EU crisis feared to spawn more undocumented Pinoys

MANILA, Philippines – As the European Union debt crisis deepens, a Filipino nonprofit group has expressed fears that Filipino workers in the euro zone will continue to stick it out there despite their precarious situation and as a result, could become victims of human traffickers, especially in Italy and Spain.

“They would still search for other jobs in Europe, even lured into trafficking situation no matter what the cost, especially since the Philippines is not showing signs of sustainable growth and absorptive capacity,” said Noel Valencia of the 20-year-old Kanlungan Center Foundation Inc.

Filipino workers will return to the Philippines only as a last resort, he said.

“The EU countries are in dire financial straits. They [OFWs] can’t be absorbed by the local economy. More so by the Philippine economy,” Valencia also said.

Valencia spoke as the New Year ushered the start of a so-called six-pack program that is being adopted to avoid what European Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs Olli Rehn said was “the build-up of damaging divergences in competitiveness, current-account deficits, asset-price bubbles and other macroeconomic imbalances” in the world’s largest economy.

In a statement in December, EC Vice President Rehn said the commission will “take the first step in the new macroeconomic imbalances procedure” this month, consisting of “the so-called Alert Mechanism Report, which will be based on an economic reading of the scoreboard of selected economic indicators, to identify countries for in-depth study.”

The International Labor Organization (ILO) said nearly a million (954,000) Filipinos live on the continent, citing estimates of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas Missions. The ILO estimates that more than half of these Filipinos (58.29 percent or 556,000) in 2007 are temporary migrants while more than a tenth (11.85 percent or 113,000) are undocumented or irregular migrants.

“Because most of our compatriots there are in the service and household work, they are dispensable. Like luxury goods, they could be affordable but in times of crisis, they become luxurious entitlements that the wealthy can easily dispense with, especially in such highly developed countries,” Valencia said. This was where he expressed concern that the crisis in Europe would make many Filipinos vulnerable to human-trafficking gangs.

Even before the EU plunged into a fiscal crisis in November last year, Valencia said Kanlungan had already been receiving as high as three cases of human trafficking a month.

“And these are just the ones we’ve been able to take in. They may be more out there.”

Valencia noted that while there is growth in job generation in the Philippines, with the country posting a lower unemployment rate of 6.4 percent in October last year, “this is still slow considering the acceleration of the crisis overseas.”

Valencia said the government must encourage economic activity at the local level, “even at the family level, while the crisis is still overseas.”

“And families of overseas Filipinos need to build strong social organizations to pressure the government to be more aggressive in fortifying local economies that can absorb the idle as well as job-seeking labor force.”

Valencia said doing so may attract Filipinos in crisis-riddled EU countries to return home. –Dennis D. Estopace, Business Mirror

Established in 1989, Kanlungan is a crisis center for Filipino women migrant workers.