BY LAURENCE MARVIN CASTILLO
(Continued from Aug.6, 2020)
Filipino migrant workers and international students were further thrust to the economic margins of their host countries, either fired or stood down by their employers. The Philippine state, however, has done very little to look after disenfranchised migrants. Embassies and consulates have failed to mobilize comprehensive welfare drives especially for Filipinos left with little to no means to survive.
Worse, in May, an additional burden to the already weary overseas population was imposed, in the form of a circular directing an increase in mandatory payments to PhilHealth, the government’s health insurance corporation.
The pandemic has left thousands of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) with no choice but to go back to the Philippines. Compounding the sense of economic uncertainty that confronts them upon returning home is the subhuman condition to which they are being subjected. There are reports of returning migrants confined in unkempt, barely habitable quarantine areas, of migrants forced to camp out under a flyover near the international airport, and even of migrants pushed to the brink by desperation, choosing to end their lives.
Looking at history, one can say that state abandonment is very much the official disposition on which the labor export system is hinged. The Philippine government is fundamentally inclined to function simply as what sociologist Robyn Rodriguez calls a “labor brokerage state,” an institutional apparatus that facilitates Filipinos’ outward labor traffic.
The state’s social responsibility for OFWs practically ends in the airport gates, as the transaction between the Philippine state and the host country is largely a profit-oriented one, in which questions of social protection, decent work, fair pay and labor rights barely figure.
For OFWs, navigating the overseas labor market means relying on one’s individual will and capacity to survive. In the worst of circumstances, when they are forced to turn to overseas state agencies, they only end up confirming the Philippine state’s inadequacy in securing their welfare.
It is even more insidious that when the Philippine state chooses to extend its political reach amidst and among OFWs, it is to flex its counterinsurgent capacities by restraining dissent overseas.
A prominent example is the stymied attempt, in late April, to deport a Taiwan-based OFW who aired her criticisms of the government online. Then, of course, there is the covert sponsorship of smear campaigns against legal migrant organizations. What is ironic is that in the face of state neglect, these organizations are among the groups that step up to address migrant concerns and fill in the gaps left by state abandonment.
These groups inspire possibilities of nation-based identification that refuses the individualizing survivor mentality that such abandonment often gives shape to. This identification – premised on solidarity and given to justified collective outrage over government crimes of omission and commission – is always and understandably opposed by a state that is increasingly dependent on fabricating national political fictions that now fail to convince day by day. (Bulatlat.com)
