Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

The United States could easily design mechanisms
to ensure that developing countries would share
in these gains. Even with no governmental action,
developing countries would benefit from an increased
flow of remittances from emigrant professionals.
The United States could also ensure that part of the
earnings of foreign professionals would be paid to
home-country governments to compensate for those
countries’ investment in educating professionals.
Since professionals must have their licenses renewed
on a regular basis, coordinating this transfer
should be straightforward. If, in addition, the US
government increased its foreign assistance by
an amount equal to the efficiency gains from the
inflow of foreign professionals [ignoring the gains
to consumers], the resulting transfer of funds would
more than double the foreign aid budget.
Baker does not include nurses among the highlypaid
professionals that he lists, but others not so
discriminating would readily extend the argument to
other professions including nursing, and indeed, why
not to lesser-skilled immigrants as well?
In a recently published book The Anti-Development
State: The Political Economy of Permanent Crisis in the
Philippines (University of the Philippines, 2004) Walden
Bello and his co-authors Herbert Docena, Marissa de
Guzman and Marylou Malig pose the question why,
among the Southeast Asian countries, the Philippines
was notably bypassed in the massive redeployment of
Japanese manufacturing capital following the Plaza
accords of 1985, when the upward revaluation of the
yen by 50 percent threatened its export competitiveness.
Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia in particular were
the favored choices as low wage offshore production
platforms, and with further investments from Hong
Kong and Taiwanese (and US) manufacturers, it went
on to stimulate the export-oriented industrialization of
these Southeast Asian countries.
Bello and his colleagues argue that corruption was not a
key factor since it appeared not to deter investors from
South Korea, Indonesia and other notably corrupt East
and Southeast Asian states. They highlighted instead
the small domestic market, a consequence of a lack
of meaningful land reform and the associated extreme
inequality of income distribution. It is not clear that
a limited domestic market was a decisive factor for
export-oriented investors. More pertinent perhaps,
among the other factors mentioned, was the (Aquino
administration’s) burden of debt servicing, inherited
from the Marcos dictatorship and perpetuated by a
corrupt political class incapable of subsuming their
CHANGING LIFESTYLES AND HEALTH
201
short-term factional interests, which annually consumed
a third of the Philippine national budget and decimated
the country’s supportive infrastructure (physical,
technical, educational and social). 53
Adding to the political instability, rapacity and
factional struggles of the oligarchic elites, the “failed
developmentalist” state was further hobbled by
neo-liberal dictates imposed during the Ramos
administration, which further weakened its fiscal
capacity as the WTO-mandated trade regimes deprived
it of custom duties.
Under such circumstances, the labor export policies
that were crafted in the 1970s by Marcos’ Labor
Secretary Blas Ople, to increase foreign currency inflows
(labor remittances) to service the country’s mounting
international debts, have become a permanent fixture
of Filipino economic and social policy.
The Philippines is presently the world’s leading exporter
of labor. If globalizing capital doesn’t come to the
mountain, the mountain will seek it out. So in 2004,
an average of 2,600 Filipinos left the country daily to
seek employment and livelihood abroad. There are
currently at least 7.5 million registered migrant workers
employed in 186 countries, and unregistered workers
estimated conservatively at 1.7 million. This amounts
to 11.2 percent of the Filipino population (or 17 percent
of the labor force), whose remittances to the Philippines
totaled US$10.35 billion in 2005, equivalent to a
quarter of the country’s exports, or about 12 percent of
gross domestic product, 54 without which the Philippine
economy might well have collapsed.
As Pepe Escobar, a regular columnist for Asia Times
online puts it: 55 “The soundtrack of Southeast Asia—
and most of the Middle East—is played by Filipinos.
Officials and crews on cargo and cruise ships sailing
across all oceans are invariably Filipino. Filipino doctors
and nurses [and teachers] migrate to overseas hospitals
[and schools] by the thousands every year. At least
4,000 Filipinos risk their lives working in Iraq. (The
Philippines banned its citizens from going to work in
Iraq after truck driver Angelo de la Cruz was kidnapped
by Islamic militants on July 7, 2005. However, 42% of
all Filipinos believe they have a right to look for a job
in a danger zone such as Iraq). Hong Kong’s [Filipino]
amahs leave their families behind and embark on twoyear
contracts that pay a fixed salary set by the Hong
Kong government. They then send 70-85% of the total
back to the Philippines every month. The “privilege”
of working in a wealthy, advanced and multi-racial
society where they keep the house impeccably clean,
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows