Fight Or Flight, Filipinos In The Diaspora

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS

BIMBO CABIDOG

When the late Manuel L. Quezon said “I’d rather have a country run like hell by Filipinos than a country run like heaven by Americans,” he may not have fully imagined the misery his future countrymen would be going through under a rule of their own.

Seven decades after supposedly gaining independence from the United States, most Filipinos would rather get out than remain in their native land. They would rather hack it abroad, dodging bullets and suicide bombers in Jihad-torn places than try to make a living here.

Overseas Filipino workers are from time to time reported to be brutalized by foreign enslavers. They are occasionally subjected to unjust conditions and encounter violence in alien work environments. And there is usually no chance at redress. Nevertheless, they still want to go abroad instead of just seek betterment at home.

In 2003-2005, when air bombardment by the US was pulverizing the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, and the Israeli Defense Forces later was also doing the same to the Lebanese capital of Beirut, tens of thousands of trapped foreign nationals scrambled for the nearest exit from these places. But Filipinos anguished at being prevented to enter and take jobs inside the war zones.

Were they so desperate not to mind the extreme dangers? Were things just inexplicably bad in their place of origin? In interviews by the media, they answered yes to both.

Parents, sons and daughters are separated for long years from their families, and distance makes them languish under the weight of distressful thoughts and emotions. But the cold lonely ordeal of earning in a land of strangers is still preferable than braving a life of failing to meet the bare minimum requirements of existence in their motherland.  

About two million Pinoys reportedly reside in the United States. Forty times more would choose to live there if they only have the chance. Hundreds of their compatriots back home queue at the American embassy everyday to get a US visa no matter how grueling and debasing.

It also doesn’t matter if the USA was once an oppressor and hundreds of thousands of Filipinos died in the succeeding Philippine-American war when the new colonizer under the guise of teaching the natives self-rule snatched victory from their revolution. The exodus of Pinoys to the land of the Great White Way does not care to remember anymore the untold sacrifices their fathers have gone through resisting American imperialist aggression and fighting for the right to determine their nation’s course.

Over the last quarter of the past century, the Pinoy global diaspora picked up. It became the premier choice to make a living of families and individuals in the country. They saw it as the only way to improve social status by quantum leaps, and to establish firm economic footing. Going abroad denoted independence with a chic conflicted sense of nationality.

Were they on the right track? Filipinos coming to the point of even dying for a living in war-ravaged climes no longer ask or entertain such question. They would rather commit suicide abroad than go through the torture of hearing loved ones wail and gnash in MLQ’s inferno. Curiously, the government has come to call them patriots or modern heroes. So, to beat misfortune in their country by fighting it in other countries has become a noble thing to do.

A grateful citizenry hailed the Great Malayan Dr. Jose Rizal as a national hero, a distinction rightly deserved for his noble and exemplary deeds that led to the birth of a nation. In the end, he offered the ultimate sacrifice of his life, not for himself or his family, but for his countrymen. His being a hero is hence unquestionable.

Rizal was also a global Pinoy. But besides tripping overseas, is there something in common between his life and purpose and those the government romanticizes now as modern heroes? There seems to be nothing more, deserving of the hero label.

On selfless dedication to country, his was as clear as day. He chose to stay here to meet his death even if he had the option to escape a violent outcome by leaving the country. On the part of his forebears in the present diaspora, the same courage and dedication fly. They beat the opposite path: escape the daunting fate in their country by going away.

Rizal’s stints here and abroad were not about merely giving himself and his family a better life. They were about giving the country a better deal. Although his initial impulses were only for reforms under the Spanish colonial order, his works contributed in no small way to nascent nation building. His modern (actually post-modern) counterparts, seeking but their own betterment through disparate pursuits may have contributed to nation unraveling.

But not only that, there’s a whale of difference in perspective between his and his countrymen’s in the diaspora. For the latter, the better life is to be gotten by leaving the Eden that Rizal poetically described “Pearl of the Orient Seas,” and hustling it out in faraway climes. The greener pastures are not here but in the deserts of the Middle East and Africa. To gain a bit of fortune so that a family can shed the perennial condition of ill-being is to try one’s luck where the soil is barren and flowing not with milk and honey but with slick black poison.

Why did they get to think so? Why the diaspora? This has nothing to do with their country, but with how it is being misrepresented and run like real hell.

At present, roughly 60 million of MLQ’s intended independence beneficiaries rate themselves poor. And assessing themselves so is not making light about it. They suffer beyond statistics. They agonize in specific, concrete and multidimensional ill-being. Adding to that is hopelessness and the constant feel of not having the power to reverse their situation.

Yet, it’s not even because of their not working or being able to work for their own good. It’s because they cannot work without being exploited, squeezed, and bled dry by the ones who rule them – the big business proprietors, the compradors, the financers, the employers, landlords, bureaucrats, political dynasties and pseudo leaders. They live under regimes of not only social and economic inequality, but class inequity.

Low unlivable incomes are a product of that inequity. Widespread unemployment also is. The mental conditioning about their helplessness boosts it. And the pervasive thinking that poverty is a fact of life, a fate they can’t do anything about but bear, is part of the conditioning. It fosters dependency: the penchant to look outside or up for redemption.

Thus, seeking job abroad is single-mindedly peddled by the government as the way out of hell. And the canard is in turn single-mindedly lopped up hook-line-and-sinker by the people. But years of experience have shown that hitching folks on the exodus bandwagon to work for other countries has never licked the problem. Underdevelopment prevails, breeding mass poverty and massive numbers of idle labor force with no industry to absorb.

Socio-economic strangulation is matched by marginalization of thought. The diaspora is shown as a heroic sacrifice for family and country. But it is actually a flight from one’s motherland to hubs of dollar-earning labor for other peoples’ prosperity and social advancement. It kowtows to the delusional thinking that foreign wealth is the answer to the tragedy of stunted growth, instead of the nation’s lush fields, resource-rich mountains, and teeming seas.

The thought is a victim of the diminution of labor and innate capacities of the people, a big lie perpetuated by their exploiters to hide the real importance of the citizenry’s brawn and brain as deciding factors in national development.

Finally, the diaspora mentality looks away from the real solution of uniting and putting all hands into the task of building a progressive society on self-reliant means, first employing intrinsic forces and resources, and harnessing the power of dynamic communities.

By the way, the country’s divine providence as mentioned in the preamble of its constitution is not meager or pittance. It has always been the object of lust by colonial/imperialist invaders.

The challenge of development is not to merely seek self-redemption by each Filipino’s hard stint overseas. The challenge is to unite as a nation and collectively buckle down to the task of producing its myriad needs, with Filipino labor no longer deployed in foreign shores but in its own farms, workshops and factories creating tremendous wealth for everyone.

This is the challenge of developing Filipino enterprise, using and managing the labor power of the people supported by the land’s vast natural resources, instead of subjecting both to wanton exploitation here and abroad by foreign masters.

The shift from banking on the global diaspora for survival, to pursuing its own reconstruction and development to augur a better life for the masses, indeed is the way forward for the country. The correctness of the path is astoundingly obvious. But no one can be blinder than those who refuse to see.