or 14.0o/o of all overseas (202,557 Filipinos with large concentrations in wealthy lapan Filipinos), Hongkong (130,537), South Korea (80,715) and Taiwan (74,010). Ofthese, 1,005,709 are temporary and irregular workers constituting 20.0% of the global stock of such workers. These indicate that East Asia as a whole including Southeast Asia have a relatively greater bias towards Filipinos of temporary/irregular status (like the Middle East) while the Americas East Asia as a whole accounted for some 1,2\9,445 and Oceania are biased towards permanent status. POEA data on OFW deployments, as opposed to the CFO data on stocks, provides a little more updated detail. In 2008 a total of 66,235 OFWs were deployed to ASEAN countries, constituting 5.4%o of total deployments worldwide: 41,678 to Singapore, 6,930 to Brunei, 6,034 to Malaysia, 3,750 to Thailand, 2,798 to Indonesia, 2,785to Vietnam, 1,015 to Cambodia, 647 toLaos,472 to EastTimor and126to Myanmar. This is a marked decrease from the 84,177 reported deployed to the region in 2007 with declines in OFWs going to Brunei (53%o drop in deployments), Indonesia ( 1 5% drop), Malaysia (38% drop) and Singapore (l6oh drop). Amidst continuous large deployments of migrants by the country, overall recorded deployments to the three main receiving countries'in the region have actually been falling in the past decade. The officially estimated number of Filipinos in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei has fallen significantly from 638,133 n 1997 composed of 485,253 in Malaysia, 120,152 in Singapore and 32,728 in Brunei - to 422,771 lrr,2007. The number of Filipinos working in Malaysia and Brunei fell, while those in Singapore increased only slightly and not by enough to compensate for large drops in the other two countries. Again, the Sabah situation may alter this picture somewhat even as the recorded trends are meaningful in themselves in indicating ASEAN's apparently decreasing importance as a site for deployment. The largest part of the recorded decline is due to the fall in Filipinos of irregular statusinMalaysiafrom396,8l3inl99T to just 128,000 in200T,likelyreflectingthe Malaysian government's crackdown on undocumented and illegal migrants and subsequent waves of crackdowns in recent years. There were also smaller drops in the number of irregulars in Singapore (70,000 to 56,000) and Brunei (1,500 to 440). Malaysia and Singapore also charge levies on the hiring of foreign workers to encourage local hiring and dampen dependence on cheap migrant labor. At the same time there was a notable increase in those of permanent status in Malaysia from 253 in 1997 to 26,002 in2007, and in Singapore from 152 to 29,850 over the same period. There are slight variations in the profile of OFWs in the region by type of work with the richer countries tending to hire more of lower skilled workers. According to POEA contract-based data on deployed OFW new hires, the top three occupations in the main receiving ASEAN countries are: domestic helpers (30% of new hires), nurses (16%) and plumbers and pipe fitters (5%) in Singapore; production and related workers NEC (15%),laborers/helpers general (10%), and laborer industry (8%) in Brunei; domestic 11