Waiting for the OFW vote
UAE's Khaleej Times has a short feature on the Philippine labor diaspora, and it reminds one of the gory details of our economy's masssive failure to generate jobs:

The Foreign Department reports that as of December 2003, there were 5,345,700 Filipinos documented as working abroad, with over half a million more working illegally.

The article points out that the OFWs are, in a way, fashioning the country's middle class, and a consolidation of their inchoate political power can reinvent--perhaps temper-- the country's elite dominance.

The OFWs indeed have the potential to reinvent the political terrain, but they didn't take to overseas voting that well. If I remember correctly, there were about only 300,000 Filipino OFWS who registered to vote abroad, a trickle by any standard, dismally insufficient to tilt the balance of power in a national election. We would have to wait for another election other than the coming one in May to see if there would emerge an OFW vote.