Conrad de Quiros on the cost of leaving

Eto sabi ng report sa Asian Development Bank:

THE Asian Development Bank has issued a warning: Migrating is hazardous to health. The national health at least. It is urging both the public and private sectors to implement measures to counteract the ferocious brain drain that is impoverishing the country as a result of the swelling flood of overseas workers.

"Brain drain has an impact on foreign direct investment as capital will flow only into economies with perceived adequate supplies of skilled labor in key sectors." Quite apart from that, there is the matter of the ability of the country to produce. "One of the greatest concerns about brain drain is that the continued migration of skilled workers reduces overall productivity."

Dagdag ni de quiros:

It's no longer just ordinary workers we're exporting, it's skilled ones. Indeed, it's no longer even just skilled workers we're exporting, it's professionals and specialists in their fields. It's nurses and doctors, or doctors who metamorphose into nurses at their points of destination. I do know many people from various walks of life -- doctors, flight attendants, print journalists, TV reporters, lawyers and even bankers -- who have left for the United States and are doing blue-collar jobs there. They probably figure wearing a blue collar elsewhere is better than wearing a dog collar at home.

Like I keep saying, I can't blame people for wanting to leave this country. It's not just that the prospect of greener pastures abroad can lure anybody, Filipinos first among them, into wanting to luxuriate in them. It's that the grass at home has grown brown and sparse and full of cow dung. It's not just that Filipinos are being drawn by a magnet to something they're prone to being magnetized to begin with. It's that they're being driven resolutely by their circumstances to abandon this country and leave it not completely figuratively to the dogs.

I know I have felt that way in moments of utter frustration. Who wants to live in a country where thugs are free to seize government and screw the citizens anyway they please in the smug expectation they can always count on those same citizens to say God is trying us like Job, let's just move on or move away? Until I realize that if I did that I would be one of those citizens -- or who are still pleased to call themselves citizens -- that are creating this situation.