IMF Team Affirms Weak Links Between OFW Money, Investment

BY JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

MANILA—A TEAM from the International Monetary Fund observed that remittances from an estimated eight million Filipinos abroad have not led to increased investments.

Ever since the country’s investment ratio has steadily declined since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, increasing remittances “has not increased investment,” IMF’s Ayako Fujita and Srikant Seshadri wrote in a policy analysis paper of selected Philippine economic issues done by a six-person IMF team.

IMF’s Country Report 07/131 (released last March) analyzed selected economic issues such as reforms in the value added tax law, an analysis of the economic contributions of the services sector, and credit growth and bank balance sheets in the Philippines.

Both Fujita and Seshadri were part of a six-person team that consulted Philippine economic planning and finance officials last January as part of the lender’s periodic consultations with countries.The weak links between remittances and investment is such even if middle-to-high income migrant families, whose main source of income is remittances from dependents abroad, are rising, says the IMF team.

The team cited data from the triennial Family Income and Expenditures Survey of the National Statistics Office, the same data that Milan Brahmbhatt and Dan Biller based their analyses for a report on East Asia for the World Bank.

Citing 1991 to 2003 data from the triennial FIES, the number of the two lowest-income migrant families receiving remittances declined from 60 percent in 1991 to 18 percent in 2003.Likewise, the top two income brackets among migrant families that count income abroad as their main source of income rose from 40 percent in 1991 to 82 percent 12 years after.

“Given that some 80 percent of (Filipino migrant) families that receive income from abroad as their main source are now middle and high-income families, it is much more likely now than in 1991 that the uses for this income go beyond consumption and subsistence, and are put toward saving and investment,” the IMF team’s paper wrote.

But the situation surrounding remittances and investments suggests that the lack of a relationship between investment and remittances “could indeed be transitory, and that going forward, one may see a pick up in investment in physical capital.”

The weak links between remittances and investment, however, also occurs in many remittance-receiving countries. “Country specific factors could determine whether a rise in external flows leads to greater consumption, including housing-related spending on the one hand, or greater investment in fixed capital on the other,”

In the case of the Philippines, the IMF team members observed that financial intermediation is a primary issue. “(Philippine banks are) still repairing their balance sheets, and are risk averse in the current environment,” IMF observed. But even if there were financial intermediation, the IMF team thinks that remittances as a percentage of gross domestic product should have increased by three percentage points, and this situation “might have a more pronounced effect on Philippine investment, which continues to decline.

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BPI joins fray to capture remittance from Pinoys in Europe

BY WILLIAM ALZONA

MAKATI CITY--BEFORE sliding to third position in the Philippine banking industry, Ayala family-led Bank of the Philippine Islands set its eyes on the profitable remittance market that Philippine National Bank previously dominated.
But with its shareholder hobbled by regulations in the United States, where bulk of remittances from some eight million overseas Filipinos go through, BPI settled for the United Kingdom.
This was what BPI president Aurelio R. Montinola III told stockholders during their annual meeting last March.“Why London, when you can target the United States where there are more overseas Filipino workers?” a shareholder echoed what would be expected questions from the banking industry.
“Certainly, we would like to have a branch in the US, but regulatory agencies would not allow us because of our partner, DBS, is not fully engaged in bank operations,” Montinola replied. Singapore's DBS Group, Southeast Asia's biggest bank, owns 20 percent of BPI. The rest of the shares are owned by Philippine conglomerate Ayala Corp., which also has assets and investments in real estate and water utility.
At the BPI stockholders’ meeting, executives revealed that the move to put up a branch in London, one of the world's financial centers, has been on the pipeline ever since the bank made inroads in the European remittance market.
According to its plans, BPI will shell out £20 million (or about P1.9 billion) to have a full service branch in London to beef up its remittance center currently based in Italy. Montinola said in March BPI expects to establish a UK-registered corporation in about six months, although the Financial Services Authority of London has already given BPI its British license to operate a bank last April 26.
“We are in the stage of finalizing our systems now. We are in one location and we need a second location [for technical purposes]. We expect that we would be in the pre-operation stage by about September or October this year and then, for next year, a full operation," he told reporters after the stockholders’ meeting.
“The whole point is to grow from remittance transactions to overseas banking relationships,” he added.

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Peso’s gain is OFW’s bane

BY LEO J. SANTIAGO JR. and JULIE JAVELLANA-SANTOS

MANILA—IN A remittance slip, there was an additional US$50 that Cesar Dimasupil’s daughter Arlene sent from London. But he remained stoic.

“That [money] would just even things out,” Dimasupil says of the dilemma that most families of overseas Filipino workers are facing under a stronger peso and a record-low inflation rate.

Dimasupil, like most Filipinos brought up in a male-as-strong society, says he doesn’t know if he should celebrate for getting the added money from something he said he shouldn’t have asked from his daughter in the first place.

“But what can I do? They say the strong peso could lead to lower prices. That hasn’t happened in the past months,” Dimasupil said.

The Dimasupil family shares the conundrum of a Philippine economy that a recent World Bank report said has been growing, in part because of the cash sent by nearly eight million Filipinos temporarily or permanently working or living abroad.In a report released by the WB last month, it noted that the stronger peso helped inflation rates to fall to 4.3 percent by end-2006 and to 2.6 percent by February this year.

Food and oil prices remained “relatively” stable, the WB said. Pummeled in recent years by political shocks to the economy and macro-economic anxieties, the peso appreciated by nearly eight percent against the US dollar in 2006, and strengthened further in early this year.It’s a cause celebre for most businesses, especially importers who can pay less from products they’re bringing in from abroad.

But for an economy that the WB said is relying on consumption, the celebration isn’t felt yet by OFW families here whose remittance receipt is boosting consumption.According to economist Fernando Aldaba, herein lies the risks of an economy relying much on remittances since many OFWs could also hedge on a possible uptick of the dollar.

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The Poor Giver: Charity Group Founder’s Woes Hobble OFW Philanthropy

By JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

CALOOCAN CITY—ON A side street of a biscuit factory here the smell of spoiled food, re-used cooking oil, murky wastewater, and sweat of a hundred laborers mixes with the fluttering haze of Maria Luisa Tayco’s dreams of migrant giving.
It is here where Tayco, recipient of the Singaporean community’s Golden Samaritan award, faces up to the reality of life after 14 years of working near Raffles’ Center and seven years of charity work on Bayanihan Centre in Pasir Panjang Road.
It is here where Tayco, who was hailed by a television show on New Year’s Eve as one of the best people the Philippines has, decided to sell her kidney.
“It’s for my son,” the 47-year-old Tayco said.
These four words echo the notion that migrant giving —hailed by advocates as OFW philanthropy— is as easy as securing a fulfilling job in a developing country like the Philippines.
The fate of Tayco, founder of the Singapore-based charity group Pinokyos Welfare Inc., would reveal that the belief that temporary migrant workers can give back to the country (aside from their remittances) looks good in paper.
Her friends and former supporters could only scratch their heads in disbelief.
“Logic alone cannot fathom why she remains helping others other than herself,” said one of her friends. She owes him P5,000.
“It isn’t healthy to help others if you have your own urgent needs, Luisa,” another friend told her. Tayco owes her P2,500.
She owes this reporter P5,000.
Tayco, who once shipped books and school supplies from Singapore to the Philippines worth P2 million, couldn’t pay those loans now amounting to P27,000 (roughly US$500).
Still, she remains focused on continuing her Pinokyos work: the food business she put up fronting the Rebisco Biscuit Corp.’s factory here was named after her group.
Likewise, a plastic piggy bank gobbles coins steadily than the Pinokyos Canteen’s cash box.
“This is for Pinokyos,” Tayco said, her hand softly landing on the coin bank’s back, temporarily forgetting that for failing to pay water and power supplies to the canteen were cut off.

