Migrants unite and resist
attacks against our rights!
By Garry Martinez
Chairperson, Migrante International
July 5, 2011, University Hotel, UP Diliman, Philippines
Distinguished speakers, Ms. Eni Lestari, Dr. Irene Fernandez, Wahu Kaara, Atty. Joseph Entero, Anisur
Rahman Khan, Lucy Pagoada, fellow migrants, colleagues and friends, greetings of solidarity! To our
guests from different countries, welcome to Manila!
I am Garry Martinez, chairperson of Migrante International, global alliance of overseas Filipino workers
in at least 200 countries around the world. I was an undocumented Filipino migrant worker in South
Korea for 12 years before I decided to become a full-time volunteer for my organization. As an OFW, I
had personally experienced the hardships, implications, the political and socio-economic causes and
effects of forced migration.
I have been asked to talk to you about the issues and struggles confronting migrants worldwide and
the resistance of the global migrant movement against attacks on our rights and dignity. To better
understand this context and topic, allow me to start my presentation with a simple yet significant
statement:
The phenomenon of labor migration is not a tool for development but the result of the increasing
under-development of nations who have long-ago opened their economies to neo-liberal policies
under the banner of globalization. The myth of migration as a tool for development has long been
discredited in that it has resulted in the further commodification of the labor force of underdeveloped
nations at the expense of genuine national development.
As the global alliance of Filipino migrant organizations, it is in this context that we stand firm in our
criticism of neoliberal globalization and its general agenda that promotes labor export over the rights
and protection of migrant workers and their families.
Why then is labor export being intensified with even other poorer countries following suit? The answer
is simple.
Governments are driven to increase the billions of overseas remittances they need to fuel their
bankrupt economies. Moreover, puppet governments resort to labor export to suppress unrest
brought about by severe economic crisis.
Labor export has long been promoted in poorer countries as a source of foreign exchange and
remittances and to quell unrest brought about by severe economic crisis. The policy of labor export has
been adopted by developing countries to solve the constant problems of unemployment and
underemployment, landlessness and massive poverty caused by the continued subservience of
governments to IMF-World Bank dictates, controlled mainly by rich industrialized countries such as the
United States. Governments of underdeveloped and developing countries enact policies to accelerate
labor migration, reorient education and training programs towards meeting the demands of laborreceiving
countries, and negotiate with governments of host countries to facilitate the transfer of their
workforce to as many labor-destination countries possible around the world.
It is interesting to note that the general theme of neoliberal globalization in recent years revolved
principally around the utilization of labor export and so-called shared responsibilities of nations to
promote the demand for cheap labor. For instance, the Global Forum on Migration and Development’s
(GFMD) corporate-like approach to the policy of migration encourages the reliance of host counties on
short term labor contracts to minimize their responsibilities and avoid risking their own nation’s
economic stability. The GFMD came about during the United Nations’ High-Level Dialogue on
International Migration and Development in September 2006. However, its conception may be dated
back to the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, when neoliberal globalization
gave birth to the convening of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Mode 4 or GATS Mode 4 in
2005. Through GATS, the exportation of natural persons and services was included in trade agreements
between nation states, and the demand for skilled workers by highly-developed countries rose to
unprecedented levels.
In the Philippines, the Department of Labor and Employment records 4,500 overseas Filipino workers
who migrate daily to work. Every year, at least 400,000 are added to the Philippine labor force, with no
jobs opportunities available but the option to work for cheap labor abroad. In 2010, OFW remittances
have brought in $18 billion to the national revenue, more or less 12 percent of the Gross Domestic
Product. The Philippines ranked as the fourth biggest recipient of migrant remittances worldwide, next
only to the $25.5 billion of India, the $24.2 billion of Mexico and the $21 billion of China. It is no
wonder then that over the recent years, the Philippines has become a model for other third world
countries to emulate.
Labor export began in the Philippines more than 3 decades ago, when the Marcos regime attempted to
cushion the impacts of rising unemployment in 1974. Since then, it has rapidly evolved into a major
economic policy adopted and embraced by past and present administrations. After more than three
decades, the Philippine labor export policy is now highly regarded worldwide as a “model” in labor outmigration
not only for the sheer number of workers it deploys annually and the amount of remittances
it generates yearly, but also for its so-called rights-based approach to migration management. Many
underdeveloped and developing countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa, including poorer countries
in Europe, have also adopted similar labor-export policies with the same motivation.
