Child and Youth Migration

Mobility-in-Migration in an Era of Globalization

A. Veale, G. Donà, A. Veale, G. Donà

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137280671
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection captures the intersection between migration, mobility and childhood studies. Contributors explore under-researched child and youth short-term and micro movements within major migration fluxes that occur in response to migration and global change.

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Complex Migrations, Migrant Child and Family Life Trajectories and Globalization

Angela Veale and Giorgia Donà

Introduction

Migration across multiple borders is a defining feature of the time in which we live, and children are central to this contemporary migration phenomenon (Bhabha 2013). Children migrate as members of migrant families and on their own. They are born of historically migrant families and may in their turn become migrants themselves. Children of migrants are often highly mobile, exchanging homes locally and internationally (Mand 2010; Olwig 2012). Adolescent migrants imagine their future lives as characterized by mobility (Veale and Kennedy 2011). Migration, whether personally experienced, part of one’s life history or imagined into the future, has become a central dimension of the lived experiences of many children and young people globally.

While the number of studies on children’s and young people’s migration is increasing (Coe et al. 2011; Ensor and Gozdziak 2010; Hashim and Thorsen 2011; Ní Laoire et al. 2011; Parreñas 2005; Tyrrell et al. 2013), there are still very few such studies when considered in the context of the number of books on migration in general. This edited collection offers an innovative contribution to this emerging literature in a number of respects. Firstly, the chapters make visible new dynamics of child mobility-in-migration as migrant children and youth engage in multidirectional, multitemporal movements in response to changing global opportunities and constraints. We see that, in the lives of children and young people, migration and mobility intersect so that migration is not an end state, but rather is one form of movement in lives characterized by different forms of mobility: local, international; embodied, virtual; real, imaginative (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006; Gale 2009; Urry 2007). The novel aspect of this book is that it captures journeys by migrant children and youth that are short- and long term, near and distant, circular, onward and return, often with uncertain outcomes leaving open the possibility – even the likelihood – of further mobility into the future. It also conveys the experiences of ‘left-behind’ children, separated from their parent by migration, in circumstances in which restrictive migratory regimes in the receiving country make family reunification difficult if not impossible.

Secondly, the chapters contribute to positioning this complex mobility-in-migration within individual, intergenerational and collective migratory lifespan trajectories. A number of contributors capture the developmental transitions of children in historical or never migrant communities who traveled out, became migrant parents, and whose own children’s lives are lived in different relationships to migration. In some cases, second-generation children of migrants are not themselves migrants, but they live highly mobile lives shaped by parental migration, ethno-national ties and global youth culture. The chapters also capture child migrants embedded in family and community relationships whether living together or negotiating intimacy at a distance, as family members individually and collectively pursue their objectives through migration.

Thirdly, the position of migrant children in relationship to globalization is explored. Stiglitz (2002) defines globalization as the closer integration of countries brought about by the liberalization of markets and technological change, but notes that goods, services, capital and knowledge flow more freely than people. New research is studying globally mobile children of the elite, such as children of professional migrant parents (Nette and Hayden 2007). By contrast, the chapters in this collection capture the lives of children and youth at the margins of globalization. The Human Development Report (United Nations Development Programme 2013) finds that migration patterns are changing with more South-to-South migration, nearly 80 percent of which takes place between bordering countries. Yet child and youth mobility within this migratory flow is largely invisible. This gap in the literature is addressed by a number of contributors. Furthermore, transnational families have been identified as an outcome of globalization (Dreby 2010; Parreñas 2005), and this is evident in this collection, but the book also captures a broader engagement of children and youth with globalization processes related to work and consumption, which remain underexplored.

Fourthly, the book makes a methodological contribution by bringing together research that draws on multisited and/or multitemporal and virtual methodologies as researchers follow their research subjects over time and space. Drawing together empirical research from Africa, Latin America, the United States, Asia and Europe, the collective impact is more than the sum of the individual chapters as the book extends its analytic reach to explore new migration trajectories as migrant parents and children respond to changing global opportunities in the South/North and constraints in the global North. It captures the ways in which children and youth engage with global systems, state policies and migration processes to advance their individual and collective life projects. This makes visible commonalities in their position that transcend local contexts to give insight into child and youth mobility and migratory processes in a globalizing system (Donà and Veale 2011). The following sections explore these themes in further detail.

