Delayed, deferred and dropped out: geographies of Filipino-Canadian high school students

Abstract

Models representing the assimilation of post-Second World War immigrants to North America use the academic achievement of children of first-generation immigrants as a benchmark of social mobility. Filipino youths in Canada fall short of this benchmark – they neither meet nor exceed their parents’ academic achievements. While concern with outcomes is a useful starting point, I suggest that there is a need to interrogate how and where students are produced as different. To do this, I attend to the geographies in the narratives of youths gathered from Filipino high school students in Vancouver (unceded Coast Salish Territories). I examine how they negotiate the spaces of transnational migration, their lives as students and spaces where their educational trajectories are deferred and delayed. I argue that the geographies of transnational migration and family should be held together with spaces of the school and education when considering academic outcomes.

Keywords:

• youth
• high school
• transnationalism
• education
• English as a second language
• Filipino-Canadian

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge and thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. Thanks to Dr Geraldine Pratt for her expertise in assisting with the research and careful comments on drafts of this paper. Thanks as well to Dr Johanna Waters who provided insights on the conference paper that formed the basis for this article. Thanks also to Leah Diana, Wesley Attewell, and Jenny Francis for their constructive input on earlier drafts of the manuscript and to Maureen Mendoza for her diligent work as a research assistant. I am also grateful to Maureen, Rene Nicolas, and Joy Jose for their discerning input on propositions I put forward in this article. Any shortcomings are my responsibility. Finally, I offer special thanks to all those who participated in the project.

Notes

1. While the academic achievement of Filipino-Canadian high school students in Vancouver aligns with the achievements of Filipino youth in other major Canadian cities and the anomaly of Filipino-Canadian youths’ less-than-expected levels of educational achievement and stalled mobility, there remains room to interrogate these patterns in specific settings.

2. The LCP is a temporary foreign worker programme of Citizenship and Immigration Canada. Live-in caregivers provide care for the children, elderly, or persons with disabilities of Canadian families. They are required to migrate without their immediate dependents. They are also required to both live and work in private homes under a temporary work permit before they are eligible to apply for permanent residency. In 2015, the live-in requirement of the programme was removed by the federal government. The programme is now known as the Caregiver Program.

3. As Rodriguez (2010) points out, the Philippine state invests significant resources to create and manage one of the world's largest pools of migrant labour. In the neoliberal global economy, the Philippines has emerged as one of the world's most important labour-sending countries (Parreñas 2005; Rodriguez 2002). Rodriguez (2010) proposes that various apparatuses of the state in cooperation with private interests work to ensure a steady supply of pliable and disciplined migrant labour (mainly female) to richer industrialised countries.

4. The FDM was replaced by the LCP in 1992. The introduction of the FDM in 1982 saw the Philippines emerge as the predominant source country for temporary domestic workers to Canada (Macklin 1992).

5. Pseudonyms are used for all project participants.

6. Prior to 2012, teenagers in the Philippines typically graduated at the age of 16, after completing four years of high school. In 2012, the Philippine government introduced a 'K to 12' programme designed to provide kindergarten and 12 years of basic education – making the Philippine education system more inline with North American educational programmes. In Canada, students typically graduate at the age of 17 or 18, after completing five years of high school. Laya was 16 years old when she graduated from high school in the Philippines and entered post-secondary education. Post-secondary education in the Philippines varies in length, depending on the programme, but, on average, it takes four years to earn an undergraduate degree.

7. There are various reasons for such a lengthy reunification time. For example, even before their children's migration to Canada, the women must pay $150 per child under 22 years of age to apply for their child's PR visa. Not only is family reunification delayed, but the youths’ educational advancement is also delayed in the Philippines for pragmatic reasons, such as the need for their mothers to save the money for application fees which might otherwise be used for their children's college tuition fees.

8. Slang word for Filipino.

9. If a student in the province of British Columbia public high school does not fulfil the requirements to graduate before he or she turns 19 years old, they may complete the requirements and earn a high school diploma through an Adult Education Centre. See http://www.vsb.bc.ca/adult-education-centres for more details.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Metropolis British Columbia [grant number 12R63475].