Raffy used to count days by pay cycles which was monthly as mandated by the Gulf country where he found employment as a construction worker 20 years ago. He first heard about the US-Israeli war on Iran while working on a high-rise tower being constructed in the middle of the city. Now he counted the days by air raid sirens that blared through a small dormitory he shared with six other Filipinos.
Around 2.4 million Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) are scattered across the Middle East, all of them suddenly exposed to a war they had no part in, all of them calculating the same impossible equation of survival – whether to stay in the Middle East and face the dangers of war, or return back to the Philippines and face slow economic death for themselves and their families.
The Philippine embassy’s notice came one day stating “voluntary repatriation” was being arranged for OFWs. It promised free plane tickets, airport assistance, temporary shelter, medical referrals, transport, counseling. The repatriation program was a “complete package,” according to the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration or OWWA.
But inside the dormitory, no one saw it that way.
“They call it voluntary,” Banjie said, sitting cross-legged on his bunk bed, his phone glowing in the dim light. “As if we are choosing between two good options.”
“They even listed what we get,” Benjie added, scrolling. “Plane ticket, airport assistance, temporary housing, medical help… counseling.” He read it like a full-course dinner menu.
Raffy almost smiled: “Complete, except for the one thing none of us could find back home – work.”
There are approximately 7,000 Filipinos who leave the country daily to work abroad, totalingover one million annually. They had not left by accident. OFWs are a product of decades of a policy that treated migration as a solution to trade deficits, using their remittances to keep the national economy afloat.
The Philippine reactionary state had built an economy that depended on exporting its people. In 2025 alone, overseas Filipinos sent home $35.63 billion which made up 7.3% of the country’s GDP, a figure large enough to sustain millions yet never large enough to build an economy that could keep them home. The government praises them as heroes, but heroes, Raffy realized, are often those expected to leave.
Myrna, calling in from a women’s dormitory across the compound where she had lived for fourteen years, laughed with a dry, knowing sound.
“Fourteen years,” she said. “Nag-menopause na nga ako dito.” I’ve practically reached menopause here.
A few chuckled, but it faded quickly.
“At our age,” she continued, her voice flattening, “no one will accept us there.”
Elvie nodded from across the room. At fifty-eight, she still moved with the efficiency of someone who had spent decades as an administrative staff.
“Even with experience,” she said, “I already know. In Manila, I am finished.”
There was a cruel arithmetic to it. Here, they could still earn up to five hundred dollars a month. It was not much, but it was just enough to keep their families afloat. Back home, they would earn nothing.
Outside, the war made itself known again. Sirens cutting through dawn, the distant tremor of something exploding somewhere else. News filtered in fragments: airspace closures, stranded workers, small batches of repatriations. A few hundred sent home, while millions remained. Even the Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas (Philippine Central Bank) central bank admitted the scale of exposure with a massive Filipino labor force directly tied to the conflict’s outcome. And yet the government response felt thin, procedural, and almost detached. They were monitoring remittances, tracking flows of dollars, managing risk as if the workers themselves were just another economic variable.
“Where is the plan?” Benjie asked quietly, though it sounded less like a question and more like an accusation. Other countries were evacuating their citizens at scale. Here, repatriation came in trickles, draped in language that shifted responsibility back onto the workers themselves. Voluntary. As if choosing to stay in a war zone was a preference, not a condition created by years of policy. As if the state had not already decided long ago that their place was elsewhere.
Raffy thought of home and the tricycle he used to drive. He reminisced the days when income depended on luck and exhaustion. The way work disappeared quietly, without explanation, until leaving his family of four became the only rational decision.
“If we still have a chance to work here,” Raffy said, steady now despite the sirens, “we will definitely grab it.”
Raffy opened the repatriation form and stared at the word again: voluntary. He thought about itover and over in his mind until it collapsed under its own weight. There was nothing voluntary about being pushed out of your country by the absence of work. Nothing voluntary about being told to return to a system that had already marked you as disposable. Nothing voluntary about choosing between being bombed abroad or being erased at home.
He closed the form.
Around him, people were still deciding. There were some who chose to leave, others indignant in staying, but all of them aware that neither option meant safety. The war would continue. The sirens would return. The uncertainty would not lift. But neither would the reality waiting in Manila, where the economy they sustained had no place for them.
So he stepped out of the dormitory and back toward the unfinished tower, toward the work that still existed, however fragile, however temporary. Above him, the sky was clear for now. The cranes still moved. The city still functioned.
In the end, the Philippine government had offered him a way out, but not a way back.
And like millions of others scattered across the region, Raffy chose to stay not because he did not understand the danger, but because he understood something more fundamental: that he had already been exported. And the country that needed his labor had never built a place for him to return.