Coming home to roost - Why And Why Not

Those Filipino Japayukis in skin-tight jeans seemed to be in partying mood as they deplaned from the short flight from Tokyo. But looks can be very deceiving. Making light of why they were coming home en masse, one giggly little lady quipped that it won't be fun to spend time in a Japanese jail.

According to the media reports, some 40,000 Filipino illegal workers -- many in the so-called entertainment industry -- will have to voluntarily return to the Philippines or face immediate arrest and deportation. Being caught in the dragnet would cost some $27,000 in individual fines plus a three-year jail term which includes manual labor.

This time around, said one grim-faced Department of Labor official, the Japanese authorities mean business and better believe it. In the next few days and weeks, expect a virtual flood of Filipino overseas workers fleeing the tender mercies of Japan's hostile public opinion and judicial system.

What's significant about this latest repatriation episode is that there's been considerable media attention, no doubt because Japayukis have always represented an aristoracy of sorts in OFW circles. They consistently earn much more than construction workers in the Middle East, domestic helpers in Hong Kong, factory hands in Taiwan, and sailors in the seven seas.

Only OFWs in certain Western European countries like Italy and France and those in Israel are said to come within range of Japayuki incomes.

Every poor and not-so-poor Filipino family, it is said, dreams of having at least one Japayuki for basic subsidy and a little investment capital. The dream of dreams, of course, is to make it all the way to the United States, Canada or Australia because that could mean eventual immigration and economic deliverance for the entire brood. But that's a middle- and upper-class fantasy. For the laboring and lower classes, having one breadwinner in Japan or Taiwan -- at the very least -- would be fulfillment enough.

Whatever promise Saudi Arabia and the Middle East have held in the past has crumbled in the face of countless rapes and beheadings, not to mention ugly intolerance and suppression of Filipino Christian traditions.

One Philippine diplomat in a major European capital once told me that there were as many as 20,000 OFWs in her area, the bulk of them without legal papers. "The authorities and the police know all about them and just look the other way," she said with supreme confidence. "They are considered better servants than Algerians, Moroccans, Indians and other nationalities."

The same arrangement applies in Tel Aviv where there must be some 10,000 Filipinos, mostly working as caregivers, a euphemism for taking care of the elderly. "Everybody's parents from those of the president to the members of the Knesset (parliament) are being taken care of by Filipinas," one Filipino resident told me. In adjoining Jordan, in fact, Filipino maids have become trusted retainers of the royal family.

What began as a controlled exodus to Saudi Arabia and the Middle East during the Marcos years turned into permanent government policy under the Aquino, Ramos and Estrada regimes. Ferdinand Marcos badly needed to solve his explosive unemployment problem and got added bonuses like a steady source of hard currency and some bargaining chips to keep the Muslim insurgency in Mindanao under benign control.

So habit-forming was this attitude of exporting human beings instead of products that Cory Aquino once made a big show of hailing the maids as "our new national heroines." Take note that those successive coup attempts had made multinational investors bypass the Philippines for Malaysia and Thailand. The fallback of the Cory government was to open the floodgates for the maids to overrun Hong Kong and Singapore where, incidentally, these chattering women have become part of the tourist attraction every Sunday.

Estimates now place the OFW population at over two million. Together, their annual remittances are said to total upwards of $7 billion or the equivalent of the nation's annual expenditures on foreign oil. Without the OFWs and the reliable hard currency stream they represent, the Estrada administration would no doubt have a much more unbalanced budget, the already frightening levels of unemployment will rise even further and the social costs of worsening poverty will just go through the roof.

And by the way, it's not only the Japayukis who are coming home for good. Down south, we are told, the Malaysians have already forced out 60,000 Filipinos from Sabah. Wherever construction workers and maids are deployed, their meagre salaries are being slashed or they're being shipped back in growing numbers. The once-lucrative Taiwan labor market has gone bust. In other words, the days are numbered for the callous export of human beings to make up for the utter lack of economic development at home.