ABOUT 1,000 Filipino nurses are projected to get work in Germany in 2020.
This would be made possible with the continued implementation of the Triple Win Project (TWP), a hiring program between the Federal Republic of Germany (FDR) and the Republic of the Philippines. The Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) administers TWP.
Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III said FDR prefers hiring Filipino nurses to address its need for healthcare professionals.
“It has been six years since the Philippines and Germany started cooperating on the placement of our Pinoy nurses. I am confident that for 2020, this partnership under the Triple Win Project would provide an improved and streamlined application process, and more importantly, ensured protection to our nurses,” Bello said.
Citing the POEA data, the labor chief also disclosed that since 2013, a total of 903 Filipino nurses have been deployed in Germany. They receive a starting monthly salary of €2,000, and it will increase to €2,400 after they are recognized as qualified nurses in Germany.
Bello, however, clarified that the application period in 2019 has already ended. The application period for 2020 is set to be announced soon.
He said the TWP’s success might open up other job opportunities for the Filipinos as Germany is eyeing to expand the project’s coverage to other sectors to meet its labor demand.
Surging racism
In recent years, amid the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment felt in Germany, several migrants have expressed concerns that they could be victims of hate crimes. Just last September, a wheelchair-bound Libyan migrant was injured after he was attacked in the eastern German city of Chemnitz, which the Associated Press reported as a “far-right hate crime.”
AfD (the Alternative for Germany), a far-right populist political party, won 94 seats in the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, in the 2017 elections. The party, its critics claimed, got support by deliberately stoking racial resentment and Islamophobia, the South China Morning Post reported.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose open-door migrant policy placed her in a political dilemma, recently vowed to fight right-wing extremism, according to a Deutsche Welle report. (KAL from PR)