Washington Monthly - September/October 2019 - 107

on political books

Around the World
in Forty Years
How one family's journey from the Philippines
to Texas tells the story of global migration.
By Colin Woodard

ander far enough into the mists of time and you'll find yourself in that unrecognizable place called the 1990s, where pundits celebrated the end of history and the increased speed of economic globalization, which promised to flood us all with milk and honey. The United States would lead a unipolar world. Europe would live in peace and harmony.
National boundaries would dissolve. Extremist ideologies were destined for extinction.
Now history is back, the U.S. is building walls and concentration camps on its borders, and a far-right backlash against liberal democracy has spread across the Western
world, from Viktor Orban's strongholds in the Buda Hills to the plains of northwest
Iowa, where Representative Steve King holds sway.
What happened?
There were seismic events, certainly, including the Bosnian conflict (which suggested that "the West" wasn't committed to defending liberal ideals, even in the heart of
Europe); the September 11 attacks (which disabused Americans of their post-Cold War
sense of invulnerability); and the 2008 financial collapse (which discredited the liberal economic order). But playing out in the background for the past quarter century has
been that corollary of increased economic globalization: the cross-border movement of
people at an unprecedented scale, a phenomenon that has served as a stress test of Western popular commitment to liberalism. It's a test that many societies don't appear to be
passing. Britain voted to leave the European Union in large part to put an end to the influx of Poles, Romanians, and other EU citizens from the East. The backlash to a flood
of Syrian and Iraqi war refugees paved the way for the xenophobic far right to enter the
German parliament. The end of race-minded immigration policies in the United States
in 1965 has made for a more vibrant and cosmopolitan country, but also fueled a nativist
counter-reaction that lifted an authoritarian-minded ethno-nationalist to the presidency of our nation of immigrants. Never, therefore, has it been so important to understand
migrants, not just as an aggregate force transforming the world, but as fellow humans
striving to protect and provide for their families.
It's our good fortune that Jason DeParle, a George Polk Award-winning reporter for
the New York Times, embedded with a family of Manila slum dwellers thirty-three years
ago and has kept contact with them ever since, even as he covered poverty and migration
around the world. DeParle's decades-long friendship with the Portagana clan enabled
him to do something remarkable in his new book, A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: tell
the story of global migration through the experiences of a single migrant family over
three generations in intimate, often eyewitness detail. It's a journey that starts in a oneroom shanty open to rats and rain and ends on a cul-de-sac in a newly constructed Texas City subdivision. Their story will leave you better understanding how the world works
today and where we're likely headed.

A Good Provider Is One
Who Leaves: One Family and
Migration in the 21st Century
by Jason DeParle
Viking, 400 pp.

Washington Monthly

107

Washington Monthly - September/October 2019

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