Zero Tolerance: An Accountability Framework for Atrocity Crimes Against Migrant Children and Families in the US

By Sarah J. Diaz and Jenny Lee

The Trump Administration’s policy of family separation cannot be accepted as a legitimate government immigration policy. Instead, it is imperative for the global community to recognize that the policy of family separation, and the manner in which parent-child separations were carried out, constitute crimes against humanity.

AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills

In the spring of 2018, United States citizens bore witness to the unfathomable: children, toddlers, and even breastfeeding infants were ripped screaming from their parents’ arms by U.S. immigration officials and then disappeared into government detention. The events that took place shocked the collective conscience, moving American mothers to march with their children to government immigration offices across the country to demand a halt to the program.

The policy of family separations, or parent-child separations, was formally announced by the Trump Administration through a memo entitled “Zero Tolerance” and defended by the administration as not only permissible but required by U.S. law. The Biden Administration condemned the phenomenon as a “human tragedy that occurred when our immigration laws were used to intentionally separate children from their parent or legal guardians (families).” However, there have been no pronouncements by the Biden Administration that the Zero Tolerance policy was anything other than a legitimate, albeit unfortunate, immigration policy.

Documenting crimes against humanity 

The Columbia University's Center on Mexico and Central America (CeMeCA) published the report as part of their Regional Expert Series entitled Zero Tolerance: Atrocity Crimes against Migrant Families in the United States: An Accountability Framework for Family Separation. The report synthesizes data gathered from litigation, Freedom of Information Act requests, and publicly available reports written by nongovernmental organizations, government bodies, and international organizations to determine how the Trump Administration’s policy of family separations unfolded. 

The review found that the Trump Administration implemented the policy of family separation under Zero Tolerance with the specific intent to deter migration from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Critically, the report found that terrorizing children and families through parent-child separation was central to the Trump Administration’s policy, not merely an unfortunate byproduct. The report found that the Trump Administration was at all times aware of the grievous and lasting harm that the family separation policy would cause to children, and that the administration exploited harm to children to employ pervasive illegal coercive practices to force deportations of separated families. As of the date of the report’s publication, the Trump Administration separated over 5,500 children from their parents; however, an accurate number will never be known.

The report’s factual findings indicate that the acts carried out by the Trump Administration to effectuate parent-child separations via Zero Tolerance constitute the crimes against humanity of persecution, deportation or forcible transfer, torture, and other inhumane acts under Article 7 of the Rome Statute, the statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The report finds that these crimes against humanity fall within the jurisdiction of the ICC. While the U.S. is not party to the Rome Statute, the ICC has held that it may exercise jurisdiction over certain transboundary crimes, including deportation, persecution, and other inhumane acts, which are initiated or completed in a state that is party to the Rome Statute (this includes all countries in the Central American Northern Triangle).

The Office of the Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court Must Act.

Source: ACLU, Family Separation: By the Numbers (Oct. 2, 2018), https://www.aclu.org/issues/family-separation

While the Biden Administration created a Task Force to enable the reunification of children separated from their parents, there is no indication that the U.S. government intends to pursue accountability nor institute an effective prohibition on the use of parent-child separations in the future. The ICC Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) has stated that there is “a strong presumption that investigations and prosecutions of crimes against children are in the interests of justice,” and that wherever the evidence permits, the ICC “will seek to include charges for crimes directed specifically against children.” Thus, the report recommends that the situation of family separation pursuant to the Zero Tolerance policy be investigated by the OTP. The report also calls upon the Biden Administration to appoint a special prosecutor in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney General to investigate avenues for domestic criminal accountability, and to make every effort to immediately restore the victims of crimes against humanity, including reunifying and providing compensation to the families who have suffered and continue to suffer from separation under Zero Tolerance.

We hope this framework for accountability can facilitate a new dialogue on behalf of separated families - recognizing that family separation was not merely a law enforcement tool subject to abuse, but an act of state violence that must never be perpetrated again.

The learn more, please read the full report.

About the authors

Sarah Diaz, J.D. LL.M.is the Associate Director of the Center for the Human Rights of Children and Lecturer in the School of Law at Loyola University Chicago. Professor Diaz has worked at the intersection of child migration and human rights for fifteen years, working with NGOs on complex human rights, migration, and international criminal law issues.

Jenny Lee, Ph.D. is a Research Assistant at the Center for the Human Rights of Children and a 3rd year law student at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She is a former educator and higher education administrator who has worked in nonprofit organizations serving immigrant women, children, and elderly who are victims of domestic violence.

Spaces of Shelter: An analysis of the quality of care for unaccompanied minor migrants in Texas influx facilities

By Neha Tummalapalli

The movement of unaccompanied minors along the Southern border of the United States has increased exponentially in the last decade. The primary federal entity responsible for the care and custody of unaccompanied children in the United States is the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which places children within one of 200 subcontracted shelters typically run by nonprofit organizations. If ORR’s operational capacity, or bed space in licensed facilities, exceeds 85% occupancy for 3 days, it becomes categorized as an influx period. During these periods of increased immigration, the detention process changes. Instead, ORR enlists unconventional structures, such as convention centers, military bases, and “soft-sided” facilities, to house children for extended periods of time.

This visual research illustrates three case studies of new types of facilities for unaccompanied youth in Texas. Emergency intake sites and influx care facilities are operated by ORR, while central processing centers are run by US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). These temporary, often quickly constructed emergency facilities are bound to fewer legal standards such as the Flores Settlement Agreement and blur the roles of the involved agencies, often leading to harmful conditions and poor treatment of children (Zak 2021).

Spaces of Shelter © Neha Tummalapalli

Case Study I: Fort Bliss Emergency Intake Site

On March 25, 2021, the US Department of Health and Human Services announced that Fort Bliss would open an Emergency Intake Site for unaccompanied children. The military base in Texas had the potential capacity of 5,000 beds (Ortiz 2021). At the peak of arrivals of migrant children in April and May of 2021, the facility housed over 5,518  boys  and girls 13-17 years old. Fort Bliss is considered a temporary, “soft-sided shelter,” which means it is a tent structure made of vinyl fabric. This type of facility is vulnerable to extreme weather, such as the desert sandstorms, extreme heat waves, and more recent record-breaking rainfall. The tents are not weather-proofed, meaning there is no sealant applied to the bottom of the tents (Kladzyk 2021). As a result, there is a space at the bottom of the tent where sand and rain can enter.

Since media coverage of the facility is so limited, aerial images revealing the overall organization of the complex are difficult to find. One report identified 12 tents with several hundred migrant children in each, while another claimed there were 5-6 soccer field sized tents that housed up to 1,000 migrants per tent (Andersson 2021; Villagran 2021). The City of El Paso denied public information requests for construction documents which would have revealed more about the shelter layout. The city explained that Fort Bliss is under federal jurisdiction because it is a military base. In either case, the accounts of staff and released migrants confirm that the facility was very crowded. There were not enough clothes and showers for young people, which left many children showering less than once a week. The government initially contracted out caregiving responsibilities to Chenega Corp, but Chenega Corp subsequently transferred care to an independently owned and operated Servpro franchise in late May. Servpro is a disaster recovery and clean-up company, whose workers are not trained in youth care (Villagran 2021). There was minimal transparency in the vetting process for the workers, and conditions in the shelter rapidly deteriorated. In June, employees and advocates were so concerned about children in Fort Bliss harming themselves that employees banned the use of pens, pencils, scissors, nail cutters, toothbrushes, earrings, and the metal clips in N95 masks (Montoya-Galvez 2021). Because family reunification services were limited, the length of stay for children in the facility was prolonged. Given the poor quality of care, the mental health of many children reportedly became dire.

Case Study II: Carrizo Springs Influx Care Facility 

The influx care facility in Carrizo Springs, located two hours southwest of San Antonio, was first opened in late June of 2019. It was used for a month and then kept on hold until February 22, 2021. It accommodates up to 1,120 children ages 2 to 17 in hard-sided structures. It consists of 8 buildings that have bedrooms in 14 suites with each suite housing 8 children. Another building consists of 2 wings which can serve 28 children each or be reserved for medical isolations. The dorms are separated by gender, with a separate space for tender-aged children under the age of 13 (Health and Human Services: Carrizo Springs). Like other influx care facilities, emergency intake sites and central processing centers, Carrizo Springs is not a licensed facility, and HHS itself has conceded that it exceeds licensing standards. Based on the limited imagery of the facility, there does not appear to be educational and recreational services provided for migrants (Hudson and Martin 2021). There remain no public accounts of staff or young people that describe the conditions of the Carrizo Springs facility, and public information requests for construction documents and building inspection reports submitted to the city of Carrizo Springs were ignored. An official in the Dimmit County Planning Department even claimed to not know about an influx care facility in Carrizo Springs on the phone. The available information about this facility suggests that it is relatively more equipped to care for migrants than other emergency facilities. However, most of the information about this facility comes from the Health and Human Services website, so it is hard to gauge the actual conditions without any accounts from young people or staff.

Case Study III: Donna I Central Processing Center

The third case study is Donna I in Donna, Texas. In contrast to influx and emergency intake facilities, this central processing center is run by CBP. Opened on February 9, 2021, this is another soft-sided facility and had an initial maximum capacity of 500 beds during the pandemic. Since March of 2021, the occupancy has ranged from 2,200 to 4,500 individuals. The showers were designed for an occupancy of 1,000 resulting in many children reporting that they did not shower for days at a time (Andersson and Laurent 2021). The facility is organized into 8 pods which are further divided by clear vinyl into smaller units (Spagat and Merchant 2021). Since Donna I has far surpassed its occupancy limits, there are often no spaces between sleeping mats. The spaces dedicated to recreational and educational activities are also fully taken over by sleeping mats. There is no consistent recreation time, although officials claim to host recreational activities during the cleaning of the pods. Donna I has two medical teams which consist of a nurse practitioner, medical assistants, and emergency medical technicians (Ordin 2021). They conduct health intake interviews and screen for any symptoms of COVID-19 or other diseases. The number of deployed medical teams has not kept pace with the rapid overcrowding in the facility and arrivals of groups of 200 or more children at a time during influx periods. In early April of 2021, Court appointed medical expert Dr. Paul Wise visited the Donna facility and found that 500 children below the age of 12 had been at the facility for over one week in violation of the Flores Settlement Agreement which stipulates children should be released from CBP custody within 72 hours of apprehension (Ordin 2021). The severe overcrowding at this facility has made it unmanageable for CBP to implement and enforce any welfare standards. The crowded spaces have also led to rampant spread of COVID-19, lice, and other communicable illnesses.

