Unaccompanied Child Migrants Research Articles

‘I wish I had listened and not come to South Africa’: fantasies, expectations and trajectories of migration among Ethiopian unaccompanied child migrants into South Africa

ABSTRACT Migration studies often focus on the socio-political and economic factors that drive people to migrate, overlooking the fantasies and processes involved in actualising the journey. This paper examines unaccompanied Ethiopian child migrants in South Africa, using the concept of fantasy to understand the preparatory processes of migration and their realisation. It argues that fantasies of future expectations and self-enhancement propel individuals into virtual fantasy worlds that can lead to physical migration. This study contributes to the migration literature by exploring the fruitful yet limited role of fantasies and expectations in the complex and multi-phased phenomenon of migration.

The Formative Intersections of “Race”, Nation, and Generation: Learning from “Care” in the Lives of Unaccompanied Child Migrants in England

This article explores how “race”, nation, and generation intersect to make and mark the category of “unaccompanied minor” in Britain, thereby shaping conditions of care for unaccompanied child migrants. Drawing on interviews with unaccompanied children and adult professionals, we trace how discourses of the unchildlike and unknowing child render unaccompanied children undeserving of support. We demonstrate how these discourses embedded in neo-colonial and generational logics breed inaction from adult professionals, often resulting in substandard or absent care. Our article contributes to conceptualizations of childhood in contexts of rising ethnonationalism, attending to how “race”, nation, and generation roost in the routine.

Reflecting on participation’s promises: Insights from collaborative research about unaccompanied child migrants, care, and the UK’s hostile immigration regime

Engaging with critiques of participatory research’s transformative claims, in this article, co-researchers from the Children Caring on the Move project critically reflect on experiences of doing research together. Our dialogue considers how the project’s motivating ethos of ‘nothing about us, without us’ permeated the research, to offer insights about the value, challenges, and practice of participatory research. Relations of care and building collective outlooks have helped to generate knowledge aimed at challenging hostile border regimes within and beyond spaces of research.

The commodification of unaccompanied child migration: A double move of enclosure

In England, unaccompanied child migrants who seek asylum are the responsibility of the local state, who acts as their ‘corporate parent’. While these young people are ostensibly supported by children’s services in keeping with responsibilities under the Children’s Act 1989, in comparison to ‘local’ children unaccompanied children are disproportionately placed in unregulated, outsourced accommodation. Drawing on data from the Children Caring on the Move research project – including over 180 interviews with unaccompanied young people, frontline workers, accommodation owners and policy makers – I argue that this part of the care system can be understood as a double move of enclosure. First, I argue that claims about the unpredictability of arrivals of unaccompanied children are used as a rationale for the marketisation of children’s services, part of an enclosure of what was previously public. Second, I point to the enclosure, and commodification, of unaccompanied children themselves. They not only become a source of profit in this enclosed sector through their statuses as ‘child’ and ‘unaccompanied migrant’, but the limited forms of support provided in outsourced and unregulated provision make it more difficult for many to regularise their status before being subject to enforced destitution or deportability as non-citizen adults. The article contributes to efforts to theorise contemporary processes of enclosure in racial capitalism, adds to understandings of the UK’s ‘asylum market’ which to date has focused almost primarily on adult or family migrants, and sheds new light on causalities of care in the UK’s marketised and bordered children’s services.

Protection of unaccompanied child and adolescent migrants in Catalonia: Inhabited places, occupied places or non-places?

Summary In response to the so-called “refugee crisis,” the Catalan regional government set up experimental services for children migrating without guardians, with the explicit aim of safeguarding their rights. With their continued arrival, however, overcrowding in the facilities and the youths’ educational and life prospects have become topics of fierce debate. This article investigates whether young migrants can live in the educational centers that host them. Basing ourselves on the distinction between occupying and living in a place, we call into question the conditions of non-life that, from the educational perspective, the reception system offers migrant youth. A qualitative study was undertaken to gather and triangulate the views of the young migrants ( n = 42), and that of their social educators ( n = 15), and of the management of the reception centers ( n = 2). Findings Despite efforts to put in place policies affording quality attention, a series of contradictions cause the system to favor the homogenization of outcomes rather than adequately acknowledging and addressing the youths’ individual needs. This added to the lack of resources mobilized, has yielded the result that the system that supposedly provides protection for minors, rather than being a lived-in place, has become a classical example of a non-occupied space. Applications Providing a habitable place depends on the pedagogical commitment of social educators and managers to offering these children the chance to build emotional ties with the center, so that it may become a proper place in the world despite the bureaucratic and structural hurdles.

