Unfortunately, if he were to leave New York, Luis will no longer afford to send his children to school. He says that no matter how much he works in Ecuador, he would not be able to provide for his family as well as he would if he stayed apart from them.
“I want to give them the best that I can, I want to give them the things that I didn’t have,” he says. I am starting to think that the love of a father can be much more valuable to them than material things.”
Luis’s situation is not at all uncommon in the migrant worker community. Workers like Luis leave their families behind in their home countries to provide money for education and necessities. Many of them work seven days per week to maximize the amount that they can send back through remittance agencies.