The Philippine government is hailed worldwide for introducing migration policies that allegedly ensure
the protection of its workers abroad and for displaying “good practices” that promote migrant
workers’ protection. Its pre-departure orientation program (PDOS) was commended as a useful model
for offering protection that “begins at home”. In addition, the Philippine government is highly praised
for its attempt to work with labor-receiving governments to formulate both formal and informal
agreements meant to ensure that migrant workers conditions are within nationally and internationallyaccepted
standards.
These, however, are more wishful thinking than reality. While it is a fact that the Philippine
government has been party and signatory to different conventions and has ratified and enacted laws
and policies involving the protection of migrant workers, the implementation of such has been found
lacking and incapable.
The truth is, OFWs are plagued with an assortment of issues and problems throughout the entire
migration cycle yet the Philippine government has barely done any decisive action to support and
protect its migrant workers and their families. Of present, there are 122 Filipino migrant workers in
death row, 7,000 in jail and tens of thousands stranded and awaiting repatriation. Millions are
undocumented and under constant threat of deportation and harassment, while families continue to
be separated resulting in the heartbreaking social costs of migration.
Migrante International is a witness to countless cases of inequality and human rights abuses that our
migrant workers are subjected to. These are tragedies that are direct off-shoots of the migration
problem. In recent years, accounts of mass deportation, illegal recruitment, human, sex and drug
trafficking, inhumane treatment and gruesome deaths, most of them remaining unresolved, have
steeply increased. Recently, tens of thousands of Filipino workers, and other migrant workers of
different nationalities were abruptly displaced, and tens of thousands more continue to be affected by
the US-led interventionist war in Libya. Hundreds of thousands more migrants now face even greater
uncertainty because of protectionist measures host countries implement in light of the current global
economic crisis.
At the same time, millions of families are being torn apart, children separated from their families and
lacking of nurture and guidance. According to a recent study, children of migrant workers have a high
rate of drug abuse, early pregnancies and school drop-outs. Sadly, these have all merely boiled down
for our workers overseas as “occupational hazards”.
Such is the greed for overseas remittances that even war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan have become
“black-markets” for Filipino labor because of corrupt officials who exploit and take advantage of
Filipinos desperate to find jobs abroad. But more than anything, it is the increasing desperation of
OFWs that compel them to face risks head-on despite depressed wages, massive retrenchment and
human and labor rights violations.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of all is that migrant workers would still opt to stay and find employment
abroad than go home. This is because the Philippine government and the domestic economy offer no
incentives, opportunities and programs that would encourage OFWs to voluntarily return. Labor export
provides a tempting alternative to the unemployed and underemployed. Because of this, governments
are not obligated to create jobs that offer decent wages and instead it becomes convenient for them to
evade responsibility of implementing policy reforms to turn their economies around.
The intensification of labor export policies is the main agenda of the neoliberal globalization. States are
encouraged to adopt labor export policies from an economic development point of view while paying
lip service to other crucial issues like the rights of migrant workers and their families. Addressing such
issues would hinder its core objective of utilizing labor export. In doing so, neoliberal globalization
clearly sides with rich and highly-industrialized countries in its desire to gather huge profits from cheap
labor and substandard services from migrant workers while keeping poorer countries continually under
debt and dependent on whatever limited opportunities they can offer migrant workers.
Richer and powerful countries will continue to demand cheap and submissive workers from poorer and
powerless countries. Sending countries, on the other hand, will continue to craft policies on how to
intensify the export of human resources but will focus on market-driven goals and not on workers’
rights and protection. This cycle will continue for as long as neoliberal globalization policies continue to
be embraced by governments and economies.
Unless governments tackle the root causes and effects of labor migration and respects the right of
peoples and nations to genuine development, it will never become relevant. And for as long as migrant
workers are bound in virtual slavery, cheap labor and enduring depressed and repressed conditions
overseas while their own people and nation are drowning in poverty, neoliberal globalization will be
rejected by peoples resisting oppression and labor exploitation. ###
attacks against our rights!
