The New Yorker’s recent restrained and beautiful article “The Cost of Caring” follows the life of Emma, a smart, persevering Filipino woman as she is forced to leave behind her job crafting health policy for the Philippine government, in order to work abroad as a maid. As do so many, she leaves her children to care for others’ children. “In the seventies and eighties,” the article notes, “most OFWs were men, who worked in merchant shipping or construction, but since the nineties migration has become increasingly female, both in the Philippines and throughout the world. Mothers and daughters leave their families so that they can do the type of ‘women’s work’ – caring for the young, the elderly, and the infirm – that females in affluent countries no longer want to do or have time to do.”

In various ways, the sacrifice and plight of our OFWs is well covered. I wrote about it myself in this column. That piece, “For my yaya and all our OFWs,” hoped to make the same political-economic point that a maid in the US, named Oalican, made to The New Yorker when she informed the magazine that she thinks that “the culture of remittances breeds political complacency: families of OFWs are less inclined to organize against the Filipino government and protest corruption, because they are shielded by the money sent from abroad, even as their communities remain impoverished.”

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