On June 25, 1980, a good-natured Filipino pool-maintenance man gathered his wife and five children for an upsetting ride to the Manila airport. At 36, Emmet Comodas had held a job at a government sports complex for nearly two decades. On the spectrum of Filipino poverty, that marked him as a man of modest fortune. But a monthly salary of $50 did not keep his family fed.
Home was a one-room, scrap-wood shanty. He had borrowed money at usurious rates to start a tiny store, which a thief had plundered. His greatest fears centered on his 11-year-old daughter, Rowena, who had a congenital heart defect and who needed care he could not afford.
Emmet's boss had offered him a pool-cleaning job in Saudi Arabia.
Emmet would make 10 times as much as he made in Manila. He would also live 7,200 kilometers, or 4,500 miles, from his family in an Islamic autocracy where stories of abused laborers were rife. He accepted on the spot.
Two years later, Emmet walked off the returning flight with chocolate for the kids and earrings for his wife, Tita. His 2-year-old son, Boyet, considered him a stranger and cried at his touch. Emmet replaced the shanty's rotted walls and put on a new roof.
Then after three months at home, he left for Saudi Arabia again.
And again and again. And the Comodas children have copied Emmet's example. All five of them, including Rowena, grew up to become overseas workers. What started as Emmet's act of desperation has become his children's way of life: leaving in order to live.
About 200 million migrants from different countries are scattered across the globe. They 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.
Growth in migration has roiled the West, but demographic logic suggests it will only continue. Aging industrial economies need workers. People in poor countries need jobs. Transportation and communication have made moving easier. And the potential economic gains are at record highs.
In the Philippines, local idiom stresses the uncertainty of the migrant's lot. An Overseas Filipino Worker - OFW - does not say he is off to make his fortune. He says, "I am going to try my luck."
Nearly 10 percent of the country's 89 million people live abroad.
About 3.6 million are contract workers. Another 3.2 million have migrated permanently - largely to the United States - and 1.3 million more are thought to be overseas illegally. There are a million OFWs in Saudi Arabia alone, followed by Japan, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates and Taiwan. They send home $15 billion a year, a seventh of the country's gross domestic product.
There is no anti-migration camp in Filipino politics. The political issue is migrant safety. Woe to the Filipino pol who appears not to have migrant welfare in mind. After a Filipino truck driver was kidnapped in Iraq in 2004, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo not only banned all contract work there but also withdrew from the American-led military coalition.
Even state visits have the tenor of bail runs. The president triumphed in Saudi Arabia last spring when King Adbullah freed more than 400 workers who had been jailed for petty crimes.
I first met Tita and the kids in 1987, as Emmet was finishing his third contract. I had a fellowship from the Henry Luce Foundation to study urban poverty; a Leveriza nun, Sister Christine Tan, introduced us, and Tita agreed to let me move in.
Emmet returned a few months into my off-and-on stay. He had missed half the life of his 11-year-old, Roldan, and nearly all of 7-year-old Boyet's. He wanted to stay.
With jobs scarce, frustration rose all around. Tita got angry when she heard Emmet urge their oldest child, Rolando, to join the U.S. Navy, and furious when she caught him encouraging Rosalie to go abroad; Tita wanted her to be a nun. Emmet was back in Riyadh within a year.
One day he opened the door to find Rolando, who had quit tech school to try his luck as a driver for a Saudi family. Rolando's luck had proven mediocre. He quit after his second contract.
By then, Rosalie had finished nursing school in Manila. Four years after graduation, she still earned $100 a month. Saudi hospitals paid nearly four times as much. After borrowing the recruiters' fee from an aunt, Rosalie was Jiddaa-bound.
A baton was being passed. At 55, Emmet had given nearly 20 years to a succession of Arabian pools. Rosalie, renewing her contract, insisted he go home. The responsibility of supporting the family was hers.
As an Islamic state that bans socializing between unmarried women and men, Saudi Arabia held out few hopes for marriage or kids. Rosalie approached her 30th birthday resigned to a dutiful life alone. She celebrated at a Jidda restaurant with Filipino friends; one of them, knowing they had a private room, disregarded the gender rules by bringing along her nephew, a construction engineer. The nephew, Christopher Villanueva, took Rosalie for an after-dinner walk, trailing a few paces behind her in case the religious police happened by.
With both of them living in guarded single-sex dorms, their 18-month courtship occurred largely by cellphone. When they flew home in 2002 to marry, they had never been alone together.
In the Philippines the following year to deliver her first baby, Rosalie saw an ad seeking nurses in Abu Dhabi that offered twice the salary she had made in Jidda. And Abu Dhabi had no religious police. She caught another plane to the Middle East, this time as a mother. The baby, Christine, soon called her Aunt Rowena "Mama." When a second daughter followed, she considered Rowena her mama, too.
Overseas prosperity is a gift and an obligation. Rosalie paid to complete her parents' new house and sends them $400 a month. Capitalizing on permissive visa laws, Rosalie has now brought a cousin and three siblings to Abu Dhabi.
