A WORLD AT WORK
It looks like an airport but without the luggage: in downtown Manila thousands of people, papers in hand, are moving around the lower floors of the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration, which monitors the deployment of workers around the world. Near the entrance, there’s a row of kiosks for Western Union and various cell phone providers. Some visitors are preparing to leave for the first time; others are home on vacation and have come to renew their papers before going back to work again. Many of the people who come through this office are highly educated, but a degree is no guarantee of a good job. According to a 2014 report jointly commissioned by the International Organization for Migration and the Philippine government, about a third of all overseas workers have at least some college education, but work outside their academic training, often as cleaners.
Across town at the office of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, an official in a polo shirt is telling about a hundred soon-to-be permanent residents of the United States how to get to their destination. When you leave, he says, you can only check two bags, no more than fifty pounds each. Some of the attendees’ teenage kids are in the next room, where a young woman adds notes to a whiteboard:
“Expectations: I will be happy
“Worries: It will be difficult to interact with other people there.
“Missed: family, friends.”
“In 2013 alone, roughly 1.5 million Philippine nationals — about 1.5 of every 100 of the country’s population— went to a foreign country to live or work.”
The number of people who cross a border or an ocean for a new life has increased dramatically in recent years. In 1970, 84.5 million people were living in a country other than the one where they were born. By 2013, that figure had tripled to 232 million — more than three percent of the global population. That same year, this shift in the global population sent home an estimated half-trillion US dollars in remittances. The money educates children, builds houses, and changes lives. Meanwhile, in the rich countries of North America, East Asia, and Europe, migrant workers are becoming an increasingly important part of society as the number of native-born youths joining the workforce falls short of the number of workers retiring.
But often countries that accept adult immigrants for their labor neglect those same adults’ children. Even in countries that depend on immigrant labor and have made it easy for foreign migrants to come and work lawfully, governments and employers will at times make it impossible for families to stay together.
One country that is especially familiar with these tradeoffs is the Philippines. Since the 1970s, the Philippines has embraced transnational migration as a means to its own national development. In 2013 alone, roughly 1.5 million Philippine nationals — about 1.5 of every 100 of the country’s population — went to a foreign country to live or work. Several government agencies exist to place workers overseas and ensure their safety in the workplace in more than 200 countries worldwide.
Jobs abroad promise more money than most Filipinos could ever make at home. But working abroad often splits families apart. That’s true even in one country desperately in need of immigrant labor: Finland.
HELSINKI
Janet Andog was working two jobs when the Finnish government denied her children’s visa because her income was too low. She cries as she recalls the story. It was 2011, and she had been living in Helsinki for three years. On a typical day, she would wake at six then work until the mid-afternoon. At eight in the evening, she’d leave for her second cleaning job, and work until one in the morning. She sent money to her family back in the Philippines whenever she could.
“Terrible, really, but I used to do this routine almost seven years, so not really,” she says. “Of course there are times when I’m really tired. But I got used to it.”
When she first arrived in Finland, Janet assumed she would return home in a few years. But when she saw the benefits of a life in the Nordic welfare state, she decided to bring her family to live with her. Then word came through one of her employers that Finland’s embassy in the Philippines was closing, part of a global shutdown as Nokia, Finland’s leading exporter around the world, teetered on collapse. If she didn’t act fast, her husband and two children would have to fly to Hong Kong just to file the paperwork.
Janet enlisted her children’s help to finish the visa application. When asked why they wanted to come, they said they wanted to see the snow. They finished in a week, and after nine months, the Finnish embassy told Janet her children’s visa had been approved. But just days later, the government corrected itself. The family’s application had been rejected. After taxes, her salary was a few hundred Euros short of the 29,160 Euro annual income required to sponsor a husband and two children. The government had sent her the wrong letter.
“We should see talent — future talent — in the children of a housekeeper… This managing of migration is the illusion that we can extract only the labor force and we can only take this person as a worker.”
A sparsely populated land of five and a half million overlapping the Arctic Circle, Finland is a wealthy nation but it’s aging fast and as its workforce retires, the country is relying more on foreign labor. In 2014, seventy-six percent of the country’s population growth came from net immigration, according to a preliminary analysis by Statistics Finland, the national statistics office. As birth rates among Finns stagnate, the trend is expected to continue.