Analysing the Lived Experiences of Undocumented and Unaccompanied Child Migrants from Zimbabwe to South Africa

Zimbabwe’s socio-economic crisis post-2000 led to the emergence of new forms of livelihoods. Long- and short-term migration emerged as a survival strategy for over a million Zimbabweans who moved legally and illegally to countries such as South Africa, England, Botswana, Namibia, Canada and Australia. While migration in Zimbabwe has mainly been an adult pursuit, post-2000, there has been an increasing number of unaccompanied child migrants. Zimbabwean unaccompanied child migrants in South Africa provide important insights into how the socio-economic rights of children are central to understanding child migration. This article focuses on the lived experiences of undocumented and unaccompanied child migrants from Zimbabwe living in South Africa. It utilises a desk research approach to analyse how the socio-economic rights of child migrants are experienced in Zimbabwe and South Africa. Both states have failed to meet their national and international obligations to protect child migrants. The article highlights various forms of abuse undocumented child migrants from Zimbabwe experience in South Africa. The article concludes that both local and international law in South Africa fails to provide a balance between the competing interests of child protection and child autonomy.

The Hidden Costs of Unaccompanied Child Migration

Abstract Dramatic reductions in refugee resettlement numbers, restrictions on asylum access and growing externalisation of humanitarian protection have significantly curtailed legal migration pathways for distress migrants. This continues to be the case despite well-established international legal obligations requiring states to protect humanitarian migrants and afford children, in particular, a series of protective procedures. We argue that unaccompanied child migrants are disproportionately disadvantaged by these restrictive measures because other avenues for legal migration – for work, for family reunification, for educational and cultural activities – are generally not open to them. As restrictions increase, unaccompanied children adopt self-initiated, challenging strategies to pay the significant costs of the journeys they embark on, a departure from more linear, “traditional” trajectories towards safety. This article presents qualitative data collected in Greece, site of the largest European distress migrant arrivals in recent years, to discuss the growing cost of irregular mobility for unaccompanied children and the role that exploitation-funded earning plays in enabling their migrations today.

Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States

In Suffer the Little Children, Anita Casavantes Bradford, Associate Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies and History at the University of California, Irvine, examines the United States’ unaccompanied child migration policy from 1930 to 2020. Through a transnational, comparative, and relational approach, Casavantes Bradford addresses how governmental and non-governmental actors operating in different domestic and international contexts developed responses to a range of child migrants, including European Jewish and Protestant children; Hungarian youth; Cuban evacuees; Southeast Asian unaccompanied minors; former child soldiers; and Haitian, Mexican, and Central American children. Across seven chapters (and an epilogue) Casavantes Bradford articulates how “the United States’ response to unaccompanied child migrants has been consistently driven by a ‘geopolitics of compassion’ that selectively highlights U.S. benevolence toward suffering people outside the nation's borders while simultaneously prioritizing foreign policy and domestic political objectives over asylum seekers’ best interests” (p. 3). While acknowledging that Gil Loescher and John Scanlan as well as Carl Bon Tempo have previously noted this connection, Casavantes Bradford convincingly establishes the need to understand child migrants’ distinct treatment and experiences (pp. 3–4).Using clear and engaging prose, Casavantes Bradford's work is grounded in an extensive amount of research in federal archives, international and voluntary organization papers, university collections, and periodicals and government publications. The text also evinces the range of personnel involved in unaccompanied child migrant policy. Of note is an emphasis on adult, state perspectives, rather than those of children, which Casavantes Bradford deems necessary to underscore “the predominant role of the state in shaping the experiences of forced migrants of all ages” but particularly of children (p. 11). However, she is also careful to detail voluntary agencies’ contributions and the entrenchment of a “‘public-private’ bureaucratic infrastructure”—as well as child migrants’ role in this development (p. 7).One of Casavantes Bradford's strongest interventions is her discussion of unaccompanied child migrants as “individual rights-bearing subjects” who need specific protections (p. 9). This focus further distinguishes her argument from previous work on refugee policy and relates to her exploration of the concepts of “refugee” and “child” (contributions which will surely also be helpful for scholars of childhood). Adding yet more rigor to her analysis, Casavantes Bradford interrogates: “how did changing notions of refugees and children's rights interact with Americans’ shifting understandings of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, class, gender, and age over time?” (p. 9). She ultimately concludes that the failure to acknowledge children in this way “played a powerful and persistent role in shaping” the United States’ “treatment of unaccompanied minors” (p. 10).Especially important to this analysis is Chapter 6, “The Most Difficult Type of Refugee: Southeast Asian Unaccompanied Minors and the Reinvention of U.S. Refugee Policy, 1975–1989,” which addresses, in part, how this status came to be imperfectly recognized under law and in practice. Casavantes Bradford focuses here on unaccompanied Southeast Asian minors, including Vietnamese and Cambodian children who fled to countries of first asylum in the late 1970s. Connected to her discussion of these populations is the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act. Specifically, the Act provided for the formation of an unaccompanied refugee minor program under the purview of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (located within the Department of Health and Human Services), which “reflected and reinforced the belief that unaccompanied refugee minors were entitled to priority admissions as well as specific forms of care and protection” (pp. 185–86). However, the Act was flawed in guaranteeing this protection: it did not create child-specific standards “for determining whether children qualified for refugee status”; defined “‘unaccompanied’ . . . narrowly”; and did not “establish procedures for dealing with unaccompanied minors who arrived as part of a major refugee influx entering the country without pre-authorization” (p. 186). In practice, these factors, as well as the racist categorization of unaccompanied minors as “anchors” who enabled family migration, limited resettlement (pp. 188–89). In the epilogue, Casavantes Bradford contends that the United States must act further to reassess its treatment of asylum seekers and “codify the internationally accepted principle of children's best interests in . . . immigration law” (p. 225).Suffer the Little Children is a rich contribution to the literature on unaccompanied child migration and complements scholarship by Laura Briggs, Arissa Oh, and Allison Varzally. This text will certainly “serve as a catalyst and foundation for further studies” on child migrants, especially those centering child voices (p. 11). Future research could engage with the “politics of childhood” and unaccompanied minors’ politicization and political capacity—a concept Casavantes Bradford developed in her first monograph The Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959–1962 (2014). Suffer the Little Children will certainly appeal to scholars of immigration, political, and foreign relations history, childhood studies, critical refugee studies, and critical migration studies, as well as individuals wanting an explanation of the United States’ unaccompanied child migration policy.

Bordering through care and control: Policing and sheltering Central American migrant youth in Mexico

Despite rising numbers of unaccompanied child migrants in the Americas, very limited research directly engages with youth as they journey north to seek protection in the United States. In this article, we examine young Central American migrant experiences of bordering, focusing on policing and shelter management. Part of a wider binational, interdisciplinary, and multi-scalar research project along the Mexico-U.S. border, which began on the heels of Programa Frontera Sur, we draw on interviews and a participatory workshop with migrant youth, and complementary interviews with migration officials and shelter workers. Through the uniquely insightful accounts of children themselves, we show how care work in shelters and direct control via policing emerge as powerful and connected techniques of bordering. In these spaces of connected securitization and humanitarian management, children negotiate highly violent, emotional, and extra-legal interactions with officials. These include extortion, apprehension, aggression, confinement and deception, but also disciplinary forms of care and protection. Our findings deepen and complicate extant work on the humanitarian care/control nexus via our focus on, and direct research with, youth from Central America in Mexico. Their narratives make clear that state policies such as Programa Frontera Sur expand the geographies of bordering and bring practices of migrant care and control into deeper relation. This bordering blocks children's access to legal protections like asylum; leaves them more exposed to exploitation and rights abuses; and encourages greater risk-taking in migration journeys.

