 I'm writing about the rise of global migration, and I'm telling the story through an extended family of Filipino workers who've traveled all over the globe in pursuit of jobs. As a young journalist, 25 years ago, I had a fellowship to live in the Philippines, and I moved into a poor neighborhood in Manila and lived with a family. There were five kids in the family. The father was away in Saudi Arabia working on a labor contract for two years. He would go away, come back home every two years, visit for a few months, and go back. There were five kids in the family, and all five kids grew up to become overseas workers like their father. So what they thought was a temporary solution or an emergency solution to their poverty became a way of life for this family and for literally millions of Filipinos who are perhaps the most globalized labor force in the world. I'm trying to use the journey of this one family to help explore the rise of migration across the world. A lot has changed since the father and this family first went overseas. One is, it's not just the fathers that go anymore, there's been a feminization of migration increasingly throughout the extended family, which includes 40-something cousins. It's the women who go. Many of them have kids that are left behind in the care of grandparents or siblings or makeshift arrangements. So one of the issues that comes up in the Philippine context and increasingly across the world is the separation of mothers and children and what that ends up doing to the relationship to the kids' well-being, what happens to the kids left behind. Another thing that's really different from the time the father went is the technology. When he went to Saudi Arabia initially in the early 1980s, he would record cassette tapes and send them home. It would take a month for the tape to get back. Everybody would gather around and listen. They'd record a tape, send it back. So it could take two months to get an answer to a question. Phone calls were prohibitively expensive. Now the entire clan is linked by Facebook and the news travels instantly across the globe. So they're hyperlinked. I think alters the experience for the migrant of being abroad, but it also promotes migration because one of the things you need for migration to start a migration network to be sustained is information and the effect of this technology is to let everybody know as soon as there's a job opportunity, it plants the idea of becoming a migrant. So it both encourages and transforms the experience of migration. We're in the midst of one of the greatest migrations in the history of the United States. There's 40 million immigrants in the U.S., one out of four children in the U.S. is either an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. Immigrants are coming from very different places than they've come from in the past. They're coming from across the developing world. They're going to many different places than they've gone to in the past. It's not just the traditional gateways like New York and San Francisco, but they're spread out to small towns and to places that aren't used to having them. So immigration is transforming the United States, but we tend to think of it as a quintessentially American issue, a product of our unique history, a product of our unique border with a poor country 2,000 miles long. What was a kind of a journey of discovery for me in going overseas was to see just how ubiquitous migration had become. People were migrating from poor countries, but also migrating to poor countries. They're migrating to non-traditional countries. Migration isn't just changing the United States, it's changing the world. I think you can't really understand both the challenges and the opportunities that migration presents to the United States unless you can step back and see it in its global context. It's the third great wave of globalization. We had the movement of goods trade across borders, we had the movement of money, international finance across borders, and we have the movement of people across borders. I think it's a help to see it in that broader context.