University Place

One Family and Migration in the 21st Century

– Hi, everybody, thank you for coming. It’s my great pleasure today to welcome Jason DeParle to Madison and to this group. He’s here at least indirectly because of me. I got an email from Jason in 2015. He’d found my name on a chapter in an obscure book and had questions about the Philippine economy, and he sent me an e-mail. Maybe it’s just my e-mail was more accessible than others, I’m not sure, but anyway. We got talking, it was fun. I learned a great deal about this project a long time ago, and I’m super happy to see it come to fruition. It’s just wonderful. You’ve all seen the flyer and had the opportunity to read Jason’s bio, so I won’t reread that for you.

What I will do since I’m an economist, is I’ll say a little bit about the context of this book. This book, as you already know, is based on three decades of Jason’s interactions with a single Filipino family. The Philippines is a country which is not unique, but kind of special within the developing world. Within Asia, it’s very special for a couple of features. One is very high inequality. Philippine inequality is more like Brazilian inequality than Korean inequality, and very low growth. Long-run average economic growth per capita. About 1/3 of the East Asia Pacific average. So very, very low by regional standards. Unusually high population growth, long-run average population growth around about 2% per year.

So when Jason began his fieldwork in 1987, the population of the Philippines was 57 million people. It’s now 107 million people. So it’s doubled in about 30 years, which is what the 2 to 2. 5% growth rate will do. That’s quite a bit faster than the growth of world population, just to put that in context. All of that plus low and kind of sporadic interactions with the global economy. So the Philippines has always been ambivalent about trade, ambivalent about investment from abroad, and as a consequence, has experienced much lower growth and lower global integration through trade than most other countries. And you put all of that together, and you add in that they don’t have significant natural resource wealth stocks to draw down, like some of the neighboring countries, and you put all of that together with a pretty persistent policy bias against tradable sectors in general and agriculture in particular, and you end up with a country which has low economic growth, high population growth, high and persistent poverty, and a lot of people migrating from the countryside to the city, where they live in squatter settlements and slums of the kind that we’re gonna hear about today. So this is a story which is kind of a microcosm of a very big macro story that applies in the Philippines and indeed in other countries as well, but especially in the Philippines. So when you have those conditions, what do you do to make money? Well, of course, one of the obvious things that you do, especially if you have English language capability as well, is you export your labor.

And we know that the Philippines’ export of labor, particularly from its urban squatter settlements and slums, has been a very big source of income. It’s now about 10% of GDP. When Jason began his work, it was about 3% of GDP, remittances from Filipinos working abroad and living abroad back to the country. So this is a very big source of export earnings. And of course, it’s a very big employer for Filipinos as well. It’s a very big part of the of the Philippine labor force. The stock of Filipinos working abroad is about 10 million. The annual flow is about one million. So that’s really big by global standards. So this is a story about a Philippine family, which is in some really important respects and everyman family as synecdoche for something much bigger that’s taking place and unfolding in the Philippines over the several generations of Jason’s exposure to it.

Now as an economist, I can see the decision to reallocate family labor to working abroad and ultimately living abroad in terms of benefits and costs. That’s our job, that’s what we do, and as a response to the kind of policy failures that delivered low economic growth and low employment growth at home, making it both necessary and possible for workers to move abroad. A novelist, and there are lots of them, covers the same kind of subject matter with empathy, maybe more empathy than an economist, I don’t know. And certainly more melodrama than an economist. And if you haven’t read it already, then Amitav Ghosh’s recent book, Gun Island, which deals in part with Bangladeshi illegal workers in Italy, is a really fantastic example of this genre. Really nice book. Anyway, so we’ve got economists writing technical stuff, we’ve got novelists writing fabulous stuff. And somewhere in between, somewhere in that middle space in between, we have long-form journalism. It occupies a very, I think, a very special middle ground of nonfiction, written, as it were, in full color. And Jason is really an outstanding practitioner of this art.

I really love reading his work. And that comes from, I think, just a really unique combination of talent for observation, for analysis, and for writing. But also and most importantly of all, an incredible commitment to his subject matter. After all, who spends 30 years researching any story, that’s just astonishing. So without further ado, let’s hear about the product of that 30-year investment. Thank you very much, Jason. I forgot one very important thing. As of this morning, the book that we see here and that we’re about to hear about is on the Washington Post’s Top 10 List for 2019. Congratulations! [audience applauding]

– Well, you can now see why, when I look back in my notes, there’s one from July 27, 2015, it said, “Wow, I met the most interesting “University of Wisconsin professor. ” I had an obscure question that I needed to figure out which was, I had a character who was born in the island of Leyte in the Philippines in 1944.

And I was trying to understand what the economy was like in Leyte in 1944. There just aren’t a lot of people you can turn around and ask that question to. It wasn’t obvious where I’d find that answer. I found Ian, and at the end of that conversation, I not only knew a lot more about the island of Leyte, I knew I wanted to know even more. He came to Washington and we had a second conversation. It struck me just what a marvelous thing a university is, that it can produce people with that kind of specialized knowledge and how grateful I am as a journalist for these factories of knowledge like the University of Wisconsin. So thank you, Ian and thank you to the university. 30 years ago, I was a young reporter living in Manila with an interest in shantytowns, the scrap wood mazes that cover the city and much of the developing world. I called the country’s most famous nun, who lived and worked in a shantytown called Leveriza. I didn’t say so, but I was hoping to move in.

Sister Christine Tan was a friend of the new president, Cory Aquino, and busy on a commission drafting a new constitution. She didn’t seem very excited to get my call. “Call me back in a few months,” she snapped. Hoping for a quicker audience, I told her that I’d been working with another nun in her order. And I discovered they weren’t friends. “That’s a mistake,” she said. “Meet me tomorrow morning in front of the Manila Zoo. ” I showed up. “Are you CIA?” she said when I arrived. “Well, you wouldn’t tell me if you were, would you?” She let me know that living with a Leveriza family wouldn’t work.

