LuisTeodoro.com

President Arroyo may have beaten her potential rivals to the draw by claiming that the absentee voting bill just passed by the House and the Senate is her gift to Filipino migrants. By enabling as many as 7.5 million Filipinos abroad to vote in Philippine elections, the bill could decide the outcome of the 2004 and future polls. But the OFW vote may not necessarily go Mrs. Arroyo’s way two years from now. The “gift” could instead blow up in her face.

The crucial factor is her government’s support for a US war on Iraq. Such a war is likely to affect as many as a million (including the undocumented) Filipino workers in the Middle East in some form or another, including their exodus back to the Philippines. Overseas workers constitute the bulk of Filipino migrants abroad, and are therefore the backbone of the absentee ballot.

Filipino migrant workers’ remittances—estimated at $8 billion yearly—are also practically keeping the country afloat. Although the exact figures are not available, a substantial sum, perhaps a quarter, of the $8 billion comes from workers in the Middle-Eastern countries including Iraq, the United States’ intended target. A substantial decrease in these remittances in the event of war will also adversely affect the entire economy.

An estimated 10 million migrant workers—from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Egypt, the Philippines and Indonesia, plus a sprinkling of Thais, Nepalese and Ethiopians—work in the Middle East. The remittances workers from the first seven countries prop up the economies of their home countries.

Overseas workers from Sri Lanka, for example, send home an estimated one billion dollars annually. Egypt’s migrant workers sent home $3.75 billion in 2000, and India’s remitted a whopping $11.6 billion.

None of these countries—and none of the Philippines’ Southeast Asian neighbors—have expressed support for a war on Iraq, except the Philippines. Although under US pressure and promises of aid, these countries apparently regard their workers’ interests as synonymous with their own.

President Arroyo thus stands out among these countries’ leaders in her unqualified support for the US. Last month she offered the United States “political, logistic and humanitarian” support for a US attack on Iraq—where several hundred Filipinos work and live.

Mrs. Arroyo’s pledge of support was only part of a series of similar pledges and actions including the presence of US troops in the Philippines calculated to earn her government several hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid—and to curry favor with an electorate she perceives to be pro-American.

However, the passage of the absentee voting bill may enable workers who by 2004 would have been adversely affected by a US war on Iraq to express their disaffection with the Arroyo government. Depending on how the House and Senate versions are reconciled, the bill will enable 4 million or 7.5 million Filipino migrants to vote by 2004.

Although the Arroyo government has played down the impact of a US war on Iraq—a National Security Council meeting in September concluded that such a war would be swift and unlikely to affect Filipino workers in the Middle East—many workers themselves are less optimistic. They fear not only for their safety but also for their future and that of their families if they are forced to go back to the Philippines and to joblessness.

That fear is reflected in the migrant workers’ organization Migrante International’s opposition to the Philippine government’s support for a US attack on Iraq. The biggest organization of Filipino overseas workers, Migrante has called on the Philippine government to withdraw its support for such a war, chastising it for making the interests of overseas Filipino workers secondary to the political interests of the government.

Not only Iraq will be affected by such a war, said Migrante, but also neighboring countries like Kuwait, where there are 35,000 overseas Filipino workers, and Jordan, where there are 5,000. Filipino workers will also be at risk in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, where the United States maintains military bases, and where even more Filipinos work.

If the United States does attack Iraq with or without UN sanction—and there is every indication that it will within the next three months—and if it does result in Filipino workers’ being injured, killed or repatriated, the political fallout is likely to affect Mrs. Arroyo’s 2004 chances at being elected to the presidency.

Forced by lack of economic opportunity to leave their families behind, and because they have been exposed to different cultures and to different ways of doing things with which they can compare Philippine practice, OFW groups reveal a critical outlook on Philippine society, politics and governance. This is a marked departure from their indifference to political affairs in the eighties, and their support for the government in the seventies.

The departure was only to be expected. The OFWs’ concern for their families and the pain of being separated from kith and kin have forced them to look for the causes of their exile in the homeland. They have concluded, as many of their countrymen have, that Philippine economic backwardness is primarily the result of bad leadership.

Their commitment to the search for a political leadership that will widen economic opportunities at home to enable them to return to the country was evident during the Estrada impeachment trial of 2000-2001, as well as during People Power 2.

During that period, migrant workers were among the most articulate Filipinos in expressing their views via the Internet, through which, in e-mail, e-groups and their own websites, they consistently argued for transparent and effective governance to get the country out of the economic abyss into which it has fallen—and which has forced them into exile in alien cultures.

These views they of course transmitted to their families at home. OFWs are thus likely to have contributed to the political awareness and education of those they left behind.

The Arroyo government underestimates the political savvy of Filipino migrant workers at its own peril. A substantial portion of this country’s population, forced by economic need to seek employment abroad, has come into contact with other cultures and points of view and is transmitting its knowledge to the folks back home.

Although this process has been sped up by the communication and information revolution, it is far from unique.

In the 20th century the same process, though at a much slower rate, occurred among overseas Chinese as well as Vietnamese in exile. Among the former—a student in France before the momentous events of the Chinese revolution—was Zhou Enlai, the first Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of China.

The Philippines’ own experience in the late 19th century, however, antedated the Chinese’s. On the eve of the Philippine Revolution, the propagandists were exiles to a man and woman, among them Jose P. Rizal, whose travels and contact with the cultures and intellectual life of Europe and Asia significantly contributed to his reformist worldview.

The country’s OFWs are displaying political awareness and consciousness superior to that of the vast majority of their countrymen at home. They have also kept close touch with events at home, and if only for the sake of sectoral and familial interests, are likely to be more discerning in their choice of candidates to vote for.

OFW opposition to the Arroyo government’s support for a US war on Iraq, in the event that the war does occur, is thus likely to manifest itself in a vote for a candidate for president more critical of US government intentions than Mrs. Arroyo has been.

The Arroyo government may not think the level of OFW political education to be high enough for its political fortunes to be affected. Two thousand four, however, is all of two years away. A war on Iraq devastating to OFWs and their families—and to the Philippine economy—can speed up the process to a level at which a substantial portion of the 4 million or 7.5 million OFWs who will be voting then can choose someone else other than Mrs. Arroyo. Her “gift” to Filipino migrant workers could yet be her undoing.

(TODAY/ABS-CBNNEWS.COM, October 29, 2002)