Ian Nillas scans Pearson International Airport.

“Do you recognize anyone?” a stewardess from his flight asks the eleven-year-old.

Ian shakes his head. He hasn’t seen much of the world outside of Pagadian, in the southern Philippines, and the crowd in the terminal is intimidating. He tightens his grip on the stewardess’s hand.

He’s dressed in the best outfit he owns — green sneakers, a green T-shirt, and green polyester pants — all purchased with money his mother has earned as a nanny in Toronto. “I’m not sure my mom will know me,” he tells the stewardess. He fingers the sign he’s wearing around his neck: “If found, please deliver to 1515 Lakeshore Road East.”

“Ian?” A woman approaches. “It’s me, Mom.” She, too, is dressed head to toe in one colour, orange. Her black hair, once sleek, is now curly.

Ian and his mother, Lyn, ask each other a few polite questions as they speed along Highway 401 in her station wagon: “What’s the weather been like?” “How was your flight?” “Do I get my own bedroom?” But before long, the two sit in silence.

Almost fifteen years later, this is how Nillas remembers his first moments in Canada — a painful experience common to the thousands of children reunited with the mothers (and some fathers) who came to this country before them to work as domestic caregivers. Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s live-in caregiver program is unique in the world, in that it allows participants to apply for permanent residency after two years’ employment. Only then, however, can they sponsor their children to join them, a process that generally takes several more years. By then, the children barely know their mothers, and they tend not to fare well.

Geraldine Pratt, a University of British Columbia geography professor who has conducted some of the limited research in Canada on caretakers’ kids, explains: “These children are first abandoned by their mothers; then they’re plucked from the grasp of those relatives caring for them and brought to a new country, a new climate, a new language, and into the arms of a stranger. They end up feeling a huge amount of anger and resentment.”

I met with Nillas in his tidy bachelor apartment in one of the series of high-rises that make up St. James Town, a low-income neighbourhood in downtown Toronto. The complex used to be dominated by Jamaicans, who were for decades Canada’s main source of domestic labour, their kids dubbed “barrel children,” after the containers in which goods were shipped home. The fact that Filipinos now far outnumber Jamaicans is evidenced by a bulletin board in the lobby that’s plastered with advertisements in Tagalog, including one for a remittance centre where nannies can send home a portion of their cheques.

“I was a badass for a long time,” Nillas says, puffing on a du Maurier Light. The alienation he felt in his new home with Lyn was reproduced at the local elementary school, where the former straight A student was made to repeat fifth grade. “The kids would yell at me at recess, ‘Go home, immigrant,’ ” he says. “God, if only I could have.” Lyn transferred him to a school with a large Filipino population, and he began to make friends and do well. But by then she’d quit nannying to get an accounting degree and was juggling three jobs. Nillas rarely saw her, and when he did they’d argue. “As our relationship deteriorated, so did my marks,” he says.