Ahmad Homidi's unassuming manner belies the turmoil he lived through as a child. He and his family fled the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, forcing his parents to start from scratch as refugees in the United States. He joined CISAC in 2011 as the administrative manager, after navigating the 2007 housing crash as the broker of a real estate firm.

His story is a study in fresh starts.

Homidi was a child in Afghanistan when the Soviet Union invaded his homeland. His parents were faced with a hard choice: His father could join the military and fight the invasion or the family could leave the country. Or his parents – already refugees from their native Uzbekistan – could once again look for a better life in another country.

"Fleeing the country meant you couldn't just walk into a bank and empty out your account," said Homidi. "It meant carrying whatever you could, physically, and leaving that night. Whatever mattress money my father had saved up, he took with him."

Homidi, at the time 4 years old, along with his parents, older brother and little sister, hid in military vehicles and tractors. Their father bribed officials to smuggle them across the border into Pakistan. Once there, they faced discrimination for their refugee status and his father had trouble finding work. After a year living in a Karachi apartment shared by several families, Homidi's father put out a lifeline to an old colleague in the United States.

"Fleeing the country meant you couldn't just walk into a bank and empty out your account. It meant carrying whatever you could, physically, and leaving that night."

His father remembered a professor with whom he had worked at a university in Beirut.

"With his funds depleted, he just wrote a letter addressed to 'Dr. Jerry Nielsen, Montana,’ and he put a stamp on it and he hoped and prayed that it actually reached him at Montana State University," Homidi said. "Lo and behold, it did.”

Dr. Nielsen sponsored the Homidi family for entry into the United States in 1982. They lived in Montana for several months before moving to the Bay Area, where a large Afghan expat community helped the Homidis get settled in Fremont. Homidi's father soon realized his foreign master's degree in agriculture and his former life as a professor and executive didn’t go far in America.

"At that point, he had the option to say, 'Things aren't going to work out here. We'll just have a meager existence,' or he could say, 'I have to rebuild myself,'" Homidi said of his father. "He chose to rebuild himself."

Homidi's father worked three jobs while putting himself through school, and successfully pulled his family into the American middle class. Homidi credits his own strong work ethic to his father's unwavering determination to earn his way in America.

Homidi's father had the option to say, "'Things aren't going to work out here. We'll just have a meager existence.' He chose to rebuild himself."

Homidi had ambition and wanted a fulfilling job in a competitive environment. This led him to his first career in real estate.

"The allure of working on commission was something I thought made sense: the harder you work and the smarter you work, the more money you can make,” he said. “So in 1999 I got into real estate while supporting myself through college."

After graduating from San Jose State University with a business degree, Homidi joined another real estate firm as office manager. Over the next five years, he helped grow the company from one Bay Area office with 45 agents to six offices across California with more than 200 agents. He rose within the company and, when the firm was sold, took over one office as head broker.

Homidi was leading that firm when the housing market collapsed in 2007. In 2010, when he found that most of his new business was from the very banks foreclosing on homes, he knew it was time to get out. He decided to scale back the firm when he saw his employees struggling to sell houses, and did his best to help them find other jobs.

"I saw myself as helping families achieve their dreams of homeownership and prosperity. That was one of the main rewards of the business," he said of the pre-crash years. "Never did I imagine I would one day be kicking people out of their homes. I knew right then and there that this was no longer what I wanted to do."

With his interest in international affairs, sparked by his family background, he jumped at the opportunity to join CISAC in 2011 as a fixed-term staffer.

"I'm struck by what we do, and the scale that we do it at," he said. "I am very fortunate to work in such an amazing environment, to be around the people that we're working with and collaborating with in different ways, it's pretty amazing."

Homesickness, long hours, and demanding employers—many Filipinos who migrate to another country for temporary employment make personal sacrifices and face daunting working conditions.

To their family members receiving much-needed supplemental income and to the Philippine government bolstering its foreign reserves, they are the “new heroes.” Remittances from Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), as they are officially called, are now the country’s second largest source of foreign reserves, beating out foreign direct investment in terms of percentage of GDP. The government has even established an annual award to honor its most distinguished OFWs.

Marjorie Pajaron, the current Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow in Developing Asia, has been studying the significant economic benefit of OFW remittances to Philippine families and to the economy. She spoke recently with Shorenstein APARC about her research, which she will present at a seminar on May 9.

How many people from the Philippines are going abroad for temporary employment, and where are they finding work?

