COVID-19 brings me back to the past

I woke up this morning wondering what I should write about. No, not COVID-19 again please. But can we escape it today?

First, a small explanation. Sundays are my column days in the Philippine STAR. I used to write both Saturdays and Sundays but I must gracefully say goodbye to all that. It is time to leave a legacy. It is Veronica, my daughter, who I hope will take it up.  She was the first Filipino anchor in international media having worked with CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera.

I don’t know if it is coincidence or destiny that she should write “From a Distance” since she now lives in London. In her column yesterday she wrote about Filipino nurses in London under the title “Our Everyday Heroes.”

“Suddenly people in the United Kingdom are noticing how dependent their healthcare system, the National Health Service (NHS), is on Filipino migrant workers. Broadcaster Piers Morgan spoke in awe and admiration about the: “amazing number of Filipinos working in the NHS and unsung heroes like so many. It’s worth bearing in mind when we talk about immigrants in this country, these are the immigrants currently saving people’s lives. Coming here and actually enriching our country and doing an amazing job.”

They haven’t been mentioned before, even though a House of Commons report from last year found that at least 18,500 Filipinos work for the NHS. They form the third largest ethnic group in the Health Service, second only to British and Indian.”

Is it coincidence or destiny? Veronica was a little girl when we were political exiles in London. (My husband and I were both in the lists of persons to be arrested when martial law was declared – he for being in the Lopez-owned Meralco and I for having written the Untold Story of Imelda Marcos.)

At that time when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister she vowed that one of her policies would be to stop immigration. The Filipino community became the target because they were not organized and the Philippine embassy then would not take up their cause.

My late husband Ambassador Alberto Pedrosa and I took up their cause.

My husband was elected by Filipinos to organize and lead the Filipino community.

We went to 200 hospitals and hotels to politicize the community. Veronica and her siblings would come with us night after night until we were able to organize the Filipino community into the group known as “Pagkakaisa ng Samahang Pilipino.” We carried with us a video machine to show a Filipina worker speak and appeal to co-Filipinos. She asked who will do it for us? Tayo lamang.

At that time some Filipinos, most of them women, would be arrested by immigration officers from their homes and sent back to the Philippines as illegal migrants. She hardly knew then what it meant to be a Filipino migrant worker except perhaps to see their tears when they sang “Bayan Ko.”

Later we would drive across Europe with our children in tow in a Citroen station wagon to meet with other Filipino migrant workers there.

We told them of our work in London uniting Filipinos to defend themselves against unjust deportation.

Organizing Filipinos in Europe was different from organizing Filipinos in the US. Most of the Filipinos in Europe are workers and they were apolitical. They did not want to take sides about the politics in the Philippines. They were abroad to work. A way out of the difficulty of the work in London was to join the British labor unions. As immigrant workers Pagkakaisa ng Samahang Pilipino affiliated with the TGWU so we could have a voice in Parliament and meet with Catholic parliamentarians.

I kept all the files and materials of our campaign for Filipino workers hoping to write a book. Some of those who helped have died, others returned home but there are those who stayed and remember the difficulties Filipinos underwent even to be recognized as people.

One of the documents I kept was how Pagkakaisa brought its case on The Immigration Women’s Campaign before the High Court in Switzerland. It was  about the British immigration policy which allowed men to bring their families abroad but not women. This was a clear discrimination against women. We won the case in the International Court of Human Rights in Salzburg. So also was the issue of simply deporting migrant women workers without trial.

How times have changed. Today Filipino workers, once illegal migrants and discriminated against are heroes in the fight against COVID-19 in Great Britain.