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Raissa Robles

Victor Lee is not the kind of man to leave behind his family without a reason, but the 34-year-old Filipino has done the sums and decided where life must take him next: Lithuania.
His wife does not want him to go. She will be left to care for their child, with a video call standing in for a husband, while Lee hauls cargo through the seaports of the Baltic. His paperwork is nearly done. He has finished his training as a heavy transport operator. He is going.
“It’s getting harder and harder to earn as a driver in Manila,” said Lee, who currently works as a driver for Grab.
Not only is the ride-hailing market saturated but the seemingly endless political brawl between President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr’s camp and Vice-President Sara Duterte-Carpios has produced protests that gridlock the streets and drain his daily take.
He has promised his wife a deal: he will return as soon as there is enough money to build a house and start a business. She is, reluctantly, coming round.

Lee’s decision to leave now, pay the personal cost and collect the reward later is one of the most well-rehearsed trade-offs in the Philippines. It has been made by millions of his compatriots across five decades – and the numbers suggest it is being made more than ever.
Official deployments of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) have almost quadrupled under Marcos: from 742,796 in 2021, the year before he took office, to 2.74 million last year.
A survey by local pollster OCTA Research released last week found that 57 per cent of 1,200 Filipinos asked were open to living or working abroad.
However, the study measured aspiration, not action, and monthly deployment figures, which dropped from 213,500 in January to 91,500 in April, show the pace of the worker exodus can fluctuate.
Still, the overall picture points to a familiar pressure: for many Filipinos, going abroad remains the most realistic route to financial security.
“They want decent jobs that will provide good wages,” said Jean Franco, a political scientist at the University of the Philippines who has studied the Filipino diaspora in the years since large-scale emigration was officially institutionalised in the 1970s.
Dreams deferred
For Charmee*, a 34-year-old assistant hair stylist in Manila, the dream is leaving for Canada, where her older sister also works in a salon. “Life is hard,” she sighed.
Her meagre pay – below the city’s daily minimum of 695 pesos (US$11) because she is still classified a “trainee” – is barely enough to support her two daughters since her estranged husband stopped paying child support.
She saves up her clients’ tips, collected from back massages while they wait for their perms to set, each coin going towards her dream of a Canadian visa.
OCTA found that the reasons Filipinos cite for wanting to leave their home country “suggest that migration is primarily driven by economic opportunity rather than by concerns related to governance, security or political conditions”.

The distinction matters for politicians, perhaps, but less so for Lee or Charmee. The proximate cause is simple: not enough money, not enough financial security and not enough future at home.
The trajectory has not been uniformly upwards, however. Monthly deployments have fallen steadily, from 213,500 in January to just 91,500 in April. Total deployments in the first four months of 2026 stood at 464,393 – less than half the 942,913 recorded in the same period last year.
“Overseas prospects are weaker because of sluggish global growth, competition from other labour-exporting countries and now the oil price shock,” said Sonny Africa, executive director of the think tank Ibon Databank.
Still, “there’s no doubt that economic insecurity and domestic job prospects are worsening”, he said.
“Work has become more informal, more volatile and scarce in recent years, real minimum wages are worth less now than 40 years ago, and the oil shock-driven inflationary surge is aggravating these.”
50 years abroad
Today, OFWs are an essential pillar of the Philippine economy, accounting for around 7 to 8 per cent of gross domestic product through their remittances.
But this dependence on overseas labour did not begin with Marcos. Today’s diaspora “is a continuation of the 1970s exodus of Filipino migrant workers in new forms”, Franco said.
Marcos’ father, Ferdinand Marcos Snr, formally launched the overseas employment programme in 1974 through his labour minister Blas Ople, who later described it as a “labour-for-oil” swap that gave 7 million Filipinos jobs and income above subsistence level while relieving pressure from Middle Eastern oil producers on his government.

The political logic was equally plain. “A jobless and hungry population is enough to make people turn against the government,” Franco said.
Or in other words, export the discontent, keep the remittances.
“They are going abroad because the government helps facilitate it via its state sponsorship of overseas employment,” Franco added.
“They are also going abroad due to demand from employers given the ageing population in other countries and the low number of young people willing to take on certain jobs deemed demeaning, dirty and dangerous.”
The machinery has only grown more sophisticated as the years have gone by. Former president Rodrigo Duterte created an entire cabinet-level ministry for it, the Department of Migrant Workers, in 2021.
The ministry’s current secretary, Hans Leo Cacdac, has spent three years opening doors: last July he met Lithuania’s national defence minister to negotiate positions in healthcare, maritime, transport, construction and food services.
Victor Lee’s Baltic posting is a direct product of that meeting.
“Large-scale migration reduces pressure on Filipino political elites by giving discontented citizens the option of individual solutions abroad rather than collective political change at home,” Africa said.
It is a system that works – for the government, for the receiving countries and, often enough, for the workers themselves. The question nobody has satisfactorily answered is what it costs the country that keeps exporting its people to sustain it.
*Name changed at interviewee’s request


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The Philippines exported 2.74 million workers last year. For many, leaving is still the most reliable path to a better life


The Philippines exported 2.74 million workers last year. For many, leaving is still the most reliable path to a better life.


No future at home? Inside the endless Filipino exodus

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The Philippines exported 2.74 million workers last year. For many, leaving is still the most reliable path to a better life

The Philippines exported 2.74 million workers last year. For many, leaving is still the most reliable path to a better life