While China won’t turn the Philippines into another Sri Lanka anytime soon, it may turn it into a new Macau.
Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg © 2018 Bloomberg Finance LP
Chinese workers are “flooding” the Philippines.
That’s according to a story published recently in South China Morning Post. Worse, Duterte’s administration is losing count of how many Chinese workers are in the country legally or illegally, according to the same source.
The flood of Chinese workers follows Duterte’s abandoning the Philippines close ties with the US and the cozying up to China.
This major shift in the country’s foreign policy includes a big flip-flop on the South China Sea disputes, and allegedly, an agreement between China and the Philippines to relax visa restrictions.
A total of 3.12 million Chinese citizens entered the Philippines from January 2016 to May 2018, according to the Bureau of Immigration. Within these figures is a number of Chinese workers, which is still unknown.
What isn’t unknown is the number of Filipinos seeking jobs overseas, which reached 2.2 million as of 2016.
That begs the question: Why is the Philippines opening up its labor market to foreign workers when it cannot provide jobs for its own people?
It is known that the Philippines unemployment rate stands at 5.1% in 2018, well above China’s 3.82%.
