Sunday, August 17, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: One world? By Erma M. Cuizon
WHO doesn’t talk about the OFW phenomenon in conversation over coffee or in lectures in school or in newspaper columns?
But there are not just Filipino overseas workers to talk about. There are all others working out of their home country. As a study puts it, the remittances are said to be “the single most important factor fighting poverty in the world today.”
Consider a few things---one of 10 people in the world sends remittances home to the family as a worker abroad. That is to say, the marvel of overseas workers is not just in Asia.
That means the world is not as strange as it used to be outside the traditionally exclusive town walls of nations.
Take the movie about the Mexican caregiver. Not yet shown here, it’s described as a comment on the influx of Mexicans to the US. They’ve crossed the US-Mexican border quite easily until attention to it was recently directed along a new unfriendly position of the Bush administration. It would be like an American in Queens County in NY waking up to find all Filipinos gone.
“A Day Without Mexicans” is a story of Mexicans in California, the women mostly working as nannies, so that it might look like the State could never survive without the services of Mexicans, and that America in that part of the country would bring up children with Mexican speaking habits of rolling the flirtatious “r.”
And what’s also true is that Mexico, or some other countries, would never survive a day without the workers’ remittances. The country which is the biggest source of remittances sent to other countries through overseas workers is, of course, the US, or $31 billion of remittance outflows annually.
And the phenomenon of new immigration patterns is world-wide. There are not just the Pinoy caregivers in the world. Children in the next generations won’t learn just Pinoy culture from yayas who sing “Pinangga ko.” From Mexicans, too, children would hear “Noche Azul.”
El Salvadorans would reveal that the country’s exports are, beginning with the biggest in number, its people, coffee, sugar and rice. For import, it attracts remittances from the US.
A friend who stayed in El Salvador in South America for some years puts it straight, “There’s a town that’s running out of men.”
It’s said that the economy of Latin America, for one, would slip if remittances stopped coming in and horribly in just three months’ time.
The opposite situation would be the remittances slowing down. There would seem to be one clear cause---when the Latin American immigrants would call America home, then ask the family to move into the rich country and send less money back to the old home.
But remittance growth has increased annually, even with the slowdown of the US economy. It has developed such that the never-failing family remittance is doing much better than development aid and foreign investment for Latin America.
Remittances increase when the local economy’s doing poorly because the overseas workers, as a reaction, send more money than the usual amount to enable the dear family to survive.
In the case of the Filipino workers, the remittance rate has been growing, it probably moves as a reaction to the state of the economy in the country and around the world.
In fact, like other overseas workers worldwide, some remitters send money home first before spending for anything or paying bills in the new country.
But the point is that the world in its interaction in all corners should have become one and beloved from any point of view, from all sides, in a happy culture merger anyone could dream of. But there’s the war between Russia and Georgia….
What has kept us back where we started, away from an ideal peace?