In 2008, OFWs numbered 2 million—representing 2 percent of the country’s total population. Fifty-one percent of these migrants were male, and 49 percent were female. Twenty percent went to Saudi Arabia; 14 percent to the Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Qatar, and Taiwan; 9 percent to Europe; and 8 percent to North and South America.

Where OFWs work depends on gender, education, and the type of employment. Many men go to the Middle East for construction-, mining-, and oil-related jobs. Women tend to go to Southeast and East Asia for caretaking and domestic jobs. In North America, most Filipino migrants work in professional jobs, including as nurses, doctors, and as other types of healthcare workers.

What is the “typical” profile of an Overseas Filipino Worker?

It often depends on the type of job. Healthcare professionals, for example, tend to be younger because they go abroad directly after graduation. Most of the nursing schools in the Philippines are linked to hospitals in the United States or Europe.

In general, overseas workers range from recent graduates to the median working age, from approximately 20 to 45 years old. Because of the large fixed cost associated with temporary overseas employment, families that are better off or who have the means to raise funds are those that are able to send family members abroad.

Most OFWs come from Manila or the surrounding urban areas. In the study I conducted, only 17 percent of rural households could afford to send a family member abroad. Usually several village families will pool together their resources, with the informal agreement that they will be repaid.

On average, male migrant remittances equal twice the amount sent by female migrants, who more frequently work in unskilled positions. For example, a well-educated man working in the Middle East in the construction and transportation industries earns higher than a woman working in a domestic position in Singapore. Some OFWs are overqualified in terms of education, but because of economic opportunity they decide to work abroad.

Do remittances provide short- or long-term economic benefits for families?

The benefits are both short and long term. Remittances can provide immediate assistance as needed, such as rebuilding after a natural disaster. From a longer-term perspective, many remittances in the Philippines go toward education, which is a form of human capital investment. Many families also invest in real estate, buying houses and land, and they also purchase durable goods, such as cars and appliances.

How do remittances benefit the country’s economy?

After exports, foreign remittances are actually the second largest source of foreign reserves in the Philippines. In 2006, remittances ranked even higher than foreign direct investment in terms of percentage of GDP. Some scholars have conjectured that OFWs have helped close the gap between the poor and the wealthy in the Philippines by contributing to a growing middle class. This is why migrant workers are called the “new heroes.” They sacrifice a lot by working in what are often unfavorable conditions. Because of the system of helping their families, they are also helping the entire country.

In your research, you have also looked at how rural farmers cope with natural disasters. What motivated you to study this issue, and what have you found based on recent years?

Farmers are the poorest of the poor in the Philippines, and since the country is in the Pacific Ring of Fire it is frequently hit by natural disasters, including earthquakes, typhoons, and drought. Filipino farmers are very vulnerable because most cannot afford to install irrigation. Instead, they have to depend on rain and their crops are continually susceptible to changes in the weather. There is limited government assistance available to them, and they do not have any formal insurance. In addition, they cannot take out loans because they do not have the collateral. So, I have been looking at how they survive after a natural disaster. The only possible explanation is that they depend on their networks of family and friends.

I had expected to find that they also depend on their family members abroad, but I have discovered that very few have been able to send relatives abroad in the first place. So this cannot be considered a reliable source of support. Instead, they seem to mainly rely on family members who have migrated to Manila and other cities.

There is much more work to be done on this issue. Studying how rural residents survive is important given they have limited access to formal credit, capital, and insurance markets; and government aid and transfers may also be limited or non-existent.

Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellow Jaeeun Kim’s dissertation Colonial Migration and Transborder Membership Politics in Twentieth-Century Korea has won the American Sociological Association's Theda Skocpol Award in the area of comparative and historical sociology.

Jeremy M. Weinstein, an associate professor of political science and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, received the Karl Deutsch Award from the International Studies Association (ISA).

The award recognizes scholars younger than 40 - or within 10 years of defending their dissertation - who have made the most significant contributions to the study of international relations and peace research.

Weinstein, 37, focuses his research on civil wars and political violence; ethnic politics and the political economy of development; and democracy, accountability, and political change. He is the Ford Dorsey Director of Stanford’s Center for African Studies and is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

He was presented with the award on April 4 by ISA, which promotes research and education in international affairs.

Other Stanford researchers who received the award include Michael Tomz (2011), Kenneth A. Schultz (2003), and James D. Fearon (1999).