Cost of leaving November 9, 2006

THE Asian Development Bank has issued a warning: Migrating is hazardous to health. The national health at least. It is urging both the public and private sectors to implement measures to counteract the ferocious brain drain that is impoverishing the country as a result of the swelling flood of overseas workers.

"Brain drain has an impact on foreign direct investment as capital will flow only into economies with perceived adequate supplies of skilled labor in key sectors." Quite apart from that, there is the matter of the ability of the country to produce. "One of the greatest concerns about brain drain is that the continued migration of skilled workers reduces overall productivity."

This isn't the first time the ADB has warned about this. Some months ago, it said the same thing when government was congratulating itself about the peso strengthening against the dollar. It rightly attributed the cause of it to the remittances coming from the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs), which have grown enormous because the exodus of Filipinos abroad has gotten enormous. That is the same reason the peso has gotten even stronger today: OFWs flood this country with dollars near Christmas. The ADB warned then, as now, that the country's reprieve was also the country's death sentence. Not unlike dope helping to see an addict through the day but causing horrendous long-term harm, if not a lethal one.

It's time we took the warning seriously. As with most toxic elements, the effects are more likely to come sooner than we think. It's the same thing with the environment, the effects of the ravaging of which we're already feeling, or reeling from, in terms of fiercer storms, floods and mountains crumbling even as we speak.

It's no longer just ordinary workers we're exporting, it's skilled ones. Indeed, it's no longer even just skilled workers we're exporting, it's professionals and specialists in their fields. It's nurses and doctors, or doctors who metamorphose into nurses at their points of destination. I do know many people from various walks of life -- doctors, flight attendants, print journalists, TV reporters, lawyers and even bankers -- who have left for the United States and are doing blue-collar jobs there. They probably figure wearing a blue collar elsewhere is better than wearing a dog collar at home.

Like I keep saying, I can't blame people for wanting to leave this country. It's not just that the prospect of greener pastures abroad can lure anybody, Filipinos first among them, into wanting to luxuriate in them. It's that the grass at home has grown brown and sparse and full of cow dung. It's not just that Filipinos are being drawn by a magnet to something they're prone to being magnetized to begin with. It's that they're being driven resolutely by their circumstances to abandon this country and leave it not completely figuratively to the dogs.

I know I have felt that way in moments of utter frustration. Who wants to live in a country where thugs are free to seize government and screw the citizens anyway they please in the smug expectation they can always count on those same citizens to say God is trying us like Job, let's just move on or move away? Until I realize that if I did that I would be one of those citizens -- or who are still pleased to call themselves citizens -- that are creating this situation.

I can't blame people for wanting to leave the country, but I can blame those of us who do in great part for the country going to the dogs. Easy to understand the reason, but just as easy to see that whatever the reason, the exodus is slowly snuffing the light out of this land. I don't know the answer to the problem. I can only point to the enormity of it in the hope that the specter of an impending disaster can alarm us sufficiently into wanting to do something about it.

The ADB proposal for the public and private sector to put up incentives to encourage Filipinos to stay, even if it could be done, may not even be a finger to plug the hole in the dam. The reason for this is that the entire public and private policy environment today is actively driving Filipinos to work abroad. Every institution in this country is being bent not just to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's will but also to supplying the world with more and more Filipino workers, which are probably just two sides of the same coin.

You see that in the entire educational system existing no longer to educate but to provide skilled workers abroad, notably nurses or what are euphemistically called "caregivers." Vilma Santos did a magnificent job of showing the humongous irony of that word in a movie, Filipinos who give love and care to others abroad depriving their own loved ones at home of them in the process. Whole wings of nursing departments have sprouted even in the snootiest of academic institutions, whose snootiness in any case has faded over the years from their own professors leaving to teach in Singapore and elsewhere.

You see that in English being espoused not as a language of learning but as a language to enable Filipinos to bag jobs abroad. Gloria Arroyo has been exceptionally eager to promote that (that was her speech in the graduation ceremonies she got heckled in by a student).

And you see that in the survival of the economy now resting nearly completely on the earnings of Filipinos abroad. All the economic accomplishments government is trumpeting, such as there are of them, owe to Filipinos working abroad. Without the OFW dollars, the peso would now be Japanese money, in the World War II sense of the term. Without the OFW dollars, Gloria Arroyo's value would be less than Mickey Mouse money. Ah, but that Minnie Mouse, or the Dark-side version, should be lording it over this country! But that's another story.

Or tragedy. And better left for another day.

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