A better world with and for migrants

We welcome the news that parliamentarians from South and Southeast Asia who attended the Asian Parliamentarians’ Forum on Migrant Domestic Workers have united to work together for the welfare and protection of their domestic workers in terms of salary and more humane working conditions. Their goal is to get the approval of representative governments, employers and trade unionists who will gather for the ILO convention on migrant workers in June in Geneva.

 About 62 million migrant workers, mostly women, are estimated to come from Asia, according to data provided by Ellene Sana of the Center for Migrant Advocacy. In 2010, about 800,000 out of the estimated 1.36 million Filipinos who left were domestic workers.  

 According to Ellene’s email, in 2009, Bangladesh had 475,000 migrant workers, 6% of these were women who went to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Sri Lanka deploys about 125,000 domestic workers while in 2006, Indonesians deployed 900,000 as domestic workers.

 Ellene also shared the good news about a 2006 policy issued by the POEA that mandated an entry-level salary of US$400 for Filipino domestic workers but which had not been strictly observed, she said, in Malaysia, Singapore, and the Gulf countries.

 So, while we recognize that the unity forged by Asian parliamentarians to protect domestic workers is a very significant first step, we also recognize that the parliamentarians still have to work to get their colleagues and governments back home to support their united stance and declaration. Statements are easy to make, pledges are just as easy to declare but action and commitment are really what migrants, not only domestic workers, need from their governments as well as the governments of migrant-receiving countries. We look forward to migrant-sending governments to really realize that in unity there is strength and that if they unite together to demand for better protection for their workers and really stick to their united commitment, then domestic workers can expect to be treated more humanely especially with strong support from their own governments, with strong commitment from a united pool of migrant-sending governments.

 For 2010, global migrants were estimated to have reached 214 million. The migrant population is larger than the population of Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Russia, Japan, Mexico, Philippines, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Germany for 2010.

 Despite their huge number, larger than the countries mentioned above, they are not represented in the United Nations, for example. With so many millions moving all throughout the world, the global community and governments should now push for the creation of an international agency to really focus on the welfare and protection of migrants.

 The 2009 UNDP report focused on migration and enjoined the global world to consider distributive justice for migrants within a highly unequal world. Honestly declaring that the present world is not what it should be, the UNDP report urged the international community to consider human mobility as a right of each one to reach the goal of genuine human development.

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