Filipino-Canadian youth struggle with family separation, poverty and high drop-out rates

Many immigrants come to Canada dreaming of a better life, but for many Filipino-Canadians what lies ahead is a downward trend over generations when it comes to education levels and income.

By Dyan Ruiz

Filipinos immigrate to Canada from their struggling Pacific island home dreaming of a better life for themselves and their children. But for generations of Filipino-Canadians, what lies ahead is not the dream they sought.

The stresses of immigration including family separation, poverty and difficulties in the school system are often the source of young Filipino-Canadians’ hardships. Their settlement experiences are marked by years of family separation because parents immigrating to Canada as caregivers are barred from bringing their families. Other common experiences are centered on parents working in low-paying jobs radically different than their Philippine professional careers.

In 2010, the Philippines became the largest source country for immigrants to Canada. Toronto has the biggest concentration of Filipino-Canadians with over 170,000 living in the Census Metropolitan Area.

Caring for other people’s children but missing your own

The Owatan family suffered years of family separation. Teenagers, Ester, Janet and Joel spent 13 years apart from their mother while she worked as a nanny in Hong Kong, then the Toronto suburb of Oakville, Canada.

“It was really hard for me because she left when I was still two years old,” said 16-year-old Joel Owatan. “I just saw her when I was eight or something, so I cannot recognize her the first time I saw her,” he said, recounting his mother’s first two-week vacation to the Philippines from her job as a domestic worker in Hong Kong.

“The first time I went home, he didn’t even want to come close to me,” Jennifer Owatan said. She explained that it took two or three days and a lot of convincing from the rest of the family to explain to him that this is his mother.

One in four Filipino-Canadians immigrate to Toronto through the Live-in Caregiver Program which does not allow families to accompany the worker until the caregiver finishes his or her work requirement.

Caregivers are often nurses or teachers before they come to Canada through the immigration program that has nearly 90 percent of its applicants from the Philippines. The caregivers live and work in the homes of their Canadian employers taking care of their children and elderly family members while spending years apart from their own family.

By the time their family comes to Canada, the separation between the children and their parent can be anywhere from five years to over ten. Many caregivers, like Jennifer Owatan, have worked in another country before coming here. To qualify for family sponsorship to Canada, caregivers must work hours equivalent to two years of full-time work within a maximum of four years.

In many cases the maximum time is needed because they have to switch employers. Sometimes caregivers arrive in Canada to find the family that sponsored them already has a caregiver working for them, or the family no longer wants a caregiver. Some caregivers must leave abusive employers. The processing of sponsorship applications further delays family reunification.

Often it’s the mother who leaves, causing the children pain, confusion, and a loss of self-confidence, says Flor Dandal, the executive director of the Filipino settlement agency, Kababayan Community Centre. The centre has conducted surveys with high school students in Toronto where there are many Filipino-Canadian newcomers.

In exchange for being the main source of the family’s income, the mothers become distant memories and a voice on the phone. When the family is able to reunite and the children and husband finally arrive in Canada, reunification is awkward. Just like other immigrants, they must deal with adjusting to a new culture and language in a foreign land, but they must also deal with strained and distanced family relationships.

Last year, when Jen Owatan was finally able to live with her children for the first time in 13 years, she found that the happy reunion is not without hardship. She now works the night shift at Tim Hortons and continues to work as a domestic worker part-time. Her oldest two children, 19-year-old Ester and 17-year-old Janet, work at McDonald’s three of four days a week, and the youngest, Joel, cooks dinner nightly so his mother can nap before her shift.

All three children were put in high school grades two years less than their levels in the Philippines. They are unlikely to go to university because they were put in courses that streamed them away from that path. Ester Owatan says school staff did not tell her there was a difference between university and college, and the courses you need to get to university. As well, finances are tight and university tuition for three children on minimum wage salaries seems unlikely.