To read full story, visit the OFWJC Website

Gov’t Says Open to Redeploy Pinoys Not Ready to Return

BY KRISTY ANNE C. TOPACIO-MANALAYSAY

MANILA—SUCCESSFULLY building a business after working abroad, Alberto Limbo Perez still couldn’t be pinned down in his own country. Luckily for him, a recently-built government center can give him that chance.
“Who would reject the opportunity of working abroad?” the 47-year-old Perez said in Tagalog. “Earnings from abroad are a big help to meet our needs. It’s a waste to let the opportunity pass.”
This comes from a man whose seven-year-old work abroad is being poured on a house with swimming pool at a cost of P4 million, almost half of what the Philippine government spent on a building to mold Filipinos like him to either stay home for good or go back to migrant work.
The building in Intramuros, Manila, was funded by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration with a P7-million purse (US$140,000 at US$1=P48) according to Labor Attache to Japan Reydeluz Conferido.
Conferido said the National Reintegration Center for Overseas Filipino Workers would allow temporary migrant Filipino workers with plans to return permanently here to adjust first by allowing them go back to overseas work.
According to Conferido, the Center could help these Filipino workers find jobs anywhere in the world while preparing for that time he or she could eventually return.
“The past program was intended for OFWs who have decided to stay here for good,” the country’s labor attaché to Japan said during the launch of the center early March.
It’s this past program, begun at the start of the new millennium and formally launched three years ago, that the new project builds on, Conferido added.
“The personal reintegration has been further enriched to zero in on the abilities of the OFWs and help them match the environment in the Philippines a lot better, taking advantage of their particular expertise and skills and match them to existing opportunities in the Philippines,” Conferido said.“If the OFW is not ready yet to return to the Philippine for good, the same personal reintegration program is going to help them still look for appropriate opportunities abroad,” he added.

For full story, visit the OFWJC Website

Chamber of Commerce for OFWs Pushed

BY KRISTY ANNE C. TOPACIO-MANALAYSAY and JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

MANILA–PEOPLE who built their business from working abroad are moving to form a Chamber of Commerce to lure more overseas Filipino workers into becoming entrepreneurs.
“Instead of going to greedy local businessmen, fellow OFWs can go to themselves and make arrangements to supply some raw materials, or even provide discounts to some of their products to fellow OFW entrepreneurs,” businessman Miguel Bolos told the OFW Journalism Consortium®.
Bolos spoke about the moves to form an organization after a meeting of former overseas Filipino workers-turned-entrepreneurs early March.
That meeting was attended by Filipinos who successfully built a business using what they earned and learned from working abroad.
There’s the garments export business couple Alberto and Liza Perez.
Alberto used to work as a steel fabricator in Saudi Arabia, Aruba and Malta before going into business with hundred thousand pesos (US$2,083.30 at current exchange rates) and 17 sewing machines as capital.
Before it was Perezes who went overseas; now it’s their Apryl and Aira’s Apparel brand, which they claim are bought by Wal-Mart in New York, United States.
There’s also former Saudi Arabia contract worker Eduardo Callera who owns Canor Express International Brokerage Inc., a customs brokerage firm.Before, the boxes of products Callera sent home to his family in the Philippines were the ones transported in trucks. Now, Callera’s business —his trucks— moves these boxes to both domestic and international senders.
Bolos believes that an OFW chamber of commerce will enable fellow migrant entrepreneurs to talk among themselves and be suppliers of needed raw materials for their products.
It just might work because, as he said: “We need it.”
No OFW chamber of commerce based in the Philippines exists, although Bolos said he, fellow returning OFW Francisco Aguilar and fellow migrant workers in Saudi Arabia have tried —and currently moves to— forming such an organization.
Filipino immigrants in the United States have formed county-level and a US-wide chamber of commerce. The biggest of these chambers is the Federation of Philippine-American Chambers of Commerce (FPACC), a network of some 46 chapter chambers of commerce that have over-5,000 member-enterprises run by Filipino-Americans.

To read full story, visit the OFWJC Website

Asean Migration Pact Seen to Push Low-skilled Workers into Further Risk

BY JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

MAKATI CITY—LESS protected under an international convention, domestic helpers and low-skilled temporary migrant workers still couldn’t find solace within a pact among Asean countries, analysts pointed out recently.
Advocates say this omission by member-countries in a non-binding declaration on migrant workers’ protection by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations could push millions of transient workers into accepting more dirty and demeaning jobs and weak bargaining positions.
What has prevailed in bilateral or multilateral arrangements on migrant workers is the movement of business and skilled people not on semi-skilled and unskilled workers, says Chia Siow Yue of the Singapore-headquartered East Asian Development Network (EADN).
Chia was recently in the country to speak on the “Asean Declaration on the Protection and Promotion on the Rights of Migrant Workers” that was forged in the country two months ago.
Her insights come as a second-thought on a pact that received high praises even from militant migrant advocates’ groups like the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA).
“It (Asean declaration) is good news for migrant workers,” MFA’s William Gois said in a separate forum.
Gois said the Philippines capitalized on its hosting of the Asean summit to move this non-binding declaration forward.
This is a big first step for “Asean governments to recognize the contributions of migrant workers,” he added.
Gois echoes analysts’ views that temporary migrant workers remain the source of many of the Asean member-countries’ economic strength in the past five years.
The Philippines, for one, has weathered one financial crisis after another because of billions of overseas Filipinos’s dollar remittances.
International Monetary Fund data on the balance of payments has cited the Philippines as Asean’s leading recipient of remittances from 380,080 temporary contract workers.
Data from 1998 to 2005 by the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration bared that the Philippines has deployed some 196,900 temporary contract workers to Singapore, 54,914 to Malaysia, 96,748 to Brunei, 14,051 to Indonesia, 12,921 to Thailand, and 5,446 to Vietnam.
Still, Gois personally thinks the declaration “is only for a select group of workers, and eases out low-skilled migrant workers”.
“Unskilled labor is being hired as cheap labor in Asean’s competitive industries. Negotiators in trade talks seem blind to the plight of unskilled workers,” he added.

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Steady Supply Stops Skill Spill, Social Savant Says

BY JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

MANILA—THEY are the armies of salvation; the nearly million entrants to the country’s labor force, which an economist said ensures the steady supply of skills for the economy.
“We simply have too much labor,” Doctor of Philosophy holder Alvin Ang told the OFW Journalism Consortium (OFWJC) ®.
Ang last month presented his research in public that affirms the continuing export of labor doesn’t necessarily contribute to the phenomenon called “brain drain.”Advocates against the government’s structured processing of workers for foreign economies have warned the Philippines may find it difficult to reach economic progress because its highly-skilled people –doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers– are moving out.The University of Santo Tomas professor, however, even doubts the country will experience an economic slowdown due to this outflow.
Ang believes the Philippines “has adjusted to the workers’ overseas migration by replenishing them.”
“The government seems lucky,” Ang explains, “because abundant labor supply has given it time to ease fears of a permanent brain drain.”
He said that even if Filipino doctors and nurses leave, “there are many more left behind here.”“Not all Filipinos want to migrate anyway,” Ang said.He uses himself as an example: “If the Philippines’s brain drain problem were permanent, I myself would have not been here right now.”
Ang is going against past survey, especially by the Social Weather Stations, that points to the increasing number of Filipinos wanting to go abroad for work.Health industry leaders have warned in the past of the exodus of doctors and nurses, especially from government hospitals, seeking the high pay accorded to their colleagues in another country.
The local airline industry also warned of such exodus, especially of mechanics and engineers poached by headhunters of foreign airlines.
Another economist, Edita Tan of the University of the Philippines, said in a 2006 paper that even the rising numbers of Filipinos migrating for overseas work and permanent settlement “has not tightened the country’s [domestic] labor market.”
“(The Philippine) labor force increases faster than domestic and foreign labor employment,” Tan wrote in her article titled “Labor Migration and the Philippine Labor Market” for the International Migration Review.

