Filipinos abroad helped RP recovery

By JOSE M. TIONGCO, M.D. FPCS
CEO
Medical Mission Group Hospitals and Health Services Cooperative of the Philippines

The Philippines is the only country in Southeast Asia that suffered the least in the recent regional financial debacle. She also seems to have been able to effect a faster turnaround than any one of her neighbors in the region.

The fact is that the Philippines had been previously considered as the "Sick Man of Asia" for more than three decades. Financial experts from various countries have despaired over her economic status and prognosis.

What was the reason for this surprising turn of events?

Exports.

While the other countries in the Eastern Pacific rim scrambled to export industrial products, the Philippines, left behind in the industrialization contest, continued to export her only easily available resource:

People.

When Korea or Japan exports a television set or a car, the country can earn new money from the TV or the car once, and only once. But when the Philippines exports a doctor or a nurse, the Philippines earns every time the doctor or the nurse services a patient in the importing country. Also, the shelf life of a doctor or a nurse is definitely more than the shelf life of a TV or a car.

In the past three decades, the Philippines exported a total of 10 million Filipinos to the different corners of the world. They are engaged mostly in the service sectors in their host countries. They vary from the highly skilled and much respected doctors and engineers to the lowly ditch diggers and down to the socially despised prostitutes. Most, if not all, send money back to their relatives in the Philippines.

These overseas Filipino workers remit a total of US$10 billion to the Philippine coffers every year. They are the main financial support of the Philippine Government. But they do not have a say on how the government spends their hard-earned money.

The USA is a nation of immigrants. In any major city in America, one invariably finds certain portions of the city almost exclusively populated by an ethnic group, fiercely proud of their culture and origins. Thus there are China Towns, Indian Towns, German Towns, Scandinavian Towns, etc in most urban areas. But one is hard put to find a Filipino Town.

The puzzle must be examined in the light of the Filipino's orientation. The Filipino's education, training and temperament are geared towards rendering personal service. Historically, he has never been as entrepreneurial as the Chinese, the Indian, the Korean or the Jew. So even if he has stayed for three decades, his presence has not made a dent in the financial landscape of his host country. He blends with the woodwork.

There are 3,500 Filipino associations in the U.S. There are more formed each day as each splinter group splinters in itself to several other organizations. The reason for this amazing number of groups is the fact that they are mostly, if not all, professional, regional, cultural or ethnic groupings. They have no business agenda or orientation. So it is easier to quarrel. Thus Philippine Independence Day celebrations become occasions not for unification but for the different groups to show off to each other and thereby further the rift between them.

But in spite of having stayed in the U.S. for the last 25 years or so, these Filipinos here have remained steadfastly Filipino in thinking, customs and traditions even if, one way or the other, their accents may have changed. These are the people who remit billion of dollars worth of their money to the Philippines yearly. They have greatly contributed to the economic recovery of the Philippines in the Asian currency crises although they do not have any say on how the government of the Philippines squanders their money.

In the years that they have stayed here, their children grew up as totally Americans. They do not speak our language. Their ways of thinking different. They do not know and few care to know the Filipino ways.

Our professionals are growing old. They are now approaching the age of retirement. Their incomes will be drastically cut when this happens. They will not be sending back the US$7.3 billion to the Philippines. Their children will not even think of it. So the only thing that sustained the Philippine economy even while all the rest in South East Asia floundered, will be gone in a few years.

Unless something happens now.

It should have happened yesterday. But there is still time.

And the time is urgent.

The best way to unify the three million Filipinos in America which account for US$7.3 billion worth of remittances to the Philippines every year would be to build a business organization that will cater to their common needs.

Were the Filipinos in America to pool one tenth of their total incomes together in a business venture, they would become a major financial force in the country today.

If the Filipinos in America were to pool their simple daily expenditures together in a cooperative manner, they should be able to own their own hospitals, shopping malls, investment and other business centers.

One cannot argue over Generally Accepted Accounting and Auditing Procedures. One cannot argue over the finality of the bottom line.* 

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