She said the poor are magnificent people, unlike the rich, but Americans need toilets, and most homes in Leveriza lack them. A family would feel the need to cook me special food; I’d be a burden. Sister Christine talked on, denouncing the American military bases, American corporations, and then she waved a hand above her head and said, “That’s all up here,” meaning politics. She said, “Somehow we need to build better bonds “between the first and the third worlds. ” If I returned in a few days, she’d see what she could do. I came back thinking she’d used the time between our visits to approach a family or two. And instead she led me into the shantytown and auctioned me off on the spot. I knew just enough Tagalog to know the first woman she asked was horrified. So was the second. The third, Tita Comodas, was simply struck mute.

With her thin patience exhausted, Sister Christine stalked away. “If you don’t want him, pass him on to someone else,” she said, “And don’t cook him anything special. “If he gets sick, too bad. ” So I’m standing there with a poor woman named Tita. I don’t know who was more frightened, Tita or me. We drew a crowd. Not a lot of other distractions in the shantytown. “Ask him if he eats rice,” someone shouted. “Ask him if he wants to marry a Filipina. ” [audience chuckling] Tita stalled for as long as she could.

And she gave into what she took to be Sister Christine’s request, and offered me a spot on her floor. I went to the Philippines interested in slum life, not migration, but migration was how the family survived. Tita’s husband, Emet, was 5,000 miles away, cleaning pools in Saudi Arabia while Tita was home raising their five kids on the money he sent back. What started as his act of desperation became their way of life. All five kids grew up to become overseas workers like their father, and they’re part of a large extended family spread out across the globe. Tita’s one of 11 siblings, nine in that generation went abroad, and if you can imagine like a family tree with a second generation of 45 cousins, I think 25 of those have been abroad. So just about everything that could happen to a migrant, good or bad, has happened to one of them. The book takes its name from Tita’s sister, Peachie, who was living in a straw hut and watching her siblings return from their overseas jobs to build cement block homes. She was envious and turned to her husband, and urged him to find overseas work too, with a phrase that became the family motto: “A good provider is one who leaves. ” The member of the family I came to know best was Tita’s daughter, Rosalie.

She used her father’s remittances to make the long leap from the slums to nursing school, and spent nearly two decades working in the Persian Gulf, mostly Abu Dhabi, all the while hoping to get to the States. She was just about to give up hope when a hurricane slammed into Galveston, Texas with Katrina-like consequences. A sixth of the island never returned. Unable to lure enough nurses back to rebuild the hospital, the medical center finally recruited abroad, hiring 24 nurses to open a new ward. Rosalie finally had her chance. She arrived in the summer of 2012, and her husband Chris and their three children soon followed. Their period of adjustment coincided with the rise of Donald Trump and a surge of conservative populism that regards assimilation as a failure and immigrants as a threat; a threat to jobs, culture, safety, fiscal health, national security. Rosalie’s story offers a retort. With a house in the suburbs and kids on the honor roll, she achieved in three years a degree of assimilation that used to take three generations. And she did so, moreover, in Metro Houston, a hub of pro-immigrant sentiment deep in red state America.

I take that as a hint that immigration is less divisive in daily life, at just the lived, normal level than it is in national politics. If all you knew about immigration was national politics, you would imagine a tableau of conflict much different from what you would see in Houston. In a country of 44 million immigrants, no family stands for the whole. The Villanuevas merely stand for the part missing from the Trump Twitter feed. Rosalie’s story also happens to be the greatest anti-poverty success story I know. It begins in the early 1950s on the island of Leyte, when a young boy was smuggled across the crowded ferry for an overnight trip to Manila. Rosalie’s father, Emet, was recently orphaned and a distant relative visiting the province had agreed to take him home. Home was Leveriza, a squalid mudflat, ruled by warring gangs where sanitation consisted of quote, “flying saucers,” bundles of waste wrapped in newspaper and flung into the surrounding canals. Leveriza was grim, but Emet liked the tumult of city life. He liked the garish jeepneys, the babble of dialects, the men throwing dice in the alleys.

He wore his geniality as a shield and was quick to make friends. Drawn to commerce more than to school, Emet spent his youth in traffic, hawking newspapers and cigarettes. And then in his early 20s, he landed his first real job, cleaning a government pool. He was walking home with his first paycheck when the love story starts. He spied a beautiful young woman in the alley, ironing clothes. This was Tita, and Tita had no interest. She considered Emet plain looking and quote, “poorer than a rat. ” But his persistence carried the day. They married in 1967, and five children followed in alliterative step. This will make sense to you, I think, only if you’re Filipino.

Their names are Rolando, Rowena, Rosalie, Roldon, and Roselier. [all chuckling] So as an author, I have a character named Rosalie and I have a character named Rosalier, her brother, yeah. Rowena, Rosalie’s older sister, was born with a heart defect that left her perpetually weak and in need of medicine that Emet couldn’t afford. Emet is a very religious man. After years of fretting over her frail health, he dropped to his knees and he asked God to make a decision. “Take her or let me have her,” so cure her, take her up to be with you in heaven, Lord or let me have her. And God answered in a mysterious way. Soon after, Emet got an offer to work in Saudi Arabia. He’d be away from his family for two years in an Islamic autocracy, where stories of abused workers are rife. But he’d earn 10 times his Manila pay for doing the exact same work.