Conclusion

These case studies reveal how the spatial qualities of the facilities significantly impact the care young people receive. The temporary tent facilities often cause spaces to be uncomfortable and unsafe due to lack of weatherproofing and privacy. Young migrants further suffer when the facilities operate over the maximum capacity. They often receive insufficient medical and legal services, and the cramped spaces lead to children contracting illnesses. While these three examples occurred during the Spring of 2021 and circumstances have since improved, it is important to study these conditions as they will likely repeat in the next influx of migrant children. For example, after advocates criticized CBP for the conditions at the McAllen central processing center which opened in 2018, similar issues have been observed again in the Donna I facility two years later. There is significantly less oversight and regulation for these unlicensed emergency shelters, which makes young people even more susceptible to the poor conditions. Furthermore, the dearth of accessible information and visitors to these facilities makes it challenging for the public to hold ORR and CBP accountable for their treatment of migrant children and youth.

Works Cited

Health and Human Services. Carrizo Springs. February 17, 2022.

Jenny Lisette Flores et al v. Janet Reno, CV 85-4544-RJK. (C.D. Cal. 1997).

Office of Refugee Resettlement, Children Entering the United States Unaccompanied: Section 7 Policies for Influx Care Facilities, September 2019.

Office of Refugee Resettlement, Unaccompanied Children Program, April 2021. 

Ordin, Andrea S. Independent Monitor Report for Jenny Lisette Flores et al v. Merrick B. Garland. Case No CV 85-4544-DM, (C.D. Cal. April 2021)

Texas Health and Human Services Commission, Minimum Standards for General Residential Operations, April 2022. 

About the author

Neha Tummalapalli is a fifth-year undergraduate honors student at Syracuse University pursuing a bachelor's in architecture with minors in policy studies and data analytics. She is passionate about exploring the intersections of architecture with socio-political issues to understand the implications of complex spaces. She has been involved in diverse research investigations throughout her undergraduate career, which has shaped her perspective on architecture. Her research work has been financially supported by the Syracuse University SOURCE award.

Migrant Family Detention and Grassroots Shelter in Mexico

by John Doering-White and Alejandra Díaz De León

(Español abajo)

This post examines recent reforms to Mexican migration law that prohibit holding children—whether accompanied or unaccompanied—in detention centers. Drawing on fieldwork at a migrant shelter in Central Mexico, we explain how these seemingly progressive reforms, which off-load care responsibilities onto overburdened grassroots migrant shelters, can leave families feeling protected and abandoned simultaneously.

Migrant families—parents and/or guardians traveling with children—make up a growing number of people who access the loose network of grassroots migrants shelters that dot railways and highways across Mexico. Increasingly, these families are dropped off directly at a shelter’s door after being detained, then released, by the National Migration Institute (INM – Instituto Nacional de Migración), Mexico’s immigration enforcement agency. Seeing INM agents drop off migrants at the front door of spaces that are primarily known for providing sanctuary to undocumented immigrants is an odd feeling. In this post, we draw on fieldwork at La Casita, a migrant shelter in Central Mexico, to sketch out how policy reforms that prohibit the Mexican government from holding migrant children in detention centers—reforms that have been heralded by some advocates as “an incredibly positive step for children”—can leave migrants feeling simultaneously cared for and abandoned.

A migrant child and a shelter work playing soccer at a shelter in Mexico [Photo taken by John Doering-White]

Mexico’s reforms prohibiting family detention went into effect in the Spring of 2021. They are undeniably a step towards upholding the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Mexico is a signatory. The reforms promise to limit instances of children being detained alongside adults and they offer to reduce the number of individuals who are returned to the violence and insecurity from which they fled in the first place. However, they are insufficient. “They are not backed up by anything,” a lawyer in charge of managing family cases told us. The reforms designate that children and family units are to be released to shelters operated by Mexico’s National Family Development System (DIF—Sistema Nacional de Desarrollo Integral de la Familia). However, migrant families are increasingly off-loaded onto nongovernmental migrant shelters like La Casita when DIF’s chronically underfunded shelters are at capacity. As the story of Walter and Kelvin, a father and son we met at La Casita in July of 2021, illustrates, this leads migrants to view migrant shelters as spaces of care, confinement, and abandonment all at once.

Walter and his twelve-year-old son Kelvin had been in Mexico for two months before we met them at La Casita in July of 2021. Well aware of how quickly plans can change along the migrant trail, they, like many families fleeing Central America, left Honduras in a hurry and with only a loose plan for crossing Mexico. Upon arriving at a nongovernmental shelter in Tapachula, the small city near the Guatemala-Mexico border where migrants increasingly wait weeks and months for decisions from Mexico’s persistently understaffed Refugee Commission (Comision Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados–COMAR), they initiated a petition for refugee status. Several weeks later, Walter and Kelvin were granted a temporary visa allowing them to move freely within the state of Chiapas, where Tapachula is located, but no farther. Central Americans waiting out asylum determinations in Tapachula regularly experience racialized stigmatization and underemployment. Walter had heard rumors that migration authorities were not detaining families in southern Mexico and a family member had also promised to arrange a smuggler to cross them into the United States if they could get themselves closer to the U.S.-Mexico border. Attempting to travel by bus deeper into Mexico’s interior became the next best option.

A group of migrants watch other migrants playing soccer at a shelter in Mexico [Photo taken by John Doering-White]

We interviewed Walter on a sunny day as Kelvin kicked a soccer ball around the shelter’s concrete patio. They had been detained by INM agents at a small-town bus stop and were released to La Casita two days later. When we spoke, Walter seemed relieved to have made it out of southern Mexico, often considered one of the most dangerous stretches of the journey. Fifteen years earlier, Walter’s brother had disappeared while they crossed Mexico as teenagers. This trauma seemed to shape a somewhat contradictory feeling about both INM and migrant shelters like La Casita. “When they grab you it’s because traveling on this route carries risks and everything,” he explained, “And for me that’s a good thing. Thank God they have us here, because look, here I am safe and sound.” On the one hand, Walter described INM as an agency that is primarily interested in protecting migrants from being exploited, kidnapped, or disappeared. This appreciation, however, was also shaded with a sense of confinement: “If they assign you here [to this shelter] it’s because they know that there are risks that the route carries. And I come here with my son. They understand that too, in [the importance of] family.”

Walter’s sense of La Casita as a space of benevolent detention was disconcerting. After all, the legitimacy of a shelter like La Casita revolves around the ability of migrants to come and go as they please. Beyond concerns about how struggling to care for vulnerable migrants might delegitimize migrant shelters, the reforms are also concerning to the extent that they can leave migrants like Walter feeling both confined and abandoned. During our interview, it became clear that Walter was weighing whether stay at the shelter and re-open his asylum petition; leave, and continue northward; or to “voluntarily” return to Honduras with Kelvin. “I’ll keep going if I can find another way to keep moving forward, if you know what I mean,” he explained, subtly referencing his family’s offer to arrange a smuggler, “but that would depend on what my nephew can do and what the lawyer here says.” As the interview went one, Walter repeatedly asked for assurance about what would happen if the told INM he wanted to return home to Honduras. “What I want to know is, what I am thinking about, is if they are really going to give me the deportation back to Honduras. Yea, because I imagine that if I left here [to try and connect with a smuggler] I wouldn’t be able to go back and ask for help returning [to Honduras]. I would just be left here.”

Much like the anxiety of someone being gaslit by an abuser, Walter’s story speaks to how Mexico’s family detention reforms can leave parents feeling at once protected and deserted. Ending family detention is a crucial step towards treating migrants with dignity, but it is only a half-step. Without practical and meaningful access to status regularization and services that can help families build a dignified life in Mexico (housing, employment, health care, and education), it appears that the reforms in fact do little to provide meaningful protection for people like Walter and Kelvin.

 About the authors

John Doering-White is Assistant Professor of Social Work and Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. His long-term ethnographic research examines the everyday politics of humanitarian aid in and around migrant shelters across Mexico. His work appears in Social Service Review, Children and Youth Services Review, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Qualitative Social Work, and Social Work Research, among other outlets.

Alejandra Díaz de León is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Center for Sociological Studies at Colegio de México. Her research focuses on human rights, solidarity, and the creation of bonds, trust, and cooperation among strangers during contexts of violence and uncertainty, like the transit of Central Americans through Mexico to the United States.

Detención de Familias Migrantes y Refugio de Bases en México

John Doering-White y Alejandra Díaz de León 

Este texto examina reformas recientes a la ley migratoria mexicana que prohíben tener niños—acompañados o no acompañados— en centros de detención. Usando trabajo de campo en un refugio de migrantes en México central, explicamos cómo estas reformas aparentemente progresivas, que quitan responsabilidades de cuidado a refugios de migrantes ya sobrecargados, pueden dejar a las familias sintiéndose protegidas y abandonadas al mismo tiempo.[1]

Las familias migrantes (padres o tutores que viajan con niños) son una proporción creciente de las personas que usan la red de refugios de migrantes que están a las orillas de vías de tren y carreteras en todo México. Es cada vez más frecuente que el Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM), la agencia de migración mexicana, deje a estas familias en las puertas de los refugios después de detenerlas. Ver a los agentes del INM dejar a los migrantes a la puerta de espacios que son principalmente conocidos como santuarios para migrantes indocumentados deja un sentimiento extraño. En este texto, usamos trabajo de campo que hemos hecho en La Casita, un refugio de migrantes en México central, para esbozar cómo las reformas que prohíben al gobierno mexicano tener niños migrantes en centros de detención —reformas que han sido defendidas por algunos como “un paso increíblemente positivo para los niños”— pueden dejar a los migrantes sintiéndose cuidados y, al mismo tiempo, abandonados.

