Since assuming office in July, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has made headlines for his fiery rhetoric, lashing out at Western leaders from the EU to the US, and his deadly war on drugs, which has killed more than 3,000 people in a matter of months.
In a wide-ranging and expletive-laced series of interviews with Al-Jazeera’s Steve Chao, Duterte spoke candidly about his views on the US, the war on drugs, and, somewhat surprisingly, refugee resettlement.
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When it came to the US, Duterte held nothing back. “Bigotry is very much alive in America,” the strongman said.
Duterte has attacked President Barack Obama on multiple occasions, calling him a “son of a bitch” and telling him to “go to hell.” He has threatened to end relations with the US, all the while strengthening ties to Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping.
His anti-US rhetoric seems to be hitting home in the Philippines, even despite the fact that most Filipinos (92% in 2014) had a favorable view of the United States.
His views towards immigration were much more restrained. Duterte believes Western countries can learn from the Philippines with respect to refugees: “[Refugees] can always come here, and we will welcome them until we are filled to the brim,” he said.
“I say, ‘send them to us.’ … We will accept them. They’re human beings.”
The US, in comparison, has been reluctant to accept refugees, but still accepted just over 10,000 Syrian refugees in 2016 and about 85,000 in total. That’s a far cry from Germany, which received over a million refugees in 2015, and 300,000 in 2016.
Duterte’s rhetoric, while both conciliatory and welcoming, may be more symbolic than anything in a country that has a net migration rate of -2 migrants/1000 people — roughly on par with that of Syria.
With that in mind, the Philippines has been a haven for refugees in the past. In the late 1970s through the early 1990s, the Philippines accepted more than half a million Vietnamese refugees at the Palawan camp, according to one estimation.
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Whether Duterte will stay true to his verbal commitment to accepting refugees is another matter.
Though he ran on a campaign of law-and-order and anti-corruption that appealed to poorer Filipinos, Al Jazeera notes that most of the killings in Duterte’s drug war have taken place in those same poor neighborhoods. The majority of the people who have been killed “are the very people who voted for Duterte, believing in his promise of change,” Al Jazeera reported — showing that what you hear is not necessarily what you get.