He accepted on the spot; took him two weeks to get up the courage to tell Tita. By the time I arrived seven years later, Emet was on his third contract. Rowena had her medicine, and the house was one of the few in Leveriza with a toilet, which I came to understand was one of the reasons why Sister Christine had steered me there. So I moved into the shantytown. This was a big thing for me; I’d found my place among the poor, but I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them. They weren’t quite sure what to with me. I had asked Sister Christine for a job, but she told me my instruction should come from the people. Language gaps and excessive politeness kept Tita and me strangers for a few days. And then she enlisted my help with a gluing project, turning newspapers into paper bags to sell rice. I botched the job so badly she laughed and threatened to mark them “Made in USA.” [audience laughing]

I think my incompetence put her at ease; her sense of humor certainly put me at ease. Half of Tita’s life revolved around drudgery. I’d be on my floor mat before dawn, listening to her boil the breakfast rice. I’d be back there again at midnight listening to her wrestle the laundry. But she had this whole other life going on, this other life revolved around slum solidarity. As a member of Sister Christine’s uplift group, Tita was deeply involved in a program of Bible studies and livelihood projects. An offshoot of liberation theology, that was essentially meant to answer the question, “What would Jesus do if Jesus were a slum dweller?” As manager of the co-op store, Tita was responsible for distributing 2,000 eggs a week, which she stacked under a fluorescent light in the kitchen to keep away the rats. Between chores, Tita told me she’d been asking God a question. “Why, if you love your son, are so many Filipinos poor?” And this is the central question of faith. Why does an omnipotent God allow suffering, allow evil? And it’s one with a special meaning in a place which suffers as much as Leveriza.

But it wasn’t a question I expected a besieged woman with a sixth grade education to be able to so readily articulate. I asked Tita what God had answered and she laughed. “Not yet,” she said, as if mocking her own presumptuous attempts to fortify her faith. I’m not sure what I expected to find in the Manila slums, but it wasn’t a woman in a worn house dress trying live out the gospel beneath a tower of eggs. Rosalie, her daughter, was Tita’s main helper. A shy, dutiful girl who always got cast as the nun in the school group plays. If you were gonna pick a girl with the drive to escape Leveriza, you wouldn’t have picked Rosalie. Others seemed stronger, they were more outgoing, they had better academics, better grades. The Bs she made in high school, Bs and Cs really, showed no special academic promise. But the most telling line on Rosalie’s transcript wasn’t her grades.

For four years of poverty and literal revolution in the Philippines, Rosalie never missed a day. “About high school’s where I got grit,” she later told me. The surest way for a Filipino woman to advance was to become a nurse. The U. S. had established the country’s first nursing schools during the colonial occupation. Filipinos trained in English on an American curriculum, and over the decades, thousands had migrated to the United States. I attended a nursing school graduation a few years ago and asked the dean what share of the students were, had gone to nursing school in order to migrate to the States, and she said 100%. Nursing school was a leap for a girl from the slums. She would never have been able to do it without Emet’s remittances.

It was a leap in both financial and academic terms, but it’s one Rosalie managed to make, if just barely. Then an uncle returned from Saudi Arabia and said a hospital near Mecca was hiring. On her second contract in Saudi Arabia, Rosalie met her husband Chris, a Filipino man working in a Jetta factory. They had to court secretly to avoid the religious police, and they came home and got married in the Philippines. So at this point in the story, the family logistics get a little complicated. They have a daughter in the Philippines, Rosalie goes to Abu Dhabi, they have two more children, the kids come home to stay with the parents. Tita and Emet have moved back to the family farm from the slums. So Rosalie and her husband Chris are living in Abu Dhabi. The kids are back mostly with the parents in the Philippines. This is supposed to be a very short-term arrangement until Rosalie gets a visa in the States.

And it lasted for eight years. Rosalie and I kept in touch, but we didn’t see each other for two decades. Then I went back to write a story about the family for The New York Times Magazine. The light bulb moment for me in understanding the importance of migration, was learning that remittances, the sums that migrants sent home, are more than three times the world’s foreign aid budgets combined. Migration is the world’s largest anti-poverty program. If you think that poor people should do more to help themselves, migrants do. No country does more to promote migration than the Philippines, where the government trains and markets overseas workers and presidents celebrate them as heroes. Migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit, the civil religion. The paper sent me to explore migration’s effect on Philippine culture, and I worried that the story might be too subtle for an outsider to grasp. I don’t speak Tagalog, I hadn’t been living in the Philippines, and could I really describe migration’s effect on Philippine culture? Then I landed, from the airport I was driving to the hotel and went past the Philippine Central Bank, which had the year’s remittance tally strung up in Christmas lights 10 stories high.

So whatever else the story was, it wasn’t subtle. While I was in the Philippines, the president, President Arroyo, went to the Philippines to do her annual greeting of the Filipino workers coming home. They literally roll out a red carpet and she stands at the end to give them cookies as their, welcome the people who are sending their remittances back home. On the way to the ceremony, I managed to jam in an elevator beside her, and I asked why she called the Filipino overseas workers heroes. She’s about this tall and she has a PhD, she’s both a politician, but she’s also an economist. She has a PhD in economics from Georgetown. And she looked at me like I was a total dunce and she said, “They send home a billion dollars a month, “that’s why I call them heroes. ” Now it’s $2 billion, more than $2 billion a month. A quarter billion migrants have spread out across the globe. They support a population back home as big if not bigger.

But what characterizes modern migration isn’t just its size, it’s its ubiquity. Ireland has its first African-born mayor, Mongolians do scut work in Prague. There are Miss Israels who were born in Ethiopia. Every country’s story differs, but the underlying forces are generally the same. Rich aging countries need workers, workers in poor countries need jobs. As Ian said, the population in the Philippines has doubled just in the time I’ve been following the family. There just aren’t enough, too many workers, not enough jobs. Cheap travel speeds the migrants’ way and instant communication spreads word that opportunity awaits. War and persecution are another factor that push the number of displaced persons to record highs. I was captured by the global sweep of Rosalie’s story and wanted to expand it into a book, but I hesitated for several years because in narrative terms, I faced a problem.

