The Children Left Behind
Growing Up With a Parent on the Other Side of the World: The Hidden Generation Shaped by OFW Migration
She was three years old when her mother left for Hong Kong. She is twenty-three now. In between, there were video calls that felt like talking to a stranger, balikbayan boxes that smelled like somewhere else, and a question she could never quite answer: How do you miss someone you don’t really know?
This is the story no one tells when celebrating the heroism of Overseas Filipino Workers. Not the workers themselves—their struggles are documented, their remittances tallied, their sacrifices acknowledged. But their children? The nine million Filipino children currently growing up with at least one parent working abroad? They are statistics in migration studies, footnotes in economic reports, invisible participants in a national experiment no one designed and no one fully understands.
They are called the “left-behind generation.” The term itself carries judgment—as if they were luggage forgotten at the airport rather than human beings navigating childhoods shaped by absence. They grow up in houses built with foreign earnings, wearing clothes from balikbayan boxes, supported by money that arrives monthly from people who exist primarily as voices on phone screens.
What happens to these children? Who do they become? And what does the Philippines owe to a generation raised by remittances?
Part 1: The Scale of Absence
The Numbers We Don’t Talk About
The Philippines has approximately 10 million citizens working abroad at any given time—roughly 10 percent of the total population, and a far higher percentage of working-age adults. The majority are parents.
According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, approximately 9 million Filipino children—nearly one in four—have at least one parent working overseas. Of these, an estimated 3 million have mothers abroad, a figure that has increased dramatically as demand for Filipino caregivers, domestic workers, and nurses has grown.
These children are not evenly distributed. In regions with high migration rates—Ilocos, Central Luzon, CALABARZON, Central Visayas—the proportion reaches 30 to 40 percent of all children. In some municipalities, OFW families are the majority. Schools where half the students have absent parents are common. The experience is not exceptional; it is the norm.
Yet Philippine social policy, educational systems, and support structures treat parental migration as an individual family matter rather than a generational phenomenon requiring systematic response.
Who Leaves, Who Stays
The pattern of who migrates has shifted over decades, with profound implications for children left behind.
In the 1970s and 1980s, OFWs were predominantly male—construction workers, engineers, and seamen heading to the Middle East. Children lost fathers but retained mothers as primary caregivers. The traditional family structure bent but did not break.
Beginning in the 1990s, feminization transformed OFW demographics. Today, women constitute approximately 60 percent of newly deployed land-based workers, concentrated in domestic work, caregiving, and healthcare. These are roles that require physical presence—you cannot care for an elderly person in Singapore via video call.
When mothers leave, the care arrangements become more complex. Children may stay with fathers (many of whom struggle with unaccustomed caregiving roles), grandparents (who may be elderly and in need of care themselves), aunts and uncles, older siblings, or rotating combinations of relatives. Some children effectively raise themselves.
Research consistently shows that maternal absence affects children differently than paternal absence—not worse necessarily, but differently, in ways Philippine society has been slow to recognize and address.
The Economics of Left-Behind Childhood
Children of OFWs are, on average, materially better off than their peers. Studies show higher household incomes, better nutrition, greater access to education, and improved housing. The remittances work—at least in economic terms.
But material provision is not the same as presence. A 2019 study by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies found that while OFW children had better educational access, they did not have correspondingly better educational outcomes. More money for school fees did not automatically translate to better grades, higher completion rates, or improved test scores.
The researchers identified a gap between economic investment and developmental return—a gap shaped by the absence of parental involvement in daily learning, homework supervision, and educational encouragement that money cannot replace.
Part 2: The Psychology of Parental Absence
What Research Tells Us
Academic literature on children of migrant workers reveals consistent patterns across countries and contexts:
Attachment disruption: Children who experience parental separation during critical developmental periods (birth to age three, and again during adolescence) show higher rates of attachment difficulties. They may struggle to form secure bonds, exhibit anxiety about abandonment, or develop avoidant attachment styles that affect relationships throughout life.
Emotional and behavioral challenges: Multiple studies document elevated rates of depression, anxiety, anger issues, and behavioral problems among left-behind children. A comprehensive Philippine study found that children with OFW mothers showed significantly higher rates of emotional difficulties than those with OFW fathers or no migrant parents.
