SikhSpectrum.com Quarterly Issue No.25, August 2006
Teacher Exodus to US Adds to Philippine Brain Drain
Danny Chan
The city of Baltimore, faced with a shortage of teachers in its schools, has had to look overseas to fill its openings. School officials from Baltimore recently visited Manila to find math, science and special education instructors for the city’s public schools.
This particular recruiting drive saw 81 Philippine teachers hired by the school board to work in America, where salaries are double or triple what they could earn at home. Upwards of 200 Philippine schoolteachers are currently working in the Baltimore area due to a dearth of qualified instructors in the United States. A principal at a special education school, Patrick Crouse, said trying to recruit domestic teachers is almost a waste of time.
“I could go out for recruitment and I might see five or 10 teachers. Overseas we saw hundreds,” he told reporters. Schools throughout America have also adopted a similar approach: Clark County in Nevada has recruited math and science teachers from Canada; Topeka, Kan. has hired instructors from India and Spain; the city of Dallas has brought in schoolteachers from Mexico and Chile. The US experiences an estimated shortfall of 10,000 teachers each year.
In the Philippines, overseas workers send home $10.7 billion (US) in hard currency each year. Working in professions such as health care, engineering, domestic services and entertainment, overseas workers help buttress the Philippines’ banks, telecommunications, retail, transportation and real estate industries with their remittances.
The government lauds its overseas workers as the nation’s secret weapon. Its English-speaking workers have supplanted electrical equipment, garments, fruits and chemicals as the nation’s most lucrative export. The Bank of the Philippine Islands’ president, Aurelio Montinola, said in a speech earlier this year that the country’s overseas workers would eventually constitute “the standard for [a] new mobile global order.”
Citizens certainly have the right to seek employment in such overseas locales as Berlin, Hong Kong, Kuwait, Riyadh, Singapore or Tokyo if they cannot find sufficient work at home. But while American schools are pleased with the quality of their international employees, and Philippine workers are grateful for a chance to emigrate to better-paying jobs overseas, some see a potentially deleterious effect back home.
“There’s a problem with all this though. “It’s like an addiction—one that over time may do more harm than good,” Ifzal Ali, chief economist at the Asia Development Bank, said.
Overseas workers, who comprise almost 10 per cent of the Philippines’ population of 88 million, contribute to the country’s brain drain. The country’s economic migrants, particularly the young and educated, deprive the nation of much-needed skills and expertise.
In the Philippines’ medical profession, locally trained doctors are retraining as nurses to work as nurses abroad. Government statistics also indicate airline pilots are leaving along with teachers and doctors.
As remittances flow into the archipelago from around the world, any incentive to improve the nation’s economy is removed. In the long run, as workers vote with their feet, it dissuades local government from enacting any meaningful reform to creating decent jobs and improving living standards.
Despite 5 per cent annual growth, much of the Philippines’ wealth is unevenly distributed. One-third of the nation subsists on roughly 60 cents a day. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has yet to show her constituents that the government is committed to improving the country’s infrastructure and creating quality jobs.
An additional effect of overseas workers is the social cost inflicted on the country’s children. In their 2003 book “Global Women”, Russell Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich examined how female overseas workers had a detrimental effect on the nation’s young.
“Each year, millions leave Third World countries for jobs in the homes, nurseries and brothels of the First World,” they wrote. “This enormous transfer of labor results in a risky displacement, in which the same energy that flows to wealthy countries is subtracted from poor ones, easing a care deficit in rich countries, while creating one back home.”
As western nations such as the US, Germany and Japan age, the number of Filipinos emigrating overseas will increase to care for the aging baby boomers. The full extent of this mass exodus has yet to be studied.