By Garry Martinez
Chairperson, Migrante International
July 5, 2011, University Hotel, UP Diliman, Philippines
Distinguished speakers, Ms. Eni Lestari, Dr. Irene Fernandez, Wahu Kaara, Atty. Joseph Entero, Anisur
Rahman Khan, Lucy Pagoada, fellow migrants, colleagues and friends, greetings of solidarity! To our
guests from different countries, welcome to Manila!
I am Garry Martinez, chairperson of Migrante International, global alliance of overseas Filipino workers
in at least 200 countries around the world. I was an undocumented Filipino migrant worker in South
Korea for 12 years before I decided to become a full-time volunteer for my organization. As an OFW, I
had personally experienced the hardships, implications, the political and socio-economic causes and
effects of forced migration.
I have been asked to talk to you about the issues and struggles confronting migrants worldwide and
the resistance of the global migrant movement against attacks on our rights and dignity. To better
understand this context and topic, allow me to start my presentation with a simple yet significant
statement:
The phenomenon of labor migration is not a tool for development but the result of the increasing
under-development of nations who have long-ago opened their economies to neo-liberal policies
under the banner of globalization. The myth of migration as a tool for development has long been
discredited in that it has resulted in the further commodification of the labor force of underdeveloped
nations at the expense of genuine national development.
As the global alliance of Filipino migrant organizations, it is in this context that we stand firm in our
criticism of neoliberal globalization and its general agenda that promotes labor export over the rights
and protection of migrant workers and their families.
Why then is labor export being intensified with even other poorer countries following suit? The answer
is simple.
Governments are driven to increase the billions of overseas remittances they need to fuel their
bankrupt economies. Moreover, puppet governments resort to labor export to suppress unrest
brought about by severe economic crisis.
Labor export has long been promoted in poorer countries as a source of foreign exchange and
remittances and to quell unrest brought about by severe economic crisis. The policy of labor export has
been adopted by developing countries to solve the constant problems of unemployment and
underemployment, landlessness and massive poverty caused by the continued subservience of
governments to IMF-World Bank dictates, controlled mainly by rich industrialized countries such as the
United States. Governments of underdeveloped and developing countries enact policies to accelerate
labor migration, reorient education and training programs towards meeting the demands of laborreceiving
countries, and negotiate with governments of host countries to facilitate the transfer of their
workforce to as many labor-destination countries possible around the world.
It is interesting to note that the general theme of neoliberal globalization in recent years revolved
principally around the utilization of labor export and so-called shared responsibilities of nations to
promote the demand for cheap labor. For instance, the Global Forum on Migration and Development’s
(GFMD) corporate-like approach to the policy of migration encourages the reliance of host counties on
short term labor contracts to minimize their responsibilities and avoid risking their own nation’s
economic stability. The GFMD came about during the United Nations’ High-Level Dialogue on
International Migration and Development in September 2006. However, its conception may be dated
back to the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, when neoliberal globalization
gave birth to the convening of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Mode 4 or GATS Mode 4 in
2005. Through GATS, the exportation of natural persons and services was included in trade agreements
between nation states, and the demand for skilled workers by highly-developed countries rose to
unprecedented levels.
In the Philippines, the Department of Labor and Employment records 4,500 overseas Filipino workers
who migrate daily to work. Every year, at least 400,000 are added to the Philippine labor force, with no
jobs opportunities available but the option to work for cheap labor abroad. In 2010, OFW remittances
have brought in $18 billion to the national revenue, more or less 12 percent of the Gross Domestic
Product. The Philippines ranked as the fourth biggest recipient of migrant remittances worldwide, next
only to the $25.5 billion of India, the $24.2 billion of Mexico and the $21 billion of China. It is no
wonder then that over the recent years, the Philippines has become a model for other third world
countries to emulate.
Labor export began in the Philippines more than 3 decades ago, when the Marcos regime attempted to
cushion the impacts of rising unemployment in 1974. Since then, it has rapidly evolved into a major
economic policy adopted and embraced by past and present administrations. After more than three
decades, the Philippine labor export policy is now highly regarded worldwide as a “model” in labor outmigration
not only for the sheer number of workers it deploys annually and the amount of remittances
it generates yearly, but also for its so-called rights-based approach to migration management. Many
underdeveloped and developing countries in Asia, Latin America and Africa, including poorer countries
in Europe, have also adopted similar labor-export policies with the same motivation.