It was a story basically about Filipinos in the Persian Gulf, and would seem extremely esoteric to an American audience. I finally decided I was taken enough with Rosalie and the family story that I would write it anyways. And then a month after I committed to the project, the narrative gods smiled: Rosalie got a job in Texas. Shortened my commute and made the story a lot more relevant for an American audience. I met Rosalie in Manila, we flew to Galveston, and things got off to a rocky start. She’d spent 20 years wanting to come to America. She had it up on a pedestal, and she was in a working class, blue collar town on the Texas Gulf Coast. She came expecting Disney World and was surrounded by a vista of vacant lots. The cost of living was higher than she expected, and American English was hard to understand. When we got to Galveston, the restaurant– The apartment manager suggested we grab lunch at a little hole in the wall.

And Rosalie looked at me very alarmed and leaned over and said, “How are we gonna eat in the hole in the wall?” [all chuckling] The hole in the wall served po’ boys. Rosalie wanted to know why it didn’t serve poor girls. World travelers aren’t always worldly. Rosalie had worked abroad for nearly two decades, but she’d always lived in a cocoon of Filipinos. There’s so many Filipinos in Abu Dhabi, they do Mass in Tagalog, and she gets to– We’re driving and she’s in Texas, and there’s a sign that said bakery in Spanish, and she thought it was a Filipino bakery. Homesick, she retreated into the familiar. There’s 7,641 islands in the Philippines. I came to think of Rosalie’s apartment as the 7,642nd, with purple yam in the refrigerator, Tagalog soap operas on TV. She kept a Skype open connection all day long so you could sit in her apartment and listen to the roosters crow 13 time zones away. The first place that Rosalie felt comfortable was in the hospital, not because the work there was easy, but because she felt equal to its difficulties.

Work for her became a vehicle of assimilation. I think there’s a broader point there if you think about why, in general, the United States has had a more successful record of integrating your immigrants than say Europe. One reason is the immigrants have higher employment rates. Work is a way of getting to know a new culture, meeting people, moving into the mainstream. One thing to notice about Rosalie’s work is that she didn’t take an American job. She filled a job that the hospital had been trying for years to fill, and in doing so, she improved the community’s health care. The hospital was so desperate to try to attract workers back onto the island, they were offering $5,000 bonuses and they were still couldn’t keep or attract the American workers because the nursing market in Houston was so hot, and Houston’s 45 minutes away. The workers would leave and go there. Another thing to note is that Rosalie’s a really good nurse. I suspected as much, but it was wonderful to see it.

The hospital gave me a pair of scrubs and permission to follow her around the ward pretty much as much as I wanted. My wife is a health policy official, and she described me as a walking HIPAA violation, [audience laughing] which I’m afraid I was. But then I got a number of great comments about Rosalie’s care inside the hospital. But the most telling testimonial came in a Walmart produce aisle. Rosalie was grocery shopping when a former patient rushed up and grabbed her and said, “Remember me?” It was obvious from Rosalie’s blank look that she didn’t, and the woman said, “Bad GI bleed, bad GI bleed. ” And Rosalie goes like this, “Room 13. ” It’d been like six months, Rosalie remembered her. The woman had no idea who I was, but she turned to me and she gushed, she said, “You can just tell she loves to take care of people, “wasn’t like ‘this is just my job. ‘” So obviously she didn’t know she was saying that to a reporter, which gives her comments even more credibility, but I heard that a lot inside the hospital. One patient recalled waking up from surgery and looking at Rosalie’s face.

“I just remember thinking, she’s got the kindest eyes,” the woman said. Another said, “It’s just like she feels your pain. ” Given all the talk of immigrants taking jobs, I wondered if her patients would harbor any resentments about that. I made a point of asking in private; not one did, or at least not one told me they did. They had noticed her care, not her ethnicity. If anyone were to resent her, I thought it might be an elderly African-American woman I met one night, who told me that she’d always wanted to be a nurse herself, but had never gotten beyond minimum wage work as a nursing assistant. This woman had a story kind of out of Zora Neale Hurston. She was 80 years old, she had been raised as a Louisiana sharecropper. She had chopped cotton behind mules, she’d been beaten senseless by an abusive husband. And she’d always wanted to be what Rosalie had become, but hadn’t made it.

So how did she feel about foreigners getting the job she wanted? I asked, was she resentful? Though she was black and Rosalie was Filipino, she said she considered themselves part of the same clan. The tribe of low-born strivers. “I admire everybody and anybody who tries to get up “just a little bit higher,” she said. “Don’t stop, keep going. ” So a really nice moment of, an unexpected moment of class solidarity across ethnic lines. Six months after Rosalie arrived, the family followed. Kristine was nine, Lara was seven, and Dominique was six. This was an interesting family reunion because they weren’t just learning to live together in a new country, they had to learn to live together period. They’d been separated for most of their lives. The kids assimilated rapidly, but in surprising and contrasting ways.

Kristine, the eldest, adopted the popularity-seeking ways of middle school girls, snapping selfies by the thousands and posting them on Instagram accounts with names like Kristine Cute and Selfie Queen. [chuckling] I don’t know if this is a reference appropriate for this audience. I don’t how many of you watch The Suite Life of Zack and Cody. You’re probably either too old or too young, but if you have children who might have been drawn to this show, it’s a sitcom for middle schoolers. One of the characters is named London Tipton, was kind of a knockoff on Paris Hilton. That was Kristine’s idea of how to be an American, to be a kind of ditzy diva who shopped a lot and posted a lot of Instagram pictures. Her younger sister, Lara, was two years younger. And it’s significant, when her teacher saw her doing this, her teacher says, “She’s Americanizing,” and she groans. Historically, that would have been considered a good thing. Traditionally, in assimilation theory, to Americanize is to advance, but I think for this generation of Americans it’s taken on a, or this generation of immigrants it’s taken on a more ambivalent meaning.

