By Walden Bello
Member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines representing Akbayan

The migrant worker experience is one that is increasingly typical. Let’s start with myself. I am now back in the Philippines, but I spent nearly 20 years as a political exile in the United States during the Marcos dictatorship. During that time I survived by working as a journalist, teaching, doing research, and taking on odd jobs in different American cities.

Multiple sites, multiple identities

This experience of multiple sites of work during one’s active years is not too different from that of the Palestinian engineer who returns to the West Bank or Gaza after working in Kuwait, Egypt, and the United States. Nor from that of the Mexican peasant who goes to the United States to work in a variety of jobs, returns to tend to his or her farm in Morelos for extended periods, then heads back to Chicago. Nor from that of the Keralan who alternates between tending a small shop back home built with savings from her overseas work and long stints serving as domestic help in the Gulf countries.

With multiple sites of work have come multiple identities. Over the years, in addition to our original identity, we begin to regard our country of work as our home, indeed even with some affection, even when that country is not hospitable to us. And beyond identities forged by nationality and residence, there is the identity of class—that becoming aware of a condition we share with so many others of different nationalities, that sense of being part of an international working class.

Negative and positive realities

But let us not romanticize the lot of the globalized worker. Instability and lack of security is the condition of many. Capitalism in the neoliberal era destroys jobs at home and creates them elsewhere, forcing many into dangerous transborder journeys to find those jobs. Unregulated as it is today, capitalism is marked by periods of expansion and contraction. When contraction arrives, the lot of the migrant becomes a perilous one, as opportunistic politicians scapegoat him or her for the loss of jobs of workers from the dominant culture. This is the situation in the developed countries today, where discrimination, police repression, and deportation have become pervasive. In Europe, this is accompanied by cultural stigmatization, with migrants of Muslim origin being defined as the “Other.”

But let us not be too negative either about our host societies. These are often democratic societies where there are rights and liberties that are institutionalized. Many migrants, of course, are deprived of a number of these rights and liberties, but in many respects, these polities provide a model of what is possible in our societies of origin, where rights and liberties are fragile if not non-existent and political corruption is pervasive. Women from many developing societies find in their host societies a level of respect and a state of formal equality with men that is sorely absent where they came from. Filipina women, for instance, are afforded in Europe and the United States the means to assert their reproductive rights via contraception which benighted forces make it difficult for them to obtain back home. They also have the right to divorce abusive or irresponsible partners, a course of action they are legally deprived of in the Philippines with its medieval code governing marriage.

Crisis of the home economy

But when all is said and done, most migrant workers would probably prefer to stay and work in their countries of origin if they could find the jobs that would provide them with a decent living. This is why it is important for migrant advocates to understand the conditions which have made emigration from developing countries so pervasive over the last three decades.

Conditions of poverty and economic distress push people out of their societies, but these conditions are not natural. They are created. And in scores of developing countries since the late eighties the prime engine expanding poverty and economic distress has been structural adjustment programs pushed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and trade liberalization promoted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

Promoted under the guise of bringing about efficiency, these programs have destroyed agriculture and industry in country after country. In Mexico, severe cutbacks in state support for agriculture, efforts to roll back agrarian reform, and Nafta-imposed trade liberalization have made agriculture a losing proposition, forcing Mexico’s peasantry, as the saying goes, to transfer en masse to the United States. In the Philippines, structural adjustment has destroyed the country’s industrial base and with it, hundreds of thousands of industrial and manufacturing jobs, while WTO-imposed trade liberalization has made farming unattractive for peasants whose products cannot compete with the subsidized commodities being dumped by the US, Europe, and other countries. For many of these displaced farmers and their children, relocating to the urban metropolis is followed by emigration.

The remittance economy

So massive has been the unraveling of our industrial and agricultural base wrought by neoliberal policies that it is oftentimes only remittances from migrant workers that keep our home economies afloat—something that can be said without exaggeration of the Philippines. Remittances are critical and our migrant workers are to be complimented for their heroic role, but the remittance economy is no substitute for a vibrant domestic economy. Unfortunately, in the Philippines, our policymakers have made remittances a substitute for domestic production.

Two-front war

Thus, to seriously address the problems they confront, migrants and migrant advocates cannot but be involved in a two-front war. On the one hand, we must struggle in our countries of origin to end the conditions of structural adjustment, trade liberalization, and other neoliberal policies that have eroded our industrial and agricultural base and destroyed millions of jobs. We must tell the US government and the European Union that we do not need aid; what we need is for you to stop imposing bilateral trade agreements and economic partnership agreements on us. What our countries demand is a halt to the structural adjustment programs still in effect in scores of countries in Africa and an end to further liberalization of trade under the WTO and bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. Of course, development has many other requirements, but stopping structural adjustment and trade liberalization is a sine qua non, a condition without which other indigenous development initiatives cannot prosper.

