Keeping Family Compact: Filipino Immigrants' Experience

Migration is usually a family strategy for the survival and better wellbeing of its members; yet, the process of migration and integration often generates unique and challenging environments and conditions that make it hard to keep family system compact. Following the family system theory, this empirical study examines the dynamics of immigrant family system. Qualitative data are collected from the Pilipino community in Winnipeg, Canada. Mainly, we have found that despite the nuclear family definition and practice in Canada, Pilipino immigrants follow their original norms and rules of extended family and kinship. They adopt innovative strategies, such as “ fictive kin”, to preserve and strengthen their family system and its functions, keep ordinary exchanges of material and emotional resources among its members in the context of family transnational migration and cross-cultural integration.