Jason DeParle, "A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves"

Jason DeParle discusses his book, "A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves", at Politics and Prose.

DeParle, an award-winning reporter for The New York Times, chronicled the realities of poverty and welfare through the lives of three Black women in his acclaimed American Dream. Taking a similarly intimate approach to immigration, his new book follows three generations of a Filipino family. The Comodas lived in the Manila slums when DeParle first met them thirty years ago. The middle daughter became a nurse, but the price of escaping poverty was leaving home—first to work in Abu Dhabi, then in Texas. As DeParle chronicles her difficulties getting visas, her long separation from her children, and her hard work, he sketches the complex cultural, economic, and personal upheavals of migration.

Jason DeParle, an Emerson Fellow at New America, is a reporter for The New York Times and has written extensively about poverty and immigration. His book, American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Helen Bernstein Award from the New York City Library. He is a recipient of the George Polk Award and is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

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Produced by Tom Warren