas work as a choice – not a necessity – for Filipinos will come true sooner than we realize.