"These officials have put the President in a tight spot."
"These officials have put the President in a tight spot."
Poor President Rodrigo Duterte. Because of his errant, non-performing subalterns, he has been placed in a spot where he’s the one defending his government on the issue of 300,000 Chinese working here apparently without permit.
This is more than an immigration and labor problem. Chinese here illegally pose a national security problem since the Philippines has a territorial dispute with Beijing on the South China Sea. Not only have the Chinese pushed their borders in the West Philippine Sea without regard or deference for international law and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, they are well on the way to annexing the Philippines as a province of China.
President Duterte is obviously to be blamed for this situation. His embrace of Chinese President Xi Jinping in his alleged independent foreign policy to shift from traditional ally United States has driven him into the arms of a rising China. The career diplomats at the Department of Foreign Affairs must be aghast at this drivel of allegedly diversifying our diplomatic relations. There is nothing wrong with that.
Still, to break away from America’s embrace only to be suffocated in the lock of the tight arms of another, is mindless—especially since China is seen as an aggressive power with an agenda of hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region.
The President has taken an oath in the Constitution to protect to the people and the country’s sovereignty. He still has a chance to correct his mistakes and those of the key members of his official family. What should he do? I hope he and Presidential Spokesman Salvador Panelo do not tell me to get myself elected president first before telling his boss how to run the country. But we are the people an elected President is sworn to serve.
So, for starters he should call Secretary of Defense Delfin Lorenzana, Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello, and Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra—whose Department of Justice has jurisdiction over the Bureau of Immigration—to give the facts and figures on the Chinese working in the country. As it is, they are making their boss look clueless on the actual number of Chinese working here.
These illegal Chinese are displacing our own Filipino workers who have to seek dangerous jobs overseas because of the lack of work here in their own country. Yet DOLE, DOJ and the DND have allowed llegal Chinese slip through. President Duterte has been made to look like he is fumbling with his words when he said the jobs being done by the Chinese is work Filipinos are not qualified for or do not want to do. What nonsense is that?
Filipinos are known to do work as engineers in the oil fields of the Middle East and even highly technical jobs in the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) of the United States in its moon and Mars explorations. Pinoys are also willing to do dirty work in cleaning up foreign employers’ toilets. So, that should dismiss the claim Filipinos do not want to do certain work. Filipinos will do all and any kind of work to feed their family. I do not approve of their excuse when criminals say they only did it because they want to put food on the table for their family. But as I said, they will do all kinds of work, criminal and otherwise, to feed their families. That should debunk the drivel of the President’s excuse that some Filipinos do not want to do certain kinds of work.
It’s less than two months before the May 13 midterm elections. This is seen as a preview of the presidential elections in 2022. Filipinos must vote wisely to separate the chaff from the grain as winners in this election could give us the next president of the country in 2022. Let us all put in our minds that the main issue here is jobs, jobs and jobs which is key to solving poverty, hunger and reducing crime.