When it comes to the other front, in our host countries, the agenda is clear. We must aggressively assert what is the unvarnished truth: that migrants overwhelmingly make a positive contribution to the economy and culture of their host countries. We must frontally oppose state repression of migrants and confront the right-wing populist groups that scapegoat them. We must demand an end to the deportation of undocumented migrants, the rapid legalization and granting of full citizenship rights to those with papers and their children, and the facilitation of the achievement of legal status of those without papers.

Success in solving the dilemmas of migrants will necessitate progress in both these fronts. There is no guarantee of success in our advocacy, but unless we confront the challenges in both fronts, we are sure to fall short of our goals.

Tagline: Speech delivered at the People’s Global Action Conference during the Global Forum for Migration and Development, Athens, Greece, November 1, 2009.

By Ninotchka Rosca

DESPITE the admonition not to arrive before 7 a.m., 50 people were already lined up before the Brooklyn Courthouse reception. It was 7:05. I had flown to New York from Los Angeles the night before and was to fly back at 4:00 p.m. I was about to take my oath of citizenship. I’d considered postponing but all my Filipino friends screamed: TAKE THE OATH!

The decision to be a US citizen, made after months of angst almost four years ago, morphed into weirdness. First, along with the application for naturalization, one had to list all trips outside the US since becoming a permanent resident. Fortunately, I’d kept all seven of my Philippine passports; the list ran to three pages single-spaced.

Then the questions: have you ever been a prostitute? Not yet. Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party or any of its affiliates? Come to think of it, I REALLY don’t know.

Humor is not an option, a lawyer-friend said, write no. $400 filing fee; $300 for renewal of permanent residency; $70 for biometrics, $1,000 lawyer’s fee.

Three months later I was told to submit to biometrics. Blood sample, DNA swab, lock of hair? Be there at 10:00 a.m. or your application will be considered abandoned. Resistance is futile. At 9:00 a.m., 45 men, women and children shrieking in the cold were lined up before the service center. Smug in what I thought was an appointment, I headed straight for the front door and was promptly sent back to the end of the line.

Biometrics

Biometrics, it turned out, meant fingerprints. Long line outside; long line inside. Read two sci-fi books. Suffered 32 attempts at digitalizing my prints. Then I was handed a tissue paper to wipe my fingers. Curious, I asked a clerk why I was made to stand in line when the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) gave me an appointment. His reply: “I don’t know why they do that; it’s always been first come, first served.”

Almost a year later came another notice. You have to take the civics exam; questions and answers are online and in a booklet available at any INS office. I read 32 books on American history; took the online practice test 144 times, scoring 100 percent correct 140 times; memorized the Star-Spangled Banner; read the US Constitution and all the amendments thereto. Be there at 9 a.m., said the INS, or your application will be considered abandoned.

Old-fashioned bank teller windows lined one end of the humongous INS office. A tight-lipped woman took the note and said: take a seat; your name will be called. I was in the middle of my 2nd sci-fi book when I noticed that those with easy names were told to go to Door No. 1; those with “difficult” names like Abou Amadilatif were sent to Door No. 2. Hmmm. Then the thunder of my name came over the public address system with the dreadful words: Door No. 2!

I’ve been a New Yorker so long extreme anxiety turns me Jewish. Oich vech, I muttered, now the pogrom comes; why oh why did you agree to have a book with someone on the terrorist list; everyone else was diving under the table then… doomed!

Dossier

You come to me because I am the only one with the security clearance to access your file, said the agent when I asked why Door No. 2. He was white, seemed 11 feet tall, had a Clint Eastwood profile.

I have a dossier?

Yes. How many stars are there on the American flag?

50. Can I read my file?

No. In 1969, you founded the SDK [Samahan Demokratiko ng Kabataan – Ed.] which was intended to recruit members for the Communist Party of the Philippines.

1969? Lord, that’s just nostalgia. And it’s incorrect. Here, let me at it; I’ll tell you what’s true and not; I’ll correct my dossier.

No. How many stripes are there in the US flag?

Thirteen. I’ll even input the corrections into the computer. Take two minutes, I swear.

Younger girlfriend

It went that way for about 30 minutes. Somehow, we got to his girlfriend being younger than he was. “She’s 14 years younger; hey, I didn’t go after her; she came after me… I had worries, reservations, I told her I was too old for her… who’s the father of USA?”

George Washington. What do her parents say?

Oh, they’re cool with it. It’s quite different. My girlfriends before—the age difference wasn’t that much. What do the 13 stripes stand for?

The 13 original colonies which revolted against England.

Some would find something wrong with my having a younger girlfriend. I say they’re fundamentalists. What do you think of fundamentalists?

I don’t. What kind of fundamentalists?

We’ll get them all. You know the US Constitution, right? What do you think of it? Me, I think it’s one of the greatest documents the world has ever had—not that I’ve read all of it.

