BY ARNEDO S. VALERA, ESQ.
LEGAL COUNSEL, NATIONAL ALLIANCE FOR FILIPINO CONCERNS
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, MIGRANT HERITAGE COMMISSION
Democratic Space
Posted by Bulatlat
Vol. VII, No. 41, November 18-24, 2007

Allow me to begin by saying that the issue about the ABC TV show’s Desperate Housewives has once again awakened us with one thunderous voice of indignation – proof that Filipinos in the United States have common grounds for unity and action. For weeks following the episode’s showing last September, Filipino immigrants and U.S.-born Filipinos, many of them professionals like doctors, nurses, and lawyers took to the streets to stage protest pickets, as well as sign online statements, issue news releases, and organize forums. For its part, the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON), Migrant Heritage Commission and its affiliate organizations throughout the U.S., took the stand that the short “apology” issued through email by the ABC management was inversely proportional to the racial slur that damaged the integrity and competence of Filipino professionals and institutions and henceforth, the nationwide alliance moved and called for the boycott of all ABC-Disney products unless the TV network issued a real apology and adopted concrete measures to ensure that the incident will not happen again.

I believe, likewise, that the ABC racial spat episode should be seen as essentially an immigration issue because of its broader implications on the rights of Filipinos particularly the medical professionals and workers. It disparaged and damaged the career, rights, and future practice of the medical professionals, with an element of racial prejudice because it singled out the Filipinos as a whole. It was entirely farcical for ABC to talk about the unreliability of Filipino medical professionals when their competence and compassionate care for millions of patients not only in the U.S. but in other countries is known all over the world. Lies are lies, and it is legally and morally dangerous to use them as a butt of joke or a satire especially against a nationality.

It is, moreover, unconscionable for the Philippine government to accept ABC’s short apology especially because the acceptance was issued contrary to the sentiments of many Filipinos in the U.S. and in the Philippines who were demanding justice and redemption in form and substance proportional to the injustice committed and in the same international and public venue – the TV network – used by the company to inflict the racial slur. This is a government that we know whose economic survival depends on the remittances of overseas Filipinos yet is short of performance when it comes to defending the hardworking Filipinos’ rights and ministering to their needs in their countries of destination.

The ABC controversy is just one of many incidents – which are largely unreported – of racial prejudice, racial profiling, wage discrimination, unjust employment terms and conditions, and other acts of injustice that many of our fellow migrants in the U.S. suffer.

That is why there is all the more reason for the Filipino-American communities to face up to these threats to our democratic and immigration rights, for these to galvanize us into action, and to be engaged in united though diverse forms of action. For instance, various organizations in the U.S., such as the Philippine Forum, the New York Committee on Human Rights in the Philippines, NAFCON, and the Migrant Heritage Commission have taken the cudgels of the Sentosa 27 nurses who face the threats of criminal convictions and deportation even if they were the ones victimized by illegal recruitment and unjust labor conditions. The deteriorating state of human rights in the Philippines, characterized by the spate of extra-judicial killings that resulted in the death of nearly 890 social activists, human rights volunteers, lawyers, health activists, church leaders, and other victims, from 2001 to the present is another issue that engages these U.S.-based organizations in coordination with human rights organizations and institutions in the Philippines and elsewhere. One other concern that has drawn the outrage of these organizations as well as other groups and communities in the United States is the corruption that continues to infest high officials of the Philippine government. Some of the most recent graft and corruption cases such as the ZTE national broadband scam and the multi-million “brown bag” bribery involving some members of Congress and local government officials have brought us to the realization about how rotten the government has become even as the country’s economy has become irremediably stagnant, with the poor becoming poorer and the wealth more and more concentrated in a few families.

Cases like these that involve the office of the presidency have made the Philippines the second country in Asia with the highest incidence of corruption. Until now, there are no exact figures how much of the remittances sent to the Philippines by Filipinos abroad in billions of dollars every year is lost to government corruption.

The remittances that overseas Filipinos, including us immigrants in the United States, send to our families and relatives in the Philippines may provide short-term economic relief to them or even as a fallback income for some of us who eventually will spend our retirement in our country of roots. But we know for a fact that the long-term stability and a secure future for our unfortunate brothers and sisters back home can only be ensured under a situation where the people are able to take control of their own economic future and under a government that truly represents the interests and aspirations of its broad constituencies.

It is under these circumstances that I invite you to look again at the current situation of the Philippine society which, I believe, is in a state of transition, where people are beginning to question the wisdom of maintaining a government – not only a President – that is beginning to lose its credibility; where the system of check and balance, as represented by Congress, does not function because the institution is itself plagued by corruption while it only maintains itself virtually as a social club for political dynasties; where the election continues to be just a fraudulent process of recycling the reign of power of the same political dynasties that have been in control of government for generations and decades; and where the dire economic conditions are driving people to leave everyday in their thousands in search of jobs in other countries. We cannot, I believe, insulate ourselves from the unjust rule and social injustice that continue to confront the Filipino people; or turn our backs while millions of our people face poverty or die in the process of advocating for reform.

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