Is This Trip Really Necessary?

The three Filipinos who were recently executed in China on drug trafficking charges and their OFW (overseas Filipino worker) counterparts who leave the Philippines to work abroad legitimately have one thing in common. They avail of opportunities (and risks) to make more money in jobs overseas than they could at home in order to benefit their families, especially  their children, even if means taking positions below their socioeconomic stations, such as teachers hiring out as maids and for stretches of time that may last months, even years and in which they are often are subjected to degrading and abusive working conditions, especially  in such countries as Saudi Arabia which has recently stopped accepting Filipino domestic helpers rather than comply with rules from the Philippine government intended to protect them.

Even when the Philippine government rescues and repatriates victimized OFWs, many of them turn around and take new positions in the countries where they were mistreated.  In war-torn Libya  where their very lives are in jeopardy, many Filipinos are staying on due to enticements such as double pay.  The bigger picture fact that if they wind up killed or disabled in such a dangerous environment, it will mean the end of providing for their families doesn't seem to enter their minds.

Importantly, however, the money that OFW's remit home contributes tremendously  to the Philippine economy as a whole, even to the point of propping it up. In 2010, this amount totaled almost $19 billion (which is well over half of a trillion pesos!). In anyone's book that is a chunk of change.

Considering the closeness of most Filipino families, for OFW's to leave their loved ones behind sounds like a  noble sacrifice. However a close examination of this phenomenon shows that the plight that causes them to take this step is really one of their own making and hence usually avoidable.  This is because couples here have children without taking the responsibility  to stop and think about what they are doing.  As a result they wind up with larger families than they can afford.   Behind this lack of family planning is pressure from the Catholic Church to reproduce as many children as possible, along with the fatalistic cultural trait of bahala na, which loosely translated means "God will provide" or "What will be will be".

The problem is that when families crunch the budget numbers, they usually find that God hasn't provided after all (nor has the Church), which means that one—or sometimes even both—of the parents will have to step up to the plate and seek employment overseas to make ends meet.  The frequent negative results of such separation are predictable even when the OFW faithfully remits funds back home:  Infidelity and desertion by one or both partners, discipline problems and resentment issues from the children, and recipients' eventual  over-dependence and misuse of the money provided by the absent family member.

Often those who leave their families behind to work abroad were themselves children of overseas Filipino workers and know full well  the emotional and psychological toll such separations entail. But they nevertheless repeat the pattern. Couldn't they see what was coming before they started having kids or did they deliberately ignore the inevitable consequences of their actions?

As for OFW's contribution to the national economy it is  their absence from the local workforce and their pumping of the previously mentioned trillions of pesos into the country  furnishes a crutch and perpetuates a system that allows the Philippine government to avoid dealing with root causes of poverty such as overpopulation and corruption, and to indefinitely defer taking meaningful steps to reform the Philippine economy into one that provides decent paying jobs locally for all workers so that no one would ever again have to leave the country to earn a living.