Senator Aquilino Pimentel Jr. called on the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration to reduce the departing overseas Filipino workers' membership fee to only P200, a press release from his office said.

The OWWA has recently reduced the membership fee for migrant workers by P225 – from P1,275 to P1,050.

Although he hailed the OWWA decision to cut down the fee, Pimentel said P1,050 fee is still a huge amount.

We are talking here of “fees” which, in the old law, means payment for the cost of processing papers. P200 would be reasonable enough to cover those costs, Pimentel said in the press release.

He said the OWWA fee is not meant to be a revenue-generating scheme, and a non-government organization, the Philippine Migrants' Watch, has denounced the “huge fee” as “illegal.”*

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