Identity confusion: Children often struggle to integrate the abstract concept of a loving, sacrificing parent with the lived experience of that parent’s absence. They may feel guilty for resenting a parent who is “doing everything for them,” creating internal conflict between gratitude and grief.
Parentification: Older children frequently assume parental roles—caring for younger siblings, managing households, becoming emotional supports for the remaining parent. This premature responsibility can accelerate maturity in some ways while stunting development in others.
Academic impact: Despite better resources, left-behind children often show inconsistent academic performance. Some excel, driven by desire to honor parental sacrifice. Others disengage, lacking daily supervision and encouragement. The variance is higher than in non-OFW families—more extreme successes and more extreme struggles.
The Voices of Left-Behind Children
Statistics capture patterns but miss texture. Here is what children of OFWs say about their experience:
“Every time she came home, I had to get to know her again. And then she would leave before I finished.” — Maria, 19, whose mother worked in Taiwan for fifteen years
“My father sent money for everything. Tuition. Allowance. New phone. I had more stuff than my classmates. But when I had problems, I couldn’t call him because of the time difference. When I was sick, he couldn’t come. Having things is not the same as having a father.” — Jerome, 22, whose father worked in Saudi Arabia
“I used to watch my friends get picked up from school by their mothers. I told myself it didn’t matter. But I would dream about it—my mother being there, waiting for me. Just once.” — Angela, 24, whose mother worked as a domestic helper in Hong Kong
“People say we’re lucky because we have money. They don’t understand that we would trade everything in those balikbayan boxes for one normal dinner with our whole family.” — Kenneth, 17, both parents working in Dubai
“My lola raised me. She’s my real mother. When my actual mother comes home, I don’t know how to act around her. She’s like a stranger who pays for my life.” — Divine, 16, mother in Singapore since she was two
These testimonies are not universal—many OFW children report positive experiences, strong relationships maintained across distance, and gratitude untinged by resentment. But the pain is common enough to constitute a pattern, widespread enough to demand attention.
The Developmental Stages of Absence
The impact of parental migration varies by the age at which separation occurs and how long it lasts.
Infancy to age three: This is the critical period for attachment formation. Children separated from primary caregivers during this window may struggle with basic trust and security throughout life. When mothers leave infants, even excellent substitute care cannot fully replicate the biological and psychological bond being interrupted.
Early childhood (3-6): Children at this stage understand absence but not its reasons. They may interpret a parent’s departure as abandonment or punishment—”Mommy left because I was bad.” Magical thinking dominates; the child may believe they can bring the parent back through good behavior or, conversely, blame themselves for the continued absence.
Middle childhood (7-12): Children can understand economic rationales intellectually but still experience emotional impact. This is often when anger emerges—resentment that the parent “chose” work over them, frustration at being different from peers with present parents. Academic effects often become visible during this period.
Adolescence (13-18): The identity work of adolescence becomes complicated by parental absence. Teens need to individuate from parents—difficult when the parent is already absent. They need guidance navigating relationships, sexuality, substance use, and life decisions—guidance that grandparents or guardians may be unable or unwilling to provide. Risk behaviors often peak in this period.
Emerging adulthood (18-25): Young adults must integrate their left-behind experience into their identity. Some become fiercely independent; others struggle with intimacy. Many report that the full emotional impact of their childhood only becomes clear in adulthood, when they face their own decisions about relationships, parenting, and whether to migrate themselves.
Part 3: The Guardians—Grandparents Raising Grandchildren
An Overlooked Caregiving Crisis
When parents migrate, grandparents often become primary caregivers. This arrangement is so common it has become invisible—a default assumption rather than a recognized caregiving category requiring support.
The numbers are staggering. An estimated 5 to 6 million Filipino children are being raised primarily by grandparents due to parental migration. These grandparents—mostly grandmothers—are typically in their 60s and 70s, often managing health challenges of their own while raising children from infancy through adolescence.
This creates a “skipped generation” household structure with unique challenges. Grandparents must bridge a generational gap of 50 or more years, navigating technology they did not grow up with, educational expectations that have changed dramatically, and youth culture entirely foreign to their experience.
The Burden on Grandparents
Research on “grandfamilies” in OFW contexts reveals consistent struggles:
Physical exhaustion: Caring for active children requires energy that aging bodies may lack. Grandparents report chronic fatigue, exacerbated health conditions, and inability to keep up with children’s activity levels.
