Transnational Childhoods: The Participation of Children in Processes of Family Migration

Abstract

S e n d r e q u e s t s f o r p e r m i s s i o n t o r e p r i n t t o : R i g h t s a n d P e r m i s s i o n s , U n i v e r s i t y o f C a l i f o r n i a P r e s s , J o u r n a l s D i v i s i o n , 2 0 0 0 C e n t e r S t . , S t e . 3 0 3 , B e r k e l e y , C A 9 4 7 0 4 -1 2 2 3 .

A rite of reverse passage: the construction of youth migration in the US asylum process

“…Rather, intermediaries encouraged them to say that adult family members who were afraid for their lives sent them away. This portrayal coincides with western assumptions that see children as passive and dependent on adult family members, considered to be the key decision makers (Orellana et al 2001), and that pathologize the independent mobility of youth (Heidbrink 2014). Distancing youth from the migration decision thus satisfies the prevailing assumptions of adjudicators who frequently use minor status to disqualify youth from asylum on the basis of their supposed 'incapability of acting as political agents' in line with a 'concept of "political act" in refugee law [that] is still insufficiently gender and age inclusive' (Bhabha 2014, 229).…”

“…The second stage begins when they encounter the asylum bureaucracy in the receiving country, a system that acts within culturally defined western norms and 'ambivalent' notions about childhood and forced migration, constituting victims and agents as mutually exclusive categories (Bhabha 2014). To satisfy its demands and acquire status, youth rely on legal intermediaries who edit their accounts of forced migration to construct narratives, which distance them from identies that emphasize agency and associate them with those that exemplify the standards of passivity and victimhood expected of children, through a series of discursive moves: from criminal gang-members to 'good boys'; from economic to forced migrants; from migrants who leverage entrepreneurial and 'illegal' means to travel to passive pieces of 'luggage' sent abroad by relatives who cannot ensure their protection (Orellana et al 2001); from men to crying children. These moves reflect how intermediaries and youths respond to the way in which the latter are perceived in the US, where conceptions of childhood interact with the racialization of Latinos.…”

European Somali Children Dumped? On families, parents, and children in a transnational context

“…Mobility and migration abroad are taken-forgranted aspects of life in some cultural contexts, and this will have an impact on children (e.g., Akesson, Carling, & Drotbohm, 2012;Coe, 2012). In some contexts children specifically are the ones on the move (e.g., Olwig 2012, who has studied children's transnational mobility between households in the Caribbean migration tradition; Ní Laoire et al, 2012;Orellana, Thorne, Chee, & Lam, 2001).…”

“…In such cases, it is seen as a means to foster children or youth, whose development trajectory is regarded by adults as 'off track'. A general tendency in the research field of transnational mobility of children is to highlight the fact that children are subjective beings in their own right, with agency and decision-making capacity, and yet positioned in a web of wider family power dynamics (e.g., Ní Laoire et al, 2010;Orellana et al, 2001;White, Ní Laoire, Tyrrell, & Carpena-Méndez, 2011). Further, children are parts of larger family networks, where strategic decisions concerning children are taken for the benefit of the collective (Orellana et al, 2001).…”

Social Orphans and Care at a Distance: Popular Representations of Childhood in Ukrainian Transnational Families

“…In this article I will focus on one phenomenon that has received much attention internationally in the last years -namely, what Orellana et al (2001) refer to as transnational childhoods (see also Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002;Parreñas, 2005;Dreby, 2010). As a consequence of the mass labor migration from Ukraine to Europe and Russia since the mid-1990s [1], many Ukrainian children grow up in transnational households, in which one or both parents work abroad for a shorter or longer period, while children and youth remain in the care of grandparents or other relatives, or are left more or less to themselves.…”