When a war erupts, Filipino migrant workers often have only hours to decide to either stay and risk their lives or return home to unemployment. For many Filipinas working as domestic helpers, caregivers, and nurses, neither options are survival. Rather, these options feel like abandonment—by the countries they serve, and by the country that sent them there.

Our country has long framed labor migration as an opportunity, and even heroism. Overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are celebrated as “modern-day heroes,” with their remittances sustaining the national economy. But beneath this narrative masks the truth that, at the end of the day, the Philippines does not simply export labor. It exports care, and that care is overwhelmingly performed by women. 

Across the globe, Filipinas fill the care deficits of wealthier nations. They raise children who are not their own, tend to the elderly in foreign households, and staff hospitals in countries with stronger economies but weaker healthcare systems. This is sustained by what we call the “global care chain,” a cycle in which the migration of one woman creates a gap that another woman must fill. 

When a Filipina leaves to work abroad, caregiving responsibilities at home do not disappear. They are transferred to grandmothers, daughters, sisters, or other women, often without pay or recognition. Care is not removed from the equation; it is redistributed downward, concentrated among those with even fewer resources.

In this chain, women are both the solution and the sacrifice. And the precarity of this arrangement becomes most visible in times of crisis. 

Last February 2026, Mary Ann De Vera, a 32-year-old Filipina caregiver in Israel, was killed by shrapnel during an Iranian missile strike while assisting her elderly patient to a bomb shelter. She was among the first recorded Filipino casualties in the escalating war. Unlike citizens, OFWs often lack immediate access to protection or evacuation. Domestic workers, in particular, may be confined to private homes and their mobility restricted; but their safety is dependent on employers who may themselves be fleeing or prioritizing their own survival.

In these moments, the same global economy that depends on migrant women’s labor reveals how disposable that labor truly is.

For countries like the Philippines, already structured around labor export, these global crises intensify the cycle. As of recent government estimates, over 2.19 million Filipinos work abroad, with women comprising the majority in care-related sectors such as domestic work, caregiving, and nursing. They are concentrated in regions that are frequently sites of conflict, such as in West Asia, making them collateral in wars. The government has so far repatriated 4,241 OFWs amidst the war, yet many remain reluctant to return due to the lack of stable jobs waiting for them at home.

This is the contradiction at the heart of the Philippine labor export model: migration is presented as valor, yet it is rooted in the absence of viable alternatives. Women are praised for their resilience, yet that resilience is demanded by a system that leaves them with no other option.

When we continue treating migration as an economic strategy, we become accepting of this cycle of disposability. We are then accepting the fact that Filipina workers will continue to bear the burden of sustaining both their families and the global economy, even at the cost of their safety.

The Philippine government must move away from its dependence on labor export and invest in building an economy that allows its people, especially its women, to stay. This means creating stable, well-paying jobs domestically, particularly in sectors like healthcare and social services where women’s labor is already concentrated.

But beyond this, there must be a shift in how we understand women’s labor. Filipinas are not mere economic agents. We must be viewed as individuals whose lives should not be defined by how much we can endure for others.

A nation that truly values its women would not depend on their absence for survival. It would not build an economy on their displacement, nor expose them to the dangers of foreign wars in exchange for financial stability.

Care should not be the country’s main export. Until the state builds an economy where women can live and work safely at home, every Filipina sent abroad will remain one crisis away from becoming another expendable life.

Editor’s Note: This article was first issued in the January to May 2026 Second Semester Newsletter of Atenews.