Life can be hard for newcomers. Some foreign workers complain of overt racism and discrimination at their jobs. For immigrant children, rates of discrimination in schools are high, and performance rates are low. Only around three percent of native youths between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are not in school, training, or a job. Among youths who immigrated before age fifteen, more than ten percent have similarly dropped out of the system. The performance gap between native-born and immigrant youth is one of the widest of any developed country.
Even before adjusting to school, foreign workers in Finland often struggle to bring their children to the country. In 2011, when Janet first applied, the Finnish government required her to earn 10,800 Euros per year for herself and 7,560 more to sponsor her husband. Sponsoring each child required an additional 5,400 Euros. All these amounts are calculated after taxes, meaning a foreign worker had to earn an income greater than half the Finnish population to bring a spouse and two children to live with her. (Since 2013, the income required for sponsoring a family this size has increased more than two thousand Euros, to 31,200 after taxes.)
For the more than 2,000 Filipinos living in Finland, more than a third of whom work in unskilled professions like custodial work, the threshold is especially high. In 2011, the pay rate for immigrant office cleaners was, on average, just 10.03 Euros per hour. The resulting wage was seven percent lower than the usual rate for Finnish cleaners, according to Statistics Finland. For many, sleep becomes a luxury as they labor to meet required income levels to bring their children to the country. The year her application was rejected, Janet was working through a pregnancy despite fears that the stress would harm her child.
“It really destroys your focus on work,” Janet told us. “You really lose it, like if I was cleaning, vacuuming, I’d really start crying… I’d send money, get my salary, send money again. I could only see my children on the computer, asking me when I’m coming home. That’s how it was.”
That such a high bar exists for allowing an immigrant mother to raise her children in her adopted country is a symptom of a country which compartmentalizes newcomers says Lena Näre, a sociologist at Helsinki University. In the eyes of the government, a migrant can be a worker or a parent, a contributor to the system or a burden on its services, but not both. She says it’s not uncommon for Filipino practical nurses and cleaners to work two jobs and sleep two hours per night to earn the income required to sponsor their families. “This nationalist system is too strict in perceiving people through their categories of entry — whether they are refugees, whether they are students, whether they are labor migrants, whether they are au pairs, or whether they are highly talented skilled laborers,” Näre says. “We should see talent — future talent — in the children of a housekeeper… This managing of migration is the illusion that we can extract only the labor force and we can only take this person as a worker.”
Finland is hardly alone in spinning illusions about managing migration. Despite the need for more workers around the world, countries typically treat immigrants as commodities whose inflows are to be managed and controlled like any other import. In Ireland, immigration officers are expected to deny entry to families who might present “substantial liabilities” to state services. In the United States, the government has detained children and mothers who have fled violence in Central America for months in harsh conditions before deporting them, merely to dissuade aspiring migrants from following them. The rhetoric can be equally disturbing. In Japan, an ex-adviser to prime minister Shinzo Abe conceded the country needed migrant workers to overcome a declining birthrate, but proposed modeling a system after South African Apartheid to keep them outside mainstream society.
While marginalizing immigrants may be politically expedient, it’s also short-sighted. In countries lacking people to fill future jobs, any children are important. Relegating some to the margins because they threaten to change society ignores the fact that social change will be necessary for these countries to weather the coming decades.
In spite of everything, Janet says her struggle was worth the cost. After her family’s first application was rejected, she visited her family in the Philippines and became pregnant with a third child. Back in Finland, she gave birth, driving the income needed to sponsor her family even higher. Unable to meet the threshold alone, Janet brought her husband, Danilo, to live with her. While her two oldest children lived with Janet’s parents in the Philippines, Danilo worked as a cleaner under her sponsorship. With a higher household income, Janet applied to sponsor her children again and finally, in 2014, she succeeded. Now in Finland, her kids live in a safe neighborhood and can go to school and see a doctor for free. Janet still sends money to her brother, a college student in Manila, but she will never have to save for her children’s education: they can all go to college and even get Ph.D.’s for free.
ROME
1,800 miles south of Helsinki, in Rome, Italian families and Filipino migrants have been bound together for decades. The change began in the 1970s when Italian women began leaving their homes in droves to take “real” jobs in offices. With more money in their households but no one to watch the kids, clean the houses, and make dinner, opportunities for work took shape just as the Philippine government began urging its citizens to find jobs abroad. In 1977, Italy struck a deal with the Philippine government to allow a certain number of Filipinos to work in Italy — but only within certain professions, like domestic work. The two countries have renewed the agreement regularly ever since. “From that law, we are bound to enter in a discriminated way,” says Romulo Salvador, a Filipino community leader who once represented Asian immigrants in the Roman government.
