The Costs of Migration Hit Women Hardest

Carla Danao is hit by guilt and pain every time she comes home to the Philippines for a visit. This was especially true in August, when she returned to realize that she had been far away and unavailable for her 12-year-old daughter when she had her first menstrual period.

"She said there was no one she could confide in so she talked to her female teacher for advice on what to do," she said of her daughter. "How I wish I was here that time to ease her difficulty and to listen to what she wanted to ask me."

But Carla, whose recent visit was just the third since she started working as an entertainer in Japan in 1999, also feels her daughter is so distant. Definitely, she was no longer the toddler who cried and clung to her at the airport the first year she left the Philippines, one of the world's largest exporters of human labor.

She feels disrespected because her daughter is glued to her mobile phone and iPod. When Carla asked her one time to stop her texting and to remove her earphones for a while so they could talk, her daughter disobeyed her. "You're leaving again anyway, and we talk on the phone often, so don't worry," she told Carla, sulking.

Carla will be flying back to Japan in a week, just after this week's international conference that saw more than 400 delegates from 42 countries discussing similar stories of migrant women and their families.

The two-day International Conference on Gender, Migration and Development, which ended Sep. 26, concluded with the adoption of the 19-point 'Manila Call to Action 2008'. This reiterated the urgency of addressing the issues of seizing opportunities to enhance gender equality and benefits of migration for women and their families, and upholding their rights, ahead of a global conference here on migration and development in October.

It is also time for an honest assessment of migration policies in labour-exporting countries, not just for their protection but for the preservation of their families, said Delia Domingo-Albert, Philippine ambassador to Germany and former foreign affairs secretary.

She echoed new calls from the conference for governments to look at ways on how to reduce the push factor in overseas migration for work, so that families and societies are sustained. "The separation of children from parents is the most painful and most recognisable social cost of migration," she told the conference.

Carla says she is aware of government and private sector efforts to help workers like her, but does not feel they affect her life. The paperwork alone in processing her next travel papers takes her entire vacation time in the Philippines, she says. The immigration staff at the airport looks down at her. "I have my own pains, so if possible, I don't want to have anything to do with government," she pointed out. "It is not helpful."

There were 8.73 million Filipinos in 193 foreign countries as of December 2007, 10 percent of this being irregular migrants. Of this number, 3.69 million reside abroad and 4.13 million are temporarily overseas.

Experts, officials and non-government groups working with migrants also asked that the Call for Action's concerns be taken up at the Second Global Forum on Migration and Development, which will be held from Oct. 22-30 also here in Manila.

Jean D'Cunha, regional adviser for the East and South-east Asian Regional Office of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), called on governments, organizations and civil society to concentrate on women at the lower end of global migration work -- those in entertainment, domestic work and even prostitution -- because they are not adequately protected.

"There are policies that are gender-blind, protectionist and disempowering," she said of countries that do not remove hurdles for women who undergo difficult credit procedures when applying for loans, and do not provide proper pre-departure programs to help protect their citizens from exploitation and abuse.