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Firms Tap Singing-Frenzy OFWs for Biz Expansion

BYWILLIAM ALZONA and ISAGANI DE LA PAZ

MANILA—BOXER Manny Pacquiao’s endorsement of a portable music-video microphone shows the Filipinos’ penchant for singing and reflects the market is deep and wide.
But Butch Albarracin remains unimpressed. He says revenues from the domestic market are proving to be unreliable for his entertainment-focused business.
Albarracin, founder of the Center for Pop Music Philippines Inc., is setting his sights on eight million overseas Filipino workers who, despite temporarily or permanently living or working abroad, shares one dream: becoming the next big pop superstar.
Began in 1984, Center for Pop emerged as the country’s top music training school, aiming to develop a curriculum to incubate the next superstars in the entertainment industry. It has outlived other music training schools set up by other top musicians and composers in the country, after the Center, Alabarracin said, took the marketing part of the business seriously.
We balanced our focus on the music and selling the Center’s services, he added.
That strategy paid well for Albarracin, who was recognized last month by a local marketing group for his success in medium-scale entrepreneurship.
Today, the music school has 21 branches and extension classes in about 20 schools in Metro Manila.
But instead of moving towards the provinces, Albarracin said he’s more inclined to expand outside the country.
While he said he has received an offer from an investor in Daly City, California, Albarracin said he’s setting the stage for entry in Hong Kong.
“If we can go there and teach them how to sing, they can contribute to the growth of the [Filipino] community [there]. They can have a skill, and they won’t be shameful [of their jobs],” he added.

Sing-call
IT is also in Hong Kong that publicly-listed Filipino firm Intellectual Property Ventures Group (Ipvg) Corp. found not only the next singing sensation but a unique market for its prepaid calling card.Launched in July in Hong Kong, Ipvg partnered with HK-based IDT Corp. subsidiary IDT Telecom Inc. to search for a “Philippine Idol” version among an estimated 200,000 Filipinos in the former British colony.
The contest requires contestants to record their Filipino or English song entries—acapella, or with music accompaniment in the background—while using a pre-paid calling card sold by IDT Asia.Just recently, Ipvg announced from Manila the winner as Elvira Manacmul, 31, of Dinalupihan, Bataan, who bested four other finalists: 17-year-old Elija Clave of Malasqui, Pangasinan; Irene Aquino, 33, of Cagayan Valley; and, Julie Ann Jereza, 25, of San Narciso, Zambales. All were living in HK when they joined the contest.
“They outperformed over 800 other participants who phoned in… to record their songs for the contest,” IDT said.
The recorded songs were played weekly in the Philippines Tonight Show on Metro Plus AM 1044 radio which also encouraged listeners to vote for their pick.
The firm said over-400,000 votes were cast by listeners in the five month period that ended in the Grand Finals January 28, 2007.
The Ipvg statement said some 12,000 OFWs braved the chilly weather to view the creative side of the Filipino.Manacmul was selected during the live radio broadcast performance at Chatter Road in Central Hong Kong where a panel of judges pushed up her share of the estimated hundred thousand votes that poured for the contestants.Manacmul, a mother of two girls aged five- and seven-years old, would receive a recording contract with VIVA, a round-trip HK-Manila ticket, mobile phone, passes for two to Disneyland-HK, pre-paid call cards worth HK$500, and a “Magic Sing,” the portable music-video player-microphone endorsed by Pacquiao.
While Ipvg’s partnership with IDT Asia appears to be working, it is not envied by Albarracin.
“I am through with partnership. You end up fighting each other and one will go away with the money. That guy who will run away are usually those who are only after [the] money. Me, I cannot run because I’m a musician,” he said.

License to sing
ALBARRACIN, a voice coach, said to expand abroad, he must hurdle first the issue of whose license they will use: the singers’ or theirs.
Either way, he said, it could be a cause of headache.Using the singers’ license abroad could be risky since it meant partnering with other parties, while having our own license to operate in other countries meant tons of documentary requirements, Albarracin explained.
Still, he’s open to other arrangements.“There are so many arrangement that we can do. One is either I go there as a businessman, or I go there as a speaker,” Albarracin said, citing it’s easier to go the latter path.
“But I’m eyeing …a lasting relationship,” he added.
Albarracin’s plans and Ipvg’s tack come at a time when the Philippine music industry’s top revenue earners are few while others are still either catching the next flight to stardom or to other countries as solo or band entertainers.
But whether or not the plans of Albarracin and Ipvg –the firm is eyeing other countries– push through, they admit the OFW remains a good market.
“These are new markets. Sometimes people here (in the Philippines) have money, sometimes they have [none]. So we should have reserve sources of income,” Albarracin said pointing to OFWs.
Ipvg spokesperson Eric Paragas was quoted in a newspaper report as saying the success of the singing tilt has led the firm to consider “holding the contest again in Hong Kong and/or other countries.”
Indeed, both Albarracin and firms like Ipvg are singing the same tune: the country’s talents—and revenue sources—can be found outside its borders.

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Women OFWs Prop Up Spouses, Business

By MARLENE H. ELMENZO

TAGUIG CITY—WHEN two men here felt a great financial need, they turned to their wives, proving the resourcefulness of Filipino women even when they are indirectly involved in business.
Take Leticia Marrero, for one, who worked as a domestic helper in Hong Kong to prevent her husband from selling a lot that he inherited from his parents.
The couple now owns and operates a resort in the Mountain Province, far north of here where they were awarded by a government-backed group for their inspiring business story.
There’s also Didi Dayag who went to Kuwait in 1986 and whose salary she received for working as a nurse there helped build more capital for her husband Eugenio’s cattle business also in the northern Philippine province of Cagayan.
What the two women had in common was having a focus on the reasons for working abroad and their subsequent decision to come back after having achieved their goals.
Dayag, for one, was able to buy eight hectares of rice land aside from supporting her husband’s ranch expansion.
The Dayags now own a fully mechanized plantation with three tractors, a stockroom, and a solar dryer. These allow the couple to manage fourteen hectares of rice farm, forty-three hectares of sugar cane and seventeen hectares of cassava.
They have also ventured into seed growing.
The couple’s business created jobs for around 68 families relying on seasonal farm work for income.
Marrero, on the other hand, was able to augment her husband’s work as postman, ensuring their children graduated college.
The grasping of a bachelor’s degree by her youngest, the last of four children, marked the end of Marrero’s stay in a foreign land.
With her savings worth less than a hundred thousand pesos, her family decided to develop their land into a garden resort with three swimming pools, picnic cottages, a lawn tennis court, a playground, and a convenience store.
It was the first of its kind in the province.
“Masaya ako dahil mayroon konting pinagkakakitaan,” Marrero said. “Pag wala na kami, merong maiiwan para sa mga anak ko na naumpisahan na namin mag-asawa.” (I’m happy we have a steady source of income, however small. At least, we could also leave something to our children when we pass away.)