The Philippine government is hailed worldwide for introducing migration policies that allegedly ensure
the protection of its workers abroad and for displaying “good practices” that promote migrant
workers’ protection. Its pre-departure orientation program (PDOS) was commended as a useful model
for offering protection that “begins at home”. In addition, the Philippine government is highly praised
for its attempt to work with labor-receiving governments to formulate both formal and informal
agreements meant to ensure that migrant workers conditions are within nationally and internationallyaccepted
standards.
These, however, are more wishful thinking than reality. While it is a fact that the Philippine
government has been party and signatory to different conventions and has ratified and enacted laws
and policies involving the protection of migrant workers, the implementation of such has been found
lacking and incapable.
The truth is, OFWs are plagued with an assortment of issues and problems throughout the entire
migration cycle yet the Philippine government has barely done any decisive action to support and
protect its migrant workers and their families. Of present, there are 122 Filipino migrant workers in
death row, 7,000 in jail and tens of thousands stranded and awaiting repatriation. Millions are
undocumented and under constant threat of deportation and harassment, while families continue to
be separated resulting in the heartbreaking social costs of migration.
Migrante International is a witness to countless cases of inequality and human rights abuses that our
migrant workers are subjected to. These are tragedies that are direct off-shoots of the migration
problem. In recent years, accounts of mass deportation, illegal recruitment, human, sex and drug
trafficking, inhumane treatment and gruesome deaths, most of them remaining unresolved, have
steeply increased. Recently, tens of thousands of Filipino workers, and other migrant workers of
different nationalities were abruptly displaced, and tens of thousands more continue to be affected by
the US-led interventionist war in Libya. Hundreds of thousands more migrants now face even greater
uncertainty because of protectionist measures host countries implement in light of the current global
economic crisis.
At the same time, millions of families are being torn apart, children separated from their families and
lacking of nurture and guidance. According to a recent study, children of migrant workers have a high
rate of drug abuse, early pregnancies and school drop-outs. Sadly, these have all merely boiled down
for our workers overseas as “occupational hazards”.
Such is the greed for overseas remittances that even war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan have become
“black-markets” for Filipino labor because of corrupt officials who exploit and take advantage of
Filipinos desperate to find jobs abroad. But more than anything, it is the increasing desperation of
OFWs that compel them to face risks head-on despite depressed wages, massive retrenchment and
human and labor rights violations.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of all is that migrant workers would still opt to stay and find employment
abroad than go home. This is because the Philippine government and the domestic economy offer no
incentives, opportunities and programs that would encourage OFWs to voluntarily return. Labor export
provides a tempting alternative to the unemployed and underemployed. Because of this, governments
are not obligated to create jobs that offer decent wages and instead it becomes convenient for them to
evade responsibility of implementing policy reforms to turn their economies around.
The intensification of labor export policies is the main agenda of the neoliberal globalization. States are
encouraged to adopt labor export policies from an economic development point of view while paying
lip service to other crucial issues like the rights of migrant workers and their families. Addressing such
issues would hinder its core objective of utilizing labor export. In doing so, neoliberal globalization
clearly sides with rich and highly-industrialized countries in its desire to gather huge profits from cheap
labor and substandard services from migrant workers while keeping poorer countries continually under
debt and dependent on whatever limited opportunities they can offer migrant workers.
Richer and powerful countries will continue to demand cheap and submissive workers from poorer and
powerless countries. Sending countries, on the other hand, will continue to craft policies on how to
intensify the export of human resources but will focus on market-driven goals and not on workers’
rights and protection. This cycle will continue for as long as neoliberal globalization policies continue to
be embraced by governments and economies.
Unless governments tackle the root causes and effects of labor migration and respects the right of
peoples and nations to genuine development, it will never become relevant. And for as long as migrant
workers are bound in virtual slavery, cheap labor and enduring depressed and repressed conditions
overseas while their own people and nation are drowning in poverty, neoliberal globalization will be
rejected by peoples resisting oppression and labor exploitation. ###