Un niño migrante y un trabajador de refugio jugando fútbol en un albergue para migrantes en México  [Fotografía: John Doering-White]

Las reformas mexicanas que prohíben la detención familiar se empezaron a aplicar en la primavera de 2021. Son, indudablemente, un paso que obedece la Convención de Naciones Unidas sobre los Derechos de los Niños, de la cual México es signatario. Las reformas prometen limitar las instancias de niños que son detenidos junto con adultos y ofrecen reducir el número de individuos que son retornados a la violencia y la inseguridad de la cual vienen huyendo. Sin embargo, son insuficientes. “No están sustentadas en nada”, nos dijo una abogada a cargo de manejar casos familiares en La Casita. Las reformas designan que los niños y las unidades familiares deben ser liberadas en refugios operados por el Sistema Nacional de Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (DIF). Pero cada vez más frecuentemente, el INM deja a las familias migrantes en refugios de migrantes no gubernamentales como La Casita, cuando los refugios del DIF, crónicamente desprovistos de financiamiento, se encuentran llenos. Como ilustra la historia de Walter y Kevin, un padre y su hijo a quienes conocimos en La Casita en julio de 2021, esto lleva a los migrantes a ver a los refugios como espacios de cuidado, confinamiento y abandono, todo al mismo tiempo.

Walter y Kevin, su hijo de doce años, habían estado en México durante dos meses antes de que los conociéramos en La Casita, en julio de 2021. Conscientes de cuán rápido cambian los planes cuando uno está en la ruta del migrante, ellos, como muchas familias huyendo de Centroamérica, dejaron Honduras a la carrera y con un plan bastante suelto de cómo cruzar México. Al llegar al refugio no gubernamental en Tapachula, la pequeña ciudad en la frontera de México con Guatemala donde los migrantes esperan semanas y meses para escuchar decisiones de la Comisión Mexicana de Ayuda a Refugiados (COMAR)—persistentemente desprovista de personal suficiente—, Walter y Kevin iniciaron una petición por el estatus de refugiados. Varias semanas después, se les otorgó una visa temporal que les permitía moverse libremente dentro del estado de Chiapas (donde está ubicado Tapachula), pero no más allá. Los centroamericanos que esperan determinaciones de asilo en Tapachula regularmente experimentan estigmatización racializada y subempleo. Walter había oído rumores de que las autoridades migratorias no estaban deteniendo a familias en el sur de México, y un familiar suyo le había prometido arreglar que un coyote los cruzara a Estados Unidos si podían llegar a la frontera norte de México. Intentar viajar por autobús hacia el centro de México se había convertido en la mejor opción.

Un grupo de migrantes mirando a otros migrants mientras juegan fútbol en un refugio para migrantes en México.  [Fotografía: John Doering-White]

Entrevistamos a Walter un día soleado, mientras Kevin jugaba con una pelota de fútbol en el patio de cemento del refugio. El INM los había detenido en la parada de camiones de un pueblo pequeño, y los dejaron en La Casita dos días después. Cuando hablamos, Walter parecía aliviado de haber salido del sur de México, considerado uno de los tramos más peligrosos del viaje. Quince años antes, el hermano de Walter había desaparecido mientras cruzaban México, cuando ambos eran adolescentes. Este trauma parecía moldear un sentimiento contradictorio sobre el INM y refugios de migrantes como La Casita. “Cuando te agarran es porque viajar en esta ruta es riesgoso y todo”, explicó, “y para mí eso es algo bueno. Gracias a Dios que nos tienen aquí, porque mira, aquí estoy sano y salvo”. Por un lado, Walter describió al INM como una agencia que está principalmente interesada en proteger a los migrantes de ser explotados, secuestrados o desaparecidos. Sin embargo, esta apreciación también estaba acompañada de un sentido de confinamiento: “Si te asignan aquí [a este refugio] es porque saben que hay riesgos en la ruta. Y yo vengo aquí con mi hijo. También entienden esto, la [importancia de la] familia”.

La idea de Walter de que La Casita era un espacio de detención benévola era desconcertante. Después de todo, la legitimidad de un refugio como La Casita gira en torno a la habilidad de los migrantes de ir y venir como gusten. Más allá de las preocupaciones de que intentar cuidar a migrantes vulnerables pueda deslegitimizar a los refugios de migrantes, las reformas también son preocupantes en la medida en la cual pueden dejar a migrantes como Walter sintiéndose confinados y abandonados a la vez. Durante nuestra entrevista, se hizo evidente que Walter estaba evaluando si quedarse en el refugio y reabrir su petición de asilo; irse y seguir hacia el norte, o regresar a Honduras con Kevin “voluntariamente”. “Voy a seguir adelante si puedo encontrar otra forma de avanzar, si me entiendes”, nos explicó, refiriéndose sutilmente a la oferta de su familia de hacer tratos con un coyote, “pero eso dependería de lo que mi sobrino pueda hacer y de lo que diga el abogado de aquí”. Conforme la entrevista avanzó, Walter repetidamente nos pidió que le contaramos qué pasaría si le decía al INM que quería regresar a Honduras. “Lo que quiero saber… Lo que estoy pensando es… Si en verdad me van a dar la deportación para Honduras. Porque imagino que si me voy de aquí [para intentar acordar algo con el coyote] no me dejarían volver aquí y pedir ayuda para regresar [a Honduras]. Me dejarían aquí y ya”.

Similar a la ansiedad de alguien siendo engañado por un abusador, la historia de Walter habla de cómo las reformas mexicanas de detención familiar pueden dejar a los padres desprotegidos y abandonados. Terminar con la detención familiar es un paso crucial hacia tratar a los migrantes con dignidad, pero sólo es la mitad de un paso. Sin acceso práctico y significativo a la regularización del estatus y a servicios que puedan ayudar a las familias a construir una vida digna en México (vivienda, empleo, salud y educación), parece que las reformas hacen poco por proveer protección significativa para personas como Walter y Kevin.

Sobre los autores

John Doering-White es profesor asociado de trabajo social y antropología en la Universidad de Carolina del Sur. Su investigación etnográfica a largo plazo examina las políticas humanitarias de asistencia en refugios de migrantes en México. Su trabajo ha sido publicado en Social Service Review, Children and Youth Services Review, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Qualitative Social Work y Social Work Research, entre otros.

Alejandra Díaz de León es profesora asociada de sociología en el Centro de Estudios Sociológicos de El Colegio de México. Su investigación se centra en derechos humanos, solidaridad, y la creación de vínculos, confianza y cooperación entre desconocidos en contextos de violencia e incertidumbre, como durante el tránsito de los migrantes centroamericanos por México de camino a Estados Unidos.

[1] Agradecemos a Carlos Arrollo Batista por traducir este texto del inglés.

Reflections on the Rise of Mass Immigration Detention and the Perception of Asylum Seekers

By Smita Ghosh and Mary Hoopes

This post explores the rise of immigration detention in the United States. It explores a puzzling institutional dynamic between the executive and legislative branches, and explains how immigration detention began as an ad hoc executive initiative and evolved into one imposed by the legislature, over the objections of the immigration agency. In this article, we explain how a transformation in the perceptions of asylum seekers was critical to this transformation.

Our interest in this project began when we encountered a puzzling congressional hearing from 1981. In this hearing, lawmakers pushed back on the Reagan Administration’s plan to detain anyone who arrived without proper travel documents.

While it’s hard to imagine today, detention had not been routine prior to this; in fact, immigration authorities did not generally detain non-citizens even after a final deportation order was entered.

This hearing was at odds with our understanding of how immigration detention had evolved: we had thought that the system of immigration detention was imposed by the legislature in laws like the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), but lawmakers were actively opposed to detention in the early 1980s. A puzzle emerged. What had happened during these fifteen years? In other words, how did the system of immigration evolve from an ad hoc executive policy into one imposed by the legislature over the objections of the executive branch?

To answer these questions, we set out to comprehensively review the legislative history. We read more than five thousand pages of congressional hearings and reports and supplemented these texts with archival materials from presidential libraries and a review of print media sources.

What drove the transformation in detention policy over these fifteen years?

Photo taken by John Moore at Adelanto Detention Facility in Adelanto, California. The facility is managed by the private GEO Group.

We learned that a critical component was a transformation in lawmakers' perception of asylum seekers. Prior to the early 1990s, members of congress focused their detention efforts on noncitizens with criminal convictions. They heralded the rights of asylum seekers, emphasizing that the right to asylum was a core humanitarian commitment. However, after the asylum “crisis” of 1993, lawmakers changed their depictions of asylum seekers dramatically. No longer the embodiment of sacred American values, they were now, in the words of one Congressman, “walking Typhoid Marys,” who harbored infectious disease and sought to take advantage of generous procedural protections. This change in discourse cleared the way for the mass detention of arriving migrants more generally. 

We learned that this fifteen year period could be roughly divided into three “eras” that each reflect a different dynamic between the executive and the legislature. In the first era, the executive branch pushed the legislature for the power to detain, trumpeting it as a deterrent to future immigration crises. Lawmakers resisted these efforts, describing them as offensive to the country’s historic commitment to asylum. In the next era, beginning in the mid-1980s, lawmakers developed a preoccupation with the so-called “criminal alien,” and began to voice support for more detention as a way to ensure that government agencies removed noncitizens with criminal convictions. Members of congress still distinguished between asylum seekers and ‘criminals’ during this period. This would all change beginning in 1993, as a series of factors converged to create an “asylum crisis.”  The media seized upon the fact that one of those responsible for the World Trade Center bombing had applied for asylum, which coincided with a general recasting of unauthorized migration as a crime in the public imagination. In a segment of 60 Minutes that was later introduced in Congress, a representative from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), the leading anti-immigration lobbying group, explained that “if you get to the US, you say ‘political asylum,’ and that’s it. That’s your ticket in. You get a free ride. And you can stay indefinitely.”[1]

Lawmakers now described asylum seekers using the rhetoric of disease and danger, and characterized the asylum system as “sick” and able to be manipulated with ease. Now legislators from both parties were eager to detain broad swaths of people, even though the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the government agency that managed immigration before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created in 2002, countered that this would be ineffective and was unnecessary. This paved the way for the mass detention of immigrants, culminating in broad pieces of legislation in 1996, including IIRIRA, that marked what Margaret Taylor calls a “seismic” change in the landscape of immigration detention.

A number of implications follow from our analysis. As we learned, congressional discourse about asylum seekers changed as the number of asylum seekers increased and as they were incorporated into existing racial hierarchies. In 1993, a moral panic took the form of an asylum crisis, spurred by a confluence of factors, including the end of the Cold War, the recasting of unauthorized immigration as a crime, and a set of terrorist events. Together, this moral panic created a new class of “deviants.” This allowed lawmakers to resolve the dissonance between their humanitarian commitment to asylum seekers, and the threat posed by this new class of allegedly dangerous and risky newcomers. 

