IT was supposed to be a year marking the start of return to normalcy, or whatever “normalcy” meant. For millions of Filipinos dependent on the economies of padala—it meant return of dollars and more food on the table from the depressing first year of the pandemic.
As soon as Covid-19 vaccines became available in developed countries, hopes rose again among and for the 10 million Filipinos working overseas. With more people vaccinated, governments lifted lockdowns and businesses resumed. Slowly, countries opened their borders and welcomed expatriate workers anew. Records from the Philippine Overseas Employment Agency (POEA) showed that for the first nine months of 2021, an average of 70,000 OFWs were deployed every month despite the pandemic.
Around 57 percent of these new hires this year are seafarers, as crew change became more regular for cargo, transport and petroleum vessels. The cruise industry likewise got reinvigorated as fully vaccinated passengers were allowed to travel again to the Americas, Asia and Europe. This is almost the same rate as the prepandemic level. In 2019, Filipinos made up 30 percent of the crew in cruise ships around the world. The rest of Filipino migrants who left this year are land-based workers, but the numbers are, the POEA said, still low compared to prepandemic levels averaging almost 92,000 people every month.
Meanwhile, across the globe, demand for health-care workers, especially nurses, have gone up. The Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), however, still won’t allow all Filipino nurses—earning an average of P20,000-P35,000 monthly locally—to be recruited abroad to North America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe: job markets with insanely attractive monthly salaries ranging from P100,000-P500,000 plus insurance and accommodation benefits.
PHL nurses in demand
Indeed, and not surprisingly, demand for Filipino nurses is unprecedented amid continuing challenges of the pandemic, especially in the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait. So much so that the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) finally allowed the increase of the annual cap for nurses deployment twice—from 5,000 to 6,500 and then in November to 7,000. Still, a nurses group insisted the higher ceiling is not enough and demanded to be freed from the shackles of state-imposed travel restriction.
If this trend continues until the end of this year, around 840,000 Filipinos may have left the country to seek greener pastures. Whether this number offset the 1.5 million Filipinos who were repatriated since the pandemic began remains to be seen.
At the macro level, keeping these OFWs and Filipino migrants abroad meant better fiscal position for the Philippine government. An economist estimated that the deficit in the Philippines’ balance of payments position can climb to positive territory, with a surplus of $353 million (P17 billion), thanks to the remittances from OFWs who usually send more money to their families during holidays.
Economics of travel curbs, repatriation
Again, whether this economic gain can offset the more than P11.4 billion released this year to the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA) and the Department of Foreign Affairs to repatriate OFWs stranded in countries affected by the bimonthly changes in IATF travel restrictions remains to be seen.
When Covid-19 cases ebbed in countries, the Philippines opened its borders slowly from arriving international passengers, only to be closed again even for OFWs and balikbayans on fresh surges in cases.
When the Delta variant was discovered in India, the IATF stopped flights coming from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Then, the more transmissible Omicron variant happened, with flights from South Africa suspended, as well as those from European countries hosting big numbers of OFWs, including the Netherlands, France and Italy. Every time the IATF announces new countries under its red list, OFW and balikbayan travelers are forced to change or cancel their travel plans—already complicated with different vaccination and quarantine requirements from one destination to another. The DFA and Philippine embassies and consulates would have to mount repatriation flights to rescue OFWs stranded in airports, caught by the dizzying plethora of travel and health protocols. Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro L. Locsin Jr., who is so accessible to OFWs because of his hyperactive Twitter account, has repeatedly said the DFA won’t spare any effort or cost to bring home any distressed OFW.
Aside from the cost of flights or stranded OFWs, the government is also paying for the hotel quarantine of all OFWs and their testing. If they live in the provinces, OWWA is also mandated to bring them home.
As thousands of Filipinos apply for work overseas, the demand for passport application—both new and renewal—has likewise increased. By the middle of the year, it had become almost impossible for anyone trying to get an online appointment for passport application in any of the DFA consular offices. DFA Undersecretary Brigido Dulay Jr. attributed this to increasing demand for travel compounded by the IATF restriction limiting the number of people inside the building where photos and the biometrics of passport applicants are being taken.
In 2019, before the pandemic, the DFA processed 4 million passport applications. In 2020, the DFA only released 1.7 million passports. As expected, an industry of “passport fixers” made a glorious comeback—sophisticated yet socially distant and harder to track down—by servicing desperate passport applicants in their online appointment. Then, the contracted courier service of DFA failed to deliver the passports of more than 4,000 applicants. As if Lemony Snicket’s series is trying a catchup, the DFA’s online passport tracker was exposed to potential data privacy breach. Migration expert Emmanuel Geslani said many OFWs have lost opportunities to work abroad from the passport fiasco. “Given that the entire country is now at low risk from Covid infection, we should open the DFA consular offices for walk-in applicants to accommodate our OFWs,” he said.
2022 outlook
Geslani said recruitment industries are expecting an upward trend in 2022. The Middle East North Africa (MENA) region, for one, appears to have sustained very low cases. With the rise in crude oil prices from a low of $40 per barrel to $80 in the last quarter of 2020, he believes that traditional expat-labor-dependent countries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE will prime their economies with big infrastructure projects. Technology-driven companies, as well as the health sector, now the biggest gainers during the pandemic, will continue to attract foreign skilled laborers.
While the prospects for the 2022 labor market vary from country to country, the only constant remains—making Filipinos safe and protected wherever they are in the world. President Duterte is now trying to create a legacy for this special segment in society who gave him a landslide victory in 2016. As of this writing, a landmark bill is now at his desk for signing that will create a department solely dedicated to OFWs.
The Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) will merge all the government agencies engaged in OFW concerns from the POEA to specialized offices of the DFA, DOLE, the Department of Social Welfare and Development and the Commission on Filipinos Overseas. OWWA, meanwhile, will no longer be an attached agency of the DOLE but of the DMW.
While Congress explicitly said the state will not promote overseas employment as a means to achieve economic growth, this very act rightly made it so. After all, we are a migrant people—intrinsic in our nature to always travel as an archipelagic nation. Our new normal, at the risk of being too simplistic, is just a mask with a passport and luggage on hand.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes
