“Is that your amo (master)?” A middle-aged Filipina on the bus in Rome casually asked me about my companion. That day in 1992, I was with the late Bruno Amoroso, my Italian-Danish professor in Welfare and Environmental Economics.
By 1992, the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and Europe was on the verge of uniting. So, a journalist from Thailand, a lawyer from the Philippines, and I were there to learn what happens next from Professor Amoroso (1936-2017) at Roskilde University in Denmark. In Italy, we stayed at his flat near Roma Termini.
Unbeknownst to me, Filipina maids worked in households around this central train station in Rome. Every morning I caught a glimpse a Filipino nanny through the windows of an apartment across the street. And I always saw one or two Filipinos, not among the hordes of tourists, but on the bus rides we took.
Being mistaken for a domestic worker was not new. Too preoccupied to explain, I remember saying, “yes,” to my inquisitive seatmate. Back then, I did not bother to ask her how many more Filipino women toiled in Rome as live-in helpers, caregivers, or cleaners. Now, I wonder how many of them worked “legally” with some degree of protection. And how many came through underground placement, on tourist visas, or under the pretext of religious pilgrimage.
Willing, Able and Invisible
That day on the bus, I did not engage because I intuitively knew that staying mum had benefits. “Invisibility” increased a migrant worker’s chances of survival. Often, the success of a Filipino Overseas Worker (OFW) meant deliberate self-erasure. Triumph was measured not in terms of social recognition, equitable wages, or even fair treatment but by “remittances” or the money sent to support families back home.
Now absorbed by the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW), the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA) did not publish an exact tally of Filipino women OFWs. Local estimates, however, noted that “tens of thousands” of Filipino women were “present” in Italy. In 1992, Filipino migrant workers in Europe represented a small fraction (around 3%) of all OFWs.
Through state-sponsored deployment, Hong Kong and Singapore employed at least 65,000 domestic workers each. Around 40,000 to 100,000 were in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, or the Middle East as a whole. The official count of the government-sanctioned women labor export was 275,000.
Gender-disaggregated remittance tracking was limited in 1992. But in the early 1990s the total remittances that the Philippine Central Bank could trace hovered between $1 to 2 billion USD annually. The year 1992 marked POEA’s initial record of the “Feminization Wave.” Newly hired land-based, non-seafaring, women migrants (131,213) outnumbered men (128,380) for the first time.
The Philippine government’s economic strategy of “Labor Export Program,” a policy that began in the 1970s under the then-dictator Ferdinand Marcos, met the demand for cheap domestic care workers in booming economies. Formal bilateral agreements between the Philippines and better-off host countries made that possible.
Happening at the Village
Hard-pressed economic conditions compelled Filipino single women and mothers to leave for greener pastures. They are not destitute, nor “unskilled,” a prior government designation of their labor category. But ask why a college-educated OFW would seek “elementary occupations,” the current classification for household service workers, and her response is predictable: to give parents, siblings, or her spouse and children a better life or a clear path ahead.
“Para sa kinabukasan mo ito, anak (this is for your future, son),” said a stoic mother flashing a brave smile on a TV game show aired in 2018. She repeatedly told her son, who was 6 or 7, that he was the reason why she had to work abroad. The son, who said he joined the televised contest to win money so his mom would quit, begged her to stay and take care of him instead of somebody else’s children.
In every community, the need to build a typhoon-resilient concrete house is real. And so is the “demonstration effect” of a neighbor’s ability to finish construction on a house. Everyone knows that the monthly “padala” (remittance) made the difference. Still, an OFW’s resolve goes beyond merely “keeping up with the Joneses.” It is about closing the aspiration gap–what a family dreams to achieve and what the local economy allows them to earn.
Hopeful OFWs may not necessarily be impoverished. But they inhabit an economy that is in a state of financial stagnation, where local wages could feed but not buy them the dream house or higher education that secures gainful employment for the next generation. The only way for the family to move up is for one of them to move out.
