Eduardo delos Santos could not hide his excitement when friends and relatives gathered at his home for a send-off party on the eve of his departure for New Zealand.
Delos Santos, his wife and three young children had waited for their immigrant visas to New Zealand for three years and were more than glad when the notice came from the embassy that their bid had been successful.
"We're looking forward to a new life," said the 40-year-old dentist, who closed his private practice three weeks earlier. "We feel sad that we're leaving our country of birth, but the promise of a better life is more than enough to shake off melancholy."
Delos Santos is one of many Filipinos who are opting to migrate to another country amid an economic slump, rising criminality, political uncertainties and such other problems as uncollected garbage and traffic in the Philippines.
Aside from New Zealand, other top choices of Filipinos searching for new homes are the US, Australia and Canada. According to reports, the Canadian embassy alone has seen a 60 percent increase in applications in the past year.
For Filipinos who cannot afford outright migration, they move to other countries as overseas workers.
Labour Secretary Patricia Tomas said about 2,300 people leave every day for overseas jobs, noting there was growing demand for Filipino health workers, particularly nurses in Norway and physical therapists in the US and Europe.
"Under more relaxed immigration rules in these areas, they would be able to bring over their families after two years," she said.
Delos Santos said migration used to be a far-fetched idea, especially since his private practice had been allowing his family to live a comfortable life in the Philippines.
But the tide changed three years ago when former movie action star Joseph Estrada was elected as Philippine president, triggering a sense of hopelessness and prompting him to apply for migration to New Zealand.
"All I could think about then was how could we have elected a college dropout as president when we had so many other better choices," he said. "I knew that my children's future would be dim if we stay."
"I don't see an out for our problems within this lifetime," he added.
Estrada's ousting in January amid allegations of large-scale corruption and the succession of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, an economist partly educated in the US, did not change the minds of other Filipinos planning to flee.
Marites Gutierrez, a 29-year-old mother of two, said she and her husband plan to apply for migration to Canada as soon as they save up enough money to fund their move.
Gutierrez, a certified nurse who has been doing odd jobs to augment her husband's income as a pharmaceutical salesman, said money and fear for her two young daughters' security were the top considerations for their plans.
"My husband and I are both nurses but the job just doesn't pay well here," she said. "Then there is the fact that everyday we read about so many crimes in the newspapers."
Gutierrez said her husband's relatives in Canada have offered to "adopt" them to hasten their move.
Non-government organizations estimate that about 8.5 million Filipinos already live overseas, half of whom have already migrated.
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