Left Behind

In 2003, Chinese newspapers reported about 10 million children being raised by a single parent or their grandparents due to parental migration for work, and in 2004, approximately 9 million children in the Philippines were going through the same situation. This same pattern was seen in many developing countries in eastern Europe, Asia, South and Central America, and in Africa. Overall, this phenomenon was observed among parents that were considered “lower-skilled workers” and many reports in the last few years share that this situation has slowly grown with time.

When forced to choose one or the other, should providing for those you love take priority over healthy family relations? Would you choose to stay with your family knowing that they would live in poverty, or would you leave them to give them the chance to carve a better future for them? What would you abandon and why? I do not believe there are easy answers for these questions, and I do not believe that one answer to be superior to the other; both have their positives and negatives, and both come with sacrifices.

I had the opportunity to spend some time in Colombia from 2016 to 2018 and for a long time I was close to the border with Venezuela. During this period, there was an incredibly high amount of people fleeing from Venezuela to Colombia for the opportunity to have a better life. Most Venezuelans I got to talk to would share how they would have to bring sacks full of money to buy two pounds of rice, or how they would have to make hour-long lines to enter a supermarket that was mostly empty. I think the most common case that I stumbled upon was a father or a mother that had just crossed the border, who got all his or her possessions taken by the corrupt border police, but still retained hope to find work and support their families back in Venezuela.

These parents had chosen to leave their children because they preferred to have their kids resent them rather than starve to death. However, I do not think that these parents could fully grasp what it meant for them to cross the border. Most of them believed they would be gone for a few months until they could bring their children over the border, when it would take years before they saw their children again. I met some parents that had been working a long time to get the paperwork to cross with no success because legal processes in Venezuela were so slow that months could go by without making any progress. On the other hand, I also met parents that crossed the border with their children. They shared how horrible it was to just cross the border, how they were humiliated, abused by Colombian police and how some had to resort to cross the river that divided the country in that particular area on foot to avoid the abusive police in the bridges. They would share how finding and affording housing for the entire family was incredibly difficult, or how their jobs did not pay them enough for them to afford their most basic needs; many of them believed it would have been better if only one of them crossed the border.

I believe that the experiences of the Venezuelans who crossed the border are common to many parents who migrate to other countries in hopes of making a better future for their children. I still do not know what the best answer for a situation like this is, or if there is such a thing as a best answer. In the end, all a migrating parent can do is hope. Hope that regardless of their decision things will turn out for the better. Hope that their families will manage to live happily. Hope that they can build a better future for their children. Hope that the future is worth whatever they left behind.

Some of the articles I paraphrased and read in preparation for this entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migration_rate

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.532.5379&rep=rep1&type=pdf

https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/child-and-young-migrants

https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-migration-and-displacement/migration/

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