The American dream, says a maxim, is to own a home. The Filipino dream, to put it succinctly, is to leave the Philippines. At any given time, one Filipino worker in seven works in at least one of 170 countries, on land or the high seas.

These overseas workers and seafarers are known as OFWs [Overseas Filipino Workers]. These “modern heroes,” as the Philippine government hails them quite correctly, send home $15 billion a year, a seventh of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.

To say that overseas Filipino workers are the Philippines’ economic life-line under simplifies their role in nation building. In turn, the government is gradually empowering them through two groundbreaking legislations: first, to become dual citizens, and second, to vote in absentia in national elections, this year for senators and party-list organizations, and in 2010, for president and vice president.

The Philippine migration phenomenon was vividly captured in its economic glory and human cost in a riveting cover article in the April 22, 2007 issue of the Sunday Times Magazine written by Jason DeParle who made sense of life in Manila slums by living there.

The Sunday Times Magazine front cover carried the picture of a Filipina nurse on a beach in Abu Dhabi, where she works as a nurse earning $24,000 a year, compared to her last salary of $1,200 a year in the Philippines.

“I would see these packed hovels there, and I wound wonder: ‘How do these people survive?’” DeParle told Sunday Times Magazine last week. He soon moved in with a migrant family whose father worked on and off in Saudi Arabia.

One answer to the writer’s question on how Manila’s poor survived turned out to be a system of sending men and women abroad to work.

The article includes such statistics as: 10 percent of the country’s 89 million people live abroad; another 3.2 million migrated permanently, largely to the United States; while 1.3 million more are thought to be overseas illegally, otherwise known as TNTs [Tago Ng Tago, a Filipino term for undocumented immigrants].

“Migration is to the Philippines what cars were once to Detroit: its civil religion,” wrote DeParle. The flight last year of one million overseas Filipino workers was enough, in his graphic example, to fill six 747s a day.

The Greek work for “maid” is Filipineza, and it won’t be surprising if the word makes it to the English language in much the way that most English words, diaspora, for instance, have Greek origins.

Despite its incalculable human toll, the Filipino labor exodus is still regarded as an unusual success.