Once upon a time - say, five years ago - remittances were considered small potatoes. That began to change early this decade, when research by the Inter-American Development Bank showed that the amounts in Latin America were three or four times higher than supposed. Interest surged in 2003 when Dilip Ratha of the World Bank showed the eye-popping sums extended across the globe. Migration has been a prominent development topic ever since.
While the doubling of formal remittances in the past five years partly reflects improved counting, Dilip Ratha argues that most of the gain is real. There are more migrants; their earnings are growing; and plunging transaction fees encourage them to send more money home.
The Philippines, which received $15 billion in formal remittances in 2006, ranked fourth among developing countries, behind India ($25 billion), China ($24 billion) and Mexico ($24 billion) - all of which are much larger. Remittances make up 3 percent of the gross domestic product in Mexico but 14 percent in the Philippines. In 22 countries, remittances exceed a tenth of the GDP, including Moldova (32 percent), Haiti (23 percent) and Lebanon (22 percent).
Despite fears that the money goes to waste, a growing literature shows positive effects. Remittances cut the poverty rate by 11 percent in Uganda and 6 percent in Bangladesh, according to studies cited by the World Bank, and raised education levels in El Salvador and the Philippines. Being private, the money is less susceptible to corruption than foreign aid; it is also more precisely aimed at the needy.
The downside is the risk of dependency, whether among individuals waiting for a check or rulers who use the money to avoid economic reforms.
"Remittances can't solve structural problems," said Kathleen Newland of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington research group. "Remittances can't compensate for corrupt governments, nepotism, incompetence or communal conflict."
Casting migration as the answer to global poverty alarms some people. It risks obscuring the personal price that migrants and their families pay. It could be used to gloss over, or even justify, the exploitation of workers. And it could offer rich countries an excuse for cutting foreign aid and other development efforts.
Certainly, soaring remittance tallies cannot measure social costs, to migrants or to those left behind. Among the biggest worries, in the Philippines and beyond, are the "left behind" kids, who are alternately portrayed as dangerous hoodlums and consumerist brats.
Researchers also speak of the "left out." Lacking the money or connections to go abroad, they are marooned on the wrong shore of what is, among the poor themselves, a growing divide.
The modest social science that exists on the issue offers some reassurance. At least three studies have examined "left behind" families in the Philippines. All found the children of migrants doing as well as, or better than, children whose parents stayed home.
The most recent, from the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila, involved a national survey of 10-to-12-year-olds. The migrants' kids did better in school, had better physical health, experienced less anxiety and were more likely to attend church.
One theory is that remittances compensate for the missing parent's care. The study found migrants' kids to be taller and heavier than their counterparts, suggesting higher caloric intake, and much more likely to attend private school. The extended family can also act as a compensating force. And so can modern technology, in an age of cellphones and Webcams.
About 50 kilometers south of Manila, a dirt road ends at a residential compound carved from a small coffee farm. For decades it held nothing but the thatched hut where Tita and her 10 siblings were raised. Now a dozen cement blockhouses are clustered in a U.
One look at each home yields a fair guess of how long the owner worked abroad. Nine families in the compound sent workers overseas, and collectively those workers stayed for 131 years (and counting). A walk across the compound cuts through a century of rewards and regrets.
Tita's brother Fortz is one of two men in the family (by some counts, three) whose extramarital affairs overseas produced kids. Tita's sister Peachy learned that her husband had a girlfriend - and a son - when she received a package meant for them. The nine families of overseas workers raised 35 kids, some of whom scarcely saw their fathers.
By any measure, the price was high. Yet bookshelves sag with encyclopedia sets. More diplomas appear each year on freshly plastered walls. There are bunk beds, cellphones, stereos and big televisions.
"A good provider is someone who leaves," Peachy said, without ambivalence.
Tita and Emmet's cottage has a patio, a beamed ceiling, a tiled floor, two kitchens and two toilets that flush. It was built by Rosalie, thousands of kilometers away in Abu Dhabi. She hovers over the compound; no household there is heedless of her example or generosity.
Going abroad is difficult, but so is coming home. Since Emmet returned for good, the kids have noticed less tenderness between their parents and more quarreling. Each had grown accustomed to being the boss. One reason Rosalie left her second daughter, Precious Lara, in the Philippines is that she thinks her parents need a child to love.
In a guest bedroom there is a large framed photograph of Rosalie, taken on her wedding day. The woman in that picture shows no trace of a birthright of poverty. She turns to the camera wearing an enormous gown and a confident face. Two generations of labor migration have given her more education, more money, and more power and prestige than her mother could have dreamed of on her own wedding day.
Precious Lara rarely plays in that room and hardly knows the face, much less the sacrifices her mother has made for the blessings of a migrant's wage.
Jason DeParle, a senior writer for The New York Times, last wrote for the magazine about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