Beyond Human Cost
Despite facing potential risks and the challenge of learning a new language or culture, an OFW will take her chances and grab every opportunity to improve her family’s lot. She summons courage and bolsters faith to embark on “pakikipagsapalaran,” a venture into the unknown. She leaves things to destiny in pursuit of an aspirational prize at the journey’s end. So, once she is abroad working, she overcomes any feelings of isolation and homesickness to bring home the bacon.
In 2016, the late TV host of “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown” featured Aurora. Her last name left unmentioned, this Filipina nanny raised one of the show’s directors and producers, Erik Osterholm. She worked for his family for 30 years in the U.S. Bourdain also admitted that his daughter was being raised by a Filipina nanny in New York.
Like the domestic worker I met in Rome in 1992, care workers in the U.S. are autonomous migrants. Unlike the state-sponsored migrant worker, a self-directed one enters on a non-work visa and transitions to undocumented domestic labor. Sadly, she remains unable to return home without giving up everything. When an unauthorized worker voluntarily leaves the U.S. after overstaying for more than one year, she is banned from returning for 10 years. Aurora did not see her own children for three decades.
Her Sacrifice and Macroeconomics
Regardless of how she got hired, an OFW’s survival strategy also doubles as a macroeconomic stabilizer for her country. The remittance she sends home is systematically “harvested” to prop up Philippine foreign currency reserves, to stabilize local currency, and to pay off debts.
According to the Debt Justice page on the Philippines, from 1970 to 1980 the government’s external debt rose from $600 million to over $6 billion USD. The government had to take out more loans just to keep paying debt and interest, hence the Labor Export Policy (LEP) since the 1970s. By 1992, the national debt was roughly $31 billion USD.
Debt Justice wrote: “Throughout the course of Marcos’s dictatorship, the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank lent the regime $5.5 billion, with a further $3.5 billion from foreign governments such as the United States. Over $9 billion was lent by the foreign private sector, such as banks. One notorious deal was US government-backed loans for the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant (BNPP), built by US company Westinghouse.”
Under his dictatorship, Marcos, in 1973, announced the decision to build a nuclear power plant in response to the oil crisis. Construction began in 1976. In November 1979, he ignored the Safety Commission Report citing inadequate safeguards as a potential hazard to the health and safety of the public; construction continued. Built near fault lines and volcanoes, BNPP was completed in 1984 and then mothballed in 1986. The original project cost of $700 million ballooned to $2.2 billion.
CoverStory.Ph in 2022 wrote: “The BNPP was financed by a $1.2-billion loan from a syndicate led by the US Export-Import Bank, Citicorp, and Swiss and Japanese banks. Interest on the loan amounted to $350,000 a day or $240 million a year. The debt servicing lasted for more than 30 years and ended only in 2007. Maintenance costs for the non-operating plant amounted to P40 million (in Philippine pesos) a year.”
The Philippine Daily Inquirer in 2025 reported that Filipino taxpayers repaid a total of $22 billion on the BNPP loan. Although an OFW’s foreign-sourced employment income is entirely exempt from Philippine income tax, OFWs and their families contribute indirectly to the country’s tax pool through the 12% Value Added Tax (VAT) and excise taxes on consumer goods bought within the Philippines using remittance money.
Ironically, Italy in 1992 was also in debt by 933.9 trillion lire (roughly $650 billion USD), estimated to be 113% of its Gross National Product (GDP). Professor Bruno Amoroso took the three of us to meet the MIT-educated economist who would engineer Italy’s way out of their fiscal bind.
While both governments in 1992 were financially strained, Italy had affordable and highly skilled care for their families –thanks to Filipina OFWs toiling in a shadow labor market. Likewise, Aurora’s three decades of remittances partially paid Westinghouse’s $2.2 billion bill, BNPP bank lenders, and kickbacks to officials and brokers. She paid dearly for decisions she never made.
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The Author:
George Banez is a writer of Filipino descent and is a retired non-profit professional living in Florida.