Discipline challenges: Grandparents often struggle with authority. Children may refuse to obey someone other than their parents. The absent parent may undermine discipline by overruling decisions remotely or sending treats to compensate for absence.
Educational support limitations: Many grandparent caregivers have limited formal education themselves and cannot assist with homework, especially as children advance to higher grades. They may not understand modern educational expectations or how to advocate for children within school systems.
Technology gap: Digital communication with absent parents requires technology grandparents may find baffling. Managing children’s screen time, monitoring online activity, and addressing cyberbullying are challenges many grandparents feel unequipped to handle.
Financial complexity: Though remittances provide resources, managing money across distance creates confusion. Grandparents may feel unable to question how remittances are supposed to be allocated, or uncertain about spending authority for non-routine expenses.
Emotional labor: Grandparents must manage their own grief at their child’s absence while supporting grandchildren through theirs. They become emotional bridges—transmitting news good and bad, interpreting absent parents’ intentions, absorbing children’s anger and sadness.
When Grandparents Cannot Continue
The assumption that grandparents can raise grandchildren indefinitely ignores biological reality. Grandparents age, sicken, and die. Children who have already lost daily contact with parents may then lose the grandparents who became their functional parents.
There is no systematic support for these transitions. When a grandmother dies, the OFW parent faces an impossible choice: return home and lose income, or find yet another substitute caregiver for children already twice abandoned. Many children end up passed between relatives, with each transition adding another layer of instability.
Some children ultimately join parents abroad—but adjustment to a foreign country after years of separation brings its own challenges. Others age out of needing care, reaching adulthood with no preparation for independence and complicated relationships with parents they barely know.
Part 4: The Schools—Education Systems Unprepared
Teachers on the Front Lines
Philippine schools have become default social service providers for left-behind children, though they receive no additional resources for this role.
Teachers report that children of OFWs present distinct challenges. Behavioral issues are common—acting out as a response to emotional pain that children cannot articulate. Academic inconsistency is typical—brilliant work one week, complete disengagement the next, tracking emotional states rather than lesson content.
More difficult still are the invisible struggles. The child who seems fine but carries quiet grief. The high achiever whose perfectionism masks desperate attempts to justify parental sacrifice. The class clown whose humor deflects from loneliness. Teachers must identify these children and respond appropriately—with minimal training and no psychological support staff in most schools.
“We become the parents,” one elementary school teacher in Pampanga explained in a research interview. “When they are sick, they come to us. When they are sad, they come to us. When they need permission slips signed, they come to us. But we have forty other students and no training for this.”
What Schools Could Do (But Don’t)
Evidence-based interventions for left-behind children exist but are rarely implemented systematically:
Peer support programs: Connecting left-behind children with others sharing their experience reduces isolation and normalizes their feelings. Some schools have created informal “OFW kid” groups; few have formalized these into structured support programs.
Counseling services: Professional psychological support could help children process complex emotions around parental absence. Philippine public schools average one guidance counselor per several thousand students—wholly inadequate for the need.
Communication facilitation: Schools could partner with families to facilitate parent-child communication around academic progress—shared access to grades, scheduled video conferences for parent-teacher discussions, structured ways for distant parents to engage with their children’s education.
Caregiver support: Schools could offer training and resources for grandparents and other guardians—helping them understand educational expectations, navigate technology, and support children’s learning at home.
Transition support: Children whose parents return face adjustment challenges often overlooked. Schools could provide structured support for family reunification, recognizing that “happy endings” require their own processing.
None of these interventions require massive resources. They require recognition that left-behind children constitute a distinct population with distinct needs—a recognition that has been slow to emerge in educational policy.
The DepEd Response (Or Lack Thereof)
The Department of Education has acknowledged the existence of left-behind children through occasional memoranda and pilot programs. But no comprehensive policy addresses their needs. No systematic data collection tracks their academic outcomes. No dedicated resources support schools in OFW-heavy communities.
In 2019, DepEd piloted a psychosocial support program in select schools. The program provided training for teachers and counselors to identify and assist children affected by parental migration. Results were promising but the program has not scaled nationally.
The gap between recognition and response reflects broader governmental ambivalence about OFW migration. The policy emphasis remains on facilitating deployment and protecting workers abroad—vital priorities, but incomplete without attention to the families left behind.