As we explain in our new article, the move to expand immigration detention paralleled similar developments in criminal law. Just as legislators reacted to judicial expansions of procedural protections by broadening the scope of criminal liability, legislators reacted to a perceived expansion of asylum seekers’ procedural protections by turning to increased detention. We also locate the roots of a controversial program, expedited removal, in the convergence of two opposing legislative concerns. While expedited removal first emerged out of an assumption that speedy processing would result in less detention, it later appealed to lawmakers that were concerned about individuals falsely claiming asylum in order to take advantage of supposedly  generous procedural protections.

Many of these issues have continuing relevance today. Today, asylum seekers are once again depicted as agents of infectious disease, with the Governor of Texas recently assailing the Biden Administration for “importing COVID.”  Facing pressure not to detain families, the Biden Administration recently moved to institute expedited removal for families that immigration officials determine do not qualify for asylum after an initial screening at the border. As our work has demonstrated, careful attention to changes in the rhetoric about asylum seekers is critical to developing responses to each asylum “crisis,” and to re-imagining—and resisting—new  categories of immigration law.

[1] Asylum and Inspections Reform: H.R. 1153, H.R. 1355, and H.R. 1679, before the Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law, 103d Cong. (1993), 51.

About the authors

Smita Ghosh is Appellate Counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center.  She was previously a Research Fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center, where her research focused on the history of immigration law and policy, mass incarceration, and criminal sentencing.  The American Society for Legal History selected Smita as a Kathryn T. Preyer Scholar for a paper entitled “Policing the ‘Police State’: Detention, Supervision, and Deportation During the Cold War.”

Mary Hoopes is the Director of Research at the Berkeley Judicial Institute, a center within the Berkeley School of Law that aims to foster interaction between the academy and the judiciary. She researches how legal and political institutions can more effectively serve marginalized populations, with a focus on noncitizens. You can find more information on her website. 

“No HIV in Canada?” African Migrant Youth Act Out HIV Awareness through Community-building Improvisational Theatre

By Bonface Beti, Adey Mohamed, and Susan Frohlick

 To counteract the perception that HIV does not exist in Canada, African migrant youth from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Africa, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Kenya who had settled in Winnipeg, Canada created and performed a short skit as a community-focused HIV awareness activity.

One of the many poster sheets used to brainstorm ideas with the youth group on the issue of how HIV mattered to them. [Photo taken by Susan Frohlick.]

For youth who grew up in African countries grappling with high numbers of HIV infections—and with visible public health messaging—it might appear that no HIV/AIDS exists in Canada, given the nation’s relatively low case numbers and absence of messaging.  Yet, the misperception that HIV/AIDS doesn’t exist exacerbates potential harms of HIV stigma, stereotyping, and misinformation that could lead to untreated HIV. At the end of an ethnographic research project with African immigrant and refugee youth on HIV awareness, sexuality, and immigration, led by Susan Frohlick, she and team members Adey Mohamed and Bonface Beti stood at the crossroads of effective HIV intervention implementation. In conversation with youth research participants, we ultimately decided on an HIV awareness “pop-up” public event to be led by the young people as a promising intervention.

Led by Bonface Beti, the youth are using playback theatre techniques to translate their experiences into performance mode.  [Photo taken by Susan Frohlick.]

Drawing on arts-based approaches to community development and HIV work in refugee camps, Bonface used community-building improvisational theatre to coach youths in identifying themes addressing how HIV mattered in their lives as newcomers and urban residents. With a small group of youths who were already friends (two young men and three young women of diverse migration trajectories and backgrounds), Bonface engaged them in empathic listening and story-telling, core principles of playback theatre (Figures 1 and 2). Over the course of six meetings, the group developed a ten-minute skit to be performed at the pop-up event. To encourage involvement from community, the skit intentionally set up a dilemma for community members to respond with audience improvisation.

Because the skit re-enacted youths’ own story-telling about how HIV mattered in their lives, the skit highlights the youths’ agency and their cognisance of the complex presence of HIV in Canada (Figures 3 and 4). The following synopsis is based on a video recording of practice sessions plus fieldnotes from the event. We’ve used pseudonyms out of respect for the young people who, while they performed the skit publicly, nevertheless continue to face challenges within and outside of  their communities, families, and social networks about HIV stigma and, in particular, how HIV is bound up with experiences of racism, sexism, and heteronormativity. 

***

It’s a sunny fall day in downtown Winnipeg in the Canadian Prairies in 2017. In the middle of Central Park, a troupe of seventeen-year-olds perform a play before dozens of onlookers, in hopes of raising awareness about HIV to the African diaspora living in the neighbourhood. The marigold long-sleeved shirts they wear bear an image they designed themselves—a butterfly outlined with the HIV awareness and solidarity ribbon as its center and the words “hope,” “love,” “support,” “united,” “brave,” “change,” “growth” filling its wings.

***

Lucy and Mercy sit at a picnic table facing one another. They play two close friends. One of the characters (played by Lucy) is HIV positive. The action begins when Lucy’s character confides in the other (played by Mercy) that she is not feeling very well. She is depressed and needs to clear the air. 

Performing the skit at the HIV Awareness Community Pop-Up Event Presented by African Youth held at Central Park, Winnipeg, on September 30, 2017. [Photos taken by Paula Migliardi and used with permission.]

Mercy asks Lucy what is bothering her. Lucy has been talking to two boys now for several months, and she doesn’t know which one to choose. She has identical feelings for them. She turns to her friend for advice on how to choose the one she will date. Mercy suggests that she meets both boys at the same time and place, a local café, to tell them together about her HIV status. Lucy will choose whichever of the two boyfriends accepts this difficult news.  

Lucy is nervous. “I don’t know, um, um, that’s so hard,” she says struggling with her words. 

Her supportive friend urges her on, “You can do this. You got this, best friend!” 

Lucy calls up one of the boys (played by Franco) on her phone to ask him to meet her later in the day. 

“Why not? I always make time for you. I’m so happy,” he says. 

Mercy then encourages Lucy to call the other boy (played by Mohamed). She does, and he, too, is happy to meet with her. 

“Sweetheart, for you, anytime!” he says. 

Once that call ends, Lucy is now worried about what she has put in motion. But her supportive friend promises to help her through it.

“Let me dress you up. Let’s go!” Mercy says to her friend.

 The two of them walk off to the side. 

Seconds later, the two teen boys, Mohamed and Franco, arrive at the front of the café (enlisting a nearby picnic bench). They instantly recognize one another and comment on their appearances. 

“Look how big you’ve got. Are you hitting the gym? I know you’re getting all the ladies,” Franco asks Mohamed. 

Mohamed replies, “Damn, no no, I only have one. I love her so much. You should meet her. She’s the best.” 

“Yeah, me too. I am also meeting my girlfriend here, man,” Franco exclaims. 

As they exchange these cheeky pleasantries, Mercy and Lucy arrive at the café and find the two buddies seated at the table chatting. A tense moment of anxiety hangs in the air for a minute as questions start to rise. Both boys make a move towards Lucy. Mohamed moves closer saying, “Hey babe.”

 At that moment Mohamed and Franco get a sense that they were being played by Lucy. They try to fight each other. Mercy and Lucy intervene.

Mercy asks the boys to stop their fighting and hear what Lucy has to say. Mohamed and Franco settle down and listen to what the girls have to say. Mercy moves away and waits for Lucy to talk. Lucy is anxious while the boys calm down. They sit down at the table again. She apologizes for not being honest with them, and then breaks the news to them. 

In a low voice she says, “I’m sorry that I wasn’t honest before, but I am HIV positive.”

Franco literally jumps off his chair.

He screams, “What??” 

Performing the skit at the HIV Awareness Community Pop-Up Event Presented by African Youth held at Central Park, Winnipeg, on September 30, 2017. [Photos taken by Paula Migliardi and used with permission.]

Mohamed is shocked but composed. He puts his head down. Franco walks away leaving Mercy distressed. Although shocked, Mohamed moves closer to Lucy and hugs her. 

“It’s okay,” he says, comforting her. 

At this point the skit ends, temporarily. Franco asks the audience if they would like to come forward and replace a character in the final scene. Several audience members volunteer. 

Shahid, a young man, chooses to replace the boyfriend who ran away. Instead of running away, he tries to be peaceful and a little bit more magnanimous toward Lucy. He says, “I understand. You can choose him. I have no problem, and I am concerned about your situation. But I have no interest in continuing the relationship.” He changes the narrative by not running away. 

A second audience volunteer, a young woman, elects to play the role of the boyfriend who remained with Lucy comforting her. She comforts Lucy but then she talks to her with words of advice. “You shouldn’t be doing this in the future. You have to be open and tell people the truth. Don’t try to have two relationships without telling this person that this is the situation.” She changes the narrative by offering an alternative to secrecy.

****

This event demonstrates an important way in which African diaspora youth, situated within local and transnational networks, are active agents in the circulation of HIV awareness messaging. Through such events they help keep their communities safer. The pop-up event was a knowledge mobilization strategy that placed the young people centrally as knowledge producers and experts about their own lives. Rather than ask them to consider how HIV can be prevented, a behaviour-based approach that is often viewed as better suited for public or sexual health education, we opted instead to engage them anthropologically with thinking about HIV as a complex lived social reality. Hence, in our research context, the open-ended question (about how it mattered in their own lives) that guided the development of the skit was a compelling approach to counteract the perception that HIV ought not to be a concern as they settled into their new lives in Canada. To the contrary, the young actors demonstrated how dating practices and cultural norms, gender dynamics and embodied performativity, ethics and morals around sexuality were closely entangled with navigating HIV as Black, racialized, heterosexual, young people. That the audience enthusiastically joined in the participatory theatre suggested that these themes also resonated more widely within the community.

The skit, its performance, and methodology through which it was created (multiple meetings, challenging talks about sensitive issues, and so forth) offers this lesson: Community engaged methods and humanizing pedagogies such as improvisational theatre are allies to young people in reclaiming human agency through imagination by tapping into their transnational identities and, thereby, can lead to power knowledge mobilization and critical reflection of health misinformation.

