Migrating Children and Family Reunification

Not all labor migration is temporary or “circular” and some children eventually join their parents in the country to which they have migrated. The circumstances that allow this are very different, and so in many cases are the issues involved after reunification.

4.1 Filipino Children of Domestic Workers: Reunification in Canada

Sacrifice for their children’s future is a common theme among Filipino domestic workers who have come to Canada through the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP, now Caregiver Program), and most domestic workers hope that their sacrifice will be rewarded through the improved lives of their children and other family members. Highly educated (in 2009, 63% of those applying for permanent resident status had at least one university degree and further 33% had some postsecondary education; Kelly et al. 2011), the majority of Filipinas coming through the LCP experience significant downward mobility and deprofessionalization as a result of the time spent working as domestic workers (Pratt 2012; Kelly 2015). After completing 24 months as a live-in caregiver within a 48-month period, domestic workers have the capacity to apply for permanent resident status and sponsor their dependents as immigrants to Canada. Given the need to save for their families’ arrival, complete the necessary paper work, and delays in processing their documents, family separation has proven to be longer than expected in many cases: a median of 8 years (Pratt 2012). Since 1995, those coming through the LCP have, however, sponsored significant numbers of family members and by 2006 roughly one family member was sponsored for every domestic worker gaining permanent resident status: 48.5% of the 6895 immigrating to Canada through the LCP were spouses or dependents (Kelly et al. 2011). The Philippines is now one of the top migrant-sending countries in Canada.

There is now substantial evidence that Filipino children reuniting with their mothers in Canada are not, by and large, fulfilling their mothers’ dreams for their success. In Vancouver, children who speak Tagalog at home tend to have a relatively low likelihood of graduating from high school. Only 64% of boys speaking Tagalog at home who entered a Vancouver high school from 1995 to 2004 graduated with a degree, as compared to 80% who speak English (percentages are not as extreme for girls: 76 and 84, respectively Pratt 2012). Analyses of national data confirm this pattern. Filipinas aged 25-29 are far less likely to have a university degree than most other visible minority immigrant women of this age (with the exception of Blacks and Latin Americans), and Filipino men graduate from university at the lowest rate of any group (Kelly 2015).

These poor educational outcomes for Filipino immigrant youths, in many senses surprising given their parents’ high levels of educational attainment, are at least in part an outcome of the upheaval associated with long years of family separation, in other words, of an immigration policy that mandates that domestic workers come to Canada first alone, as a type of indentured servant. Given the difficulties of maintaining intimacy with their mothers over years of long-distance separation, compounded by the loss of their primary caregivers (often a grandmother or aunt) in the Philippines when they leave to migrate to Canada, children often feel estranged from their mothers when they arrive. One mother described the intensifi­cation of feelings of distance at the moment of reunification: “It’s more difficult when they arrive because your expectations of being reunited...It’s not back in the Philippines that [the separation] is so real. There’s no division, or you cannot see any wall between you. But when they are here: it’s like a tall building keeping your apart” (Pratt 2012, p. 66). Family estrangement; deskilled mothers who work two or three jobs and thus are unable to fully attend to their children’s lives at school; children who feel an obligation to leave school at the earliest point possible to assist their deskilled mother with basic household expenses in Canada: this is a potent mix of factors that leads to the unskilling, not just of mothers, but also their children in Canada (Pratt 2012).

4.2 Japanese Filipino Children Returning to Japan

A very different constellation of government policies and circumstances have led Filipino youths to rejoin their mothers in Japan, and researchers have begun to report on their precarious lives there (Faier 2009; Suzuki 2010, 2015a, b). From the late 1970s until roughly 2006, Filipina women entered Japan in large numbers on skilled- worker entertainer visas. In most years between 1985 and 2005, well over 40,000 Philippine Nationals worked in Japan in this capacity (Faier 2009). A “guestimate” is that tens of thousands of children were born through intimate relationships between unmarried Filipino entertainers and Japanese men (Suzuki 2015a). Before 2008, unless the father declared paternity before the child’s birth, the child was not recognized as a Japanese national, and in most cases the children born to Filipina entertainers were sent to the Philippines to be raised by extended kin. As Nicole Constable notes with respect to babies born to migrant mothers abroad, they are “largely invisible and often overlooked” (Constable 2014, p. 1). However, as the result of a successful legal challenge from several unmarried Filipina mothers, in 2008 the Supreme Court amended Japanese law to remove the requirement that paternity must be established at birth, creating the opportunity for children of unmarried Japanese fathers and Filipina mothers, who are recognized postpartum by their Japanese fathers, to attain Japanese nationality themselves.