Stories Too Big for a Case File: Unaccompanied Young People Confront the Hostile Environment in Pandemic Times

What imagery best evokes the violence unaccompanied child migrants feel when asked, or made, to tell their story over and over, as well as the violence of not being asked nor being heard? How can we show both strength and struggle in difficult times and often uncaring places such as the UK’s hostile migration regime? Taking these questions as a jumping off point, this article offers three key responses, drawing on experiences of co-producing the research-based film, Stories too big for a case file, which accompanies this text. These reflections highlight the importance of participatory, change-oriented research that ‘cares’ for participants; the value of creative forms of knowledge production and aesthetic modes of expression for communicating the affective complexities of research material; and, the importance of turning the representational gaze outwards towards systems and institutions to avoid situating social inequities as individual failings and to, instead, invite viewers to ‘walk together’ in solidarity with research interlocutors.

The Social Construction of Age and ‘Best Interests’ Discourses: An Intersectional Analysis of Canadian Immigration and Refugee Policy for Children

AbstractCanada has received worldwide recognition for its implementation of the Canada Chairperson’s Guideline 3: Child Refugee Claimants. This informal immigration rights policy, statutorily authorized by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, instructs immigration officials to provide special considerations to accompanied and unaccompanied child migrants. Our analysis examines the language of Guideline 3 to understand how the social construction of age influences the provision of protections. Our findings demonstrate that, although chronological age is prominently featured throughout Guideline 3, other factors known to impact the social construction of age, such as gender and cultural background, are only superficially discussed. The homogenized discourse of children within Guideline 3 illustrates the protection of an idealized conception of childhood, which does not accurately reflect the heterogeneity of migrant and asylum-seeking children. The implications of such an idealized notion of childhood in informal immigration rights policies delineates children worthy of protections, and children who are excluded.

Interpreting traumatic narratives of unaccompanied child migrants in the United States: Effects, challenges and strategies

This research examines the challenges of interpreting for unaccompanied child migrants in the United States and the effect of exposure to the traumatic narratives told by these children, as experienced by the interpreters involved. When a traumatic narrative is introduced, over time it has an effect on the emotional and psychological well-being of an interpreter. This study therefore focuses on the coping mechanisms interpreters employ to minimize the effects of long-term exposure to the traumatic content when they work in settings involving migrant children. During the past few decades, a number of studies have been conducted on the emotional and psychological effects of traumatic content on interpreters who work in various contexts, but very few have focused on interactions involving this vulnerable group of migrants. This study uses a qualitative approach in which data were collected through semi-structured interviews with both trained and ad hoc interpreters who work or have worked with unaccompanied children seeking asylum in the United States since the summer of 2014. The study contributes to the growing body of literature on public service interpreting. It does so by offering the interpreter’s perspective on the specific challenges and difficulties of interpreting for unaccompanied child migrants in that country who face near-insurmountable systemic barriers and challenges. It sheds light on the delicate nature of interpreting for vulnerable groups, especially children, who are seeking asylum there. Furthermore, it brings into focus the applicable strategies that help interpreters prepare for interpreting traumatic experiences, and also for coping both during the act of interpreting and afterwards.

Violence, development, and migration waves: Evidence from Central American child migrant apprehensions

Does violence lead to flight from cities in the developing world? This paper estimates the effect of violent crime in municipalities of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala on the irregular emigration of children to the United States. It studies the full universe of 178,825 unaccompanied child migrants from those countries apprehended in the U.S. from 2011 to 2016. In the average municipality, generalized insecurity that produces 10 additional homicides in the origin city caused between three and six cumulative additional child-migrant apprehensions in the U.S.—a measure of irregular migration. Diffusion of migration experience through peer and family networks produces self-reinforcing, city-specific waves of migration that can rise even after violence subsides.