About the Authors:

 Bonface Njeresa Beti is a Kenyan international multidisciplinary practitioner with over ten years work experience as a peacebuilder and theatre-maker delivering inclusive intercultural pedagogies. He holds a MA in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Manitoba, and is currently pursuing a PhD in the same program. He is the co-author of publications about theatre-based methodologies including the edited volume Engaging with Historical Traumas: Experiential Learning and Pedagogies of Resistance.

 Adey Mohamed is a social worker, author, and doctoral candidate in the Peace and Conflict Studies program at the University of Manitoba. She has been involved as a community research on the research project led by Susan Frohlick for several years.

 Susan Frohlick is a professor in anthropology and gender and women’s studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Syilx Territory and co-director of the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab. Publications related to this research can be found in City & Society and in Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health & Illness.  

The Intertwining of Physical and Metaphorical Mobility: Boarding Schools and Colonial Child-Rearing

By Elisabeth Lefebvre

This post explores boarding schools as an often-coercive form of child and youth mobility in colonial Uganda. As in other places and times, a careful reading of this history suggests that when child-rearing practices of marginalized communities are so easily dismissed and the ‘best’ educational options privilege the powerful, we lose opportunities to affirm collective and more culturally responsive approaches to schooling. We also run the risk of (re)creating systems that reproduce, rather than disrupt those same inequalities.

Beliefs about the proper care of children are deeply embedded in cultural practices. We invest a lot of time and effort into thinking about which people and what institutions might best prepare our children to become productive members of society. This was as much the case 150 years ago as it is today. History is filled with examples of ‘experts’ showing up to ‘help’ ‘less-equipped’ parents in educating their children ‘properly’, including the many modern childcare ‘manuals’ that instruct parents on eating and sleeping, and everything in between. In this generally one-sided sharing of knowledge surrounding ‘best practices’, the cultural assumptions of a more dominant group often replace or marginalize others. Additionally, since the advent of mass public education, these frequently forced interventions tend to be patterned on the assumption that a literal movement from home to school is required to make a more metaphorical movement from ‘backwardness’ to ‘civilization’, or ‘inferior’ to ‘superior’ educational opportunity.

My own interest in these assumptions finds its origin in the four years I spent as an elementary school classroom teacher from 2006 to 2010. Since that time, I have pondered the relatively recent and rapid expansion of schooling as a primary site for enculturation wherein students learn largely the same nationally- (or at least regionally-) determined curriculum, away from their families, for a growing number of years. Beginning in 2012, I have studied the initial colonial development of formal schooling in Uganda, tracing this same historical pattern and process through British missionary and government writings. As my work evidences, the British development of a network of schools demonstrates a familiar theme wherein African children are presumed to be neglected, necessitating the intervention of more ‘experienced’ teachers, who might ‘properly care for’ the next generation.

British colonial writings about the Baganda, an ethnic group in what is now Uganda, illustrate these tropes. We know from John Roscoe, one of the earliest British missionaries and ethnographers of the region, that Bagandan children were traditionally understood to belong to their clan; parents typically sent their children away to live with relatives once they had been weaned and named. The purpose of this collectivist approach was to cement a child’s relationship to their extended family. This system also gave youth the opportunity to receive more specialized training along the lines of what we might term an apprenticeship. Another missionary, C. W. Hattersley, referenced this practice as well, writing that he had been told by Sir Apollo Kaggwa that mothers were too ‘soft’ on their own children to raise them properly. All in all, though, reports of Bagandan child-rearing describe communities of care that integrated children and youth into society in thoughtful and productive ways.

Yet most early British missionaries working with the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) – including Hattersley – noted their shock and dismay at the apparent ‘nakedness’ and ‘ill manners’ of Bagandan children. Instead of recognizing the constructive and intentional nature of Bagandan parenting practices, they were appalled. One British missionary made the hyperbolic claim in an 1896 letter to the CMS: “Until quite recently, multitudes of boys and girls had no idea of who was their father or where their proper home was…” Later Bishop Tucker, then leader of the CMS mission, wrote a tract decrying the “evil custom” wherein Bagandan parents would “send their children to be brought up in other homes…It is the work of the parent to watch over the child, and to train it in good habits.”

Figure 1. “Girls’ School, Iganga” (dated around 1926) from I.M. Gateley’s 1970 dissertation, archived at the Special Collection of the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham

And how did these British missionaries, who criticized the collectivist parenting practices of the Baganda, think parents could raise their children more responsibly? Paradoxically, by sending them away—to school. As Tucker explained in his tract, he and the CMS were ultimately advocating for parents to enroll their children in newly-started primary schools, which tended to be boarding schools: “We are prepared to teach your children not only the law of God but other good things, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic…The better taught your children are, the better work they will be able to do, and the happier and more prosperous they will be in their lives.” He concluded his letter: “Do that which in your hearts you know to be right.” Tucker’s appeal seems to have been rooted in two conflicting assumptions: First, that parents’ assumed Christian beliefs would lead them to take more individual responsibility for their children. And second, that the British custom of boarding education would be entirely preferable to the “wicked” practice of sending children to live with family.

By the time the British colonial government began to take a more direct role in the protectorate’s education system in 1925, the Education Department estimated half of Bagandan children attended some form of schooling. Many of these were schools started by Ugandans for Ugandans, indicating a great deal of local interest in formal education (and likely access of the resultant privileges of schooling within the colonial government). But the British insisted that children’s ‘successful’ upbringing still required access to colonial schooling (and thereby control by British teachers and administrators), criticizing these local schools and labeling them “subgrade” for falling short of newly-applied ‘standards’. As a result, the government also denied them financial support.

Throughout colonial accounts, the importance of a literal physical migration of children from their communities to British missionary-run schools (which were often located in more densely-populated areas) and the metaphorical migration of Bagandans toward ‘civilization’ and ‘best’ practices in education and child-rearing (managed by the British) were inextricably linked. As a teacher at King’s School Budo noted in a 1925 letter to the CMS: “These people WILL have better education than they have had in the past…The Natives want to have it from us [missionaries], and…are prepared to pay for it. To miss such an opportunity would be absolutely criminal on our part”. In this way, traditional methods of child-rearing (and likewise community-run, ‘subgrade’ schools) were repeatedly ‘evaluated’ and devalued when compared to the ‘preferable’ imperial model.

Figure 2. Schoolgirls returning to their boarding school following a Sunday morning service at an Anglican church in Masaka, Uganda, taken by the author.

In terms of how Bagandans themselves responded to these schools, the archive presents a spotty and incomplete narrative (though it is important to remember that the archive itself is an imperial creation). Still, there is evidence of both resistance and cooperation. For instance, early in the colonial period, a letter written in 1900 by a Miss Thomas (a CMS missionary) highlights the perspective of a Bagandan chief who encouraged parents to send their children to a newly built school in his community. Yet in testimony presented to the de law Warr Commission in the late 1930s, parents critiqued the curriculum provided by colonial schools to girls as needlessly gender-segregated and of little practical use. Likewise, as I have noted elsewhere in a book chapter examining the diverging narratives of schooling in child-focused and child-authored sources, a series of letters provide examples of strategic compliance and conflict. Perhaps one of the best examples of this duality of resistance and cooperation, was the rapid expansion of “village schools”, mentioned above, which were founded and maintained by Ugandans, out-pacing the expansion of colonial education itself.

There is, of course, much more that could be said about colonial schooling in Uganda (and elsewhere) and this account is undoubtedly far too short to tell the whole story. Yet understanding the entangled nature of physical and metaphorical educational migrations – from the perspective of one particular place and time – offers important insights that we might otherwise miss. Specifically, this history suggests that when child-rearing practices of marginalized communities are so easily dismissed and the ‘best’ educational options privilege the practices and beliefs of the already powerful, we lose opportunities to affirm collective and more culturally-responsive approaches to schooling. We also run the risk of (re)creating systems that reproduce, rather than disrupt those same inequalities.

About the author

Elisabeth Lefebvre is an Assistant Professor of Educational Foundations at Bethel University in Minnesota. Her interdisciplinary research explores the mutually constitutive and historical relationships between schooling and childhood, as well as the ways in which discourses surrounding schools and schooling impact student and teacher experiences. Elisabeth’s work has appeared in Journal of Education Policy, Discourse, International Journal of Education Development, and Teachers College Record, as well as in the recent edited volume Children and Youth as Subjects, Objects Agents: Approaches to Research in a Global Context.

Reflections on Mobility and Multigenerational Families

By Diane Sabenacio Nititham

Associate Professor of Sociology, Murray State University

Mahal and Cara migrated from the Philippines to Ireland as dependents of their families in the early 2000s. Here, they reflect on their immigration status and transition to citizenship.

Mahal, Cara, and I met together on an afternoon just outside of Dublin during summer 2019. Cara invited us to her mother’s house for our group interview where we could have space to share pictures, drink tea, order food, and have Cara’s and my toddlers run around. I first met Mahal and Cara during my dissertation fieldwork in the late 2000s. They both grew up in different parts of Dublin and met for the first time that day. They were excited to learn that they had been living less than a city block from each other for the last year. 

Mahal and Cara both came to Ireland as dependents of their parents in the early 2000s. This was during the “Celtic Tiger” economic boom, when Ireland became one of the fastest growing destinations for Filipino migrants in Europe due to large-scale labor recruitment in healthcare.  As children of non-European Union migrants, they received Stamp 2 as a “dependent student” status as they were under 18. This status is “non-habitual,” meaning that the years they lived in Ireland did not accrue towards residency. Related challenges include being charged higher fees for education than Irish or EU residents, additional visa fees when traveling, and the possibility of having to return to the Philippines if they could not change their status. (Note that there are now additional permissions and schemes available. See An Roinn Dlí agus Cirt/Department of Justice for more information).

 These challenges shaped Mahal and Cara’s understanding of their identities, families, and social circles. While each responded in their own ways, both negotiated their perceptions of being Filipina and Irish by drawing on cultural capital from the Philippines and Ireland, their socialization into Irish society, and their experiences with systemic barriers (Nititham, 2014). Both took on responsibilities which symbolically represent adulthood, including household and reproductive labor. They also reciprocated their parents’ efforts to support immediate and extended transnational families because of their awareness of Filipino global labor migration and seeing their parents’ choices as sacrifices. They simultaneously adjusted to schooling, a different climate and landscape, dealt with new social groups and norms, and navigated Irish and Filipino values (real or perceived). Mahal and Cara are now in their 30s and have lived in Ireland for more than half their lives. Although they have different day-to-day circumstances, they share experiences of migration, mobility, and their transnational multigenerational families.