‘Can’t you tell?’

I lost my cool. “You haven’t read the Constitution? I read it cover to cover; I read all the 20-plus Amendments. I can recite the entire Preamble, whole Articles, and Sections… You, you, YOU haven’t read it?”

We stared at each other. The incongruity of the situation totally escaped him.

He who had power over my citizenship hadn’t read the Constitution. I was nonplussed. Luckily, another agent appeared, saying: “Hey, you know Wang, the Chinese guy… I just told him an ethnic joke.”

First agent sent me a sidelong glance. “Be careful; there are rules. Look at her; she’s watching you.”

Second agent. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to offend. What nationality are you?”

First agent: “She’s Filipino, can’t you tell?”

Second agent: “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you people apart!”

The boss

They cracked up. WHAT IS THIS? Another man walked in and from the two’s reaction, he was the boss.

“What’s happening?” Good; a tongue-lashing! They told him. He looked bemused. “I have a question—how many presidents weren’t born in the US?”

Seven, I thought. “You got me there,” said the first. “But that’s not allowed under the Constitution.”

Boss: “They were born before the Constitution…” He walked to a poster of US presidents. “Let’s see how many…” He counted seven.

“We should include that in the exam,” said first agent. “Like a trick question.”

Dismal person that I was, I didn’t protest. When the two visitors left, first agent turned sympathetic.

“I’m recommending approval. See I’m signing it. But you have no FBI clearance.”

WHAT?

Smoking in subway

“It’s nothing. They’re slow; they’re backlogged. Your fingerprints came back clean, except for getting fined for smoking in the subway.”

Outside, I found I had a great need to touch reality. Did I enter the right building or did I walk into an insane asylum?

The biometrics notice came again after two years. Be there at 10:00 a.m. or your application will be considered abandoned. Okay.

Two months after came a notice for additional papers and interview; first agent would speak to me again. Bet he and his girlfriend broke up. “So you broke up?” was my greeting. He was surprised. “How’d you know that?” “I had a premonition…” He interrupted me with a peroration against Younger Girlfriend as selfish, self-centered, wouldn’t return the bed he bought her; he didn’t care about the other gifts but—yaddah-yaddah-yaddah. Forty minutes of it!

He’d interviewed a mother and daughter the previous week. “The mother was kinda cute; I was kind of flirting…”

‘Woman with powers’

“Wait! Another premonition,” I said. “It’s common among Filipinos. You’ll have a happy relationship except she’s not here. You must look for her outside—in bars, theaters, shops, just not here. A long and happy romance but she’s not here; she’s out there.”

I gave him a I’m-a-Woman-With-Powers, you-nut-head look. Perhaps I could save some non-citizen woman. How do I get into these situations?

Now when could I take the oath? He speared me with a diabolical look and said: “Another two years!” And laughed himself silly.

Fortunately, it only took six months: You must notify INS at once if you are unable to comply.

Resistance was futile.

Where’s the judge?

So 7 a.m. in Brooklyn, dying from tedium as 300 were processed. We filled the mahogany pews, 10 in each row. An hour, two hours… the judge was nowhere. We were each given a newsletter and a voter registration form. My seat neighbor, an Asian woman, waved the form: “Sign?” She said, “Sign?” She barely spoke English. How did she pass her civics exam?

We lined up before a table with three seated clerks. “Has anything changed since your interview?” No. “Have you traveled outside the country?” Yes. Philippines, Canada, and Antarctica… She didn’t bat an eye. The guy next to her erupted: “What do I do? She doesn’t speak English!” He was processing my seat neighbor. I ran away.

‘Repeat after me’

Almost noon. Someone read the newsletter over the microphone. Finally, the judge walked in; we had to stand-sit. He delivered a sermon about his immigrant parents. Then he made us rise and raise our right hands. “Repeat after me…”

People behind me were laughing. My seat neighbor had her hand up in a Heil-Hitler salute as she muttered in a guttural voice. To whom was she swearing allegiance?

One guy, waving a small US flag, said he was taking his wife out to celebrate. What about you? Nothing, I said; I’m going home, filing away my citizenship certificate. Nothing? “Life goes on,” I said, “citizen or not.”

Unbearable sadness

Three months later, as I was replacing, with my just arrived US passport, the green Philippine one in my worn python-leather wallet, I had a moment of unbearable sadness. Green and I had fought so many battles together. When an Italian consul insulted it, saying Filipinas loitered in Italy to marry Italian men; I told her I’d dumped an Italian boyfriend for being less than sexually competent. My green passport and I had been mistaken for a mail-order bride, a housekeeper, an illegal…

I’d been a foot soldier in its struggle for validity and respect. The blue one, the most prized passport in the world, I’d acquired through a process I could only charitably call half-demented. Reality disappoints, truly.

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