Even at a very young age, I was already exposed to the deskilling and deprofessionalization faced by many Filipino immigrants coming to Canada. Both my mother and my father, despite over a decade of professional experience in their respective fields (healthcare and wastewater engineering, respectively), had to either retake training and/or educational programs that they have already acquired in the Philippines upon landing in Canada. I can still recall my mother working three different low-wage retail jobs while studying at George Brown College in Toronto. They were ultimately successful, but the experience demonstrated that the issues of deskilling and deprofessionalization are issues that touch upon many Filipinos in Canada, especially the students that May Farrales interviewed in this publication. For researchers that endeavour to better understand how deskilling and deprofessionalization play a role in the Filipino Canadian community’s educational and labour outcomes, this publication can be incorporated in their literature review, especially if the reviews seeks out literature that both incorporates minors as subjects in their research and explores educational structures that are pertinent to the Filipino Canadian community.

Rather than looking at the effects of transnational migration (and the subsequent family separation) and educational policies in isolation, Farrales decided to essentially amalgamate both in the belief that both play distinct and separate, but otherwise collaborative roles in causing less-than-expected educational outcomes for immigrant Filipino high school students. Many Filipino students that she interviewed can attest that the prolonged visa processing time occurring in conjunction with their studies in the Philippines, alongside the structure of English as a Second Language classes that they were assigned to once they have landed in Vancouver, were factors that had a negative impact on their educational experiences, whether that was through their perceptions of the structure, their own performances, or even their own selves. This is one of many anecdotal instances exhibiting the nature Philippines’ Labour Export Policy and Canada’s immigration policies such as the Live-In Caregiver program, where such policies facilitate the mass migration of skilled workers and students outside the Philippines to a country where their skills and qualifications immediately get devalued, and go through an education system that produces less-than-desirable educational outcomes. The effects are even more pronounced with children of immigrants coming from the Live-In Caregiver Program (where Filipinos make up the majority of the program) and related channels, as Farrales noted. 

Farrales did note that her choice of the two schools for her publication were based on both their high Filipino demographic, as well as the permissions granted to her by both schools’ administrations. Farrales also noted that there has been debates surrounding how much agency researchers should give to children and high school-aged students, and therefore attempted to strike a balance between not holding students to account for the systems that forced them into their current conditions, and not merely dismissing those students as passive objects in those systems. With that said, there were two considerations that I would’ve added in her follow-ups. Firstly, she mentions the potential of exploring other ways students navigate their everyday lives at school, in the educational system, and beyond the physical school site. While I am inclined to believe that the aforementioned educational and migration policies played a role in her interviewees’ educational outcomes, I would also like to know if the schools’ spatial relations also played a role in that. What are the physical and demographic characteristics of the neighbourhoods that the schools are situated in? What are the commuting patterns of their students? Are there nearby services that can help immigrants integrate, and how effective are they? These are important questions that could be addressed in a follow-up to this matter. Secondly, as Farrales has acknowledged that the small sample size was a limitation to her research, if she were to conduct a follow-up research, how would she have implemented her interview design differently? Would implementing less-rigid research structures and embedding more culturally-oriented activities attract more interviewees? With the availability of more electronic methods such as Zoom, would that have increased the sample size? Such follow-up efforts will be needed to, if not change broad policies entirely, at the very least, equip educational workers with better tools to help Filipino students attain better educational outcomes and, as a consequence, better upward mobility.