Yeah, she’s Americanizing, like “She’s losing something “I wish she would keep,” the teacher was saying. Her younger daughter Americanized, her younger sister, excuse me, Lara was Americanizing too, but with a special gift for combining her Filipino and American selves. I traced the arc of Lara’s assimilation to a story about Rosa Parks. When Lara first arrives in second grade, it’s Black History Month. Her teacher tells her that Rosa Parks is a hero. But the idea of a hero in handcuffs makes no sense to a little girl straight from the Philippines where children are admonished to respect their elders and obey authority. “She didn’t listen to the policeman,” Lara said, “so she couldn’t be a hero. “And besides, heroes wear capes. ” A year later, I’m sitting at dinner. It’s Black History Month again, I’m sitting at dinner with Lara.

And she announces, apropos of nothing, “I sort of agree with Rosa Parks. “She’d paid her money like everybody else, “so it wasn’t fair for her to sit in the back of the bus. ” Well, what Laura liked wasn’t just Parks’s principles about racial equality, it was also her politeness. “When the policeman arrested her, “she didn’t say any bad words,” Lara said. So for an immigrant girl, deftly blending cultures, Rosa Parks became the civil rights hero who didn’t curse. It was a really interesting moment of blending two cultures together, and it turns out it’s not unique. The point about blending cultures goes far beyond Lara. Studying 3,400 kids in New York City, the sociologist Phil Kasinitz and his colleagues found the children of immigrants on average outperformed the children of their native-born peers, and they did so despite having parents with less money and education. So how could that be? The sociologists argued that children of immigrants often enjoy a second generation advantage. Two parts of the theory of second generation advantage are familiar, one is that immigrants are self-selected for ambition.

They pass along their drive to their children, that there was something in Rosalie that was a go-getter and her kids would inherit that. And the other is that ethnic networks offer immigrants advantages that natives lack, that they have, can rely on each other, draw on each other for support, for advice, for job connections in a way that natives don’t. Those two points I think, are familiar to anybody who studies immigration. But they also cited, the sociologists did, a third factor, arguing that children of immigrants benefit from living at a cultural crossroads. They can combine the best of both worlds, their parents and their peers, and blend their cultures in a way that combine the best of both worlds. If you think about mid-20th century America, when the children of the Ellis Island generation were coming of age and the creativity, say, in mid-century New York, maybe you can appreciate the point. It took a Russian-born Jew named Irving Berlin to write “God Bless America” and “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas. ” You keep that in mind, maybe this notion of cultural creativity, the creativity at the cultural crossroads comes to, becomes more vivid. Lara was second generation personified, taking these two– blending her two cultures. Her Filipino traits included her manners, her faith, her close family bonds, but from America, she got a reduced sense of class and gender constraints.

And she also got, above all, a license to ask questions. Nothing in her Philippine life had encouraged her to probe. On the contrary, Filipino children are generally taught to obey their elders, not interrogate them, and she was in her classroom of 70 kids, so she had no time for, there was no time for raised hands. But her American teachers loved questions, and Lara obliged them constantly. Do fish sleep? Is Galveston an empire? Is the Leaning Tower of Pisa gonna fall? One day she says, “Do nurses have to be caring? “Maybe I’ll just be a doctor. ” [audience chuckling] Curious how she had grown curious, Lara formed her own assimilation theory. New to the country and afraid of having to repeat second grade, “I told myself I better be interested right now. ” Being interested as a response to her fear, this quality of– grew off her anxiety, being interested became a habit, or put differently, life at the cultural crossroads had encouraged new ways of thinking. Lara was describing this process just as the New York sociologists had. One day, we stopped for an after school snack and Lara sprang a sly question.

“Do you know how to infer?” This is a question no third grader had ever asked me. I frowned, trying to remember. “I’m going to teach you,” she said. She paused to dip her french fry in her Oreo McFlurry and increase the suspense. When I submitted the manuscript, I got a note back from my editor saying, “This is the grossest line in the manuscript. ” [audience chuckling] Lara says, “It’s like when you say it’s cold, “it’s really snowy outside. “I didn’t tell you what season it is, “but you can infer it’s winter. ” Then she waved the french fry and she said, “You see, it works. ” [audience chuckling] Just watching this little young immigrant girl develop, indulge this curiosity about feeling empowered by this, the world around her, was just so much fun. What a fun, what an experience as a reporter.

After two years in the States, the four nurses, the 20 nurses that Rosalie was a part of, they finished their contracts and they got hired at the hospital as permanent staff. Pay raises and permanent status ignited a real estate boom, and six of the Filipinos bought houses in the same subdivision and three, including Rosalie, share a cul de sac. After just three years in the United States, that badge of belonging, a house in the suburbs, was hers. And a month later, Donald Trump launched his presidential campaign with an attack on immigrants, whom he called criminals, terrorists, welfare cheats, a threat to jobs, wages, housing, schools, tax bills, and general living conditions. He offered the cheering crowds a parable about immigrant treachery he called the snake. It’s the tale of a kind woman who takes in a stranger and is repaid with a venomous bite. Rosalie wasn’t a snake, Rosalie was a nurse. In standard cost-benefit terms, her move was a triple win. Good for her, good for her patients, good for the family she supports in the Philippines. But cost-benefit alone, cost-benefit analysis alone doesn’t do her story justice.

