DAVAO CITY, 17 April — The Philippines is losing efficient and hardworking professionals who could have shared their skills and talents with fellow Filipinos back home.
The American ambassador to the Philippines, Francis Ricciardone Jr., offered this observation even as he paid tribute to the contribution of Filipinos to overseas labor. “It’s good for us but bad for you,” Ricciardone said during his visit to Cebu last Friday.
Cebu recently lost a batch of 63 teachers to the US state of Texas alone.
The Philippines is one of the biggest source of nurses and teachers for the US. Unofficial estimates have it that of the 11.9 million Asians now living in the US, 2.4 million are Filipinos. Next to the Chinese, who make up 2.7 million, Filipinos are the most dominant Asian ethnic group in the US, followed by Indians at 1.9 million.
Ricciardone described Filipino overseas workers as being “in demand” in the US because they are “among the best.”
The Filipino community in the US and Canada remain the Philippines’ biggest source of dollars. According to the Bangko Sentral, the Americas accounted for $3.3 billion, or more than half the $6.05-billion total remittances of overseas Fiipinos in 2001.
Officials have noted an increasing demand in the number of expatriate teachers in the US to the decline in the number students taking up teaching courses.
Apart from teachers and nurses, Filipino graphics artists and computer programmers are among those in demand in the US.
Many analysts say, however, that the movement of professional and skilled Filipino labor overseas is not at all bad for the country.
Sen. Blas Ople, known as the “father of Filipino overseas labor,” said that apart from providing a vital source of dollars that buttresses the Philippine economy, overseas labor has a double positive effect on the persistent unemployment problem. One positive effect, he said, is that for every Filipino who leaves his work at home for overseas employment, another Filipino gets employed.
Another is that the dollar earnings remitted by migrant workers to the Philippines results in more money that could be spent at home, which means more business, and which in turn means more job opportunities for the increasing number of workers.
“What we need to do is to keep improving our manpower pool so that our economy doesn’t suffer whenever a skilled workers moves out,” Ople once said.
As a result of the execution of Filipino maid Flor Contemplacion in Singapore in early 1995, the Ramos administration restricted the deployment of overseas labor. But when the financial crisis of struck the eastern Asian region in 1997, Ramos eased up the restriction, saying in effect that the government has no right preventing Filipinos from seeking work abroad if it cannot provide enough job opportunities for them.
The policy had been adopted by the Estrada and Arroyo administrations. The government’s emphasis now is to seek more labor markets around the world, to train more manpower to become competitive anywhere in the world, and at the same time to provide safety nets for the so-called “new heroes” in the event that they run out of luck.
