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My brother-in-law, an accountant in Chicago and still in his
mid-fifties, has told me of his decision to return to his hometown
in Tarlac to spend the rest of his life there. He said with the
recession, it would be foolish for him to stay in the US because the
high cost of living there could just eat up his retirement benefits.
Last year, my doctor friend took up nursing,
passed the board exam and was then enthusiastic about going to the
US to work as a caregiver in one of the nursing homes in Boston.
Now, he has abandoned that plan and chosen to stay put in the
Philippines.
A Filipino-American immigration lawyer Januario
Azarcon has been quoted by the Philippine Star as saying that based
on anecdotal evidence, the number of Filipinos now entering the US
as tourists and overstaying their visas appeared to be on the
decline too.
The New York Times also reported that New
York’s Polish community is shrinking as Polish immigrants are
returning to their homeland because of the dwindling business
opportunities in the US and the lure of Poland’s vibrant economy.
Unemployment woes
The main culprit for this creeping reverse
migration is the worsening outlook on the US economy despite the
$700 billion bailout approved last week by the White House.
According to the US Department of Labor,
employment has eliminated 760,000 jobs for the past nine consecutive
months. In September alone, some 160,000 jobs were lost, the fastest
pace in more than five years.
Over the last year, unemployment in the US has
swelled by 2.2 million, to 9.5 million. Goldman Sachs has already
forecast that the jobless rate in the US could reach 8 percent by
the end of next year, which would be the highest in 25 years.
Contrary to expectations, the US bailout plan
has plunged the US into a deeper quagmire, pulling the rest of the
world in its wake. Although the bailout could restore order to the
financial system and eventually filter through the economy, few
analysts expect it to swiftly reverse the nation’s fortunes.
Great Depression
The cover of Time magazine’s October 13 issue
shows hungry Americans lining up in a free soup kitchen during the
Great Depression of the l930s. The magazine’s lead article asks a
rhetorical question whether what is happening now in the US is the
21st century’s sequel to the massive collapse of the US economy in
the l930s.
According to Wikipedia, the Great Depression in
the US began on October 24, 1929, referred to as the Black Thursday,
the day the stock market crashed. This was a traumatic day for those
who owned stocks as sales volume broke all records.
The market crash marked the beginning of a
decade of high unemployment, poverty, low profits, deflation and
lost opportunities for economic growth in the US.
During the Depression large numbers of Americans
lived in poverty, desperately in need of food, clothing and shelter.
At the worst point of the Great Depression, in 1933, one in four
Americans was out of work.
Reverse brain drain
As the American dream becomes a nightmare, a
third of some one million skilled migrants in the US are thinking of
returning to their homeland and not just because of the country’s
economic melt-down but also because of its skewed immigration
policies.
A study, “Intellectual Property, Immigration
Backlog and a Reverse Brain Drain,” warns of increasing
frustration among skilled immigrants who have to wait for several
years to become permanent residents.
About 30 percent of these immigrants, says the
study’s lead author Vivek Wadhwa of Harvard University, are
Indians. As the Indian economy surges, many Indian immigrants are
returning to their home country, creating the potential of a
sizeable brain drain from the US, Wadhwa says.
Return of the native
According to another study, “The History of
Asians in America,” by Timothy Fong, Filipinos ranked first among
Asian immigrants in the US. From 1820 to 2002, of the 9,479,289
Asians in the US, a total of 1,630,142 were Filipinos, followed by
1,440,285 Chinese and 959,556 Indians.
A survey taken from 1971 to 2002 showed that
Filipinos still topped the list of Asians in the US, with 1,507,240
Filipinos, followed by 996,982 Chinese and 910,760 Indians.
The ABS-CBN Global has placed the current number
of Filipinos in the US at 1,850,314. About 70 percent of them are in
the US West Coast. ABS-CBN also reported that some 57,000 Filipino
immigrants legally enter the US annually, second only to Mexicans
and the largest among Asians.
Even if only half of this number would come back
to the Philippines bringing with them their expertise and savings,
then we could probably reverse the tide. Instead of chasing the
Great American Dream, they could perhaps start chasing the Great
Filipino Dream and finally push this country forward.
opinion@manilatimes.net
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