The economic benefits and social impact of Filipino migration

In the hospitality industry and other service sectors in the western hemisphere, you are prone to find a Filipino working. You may ask yourself why there are so many working abroad. In 2009 alone, 8.9 million Filipinos citizens worked abroad.

Migration is not a new phenomenon in the Filipino history. According to Dante A. Ang, Chairman of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, the Filipino organized migration started already in 1906 when agricultural labor was needed on Hawaii. The elite were also granted admission in the United States as scholars during this same period. After the Second World War, the second group of organized Filipinos migrated. Veterans who served in the US military, together with their families, had the opportunity to migrate to the US. The third and current group of migrates started in the 1970’s when the Middle East experienced the oil boom and simultaneously, the Philippines was experiencing its strongest unemployment rate.

According to statistics of the Bangko Sentral NG Pilipinas and ASEAN Leaflet, over 2010, almost 10% of the GDP was created by remittances. In 2011 $ 20,116,992 thousand US dollars was sent as remittance. The first quarter of 2012 has seen a 5.4% growth on a year to date basis. The top five destinations to migrate are Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and the United States. Nevertheless these are not the destinations that yield the most remittance. More than forty million US dollars comes from the Unites states, followed by Saudi Arabia, Japan, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. Read the rest of this entry »