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Realtor’s Success Proves RP Gov’t Support Key to OFW Business Dev’t

BY MARLENE H. ELMENZO

TAGUIG CITY–BUILDING and selling high-end houses in a war-torn land like Jolo might appear surreal for some investors, especially overseas Filipino workers.
For former OFW Michael Abubakar who claims a successful realty business in his hometown, links with government is key.
Abubakar was recently awarded by a government-backed group for investing in this third class municipality and capital of Sulu.
Populated by traditionally peaceful tribes of Islamic believers, Jolo, Sulu, is also clutched in a shooting war between Philippine government armed forces and armed members of branded-terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah.
Abubakar and his residential subdivision-building business were recognized last December by the group of Jose Concepcion, government consultant for entrepreneurship, as one of the OFW entrepreneurs dubbed as “most inspiring.”
“Jolo was an impoverished land and you build a housing like this and parang siyang babae na na make-up-an mo. Bago pa makuha ng iba, ikaw pa ang unang na-fall in love,” Abubakar said. (“Jolo is like a woman you’ve applied make up on and before others take her, you would be the first to fall in love.”)
Abubakar used the past tense to refer to his hometown which he left in 1973 after fighting raged between government forces and Muslims rejecting the leadership of Manila-based elected officials.
Twenty-three years later, he returned home in one piece and rich, having sold a quarter-of-a-million peso house in plush Ayala-Alabang subdivision in Manila for thirty-seven times its value.
Likewise, Abubakar said he was receiving US$6,600 a month as salary from an American firm when he decided to go home in 1996.
With that money, he established the M. Abubakar Consolidated Engineering (Mace) in Manila and flew back to Jolo the year an Asian financial crisis popped the real estate sector of countries including the Philippines.
Like a clueless gardener sent to make a landscape out of a vast, arid lot, I was confronted with a serious predicament–where and how to start, Abubakar said.
The government began it for him through a joint-venture housing project for Muslims.
With one foot in the public sector and another in business, Abubakar tapped a five-year loan from the government housing agency and built the First Sulu Estate Subdivision in Patikul, one of Sulu’s 18 municipalities.
It was the first high-class subdivision established in the province, Abubakar claims.
“When you come to think about it, in Jolo you cannot find good clients,” he said. “No one told me that [the project) would be successful. Other people told me, ‘Oy, you’re just throwing good money after bad.’”
Even my wife thought I was going crazy, Abubakar said.

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Filipino foreign funds flow foils farm progress —economist

BY JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

MANILA—No one, it seems, wants to be a farmer anymore.
Japan-trained economist Dr. Alvin Ang said the Philippines is getting too much money from Filipinos abroad that “it seems (Filipino) labor would rather wait for the opportunity to be an OFW (overseas Filipino worker) than work in the farms.”
Rising inflows of remittances is “causing sharp declines in agricultural production,” Ang said in his paper “Workers’ Remittances and Economic Growth.”
Presented to mostly students of the University of Sto. Tomas where he teaches economics, Ang’s paper challenges the positive regard given to remittances of overseas Filipinos, which has hit more than US$11 billion (which translates to half-a-trillion pesos) last year.
In a country that has recently emerged from a fiscal crisis, as announced by President Gloria Arroyo, that money is important.
Ang’s observation, however, articulates the hidden worries that the Philippines may be relying too much on remittances from its more than eight million citizens in 190 countries.
This is especially worrisome as government failed to hit its domestic economic performance target last year, meeting only a 5.4-percent growth rate in the country’s gross domestic product. Government’s economic managers think that growth rate was below the Arroyo administration’s GDP target of a low 5.5 percent to a high 6.1 percent.
Former budget department chief Romulo Neri blamed typhoons especially during the last three months of 2006, which “brought down agricultural output.”
The Socio-economic Planning Secretary specifically pinned the blame on typhoon “Reming” which battered the Bicol region, one of the major sources of the country’s cash crops.
Last year’s farm performance affirms agriculture as the lowest performing sector of the economy with a 4.1 percent growth. Services is the economy’s top performer (5.4 percent), while industry is second-best (4.8 percent).
Ang said this situation prevails because of the continuing attraction of going abroad for work among households that receive remittances.
He added that some members of these households who own farmlands “leave the agricultural sector (as) their per capita incomes grew.”

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Failures in Govt Lending Project for OFW Groups Cited

BY CANDICE Y. CEREZO

QUEZON CITY—THE bankruptcy of roughly 200 government-funded livelihood groups of overseas Filipino workers and their families reveals major errors in a project that an OFW leader and a government report said was used solely for the 2004 elections.
“Their promise to us is that there will be an OFW Groceria loan, followed by OFW Botica, and thirdly, that each member will have a loan of P200,000. However, these did not reach us [except for the grocery] loan, which we even had difficulties [operating],” Lutgarda Zapanta, a leader of an OFW group, said.
Zapanta was referring to the micro-lending project for OFWs –called OFW Groceria– that is hobbled by the inability of beneficiaries like her to pay back the grocery products for re-sale loaned to them by government.
She received in October a notice from OWWA asking her, as president of her group OFW BZ Chapter, to pay a 22-month past due loan of P45,834.80.
The problem: she and other leaders of groups she organized and which tapped the lending program don’t have the resources to cough out the money –a total quarter of a million pesos (US$7,000)– they owe government.
“Chairman, pano na ito? Two years na, wala na ang grocery. Wala na’ng pera. Anong gagawin natin?” Zapanta cited her and the leaders’ worries. [How would we go about this, Madam chairman? Two years have passed and the grocery’s folded up, the money’s gone. What should we do?]
A recent report by Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration, which now handles the two-year project, pointed to the 2004 election atmosphere as the source of debacle for Zapanta and the leaders.
A number of OFW families and dependents deliberately organized themselves just to avail of the project because it is election-time especially at the National Capital Region, the report dated June 30, 2006, noted.
It added that borrowers had a “shallow appreciation on [sic] the real objectives of the project, as they view [sic] the project primarily as an economic activity.”
“There was no clear orientation or direction of the project,” the report said .Zapanta’s predicament comes at a time when another poll event is just around the corner while government is rehashing a shuttered micro-lending scheme.

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Stranded Pinoys in Lebanon Still Traded, NGO Says

BY ISAGANI DE LA PAZ

QUEZON CITY—FILIPINO workers, mostly women, in Lebanon are still being traded for new employees after getting sidetracked from work when fighting broke out in September, advocates said.
Echoing the report of Catholic congregation Daughters of Charity Sister Amelia Asiedu-Torres, nonprofit Kanlungan Centre Foundation Inc. said migrant workers unable to flee during the shooting war between Israeli and Hizbollah fighters are being sold to other employers.
“The agencies …still make business on them by selling them to another employer at a higher price,” Kanlungan staff Ma. Helen T. Dabu said in a forum here, quoting Sr. Asiedu-Torres of the Beirut, Lebanon-based nonprofit Afro-Asian Migrant Center.
Dabu revealed the results of Kanlungan’s policy research on Filipino women migrants in Lebanon after workers were caught in the middle of fierce fighting there last October, leading to frenzied evacuation of a tenth of an estimated 30,000 Filipinos in that territory.
The research results packaged in an 11-paged Powerpoint presentation was timed as the first topic in a lecture series honoring Kanlungan founder Ma. Virginia Alunan-Melgar. Alunan-Melgar founded the nonprofit group in 1989 when trends bare an increasing number of women going out of the country and the abuses employers heaped on them than male Filipinos’ mostly labor-related cases.
Dabu said they talked by overseas call to Sr. Asiedu-Torres November 28 on the eve of the presentation of the research in Quezon City.
She added the Roman Catholic nun said that the center receive telephone calls from a minimum of seven migrant women a day, expressing a gamut of problems at the hands of their Lebanese employers.
“They have finished their contracts but the employers would not let them go home,” Dabu said of what Sr. Asiedu-Torres told her.
She added that the salaries of Filipino women migrants there –at US$100 (P5,000 in US$1=P50 exchange rates) monthly– are withheld from a period of three months.
“Some employers bluntly tell them that they cannot go home because no one will replace them,” Dabu said.
“Most of these girls [sic] are very timid to discuss matteres with their employers so at one shout of the employers they just withdraw and cry,” Dabu quoted Sr. Asiedu-Torres as saying.

