I grew up in a country where “ghost projects” is a phrase everyone understands without explanation. In 2025, government auditors confirmed 421 of them among roughly 8,000 flood-control contracts inspected — infrastructure that existed only on paper while public money vanished into it.
I’ve watched this pattern my whole life as a student journalist covering my own government: a scandal breaks, officials express outrage, nothing structural changes, and eventually a new scandal replaces the old one in the news cycle. Now the same government is being handed a 1,600-hectare “AI-native” industrial hub, financed with American capital, and told this time it’ll be different.
I don’t believe it will be. And honestly, I don’t think this deal was built with people like me in mind to begin with.
Pax Silica is the U.S.’s flagship initiative to secure semiconductor, critical mineral, and AI supply chains among “trusted” partner nations, meant to cut dependence on China. In April, the Philippines became its 13th signatory. The centerpiece is a planned industrial hub in New Clark City, Tarlac, anchored by Foxconn, sitting on land my country holds roughly a trillion dollars in untapped mineral reserves to help supply nickel, copper, gold, zinc, the raw material for the batteries and chips this whole coalition exists to build.
Officials call this the chance the Philippines has waited decades for: a route out of low-value assembly work and call-center outsourcing into real, high-value manufacturing. I get why that story sounds good. What I haven’t seen, anywhere in the framework being negotiated, is a convincing account of who actually benefits from it.
Start with the land. Farmer groups, including KMP and Pamalakaya, have accused the government of trading away agricultural land in a deal that was decided somewhere else entirely. The zone is expected to accelerate land conversion in areas currently growing rice, coconut, and other food crops. People who farm that land were never meaningfully consulted about a 1,600-hectare rezoning worked out between Manila and Washington. The people who’ll carry the physical cost of this deal aren’t the ones being promised anything in return.
Then there’s the fight over who actually governs the site. In April, the Wall Street Journal reported the hub would operate under American common law, with diplomatic immunity for U.S. personnel — an arrangement with no real precedent for an overseas commercial facility. Philippine officials publicly rejected that in May.
Washington’s undersecretary of state then called the immunity framing a distortion of his remarks, while still confirming that binding “investor protection” terms are being negotiated over a two-year window. That doesn’t reassure me. It tells me the real question — whether American investors will actually answer to Philippine courts — is still open, and it’s being settled behind closed doors, between a government with no consistent record of protecting its own citizens in deals such as this, and a foreign partner whose officials already tried once to put their people beyond local jurisdiction.
I’m also skeptical the “move up the value chain” story holds up the way it’s being sold. These are capital-heavy jobs. They need specialized skills most people don’t have yet, and won’t have soon. Meanwhile, the same technology this initiative exists to build is already eating into the business-process-outsourcing sector, which employs over a million Filipinos today. It automates the scriptable customer service and back-office work the whole sector was built on. Nobody has explained to me why what Pax Silica creates will replace what its own underlying technology is destroying, on anything like the same timeline, for anything like the same workers.
I’m close in age to the generation that’ll live with whatever this deal becomes, long after the officials who signed it have moved on. I’ve sat through enough Philippine government briefings to know the difference between an official answering a question and an official performing the appearance of one. On the questions that matter most here — who governs the site, who gets displaced, who actually gets hired — I’ve mostly heard the second kind of answer.
I get why the anxiety behind Pax Silica exists. Cutting dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains is a reasonable goal, and my country does have real advantages: mineral wealth, an English-speaking workforce, and an electronics manufacturing base already in place.
WE WATCHED A GOVERNMENT KILL PEOPLE. NOW IT WANTS OUR TRUST
But a strategic rationale that makes sense in a Washington or Manila boardroom isn’t the same thing as a deal that serves the farmers losing their land, or the BPO workers watching their jobs disappear, or a generation being asked to trust institutions that have given us no real reason to.
I’d like to be wrong about this. I’d like, for once, to watch my country handle something this big without the costs landing on people who never got a vote in it. Maybe this time really is different. I just haven’t seen it happen before, and nothing about how this deal is being handled so far tells me this is the exception.
Luther Saturion is a Filipino high school senior, student journalist, and opinion columnist, and a member of The Frontman, the official publication of the Philippine League of Column Writers. His work has appeared in Philippine national publications.