Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 108

orldwide, the number of migrants
has jumped by nearly 50 percent
since the turn of the century to a staggering 258 million, and they are supporting
at least as many family members back in
their home countries. Migration has become the world's largest antipoverty program, DeParle notes, sending $477 billion
a year to the developing world, or three
times the world's combined foreign aid. In
some countries, remittances-the money
migrants send or take back home-
amounts to more than a quarter of the
gross domestic product, according to the
World Bank. In Kyrgyzstan, South Sudan,
and Tonga, it's more than a third.
Among large countries, the Philippines
presents a remarkable case, as its government trains, markets, and lionizes its
overseas workers, who account for one
in seven of its 105 million citizens and 10
percent of GDP. There's an entire industry
devoted to recruiting, representing, and
placing maids, sailors, nurses, and construction workers with employers in Japan, the Middle East, and North America.
The title of DeParle's book is a Portagana
family saying, but it might as well be the
Philippines' national motto. It's a country
where upwardly mobile children are those
being raised by relatives because their parents are overseas for years on end, earning many times the salary they could ever
hope for at home.
In 1986, DeParle, then a young New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter on a Henry
Luce Foundation scholarship, moved in as
a boarder with forty-year-old Tita Portagana Comodas, her five children, and assorted relatives. He was studying shantytowns, and Tita's family lived in one: Leveriza, a labyrinthine slum of 15,000 built
on a Manila Bay mudflat. Toilets were a
luxury item. "Sanitation mostly meant
'flying saucers,' bundles of waste wrapped
in newspaper and flung in the surrounding canals," DeParle writes. Tita made petty cash selling eggs, but the family was really supported by her husband, Emet, who
cleaned pools as a guest worker in Saudi Arabia. Emet was missing much of his
kids' childhoods, and wanted to return
home, but by bitter experience learned he
could not properly support them on what
he could earn in Manila.

108

September/October 2019

It was a pattern that played out over the
next generation. After DeParle finished
his year-long stint in Leveriza (an experience he wrote about for this magazine in
1987), Tita's children grew up, and most
of them began working as overseas guest
workers themselves. Via letters and, later,
Facebook and Skype, they watched their
own children grow up thousands of miles
away; eventually, most of their kids were
able to move from scrap-wood shanties to
cinder-block ones with toilets, and, finally,
to proper homes away from Leveriza.
The central protagonist of the book,
Tita's daughter Rosalie, got a nursing degree, one of the most valuable credentials in the Philippines, which intentionally trains hundreds of nurses annually
for export to wealthier, aging places that
need them. DeParle follows her stoic, determined ascent, which brings her to
hospitals in Saudi Arabia in 1996, Abu
Dhabi in 2004, and, in 2012, Galveston,
Texas, where her nurse's salary ultimately
allows her family-a husband and three
children-to reunite under their own
roof in a Galveston suburb.

t's the American Dream story, but with
all the warts. Rosalie and her kin struggle with their various foreign environments, native coworkers, and each other.
Multiyear separations take tolls on marriages, children, and grandparents. Unscrupulous creditors, agents, and employers add to the stress and even take the leg
of Rosalie's cousin, Manu, maimed in an
accident while working aboard a cruise
ship and left in precarious circumstances
by the liability limitations in his exploitative labor contract.
In Texas, DeParle must have reembedded with Rosalie's family for long
stretches; readers are afforded a revealing
fly-on-the-wall view of each family member's assimilation strategies and struggles
over the better part of a decade. Her three
kids have divergent personalities, from
earnest and studious to social and flighty,
and confront the challenges of adapting
to their new world-and life with previously half-known parents-in distinct
and often touching ways. Through DeParle's eyewitness account, as well as
through Facebook posts, diary entries,

and the contents of school essays, we
see many events unfold. Rosalie's family
opened up their world to DeParle, to readers' enormous benefit.
DeParle buttresses his narrative with
cogent summaries of the scholarly research on migration and its effects, including the great debate over whether
immigrants threaten U.S. jobs and wages. The consensus, he reports, is that they
may slightly depress low-skilled workers'
wages but help grow the economy overall, ensuring that farms, hotels, hospitals, and Silicon Valley companies have
the workers they need. In terms of fiscal
costs, the National Academy of Sciences
reckons that first-generation immigrants
represent a net gain in federal revenues-
they pay more taxes than they collect
in benefits-but a net cost on cities and
states, primarily for schooling. In the second generation, however, that investment
pays off for states as well, especially if the
kids go on to college. Rosalie arrived with
a college education, and DeParle estimates
that her family and their descendants will
provide federal, state, and municipal governments a $2.5 million boost over the
next seventy-five years.
The real political challenge, he writes,
is cultural, rather than economic-"the
fear that assimilation is failing (that
we're conforming to them)," and that
Skype and cheaper air travel have made
it too easy for migrants to live in two
worlds at once. If so, Rosalie's family provides a counterpoint. Despite keeping in
constant virtual contact with Tita, Emet,
and other family members back home,
Rosalie's teenagers are clearly Americans by the book's end, more comfortable speaking English than their native
Tagalog and seeing the Philippines-not
Texas-as exotic. Even Rosalie herself,
on a recent family visit to Manila, brightens as she returns to the airport. "I feel
like I'm going to my home," she says. "The
U.S. is my home."
Colin Woodard, a longtime foreign correspondent, is the author of five books, including
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival
Regional Cultures of North America and American Character: A History of the Epic Struggle Between Individual Liberty and the Common Good.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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