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The Consequences of Overseas Employment on
Parents Who Go and Children Who Stay

Florio Arguillas
Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14850
Marie Joy Arguillas
Department of Sociology
University of the Philippines
Quezon City
Lindy Williams
Department of Development Sociology
Warren Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853

Abstract
This paper examines the consequences of overseas labor migration of parents who leave children behind in the Philippines on those migrants themselves and on their children. We draw on two sources of data, semi-structured interviews with parents who migrated to Ireland in response to opportunities created during the Celtic Tiger era, and semi-structured interviews with high-school aged children in the Metro Manila area who had one or both parents overseas. The interviewees are not related to one another, but each describes the consequences of the parents’ migration for the family. The children’s interviews focus primarily on their own experiences, while the parents’ interviews examine a range of impacts on the entire family.

Background:
In the Philippines, the overseas migration of adult members of the family is not a new phenomenon. While early overseas migration was often male migration, recent structural changes in many receiving countries (including the Middle East and Asia) have opened up job opportunities for women in the service sector and entertainment industry.
The rapid growth in demand for female workers in these sectors has contributed to the large volume of overseas migration among women from the Philippines and other developing countries. In the United States, newly-hired female Overseas Filipino
Workers (OFWs) have outnumbered males in most years since 1992 (www.poea.gov.ph).
Thus, in addition to an already significant number of children who experience growing up without a father for a significant portion of their lives, the rapid increase in the number of female migrants has

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