Families Apart: Long-term Implications of Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program for Filipino Migrant Workers and their Families

Canada’s Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP) is one of Canada’s largest and oldest temporary foreign worker programs. Throughout the first decade of the new millennium, the program grew four-fold, in line with a more general national and global expansion in temporary foreign worker programs. The majority of those coming through the LCP are Filipino women, part of a vast labour diaspora of over nine million Filipinos working in roughly 200 countries. An unusual feature of the LCP is the opportunity it affords to migrate permanently to Canada if the worker completes 24 months of live-in care-work within a 48-month period. In 2010 the Philippines displaced China and India to become Canada’s top immigration source country; by 2009 40 percent of Filipinos migrating to Canada came through the LCP. I report on research carried out in collaboration with the Philippine Women Centre of BC that documents the long-term effects of this program on Filipino families settling permanently in Canada, with a special focus on the challenges faced by Filipino youths reuniting with the mothers in Vancouver.