A GOOD PROVIDER IS ONE WHO LEAVES

One Family and Migration in the 21st Century

By Jason DeParle



In 1987, a young American reporter looking to write about life in a Philippine shantytown met Tita Portagana Comodas, a local matriarch who grudgingly agreed to rent him floor space in her shack on a mud flat near Manila Bay. That reporter, the veteran New York Times journalist Jason DeParle, stayed with Tita intermittently for eight months, developing a friendship with her and her family that spans 30 years and three generations.

It is the Portaganas who anchor DeParle’s new book, “A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves,” a sweeping, deeply reported tale of international migration that hopscotches from the Philippines through the Middle East, Europe and eventually the United States. In some ways, it offers a mirror image of DeParle’s first book, “American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation’s Drive to End Welfare,” which looked inward at the United States and the connections between domestic migration, poverty and welfare. “A Good Provider” picks up on these themes, turning its gaze outward, toward the forces behind global migration.

The phrase “mass migration” conjures images of children crammed into holding centers at the United States’ southern border, or of refugees fleeing Syria and Congo, but the story of human movement is a far more complex one, full of contradictions and on a scale so vast that it is hard to comprehend. The World Health Organization puts the number of people living outside their native countries at 258 million, an increase of nearly 50 percent over the last two decades. And yet, when politicians talk of “global markets” they are typically referring to the goods and services that flow across oceans and continents. Often ignored are the humans who flow over these same borders — the very people who drive the economies of the 21st century.

“A Good Provider” delves into this flow, adding geopolitical and historical dimension to current discussions of migration and nationalism, while never straying far from the story of a single family dispersed by the pressure to survive and provide for its members. In the process, DeParle highlights a significant but often overlooked group: migrants who make the journey legally. Tita’s daughter, a young nurse named Rosalie, becomes the book’s linchpin as she travels from Manila to Riyadh and Dubai, eventually landing a job at a hospital in Galveston, Tex. Like millions of other workers, she is wanted by her host countries, if not always welcome.