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By Juan T. Gatbonton, Editorial Consultant
My old friend’s losing his youngest son. The
boy is moving to Canada with his wife and daughter. For many
Filipino families, migrating is no longer such a big deal. Every
day, some 2,650 of our people leave for other countries, whether for
job contracts or for keeps. Toronto, 9,000 miles away, is now no
more than a long day’s jet-age commute. There are also cell phones
and the Internet. But emotional distance is as tyrannical as it has
always been; and, at least for old people, the prospects of reunion
are unavoidably uncertain.
Devastating those left behind
My friend’s quietly devastated. His family’s
always been close-knit. The four children live close by, and they
all lunch together after Mass every Sunday. His wife tells him,
“We can’t tell our children how to run their lives.” But he
still can’t understand why his son feels he must go.
Though barely 40, the son and his wife are
two-income, two-car, art-collecting, upwardly mobile Makati
professionals. They’re migrating, he tells his father, “for the
sake of the child.” And my old friend wonders how we’ve become a
country that can’t even assure a decent future for its
grandchildren.
In recent years, more and more of those
migrating are no longer the desperate jobless willing to take
anything the locals won’t. They’re young people relatively
well-established here at home: computer professionals, accountants,
doctors, engineers, architects. Nowadays half of all overseas
Filipino workers (OFWs) are college graduates (nationally, graduates
make up only 9 percent). Yet first-generation migrants must
unavoidably resign themselves to lower-rank work than they did at
home. We have all heard of doctors who become intensive care unit
(ICU) nurses.
A journalist I know became an unlikely security
guard; and one of my nephews, a civil engineer, rivets
“Bombardier” aircraft wings at an assembly line in a Toronto
suburb. What pains him most is the Canadian winter’s bitter cold,
and not seeing the sun for weeks on end.
Raising our children to be migrants
Meanwhile, every Metro Manila college seems to
be offering courses in nursing, care-giving, physical therapy,
computer programming, and hotel-restaurant management.
Language-courses—not only in French or
Spanish, but also in German, Japanese and Korean—are more and more
popular. You could even enroll in a computer course that will teach
you to speak English using an American accent. And I am certain that
these courses are all useful. But why are we raising our young
people to become migrants?
Leader of a new mobile global order?
Growing
interdependence—“globalization”—is enforcing a worldwide
redistribution of jobs, not just in traditional manufacturing but
also in once non-tradable sectors, such as services.
And the optimists say—with Wired
Magazine—that the Philippines, far from lagging behind its
vigorous neighbors, is actually the forerunner of tomorrow’s
distributed economy: the herald of a “new mobile global order.”
The Bank of the Philippine Islands currently
values the remittance industry at some $20 billion. In 2007, $14
billion—almost 15 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—came
in through the banking system. In late 2004, according to the
International Labor Organization, our country became the world’s
largest source of migrant labor—surpassing Mexico. Right now, some
8.3 million Filipinos are deployed in all 193 countries.
Meanwhile the pessimists worry about the social
problems created by families with absent parents, and the
“disturbing dependency syndrome” among their dependents left at
home. Far too many of them have apparently dropped out of the job
market—content with living on the stream of dollars from abroad.
Even for the economy as a whole, our OFW recourse is apparently
becoming counterproductive. Its very success is hampering our
competitiveness in other exports.
We must assure our young there’s hope
Whether it’s the optimist or the pessimists
who will be proved right on the OFW question, we can’t deny
there’s a growing sense of despair about our country’s future.
And it’s not just the leaders we have right now who are to blame.
People cannot break through what the Mexican
intellectual Jorge Castañeda, in the Latin-American context, calls
“the immense concentration of power—the public and private
monopolies in business, the labor movement, the media, the electoral
arena, just about everywhere.”
It’s the system itself that no longer works.
And since the problems are structural, there are no prospects for
short-term improvements that people could look to. Hence, for more
and more of our young people, the only solution is to cut
clean—and to start all over again somewhere else.
We who continue to believe in this country’s
capacity to renew itself must chart for it a new beginning. We must
assure particularly our youth that there is hope for this country.
But until the system begins to work for everyday people—and not
just for the influential and the powerful—parents and grandparents
will wait endlessly for their children to return home.
(Notes and Comment appears fortnightly.)
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