The Caregiver Dilemma

The explosion in popularity of Canada’s live-in caregiver program has had a profound impact on Canada’s demographics: the Philippines is now our number-one immigration source country. And yet the growth of the Filipino community, which numbers 450,000, has not generated the same kind
of academic or media scrutiny as that of the Chinese or South Asian. This is in part because Filipinos are less visible and do not cluster in enclaves, although their presence can be felt through the hundreds of ethnic associations they have formed, and through the many grocery shops that now cater to them, offering everything from money-wiring services to pancit noodles.

In spite of their numerical strength, little research has been carried out to investigate how this community is doing, and how the live-in care- giver program actually works over time, what are its benefits and drawbacks.

Geraldine Pratt’s fascinating Families Apart: Migrant Mothers and the Conflicts of Labor and Love is one of the first attempts to try to address some of these complex questions, and to offer a comprehensive analysis of the experience of nannies and of the children they are forced to leave behind when they come to Canada.

The program requires that caregivers come here alone and live with their employer for two out of four years. Only then can they apply to become permanent residents and to sponsor their family members. The majority of these Filipinos are women, many of whom leave behind their own children in the care of their husbands or relatives. Family reunification can take as long as seven years. What happens to these broken families and what is the price these “transnational parents” pay as a result of this protracted family separation? Does this pathway to Canadian citizenship exact too high a price? How do their children do in school? And are these women, who are usually skilled in other occupations, able to eventually find work in their fields, or do they remain stuck in low-paying jobs?

Pratt, a University of British Columbia geographer and long-time collaborator with the Philippine Women Centre of British Columbia, tackles these questions and more, offering the unique perspective of both the mother and the children left behind. She spent two decades collaborating with the Philippine Women Centre, and interviewing dozens of caregivers, and the results are impressive.

Yet her book cannot hide the ugly truth: the program is not wholly beneficial for Filipina women, and has the long-term impact of trapping many of them in poverty.

While the money Filipina nannies send home does make a difference to their family members and often allows their children to attend private schools and climb the socioeconomic ladder, the program does not work as well for their children in Canada. (Remittances from the Filipino community in Canada reached nearly $2 billion in 2009, and accounted for 10 percent of all the money sent back to the Philippines.)

Most nannies never end up finding work in the field they have trained in and continue to work as low-paid caregivers. The proportion of caregivers with university degrees in 2009 was 63 percent; and yet their lower than average incomes do not reflect this education. Moreover, many Filipino children who arrive here through the program have higher-than-average dropout rates from school as they become trapped in low-level service jobs they feel compelled to take to help out their poverty-stricken mothers.

Ottawa does not track the long-term effects of the family separation, or track data on the outcomes in school of Filipino children who entered the country in this way, their employment rates or university attainment. Pratt rightly believes that this is a mistake. “To govern a problem requires that it be counted and measured,” notes the author, quoting Nikolas Rose.

While Pratt does not hesitate to be critical of the program’s many shortcomings, her book also places it in the broader context of global migration, and she readily recognizes the substantive monetary benefits temporary overseas workers bring to their families and countries in the form of remittances and immigration channels. She provides the macro- and the micro-perspective on the migration experience, and is not afraid to ask the question of why educated Filipinas are so prepared to take on the role of domestic work.

Her book also reveals a broader social policy issue: the lack of an affordable and effective daycare policy in Canada (except for Quebec where day care costs just $7 a day) and the “scandal” of under- valued care, as the author so aptly puts it. Most nannies earn the equivalent of between $12 and $15 an hour, while those under the live-in program bring in even less.

I have employed several nannies, including one live-in, over the years to help care for my two children, aged ten and five, while I work outside the home. The challenge for them is often how to pay for childcare for their own offspring so that they can “afford” to work as caregivers. One woman I know is paying another Filipina $3 an hour to care for her seven-month-old baby, while she earns four times that doing the same thing for a middle class family. Other nannies bring their children to work to avoid having to spend their meagre wages on babysitters. If Ontario offered affordable day care, then we would all breathe easier. Caregivers could earn better wages; middle class families would not have to rely on the indentured servitude model that is the live-in program; and nannies would be able to raise their own families better, qualify for daycare subsidies and actually secure a spot in a day care. Their children would no doubt have higher educational outcomes as well, which benefits everyone.