Anzansi family program: a study protocol for a combination intervention addressing developmental and health outcomes for adolescent girls at risk of unaccompanied migration

BackgroundThe International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 11% of children (ages 5 to 17) worldwide are child laborers. ILO recently drew attention to migrant child laborers as an underreported, but more vulnerable group to adverse outcomes relative to children working locally. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) continues to be the continent with the highest rates of child labor, with Ghana registering one of the highest incidence rates at 22%, including unaccompanied child migrants engaged in labor. Adolescent girls make up the majority of unaccompanied rural-to-urban migrants in search of better economic opportunities. Studies document the myriad of serious threats to health and emotional well-being experienced by adolescent girls who migrate to engage in child labor. These threats underline the urgent need for theoretically informed preventive interventions, specifically tailored to address the root causes of female child migrant labor and the needs of girls from economically insecure families and communities.MethodsA two-arm cluster randomized control trial will be conducted to assess the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary impact of ANZANSI (family economic empowerment + multiple family groups) among 100 adolescent girls and their caregivers in the Northern Region of Ghana. Ten schools will be randomly selected from a list of eligible schools, and randomized to one of two study arms: (1) control arm (n = 5 schools, n = 50 adolescent-caregiver dyads); (2) treatment arm (n = 5 schools, n = 50 adolescent-caregiver dyads) receiving ANZANSI over a 9-month period. Adolescents (ages 11 to 14) in the same school will be assigned to the same study condition to avoid contamination.DiscussionThe primary aim of the study is to address the urgent need for theoretically and empirically informed interventions that prevent adolescent girls’ unaccompanied rural-to-urban migration for child labor. Existing programs are not preventive and primarily target children who already migrated to the city and are living and working on the streets. This study is one of the first studies to pilot test a combination intervention, integrating family economic empowerment targeting household poverty with multiple family groups addressing family cohesion and perceptions on gender norms, child education/labor, all of which are factors, when combined, force girls to drop out of school and migrate.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov; NCT04231669; Registered January 18, 2020;

The Situation of Unaccompanied Child Migrants in International Irregular Migration and Evaluation of Main Risks in Turkey

Türkiye, coğrafi ve stratejik konumu nedeniyle tarih boyunca göç hareketlerine ev sahipliği yapmıştır. Türkiye’nin göç gerçeği son yıllarda özellikle ülkenin doğu ve güneyindeki komşu ülkelerde yaşanan savaş ve istikrarsızlık ortamıyla daha da karmaşık ve kitlesel bir boyut kazanmıştır. Suriye’de yaşanan siyasi iç karışıklığın savaşa dönüşmesiyle 2011 yılından itibaren Türkiye’ye başlayan göç bunun en yakın örneğidir. Bu uluslararası göç hareketliliğinin en kırılgan gruplarından biri de çocuklardır. Uluslararası göçe katılan çocuklar sürece bazen aileleri ve yakınlarıyla birlikte bazen de aile ve yakınlarının refakati olmaksızın katılmaktadırlar. Refakatsiz göçmen çocuk, ebeveynlerinden ayrı kalmış olan ve hukuken kendisinden birinci derecede sorumlu olacak birinin bulunmadığı kişidir. Bu çalışmanın amacı, Türkiye’nin uluslararası göç gerçeğinde refakatsiz çocukların durumunu ve karşı karşıya oldukları başlıca riskleri ortaya koymak ve refakatsiz çocuklara yönelik uygulamaları incelenmektir. Bu bağlamda Türkiye’nin düzensiz göç gerçeğinde refakatsiz çocukların durumunun ve çocukların göç sürecinin çeşitli aşamalarında karşı karşıya oldukları başlıca risklerin bir değerlendirilmesi yapılarak, çocuklara yönelik uygulamalar hakkında güncel bilgiler verilmektedir.

What is Behind the Sudden Surge of Child Migrants? The Case of the Northern Triangle and Mexico

Since 2009 there has been a significant increase in the number of unaccompanied child migrants, family units and adults from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala arriving at U.S. borders. This paper uses Customs and Border Protection data and data from the countries of origin of these children to identify the causes behind the sudden surge in the number of children arriving at U.S. borders. The results suggest that violence in the countries of origin is a key driver of child migration. The results are also consistent with a learning model, in which families, after being exposed to several policy interventions that aim to deter child migration, decrease their likelihood of sending a child. This is the case even when violence towards children has increased.