Doctors become baggage handlers, dentists become dental assistants

Whether they come as caregivers, a family member of a caregiver, or through another immigration stream, Filipinos come to Canada with educational attainment higher than the average immigrant and the average Canadian. Once here, Filipino-Canadians are also more likely to find and maintain work than other immigrants and Canadians.

But they likely work in low-wage jobs in hospitality, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing. They take on jobs to survive, to pay for rent and food. For years they make the best of these jobs, working hard to earn enough for their families. Their university degrees and experience from the Philippines often mean little to Canadian employers.

Benjamin Mendoza was a doctor in the Philippines before he came to Canada in 1989 when his father was dying. After his father died, Mendoza decided to see what life in Canada would hold for him because his mother and siblings were already living here.

He has never been able to work as a doctor in Canada, going from one survivor job to the next, and now works as a baggage handler at Air Canada. Mendoza’s wife, a dentist in the Philippines, was also unable to continue her profession, and is a dental assistant in Canada.

“We started going back to our professions, but it’s really hard. It’s like the dreams are shattered already,” says Benjie Mendoza about his and his wife’s experiences.

While the Mendozas worked 12 to 18 hour workdays, they always emphasized the importance of school to their daughters, Beverley and Diana. “Ever since I was young they drill it in my head that I have to go into something in medicine,” Beverley says. She rebelled as a teenager and skipped science courses. Consequently, her grades were not high enough to get into university, but she’s now enrolled to college as a nurse.

The downward trend

Filipino-Canadians are the most educated visible minority group immigrating to Canada, yet their children are graduating from Canadian universities at rates much lower than both their parents and other visible minority groups.

In fact, only about 20 to 30 percent of second generation Filipino-Canadian youth are graduating from university, even though over 40 percent of their parents came to Canada with university degrees. Filipino-Canadians are the only major visible minority group that shows a downward trend over generations when it comes to education levels and income, according to a recent study.

De-skilling is a common story among immigrants in Canada, but it’s particularly felt in the Filipino-Canadian community and the Live-in Caregiver Program is an almost exclusively Filipino-Canadian experience. Emerging statistics are showing the impact of these immigration experiences.

York University Professor Philip Kelly and other researchers in the Filipino Youth in Transitions project compiled data from the 2006 census and landing records of Citizenship and Immigration Canada to compare Filipino-Canadians’ education levels over generations with other major immigrant groups.

Other groups like Chinese-Canadians and South Asian-Canadians show “dramatic trends upward from the first generation to the second generation,” he said with graduation rates rising from between 20 and 30 percent in the first generation to a rate of 60 to 70 percent in the second generation. This lies in stark contrast to the downward mobility trend of Filipino-Canadians.

Kelly said these trends reflect how those groups are racialized in Canadian society and the types of immigration programs they have arrived through. For example, many Chinese-Canadians arrive through the business class of immigrants, and as a consequence arrive with much more money and mobility to upgrade their qualifications if need be.

Long-term effects of settlement

“The nature of the experience of the parents, the types of employment that they were integrated into, the type of deprofessionalization they experienced has echoes, implications for children,” said Kelly. “It has resonances across generations and the outcomes of their children as well, in terms of their education, and because of that, their long term employability.”

Newcomer service coordinator at the 519 Community Centre, Benjamin Bongolan said that the odds are stacked against Filipino-Canadian youth being able to achieve university degrees. “In terms of overall life chances, I would say it’s very rare,” Bongolan said. He is the only settlement worker that works with high school-aged Filipino-Canadian youth across both school boards in Toronto.

Many Filipino-Canadian youth live in low-income, high-crime areas, dubbed “high-priority neighbourhoods” by the City of Toronto. Bongolan said many are dropping out of high school and not pursuing university in favour of working to help support their family income. They often work in the same minimum wage jobs their parents work.

“It’s Canada’s immigration system that are failing Filipinos,” says Dandal. “The Canadian dream– they can only do as far as they can in terms of survival, still hoping that one day their grandkids or the next generation, will fulfill that dream.”