Continued promotion of migration will undeniably increase the number of Filipinos put in rulnerable situations as well as strain already insufficient national and overseas mechanisms for protection. Improving the conditions for migrants in destination countries and improving government mechanisms for protection are both unavoidably extended projects whose effects will only be felt slowly over the long term. On the other hand, the push to intensiff labor export is something much more directly within the control of the government. Hence one clear way to gauge the government's commitment to promoting migrant rights is whether it is willing to ease up on its labor export policy in general. While the government's labor export policy is the most significant underlying factor to widespread migrant rights violations, the inadequate government attention devoted to addressing these is also important. There is certainly a challenge in ensuring that Filipinos scattered across the globe, sometimes thinly, and dispersed even within destination countries have access to the wide range of services they need. Nonetheless having forced and even actively facilitated Filipinos going abroad bears concomitant rights and obligations. That migrant rights violations are widespread and continue to rise is a sign of how government efforts are very much lagging behind. This is notwithstanding, for instance, a relative increase in the national government budget for such concerns in recent years. The three main agencies concerned with overseas Filipinos are the DFA, POEA and CFO which have a combined budget of P12.0 billion for 2009. Some idea of trends in their cornbined budgets in real terms can be seen by comparing this with trends in overseas Filipino stock and deploymcnt between 2001 and 2007 (the latest year for which stock data is available). The national government budget for these three agencies combined was P9.1 billion n 2007 which was equivalent to P I ,040 per overseas Filipino, P 1 ,804 per temporary/irregular worker or P8,426 per deployed worker - these are higher than the corresponding amounts of P663, P1,052 or P5,667 in 2001 (from a combined budget of P4.9 billion). The relative increase is positive although the sheer number of unaddressed cases and sustained violations of rights give grounds for deeming these as still insufficient. It is also unclear how much of the increased budget went to services for OFWs and how much to domestic campaigns encouraging migration or to more aggressive marketing of OFWs abroad. The most straightforward effect of limited resources is to limit effective physical coverage. Limited diplomatic machinery overseas for instance greatly restricts the access by migrants to offices and assistance, the extent to which programs can be implemented, and the speed and quality of responses that can be given. The thinness of resources manifest most visibly in terms of insufficient diplomatic outposts, outposts lacking legal 46