Outside the channels created through Italy’s immigrant labor quotas, Filipinos and other migrants can come on a tourist visa, find a job, and extend their stay with an employer’s sponsorship. In 2012, more than 83 thousand temporary migrants from the Philippines lived in Italy, according to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, the largest such population in Europe, and one of the largest in the world. With nearly 24 thousand Filipino child immigrants — born to both permanent and temporary migrants — Italy is also the third-largest destination for Filipino children in the world.
But these statistics mask a peculiar reality: many of the children counted as immigrants were born in Italy, sent to the Philippines to be raised, and then escorted back to Italy to live with their parents after years of separation. That so many children spend their childhoods separated from their parents is not incidental. It’s rooted in their parents’ working lives.
"Life is difficult, Navie says, “but it goes on anyway.”
When Ronavie Alota was born in Rome seventeen years ago, her mother, Rowena, a Filipina migrant and domestic worker, didn’t have many options for taking care of her. Navie needed someone to look after her, but Rowena couldn’t take time off work. The only option, she felt, was to send her child to the Philippines to be raised.
Rowena’s mother, Manuela, wasn’t happy to learn her daughter had had a child in Italy. But Rowena’s news came with an offer: take care of Navie and I’ll support you and pay for her upbringing. Manuela agreed, so when Navie was four months old, Rowena took her first to Manila, then south to Manuela’s home on the east coast of the island of Samar. There, Rowena left Navie to live with her grandmother.
Raising Navie wasn’t easy. Often in the middle of the night, she would get sick and Manuela would wait by the side of the road for a ride to the nearest town to buy medicine. But every time, Navie got better. Through elementary school, she was an honors student. She had friends. She called her grandparents her mother and father. Then when she was ten years old, Navie’s aunt escorted her to Rome and introduced her to Rowena at the airport. Navie didn’t recognize her mother, who was crying as she greeted her. Confused, Navie started crying as well. Soon after, she went home with the stranger, her mother.
Around the graffitied storefronts and littered streets of Palazzi Vittorio, a Sino-Bangladeshi business district where Rome’s young Filipinos often congregate, Navie’s story of transnational childhood is typical. In Italy, Filipina women dust, vacuum, wash the dishes, and supervise their employers’ children. Filipina women are so commonly associated with the cleaning profession that the word “Filipina” is a generic term for a household cleaner, regardless of race or nationality. Yet despite filling an essential role in the homes where they work, Filipina domestic workers can be replaced, and the threat of losing a job hangs over much of their lives.
Many Filipinos in Italy begin at a disadvantage. According to Sabrina Marchetti, an Italian expert in domestic work, Filipino immigrants will often go into debt just to make the trip. Desperate to pay their bills, they take the first job they can get, which is typically domestic work. Once they have a job, keeping it is essential, and not just for the money. Under Italian law, employers are solely allowed to sponsor migrant workers. Lose your job and you don’t just forfeit your next paycheck: you risk losing your place in Italy.
This fact alone typically puts domestic workers at the mercy of their employers, but it’s not the only way that domestic workers depend on them. Marchetti says the best employers will often help their workers find a doctor, pay for medical care, and fill out paperwork in Italian. The more essential the favor, the more critical it becomes for a migrant worker to keep her job. Marchetti says employers, aware of the imbalance of power, will often exploit it by asking their workers to return their favors by cleaning the house on their day off, or for free, knowing their workers can’t say no.
A newborn child only complicates this relationship. While Italian law requires employers to provide maternity leave, domestic workers are specifically exempted, since the government prioritizes caring for Italian children over domestic workers’. If looking after a newborn child threatens to interfere with a worker’s schedule, employers can and sometimes will fire her for missing a day.
“They would give you an ultimatum,” explains Judy Roncesvalles, a Filipino counselor at the school Navie once attended. “‘If you cannot come to work regularly, you better find another job.’”