Part 5: The Long Shadow—Adult Children of OFWs
Who They Become
The first large generation of left-behind children has reached adulthood. They are now in their twenties and thirties—finishing educations, entering careers, forming families of their own. Their experiences offer a window into the long-term effects of growing up with absent parents.
Research on adult children of OFWs is limited but growing. Preliminary findings suggest:
Relationship patterns: Many report difficulty with intimacy and trust. Fear of abandonment—rooted in childhood experience—manifests in adult relationships as jealousy, avoidance of commitment, or anxious attachment. Some unconsciously choose partners who are emotionally unavailable, recreating familiar dynamics.
Career orientations: Responses split dramatically. Some adult children pursue high-earning careers to ensure they never need to migrate themselves, driven by determination to keep future families intact. Others follow parents into overseas work, either normalizing migration or seeing no alternative path to financial security.
Parenting approaches: Those who become parents often describe hyper-awareness of presence. They refuse overseas opportunities that would separate them from children. They may overcompensate—helicopter parenting born from their own experience of absence. Some describe anxiety about whether they know how to parent, having had limited modeling.
Unresolved grief: Many report that emotional processing of their childhood experience is ongoing. Therapy is helpful but not culturally normalized. Some describe a “delayed reaction”—functioning well for years, then experiencing grief triggered by life transitions like marriage, parenthood, or a parent’s retirement and return.
Complex relationships with parents: Reconciliation with returned parents is not automatic. Years of absence cannot be quickly bridged. Some adult children describe relationships that remain superficial despite proximity—a politeness masking distance that neither party knows how to close.
The Second-Generation Effect
Perhaps most significant is how adult children of OFWs approach their own family formation and career decisions.
Early research suggests two divergent patterns:
The rejection pattern: Some vow never to repeat their parents’ choices. They accept lower incomes to remain with their children. They choose careers with geographic stability. They consciously prioritize presence over provision, having experienced firsthand the costs of the opposite choice.
The repetition pattern: Others migrate themselves, sometimes before having children, sometimes after. The normalization of absence in their childhood makes it seem less drastic. Economic pressures—often including expectations to support aging parents who sacrificed for them—push them toward the same high-earning overseas opportunities their parents took.
Neither pattern is universal, and many fall somewhere between. But the intergenerational transmission of migration patterns suggests that today’s left-behind children are tomorrow’s OFWs or tomorrow’s parents determined not to be—shaping Philippine society for generations to come.
Part 6: What Helps—Resilience, Connection, and Communication
Factors That Protect Left-Behind Children
Not all left-behind children struggle. Many thrive—excelling academically, forming healthy relationships, integrating their experience into strong adult identities. Research has identified factors that distinguish positive outcomes from negative ones:
Quality of substitute care: Children who receive warm, consistent care from grandparents or other guardians fare far better than those with unstable, rotating, or neglectful care arrangements. The relationship with the present caregiver may matter more than the absence of the parent.
Preparation and explanation: Children who understand why their parent is leaving—explained in age-appropriate terms with emotional acknowledgment of the difficulty—adjust better than those for whom departure is sudden or unexplained. Saying goodbye matters.
Consistent communication: Regular, predictable contact with the absent parent maintains connection across distance. Quality matters as much as quantity—meaningful conversations about the child’s daily life, not just check-ins. Video calls that allow face-to-face connection are more effective than voice-only or text.
Maintained parental authority: When absent parents remain involved in decisions—discipline, education, major purchases—children retain a sense of parental presence despite physical absence. Abdication of parental authority to caregivers, while sometimes practical, often leads children to feel truly abandoned.
Community support: Children in communities where OFW migration is common may benefit from normalization—they are not unusual, not pitied, not different from peers. Shared experience can provide mutual support. However, normalization can also mean inadequate recognition of legitimate struggles.
Economic stability without extravagance: Children benefit from financial security but can be harmed by excessive material compensation for absence. Lavish gifts and unlimited allowances may increase guilt, create peer relationship problems, and substitute material provision for emotional connection.
What Parents Can Do From Abroad
Maintaining meaningful parental relationships across thousands of miles is difficult but not impossible. Strategies that research and experience suggest are effective:
Establish communication routines: Scheduled calls that children can anticipate and count on. Daily might not be possible, but consistency matters more than frequency. Children do better knowing “Mom calls every Sunday at 7pm” than with unpredictable sporadic contact.