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OWWA Exec Says Religious Ties Can’t Protect Women

BY PATRICIA MARCELO & ISAGANI DE LA PAZ

MANILA—A LINE in the International Declaration of Human Rights wasn’t able to protect her from a rapist, nor could the teachings of the Qu’ran: Adela is as Muslim as the Arab employer who she said repeatedly raped her until she got pregnant.“Religious affiliation, whether Muslim or Christian, does not guarantee your exemption,” Amy B. Crisostomo of the Overseas Workers’ Welfare Administration said of Adela’s fate at the hands of her Muslim Arab employer in Kuwait.
Such is the sad twist of reality at the 58th year of the commemoration of a document guaranteeing equal protection of rights of peoples, whether they are of the same or different faith or of gender.
Likewise, the case of Adela (not her real name) slings mud on the international commemoration of Migrant Workers’ Day December 18: there are still many others –at least more than half of a million Filipinos leaving the country every year are women– needing state protection.
“No one is exempted from being raped or being maltreated [while working abroad],” added Crisostomo, officer-in-charge of OWWA in the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (OWWA-ARMM).
It is from ARMM where Adela came from and gave birth to a weak premature baby who Crisostomo said the employer who raped her tried to get aborted.
Her baby symbolically led her to freedom since the Arab employer was forced to repatriate Adela before his family discovers using the Filipino Muslim from Sultan Kudarat, Maguindanao as his own personal sex slave.
Adela bared the details of her horrifying experience to Crisostomo who, being a woman herself and a government employee, documented and gave the story to reporters to emphasize the danger Filipino women migrant workers face.
Data from OWWA-ARMM showed that last year, it received a total 181 welfare cases, nearly all of it (178) involving women, all working as domestic helpers.
The cases that the regional office handled involved maltreatment, unpaid salary, run-away, sexual molestation and abuse, rape, contract violation, death, overload of work, sickness, and no communication with the relative abroad among others.
Of five cases of sexual molestation/abuse/rape reported in OWWA-ARMM office, Adela’s case was so far the most serious since she bore a baby, Crisostomo said.
The baby, she added, is a testament to the cruelty of men, whether Catholic or Muslim.
The official expressed belief that violations and abused against Muslim overseas Filipino workers could be higher since there could be those who did not bother to file any complaint before the OWWA.

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Firms tap signing-frenzy OFWs for biz expansion

BY WILLIAM ALZONA & ISAGANI DE LA PAZ

MANILA—BOXER Manny Pacquiao’s endorsement of a portable music-video microphone proves the Filipinos’ penchant for singing and reflects the market is deep and wide.
But Butch Albarracin remains unimpressed. He said revenues from the domestic market is proving to be unreliable for his entertainment-focused business.
Albarracin, founder of the Center for Pop Music Philippines Inc., is setting his sights on 8 million overseas Filipino workers who, despite temporarily or permanently living or working abroad, shares one dream: becoming the next big pop superstar.
Began in 1984, Center for Pop emerged as the country’s top music training school, aiming to develop a curriculum to incubate the next superstars in the entertainment industry.
It has outlived other music training schools set up by other top musicians and composers in the country, after the Center, Alabarracin said, took the marketing part of the business seriously.
We balanced our focus on the music and selling the Center’s services, he added.
That strategy paid well for Albarracin, who was recognized last month by a local marketing group for his success in medium-scale entrepreneurship.
Today, the music school has 21 branches and extension classes in about 20 schools in Metro Manila.
But instead of moving towards the provinces, Albarracin said he’s more inclined to expand outside the country. He said he has received an offer from an investor in Daly City, California, but Albarracin said he’s setting the stage for entry in Hong Kong.
”If we can go there and teach them how to sing, they can contribute to the growth of the [Filipino] community [there]. They can have a skill, and they won’t be shameful [of their jobs],” he added.

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Paroled Pinoy’s Past, Present Polish Parol Parade

BY JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, USA—PAROLED convict Rico Reimigio’s hands grip different sets of bars symbolizing a freedom only he could taste: bamboo strips for his first parol, the Filipino Christmas lantern.
On his face is a genuine smile, also the first time this reporter sees on Reimigio, the former thug feared while stomping the streets of San Francisco.
He is back again on the streets, as the lantern he finished in 90 minutes would be displayed proudly along this city’s South of Market (SoMa) area as the Filipino-American neighborhood here holds its fourth parade of Filipino lanterns on December 9.“I can’t describe the happiness I feel,” the 45-year-old Reimigio said, his inch-thick thumb and forefinger deftly slipping the paper-thin bamboo slits to tie a knot holding the five-pointed lantern.
He holds it up against the light, silently proud of what his work reflects and giddy with excitement at his first Christmas outside prison.
Reimigio is grateful for the opportunity given to him by the sponsor of the parade and the materials for the lanterns, a nonprofit Filipino-American neighborhood group in San Francisco’s SoMa area.
Now out on a five-year parole program, Reimigio is also grateful to having rediscovered his being a Filipino in the United States, which has tided him over for 25 years at the San Quentin Detention Center in San Rafael, California.
Jail riots, he narrated, are common occurrences in the 150-year-old San Quentin where the US government initially imprisoned most hardened and violent criminals.
After acknowledging his Filipino roots, which his mother reminded him of after his first three years in San Quentin, Reimigio said he took a different tack than slugging it out with fellow detainees during riots.
“Talking things over worked and inmates from other races respect Filipino inmates for that.”
That respect is what Reimigio has been bringing since stepping out of prison in January this year.
ToughHE smelled the marijuana before he saw the pot smoker, a Filipino nurse.
Reimigio wasn’t surprised to have felt déjà vu walking the streets of SoMa. It was here when drugs and violence was part of his everyday life since arriving from the Philippines in 1973.
He was only 12 then, he says, but SoMa became his little “Tondo”, a gangster’s haven in the Philippines during the 1960s.Gangsterism among high school students like him became his folly in 1980 when a fellow gang member killed two African-American males. Reimigio was 19 then and, together with three other gang members, were sentenced to life imprisonment.The courts said we were guilty “by association,” Reimigio said.
Going to San Quentin, he said, never liberated him from the environment of illegal drug abuse: prison itself was flooded with drugs and alcohol. How these substances flowed in and out of the penal system there, Reimigio couldn’t tell.
But his mother saved him from entering the bowels of hell.
“When she visited me in prison, I just felt this sadness within that was so deep I couldn’t shake it off. I then asked myself, ‘Why am I doing this to her?,” Reimigio said.
“It was then that I’ve realized it is never late to do something.”
The smell of pot grew stronger and whacked Reimigio from the reverie.
“Stop taking drugs, man,” he tells the nurse.
He said he would walk this particular street and say the same thing over and over again until the nurse comes to his senses.“He won’t change overnight,” Reimigio said.
This is what he do –gang and drug prevention work in SoMa– as a tribute to his mother, who had long hoped for the son’s exit from prison bars.
SoMaSOMA is an area adjacent to Market Street in downtown San Francisco where most foreigners and first-time immigrants have been settling, Filipinos including, since the 1920s.
Its Mission Street is a prism of lives in paltry and plenty. The street with its chic buildings and parks links SoMa to the city’s financial district. People would come out of high-rise and medium-rise housing projects to buy something from dollops of grocery stores or shops selling sex toys and videos that splotch the street. Along the way, they would cast eyes on the homeless or consciously or unconsciously bump into drug addicts.
This is the street Reimigio returned to pounding with his soft-soled shoes and brain cells honed inside San Quentin.“Now I am guarding SoMa from violence.”
This self-appointed task was a trek that began in the late 1980s when Reimigio went back to books while inside prison.So starting the late 1980s, Reimigio was in a mode of personal reform.
He finished some general education equivalency subjects leading to a high school diploma, and earned an Associate in Arts degree at Hartnell College; the prison bars just a physical barrier.
The toughest challenge was within himself, especially during jail riots: Reimigio wielding his tongue rather than his fist.Holding dialogues among inmates helped him develop leadership qualities. Prison officials noticed the changes when they appointed Reimigio to lead incoming Filipino inmates serving life sentences –lifers, as they were called.
I’d tell them first “to be always conscious about their surrounding environment,” Reimigio said.
He would also incessantly remind inmates to master their addiction to illegal substances that filter through the prison bars.“If you want to get high, take drugs in your room. But I suggest you stop taking drugs,” he continuously told Filipino inmates.Lifers would lose hope and regress towards accepting the fate of never again getting outside prison.
A lifer himself, Reimigio’s hopes always pointed to the opportunity that things could change “if we do good always.”“I always tell the Pinoy inmates doing good will boost chances to shorten time in prison when parole opportunities come our way,” Reimigio said.
He proved that when that chance came in 2005: he applied for parole.

