Filipinos in Berlin Reflect on Migration, Home, and Activism

BERLIN, Germany – In solidarity with other protesters at the President’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) on Monday, July 27, Filipinos and other migrant activists gathered for a protest outside the Philippine Embassy in Berlin. Three Filipinos shared their thought on migration and what it is like to live in one country while remaining bound to the politics, memories and struggles of another. The time migration took Growing up in rural Bavaria, Annemarie always sensed that there was something different about her family. She and her mother lived in the same country and under the same roof, yet Annemarie’s childhood memories do not include moments with her mother. “I don’t have any memory that I was playing with her on a Spielplatz, on a kids’ playground,” she said. Instead, much of her recollection memories involve helping her mother navigate German bureaucracy. Annemarie translated letters and documents before she was old enough to understand what they meant. “Sometimes she was like, ‘Why don’t you understand the German?’ I said, ‘Yeah, but I’m only seven years old. I don’t know this Finanzamt (tax office) and all this.’” Annemarie’s mother left the Philippines after martial law and went to work in a German car-assembly factory. For nearly 40 years, she worked long shifts during the weekdays and cleaned homes and offices on weekends to earn enough to support relatives in the Philippines. “I also felt the cost of that sacrifice. We missed so much time together not because she didn’t want to be with me — which I only really understood many years later, but because survival demanded every hour of her labor.” Her mother only told her recently she did not feel a mother-daughter bond, not because love was absent, Annemarie stressed, but because time was. “It took me many years and many conversations with my Kasamas (other activists) to realize how deeply my own life has been shaped by forced migration.” Activism gave Annemarie a new language for her family’s experience. Being part of protests and activities organized by Migrante Germany and Gabriela, Annemarie has been able to look at her mother’s experience with pride, realizing what it took to uproot her life in the Philippines and start another in Germany. A country whose language did not sound like hers and whose culture was very different from her own. “She had no community to turn about her loneliness, her fears or about the grief of leaving her home and family behind.” Participating in protest movements has become a sense of duty. Annemarie feels what she described as anger at the German government for recruiting cheap labor from emerging economies like the Philippines. It is this anger that she has channeled into her activism. It is through her activism that she honors her duty to her mother and has now, found a space for healing in their relationship. “I feel like it’s my duty to stand for her rights and the rights of other Filipino families,” said Annemarie. Home, watched from Berlin Mitzi Jonelle Tan watched the Philippine president’s State of the Nation Address from Berlin with mounting anger and anxiety. Police arrested 51 people during demonstrations accompanying the address. Protest groups said those detained included 13 minors and three paralegals; police alleged violations including vandalism, unlawful assembly and local prohibitions on covering one’s face. Rights and activist organizations condemned the arrests as an attack on the space for public dissent. For Mitzi, the images brought back memories of her first protest at a SONA demonstration many years earlier. Had she been in the Philippines this time, she said, she would again have been in the streets. From Berlin, she worried about increasingly forceful policing amid intensifying political conflict. Protest remains one of the principal ways ordinary Filipinos can make themselves heard. The arrests made that democratic space appear to be shrinking again. Mitzi was also critical of one of the development projects promoted around the SONA: Pax Silica, a US-backed initiative under which Philippine and American officials have proposed a 4,000-acre industrial and technology hub in New Clark City. Officials have presented the project as a source of investment and employment and as a way to secure supply chains for artificial intelligence, semiconductors, critical minerals and advanced manufacturing. A staunch environmental activist, Mitzi raised questions about contested land, the displacement of communities, environmental protections and pressure on local water supplies. “In a country already exposed to extreme heat, severe storms and water insecurity, environmental and social costs cannot be treated as an afterthought to technological development,” said Mitzi. From Berlin, Mitzi can watch, organize and speak. What she cannot do is separate her future from the political conditions waiting for her at home. “With the 51 people arrested, it really scares me. It scares me being here in Germany because I want to go home. It scares me that the protests that I was able to join before, I won’t be able to join anymore. It scares me that when I go home, what’s waiting for us is arrests. What’s waiting for us is even more impunity.” Grace and courage to bear witness A Filipino-American who asked to only be called V, left San Francisco with his wife in July 2022. He had been watching what he saw as the fracturing of American democracy since before Donald Trump’s first election in 2016. “I moved partially because of the rise of fascism in the US and the fact that we might have a bit more time in Germany. But it proved very quickly not to be the case.” V is part of a visible movement of Americans building lives abroad, driven by a mixture of political anxiety, living costs, remote work and the search for a different quality of life. The Wall Street Journal has described the phenomenon as “the new American dream” — living somewhere else. Media reports citing a Brookings Institution analysis estimated that about 150,000 people left the US to live somewhere else. For the first time in nearly half a century, more people were leaving than arriving. For V, the political undercurrent he sensed before leaving the United States has since become increasingly familiar in Europe. Germany has not insulated him from racism, anti-immigrant politics or political violence. His anxiety sharpened after the deadly attack near Berlin’s Christopher Street Day celebrations, when a van was driven into a crowd near the Pride festivities, killing a woman and injuring dozens. As a migrant and a man of color, V braced himself for another wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric. “With the political climate being so tense, I think this is a storyline that has been perpetuated by the media so often,” he said. He had lived through repeated episodes of mass violence in the United States. He did not describe himself as desensitized, but as someone who had passed thro