Be present in daily life: Ask about ordinary things—friends, teachers, what they ate for lunch, what they watched on TV. Absent parents often focus on big events; children remember who cared about the small ones.
Share your life too: Children need to understand where parents are and what they do. Photos of your room, your workplace, your daily routine. Make your absence concrete rather than abstract—a real place where a real person lives, not a void from which money appears.
Maintain parental authority: Stay involved in decisions, discipline, and guidance. This requires coordination with caregivers—who must implement what you decide—but keeps you in a parental role rather than becoming merely a funding source.
Address emotions directly: Acknowledge that separation is hard. Give children permission to feel angry, sad, or resentful. Do not dismiss their emotions or respond with guilt about your sacrifice. Their feelings are valid, and they need to know you can handle them.
Facilitate local support: Help children access counseling, peer support, or mentorship in your absence. Pay for services you cannot provide personally. Enlist teachers, relatives, and community members as your eyes and ears.
Plan for returns: When you visit, avoid being merely a gift-bearing stranger. Spend ordinary time together. Help with homework. Attend school events. Be a parent, not a visiting dignitary.
What Caregivers Can Do
Grandparents and other guardians occupy an impossible position—filling irreplaceable roles without full authority or permanent status. Strategies that help:
Maintain the parent’s presence: Display photos, talk about the absent parent positively, reinforce that the child is loved by someone who cannot be there. Children need to integrate the absent parent into their understanding of family, not erase them.
Communicate openly with the parent: Share information about the child’s daily life—struggles as well as successes. Absent parents cannot respond to problems they do not know about. Being protective by hiding difficulties ultimately harms the child.
Seek support for yourself: Caregiving is exhausting, and grandparents especially may neglect their own needs. Connect with other grandparent caregivers, access community resources, and acknowledge your own grief and stress.
Maintain boundaries: You are the guardian, not the replacement parent. Some decisions should wait for parental input. Children need to maintain their relationship with their parent, which requires leaving room for that relationship rather than fully substituting for it.
Part 7: What Society Owes—Policy Recommendations
Recognizing Left-Behind Children as a Policy Category
Philippine policy has long focused on protecting OFWs abroad while facilitating their deployment. This worker-centered focus neglects the family system that OFW migration depends on and affects.
Left-behind children deserve recognition as a distinct population requiring targeted support—not as a side effect of migration but as a central concern of migration policy. This means:
Systematic data collection: The government should track how many children have migrant parents, where they are, who cares for them, and how they are doing—educationally, psychologically, and economically. Current data is fragmentary and outdated.
Interagency coordination: Multiple agencies touch left-behind children—DepEd, DSWD, DMW, LGUs—but none owns responsibility for them. A coordinating body should integrate services and ensure no child falls through bureaucratic cracks.
Earmarked resources: A portion of OFW-generated revenue—whether through fees, taxes, or other mechanisms—should fund services for left-behind children. Those who benefit from OFW labor have some obligation to those who bear its costs.
Recommendations for the Department of Education
Train teachers: All teachers in high-migration areas should receive training on identifying and supporting children affected by parental absence. This should be part of standard professional development, not optional.
Expand guidance services: Counselor-to-student ratios must improve, especially in OFW-heavy schools. Lay counselors, peer support programs, and community partnerships can supplement professional staff.
Facilitate parent engagement: Technology exists to include absent parents in their children’s education—shared grade access, video parent-teacher conferences, digital homework supervision tools. Schools should actively facilitate this engagement.
Support caregivers: Schools can offer training for grandparents and other guardians on educational support, homework help, and navigating school systems. Evening sessions, accessible materials, and patient outreach can bridge generational and educational gaps.
Track outcomes: Schools should collect and analyze data on left-behind children’s academic performance, graduation rates, and wellbeing indicators—enabling evidence-based policy and identifying children who need additional support.
Recommendations for Social Services
Strengthen DSWD family support: The Department of Social Welfare and Development should establish dedicated programs for families with OFW members—counseling, crisis intervention, financial management training, and caregiver support.
Regulate care arrangements: While avoiding punitive approaches, government should establish minimum standards for care arrangements and provide resources to help families meet them. Children should not be left in unsafe or unstable situations because no alternative exists.
