Author: Arnel Tam

Inside the Facebook Underground: How Social Media Became the World’s Largest Illegal Recruitment Network for Filipino Workers The message arrived at 11:47 PM, while she was scrolling through Facebook before sleep. The profile picture showed a smiling woman in a blazer, standing in front of what appeared to be an office building in Dubai. The

Inside the Hidden Loan Industry That Owns OFW Families: 5-6 Lenders, Loan Sharks, and the Mathematics of Perpetual Poverty She borrowed ₱50,000 to send her husband to Saudi Arabia. The lender was a neighbor—a friendly woman who ran a sari-sari store and “helped” families in the barangay with cash needs. The terms seemed simple: pay

Inside the ₱85 Billion Balikbayan Box Economy: Love, Logistics, and the Hidden Industry That Ships Filipino Hearts Home The box arrives in December, as it always does. It has traveled 9,000 kilometers from a small apartment in Milan, Italy, through consolidation warehouses in Rome, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, around the tip of

Agency Fees, Debt Traps, and the True Cost of Working Abroad A Data-Driven Investigation for OFWs, Families, and Aspiring Overseas Workers Introduction: The Price of a Dream Every year, millions of Filipinos pay substantial sums to recruitment agencies in pursuit of overseas employment. In 2024 alone, the Department of Migrant Workers processed over 2.6 million

Inside the POEA Medical Exam Industry: The Billion-Peso System That Decides Who Gets to Leave He had worked in Saudi Arabia for eleven years. Eleven years of sending money home, of missing his children grow up, of enduring heat and homesickness and the particular loneliness of foreign labor. He came home for a two-month vacation,

Inside the Filipino Flight Attendant Pipeline: Dreams, Debt, and the Airlines That Disappeared She graduated top of her class from a flight attendant training academy in Pasay. She paid ₱287,000 for the eighteen-month program—borrowed from an aunt who mortgaged a rice field in Nueva Ecija. She was told airlines were hiring. She was told placement

Introduction: The AI Revolution and Filipino Workers The world of work is undergoing its most profound transformation since the Industrial Revolution. Artificial intelligence is reshaping every industry, every occupation, and every country—and overseas Filipino workers stand at the crossroads of this change. With $38.34 billion in remittances sent home in 2024 (a record high representing

What Happens When Your Organs Fail Abroad: The Medical Repatriation Crisis No One Talks About The call came at 3:47 AM Manila time. Her son was in a hospital in Jeddah with kidney failure. The company was offering to fly him home—but only if the family signed papers releasing them from further responsibility. She had

Growing Up With a Parent on the Other Side of the World: The Hidden Generation Shaped by OFW Migration She was three years old when her mother left for Hong Kong. She is twenty-three now. In between, there were video calls that felt like talking to a stranger, balikbayan boxes that smelled like somewhere else,

He worked twelve years in Saudi Arabia. He sent home ₱30,000 every month without fail. When he returned to the Philippines at 48, he had no savings, no property, and no pension. His family had a nice house—but it belonged to his brother. The money had vanished into daily expenses, fiestas, and “emergencies” that somehow