Mobility-in-migration, children and youth

Children and young people are growing up in an increasingly mobile world (Barker et al. 2009; Urry 2007; Vertovec 2007a). This book draws attention to the complex, multidirectional, dynamic nature of children’s mobility within global migratory processes. The chapters use multisited, multitemporal methodologies that capture an emergent complexity to cross-border migrations in which children and young people move for different purposes, distances and time periods within broader migration trajectories. The migration of a parent sparks a change of household for children who remain behind. Children born to migrant parents in a country of settlement ‘return home’ for short-term visits and move back and forth between countries of origin and settlement. Adolescents cross borders of their own volition seeking work or to earn money that can enable them to meet their intergenerational family obligations or to participate in a global consumer economy. They move to, fro and onwards as economic pressures mount due to global economic change. Children of migrants move locally to participate in activities with ethnic co-peers, make circular ‘home’ visits and engage virtually as ‘global diaspora’. Across the different chapters, by following and seeking to understand this movement, we learn something new about how children, youth and families within migratory communities are engaging with global change.

The traditional migration story of an earlier generation of migrants that moved for work and settled long term in new host societies generated a research agenda that was dominated by a need to understand the impact of living as a member of a migrant ethnic minority in a majority host society. Research sought to understand the lives of child migrants and children born to immigrants in terms of ethnic identity (Phinney 1990), sociocultural adaptation (Berry et al. 2006), school adjustment (Fuligni 1998) and psychological or behavioral adjustment problems (Choi 2002; Fandrem et al. 2009; Oppedal et al. 2004). Post settlement, children’s lives were assumed to be static. For a new generation of migrant children, youth and families, this old paradigm no longer fits the realities of their lives. Adult migration patterns are changing, giving way to ‘new mobilities’ (Baycan and Nijamp 2012) such as serial migration in which migrants move from one country they consider as ‘home’ for periods of time to another (Ossman 2004, 2013), seasonal or circular migration (Vertovec 2007b), transnational migration (Glick Schiller 2003) and return migration (Muggeridge and Donà 2006; King and Christou 2011; King et al. 2011). Within this new literature, the migration of children and young people is generally subsumed within adult migration or construed as an exceptional phenomenon (Donà 2006), including child trafficking (O’Connell Davidson 2011), asylum-seeking children (Lane and Tribe 2006) and unaccompanied minors (Bhabha 2004). New scholarly work is addressing childhood and new migrations (Whitehead and Hashim 2005). Ní Laoire (2011) explored the experiences of children moving within family groups as return migrants to Ireland and notions of ‘homecoming’. Ní Laoire et al. (2011) identified a phenomenon of the ‘in and out’ serial migration of the children within middle-class professional Latin American families who move from one European country to another. Evidence of child mobility within migration is surfacing in the literature. Ní Laoire et al. (2011) noted the internal mobility experienced by asylum-seeker children in Ireland as they moved within the asylum system, the residential system and also between Irish towns. Coe et al. (2011) argues that children commonly experienced ‘everyday ruptures’ due to family mobility and draws continuity between previous eras marked by rural to urban internal migration and present-day international migration. Mand (2010) noted that British-born Bangladeshi migrant children were highly mobile between the two countries, moving for holidays, special occasions and longer stays of up to a year, and this facilitated families to remain interconnected and interdependent. Similarly, Olwig (2012) argues that, in the Caribbean, child mobility between households locally and transnationally facilitates adult migration, and that moves can be short-or long-term in duration and initiated by adults or by children. Furthermore, girls who move to live with caregivers are expected to contribute to domestic chores; as they approach adulthood, many move to seek work as migrant domestic workers, a progression that she argues is ‘an extension and transformation of child migration’ (Olwig 2012: 933). We argue that there is something fundamental about these child and youth mobilities within migration trajectories that are presently invisible and undertheorized that tells us something new about the experiences of migrant children and also about changing, complex migration in response to global economic and social change. A core aim of this volume is to contribute at an empirical level to knowledge about the intersection between children, migration and mobilities by highlighting underresearched child and youth short-term and micro-movements within major migration fluxes that occur in response to migration and global change. We refer to this as mobility-in-migration or complex migration.

