Is there room for families in the global labor trade?

If you live in a developed country, chances are good that the people who clean your office or home, stock the shelves at the local store, or clear your plates at the neighborhood restaurant, were born in another country.

If you live in a developing country, it’s likely that someone in your community has crossed a border (or an ocean) for a job, and has sent back money to support an economy you rely on. During the last four decades, the number of international migrants has nearly tripled. Almost a quarter of a billion people live in a country different from the one in which they were born.

In the past 10 years, immigrants accounted for nearly half the increase in the American and 70 percent of the European workforce. Many countries in North America, Europe and Asia have created legal channels for foreign workers. As these countries’ birth rates decline, they will need not just foreign workers, but their children as well. Yet from country to country, governments treat the children of foreign workers as an unwanted burden. Frequently, the children of migrants have become part of a disconnected generation, brought to a strange land where they are unsure how to claim a place, or left at home because their parents cannot accommodate them abroad.

The Philippines is especially familiar with these trade-offs. Since the 1970’s, the Philippine government has embraced the global labor trade as a means to national development, even calling departed citizens “national heroes” for their sacrifice. In 2013, more than 2.3 million Filipinos went abroad to work. Remittances from this army of laborers accounted for more than 10 percent of the country’s GDP. The government has even established dedicated agencies to place workers abroad and monitor their safety overseas.

This story was produced by Orb, a nonprofit media company that is fusing massive data analysis with crowd-sourcing and professional reporting. Visit Orb's original in-depth publication for what they uncovered through their reporting.

The Price of Family

With its population aging, Finland is desperate for immigrants to come and fill essential jobs. In the capital, Helsinki, cleaning jobs are largely taken by foreign workers, many of them Filipinos. Janet Andog is a cleaner who has lived in Finland since 2008. While the country made it easy for her to come and work, the problems she encountered when she tried to reunite her family illustrate Finland's lack of interest in accepting immigrant children.

Janet’s first attempt to bring her children to Finland, in 2011, forced her to take on an almost unbearable work schedule. But difficult as her first and ultimately failed attempt was, Janet’s second attempt to sponsor her family was harder still. In 2014, Janet briefly returned to the Philippines and became pregnant. After her third child was born in Finland, she had to prove an income of 34,560 euros after taxes to sponsor her entire family.

“This is more than the average Finn earns,” says Lena Näre, the sociologist at Helsinki University. “An average Finn couldn’t afford a family if this same standard was applied to them.”

To meet the requirement, Janet asked her husband, Danilo, to join her in Helsinki, temporarily leaving the children in the care of relatives. Only with their combined incomes could Janet meet the burden required to bring all three children to live with her.

Despite its high income requirement, sponsoring migrant children is easier in Finland than in many other destination countries. To compare the relative ease or difficulty of reuniting a family in European and North American countries, the Migration Policy Group in Brussels and the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs have developed a system for scoring and ranking countries by their family reunification policies. With a score of 70 out of a possible 100 points, Finland is the seventh highest ranked country in this category.

Source: Migrant Integration Policy Index, 2010.

The Losing Generations

A thousand miles south of Helsinki, in Rome, Italian families with money to spare benefit from a system which, since the 1970’s, has brought Filipino workers into their homes to clean houses, cook meals, and take care of Italian children. Today, that system has created in Italy one of the largest Filipino populations anywhere in the world. But in prioritizing labor, the Italian government and the employers it favors have neglected the children of those workers, who are typically treated as a burden on their parents’ working lives, and not as an asset in a country with a declining birthrate.

For immigrant workers in Italy, it’s important to keep the boss happy. Since Italian law only allows for employers — not spouses, brothers, sisters, aunts or uncles — to sponsor a migrant worker’s residence permit, keeping a job is also essential to staying in the country.

But having a child can complicate the balance. While maternity leave is guaranteed under Italian law, domestic workers are explicitly denied the right because their first responsibility is to care for their clients’ families. If their kids are sick, migrant workers have to take time off work, but employers are often willing to fire their help for missing a day.

Among young Filipinos in Rome, a sense of displacement is common. The thousands of Filipino children who arrive to Italy every year are not joining the Italian mainstream but forming their own society at its margins.

At night in Rome, Filipino youth caught between the country they left and the one they live in now will sometimes congregate around Piazza Vittorio to drink and smoke. Raphael, a 21-year-old Filipino, is one of those young people. Below, he explains some of what his life and the life of his peers is like.

Left Behind

When parents leave their home country for work, they often leave their children in the care of relatives. Sometimes, as in the case of Janet and her family, the arrangement is temporary. Once they've earned enough, parents can come home or bring their children to the new country. At other times, separation is permanent. Daily interactions between parents and children are mediated through technology. In some towns in the Philippines, like Alaminos, outside Metro Manila, most parents who could afford to go abroad for work already have.

Out of about 5,000 families in the Santa Rosa ward of the town of Alaminos, around 2,000 adults have left the Philippines to work, says a Lito Santos, a local council member. While families suffer from the absence of their members, he says it’s the ones who don’t have relatives abroad to send them money who struggle the most. As the map below shows, in some regions of the Philippines, one in every 25 people was working abroad in 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available.