On behalf of President Benigno S. Aquino III, I extend my warm greetings to all our delegates from Asia and Europe to this 7th ASEM Interfaith Dialogue.
The theme of this assembly---“Harnessing the benefits and addressing the challenges of migration through interfaith and inter-cultural dialogue”---strikes at the very heart of a most important international concern. Migration affects us all, but it affects some much more profoundly and much more directly than it does others. It certainly affects us Filipinos, more deeply than it affects some of our neighbors.
At least ten million Filipinos, or nearly one-tenth of our total population, are scattered worldwide as migrant workers. With such numbers, we cannot be blind to the blessings and challenges of migration.
Last year, the central bank reported $18.4 billion in dollar remittances from our global workers. The benefits of migration are tangible: For example, once decrepit homes have been renovated, housing the families of our OFWs, or Overseas Filipino Workers. But serious challenges remain, and we have to promptly and adequately respond to them.
As the president’s principal adviser on OFW concerns, I bear a special responsibility, in collaboration with all my co-workers in government, civil society and the private sector, in ensuring the timeliness and adequacy of that response.
This is my second year as vice president. I have travelled twice to the Middle East, where we have at least half of our OFWs, and thrice to the United States, where we have most of the other half, to look into their conditions, in the light of political and economic developments in their host countries.
Migration has its blessings, but it carries in its train its own problems.
The transformation of the entire planet into one global jobs market has created the largest push from the less developed economies to the developed economies.
Migration from labor-surplus economies, particularly from Southeast Asia, followed the call of the oil-producing economies which have learned to depend more and more on foreign labor to help them run even their private homes. Ten million skilled and unskilled Filipinos have crossed to foreign shores. Another million or so is added to this figure each year.
This increasing number constitutes our modest contribution not only to the growth of the host countries, but to the global exchange of ideas, beliefs, values and cultures. By means of that, we have added, even in a small way, to the diversity of our evolving civilization.
But I need to emphasize that the social cost has been high. And the Filipino family, which is meant to be the principal beneficiary of every migrant’s decision to leave home, has borne the hardest impact of all. Where one spouse has gone abroad, the consequent separation from the family is likely to exert increasing pressure on the couple until one spouse or the other or both succumb. Then the marriage breaks up, and the children are left fatherless or motherless, or in any case, on their own.
Where both spouses have gone abroad, they normally remit money regularly to their children, to compensate for their absence. This leaves the children, especially if they are minors, vulnerable to all sorts of addictions. In time, before the absent parents get to know about it, the children have already become drug users or have dropped out of school, parish life or other community involvements.
Not many have the courage to give up a foreign job in order to be reunited with their families without an income. So the migrant worker bites the bullet and bears the social cost of prolonged separation. But is there no way of mitigating this at all?
I believe there is. But it requires political will and imagination. It requires the joint resolve of the labor-sending countries, and the whole-hearted understanding and sense of justice of the labor-importing ones. The first will have to push hard, and the second will have to look beyond their self-interests, and bring down all physical and legal barriers to allow the migrant workers to bring their families with them, or at the very least to allow family visits on the most liberal terms.
This is not easily done. But it could be worked out either through bilateral agreements between sending and receiving states, or through an international treaty binding upon all governments. What the World Trade Organization Treaty has done in terms of the free movement of goods around the world, despite some subsequent distortions from some economies, a new treaty must now do to guarantee the free movement of peoples across borders.
Lifting immigration barriers must now be seriously considered, while retaining the necessary safeguards against human trafficking, illegal recruitment, international terrorism and other transnational crimes. The time for this is now.
Be that as it may, no labor-importing country is likely to make this proposal. Their natural tendency is to protect their own labor as much as possible.
This is where the participants in this dialogue could show the way.
As we meet here today, the world continues its search for solutions to the most serious problems it has had to face in recent memory.
Rising unemployment in the United States and collapsing economies in Europe may have well produced growing resentment against foreigners who continue to be gainfully employed. Many who have lost their jobs when the meltdown began in 2007 have not been rehired; we cannot blame them entirely if they feel foreign migrants have taken away their jobs.
Under normal circumstances, such tension should not arise. But it apparently has, and government seems poorly equipped to deal with it. Moral counseling, spiritual healing, and extended social interaction with sectarian groups might be able to do a much better job. This is one more area where the dialogue partners could try to make a difference.
My friends,
The forum’s task is clear. As dialogue partners, we belong to different faiths; we keep different formulas, forms and rituals. But we belong to one humanity and share the same covenant. We are here to learn together and to learn from each other how best we could serve the ends of peace and justice.
It cannot be the purpose of this dialogue to try to unify the religions represented here. No one expects it. But we have every opportunity to show that we can work together above our differences.
Hans Kung once famously said that “There can be no world peace without peace between the religions.”
Yet we can remind ourselves that the war of religions ended with the peace of Westphalia 363 years ago, and that it is no more. The great religions are not at war with each other, whatever their differences. This dialogue is the first proof of that.
On my way to this forum, I had some misgivings about the Vice President of the Philippines giving the keynote, and the government itself playing a key role in this interfaith project. I would have thought that the various religions and cultural legacies represented here should be able to proceed, minus the government. For I have long learned to believe that religion should never be pressed into the service of political ends.
But it is quite obvious that we are not here to discuss politics, and the presence of our European friends was enough to quickly melt any persistent doubt. For it was not too long ago that Europe was engaged in a bitter debate on whether or not its constitution should acknowledge its Christian roots. And yet, here we are with our two eminent European co-chairs, minister of the interior Paivi Rasanen of Finland and Ambassador Guy Ledoux of the delegation of the European Union to the Philippines.
Encouraged by their example, I now express the hope that our official participation in this dialogue will reaffirm once and for all the fact that the secular state does not contradict itself when it recognizes God’s dominion over all human affairs, and that we remain a Christian nation, although not a confessional state.
I would further like to believe that our participation in this project strengthens our democracy, far from weakening it. For as Alexis de Tocqueville reminds us, “Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”
I wish you a most fruitful dialogue.
Thank you very much and good morning.