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Organize to survive, health expert advises Pinoy nurses in UK

By MARLENE H. ELMENZO

MAKATI CITY--HAVING a collective voice may save the jobs of Filipino nurses threatened to be sucked into the fiscal hole of the United Kingdom’s public health system, a health management expert recommends.
Filipino nurses who wish to stay longer in UK should make the NHS (National Health Service Trusts in the UK) realize their impact on that country’s health sector, Dr. Eufemia Yap of the Ateneo Graduate School of Business told the OFW Journalism Consortium.
“They should address this with a collective voice,” the school’s health unit director said. “They need to tell the NHS: ‘Hey, we are important players here.’”
Yap was responding to questions on what Filipinos could do a month after UK Health Minister Lord Warner of Brockley in July announced the removal of nursing from the “national shortage occupation list”.
With this new policy, job openings for nurses will first be advertised to British nationals and Europeans. Foreigners would only be considered for recruitment if there would be no qualified candidates from the European workforce.
The same rule applies for foreigners currently employed under work permits: they would be given the last priority for hiring.
“Taking nursing off the shortage list does not stop employers undertaking international recruitment, it only means that they have to demonstrate that they cannot fill a post with a UK or EEA [European Economic Area] applicant first,” a July 3, 2006 statement from the health department said.
“If employers are unable to fill a particular nursing post following advertisement, they may then apply to the Home Office for a work permit,” it added.
Currently the largest health care services system in Europe, the NHS is subdivided into smaller organizations called Trusts. Apart from overseeing hospital operations in every county or province in the UK, an NHS Trust also manages recruitment of doctors, nurses, health workers and non-medical staff.
In this system works some 40,000 Filipino nurses, half of who have no residence visa and would have to leave the UK upon expiration of their work permits, as the new policy mandates.
According to the policy, posts held by these foreign workers would be offered first to locals.

No return
ACCORDING to Yap, in this situation, it is best for nurses to rely upon themselves because the Philippine government, which remains divided on the issue of health worker migration, could only do so much.
On the one hand, she said, is the Department of Health, which makes do with the limited healthcare workforce in the country. On the other is the Department of Labor and Employment, which continuously manages the export of the country’s best and brightest.
Filipino nurses, Yap said, also need to solve their problem by making themselves more competitive.
“They should challenge themselves and reshape themselves as nursing professionals,” she said. “They can do this by continuing their professional education and taking in leadership roles.”
Ateneo, to note, has the only business school that offers hospital management degree courses to health sector professionals.
“Packaging themselves well” will also help nurses to demand for better opportunities should they decide to settle in the Philippines, Yap said.
Nurses who really don’t want to return to the country, however, must start seeking other opportunities in the Middle East or in the US, and consider possible “trade-offs”, she added.
“They may be employed in other countries [even though] the work condition is not as good as that in UK’s.”
Nurses like Riza Franco who works in Queen Alexandra Hospital, Portsmouth, Scotland, are bracing for an extreme scenario: the narrowing of the market for foreign health workers.
“There’re a lot of opportunities,” she said. “Australia alone is offering immigrant visa. It offers better compensation packages.”
Still, Franco, 31, says she’s not that worried since she has an “indefinite leave to remain” (permanent residence) visa.
Except for the right to vote, the visa entitles Franco to the rights enjoyed by the British.
“I am already a resident here so I am not under a contract anymore. I can work anywhere and as long as I want to.”

Voting thru mail likely in 39 more countries by 2007

By JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

SAN FRANCISCO, USA—OVERSEAS Filipinos spread in four continents who have registered for the national elections next year are expected to vote by mail, a Philippine foreign affairs executive said here.
Vice consul Anthony Mandap of the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco, USA, said the Manila-based Commission on Elections gave the country’s diplomatic posts abroad the news that the commission en banc will likely allow overseas Filipinos situated in 26 diplomatic posts to vote by mail.
These posts cover 39 countries and include the United States. Thus far, only over-9,000 of some 1.85 million Filipinos in these countries have registered for the 2004 elections and in the ongoing voter’s registration.
Mandap said embassies likely to be covered by the prospective Comelec directive include Vienna, Austria; Berlin, Germany; Bucharest, Romania; Budapest, Hungary; Madrid, Spain; Bangkok, Thailand; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; Berne, Switzerland; Pretoria, South Africa; Wellington, New Zealand; Singapore; Tel-Aviv, Israel; and Washington, USA.
Consulates and other diplomatic offices of the country that will be likely covered by the vote by mail are Sydney, Australia; Agana, Guam; Milan, Italy; Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands; Manado, Indonesia; Geneva, Switzerland; the Manila Economic Cultural Office in Taipei; and the US-based consulates of the country in Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.
“This (development from Comelec) is certainly good news for Filipino overseas voters in the US,” Mandap said in reference to the 7,011 registrants for the May 14, 2007 elections, and to the 3,537 who registered in 2003.
Those 26 diplomatic offices will join Japan, United Kingdom and Canada (covering three embassies and three consulates) that will allow voting by mail. The three countries, during the 2004 national elections and as per the implementing rules and regulations of Republic Act 9189, piloted the voting through mail mechanism.
The 19 countries mentioned will not only cover the countries where these embassies and consulates are physically situated. Some six embassies and three consulates also cover Filipinos situated in some 20 nearby countries and island-states, and voting by mail will also cover Filipinos coming from those places.
These include: Bulgaria and Moldova (embassy in Bucharest); Poland, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (embassy in Budapest); the islands of Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu (embassy in Canberra); Morocco and Andorra (embassy in Madrid); Cyprus (embassy in Tel-Aviv); Slovenia, Croatia (embassy in Vienna); Marshall Islands, Wake Islands, Micronesia (consulate in Agana); and CNMI islands Tinian, Rota and the Northern Islands (consulate in Saipan).
However, it is not known nor reported if Filipinos from those 20 other countries registered in 2003, and if they crossed islands and border countries to sign up for the ongoing voter’s registration.
Missing in the list of countries to be allowed voting by mail is Saudi Arabia.
An October 6 report by Arab News bared a House oversight committee on overseas voting thumbed down a proposal to allow mailed voting in the Kingdom because Filipinos use postal office (PO) boxes instead of real addresses
During the 2004 elections, Filipinos there work in places far away from the embassy in Riyadh, the consulate in Jeddah, and the Philippine International School in Al-Khobar, and had to travel hundreds of kilometers driving borrowed vehicles or flying in domestic airlines.
Mandap explained other embassies and consulates formally requested the Comelec to allow registered absentee voters to vote by mail in the 2007 elections.
It is possible other embassies and consulates will be allowed by Comelec if they request that to Manila before Comelec finalizes a resolution for voting by mail, Mandap told the OFW Journalism Consortium.
The United Kingdom, Canada and Japan were initially chosen by framers of RA 9189’s implementing rules and regulations to have voting by mail in the 2004 elections “owing to the efficiency of (their) mailing systems,” wrote a 2004 Statistical and Narrative Report by Comelec’s Committee on Absentee Voting.
But Mandap said that voting by mail works in the US because of “an efficient postal system”.
The US Postal Service website (www.usps.com) bared domestic express mail can be sent the next day for at least US$14.40 (P723.02 in current exchange rates). Meanwhile, domestic priority mail and ordinary letters or cards can be sent in 2-3 days for at least US$0.39 (P19.58) and US$4.05 (P203.35), respectively.
Mandap said the 2004 overseas voting exercise was “cheat-proof” in all embassies and consulates, including the UK, Japan and Canada.
“Those in Manila should expect the same for 2007, and I hope mailed voting will be a big incentive for Filipinos in the US to register and then vote.”
As of October 9, some 3,153 Filipinos in the San Francisco consulate’s jurisdiction have signed up in the ongoing registration to add up to the 855 who signed up in the 2004 elections. The San Francisco consulate covers counties in northern California and northern Nevada, and the states of Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Oregon, Washington and Wyoming.
The figure is tops in the whole US, as 7,011 thus far signing up in the new registration that started on October 1, 2005 and that was extended up to October 31, two months from the original August 31 deadline.