The National Academy of Sciences put out an entire volume, hundreds of pages long, looking at the fiscal impacts of immigrants, and for someone with Rosalie’s background, they predict that she and her descendants, over the next 75 years, will bring hundreds of thousands of dollars to the federal, state, and local governments. And that’s great, I’m glad to hear that, but cost-benefit analysis alone doesn’t do her story justice. Rosalie’s escape from Leveriza is a minor miracle. Migration was her vehicle of salvation, it respected her talent. It rewarded her sweat, it enlarged her capacity for giving. It made her life deeper, fuller, and more filled with hope. That her quest ended in Texas is something for Americans to cheer. It’s good for your country to be the place people go to make dreams come true. I asked Rosalie how the house compared with the hovel where we met, with the leaks, rats, crowds, stench. She couldn’t find the words; I couldn’t either.

“Oh my God,” she told the kids. “Big difference, Mommy grew up in a shanty. ” Kristine looked up from her Instagram account. “What’s a shanty, Mommy?” she said. Thank you. [audience applauding] I have a few slides. That’s Leveriza, 1987, when I got there. It’s probably a scene that you all have seen in other places. Sister Christine, who introduced me to the family. She used to take the kids in the squatter area to Malacaang Palace to see Imelda’s shoes.

Imelda left 1,000 pairs of shoes when she went. She would lecture them about the virtues of simplicity. She tried to make, recruit Rosalie to the convent. She wanted Rosalie to become a nun. And Rosalie didn’t mind the part about abstinence and marrying Jesus, but she didn’t like the vow of poverty. Having come by her poverty more honestly, she said she said she didn’t need 1,000 pairs of shoes, but a dozen would be nice. [audience chuckling] She became a nurse. Tita and Emet on their wedding day, 1967. He’s poorer than a rat, and, she’s along with him. Right before Emet went abroad, in their shanty in Manila.

That’s Rowena on the far left, is Rosalie’s daughter, Rosalie’s sister with a heart defect. That’s Rosalie beside her. Tita may have been pregnant in this photo, because by the time Emet left, there was another child. So this is maybe a year or so before he goes. Work permit in Saudi Arabia. Again, it’s one thing to say that, I think that his salary increased tenfold. I mean, that’s astonishing, right, to begin with, but also to think he’s doing exactly the same work. He’s making 10 times the money for doing exactly the same thing. So can you imagine that guy like showing up on your doorstep and saying, “Hey, I want to move in. ” [audience chuckling] Thank God she said yes.

Tita and the eggs. I really came to think the eggs is like metaphorical. The fragile hopes of Philippine democracy, her fragile struggle out of poverty. She was the guardian of 2,000 eggs a week. Rosalie’s nursing school graduation photo. You had to have an 80 to get into nursing school. Rosalie had, I think 81, maybe 82, barely made it in. Her cousin Tess was just 78, 79. So the two of them were like nine months apart, and two, like best friends, and their lives diverged on that test. Rosalie became a nurse as a result and Tess became a midwife.

And then once Rosalie got into nursing school, she had to keep an 80 average to finish. They cull the class after two years, and she had a 79. 5, and the dean put her name up on the list of people forced to leave outside the school. And Rosalie went off crying, and then the dean rounded it up. And so, salvation by upward rounding. That’s the piece I did for The New York Times Magazine in 2007 that got me thinking about doing the book. We originally tried to shoot the cover in the Philippines. This is Rosalie standing on the beach in Abu Dhabi. An art director in New York came up with the concept. We were originally trying to, for some reason the picture was gonna be of the family with a cow in the Philippines and the cow wouldn’t cooperate.

So we spent an entire day trying to get the cow– the cow kept relieving itself in the photo shoot. [audience laughing] So the photo shoot wound up in Abu Dhabi, and Rosalie was kind of like, “Why not poor girls?” It was one of those moments, it was, “Why do I–” The full picture shows her barefoot on the beach. She says, “Why do I have to keep taking off my shoes “and walking on the beach to be in the magazine?” The three kids when they arrived. That’s Kristine on the left, Domininique, whom everyone called boiboi in the middle, and Precious Lara is Lara’s full name, named after a Filipina beauty queen. We took a trip to New Jersey for a Filipino 18th birthday party of one of Chris’s, Rosalie’s husband had a cousin whose daughter was having a debut party. And we squeezed in a very quick trip to the Statue of Liberty. Chris was late to get his plane back, he had to work the next day, so he was very rushed. We had time for like one picture before catching the next ferry. And I kind of think of them as stuck between the Statue of Liberty’s armpit there, but nonetheless nestled in the shelter. Kristine practicing her selfies.

Lara, Lara was known as the slowest eater in the family. So if you really wanted to, quote “interview” Lara, you would sit there as she picked her rice and she would talk about Rosa Parks or Harriet Tubman or whatever else was on her mind. The new house in Texas City, Texas, a suburb midway between Galveston and Houston. After I made this slide, I realized I didn’t really need to write the book, pretty much. I could have just done that slide, that tells it all, right? [audience chuckling] I’ve been a poverty reporter for 30 years and I’ve never seen a transformation that profound. And when I look at that shantytown, and think Rosalie getting from point A to point B, you multiply that by how many billion people live in conditions like that around the world, and just how much undeveloped human potential that represents. Rosalie wasn’t the smartest, Rosalie wasn’t. . . There’s millions of Rosalies out there who could follow that same trajectory if they had the chance.

The New York Times did an excerpt from the book when it came out in August. One of the things that happens when you follow families like this, then you have to go write the book, is that the kids get a lot older before the book comes out. So the book kind of ends with the kids in middle school, but now they’re in high school. They forget half of what’s in the book. The hardest restaurant in Washington, D. C. to get a reservation in right now is a Filipino restaurant called Bad Saint, has about 20 seats. It’s celebrated in every gourmet magazine across the country. So when the kids, when they came up, my wife said– we’d never been able to get in. My wife says, “We have take them to Bad Saint.”

