What I don't understand: Why has this "sending money home" thing gone on for years? I can totally understand sending money when someone's in trouble -- Dad needs surgery, little brother needs help with tuition, sister wants to move into a bigger place because she just had twins -- but isn't sending money on a constant basis a bad idea? Wouldn't that money be better spent in helping the family relocate to a place where they wouldn't need constant handouts?
I'm thinking of the "give a man a fish" thing.
They see it differently. They see it as having the overseas worker provide the means for the entire next generation to learn to fish, instead of having the overseas worker grill up his catch and eat it himself while the rest of his family goes without.
First, family isn't just a nuclear parents-and-kids thing everywhere the way it is in many industrialized countries. When people talk about moving "the whole family" from the Philippines, that doesn't just mean the spouse and kids. It means means brothers, nieces, great-aunts, and possibly a dozen households in total. That's a lot of plane tickets, and a lot of mouths to feed until the others become employable, which could take a while for reasons I'll get to in a minute.
Second, even if you could wave a magic wand and transport family members across the sea, there's the issue of how to feed and house them once they arrive. A dollar in rural Luzon goes a lot farther than it does anywhere in Minnesota because of the exchange rate and because of the far lower cost of living in rural Luzon. Whereas half of a worker's income might barely feed the large extended family if they were in Minnesota (and forget about putting clothes on their backs or a roof over their heads), in Luzon it can comfortably support more than one household while covering the school fees of the next generation, who can be reasonably expected to have high-status, high-income occupations afterwards.
Third, the worker is holding up his end of a bargain. Where he came from, public education beyond the rudiments most likely wasn't free, and his family had to make huge sacrifices in order to make sure he learned English and got the kind of skills that led to him being employed on a cruise line or as an overseas worker. He may have benefited from an overseas-working aunt or cousin who went before him. But instead of paying that person back, the custom is to pay forward to the rest of the family. Someone worked so that he could have the opportunity to learn and earn, so it's his turn to provide for whoever is next in line.
Fourth, I mentioned earlier that there's a lot better bang for the buck when the buck is spent on people back in Luzon as opposed to people who migrate to a higher cost of living country, but because of the exchange rate it's very hard for the people back home to understand just how little purchasing power the overseas worker actually has. There's the misperception that the overseas worker is rich, but in reality it's not unusual for a family "back home" to be much more affluent if they save and invest at least some of what gets sent back. Many times, a family with an overseas worker uses the extra income to buy land, stock, or other income producing assets that (together with education) permanently improve the socio-economic class of the entire family. Everyone gets upwardly mobile.
Fifth, I mentioned earlier that it might take a while to become employable in a new country. Suppose a person reading this post was instantly transported to a country where he or she didn't speak or even read the language, and had to try to make a living surrounded only by, say, Farsi speakers. How easy would it be to practice your profession? You could be a surgeon, an engineer, or an airline pilot, but without communication skills you'll be lucky to get work scrubbing floors. So it makes far more sense to stay home and do what you were trained to do.
A lot of the people you see scrubbing floors have university degrees in other countries, but due to differences in the credential system they can't use their credential to get work here. While I was living in Alberta and working nights in an office, I was often used as an opportunity for speech practice by other night workers. It's because news got around that I liked to trade words. In exchange for a few words in Tagalog or Vietnamese I'd help with vocabulary in a language I spoke fluently. This made me far more approachable than most of the rest of the night shift, and the notion of trading words makes an impromptu lesson feel less like receiving charity. Thus I struck up an extended ongoing conversation with one of the janitors, who like many people from Vietnam used me from English practice but spoke fluent French. He was university educated and had an undergraduate pre-medical degree, but had settled in Alberta for family reasons and was going to school to get his high school equivalency diploma so he could qualify for a better job. Since English was his fourth language, one day he indicated that it was very frustrating to him to be treated as having never learned the basics when in reality he was more than qualified to teach the courses (except for the language barrier). Many of his friends and co-workers were in the same boat.
Naturally, I asked my co-worker why he didn't simply take the exam in French. He looked at me as if I'd hit him in the back of the head with a board, and asked whether that was actually possible. I told him I'd find out, but that the law required all provincial services to be offered in both French and English. The next day I called around during business hours and parlez-vous'ed a bit to make sure I had the facts straight and that the services could indeed be accessed through francophone-only channels. Then I collected the relevant addresses, prices, phone numbers, and business hours, and proudly handed them off to my buddy the next day with a sincere "bonne chance". He took the little piece of paper as though it was made of platinum and thanked me profusely. I never saw him again (never got the chance to say Tạm Biệt), but I like to think he went in and aced the test the next day, then left for greener pastures. Sadly, that option isn't available to most people who immigrate: they have to learn the language from scratch, and work substantially below their skill level in the meantime. Were they back in their native countries, they wouldn't be scrubbing floors because they'd be working in the professions for which they'd been educated. That's why so many people from overseas-worker economies stay home even after having been educated on a relative's time and dime.
Finally, there's the ubuntu concept. If you're used to thinking of yourself as a member of a much larger collective, then enriching yourself at the expense of everyone else's opportunities feels selfish and inappropriate, even if nobody ever overtly pressures you to feel that way. There's always one more kid to put through school, and that mentality applies regardless of whether you stay home or work abroad.
I'm not saying whether there's a right or wrong way of looking at it, I'm just presenting the point of view I had explained to me by people who were actually living the life.