Unable to watch their kids without risking a day of work — and with it, their jobs and their place in the country — Filipino parents often choose to send their children home to live with relatives. Then, after some years, when the kids are old enough to look after themselves, parents like Rowena will call their children back to Italy, sponsoring them through a family reunification visa. To sponsor four family members, a permit-holding migrant needs only to prove an income of 17,492 Euros, a low burden compared to Finland. The returned children are so numerous, Italy’s Filipinos have a term for them: “petition babies.”
It’s not hard to see the nationalism lining Italy’s approach to managing inflows of foreign workers. Like in Finland, Italy welcomes labor migrants for their labor only. But in denying these parents the same control over their family life that Italian citizens enjoy, many new parents can’t care for their children at all. While there are no laws forcing migrant workers to send their children to the far side of the world to live with relatives, parents have so little power over their family life that they are often forced to do this anyway. The result is a generation of distraught and disconnected Filipino youth who live in Italy without being a part of it. Like Navie, many gravitate to the comforts of other Filipinos their age.
When Navie came back to Rome, she studied hard and picked up Italian quickly. (She still talks in a mix of Italian and Tagalog when expressing more complicated emotions.) But with her mother having never learned more than the basics of the language, Navie had to translate for her, especially during tense conversations like negotiations over rent. In her first few years in Italy, Navie endured some additional shocks. Her great grandfather, who had helped to raise her in the Philippines, died. Rowena became pregnant again, and lied about it, claiming she was just gaining weight. Navie stayed out with friends late drinking and eventually quit school. Now a reserved seventeen-year-old with bangs that sometimes cover her eyes, she remains legally under her mother’s protection, but they feud constantly.
These days, Navie’s daily routine looks like a prelude to her adult life. Every morning, she takes her four-year-old brother to school, a trip that requires two busses and a tram. Then she follows the same route backwards to home, where she cleans the house and cooks so her mother won’t have to. Until recently, she would spend the afternoons around Piazza Vittorio, drinking and smoking cigarettes with other Filipinos her age. Now she mostly plays basketball with her boyfriend at the school she used to attend instead.
In a few months, Navie will be eighteen and legally independent. Had she lived in Italy her entire life, she would then be eligible for Italian citizenship, but having spent such a long period outside the country, she’ll have to wait years longer. To lawfully stay in Italy, she’ll have to find a job, and without a diploma, she’s likely destined to follow her mother’s line of work. Life is difficult, she says, “but it goes on anyway.”
ALAMINOS
It’s not just the children who join their parents abroad whose lives are upturned by the global labor exchange. In the Santa Rosa ward of the town of Alaminos, ninety minutes south of Manila, we met an eighteen-year-old with a Mohawk named Jerrik whose parents were working in Barcelona. When he was still in his early teens, Jerrik had gone to live with them. But Jerrik proved either unable or unwilling to learn Spanish or fit into the country. After two years, his parents sent him home. Since returning to Alaminos, he’s been unemployed, passing time at the mall and drinking away the money his parents send him.
“My parents, that’s why they went to Barcelona, to give us a good life,” Jerrik says. “And me, I didn’t even finish school because I got lazy. I wanted to just hang out all the time... Well, there’s no diploma, ‘cause I didn’t finish, so I can’t get a decent job.”
In the town of Alaminos, in the Philippines, about 2,000 adults from 5,000 families live abroad.
Lito Santos, a local councilmember here, says about half the youths in Santa Rosa whose parents live abroad squander their parents’ remittances in similar ways. Dishonesty is prevalent on both sides. Parents mislead their children into believing they have great jobs, when in fact they are domestic workers. Kids lie to their parents about doing well in school even as they turn to drugs and alcohol and end up in jail.
Santos lays some of the blame on the parents for leaving, but he concedes that there’s no way the town could survive without their remittances. Insects have destroyed their coconut crops so they have to work overseas. Currently, he says, about 2,000 adults from the town’s 5,000 families live abroad, mostly in Europe. Ideally, he says, one parent would leave while the other stayed behind.
For every Jerrik in Santa Rosa, there’s a boy like Alexis, age sixteen, or a girl like his seventeen-year-old sister, Sairah, whose parents live in Perugia, Italy. Sairah says she misses her parents terribly, but both siblings talk with them frequently. Alexis is saving the money their parents send to go to college. Sairah is planning to join her parents soon and look for work as a domestic worker.
