REFLECTIONS By Fr. Shay Cullen Migrant workers helped by missionaries are heroes
The seven million Filipino migrant workers who sacrifice simple love and joy of their families just to work abroad in difficult, hard-working low-paid jobs are the heroes of the Philippines. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo told a news conference that they are “our greatest export, the backbone of the new global workforce.” They send back officially about $10 billion every year and another estimated $4 billion is sent back through friends to avoid the pilfering by corrupt government and bank officials.
The government survives on their earnings. Yet when the bombing began in Lebanon, the billons of pesos in overseas workers assistance fund that the government took off from OFWs in departure and placement fees was nowhere to be found to help evacuate them. Governments of developed countries have to cope with the influx of illegal migrants by the thousands. Some are compassionate and kind, others harsh and cruel.
One Australian politician concerned about migrants criticized the iron-fisted antimigration policy of his country and said Jesus and the Holy Family would be turned away if they arrived in Australia today.
According to government statistics, about 700,000 Filipinos, most of them women, leave yearly to work in 181 nations around the globe. There are 2.5 million Filipinos working in the United States but most overseas workers are now employed in the thriving economies of Asia.
Sadly the Philippines’ economy is almost severe. Little is spent on education, job creation and social services—an IMF formula for poverty creation. The Philippine’s wealth is scooped up by greedy politicians and their corrupt corporations and smuggled abroad. There is little hope this system will ever change.
Many children as young a 12 are lured out of Mindanao and other poor provinces. Many become victims of human trafficking and are sold into slavery as domestic helpers, caregivers and factory workers or sold as young teenage brides to old men. They are threatened with imprisonment for not paying “debts” created by traffickers and gang masters. Some are forced or tricked into prostitution.
Last August Columban Father Donal Bennett who worked for 39 years in the Philippines and is now based in Northern Ireland reports how he was called one night by a group of near-hysterical Filipino women contract workers who were being attacked by a group of migrant male workers from Eastern Europe. The knife-wielding men threatened them and would have raped them had not Father Bennett called for help. Five men were arrested. Their recruiter gang master spirited them away the next day to hire them out elsewhere.
Fr. Bobby Gilmore, a Columban father who worked for many years in the Philippines and in England, founded the Migrant Rights Center Ireland. He and Siobhan O’Donoghue have helped many migrants in Ireland who have been cheated, exploited, alienated and abused.
A young woman and her friend saved from prostitution in Hong Kong by Columban Father Jim Mulroney came to visit me in Olongapo City at the PREDA human-rights center and told me of her miraculous escape. “If it were not for Father Jim I would be still trafficked in the sex industry,” she told me with tears of relief and gratitude. She and her friend were lured to work in Hong Kong but ended up trapped, exploited and cheated. Their only way out was to become prostitutes but they refused, escaped and found Father Jim who gave them shelter, protection and an air ticket back to the Philippines. Thousands more are victimized in this evil and ugly trade in humans.
