send home. Migrants in general are particularly wlnerable to such exploitation for having travelled so far and at great expense but irregular migrant workers are the worst offfor being even more outside legal protections. Migrante for instance has monitored 34 displaced Filipina women workers in South Korea who opted to go undocumented and accept much lower salaries than they expected rather than return to the Philippines. Or there could be even those displaced and become stranded for lacking the resources to go home. Migrante has reports of hundreds of runaway and retrenched OFWs living under Khandara bridge in Saudi Arabia. In Japan there are numerous accounts of laid offfactory workers resorting to odd jobs such as in hotels and restaurants to survive. Newspapers reports also tell of OFWs scavenging to survive while on 2-3 month leaves without pay. Discrimination could also manifest itself more. In Hongkong there are for instance news reports of legislated adjustments in the minimum wage of locals which excluded foreign domestic household workers. Filipino migrants and their families may already be suffering lower average incomes. There is no study yet on trends in migrant incomes since the onset of crisis in 2008. Nonetheless, available macro data are consistent with the possibility that Filipino migrants'eamings or, at the very least, the incomes of remittance-dependent households are already starting to be pressed downwards. The record 1.24 million deployments reported in 2008 is an exceptional l4.To/o increase from the year, a dramatic turnaround of an overall declining trend since 1997 , and, the highest growth registered since 1991. Yet at the same time, monthly remittance growth has continued to fall from its most recent peak of 30oh in June 2008 to just 3.3% in June 2009. Moreover, the merc2.9Yo growth in cumulative remittances in the January-June 2009 period is already the slowest for this period in seven years, and much less than the 28.4% growth recorded in the first six months of 2005. The flattening remittance growth despite apparently much higher deployments may be indicating lower average incomes for migrants and/or remittance- receiving households. IV. Migrants and Human Rights: Burdens and vulnerabilities The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR, 1966) and 2 optional protocols, and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966) define basic and inalienable rights of all persons of whatever nationality wherever they are. Additional rights are conveyed in Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1979\, Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and other major conventions especially those sponsored by the International Labor Organization (ILO) such on Migration for Employrnent (No. 97) and on Migrations inAbusive Conditions and the Promotion of Equality of Opportunity and Treatment of Migrant Workers (No. 143). 26