Adjacent to their home in Santa Rosa, Alexis and Sairah’s aunt, Marilyn, is building the house she will retire in. The ceilings are high, with a living room large enough to fit most houses on the block. Alexis says his aunt wanted it big so she could host the entire family when they are together again. The entire structure is made from concrete. Even the dining room table is a solid gray mass fused to the floor, a concrete anchor for a family stretched across two continents. In the master bathroom, one of the house’s only finished rooms, there’s a toilet and bidet imported from Italy.
COUNTING THE COST
For migrants and their families, it can be hard to weigh the gains of entering the global labor trade against its social and economic costs. The Philippines tracks the number of people who go abroad for work with an unusual degree of accuracy, but how often the emotional pains of those departures outweighs the benefits is harder to assess. While there are estimates available for how many dollars migrants send home, the benefits of those contributions are harder to measure. Some families depend on remittances to survive. Some receive too little to make a difference.
Even for one migrant who chose to leave more than twenty years ago, the question of worth is an open one. “Who is to blame for the world we live in?” asked Aida Bocar, a domestic worker and mother we met in Rome. “For Filipino society that lets us go without being prepared...? The parents that force us because they say there is opportunity outside the Philippines? Now that I’m coming to this age of understanding it all, I can say that if we had been satisfied with the simple life we had, these torments never would have happened. We were just poor and that’s it.”
Every year tens of thousands of Filipinos choose to go where the money is, or where they expect it to be — a small sliver of the millions who leave their country of birth to make money abroad. Many suffer and many go knowing they will suffer, but it’s likely that millions more would join them if they had the means. In rich countries from Canada to Singapore, their labor is needed. Perhaps the question is not whether the exchange is worth it for participants. That people leave may be inevitable, but, if it is, what can the countries for which these migrants leave do to embrace them, not just as workers, but as parents and individuals? How can governments construct policies which accept children of those migrants not as a burden, but as the future of society?
In rich countries, this question is washed out by a storm of rhetoric around the role of foreign workers. Yet whether migrant workers’ children live in their parents’ home country or in their adopted one, the burdens of the global labor trade are never felt by the worker alone. When migrants are accepted for their labor alone, families and children suffer. For countries with low and declining birthrates, embracing foreign workers without embracing the children they bring with them is not just a morally questionable approach to immigration. It also squanders the potential for those children to contribute themselves. Voters in the rich world may think immigrants should be grateful for being allowed in their countries, however precarious and marginal their place. Many are, but does that mean the system is fair, or wise?
“That’s just the way it is with poor people. We have to separate to make a living.”
During Holy Week in a village on the eastern coast of the Philippine island of Samar, a few minutes walk from the ocean, below a few rows of deep green hills, we met Navie’s family, the family Navie’s mother and Navie herself had left for a life in Italy. Apart from a few scattered houses, buildings are scarce. The people here live in the beauty of nature, and at its mercy. For money, Navie’s family picks the fruit off a grove of coconuts an hour away by foot, but those trees were mostly torn from the ground two years ago by typhoon Haiyan. The family also keeps a rice paddy, and sells snacks and cigarettes out of their house. There is a little food, a little money, but rarely enough of either.
On the second day of our visit, Manuela and some other women take bait and bamboo rods to the shoreline. The youngest kids swim nearby, while the older boys plumb the waters for fish. After an hour or so, Manuela shows her catch: enough small fish to fill two hands.
Manuela says she wants Ronavie to come back, but even if she came, she’s not sure what she would do. There are no jobs in this province, but at least the children go to school.
“It’s really hard, but it doesn’t matter,” she says. “That’s just the way it is with poor people. We have to separate to make a living.”
In the past, Rowena’s money could help the family get by, but their daughter sends less than she used to. A few years ago, she would send 500 Euros every month. In December, she sent half that much, and the Euro’s value is falling. Recently, Rowena asked them to stop calling to save money.
…
On another day in Manila, on a lawn at the University of the East, we speak with Janet’s eighteen-year-old brother, John Kenneth, who is about to take a test. He’s studying to be a civil engineer. After he graduates, he’d like to go abroad. His siblings have worked so hard to help him, and they still have a younger brother to put through school. “I’ll be the one who is going to take their place,” he says.
What do you buy with the money your family abroad sends you? We ask.
“It pays for what I’m studying in school. At home, it pays the rent for our house.” For a moment, he turns away, tears falling over the sides of his face. “They’re the ones who sustain our everyday needs. They’re the ones who support us so that we can reach our dreams.”