Reviews for A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century

by Jason DeParle

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A powerful examination of one of the day's most important topics: global migration.In many ways, the latest from New York Times reporter DeParle (American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare, 2004), a George Polk Award winner, is a summary effort of the past three decades of his core research that began in the Philippines when he was a much younger reporter launching his career. Some of the close relationships he forged during his time there became lifelong friendshipsand helped lead to this crucial and timely volume about the increasingly explosive and controversial phenomenon of global migration. Three decades ago, when the author was reporting on the poverty of the shantytowns of Manila, he met Tita Comodas, who reluctantly took him in as a boarder. Unable to provide for his family, Emet, Tita's husband, was forced to take a job abroad in Saudi Arabia, and he spent the next 20 years living far from his loved ones in order to send remittances home and afford his children a higher standard of life. Identifying the book's title as the family mantra, DeParle focuses on their daughter, Rosalie, then a 15-year-old studying nursing. He follows her through the years as she graduated and took nursing jobs abroad, eventually arriving in Galveston, Texas, and her own lifelong dream fulfilled: a job in the U.S. Moving in and out of the narrative of Rosalie's journey, the author chronicles her daily struggles, tying them to the bigger picture of migration movements and globalism as well as the economic, political, and cultural particulars of immigration in North America. DeParle also weighs in on immigration in the European Union while expanding on the economic effects of family remittances on a national and global scale. Giving a human face to the issue of immigration, the author does a great service to his readers and his subjects.A gorgeously written, uniquely insightful, and evenly critical volume that hits every talking point on immigration today. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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