The ubiquitous Pinoy

I have a strong feeling that the day will come when Tagalog will become as major a language as English or Spanish. Any Pinoy can travel the world and be at ease that there will be someone who will understand him wherever he goes. Thanks to our rotten politicians who did nothing to make our economy respectable, Pinoys found it necessary to go far and wide to earn a living.

As it is now starting to happen, there is hardly a corner of the world that had not been settled by Pinoys for economic reasons. And because many of these Pinoys ended up as yayas, it is entirely possible that the next generation of Singaporeans, Europeans and yes, even those of the tribe of Cheap Shot in Hong Kong would be able to speak or understand Tagalog. I noticed a Pinay yaya pushing a Caucasian kid in a stroller in a Singapore mall last week and she was talking to the toddler in Tagalog. My wife and I saw that same scene on board a cruise ship last year in Greece.

Oh well… unlike the Mexicans and other Latin Americans whose migrant workers basically went to the US, our workers went everywhere. This is also why OFW remittances were not as badly affected as the remittances of the Latin Americans whose jobs vanished in America.

Given the declining population growth rates in Europe and Japan, they may have no choice but to admit an ever increasing number of Pinoy migrants. And why not? We are just about the most culturally adoptable people I know of. We tend to blend with the population of host countries. We don’t insist on separating ourselves by wearing head scarves or national costumes as everyday attire. Unlike Hispanics in America who insist on special privileges in schools and other institutions to speak in Spanish, we have no problem speaking in English.

But we do have the tendency to find security with fellow Pinoys and if the Pinoy community is big enough, to break up into regional groupings too. I am always amazed every time I walk down Orchard Road in Singapore and pass by Lucky Plaza. It is almost as if we have conquered that patch of the island state. Last week, I noted that there are stores there that sell among other things, frozen Vigan longaniza from Gov Chavit’s home province.

There was a Philippine National Bank and a Metro Bank branch in Lucky Plaza as well as a number of remittance centers. Smart has a branch there too. SM or Ayala should buy the building and complete the Philippine conquest of that mall. I am told that it is full house on Sundays when our yayas go there during their day off.

In a mall near my son’s place at Novena, my wife and I were looking at a store that specializes in providing solutions to various foot disorders. I have this painful heel spur that limits my ability to walk long distances and so we decided to inquire what they have. A Singaporean sales clerk initially attended to us but it was difficult to communicate with her surprisingly limited English. Then the store’s podiatrist came and she happened to be Pinay who sounded like she knew her business. They made a sale.

As we walked back to my son’s place after a chicken rice dinner, we came upon a Catholic Church conducting Holy Thursday Mass. Most of the people there looked like Pinoys and most probably are. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that were it not for Pinoys, attendance in Catholic Churches in many parts of the world, particularly in Europe, would have declined enough to close the church.

My son, who is better traveled than I, tells me that he has met Pinoys in the unlikeliest places in the world. While he was working for a food manufacturing company in an isolated rural part of Ireland, he was greeted on his first day of work by a Pinay working in the company cafeteria.

Indeed, this mass migration of Pinoys has already affected life back home. We are now starting to have generations of Pinoys who grew up in homes broken up by the need for one or both parents to work abroad. While studies showed that OFW children were in general better provided for and better educated, one wonders about the long term emotional impact of not having a normal family while growing up.

This reminds me of how a major network suffered a ratings setback some years ago because its scriptwriters failed to account for mothers going abroad to work and leaving their husbands behind to raise the children. Traditional gender roles have shifted and the network was till gearing their prime time offerings to mothers, the way it had traditionally been doing. The other network had somehow managed to offer raunchier programs that appealed to the husbands left behind.

And even after they have returned, focused group interviews showed OFW mothers were no longer attracted to traditional soap operas where the women are portrayed as long suffering martyrs. Having experienced working abroad and overcoming difficult conditions there, OFW women are more inclined to appreciate telenovelas where women are portrayed as more empowered and less inclined towards traditional gender expectations.

This brings up another important concern: whether OFW remittances are creating a nation of unproductive citizens (like lazy husbands) who are content to just sit around waiting for their monthly fund transfers. There are fears that those left behind are unable or unwilling to find work because they are happy enough with the peso equivalent of the “padala” from the OFW mother or father or both.

This problem could happen to the macroeconomy too. A BSP paper “Philippine Overseas Workers and Migrants’ Remittances: The Dutch Disease Question and the Cyclicality Issue” raised this issue. Happily, the study concluded that while remittances play a significant role in the economy, there is still “no strong evidence to suggest that remittances have led to a Dutch disease phenomenon.”

Dutch disease, which describes the deterioration of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands due to strong reliance on natural gas production, is an economic theory that explains that de-industrialization of a nation because of its dependency on other revenue sources, specifically, foreign exchange inflows. I suspect the reliability of OFW remittance may be breeding complacency among our leaders and the families left behind.

Exporting labor was supposed to be a stop gap measure resorted to by the Marcos government while the economy was supposedly being developed and still unable to absorb the flow of people into the labor force. But the stop gap measure has been there for decades now and government is showing no signs that it is ready to depend on other means to sustain the economy. In fact, the economy has deteriorated in the meantime while population growth exerts an increasing pressure on jobs creation.

Going abroad to find decent work is now seen as a fact of life. A McCann Erickson survey of our young people has shown that the ultimate ambition of our youth is to go abroad to work. The biggest number of graduates appears to be in nursing and tourism related courses because of the supposed promise of these courses for students to eventually work abroad.

Nothing wrong with that. My experience with my own children is that sending them abroad straight out of college was the best post graduate course in life they could get. But our people should have a real choice about where to work. They shouldn’t have to go abroad because our economy cannot give them a good job here.

That’s the real challenge for all those people who want to become president in 2010. They should give us a program that should revitalize domestic job creation through a more robust economy. Or even just have a credible program to harness OFW remittance flows so that it could be used to provide the capital needed to sustain the growth of other sectors of the economy.

Then again, if nothing really happens to our economy… that would give us no choice but to populate and conquer the world whether the world wants it or not. Actually, we have started that process already. The world just wouldn’t be the same without all the Pinay yayas and nurses and all our sailors doing what they do best.

No comparison

From Marilyn Robles.

Tatay: Bagsak ka na naman! Ba’t di mo gayahin si Pedro? Palaging may honor.

Anak: Unfair naman kung ikumpara nyo ako kay Pedro.

Tatay:  Bakit naman?

Anak:  Matalino tatay nun!!!

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]