And it is the voices of the children of caregivers that form the most compelling part of Pratt’s book. The trauma involved in living apart from their mothers for almost all of their early lives, and then the difficulty in forming meaningful attachments to them when they finally reunite in Canada makes for powerful, often heartfelt, reading. “[My mother in Canada] talks a lot about other children, which I’m not interested in hearing about. A lot of things going on that I cannot relate to, so I can’t talk to my mom for long on the phone. Since she’s separated from me, she doesn’t know me that much, so all of the advice that she could give me …is the usual things that a person would give when they’re watching a teledrama.”

Some children literally do not recognize their mothers when they finally are reunited in the airport of Manila. Others know them only by their voices. “I didn’t really miss [my mother] … because I don’t have that connection to my mom anymore…She’s no more…than a drawing.” The mother-child bond, one of life’s most powerful, is reduced to letters and items of food sent home, to t-shirts and candy. Another child said his mother did not seem real, but was just a disembodied voice on the phone asking him questions, “like a one-way conversation.” In those moments, he did not see his mother as a parent.

For many children, the most difficult part of the separation occurs when the mother makes a trip home to the Philippines for a visit, and then has to leave again. The children resort to avoiding her because of the anticipated future trauma and estrangement. “What could be more traumatic to a child than the unexplained departure of its mother? And what could prepare a child less than a departure while it sleeps?” Pratt notes, referring to a boy whose mother left without saying goodbye in an effort to spare them both emotional pain.

The book’s first three chapters with these detailed testimonials succeed in conveying the pain and grief that are so central to the nature of the live-in caregiver program, and portray the process of sacrifice and debt inherent in family migration.

I found chapter four, which detailed a play that the author helped to produce based on the more powerful nanny testimonials, somewhat less insightful. Called Nanay, the play aims to pull Canadians into an issue they may have been wholly unaware of. While interesting, the chapter seemed disjointed from the rest of the book, and almost read as a separate dissertation. The following chapter, about a trip to the Philippines undertaken by a group of advocates, was also not as seamless as this reader would have liked, although it is useful to understand more about the Philippines and the context that leads to mass global migration from this Southeast Asian country of 92 million. The government of the Philippines encourages the virtues of overseas labour, holds seminars for overseas Filipino workers and calls them “modern- day heroes” because of the vast amount of money they send home in remittances, which helps to prop up a sluggish economy. The social acceptance of this model is understood in the context of the Philippines’ long history of colonization, often ineffective governance and local corruption. Currently, more than 8 million Filipino nationals are working in 190 countries, the majority on temporary labour contracts. In comparison, Canada’s program looks favourable because at least it leads to a path to citizenship, unlike countries such as Hong Kong or Israel that do not allow Filipinos to immigrate permanently.

While Pratt offers a sophisticated analysis, the text on occasion becomes bogged down by dense academic vocabulary and phrases such as “whenever interdependencies generate benefits and burdens that are contingent on existing spatial and institutional relations, those living within this network of institutional relations stand in relations of justice.” Clearly, this book is written for an academic audience. And yet a diligent rewording of some of the weightier concepts it explores would lighten the load, and give greater insight into the meaning of the rich material and powerful stories Pratt has unearthed during her years researching this topic.

The conclusion of the book is not a call to arms to lobby the government to abolish the live-in caregiver program. Rather, true to her roots as a geographer, the author asks readers to explore beyond the boundaries of their world. In the final analysis there are benefits to being able to immigrate to Canada, or the live-in caregiver program would not remain so popular. She presents a Foucault analysis: Filipina women are sacrificed for the vitality of the Canadian population. Canadian families prosper by tapping into a global supply of well-trained workers who labour and live under conditions that are unacceptable to national citizens.

But then she rejects this for lacking in nuance. I think she is right not to see it in such a binary way. Despite its shortcomings, the program remains popular and Filipinas continue to apply to come to Canada through this immigration stream in growing numbers. They accept that the short-term sacrifices are worth the long-term gains.

And yet the program could certainly be improved. Ottawa should be analyzing the integration and success of the Filipino community and consider making changes to the live-in caregiver initiative: What about allowing women to arrive with their spouses? Or getting rid of the live-in requirement? Certainly these are areas worth exploring.

If nothing else, this book will broaden the readers’ understanding of the life of a Filipina nanny, and surely make them more sympathetic to the complexities of the role. The next time you see a caregiver pushing a stroller down the street, you will be better able to imagine the circumstances that drove such a person to leave behind her own children to better her economic circumstances, and the heartache and grief involved in such a process.