MANILA – OVERSEAS Filipinos face the repeal of their much fought for overseas absentee voting law (OAVL) if registration figures continue to be dismal, a Commission on Elections (Comelec) official bared to the OFW Journalism Consortium recently.

Comelec Commissioner Florentino Tuason Jr. told the Consortium that if less than a million would register for overseas absentee voting, this would make the election process too expensive as had been alleged when the bill was being debated upon in the Philippine Congress.

MANILA – A FORMER Department of Health official and other experts offer additional proof to belie the assertion of Labor Secretary Patricia Sto. Tomas that there is no “brain drain” phenomenon in the country.

Former Health Secretary Jaime Galvez Tan cited data from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), an agency under Sto. Tomas’s leadership, that increasing nurse deployment is draining the country’s medical labor pool.

MANILA — NUMBERS tell it all: 200 million migrants, $225 billion remittances.

But the concepts of “brain gain” and “brain drain” threw a monkey wrench in the attempt by experts to pinpoint the positive and negative effects of international migration in knowledge societies.

Generally, what the 288-paged World Bank study “International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain” can offer in the long run is conventional wisdom.

MANILA — FROM pasting stamps to finger-stamping on handheld keypads, overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and their families are discovering that new talk technology has altered much the way they communicate with each other.

“We don’t write letters anymore, not even send each other greeting cards,” Evita Cabusao, mother on her three children working abroad who talk to her and her husband via handheld mobile telephones.

MANILA – SOUTHEAST Asian women migrant workers, of which over a half are Filipinas, sent more money than male workers to their home countries, a study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) showed.

An estimated 2.182 million contract workers and immigrants, largely women, remitted some US$3.3 billion from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia “on monthly averages ranging from US$300 to US$500,” said the ADB study Southeast Asian Workers´ Remittances.