Introduction
Arvin’s mother left the Philippines to work in Saudi Arabia as a domestic worker when he was an infant. For a while she visited Arvin every 5 years for 2 to 3 weeks, but this stopped when she had troubles securing her temporary worker status: Arvin’s mother then stayed in Saudi Arabia and sent money home for his care in the Philippines.
Arvin’s perception was that he was passed from family member to family member as he was growing up: “When my uncle got tired of me, I would go to my aunt’s. I didn’t experience play when I was young. I didn’t experience care. That’s why I became angry. Because no one was taking care of me.” At the age of 14, Arvin was literally scavenging food for survival when living with his grandparents in the provinces: “I finally decided that I would just be the one to decide for myself... I got used to eating whatever was available. I would eat anything: coconuts, fruits. I brought these habits and skills to Manila.” Unable to find stable work in Manila, at age 22 Arvin found the dangerous work of driving trucks for long hours in Saudi Arabia. Through a series of extraordinary coincidences, he reunited with his mother there, and they lived together as mother and son for 2 years. This is the longest time that he has ever lived with his mother. “That’s where I felt: ‘Oh, this is how things are when you have parents who will take care of you. ’ So I was very happy. We pretended that I’m still young, that I’m still a baby. I would point at food to eat from Jollibee [a fast food restaurant]. It’s like, I want to play myself, that I’m still a baby. It was our system. ‘Ok, how would you feed me, Ma, now that we are here at Jollibee?’ Because I didn’t experience it when I was young... I saw that [behaviour] in Jollibee: children, they are fed by their parents. I would say, ‘Ma, how about me? Pretend I’m still a baby. How would you feed me?’ Like that. Instead of taking care of someone else... she would show me!” Interviewed in August 2014 in Manila the week before he returned to Saudi Arabia for a second stint as an Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW), Arvin stated his ambition to save enough money to build a concrete house for himself and his mother in the province from which they came, a house strong enough to withstand the onslaught of hurricanes and typhoons. “I’ll make sure they’re building a house that, even though I’m away and I hear about an earthquake or a typhoon, I am sure that that house is made with cement and is safe and stable. I will not worry. My parent needs a permanent home here.” “At least now that we’ve been together, I understand why she had to sacrifice everything for me. It was all just for me. As my payment - even though she didn’t succeed in putting me through college, I tell myself that if she worked really hard for me to live, I will also work very hard myself. I will not be satisfied until I finish building that house for her.” His mother, now 64, is planning to return to the Philippines in the near future. Arvin, in the meantime, has replaced his mother as the next-generation OFW, though his dream is to share the house with his mother in the Philippines sometime in the future. Asked which parts of his story he would like to be shared with others, he emphasized the joyful reunion with his mother in Saudi Arabia and his plans for the future (Pratt et al. forthcoming).We can take from Arvin’s story as well an impression of the ways that global political economic relations reach deeply into the lives of children, to structure their family life, emotional wellbeing, and chances for the future. Arvin is one of millions of children left behind when their parents leave to work “temporarily” in another country. In an influential 2005 report, the Global Commission on International Migration concluded that, worldwide, the old paradigm of permanent immigrant settlement had given way to temporary or circular migration, and noted that almost half of these temporary workers are now women.
As Leah Schmalzbauer (2004, p. 1320) put it: “In the global south, mother work increasingly mandates migration,” frequently to care for children and the elderly in the global north. Whether or not children migrate themselves, migration seeps through and structures their lives, but as Alvin’s life story also indicates, children of migrant parents often migrate as well: in 2010 UNICEF estimated that 11% of global migration to developed states consisted of children and youths under 20 (quoted in Bhahba 2014, p. 2) and in 2006 the World Bank estimated that 12-24-year-olds made up roughly one third of all international migrants (quoted in Donato and Sisk 2015, p. 60). Like Arvin, an astonishing number of youths manage this migration unaccompanied by their parents (Bhabha 2009, 2014). In 2014, the number of unaccompanied children and youths detained at the US-Mexican border for attempting to cross without legal documents rose to 68,000 (Donato and Sisk 2015), with a 117% increase in the numbers of children 12 years of age or younger apprehended that year (Krogstad et al. 2014). These numbers likely represent only a portion of unaccompanied children crossing this border and only a fraction of unaccompanied child migrants worldwide. Further, it is estimated that there are 1.8 million unauthorized children living in the United States alone (Bhabha 2009), an arbitrary artifact of immigration policy that has decisive lifelong implications for economic wellbeing.Until recently, very little research has explicitly addressed children’s experiences of transnational labor migration from the perspectives of the children and youths whose lives are so affected by it (Constable 2014; Suzuki 2015a, b). This situation has paralleled the inattentiveness of policy makers and migrant advocates. Jacqueline Bhabha (2014) reasons that the latter changed in the late 1990s for two reasons: the growing presence of unaccompanied youth required some policy response from developed destination states, and children began to receive increasing attention in international law after the ratification of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.
Among researchers, the influences are likely more diverse, including close working relationships with community organizations concerned about the wellbeing of youths of transnational families. While parents are often explicit that their economic migration is aimed at securing a better future for their children, migration can also perpetuate lifetimes of precarity for both adults and children. Children and parents often experience the “same” migration differently, their interests are not always aligned, and the costs and benefits can be unevenly or differently distributed. Further, if researchers are silent on children’s experiences, they inadvertently perpetuate the invisibility of the mundane violence associated with state policy and practice, and the tendency to view children as appendages, dependents, or possessions of their parents in ways that trivialize children’s needs, rights, and agency.The focus of this chapter is on economic migration of families, and in particular, family separation and reunification, with especial focus on the children implicated in the Filipino labor diaspora and Latin American migration to the United States. This focus emerges in the first instance from the fact that family separation due to labor migration is extensive from these two regions and there is a substantial body of research on each. It is estimated that one in ten Filipino nationals work overseas in over 190 countries, and that 85% of these workers are on temporary labor contracts (Pratt 2012). As a consequence, at least nine million children in the Philippines (or 27% of the overall youth population) are growing up with at least one parent working abroad (Parrenas 2010, p. 1827). The comparison with families from Mexico and Central America is instructive as well because although there is no singular “immigrant experience,” there are resonances across different histories of migration that collectively raise broader questions about the violence of distinctive and yet similar state policies, in particular the opening of national borders for temporary labor migration and the hardening of national borders for families.
These state policies are framed within contradictory neoliberal economic rationalities and liberal-democratic values, and are also expressive of fundamental ambivalences about the entitlements and basic human rights of children and temporary migrant workers. (See also within this volume: Wills, Gupta and Clayton for unaccompanied asylum seekers and Martin for migrant family incarceration and detention.) Contrary to liberal values of universality and inclusion, state protection of and investment in the child is practiced very unevenly across different groups of children. Children of migrant workers, by fiat or design, often exist outside these protections and investments. After outlining the broad contours of this argument, the experiences of children left behind, those born of migrant mothers and sent “home” to relatives, and those reunifying with migrant parents will be addressed in turn.2