Opportunities and Movements

Both Mahal and Cara noted that the emotional and psychic demands of their families’ migration and adjustment to Ireland during their youth continue to shape their views and future goals. They each pursued postgraduate education, and while common amongst their friend groups—especially in a competitive labor market—they both saw an advanced degree as a crucial pathway to enhance their education and become self-sufficient providers for their multigenerational families.

 Both recognized that acquiring Irish citizenship offered more mobility, opening up financial and political opportunities previously denied because of their dependent/non-habitual status. They were now entitled to pay Irish fees for postgraduate education, to vote in local and general elections, and had much greater mobility. These opportunities gave them feelings of security and ability to plan long-term. Cara said, “It’s not something [we] have to think about anymore, whereas before we had to think about it a lot. And prepare, and plan and save for it, but now we just sorta relax.”

 Mahal echoed Cara’s sentiments, adding that having Irish citizenship has led to a sense of belonging at the EU level. She loves traveling and the experiences that come with it: “Having an Irish passport made it easier to travel, not have to pay for visas; not having to go for an appointment just to go to get a visa, having it to just go on holidays. Whereas now we are all Irish citizens, we just go, ‘Are you off [from work]? Let’s go somewhere.’”

Mahal and Cara share stories of their youth in the Philippines and in Ireland.  Photo Credit: Diane Sabenacio Nititham, 2019.

Multigenerational Families and Customs

While citizenship has offered more opportunities, other challenges remain. Cara regularly thinks about Filipino and Irish traditions to share with her Filipina Irish child. As her child will grow up in Ireland, Cara wants to intentionally foster an appreciation of having a bicultural identity, multigenerational families in Ireland and the Philippines, the social values and cultural expectations that she may encounter, and challenges that may emerge. Her own experiences inform this perspective.

She mentioned teaching customs like the mano po, a gesture that expresses deference to elders by asking them for a blessing by bowing one’s forehead to their hand. While Cara’s family and social circle do not practice this, Cara wondered whose responsibility it is to share the symbolism of gestures and customs. Sharing values from the homeland can carry considerable meaning for diasporic individuals, especially for those who have felt they were  negotiating different spaces (see Nititham, 2016; Wang and Collins, 2016; Gutierrez, 2018). Whether she adhered to customs or not, Cara said that being knowledgeable was important because if they visit the Philippines, “People actually expect that you do that, and when you don’t it’s actually rude or at least that what I think, cause [they’ll say] ‘it’s rude ‘cause you’re disrespectful.’” She hopes her daughter will not see this as simply straddling “the two cultures,” but rather an opportunity to have rich experiences.

Ongoing “In-Between”

Mahal and Cara reflected that their identities as Filipinas in Ireland can be straightforward yet conflicting, mundane and rich. They described their experiences as “in-between,'' but felt the phrase “in-between” is a limited way to explain the complexities and nuances of their lives. In reflecting on their transitions to Irish citizens, they have seen how citizenship offers pathways for mobility and stability. They share similar experiences with other children of immigrants from outside the EU in Ireland, including how their previous limitations, their ongoing family responsibilities, and their future possibilities impact how they interact with others and provide for their multigenerational families. For Mahal and Cara, Ireland is their long-term home, and that the social, economic, and political climates in Ireland and the Philippines will continue to shape their sense of belonging and strategies to respond to their families’ needs. 

Diane Sabenacio Nititham is an associate professor of sociology at Murray State University. Her interests include home, diaspora, and transnational social communities.  Her book, Making Home in Diasporic Communities: Transnational Belonging Amongst Filipina Migrants, highlights the intersections of global labor migration and everyday practices for Filipina migrants in Ireland. In Fall 2021, she will hold, “Emergent Socialscapes” at  Murray Art Guild, an exhibit featuring research and photography of Ireland’s Filipino communities between 2005-2020. She will also be working with the Radio Preservation Task Force, a project of the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, on Filipino radio history.  You can follow Diane on LinkedIn and Twitter (@DrNititham). 

Border Line Limbo

By Sara Gomez

I recently concluded two and a half years working as a legal assistant at the International Refugee Assistance Project, an organization that provides legal assistance to and brings systemic litigation on behalf of refugees, immigrants, and other displaced people. As an immigrant myself, I cherished the opportunity to learn how to use the law as a tool to help families seeking safety in the U.S. I never expected that I would get so caught up in the technicalities of a lawsuit that I would ever, even briefly, lose sight of my own complex and complicated immigration journey.

During my time at the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP), our rockstar litigation team reached an historic settlement with the United States government in a lawsuit challenging the Trump Administration’s unlawful termination of the Central American Minors (CAM) parole program that allowed families to safely reunite in the United States. Natalia Villavicencia* is one of the young people who was able to travel to the U.S. thanks to this settlement agreement. Natalia was able to enter the country with temporary parole status and reunite with her father after years apart. The family was scheduled to meet with IRAP staff shortly after her arrival.

Navigate MN / Unidos MN 2018 Day of Action. Photo by Fibonacci Blue.

I was humbled and excited to meet Natalia and her family. Working at an organization that serves refugees and immigrants around the world, most of my contact with the people we assist is remote – phone calls, WhatsApp messages, the occasional video chat. The chance to meet a family impacted by our litigation in person felt like a treasure. I expected every member of the Villavicencia family to be just as overjoyed to be reunited in the United States as I was to meet them.

Unfortunately, I was so caught up in the victory of our lawsuit that I failed to center – or even consider – the complexity and nuance of Natalia’s feelings. Wrapped up in the weeds of the settlement agreement and travel logistics, I momentarily forgot about my own journey from Colombia into the U.S. and how full of contradictions it was. In front of four attorneys and myself, Natalia’s mother asked her if she was happy to be in the United States. To my surprise, the only sound that escaped her lips in response to that question were panicked sobs. I was taken aback. Wasn’t she happy to be with her father in the U.S.? What was the source of these tears?

Through gasps and shallow breaths, Natalia informed us that she was confused about why she had to be in the U.S., that she did not feel welcomed or comfortable at her new school, and that she wanted to go back home - home. “¡No me gusta aquí, quiero regresar a mi casa! Los niños en el colegio se ríen de mí porque no sé hablar inglés.” (“I don’t like it here; I want to go back home! The kids at school laugh at me because I don’t know how to speak English.”) She had been thrust into a brand new world in the dead of winter, a country unbeknownst to her filled with people who communicated in a language she did not speak. Once Natalia explained her utter confusion about why she could not move freely between this new country and her own, her cries made perfect sense.

 As an immigrant at the mercy of borders myself, Natalia’s words unlocked a deep memory in me. I was transported back to being nine years old on a public-school playground in rural Illinois. A classmate strolled up to me, called me a beaner** and asked, tauntingly, “Where’s your green card, beaner? Do you even have one?” Not knowing what that was, I muttered, “Um, yeah… I think so?” I was confused and embarrassed, but I tried to keep my cool. I ran home after school that day to ask my mom what a green card was, if I had one, if it was, in fact, green.

Sara at her 6th birthday party in Illinois. Photo provided by author.

That was the day I learned that I am undocumented. As it turned out, I didn’t have a green card. I’m sure the quick-fire questions I asked across the kitchen table that afternoon left my mom reeling: ​“What does that mean? Why don’t we have green cards? Are they actually green? How do we get one? Why do we need one? Who made up these rules?” The innocence behind these questions rings more loudly today than ever, each one just as valid and pressing now as it was then. My mom somehow managed to answer each one calmly, in turn.

“I quickly realized that Natalia felt trapped inside borders she did not ask for, just like me.”

Snapping back into the room full of people around me, I quickly realized that Natalia felt trapped inside borders she did not ask for, just like me. Though our experiences and journeys are unique, her panicked cries resonated deeply with me that evening. How many times have I felt suffocated by border lines, by this country, by laws that tell me I don’t deserve to be here? By the ignorance of individuals and institutions that have called me beaner and asked, “Why didn’t you just come here the right way?” as if there’s a right way to traverse continents in the search for safety when you’re a kid whose life hangs in the balance.

There’s something deeper and complexly intertwined in Natalia’s perspective, and in both of our experiences as immigrants, that deserves to be lifted up. Doesn’t Natalia deserve to travel freely, as she wishes, to spend time with her family here and in her home country? Don’t I? I hope that by sharing her story I can honor Natalia’s bravery, complexity, and wholeness as a young person in the crossfire of border lines. I hope to provide a glimpse into how much violence such insane and inane immigration policies inflict on young people like Natalia, like myself, like millions of others. I hope to let Natalia know that she has left a mark on my heart – I have never met anyone who seemed to understand and encapsulate my own feelings about being a young person in immigration limbo better than she did the day I met her.

May we continue fighting towards a future free from xenophobia, racist immigration policies, and the weaponization of immigrants as political chess pieces.

* All names are pseudonyms for purposes of anonymity.

** Derogatory term used to describe persons of Mexican descent, in reference to the prevalent use of varieties of beans in Mexican cuisine. (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/worst-slur-mexican-americans-still-mystery-some-n959616).

About the Author

Sara Gomez is a graduate of Pomona College with a B.A. in Media Studies and a concentration in Politics, a former legal assistant with the legal services and litigation teams at the International Refugee Assistance Project in New York City, and a rising 1L law school student. She can be found on twitter at @saragomezzzzz and contacted via email at sara.gomez.bohorquez@gmail.com. The views expressed here are her own.

Creating a research-engaged pedagogy to support vocational learners transitioning into higher education

by Charlie Davis

This post is based on the outcomes of a student-staff partnership project aimed at creating a research-engaged pedagogy to support vocational students develop academic capabilities as they transition into higher education. Our partnership comprised of two staff members and seven students from a range of disciplines and year groups in a UK university. Through our work, which you can read in full here, my colleague, Luke Parmenter (Nottingham Trent University) and I, contributed to conversations that challenge deficit narratives of vocational learners as lacking epistemic credibility when compared to individuals identified as “academic” or “academically minded.”