The Mixed Motives of Unaccompanied Child Migrants from Central America's Northern Triangle

A growing body of literature has argued that the distinction between forced and voluntary migration can be, in practice, unclear. This literature points out that each individual migrant may have mixed motives for migrating, including both forced and voluntary reasons. Few studies, however, have actually set out to analyze mixed-motive migration. This paper examines the mixed-motive migration of unaccompanied minors from Central America's Northern Triangle states (Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador), using data from a small 2016 survey carried out in 10 shelters for unaccompanied child migrants run by a Mexican government child welfare agency. Using this survey, the paper identifies the immigrating minor's motives, which are oftentimes mixed, and details differences by nationality, gender, and age groups. Some of the key findings include: • Around one-third of the child migrants surveyed had mixed motives, including both forced and voluntary reasons for migrating. • Violence appears most often as a reason for migrating among minors with mixed motives, as opposed to the search for better opportunities, which appears more often as an exclusive motive. • Significant differences between the three nationalities are observed. Relatively few Guatemalan minors indicated violence as a motive, and few displayed mixed motives, as opposed to Hondurans, and especially Salvadorans. • The minors fleeing violence, searching for better opportunities, and indicating both motives at the same time were largely mature male adolescents. • The minors mentioning family reunification as their sole motive were predominantly girls and young children. The results indicate that binary formulations regarding forced and voluntary migration are often inadequate. This has important implications, briefly addressed in the conclusions. These implications include: • the need for migration scholars to consider forced reasons for migrating in the context of mixed-motive migration; • the fact that mixed motives call into question the established, clear-cut categories that determine whether someone is worthy of humanitarian protection or not; • the need to have in-depth, attentive, and individual asylum screening because motives may be interconnected and entangled, and because forced reasons may be hidden behind voluntary motives; and • the need for a more flexible policy approach, so that immigration systems may be more inclusive of migrants with mixed motives.

Moving on: Multiple Transitions of Unaccompanied Child Migrants Leaving Care in England and Sweden

This paper explores the priorities of young people who arrived in England or Sweden as unaccompanied minors and are leaving the care of the state to transition to adult life. Policy and practice for these young people are themselves in transition in Europe, and we aim to contribute to the slender first person qualitative evidence base for those delivering services. Our methods comprised a scoping review of scholarly and grey literature, and group and individual interviews. Despite a commitment in both countries to listening to the voices of young people, we identified few studies representing the voices of unaccompanied care leavers. In both the literature and our interviews, health in a clinical sense was rarely among their priorities. Their accounts focused on the determinants of health, and in particular housing, education, food and employment. In Sweden, where services are universal rather than targeted, the Health and Social Care Board (Socialstyrelsen) notes the paradox of unaccompanied children being surrounded by adult supporters, none of whom takes overall responsibility for the young person and his/her everyday life. Those we spoke to describe the vital role played by foster carers, health and social care professionals and friends that they could rely on. The young people whose narratives appear in the research literature and those in our own sample are working hard to cope with multiple transitions and to manage health in its widest sense, whether by finding the right place to live or attending to their education or training.

Violence, Development, and Migration Waves: Evidence from Central American Child Migrant Apprehensions

A recent surge in child migration to the United States from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala has occurred in the context of high rates of regional violence. But little quantitative evidence exists on the causal relationship between violence and international emigration in this or any other region. This paper studies the relationship between violence in the Northern Triangle and child migration to the United States using novel, individual-level, anonymized data on all 178,825 US apprehensions of unaccompanied child migrants from these countries between 2011 and 2016. It finds that one additional homicide per year in the region, sustained over the whole period—that is, a cumulative total of six additional homicides—caused a cumulative total of 3.7 additional unaccompanied child apprehensions in the United States. The explanatory power of short-term increases in violence is roughly equal to the explanatory power of long-term economic characteristics like average income and poverty. Due to diffusion of migration experience and assistance through social networks, violence can cause waves of migration that snowball over time, continuing to rise even when violence levels do not.

Migration as Resistance to Global Capitalism: From Cause to Action in the Migration of Central American Children to the United States, Summer 2014

When thousands of unaccompanied child migrants arrived at the Mexico-usborder in summer 2014 a single question seemed to dominate the news—why did they come? This article suggests perspectives that relied on nation-state and binational paradigms are far too limited to explain this migration. Rather, the children’s arrival is argued to be a form of resistance to global capitalism, where the inherent subordinating relations of capitalist globalization engendered resistance in the form of migration. Children from communities with extreme poverty responded to structural and direct violence by migrating north as a way to seek alternatives to their lived experience of globalization.