I said, “It’s crazy, how are we gonna get in?” She went off and wrote them and told them that her husband had written a book about a family of Filipino immigrants and they said, “Sure, come on in. ” So there we are. [audience laughing] Thank you, that’s them. Thank you, thank you for the question, which I’ll summarize as what shared migration is pain and what shared migration is gain, and how are the two related? I think they’re just inextricably twined in the Filipino story. The Overseas Workers Welfare Administration, which is the bureaucratic agency charged with looking after migrants across the world, its logo is the sun doing battle with the rain. I mean, the notion of pain is so deeply embedded. Can you imagine like the Social Security Administration having a logo with a skull and crossbones or something? That shocked me. But the Filipino idiom for going abroad, that when a Filipino goes abroad, they don’t say, “I’m going to make my fortune,” they say, “I’m going to try my luck,” which itself sort of embodies that “anything could happen” quality. There are two other characters. You’re absolutely right that Rosalie has kind of a best case scenario outcome.

And even in her story involves years of separation from her children, terrible homesickness, all kinds of difficulties. There are two other characters in the book, relatives of hers who had less successful outcomes. One is a nanny, her cousin Tess, who doesn’t pass the nursing exam and ends up going abroad as a nanny, and leaving behind two daughters. And another is a man who has married Rosalie’s, one of Rosalie’s cousins, who was a cruise ship worker. And he got in a terrible accident, as I was working on the book, in the Caribbean, and lost his leg. This was happening in real time as I was reporting it. He got evacuated to– Long story, he got hurt on the ship. They mistreated him in a Caribbean clinic, he got evacuated to Miami. He got there too late, they amputated, he made me his medical guardian in the middle of this. And so I got this phone call at 4:00 in the morning from a doctor asking if it’s okay with me if they amputate his leg.

Then he was in the hospital for like five months fighting the cruise ship company because they wouldn’t give him a prosthetic leg. They were trying to ship him home without the leg. So he just had a, it was a nightmare of an experience. I talk in the book about other workers, there are workers who’ve been killed, workers who were sexually abused. That’s not Rosalie’s story, I tried to bring it in around her story to be sure that people understood that her outcome wasn’t the only possibility. She had a pretty good outcome. Okay, so your question is what’s the impact of remittances on poor countries? Ian had mentioned, when I first met the family, the remittances would have about 3% of GDP. It’s now 10% of GDP. It’s had a profound impact on the whole extended family. Tita had a sixth grade education.

She’s the oldest of the 11 siblings. Her younger sister wound up with a PhD that she earned with her daughter’s remittances coming back. The farm that Tita grew up on is about three-hectare farm in the Philippines. She grew up in a nipa hut. One grass hut with 11 kids. Now on that same farm, she and her siblings have built maybe 15 houses, I’ve lost track. They’re kind of arrayed in a semicircle. So you can drive in on the driveway and you see this, a dozen or more houses arrayed like this. You can, it’s like an ocular form of carbon dating. You can look at each house, and guess how long the occupant worked abroad.

The house with unpainted cement blocks, that guy went for two years, didn’t like it, came back. The guy with glass windows and a second kitchen in the back, he went for 10 years. And Tita, Rosalie’s mom, has like the crown jewel. It’s this pink bungalow with a private water tank and faux marble floors. All the houses have proud pictures now of their kids’ diplomas. The last time I was there, the new status symbol was braces. I mean, they’ve gone in a generation from this living in a grass hut to kind of being part of a, kind of global middle class. But they’ve done that, earlier question was that at a cost of great separation. Mother-daughter separation, of parent-wife separation. It’s often left a hole between the generations.

– Audience Member: A similar decision?

– The question’s whether whether they were coming to the U. S. to stay. Absolutely, ’cause when Rosalie first came to the United States, her income didn’t go up from what it was in Abu Dhabi, given the cost of living. She had free housing and free health care in Abu Dhabi. But in the Emirates, she would never become a citizen, she could never get permanent permission. You’re always a guest worker. And I don’t think, she wouldn’t have wanted to, but the idea that she could come to the United States and become American, that was a deeply attractive lure for her, particularly for her kids. So yeah, the idea of staying here and starting a new life for her children was was very important to her. Rosalie had a profound struggle over the question of how much of her wealth she should share with the broader family.

I mean, she paid for her father’s, both her parents ran up big medical bills. Went into debt to pay for that. Her sister Rowena has a heart defect, Rosalie paid for that. She’s sending a half dozen nieces and nephews to college. I mean, anytime anything goes wrong in the extended family, the call eventually gets back to Rosalie. And more than just the money. Her sickly older sister Rowena had largely raised Rosalie’s oldest daughter, Kristine. So Kristine, Rosalie’s firstborn child, called her aunt, Rosalie’s sister, Mama, and favored her over, even after she came to the States, Rosalie and her sister were kind of in a struggle over who was the. . .

Kristine had Mama back in the Philippines and had Mommy in Galveston, and Mama and Mommy were competing for her affection and sort of for authority over her. So Rosalie took four years to go back to the Philippines. And at first, I just thought, “Well, it’s expensive and she’s busy. ” But I came to realize there was a reason she didn’t go back. I think she really wanted to consolidate her authority as the kids’ mother, ’cause the kids had been raised by the extended family, and she wanted to bond the family more closely and there was, and to grow comfortable, I think with saying yes and no to certain requests. I mean, there’s a part of me that thinks, I think Rosalie was glad to have the Pacific Ocean. It allowed her to finally have her family and her earnings be her own, in a way that for much of her life, it never had been. I mean the sense of Filipino sacrifice for family. I know you spent time in the village, it’s just so profound and beyond any American reference point that for much of her life, Rosalie didn’t think her paycheck was her own, it belonged to other people. Yeah, Rosalie’s very ambivalent about Americanization.

