Labor migration has become the safety valve to the country’s unemployment crisis and a major source of foreign exchange: It has surged way past the domestic job market as the remaining option for many Filipinos. In 2000 alone, more than 800,000 Filipinos were deployed abroad while only less than 200,000 were effectively added to the domestic labor market.(1) As unemployment has worsened under the Arroyo administration compared to the past 50 years some 3,000 Filipinos leave the country every day for overseas jobs – or a total of more than 1 million every year. With remittances growing by the year – 14.4 billion US dollars in 2007 constituting 10 percent of the country’s GDP – the government target is to increase labor migration to 2 million by 2010.(2) And the government is determined to meet the target: From January to April this year there were 516,466 migrant workers deployed thus raising the daily departure to 4,314 from last year’s 3,000.