South Eastern Asia · data through 2024
The Philippines has built one of the world's most organised systems of overseas work, with care, health, seafaring, and service workers in almost every region.
Twenty five year view
These lines show migrant stock, meaning people living outside their birth country at each point in time. They do not show annual arrivals.
Why people move
Overseas Filipino workers are a formal part of national economic life, with dedicated ministries, welfare funds, and pre departure requirements. Money sent home supports a very large share of households.
Connections
Common destinations
United States, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Japan, Canada, Italy
Common origins
China, Indonesia, United States
Adapting and finding support
Long separations shape family life across generations, with children raised by grandparents. Care workers abroad often carry qualifications well above the role they are hired into.
The national migrant worker system offers real protection and should be used rather than bypassed.
Use the support guideResearch that explains this pattern
Anthropology
Many families are not here or there but genuinely both, with money, decisions, care, and authority moving constantly across the border.
Integration and continued attachment to home rise together rather than trading off.
Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc Szanton
Anthropology
Sending money home is not only economic. It maintains standing, honours obligation, and keeps a person a member of the family they left.
People send money they cannot spare, and stopping carries social cost heavier than the financial one.
Marcel Mauss on the gift, applied in contemporary migration ethnography
Psychology
Grief without a body or an ending, a parent alive but unreachable, a home that still exists but cannot be returned to, resists ordinary mourning.
Families hold the loss open for years, and closure focused support can do harm rather than help.
Pauline Boss, ambiguous loss theory
Support inside and beyond Philippines
Regulation of recruitment, contract verification, and worker protection abroad.
Filipino workers going overseas
OpenWelfare, insurance, repatriation, and family support programmes.
Members and their families
OpenAssistance, voluntary return, reintegration, and counter trafficking support through the local office.
Anyone moving, arriving, or returning
OpenThese are public organisations. The project is not affiliated with them and cannot guarantee outcomes. Nothing here is legal advice or an emergency service.
Figures are rounded published estimates. Causes and adaptation differ within every country and should not be read as a verdict about any person.