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

• Date: 01 September 2019
• Author: Woodard, Colin

Wander 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...