Every year, in the second week of August, students across the UK receive their Advanced Level qualifications (A-Level) results. A-Levels are post-16 qualifications which are seen as the traditional route into higher education (Gill, 2018). Results Day causes much joy, anxiety, and uncertainty as those students planning to go to university discover if they’ve achieved the points needed for the courses they want to study. The media are always at hand to capture the moment students find out what their grades are, and what life might hold for them going forward. In 2020, however, rather the stock images of jubilant students delighting in the results they received, the media captured the despondency of a generation of students suffering at the hands an unforgiving pandemic.

Owing to social distancing, A-Level examinations, traditionally held in large exam halls, were cancelled. Therefore, results were calculated by an algorithm which predicted grades based on a student’s school ranking in their subject area, their school’s exam performance over the previous three years and a student’s past results in their exam subject. It soon became apparent, however, that the algorithm was less than effective, throwing the lives of some students into turmoil because the results were not what was expected. Mobilized by a collective sense of injustice, students rallied under the clarion call of “F**k the algorithm”. Their protests, and subsequent media coverage, forced the government to abandon the algorithm. However, for many students it was too late as the damage had already done; the places they had been offered subject to their results were no longer guaranteed.

Student protest signs. Credits: Jason Cairnduff, Reuters Connect.

“The whole sorry affair highlighted the social inequity which continues to characterise aspects of the UK education system.”

The whole sorry affair highlighted the social inequity which continues to characterise aspects of the UK education system. Predicted grades calculated by the algorithm disadvantaged schools from less-privileged areas because year in, year out, they underperform in comparison to their more affluent counterparts The situation was a bleak reminder, as if it were needed, of the growing gulf of educational imbalance between the haves and have-nots in UK society (Elliot Major and Machin, 2018).

The A-Level catastrophe also illustrated the biases which exist in relation to the degrees of epistemic credibility assigned to different qualifications. In the UK, you’d not be forgiven for thinking that A-Levels were the only Post-16 qualifications in existence, given the exalted position they occupy in the social imagination. However, there are other Post-16 options, such as BTECs (Business and Technology Education Council), often characterized as inferior vocational alternatives to A-Levels (Al Meselmani et al. 2018). The persistent representation of BTECs as A-Level alternatives, reinforces a perception of vocational education as epistemically inferior to its academic counterpart (Wolf, 2011; Reay, 2017). Internet memes liken BTECs to Pepsi and A-Levels to Coca-Cola; the inference being Coca-Cola is of a higher quality than Pepsi (Kelly, 2017). During the A-Level results debacle, it seemed BTEC students, who were waiting on their results too, were forgotten about, because they barely featured in initial media coverage.

Students protest outside parliament against the downgrading of A-level results. Source.

BTECs, and other non-A-Level Post-16 qualifications are often labelled non-traditional. So-called non-traditional students are more likely to come from under-represented groups, include students with low socio-economic status, Black, Asian and Minority Ethic (BAME) students, neurodiverse students, Lesbian Bisexual Gay Transgender Queer (LGBT+) students, mature students, individuals from Roma, Gypsy and Traveller groups and disabled students (OfS, 2021). Students identified as non-traditional, such as vocational qualification holders, are more likely to have inadequate access to social, culture and academic resources needed to thrive in Higher Education are limited (Holton, 2018). There are higher dropout rates among vocational qualification holders in Higher Education because they are often not equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in academic contexts (Katarzi and Hayward, 2020). In response, institutions seek to arrest dropout rates through extra-curricular support to develop the academic capabilities of students flagged up as in danger of exiting their courses. While this can be beneficial, it does little to address the structural injustices excluding these students from earlier access to educational experiences to develop a range of academic capabilities (Haggis, 2006; Smit, 2012). Our study sought to address this issue by creating a research-engaged pedagogy to support BTEC students develop academic capabilities before transitioning to Higher Education.

Working with disequilibrium to foster collectivity  

Embracing a participatory research approach, we worked in partnership with seven multidisciplinary students at a university in the Midlands of England to develop the research-engaged pedagogy. The research process was an experiential one, immersing the participants in a project researching belonging at their institution. As students carried out their research, they reflected on the experience to shape the research-engaged pedagogy for the BTEC students. From the outset, my colleague and I devolved power to the participants in an effort to unsettle traditional staff-student dynamics. In line with methodologies advocating the co-production of knowledge, we created a collective space in which everyone had a say in how the community of inquiry evolved (Banks et al, 2019).

The study took many twists and turns, some of which, particularly in the early stages, were unsettlingly discomforting. For my partner and I, unlearning how to act like teachers was easier said than done. Habits like unconsciously gravitating to the front of the room were hard to jettison. The student partners picked up on this because it contradicted our espoused commitment to share power. Initially, we struggled with the unsettledness, but we soon realised the disequilibrium offered opportunities create a more egalitarian power structure. We created a questioning culture where “dissensus” prompted us to consider other possible ways of thinking and being (Biesta, 2017: 83). Through sharing our vulnerabilities, my partner and I, built trust and reciprocity, which helped create a more equitable inquiry space. We became the “meddler[s]-in-the-middle”, working in collaboration with the students to learning collectively from each other (McWilliam, 2008).

During the study, everyone, in similar and different ways, developed epistemic confidence (Fricker, 2007); whether it was the strength to stand up in a class and share opinions or to contribute knowledge to discussions perceived to be dominated by more privileged individuals. While we experienced quite a few highs, the experience of mobilising the approach with the BTEC students after our initial study reminded us that there is some way to go to implement such approaches in mainstream curricula. Our slow pedagogic approach, fraught with uncertainties and messiness, is at odds with the tidy linear modular processes of outcomes-based models of education; so dominant across hyper-marketized Higher Education landscapes Harland, 2016; Mountz et al., 2015).

The approach we developed is more suited to contexts where smaller groups of individuals devoted to pedagogic activism seek to change aspects of their shared social realities. At the heart of our work, is a commitment to keeping meanings open by questioning what we take for granted as how things are. This can be unsettlingly discomforting at times, but it provides the impetus for critical reflections which can generate knowledge to transform inquiry spaces and ourselves. We continue to take our work in different directions; each project transcending educational spatial boundaries to establish equitable learning opportunities for different social groups, particularly those that are under-represented. In line with a recent UNESCO (2021) report on the futures of education, we hope our work contributes to efforts to generate knowledge aimed at creating a more just world where education is a public good for all.

About the author

Dr. Charlie Davis is an assistant professor in Higher Education at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has been working in Higher Education since 2009, having spent eight years previous to that teaching English to Speakers of Other languages. Charlie’s work facilitates participatory research approaches aimed at co-producing knowledge for social justice purposes. His work seeks to provide participants with opportunities to develop epistemic confidence so they can be heard in situations where their contributions are often silenced as they are viewed as lacking epistemic credibility as knowers. In his research, Charlie utilises a range of life history methods including critical storytelling and other creative methods to support participants generate knowledge. Currently, Charlie is leading a participatory project mobilising critical storytelling methods to provide academics of working-class heritage in elite UK institutions represent their lived experiences on their terms. He is a member of the Collaborative Action Research Network (CARN) and the Association for Working Class Academics (AWCA).

Unaccompanied refugee minors’ experiences of irregular mobility to and in Europe

By Océane Uzureau

(français ci-dessous)

Unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs), are foreign minors who most generally leave home to escape from poverty, discrimination, or war and in search of freedom, safety and better life opportunities. Many of these children and adolescent youth are alone in their lengthy and perilous journeys or are separated from caregivers in the course of their migratory trajectories. Little is known about migrant children’s experiences during the journey and on their impact on children’s mental health, especially for those engaged in onwards mobility within Europe. My research is embedded within the European Research Council (ERC)- funded Childmove research project. This multi-sited, longitudinal and mixed-methods study aims at documenting the impact of pre, during and after flight experiences on unaccompanied minors’ mental health and psychological wellbeing.

Credit pictures: Océane Uzureau 2017

I conducted my research with young people encountered in Italy between October 2017 and March 2018. I partnered with 39 participants (ages 14 y/o to 17,5y/o): the majority of them identified as male but four were young female refugees. At the time of the first interview, I met young migrants in Palermo (11) in Sicily, Rome (4) and Ventimiglia (22) near the Italian-French border. The majority were already on the move (22) and trying to reach another EU country. The second and third interviews with those who took part in the follow-up study (25 participants for M2 and 14 for M3) were conducted between March 2018 and November 2019 in Italy and in six other countries of residence (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, Malta and Spain) where some of them had migrated since our first meeting.

Unaccompanied minors’ irregular mobilities across Europe

In spite of their young age and the absence of a protective adult along their journey, young migrants must adapt to shifting and sometimes hostile social contexts while finding the necessary means to pursue their migratory project. The young people I interviewed explained that they had many reasons for mobility after arrival in Europe, such as joining family members or looking for better reception conditions, educational opportunities, and employment. Yet, when traveling alone through alternative and irregular migratory channels, they also face increased challenges related to safety, daily survival and migration controls.

The 24-month longitudinal study enabled me to account for the diversity and complexity of unaccompanied minors’ trajectories in Europe. If some of the participants left Italy quickly after arrival, others were determined to stop their journey and settle permanently there. Finally, others migrated again several months or years after arrival, this onward mobility resulting from their failed attempts to settle durably in one place. Following these individual trajectories also challenged the oversimplified categories of ‘transit’ and ‘destination’ countries by showing how both realities often coexist within the same national space.

During my research, many participants often relied on irregular mobility to escape lengthy asylum or family reunification processes, poor receptions conditions, increasingly restrictive residence policies and reach their country of destination. Some children were traveling irregularly with a clear destination in mind and were highly distrustful of official reception structures. They feared to be diverted from their intended trajectory: most of them were fingerprinted upon arrival in Italy and dreaded to be returned to this European country of first entry. In fact, in the course of their journey, they could find themselves trapped in mobility. For instance, several minors travelled from Italy to France and, once there, found themselves unable to enter the protection system due to limited reception provisions or disputes over their age. They ended up on the move again across different cities, trying to find local child authorities recognising their need of protection.  In general, young people described irregular mobility as emotionally and physically taxing, and as offering no opportunity for personal growth.

As explained by Caleb in Ventimiglia, “To change country and place all the time is boring. I would like to stay in one place and to study and work there.” Here, Caleb refers to the repetitive routine of survival produced by his irregular mobility and the dire living conditions experienced within migrant settlements in Ventimiglia, Paris, Calais or even Brussels. Youth further navigated a complex network of humanitarian and grass-root organisations to fulfil their basic needs while also often interfacing with local smugglers to reach their destination. Although the volunteers’ hospitality offered safety and respite at night and on weekends, it was not a long-term survival strategy.