Migration generally refers to large-scale movements of people from points of departures – usually understood as countries of origin – and points of arrival, receiving countries. It traditionally refers to long-term movements. Globalization, defined as the proliferation of cross-border flows and transnational networks, has changed our understanding of migration, as the new technologies of communication and transport connected to globalization allow frequent and multidirectional flows of people, ideas and cultural practices from a ‘settler’ model to also incorporate a temporary or transnational model, which captures the experiences of migrants who move on a temporary basis to host countries and still maintain relations with their countries of origin (Castles 2002).

The concept of mobility is broader than that of migration in that mobility encompasses ‘both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public spaces and the travel of material things within everyday life’ (Hannam et al. 2006: 1). In their editorial introduction to the first issue of the journal Mobilities, Hannam et al. (2006) set the agenda for mobility research, which, in addition to virtual and information technologies, spatial mobilities and materialities, includes migration, travel and tourism. The mobility literature, therefore, is concerned with all forms of mobility, ranging from daily routine movements around the home and neighborhood to long-distance movement and virtual mobility, and the ways in which transport, travel and communication functions in people’s lives (Hannam, Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007). It is about people moving back and forth, the dynamic nature of mobilities.

In this book, we use the term ‘migration’ to refer to large-scale, long-term movements, and the term ‘mobility’ to capture small-scale, short-term and dynamic movements of people as a practice of everyday life. While we understand that migration can be understood as one type of mobility, our goal is to highlight the connections between emerging forms of mobilities and conventional forms of migration. Recently, the concept of the mobility-migration nexus has been used to bring to the fore these connections (Hashim and Thorsen 2011). This edited book aims to advance this connection by examining specific ways in which the two concepts connect in the lives of children and young people.

The chapters in this volume draw attention to how children and young people use different types of mobilities-in-migration, that is, mobilities within their migration trajectories, for different purposes in response to changing economic, social and cultural circumstances over time and across different places. Punch (Chapter 2) describes the mobilities of Bolivian migrant youth to Argentina whom she first encountered in their rural communities when they were between the ages of 3 and 17 years, and followed for ten years as they began their migration journeys and diversified their work and mobility patterns in response to the Argentinean economic crisis of 2001. She captures an intersection of globalization, mobility and developmental transitions from childhood to young adulthood and young parenthood. Her chapte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Complex Migrations, Migrant Child and Family Life Trajectories and Globalization
• 2  Young Migrant Trajectories from Bolivia to Argentina: Changes and Continuities in an Era of Globalization
• 3  Transnational/Indigenous Youth: Learning, Feeling and Being in Globalized Contexts
• 4  Jeans, Bicycles and Mobile Phones: Adolescent Migrants Material Consumption in Burkina Faso
• 5  New Youth Mobilities: Transnational Migrations, Racialization and Global Popular Culture
• 6  Forced Migration, and Material and Virtual Mobility among Rwandan Children and Young People
• 7  I Wish, I Wish: Reflections on Mobility, Immobility and the Global Imaginings of Nigerian Transnational Children
• 8  The Children Left Behind by International Migrants from Sri Lanka: Victims or Beneficiaries of Globalization?
• 9  Ways of Being a Child in a Dispersed Family: Multiparenthood and Migratory Debt between France and Mali (Soninke Homeland)
• 10  Protecting Children or Pandering to Politics? A Critical Analysis of Anti-Child Trafficking Discourse, Policy and Practice
• 11  Mobility-in-Migration in an Era of Globalization: Key Themes and Future Directions
• Index