President Benigno Simeon Aquino III in his fifth and final State of the Nation Address enumerated the accomplishments of his administration. The speech ran over two hours and was said mainly in the vernacular, which many Filipinos appreciated.
Toward the end of the speech, the President thanked the members of his Cabinet, citing each one of them individually, and even a long-time member of his household staff, as well as the stylist and hairdresser that looks after his presidential style. Peppered with dry humor, the speech had several memorable moments. A portion of the speech was devoted to gains made in the labor sector.
“In 2011, according to the Department of Foreign Affairs, there were 9.51 million Filipinos overseas. Based on the latest estimates in December 2014, that number went down to 9.07 million. It is reasonable to say that a good number of the estimated 400,000 Filipinos represented by that decrease came home and were able to find work.”
President Aquino said that the unemployment rate has gone down to 6.8 percent, the lowest in a decade. He also commended Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz for the accomplishments of her department. I asked my friends in the licensed recruitment industry on whether they agree with the DFA’s figures regarding the declining number of overseas Filipinos.
According to John Bertiz, the president of the Philippine Recruitment Agencies Accredited to Saudi Arabia or PRAASA, the demand for Filipino domestic workers continues to increase but the number of skilled Filipino workers is on the decline because their rates are not as competitive as before.
A former OFW based in Saudi Arabia, Jun Aguilar, of the Filipino Migrant Workers’ Group lamented that the lack of accurate data on government’s part has made it nearly impossible to ascertain the veracity of President Aquino’s statement and the figures offered by the DFA.
“The term “Filipinos overseas” rather than the more specific “Filipino overseas workers” is already an indication that we don’t have hard data on labor migration,” Elso Cabangon, also a former OFW based in Saudi Arabia said.
Aguilar said that the law mandates the creation of a Shared Government Information System for Migration to align all data collection and provide the Philippine government a solid footing in tracking migration trends and statistics. Unfortunately, the SGISM remains unimplemented from 1995 up to today.
OFW advocate and founder of the Pinoy Expat/Bloggers Awards (PEBA), Jebee Kenji Solis said that the government should write to the immigration offices of various countries to compare their data with the stock estimates of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas.
President Aquino deserves high praise for the economic gains achieved under his term. However, when it comes to declining numbers in relation to overseas Filipinos, the veracity and basis for such ratios needs further validation.
The question, therefore, should be: How many Filipinos are overseas, where, and for how long? And of those who have since returned, is it because the national economy is stronger or was there a change in labor or immigration policies on the part of the host government?
Unless we can get a hold of more reliable statistics, our economic planners and labor policy experts would have a difficult time correlating the state of the Philippine economy to migration patterns and trends involving Filipinos worldwide.