Pinoys ‘in hiding’ abroad a million less after 7 years

By JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

SAN FRANCISCO, USA–ARE more Filipinos here coming out to explore the belly of the beast legally?
In view of American officials’ moves to squeeze out illegal migrants in the name of homeland security, Philippine government data swing to the affirmative node. The figures show the number of Filipinos “in hiding” –Tago ng tago (TNT) in local parlance– have dropped sharply.
This is what the multiple-year stock estimates of overseas Filipinos from 1997 to 2005, from Philippine government agency Commission on Filipinos Overseas revealed: there was a high of 1,913,941 undocumented migrants in 1998, and a “record-low” of 881,123 last year.
Looking at regional data that the CFO gave to the OFW Journalism Consortium, North, South American and Trust Territory countries –including the US– had the most drop of irregular migrants.
These countries have a total of 357,923 irregulars, down by 589,047 from the 1997 figure of 946,970, the CFO estimates.
The US had the most reductions of irregular migrants in the stock estimates data: from a high of 844,046 in 1998, undocumented Filipino migrants went down to 157,998.
Striking in the US figure was that the estimates were 510,000 in 2003, and 350,000 in 2004, the CFO record says.
The reduction of the figures in the US comes before the heated debate among American legislators on the immigration question, which began in the first quarter of the year. Several bills seen to slash benefits to non-American workers in the US Senate and House of Representatives did not meet Congress’ October 1 deadline, thus these bills go back to zero when Congress resumes sessions after the November 7 US elections.
Thus, a “good news” perspective could mean there’re more Filipinos here working or living temporarily or permanently with all documents certified legal and have been registered as so in over-90 Philippine diplomatic posts.
However, the figures themselves remain debatable: how could a government agency document the number of people it says are “undocumented”?
Likewise, some analysts say the reduction in the number of illegal migrants could mean an increase in the number of them deported back to the Philippines.

Go figure
THE sharp reduction in the number of Filipinos migrating here sans legal documents reflects global trends, based on the CFO data.
For example, in Malaysia, where Sabah island is believed the common route for irregular migration, the CFO cited a drop in the number of undocumented Filipinos to 125,000 last year from half a million six years ago. The drop came after the Malaysian government cracked down on irregular migrants in 2002.
If the year-on-year reduction figure for the US is 192,000, the CFO registered a reduction in Malaysia of 175,000 based on an estimated 300,000 undocumented Filipinos in that country in 2004.
The CFO listed other countries with large numbers of undocumented migrants as of last year include France (40,105), Singapore (37,600), Japan (30,619), Israel (23,000), Italy (20,000), and the United Arab Emirates (20,000).
East and South Asian countries —including Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, and Korea— is another regional hub of irregular migration that got a significant drop: the 2005 figure of 238,238 is 496,109 less than the year 2000 estimates of 734,347.
Lawyer Golda Roma of the CFO’s Planning and Policy Research division says estimates of both undocumented and documented temporary contract workers and immigrants come from Philippine diplomatic posts abroad, and records from homeland-based agencies involved in managing migration outflow.
What CFO does, Roma says, is “cross-check these data from the posts”.
Countries like the US have figures coming from host countries’ census offices, while the other data come from passport registrants in diplomatic posts, records for assistance to nationals program, travel documents, and even meetings with members of Filipino communities in host countries.
Roma said there is no precise figure in coming up with those estimates of undocumented Filipino migration, yet she says it should be “at least 20 percent of the total number of overseas Filipinos”.
The 2005 stock estimates show there are 7,924,188 overseas Filipinos –3,651,727 temporary contract workers, 3,391,338 permanent residents, and the 881,123 who are undocumented.

US labor unions adrift over foreign workers' activism

By JEREMAIAH M. OPINIANO

SAN FRANCISCO, USA—JOHN Ford was flipping an egg in his kitchen when union members and immigrant activists in the Bay Area marched down Market Street here.
Ford may have sensed something was up since he paused for a fraction of a minute before going back to cooking.
Ford's absence in that march bares the ambivalence that have clutched American unions on the issue of immigration reforms, pending bills in Congress that never saw light when legislators recessed October 1.
Union leaders like Ford –he represents iron workers– even stayed at home weeks before lawmakers signed off amid clamors for positive immigration reforms to benefit undocumented and legalized foreign workers (including Filipinos).
Labor union members —as themselves, like some members of Ford's Iron Workers Bridge Structural, Ornamental and Reinforced Union Local 377— went to Civic Center (the seat of the city of San Francisco's governance) September 4, but top honchos of unions like Ford's weren't around.
Ford's reason: the union is still discussing some reform measures in the pending immigration reform bills that, because of the recess, would be reverted back to committee hearings.
Traditionally, US labor unions are unsupportive to immigrants, and their officials might need more time to understand immigrants' concerns in today's rise of immigration issues, says Oakland, California-based Mexican Lara Casillas of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition.
While this indecision to support immigrants or not prevails, foreign-born workers in the US are growing in number. The Migration Policy Institute in Washington D.C., in a May 2004 paper citing US Census figures, said there are 17.654 million foreign-born wage and salary workers.
"There is a changing demographic in the workplace: union members now speak English with an accent," Casillas said.

Undecided

RALLIES in various US cities, including San Francisco, marked Labor Day holiday over a month ago, though some 1,000-4,000 rallyists were spread out among themselves in their march from Embarcadero Avenue to Civic Center.
That Labor Day rally was no match to the estimated 50,000 that filled Civic Center Plaza last May, at the height of the US immigration reform debate.
And for the first time "in a long while," observes Casillas, this year's American Labor Day celebration touched on immigrants' issues.
Still, San Francisco Chronicle headlined the rally, reporting on September 5 that the affair "(demonstrated) a new alliance between unions and illegal workers—groups that have been at odds".
"I went here at the rally on my own," Filipino Bryan Cruz of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 790 said.
Cruz also told the assembly: "I believe the 11-to-12 million undocumented migrants should be legalized. My local union sees (immigration issues) as a cause."
That day saw immigrant union members –janitors, hotel and garments, and other service workers– wearing colorful t-shirts, hats, and caps.
Ford said two days after that march that some of his union's members joined the rally, as his local union "has no formal stand yet."
IWBSOR Local 377, whose members maintain the structural strength of San Francisco's bridges, has 3,000 members –all paying $40 in union dues monthly.
Foreign workers like Mexicans and some Filipinos already make up 40 percent of Local 377, but whether they're black, brown or white-skinned, Ford said Local 377 negotiates for them.
"Our union represents all workers, and we are not mindful at looking at them as 'immigrants.'"

