A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves

I have highlighted the stats but read the article to get a personalized understanding of what these migrants lives. When I was in Saudi Arabia, we had many Filipino, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Jordanian etc..."guest workers." Nearly everyone of these I met was incredibly kind and unselfish, toiling away to send money back home to help their family. In many cases the grandparents raised their grandchildren as the parents were working overseas.
The Filipinos highlighted in this article stood out in their kindness, work ethic, and caring. One of the highlights of my 8 years in Saudi Arabia was developing a deep understanding of the wonderful qualities of the Filipino culture through my many friendships with the nurses st the King Khaled Eye Specialist Hospital.

About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe, supporting a population back home that is as big if not bigger. Were these half-billion or so people to constitute a state — migration nation — it would rank as the world’s third-largest.
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Migrants worldwide sent home an estimated $300 billion last year — nearly three times the world’s foreign-aid budgets combined. These sums — “remittances” — bring Morocco more money than tourism does. They bring Sri Lanka more money than tea does.
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Yet competing with the literature of gain is a parallel literature of loss. About half the world’s migrants are women, many of whom care for children abroad while leaving their own children home.
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With about one Filipino worker in seven abroad at any given time, migration is to the Philippines what cars once were to Detroit: its civil religion.
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Nearly 10 percent of the country’s 89 million people live abroad.
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There are a million O.F.W.’s in Saudi Arabia alone, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. Yet with workers in at least 170 countries, the O.F.W.’s are literally everywhere, including the high seas. About a quarter of the world’s seafarers come from the Philippines. The Greek word for maid is Filipineza.
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