Prepare for transitions: Services should support key transitions—parental departure, caregiver changes, parental return, reunification abroad. Each transition carries risks that preparation can mitigate.
Address elderly caregiver needs: Grandparent caregivers are often themselves in need of support—healthcare, financial assistance, respite care. Services for elderly caregivers benefit the children in their care.
Recommendations for OFW Policy
Pre-departure family preparation: Orientation seminars should include family preparation—helping workers establish communication plans, care arrangements, and financial structures before departure. Workers should understand the developmental needs of children at different ages.
Family communication support: The government could negotiate reduced communication costs with telecoms, facilitate internet access in remote areas, or provide subsidized communication tools for OFW families. Staying connected should not be a luxury.
Return and reintegration support: Services should support not just economic reintegration of returning OFWs but family reintegration—helping families reconnect after years of separation.
Consider migration alternatives: Where possible, policies should support domestic economic opportunities that reduce the need for family-separating migration. The best policy for left-behind children is reducing the number of children who are left behind.
Part 8: A Letter to the Left-Behind
If you are reading this and you grew up with a parent abroad—or you are growing up with one now—this section is for you.
Your feelings are valid.
Whatever you feel about your parent’s absence—anger, grief, gratitude, resentment, love, confusion, all of these at once—you are allowed to feel it. You do not owe anyone a particular emotion. You are not obligated to feel only grateful because your parent sacrificed for you. You are not wrong if you sometimes wish they had chosen differently.
It is not your fault.
Your parent did not leave because of you. They did not stay away because they do not love you. Economic forces, limited opportunities, the machinery of global labor migration—these shaped decisions that were never really about you. You did not cause the absence, and you could not have prevented it.
You are not alone.
Millions of Filipino children share your experience. You are not strange, not uniquely damaged, not the only one who lies awake wondering why things are this way. In your school, in your barangay, in your country, others understand what you feel because they feel it too.
Your experience shapes but does not define you.
Growing up with an absent parent affects who you become—but it does not determine who you become. You get to decide what your childhood means, what lessons you draw from it, how it influences your future choices. You are not a victim of your circumstances unless you choose to remain one.
It is okay to need help.
Struggling does not mean failing. Needing support does not mean weakness. Counselors, teachers, friends, community members—reach out. Therapy is not shameful; it is responsible. Talking about your experience is not complaining; it is processing. Ask for what you need.
Your relationship with your parent can evolve.
Whatever your relationship is now—close or distant, warm or strained, complicated or clear—it can change. As you grow, as your parent returns or retires, as circumstances shift, you have opportunities to build something new. The childhood you had is fixed; the relationship you build going forward is not.
You get to choose your own path.
You do not have to migrate. You do not have to stay. You do not have to follow your parent’s path or reject it absolutely. When you build your own family, you get to make your own choices about work, presence, and sacrifice. Learn from your parent’s choices without being imprisoned by them.
Final Thoughts: The Invisible Cost
Every day, parents board planes in Manila, Cebu, and Davao, heading to jobs that will keep them away from their children for years. They do this for their families—to provide opportunities they themselves never had, to build houses and fund educations, to give their children better lives.
This is love. Real, tangible, sacrificial love expressed through labor and remittances and years of loneliness.
But love at a distance is different from love that tucks you in at night. Money that arrives monthly is not the same as a parent who arrives when you call. Sacrifice for your future does not fill the space at the dinner table today.
The nine million Filipino children growing up with absent parents are not abstractions. They are kids in classrooms right now, wondering when Mom will call. They are teenagers making decisions without guidance. They are young adults trying to form relationships without models of daily parental presence. They are an entire generation shaped by the economic logic that says labor must flow to capital, even when the laborers leave their hearts behind.
The Philippines has benefited enormously from OFW remittances—the foreign currency that stabilizes the economy, the consumption that drives growth, the poverty reduction that migration enables. These benefits are real and should not be dismissed.
But benefits have costs. And costs that fall on children—who did not choose this arrangement, who cannot advocate for themselves, who bear consequences they barely understand—deserve attention, resources, and response.
We celebrate OFWs as heroes. We should also recognize their children as casualties—not to condemn the parents who leave, but to acknowledge the full human cost of a migration system that separates families by design.
These children deserve more than remittances. They deserve recognition. They deserve support. They deserve a society that sees them clearly and responds to what it sees.
They deserve to stop being invisible.
