“I dream of a better future to help my mother, to give her back all she gave to me…”: social mobility projects, the family and other det

Abstract

The migration of children has caught the attention of the social science research community in recent years. The institutional treatment of unaccompanied children in European host societies has been widely discussed as it concerns a social actor combining several legal profiles: that of an unprotected child and that of an irregular migrant. This paper aims at presenting the results of the research work conducted between 2010 et 2015 with unaccompanied children fostered in the child protection services system of the Autonomous Community of Galicia in Spain. By applying a combined methodology and a multi-site ethnographical field survey, the study has drawn upon different members of children’s kinship networks and key informants to discover the pre-migration determinants and relational processes that are involved in children's migration projects. The study reveals how the combined effects of different social actors and public policies influence and determine the framing and results of a child’s migration process, normally leading to segmented incorporation within the host society.