By 1871, Filipino workers were in 108 countries. Indeed, he’s a historian in seeing the process with a centuries-long perspective - he notes that Benjamin Franklin called the German immigrants of the mid 18th century the “most ignorant Stupid Sort” - but is a journalist with a reporter’s eye on contemporary events, seeing how corruption, poverty, and violence spur great waves of migration.įleeing war and woes, migrants are changing our world both literally and metaphorically, and the evidence may be sturdiest in the Philippines. “Now the foreign born are economically diverse, ethnically varied, and geographically scattered.” “The average immigrant a century ago was a penniless European in a big city,” he writes. In these pages DeParle offers us a brisk history of immigration and immigration policy and wise reflections on contemporary migration. She’s the kind of immigrant who’s become invisible in the political debate, yet increasingly common.” To the challenges of assimilation, she brings advantages the poor and unauthorized lack. “I was absorbed by Tita and her world.”īut the book’s real personification of these sweeping changes is Tita’s daughter Rosalie, a 15-year-old C student when DeParle met her, and a 48-year-old Texas nurse now: “She never crossed a border illegally. “My study of the global poor shrank to a sample size of one,” he writes.
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