Home for the holidays

A twenty-something single woman I will call M is home for the holidays.

Many years ago M dropped out of school, leaving her home province to work as a maid in Manila and help support her many siblings.

Her employers, seeing her potential, sent her to a nearby public school to finish elementary and high school, where she graduated with honors. They also financed her tuition so she could become a nursing aide.

After a brief on-the-job training in a private hospital in Metro Manila, M found a job in the United Arab Emirates.

In the UAE she polished her English as she interacted with foreigners, learned to use the Internet extensively and found a British boyfriend who, among other things, often treated her out. All this she told to relatives back home by email or phone call, which can be cheap with phone cards and at certain hours in the UAE.

Before Christmas 2010 she returned to the Philippines for the first time in about two years, for a month-long holiday break approved by her Emirates employer. On New Year’s Day M visited her former employers.

She arrived in her usual t-shirt and jeans, wearing silver gladiator sandals, carrying bags of pasalubong: top-quality dates, ground coffee and beans, chocolates and pashmina.

The most striking change was not her slightly slimmer figure but her self-confidence – the self-assurance of someone who has survived on her own in difficult circumstances. Everyone was happy for her.

M is lucky that she has not suffered the trauma of other overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), particularly women, whose foreign experience was mainly one of suffering and various forms of abuse.

She has also escaped the fate of OFWs who have been forced to leave a baby or fetus on return flights from the Middle East.

Instead, M is one of the estimated 10 million Filipinos who are glad to be contributing to the country’s economic growth through their remittances.

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Those remittances did not go down with the global financial meltdown. We like to believe that this was because our workers’ skills were indispensable, but economic analysts think it also had a lot to do with the fact that Filipinos were willing to work for less amid the downturn.

So in 2009, OFWs sent home a hefty $17.35 billion, up 5.65 percent from the previous year, making the Philippines the fourth largest recipient of remittances from its diaspora after India, China and Mexico, according to the World Bank.

The UAE was one of the eight top sources of those remittances, together with the United States, Saudi Arabia, Canada, Japan, the UK, Singapore and Italy.

Think of how much higher remittances could be if OFWs had a skills upgrade, if workers like M were nurses instead of nursing aides, if our nurses were instead doctors in specialized fields, or if our teachers who accepted employment as maids because their Philippine education did not meet requirements abroad actually found work as teachers in other countries.

Even if millions of our workers occupy the lower rungs of employment, economic analysts believe OFW remittances still account for a substantial four percent of the country’s annual economic growth.    

This makes remittances the second largest source of foreign capital for the country, after exports. Analysts have not ruled out the possibility that remittances might overtake exports as the largest source.

That guaranteed source is good news for national leaders who need something positive to show when they are accused of corruption and abuse of power. Filipinos who were forced to find jobs overseas for lack of opportunities in their own land accounted for much of the rosy economic figures during the presidency of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

The remittances also make it easier for entrenched political interests to argue that all is well with the world, and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?

“They have created an underlying floor for the economy that… shielded the conservative Philippine elite from pressure to reform the status quo,” according to the Joint Foreign Chambers of the Philippines, in its advocacy paper titled “Arangkada Philippines 2010” from which I obtained those figures above. (More on this in future columns.)

Those reforms could bring in the kind of job-generating investments that would eventually lure back OFWs. It is easier for political kingpins and businessmen who control local monopolies to argue against reforms that have made other Asian countries leave the Philippines behind in terms of prosperity and other aspects of human development.

Many quarters have pointed out the social costs of the Philippine diaspora. Families end up broken; children grow up without one or both parents.

M is lucky not to have encountered physical or sexual abuse in the UAE, but she has experienced discrimination and misses her family.

At this point the country cannot afford to lose the huge remittances from its massive army of overseas workers. But one day the country must have enough employment opportunities to lure back many of those workers.

There is no place like home.