Police says going high-tech, aggressive vs illegal-recruiters

By WILLIAM IMPERIAL

QUEZON CITY—POLICE officials in one of the key metropolitan cities said they are going to be aggressive in weeding out illegal recruiters, using surveillance cameras and other advanced equipment.
Superintendent James Brillantes, Quezon City Police District’s Intelligence Investigation Division chief, told the OFW Journalism Consortium the move comes with an increase in the number of cases his group has monitored and worked on.
Brillantes cited that in 18 months up to June this year, his group has arrested 50 illegal recruiters –some of who, he said, are members of “big-time” syndicates.
Under Presidential Decree No. 2018, illegal recruitment is deemed committed by a syndicate if carried out by a group of three or more persons conspiring and/or confederating with one another in carrying out any unlawful or illegal transaction, enterprise or scheme. Illegal recruitment is deemed committed in large scale if committed against three or more persons individually or as a group.
No bail is recommended for those caught engaging in the latter kind of activity.
The total number of those arrested by Brillantes’ group meant an average arrest of two illegal recruiters a month beginning January last year.
These recruiters have been paid by some 79 victims a consolidated total of roughly P7 million, with victims coughing out an average P87,859.50 each (see Table 1).
Brillantes cited that the victims told the police the jobs offered were domestic help or housekeeping, factory work, entertainment, and nursing.
Brillantes said a worker applying for a factory job in Taiwan was asked to pay P120,000.
Such amount is in excess of the authorized fee, which is the equivalent of a worker’s one-month pay, plus P5,000.
The victims, Brillantes said, concentrate on the promise of jobs sans doubts they are being duped.
“By the time they realize their mistake, it’s already too late. Nasayang na iyung savings na nagamit to pay [the illegal recruiter],” Brillantes told the OFW Journalism Consortium in a phone interview.

Depression

ACCORDING to Brillantes, illegal recruiters choose Quezon City as base of operations because of the city’s high rate of informal settlers and the unemployed.
This is supported by a recent study conducted by Task Force Sikap-Buhay, a local government’s social welfare arm, which showed that 50 percent of those living in the city are informal settlers Laraine Abad-Sarmiento, the task force chief, said that out of the 2.3 million people residing in Quezon City, almost half live in informal settlements or squatters’ areas.
She said most of these settlers lived in provinces near the country’s former capital, which connects Manila and the south to northern parts of the Philippines.
Nonetheless, Brillantes said that a number of skilled workers and professionals, like architects, accountants, nurses and even doctors had also been duped by illegal recruitment syndicates in recent years.
“Some of the victims graduated college and are living comfortably. Their dreams of earning big abroad are what illegal recruiters capitalize on,” he explained.
He said cases of estafa and violation of Article 38 (b) in relation to Article 39 (a) of the Labor Code by PD 2018 were already filed by the police against the suspects in various Quezon City and Manila courts.
“As far as we know, the cases filed against these illegal recruiters and syndicates are still being heard in various Quezon City courts. The wheel of justice is rolling against them,” he said.
Still, the wheels churned slow to bag a certain Lorenzo Alvarez Sosa, also known as "Roberto Carpena Alvarez", of 33 B Datsun St., Greater Lagro, Fairview, Quezon City.
In a six-page joint complaint of large-scale illegal recruitment and estafa by 25 of 35 of his alleged victims, Alvarez remained missing with roughly P1.36 million they paid him as “processing fees” for promised work in Saudi Arabia.
The complainants said they learned that Alvarez’s wife was also no longer living in the address Alvarez gave them.
These complainants, mostly engineers, architects, and accountants, said they paid P27,500 each to Alvarez in December last year.
His promises of flight were replaced by reasons for delays –even using his mother’s alleged death on July 10, the last time each heard from Alvarez.

Table 1: Case profiles on illegal recruitment in Quezon City (January 2005 to June 30, 2006)

No. of victims	Promises	Money paid each	Total money paid
4	work in Italy	P350,000	P1,400,000
5	work in Italy	P350,000	P1,750,000
12	work overseas, money for alleged visa processing	P8,700	P1,104,400
4	work in South Korea	P250,000	P1,000,000
1		P40,000	P1,040,000
1		P95,000	P1,095,000
3	work abroad in USA	P50,000	P1,150,000
8	factory work in South Korea	P20,000	P1,160,000
8	work in France	P175,000	P1,400,000
33	work in the US and Middle East, money for alleged stamping of visa and processing fee	P25,500	P1,841,500
79*			P6,940,900**

*P87,859.50 average amount paid by a victim

**US$138,818 (at US$1=P50)

Skepticism greets CFO task force

By Julie Javellana-Santos

MANILA—ANOTHER task force created by a government agency was met with skepticism by migrants’ rights advocates.
Reeling from reports of undocumented workers jumping to their deaths to escape abusive employers in Lebanon, Malacañang issued Executive Order 548 titled “Creating a Task Force against Illegal Recruitment (TFAIR) under the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO).”
President Macapagal-Arroyo’s former publicist and now CFO chair Dante Ang said the task force would include representatives from the police, the foreign affairs and justice departments, airport authorities (MIAA), the government’s overseas recruitment office, and the Bureau of Immigration.
But Maya Bans Cortina of nongovernment group Kanlungan Centre Foundation Inc., questioned the order’s mandate to the CFO, an agency she described as indecisive against illegal recruitment.
“Why the CFO? They have always been wishy-washy like in the fight against illegal trafficking and mail order brides.”
Ellene Sana, executive director of the Center for Migrant Advocacy (CMA), asked why create another task force when one created in 2004 having similar purposes “did not even produce any results”.
“Where is the performance report of the first task force, the Presidential Anti-Illegal Recruitment Task Force?” she asked. The PAIRTF, headed by Director Reynaldo Jaylo, was created two years ago after three women overseas workers –Luz Pacuan, Catherine Bautista and Louella Montenegro– died almost one after the other in the first five months of 2004.
Reports cited these workers exited the Philippines through an “escort service” at the international airport named after the country’s anti-corruption advocate and late Senator Ninoy Aquino.
Jaylo, a former police officer, was later charged with illegal detention.
“The existence of escort system at the airport is very disturbing,” said Robert Ceralvo, a Filipino community leader based in New Jersey, United States.
Ceralvo cited the cases of two women contract workers who fell to their deaths in war-torn Beirut. The two were reportedly attempting to escape from abusive employers and be repatriated to the Philippines, amid the fighting between Hizbollah armed groups in Lebanon and Israeli soldiers.
It was reported that two out of three overseas Filipino workers repatriated from Lebanon were undocumented workers, many of whom had used tourist visas and availed of the “escort services” at the international airport.

Tasked, forced
CMA legal adviser lawyer Henry Roxas said: “suddenly, its task force formation season once again.”
“There’s a task force against illegal recruitment and … against prostitution. I suppose other task forces will be created against gambling, drugs, smuggling and what have you.”
Sana said the lack of a performance report on the PAIRTIF operation reflects government’s lack of seriousness in combatting illegal recruitment.
She added: Why not just beef up the POEA’s AIRTF?
POEA Administrator Rosalinda Baldoz herself expressed surprise over the president’s choice of the CFO as lead agency for the anti-illegal recruitment group.
Still, Baldoz said she “welcome[s] the move”.
“Hopefully their efforts will be better because they will take care of illegal recruitment using tourist visas and other non-worker visas,” she said.
Baldoz said at least there would now be a body to concentrate on the criminal aspect of illegal recruitment, which the POEA has been unable to do, that being not part of their mandate.
According to the order, the new task force would be tasked to “develop and execute strategies and schemes” against illegal recruiters like the so-called “escort” services within the country’s international airports and other points of departure.
CFO officials wanting to remain anonymous expressed doubts over the wisdom of placing such a “tough” campaign in the hands of their agency, which they said has always distanced itself from issues concerning OFW.