Wednesday, February 28, 2007 Opiniano: Getting accustomed already with migration By Jeremaiah M. Opiniano
THE headlines on February 16 screamed to rejoice a new Philippine record. This record is in the matter of remittances coming from some eight million compatriots abroad, either as temporary contract workers, immigrants, or as undocumented migrants. Some US$12.8 billion of remittances went through the formal banking channels.
For government officials, the projections can go nowhere but up. Officials hope that 2007 remittances will reach US$14 billion, and this is despite issues such as the shutting out of the June 2006 nursing board examination passers in the US market, feared kidnappings of Filipinos in some countries, the closure of the United Kingdom market for nurses, among others.
On the side however, the country's gross domestic production did not meet government targets. The 2006 gross domestic product growth rate was 5.4 percent, slightly higher than the 2005 growth rate of 5.1 percent. Government's targets for GDP were 5.3 in 2005 and 5.6-to-6.1 percent in 2006.
Thus, much as we want the Philippine economy to gain significant economic headway, we still have to wait a little longer. For the meantime, overseas Filipinos have never been valued much as now. Their income sent to families back home are the reasons for the strong rebound of the Philippine peso's value to the US dollar, and for a balance of payments surplus of US$3.77 billion in 2006.
When there was this craze about the "development potential" of remittances, development finance experts were abuzz. This is because despite episodes of economic slowdowns by developing countries, remittances respond to such situation with their rising numbers. This situation has always been the case in the Philippines.
Remittances always buoying consumption have also been the case, and there may perhaps be few efforts by remitters to direct those remittances to investments, job generating enterprises, and the like.
The only difficulty arising here is that remittances are private monies of overseas Filipinos and their families, and the best that we can do is provide these migrants and their families with a range of options.
This menu of options will tell them where best to put their money that will be to their competitive advantage and, hopefully, that will generate spillover effects such as jobs and new products if income earned from abroad is invested into a manufacturing-related business.
The greater challenge to all these is how can a country like the Philippines go beyond what is has always been accustomed at. The World Bank said in previous years that while remittances have been a big lit to the Philippine economy, the government should not rely on those monies and on international migration as a development strategy.
The government said "it does not rely on migration" for the country's economic survival, although the country has yet to showcase large-scale efforts to utilize remittances for more productive purposes. What have been the "productive" directions that the private sector is suggesting include franchising, newer bank products by commercial banks that are below the inflation rate, condominium and housing properties, investments in the Philippine stock market, among others.
As for the rural areas, they are in dire need of resources as well-and the suggested ways to use remittances productively have been favoring the urban areas more. If there are those daring enough to try out development in the rural areas, like selling high-end houses in Jolo, Sulu by former Saudi Arabia contract worker Michael Abubakar (as reported by the OFW Journalism Consortium), doing rural area-based investments is at their own risk.
The dependency is even prevalent among families of migrants. What has been usual is family and household members receiving more remittances, and reportedly not doing steps to erase their dependency to the parent, sibling or kin abroad sending the money home. But a study by University of Santo Tomas economist Alvin Ang showed a different twist: that household members receiving remittances work harder.
This is because they want to train here so hard and try out overseas work in the near future. On one hand, as Ang's econometric findings showed, labor productivity is increasing. On the other hand, these family and household members are getting accustomed already to something - international migration- that is the only way for a brighter future for them.
And what's forthcoming for the country is the national and local elections. I do not know if Filipinos are eager to participate in this year's elections, especially given the fact that we have yet to await true-blue socio-economic and policy reforms that will provide equitable development and buoy the domestic economy. Some 21 years after People Power 1, there are now eight million Filipinos abroad. To this, "the remittance bonanza has not been totally an unmixed blessing, not only for the households but for the macro-economy," says University of the Philippines economist Ernesto Pernia.
But Pernia gives us a caution: "(Remittances have) kept the government from pursuing real policy reforms that would have improved the performance of the domestic economy and reduced the need for overseas (migration)."
That is the major thing that the Philippines is accustomed itself with: slow or no policy reforms, continued receipt of remittances, continued export of skilled and semi-skilled workers, among others. Behind these things that we have gone accustomed with are the lives of Filipinos abroad; even their rights and welfare abroad is primary -and ironically, the current craze is about migrants' money and not about migrants themselves.
While it seems that the rights and welfare of migrants is becoming secondary to their money with regard to the public's attention to international migration, we could only hope that this scenario is not something we will all be accustomed with for a long time.
We also hope the government listens to what Pernia recommended in his July 2006 paper on remittances: "The government would probably be well advised to rethink its policy on labor export -a phenomenon subject to all kinds of vicissitudes, regard it (migration) as transitory), and just buckle down to do its long overdue work."
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