Nobue Suzuki has chronicled the largely painful biographies of Japanese Filipino Children (JFC) who have reunited with their Filipina mothers and sought out their Japanese fathers in Tokyo as teenagers (they must attain and declare their Japanese citizenship by age 22; dual citizenship is not recognized by Japan) and notes that securing legal citizenship has offered no assurances of social membership in Japan. Perhaps because many of the mothers had established new families in Japan, Suzuki reports numerous cases in which mothers have taken highly instrumental approaches to their JFC child, requiring the newly nationalized JFC to contribute significantly to household expenses and the care of step-siblings (Suzuki 2015a, b). Youths’ aspira­tions for educational advancement and their employment ambitions are often frustrated by their poor Japanese and in some cases these youths have followed their mothers’ career trajectories, working in bars and the low end of the entertainment and service sectors (Suzuki 2015a). The maternal neglect and instrumentalism reported by Suzuki are likely extreme cases. Drawing on her in-depth ethnography of Filipina hostesses in rural Japan, Lieba Faier paints a more sympathetic portrait of maternal care and argues that the children who have been able to join their mothers in Japan as young children appear to have adapted smoothly, learning Japanese quickly and enrolling in Japanese schools. Those who have come as teenagers from Manila “were not doing as well.” “A few told me,” she writes, “that they remained in Japan only because their mothers insisted that more opportunities for their futures would be found there. They dressed in fashions from the Philippines, listened to the Philippines pop music, and said that more than anything they wanted to return ‘home’”(2009, p. 214).

4.3 Children Migrants from Mexico and Central America

The fates of unaccompanied children traveling from Mexico and more recently in great numbers from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador have received considerable media attention.

The experiences of undocumented youths have rightly garnered considerable attention (more below), but those who have reunited with parents with regularized status also resonate with the experiences of Filipino youths separated and then reunited with their parents. A large national survey of immigrants receiving legal permanent resident status (their “green card”) between May and November 2003 indicated that Latin American immigrant youths tended to be older than other children in the same grade and a large proportion do not complete high school (40%). This is especially the case for children who have been separated from their parents (and in particular their mother) before migration, who migrated at 13 years or older and whose parents were undocumented before acquiring their green card, a constellation of factors that are likely interlinked (Gindling and Poggio 2012). The experience of family separation was much more common among Latin American immigrant children than it was among other immigrant groups (45% of whom had been separated, compared to 28% and 21% for those classified as “Asian” and “Others”, respectively; Gindling and Poggio 2012, p. 1162. See also Suarez-Orozco et al. 2011 for an extensive review of the sociological and clinical literature on the reunification of Central American and Mexican transnational families.)

Children of undocumented parents are especially vulnerable, even if they them­selves were born in the United States and thus have US citizenship. US-born children with at least one undocumented parent are twice as likely as other children in the United States to live in poverty (Bhabha 2014, p. 71). So too, undocumented parents’ fears of being deported jeopardize their children’s access to education, that which 75% of immigrant children in the United States identify as “the most important thing in life” (Suarez-Orozco 2005). With over a thousand deportations processed daily (see Martin this volume), an estimated 11 million undocumented people in the United States live in “a constant state of anxiety” (Torres 2014). As much as actual deportation, de Genova writes of the way that deportability reaches into everyday life to render undocumented migrants as a highly vulnerable and thus exploitable labor force. Deportability, he argues, creates an “enforced orientation to the present” based in the “revocability of the promise of the future” (de Genova 2002, p. 427). Working with undocumented students in Salt Lake City, Utah, Cahill, Gutierrez, and Cerecer (2015) trace the abrupt foreclosure of undocumented youths’ futures when they begin to contemplate a university education. As a result of the 1982 Plyler versus Doe Supreme Court decision, all children in the United States are entitled to state-funded public education for primary and secondary schooling regardless of their immigration status (but see Smith and Winders 2015 for the harsh realities and fear that prevent some undocumented children from exercising this entitlement). As Justice Brennan commented in that judgment, “It is difficult to understand precisely what the State hopes to achieve by promoting the creation of a perpetuation of a subclass of illiterates within our boundaries” (quoted in Bhabha 2014, p. 274). For this reason, some of the students participating in research with Caitlin Cahill and her colleagues realized that they were undocumented only when they were unable to supply a social security number at the time of applying for student aid to attend university. This “process of ‘learning to be illegal’ is experienced as an existential shock and a deep sense of betrayal” (Cahill et al. 2016, p. 132).

Many children of long-term resident undocumented parents are in a sense also already transnational: the children born in the United States are US citizens, while their parents retain the citizenship of their original country, typically Mexico or a Central American country. A child’s inability to sponsor their parents’ citizenship points to the asymmetry of adults’ and children’s citizenship entitlements, rooted in the state’s ambivalence to children as citizens. The deportation of a parent is the de facto deportation of the child. If one agrees that, “the most significant citizen-specific entitlement today is the guarantee of nondeportability,” then the inability on the part of the citizen-child to initiate family reunification is an extraordinary denial of membership entitlement (Bhabha 2014, p. 67). It is within this context of establishing children’s citizenship rights that arguments about children’s civic com­petencies and responsibilities, evidenced for instance when children take on the important role of translating for non-English speaking parents when they engage with medical and other institutions, assume such importance (Aitken 2014). With the President Obama’s expanded Deferred Action [i.e., deportation] on Child Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), announced in November 2014 and still in the courts at the time of writing, this is a site of intense political contestation.

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