She was horrified when she learned that Americans send their kids away at 18 to go to schools, far distances. She would never want that to happen to her children. She says American kids are too independent. They try to think for themselves, she wants her children to obey her. And at the same time she’s really, she wants them to learn English, wants them to do well in school. So it’s I think it’s a paradox. She wants them to Americanize, but there’s a lot about American culture that makes her uncomfortable. I think that’s a classic immigrant experience. At one point, she erupts at Kristine about, Kristine was in sixth grade. Rosalie suspected wrongly, but suspected that Kristine had a boyfriend and gave her this just scorched earth lecture about the dangers of how she was ruining her life.

And yeah, I could imagine that conversation with a Polish or Lithuanian accent or an Italian. I mean, I’m sure it’s been delivered in every language. I definitely came to see, you asked how it changed my views. You see a lot of echo patterns. I mean, there’s a lot of discussion about what’s different about immigration now, and some things are, but that ambivalence, that conflict, I think, among the parents’ generation and watching their kids Americanize is long-standing. So the question is, how has migration affected both inequality and politics in the Philippines? Well, it definitely grew up as an effort to alleviate class, potential class rebellion. I mean, Marcos, President Marcos started the migration program during martial law in 1974, when he was faced with an insurgency. And one of the reasons he, to do it was to get unemployed young men out of the country before they join the rebels. So it definitely has that element of, as alleviating class conflict. And you’re also right that it is an anti-poverty program, it raises lots of people’s incomes.

But it also exacerbates inequality because it builds up, has an inflationary effect. And the workers who can afford stuff, the gap between those who go and those who don’t grows wider. I expected to find when I got to the Philippines, a kind of nationalist movement that was saying “This was bad for our culture, bad for our economy. ” And it’s doesn’t really exist in the Philippines. I mean, there are some few intellectuals and there are some people, but it’s very muted or much more muted than I would have expected. I think so many people have voted with their feet, that most politicians feel like they can’t stop it if they wanted to and it’s better just to kind of court it and try to be seen as the protector of the immigrants rather than, or the outward bound laborers than to try to stop it in any way. That’s a good question. Well, just the numbers of poor people are just so much, there isn’t much of a middle, comparatively speaking, of a middle class. There’s been a long tradition of upper class Filipinos coming to the U. S. for education, for investment. Sister Christine, the nun, who introduced me to the family is from a wealthy Filipino family and was educated in Los Angeles. So there’s those sorts of relationships, but in terms of going abroad on these temporary labor contracts, I think that’s primarily a working class, lower class phenomenon. But not usually the lowest.

One thing that, ’cause it takes a certain amount of resources to migrate, the poorest of the poor don’t usually go. You have to have a passport, you have to have medical exam, you have to often pay, go into significant debt, sometimes to pay a job broker. So when Rosalie first went abroad as a nurse, my thought was “Poor Rosalie, she has to go,” and her thought was kind of, “Lucky me, I get to go. ” For Kristine, the oldest, leaving her mama, her aunt, that was really wrenching. When she left, the night before she left, she wrote like dozens of yellow sticky notes to her mama. “Mama, I will never forget you.” “Mama, don’t forget to take your medicine. ” “Mama, I’ll always love you. ” And kind of papered the house in these. Left kind of terribly worried about, almost guilty ’cause Rowena was childless, the aunt, and sick so really her. . . Kristine was all she had, and Kristine at age nine was old enough to understand that. So she both felt sad for herself, leaving her mama, but even more than that, she felt guilty. It took her a couple of years, I think to sort of make the transition from mama to mommy. The younger daughter was like, “I don’t get what the fuss is all about, “I’m going to America, this is gonna be fun.

So they had two different reactions. At this point, what I’m really struck by is how little– so there’s tremendous longing and difficulty during that period, but now, they’ve been here seven years. What I’m struck by is how little conflict there is. When you read about the Ellis Island generation, there was really a big alienation between the children of that generation and the immigrants themselves, and the way they were acculturated into the schools where they were taught not to talk like their parents, not to dress like their parents, not to eat their parents’ food. That was like, to Americanize was to abandon all that was behind, conform. And that was how you would advance. There’s a famous quote from a Italian immigrant who became a New York City educator that said “We became Americans by being taught “how to hate our parents or to be ashamed of our parents. ” Not hate, to be ashamed of, to be embarrassed by immigrant culture. There’s none of that in Lara and Kristine. They don’t feel embarrassed by Rosalie, or Chris.

Their parents have heavy accents, their parents speak Tagalog at home, the parents watch Filipino movies, but the kids, they don’t feel any conflict about that. They feel perfectly at home in Instagram with mixed race friends. One thing I’ve noticed is they’ve really imbibed the ethos of like racial equality in a way that their parents haven’t. At one point, Rosalie says, the girls were 9 and 11. Rosalie, apropos of nothing, says to them, “I really want you to marry a Filipino. ” And Kristine says, “That’s racist, Mommy. ” And Lara says, “Yeah, it’s just what’s in his heart, Mommy,” and she’s nine. And Rosalie doubled down. She said, “No, he’s gonna have to be Filipino “so we can go to the Philippines. ” They doubled down like, “No, no, that’s not the way we do things.

” So there’s definitely a differing of perspective, but it’s not like a conflict the way, what I understand earlier generations. And I think that, it makes sense if you think about how diverse American society is, right? I mean, you can. . . There’s less conformity demanded of any of us to be in sort of mainstream American society. Now you can have tattoos, you can have an earring, you can have dreadlocks, you can wear a yarmulke. Everybody kind of fits in. So the kids, I think, don’t see a conflict between their parents’ culture and their American culture. Thank you all so much. [audience applauding]