No Remittance Day: The unified cry of 12 million OFWs

The callousness of certain public officials, in a government that has long pretended to be pro-people, but actually are only interested in collecting customs duties and taxes, and such seemingly uncaring bureaucrats like the Customs commissioner, and their anti-people minions and subalterns, should deserve the concerted outrage of twelve million Filipinos. It is our firm belief that the one-day NO REMITTANCE boycott by all OFWs world-wide should be made at least one week or even one month. The impact should be dramatic in order to awaken the impervious officials and personnel in government, and to create a tipping point in the mind of the President and his men.

As a former labor attaché in Malaysia, Kuwait, and Taiwan, I have seen with my own eyes how our millions of migrant workers are making tremendous sacrifices for their families. By sending home no less than twenty-five billions US dollars as remittances, every year, through the formal banking system, these Filipinos abroad are doing the whole country a great favor by making sure that the country's economy has more than enough supply of foreign exchange. Thus, the stability of our currency has remained unperturbed even by some regional instability and global economic upheavals and financial turmoils.

Even as the President himself has already instructed the Customs commissioner to back off and set aside his unilateral and out-of-the blue directive to open balikbayan boxes for suspicion of smuggling, Bert Lina has persisted in his mysterious silence as if he did not hear anything from Malacañan. Prior to the presidential directive to withdraw such an anti-OFW Bureau of Customs policy, the commissioner, seconded by a Malacañan spokesman, has kept on harping that the Customs code allows the bureau to open all boxes in the exercise of its official functions. Not only that, Lina attempted to tax a victory belt of a returning female boxing champion. What audacity, what a shame.

Now that the Bureau of Customs has admitted that it is its duty to open all boxes, let them answer why they allowed hundreds of thousands of tons of garbage from Canada without opening the containers and then refusing to ship them back to its origin. Why has the Bureau singled out the balikbayan boxes coming from the OFWs? Are they the most vulnerable and helpless? It is good that there are vigilant NGO's and PO's like the MIGRANTE INTERNATIONAL that has come out with this NO REMITTANCE DAY so as to make the government know and realize that they cannot fool all the people all the time.

There was a TV commentator who observed that perhaps Bert Lina is a campaign manager of Jojo Binay. By coming out with such a "brilliant idea" of antagonizing the millions of OFWs and their families, Lina is allegedly trying to make Mar Roxas lose and Jojo Binay win. That is assuming that Grace Poe and Rudy Duterte are not running. Whatever are the political repercussions, what matters most to us is that such a callous idea will definitely reinforce the thesis that this government is really anti-people, anti-labo and anti-OFW. Any endorsement by this administration for next year's elections will be nothing else but a mortal kiss of death.

At the end of the day, when this administration is out of government, when Bert Lina is out of Customs and back to his logistics and messengerial businesses, the twelve million OFWs will still be abroad, and still be remitting more than twenty-five million US dollars annually. To the country, they are who really matter most, not Lina, not even this administration. The people know that the NO REMITTANCE DAY deserves total and massive support. It is high time that the callous, the inept, and the uncaring bureaucrats should know that they are not the kings. The people are. There must be more and longer NO REMITTANCE protests. Until the government ceases to be "manhid" and "palpak."