But most people, especially in the U.S., know relatively little about it. Global migration is a huge topic, one that we at Western Union are more familiar with than most. So says author Jason DeParle, in the prologue of his new book “ A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves,” a deeply reported personal story of an extended Filipino family who, over three decades, go their separate ways all over the world to find economic opportunity for themselves and to share it with the loved ones they’ve left behind.
Migration is the world’s largest antipoverty program, a homegrown version of foreign aid.”
Ordinary and extraordinary at once, their journey is a twenty-first-century classic, rendered in gripping detail.“My own light bulb moment came in learning that remittances - the sums migrants send home - are three times the world’s foreign aid budgets combined. Reunited with their children after years apart, Rosalie and her husband struggle to be parents, as their children try to find their place in a place they don't know. With no issue in American life so polarizing, DeParle expertly weaves between the personal and panoramic perspectives. One in four children in the United States is an immigrant or the child of one. It pumps billions in remittances into poor villages, fuels Western populism, powers Silicon Valley, sustains American health care, and brings one hundred languages to the Des Moines public schools. Migration touches every aspect of global life.
At the heart of the story is Rosalie, Tita's middle child, who escapes poverty by becoming a nurse, and lands jobs in Jeddah, Abu Dhabi and, finally, Texas–joining the record forty-four million immigrants in the United States. In A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves, DeParle paints an intimate portrait of an unforgettable family across three generations, as migration reorders economics, politics, and culture across the world. Nor did he expect to spend decades reporting on her family–husband, children, and siblings–as they came to embody the stunning rise of global migration. Abstract:When Jason DeParle moved in with Tita Comodas in the Manila slums thirty years ago, he didn't expect to make a lifelong friend.
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