Inter Press Service - October 26, 1999
Johanna Son

As it is, millions of women migrants have poor or no access to health in their countries they work, regardless of whether they hold legal status or not. Legal migrants often pay much more for health services. Legal or illegal, many women migrants work in environments little reached by the law and where they are at risk of sexual and physical abuse, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies and illness from poor working conditions.

The alarm raised by the neglect of health rights of migrant workers must be heeded by host and labour-sending nations as "HIV transmission is most efficient in situations of repression and abuse," explained Aida Santos of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women Asia-Pacific here at the Fifth International Congress on AIDS in the Asia-Pacific.

And when they fall ill, women migrant workers often have little recourse to adequate treatment. Illegal status and fear of losing jobs and repatriation discourage women from seeking treatment as well.

But to be both a woman migrant worker and be HIV or AIDS positive creates an even more difficult situation, especially in host countries that do not even acknowledge they have rights in the first place, says Irene Fernandez of the Malaysia-based NGO, Tenaganita.

Not least, "health workers who discriminate against people with HIV further discriminate if it is a migrant worker who has it, so this is double discrimination", Fernandez said at a discussion organised by Tenaganita and Ford Foundation here.

And though labour-sending countries are pursuing ways of boosting protection for overseas workers, they often centre on wages and contracts and Fernandez says "health remained behind the curtain".

Yet more and more labour migrants in Asia, estimated at more than 7 million though reliable figures are hard to come by, are women. Sixty percent of migrant workers from the Philippines, which has nearly 4 million overseas labourers around the world, are women.

In the seventies, Asian women went in droves to other regions like the Gulf and western countries in search of work. Many later went to richer East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and Taiwan and the emerging 'tiger economies' such as Malaysia and Thailand.

Asia's border areas are also seeing worrisome rises in cases of HIV/AIDS, which is spreading through the region through drug use and unprotected sex. Burmese activists say problems related to reproductive health have been rising in border areas with Thailand, for instance, apart from the usual problems like malaria and other illnesses.

Some 30,000 Burmese women are estimated to work in Thailand's sex industry and some 100,000 Nepalese women are said to work in India's commercial sex industry, many of them trafficked by organised criminal networks. In Cambodia, nearly half of the 10,000 to 20,000 women in prostitution are believed to have HIV.

Pressures for migration are also fed by the economic crisis, which has sparked competition for lower wages among sending nations. Malaysia, whose illegal migrant population has been put at 1 million, recently turned to recruit from Cambodia when Filipino domestic workers lobbied for higher wages.

Fernandez added: "More and more women are doing part-time sex work because wages have been reduced and the amount of money they need to send home has become more".

Meena Saraswathi Seshu of the India-based Sangram HIV/AIDS prevention centre says trafficked women and girls -- forced in exploitation for the sex industry, domestic work, begging or bonded labour -- get even fewer attention when it comes to HIV/AIDS.

"Undoubtedly, women who have been trafficked are more vulnerable than men and more likely to be in situations where they are unable to control and protect themselves from HIV transmission," she said. "As illegal migrants engaged in an illegal trade, they are very often subjected to sexual abuse in the hands of authorities."

While many groups work with trafficked women and illegal migrants, HIV/AIDS education and prevention is rarely part of their job, Seshu points out, indicating that there seems to be less attention to rights when it comes to migrant populations.

Nguyen Nguyen Nhu Trang of the Coordination of Action Research on AIDS and Mobility (CARAM-Asia) in Vietnam says the root of the problem lies in the fact that "migrant workers are treated as an economic tool, not as human beings". Asian countries, many of which are both labour importers and exporters, often find useful the contribution of legal and illegal migrant workers to their economies, but are less than willing to formally recognise their basic rights or provide access to basic services.

This view of migrants as economic tools, which critics say appears to underlie many government programmes and immigration laws, leads to a situation where many sending and receiving governments put conditions such as mandatory HIV/AIDS testing for foreign workers in order to "protect" local populations.

Some governments require the deportation of pregnant workers, which forces many to go for unsafe abortions that can put women at risk of HIV transmission or other infections, and rules often prevent spouses and partners from joining workers.

Fernandez points out that action taken with on migrant workers often focuses on the women, especially sex workers, as "transmitters" of the virus. They do not consider the fact that her plight as staying alone in a foreign country may prod her into risky behaviour, which education and support programmes could probably address, she explains.

Beyond the health and human rights issues, the sensitivity that surrounds international migration is another complication. The debate over "rights" for people who are assumed to be temporary visitors makes international consensus on the rights of migrants is a political minefield.

Receiving countries fear opening their gates to immigration, which is why a 1990 international convention recognising rights of migrant workers and their families has yet to have enough state signatures to come into force.

Only nine countries have ratified this International Labour Organisation convention -- which does not cover people who work in the "entertainment" industry, Trang pointed out.

In face of reports of abuse by their overseas labourers, many sending governments have tried to reach agreements with host countries. But these are often bilateral instead of multilateral accords, which activists say do not focus enough on health-related rights crucial to women migrants and allow receiving countries to apply different standards.

Malaysia for instance has different agreements with Thailand the Philippines, Indonesia, Pakistan and Banglahdes. The Philippines has separate accords with Malaysia, Iran and Iraq, among others. "The sending countries must be much more powerful," Fernandez said.

Many receiving countries believe they are protecting their own nationals by imposing rules like mandatory testing or screening.

But women's activists say these often only encourages people to hide their HIV status, does little to stop migration flows across borders and educate them to get them to actually change or avoid risky behaviour.

Instead, they say pragmatic governments should work on extending education and health protection programmes to everyone, including the migrant population they already host in their midst and find so useful in boom times. (END/IPS/ap-he-hd/js/99)
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