This was what presidential adviser on overseas Filipino communities Heherson Alvarez told Filipinos in Los Angeles, California yesterday.
Alvarez advised these Filipinos to participate in the Philippines’ political affairs by "beating the deadline to register and vote in the upcoming elections and to invest your hard-earned dollars back home."
Speaking before a town hall meeting at the Philippine Consulate in southern California, Alvarez urged representatives of the various Filipino communities to "embrace the Absentee Voting Law that will select the next worthy leaders of our Motherland" as well as help in pump-priming the economy.
With the registration of overseas Filipinos ending on Sept. 30, Alvarez said the Absentee Voting Law may go to waste because of poor participation by Filipinos abroad.
As of yesterday, only 218,474 voters registered in government registration centers abroad — just 12.8 percent of the estimated 1.7 million potential Filipino overseas voters.
According to the Overseas Absentee Voting Secretariat of the Department of Foreign Affairs (OAVS-DFA), the registration centers in the United States registered the lowest turnout with only 7,224 voters.
In the Asia-Pacific region, 106,920 overseas Filipinos registered, while the OAVS-DFA counted 85,557 registrants in the Middle East and Africa and 18,773 registrants in Europe.
Of the 7,224 voters in the US, Saipan registered the most number of registered voters (3,694). In areas where most Filipinos are concentrated, only 119 registered in Los Angeles, 736 in San Francisco and 68 in Honolulu.
There are an estimated 129,884 voters in Los Angeles, 75,000 in San Francisco and 35,000 in Honolulu.
In his speech, Alvarez also explained that the Citizenship Retention and Reacquisition Act of 2003, also known as the dual citizenship law, will give former Filipino citizens the right to own real estate property, explore the natural resources and invest 100 percent in business enterprises in the Philippines.
"Dual citizenship is the latest globalization effort of developed countries to reach out to Third World countries and alleviate suffering and poverty," Alvarez said. "There are over 80 countries which now allow dual citizenship."