A crowd of Filipina domestic workers celebrate Easter Sunday in Hong Kong. Photo courtesy of Rob Blau

At only 24, he was already earning a good income as a bank manager.  But the good times did not last.  His country’s unstable politics led to his employer closing its doors and Insua decided he needed to move.  In 1989, he settled in Vancouver and soon had a job in the city’s financial industry.  Most of his extended family remains in the Philippines, and he still sends money home to help with his mother-in-law’s medical bills and tries to visit his aging father once a year.

“It’s hard to depend on the Philippines for my future, so I had to move,” said Insua, now the president of the Philippines Canada Trade Council.

Insua’s story is both similar and different from the millions of Filipinos who find work in foreign countries.  The nation of 91 million sends roughly 10 per cent of its population to work overseas in nearly every country on the globe.  More than 2,000 more people leave the Philippines each day, according to Migrante International, a Filipino group that champions workers rights.

“We’re modern slaves in these foreign countries,” said Joy Sioson, chair of Toronto’s Philippine Women’s Centre. “We’re doing the most dirty, dangerous jobs that no one else will do.”

Most Filipinos have found work in service industries, like nursing or child-care, or low-skill construction labour.  Insua said that more Filipinos have started to find white-collar jobs, but Sioson disagreed.  Many architects and bankers are still forced to take jobs below their qualifications in other countries, she said, because of restrictions on foreign labour or simply to find work.

The Philippines received a total of  $14.4 billion US in 2007 from remittances, the funds sent from these foreign workers.  That amount ballooned by more than 13 per cent from the year before.  The Philippines is one of the world’s major remittance receivers, with eight per cent of the global share of money sent home from overseas.

The nation’s GDP per capita was $4,770 in 2007, thirty-first out of 57 Asian nations, while unemployment registered at 7.9 per cent the same year.

"The Philippines is in a state of chronic poverty and unemployment,” Sioson said, and there are not enough jobs for everyone. The only option then, for workers to support their families is to leave the country.  Sixty-five per cent of these temporary emigrants are now women, she said.

The most popular destinations are the Middle East, North America, and other Asian countries.  The top three nations housing Filipino workers in 2006, according to the Philippine Overseas Labour Office’s statistics, were Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong.  Canada ranks seventeenth, with 438,000 workers from the Philippines. These Filipinos sent almost $600 million in 2006 from Canada, which was the world’s third-highest source of these transfers.

'Just as important as aid'

Remittances are a big business, and have financial companies scrambling to be the carrier for this money.  Workers can send their money through a bank or financial institution like Western Union, but pay hefty fines; sending a bank transaction can cost eight per cent of the total amount or more.  Other times, Filipinos send the money home for free through a returning friend or acquaintance.  Growing global accessibility to cell phones and the Internet is also affecting remittance payments, as a rising number of migrant workers choose to send money digitally.  Adopting this new technology allows remittances more conveniently, with much smaller fees and without hold on the money.

Remittances are just as important as aid in many developing countries, said Elliot Tepper, political science professor at Carleton University. The Philippines is a prime example of a nation surviving by exporting its human labour.

These funds are “keeping the Filipino economy afloat right now,” Sioson said. According to the Philippines’s Canadian embassy, the money goes toward paying down the country’s $62 billion external debt and buying oil.  The money also helps distribute wealth to some of the country’s poorest people, although the country loses a large portion of its workforce that could provide services for Filipinos.

In the 1970s, strongman president Ferdinand Marcos made sending Filipino workers overseas part of his national economic policy.  The move was a temporary fix at first, but since then politicians have embraced the idea and entrenched remittance from overseas labour in the country’s financial system.  Now, the Philippine Overseas Labor Offices monitors these workers.  Current President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s economic plan aims to send one million Filipinos overseas each year, Sioson said.

The country and its politicians have come to rely on overseas income.  This attitude has kept the Philippines from fixing its real problems at home, Insua said, where the country needs a national industry .  Politicians have no incentive to fix things at home because their actions will not affect remittances. “They’re just having a heyday,” Insua said.

Unprotected abroad

Migrant workers often do not enjoy the same protections a citizen would.  Both the host nation and the Philippines’s embassy often pay little attention to the harms Filipinos face in other countries, Sioson said.  “They just turn a blind eye.  There’s really no protection.” Workers can have their passports taken away until they fulfill their contract, Insua said, effectively making them prisoners.  Other people are sucked into the sex industry, physically abused, or paid indecent wages.

Canada has the regulations to keep its foreign labourers safe, Tepper said, but exceptions do happen.  A Filipino woman named Arcelie Laoagan worked two jobs in Calgary to support her husband and five children back home. She was found dead Jan. 18, six years after leaving the Philippines.

Familial ties are very important in the Philippines, Tepper said, and sending money home is considered an obligation.  Overseas labour is only a temporary migration, but it still can break family bonds.  Social values erode when families are split up, Insua said. He said expected this diaspora to take a toll on the nation’s morals. Even if they do not face physical danger, Insua said, working long hours away from home is a lonely life.

Relying on remittances is a risky business, he said. An international war or catastrophe could freeze the money transfers and leave the Philippines without this major income source. But most important, he says, is the Philippines’s need to develop a national industry to support itself and staunch the flow of overseas labourers by improving conditions at home. A self-sufficient nation could gain economic momentum as its best and brightest Filipinos stay behind and contribute to their national economy.

“This is out of necessity,” Insua said. “Every Filipino I know longs to go back. The Philippines is a beautiful country…we’d rather be there.”