Credit pictures: Océane Uzureau 2017

Young people experienced additional stress while stuck in border spaces, where they were exposed to discretionary and illegal practices by border guards. At the Italian-French border, ‘push backs’ from French border guards led minors to be automatically returned toward Italy without any assessment of their protection needs. Further, in their journey, the repeated settlement evictions combined with violence from border and police officers – especially in the North of France – were consequential for youths’ well-being. Abel explains that in Calais “the place didn’t allow us to remain immobile and we tried to cross many times.” Here again, migrant children were stuck between the mobility produced by deterrent policies toward transit migrants and by their repeated crossing attempts. 

For these reasons, it was important to conduct interviews in safe spaces and avoid further mobility. For instance, I met some participants as they were temporarily housed by civilians from humanitarian grassroots organisations such as Plateforme Citoyenne in Brussels (Belgium) or Migr’Action in the North of France. To date, all the participants that I followed but two finally managed to reach their desired country. For all of them – far from being a choice – irregular mobility was the consequence of limited legal options to travel. As illustrated by Abel, whom I followed from Italy to the UK: “For me, I will never even think of a journey like this again. However, if it would be legal, using an airplane, I would do it again.” While currently legal pathways for migrant children are rather limited, through this is contribution I aim to highlight some of the challenges they face when left with no other option but to rely on irregular mobility.

About the author

Océane Uzureau is a PhD candidate in Educational Sciences at Ghent University (CESSMIR) and a member of the ERC funded ChildMove project. She is holding a Master’s degree in Migration Studies from the University of Poitiers (France). She previously worked for the Observatory of the Migration of Minors (University of Poitiers/ MIGRINTER – CNRS) on action-research projects with unaccompanied minors newly arrived in France, analysing their access to protective services and strategies of local inclusion with local institutions and NGOs. Her research interests are unaccompanied minors’ mobile trajectories toward and within Europe, border crossing experiences and migrants’ voices while on the move.

Les expériences de mobilité en situation irrégulière des mineurs migrants non accompagnés

Par Océane Uzureau

(English above)

Les mineurs réfugiés non accompagnés sont des enfants étrangers ayant fui la guerre, la pauvreté, et les discriminations vécues dans leur pays d’origine à la recherche de sécurité, de la liberté, et de meilleures opportunités pour le futur. La plupart de ces enfants et adolescents s’engagent de façon autonome dans de long et périlleux voyages migratoires ou se retrouvent séparés de leurs parents au cours de leur trajectoire. Il existe actuellement très peu de connaissance sur les expériences vécues par ces jeunes migrants durant leur parcours migratoire, précisément sur l’impact de leur mobilité dans l’espace européen sur leur santé mentale. Ma recherche s’inscrit dans le cadre du projet de recherche Childmove financé par le Conseil Européen de la Recherche (ERC). Cette enquête multi-située et longitudinale mobilise des outils de recherche quantitatifs et qualitatifs afin de documenter l’impact des expériences vécues dans le pays d’origine, pendant et après la migration sur la santé mentale et le bien-être psychologique des mineurs non accompagnés.

Crédit photos : Océane Uzureau, 2017

J’ai réalisé ma recherche auprès de jeunes réfugié.es non accompagné.es rencontrés en Italie entre Octobre 2017 et Mars 2018. J’ai ainsi collaboré avec 39 participants (ayant entre 14 et 17,5 ans) : la majorité d’entre eux étaient des adolescents masculins et au total, quatre jeunes filles réfugiées ont également participé. Lors du premier entretien j’ai donc rencontrés de jeunes migrants localisés à Palerme (11) en Sicile, à Rome (4) et à Vintimille (22) près de la frontière italo-française. La plupart déclarait être en transit (22) avec comme objectif principal de rejoindre un autre pays européen. Les second et le troisième entretiens réalisés dans le cadre du suivi longitudinal (concernant 25 participants pour M2 et 14 participants pour M3) se sont déroulé entre Mars 2018 et Novembre 2019 en Italie et dans 6 autres pays européens (France, Royaume-Uni, Allemagne, Belgique, Malte et l’Espagne) où certains jeunes avaient migré depuis notre première rencontre.

Les mobilités des mineurs migrants en situation irrégulière en Europe

Malgré leur jeune âge et en l’absence d’un adulte responsable de leur protection au cours de leur voyage migratoire, les jeunes migrants doivent s’adapter à des contextes sociaux instables et parfois hostiles tout en trouvant les moyens nécessaires à la poursuite de leur parcours. Les jeunes migrants que j’ai interrogé ont expliqué avoir différentes raisons pour poursuivre leur mobilité après leur arrivée en Europe telles que rejoindre un membre de leur famille ou bien un pays perçu comme plus favorable en matière d’accueil, d’accès à l’éducation et plus tard, à l’emploi. Cependant, lorsqu’ils empruntent des voies migratoires irrégulières et alternatives, ces jeunes doivent également faire face à de nombreux défis relatifs à leur sécurité, leurs besoins quotidiens et aux politiques migratoires. Le suivi longitudinal de 24 mois réalisé dans cette recherche m’a permis d’observer la diversité et la complexité des trajectoires migratoires des mineurs migrants en Europe. Si certains participants ont quitté l’Italie rapidement après leur arrivée, d’autres étaient déterminés à s’y installer durablement. Enfin, d’autres ont migré à nouveau plusieurs mois, voire années après leur arrivée. Cette poursuite de la mobilité résultant de leurs échecs à s’installer durablement dans un territoire. Suivre ces trajectoires individuelles permettait ainsi de questionner les catégories parfois abstraites de ‘pays de transit’ et ‘pays de destination’ en révélant la coexistence de ces deux réalités au sein d’un même espace national.

Crédit photos : Océane Uzureau, 2017

Au cours de ma recherche, de nombreux participants n’avaient d’autre alternative que la mobilité irrégulière pour échapper à des procédures d’asile ou de regroupement familial interminables, des conditions d’accueil jugées insuffisantes, des politiques de résidence de plus en plus restrictives ou simplement pour atteindre leur pays de destination préféré. Certains jeunes migrants voyageant de façon irrégulière vers une destination clairement identifiée étaient hautement suspicieux à l’égard des structures d’accueil officielles. En effet, ces derniers craignaient d’être détournés de leur trajectoire : la plupart d’entre eux avait être identifiés avec leurs empreintes à leur arrivée en Italie et redoutaient donc d’être retournés vers ce pays européen de première entrée. En effet, certains peuvent se retrouver piégés dans la mobilité au cours de leur parcours migratoire. Ainsi, certains mineurs ont voyagé de l’Italie vers la France et se retrouvèrent incapables d’accéder au système de protection du fait de dispositions d'accueil limitées ou inexistantes dans certains départements et de non-reconnaissance de leur minorité. Malgré leur désir de s’installer durablement, ils se retrouvèrent à nouveau en situation de transit entre différentes villes, à la recherche de services locaux de protection de l’enfance susceptibles de reconnaitre leurs besoins de protection en tant que mineurs. De manière générale, les mineurs ont souligné l’épuisement physique et psychologique ainsi que l’absence d’évolution personnelle de qui caractérisent la mobilité irrégulière.

Comme l’a expliqué Caleb à Vintimille : « Changer de pays et de lieu tout le temps est ennuyeux. J'aimerais rester au même endroit, pour y étudier et y travailler ». Ici Caleb fait référence à la routine de survie répétitive produite par la migration irrégulière et les conditions de vie difficiles vécues dans les campements informels de migrants à Vintimille, Paris, Calais ou même Bruxelles. En outre, les jeunes naviguaient un réseau complexe d’organisations humanitaires et d’associations de bénévoles pour satisfaire leurs besoins fondamentaux mais devaient également interagir avec des passeurs locaux pour poursuivre leur parcours migratoire. Bien que l’hospitalité de bénévoles hébergeurs offrait un peu de sécurité et de répit le soir et pendant les weekends, cette stratégie de survie n’était pas durable et parfois indisponible.

Les jeunes migrants ont aussi vécu un stress accru lors de périodes d’attente en zones frontalières où ils étaient exposés à certaines pratiques illégales et discrétionnaires de garde-frontières. A la frontière italo-française, il s’agissait du renvoi systématique vers l’Italie sans évaluation du besoin de protection des migrants et des mineurs non accompagnés par la police française (appelé aussi ‘push-back en anglais). Plus tard, les démantèlements systématiques de camps de fortune par la police  et les agents aux frontières –particulièrement dans le Nord de la France- ont eu des conséquences sur le bien-être des jeunes. Abel explique qu’à Calais « le lieu  ne [nous] permettait pas de rester immobiles et nous avons essayé de traverser de nombreuses fois ». Là encore, les mineurs migrants devaient faire face à la mobilité générée par les politiques hostiles à l’égard des migrants en transit et celle produite par leurs tentatives répétées de passer la frontière.

Pour toutes ces raisons, il était important de réaliser les entretiens dans les lieux sécurisés et d’éviter davantage de mobilité. Par exemple, j’ai rencontré certains participants durant leur hébergement provisoire chez des hébergeurs bénévoles appartenant aux réseaux de la Plateforme Citoyenne à Bruxelles et Migr’Action dans le Nord de la France. A ce jour, tous les participants que j’ai suivi, sauf deux, on finalement atteint leur pays de destination. Pour chacun d’entre eux – loin de constituer un choix – la mobilité irrégulière était la conséquence du manque de voies de migration légale. Cet aspect fut illustré par Abel que j’ai suivi durant son parcours de l’Italie vers le Royaume Uni : « Pour moi, je n'envisagerai plus jamais un tel voyage. Cependant, si c'était légal, en utilisant un avion, je le ferais à nouveau ». Alors que les voies de migration légale sont actuellement limitées pour les mineurs non accompagnés en situation de mobilité, je voulais par cette contribution mettre en lumière les défis qu’ils rencontrent lorsque leur unique recours est celui de la mobilité irrégulière.

A propos de l'auteur

Océane Uzureau est doctorante en sciences de l'éducation à l'Université de Gand (CESSMIR) et membre du projet ChildMove financé par le Conseil Européen de la Recherche (ERC). Elle est titulaire d'un master en études migratoires de l'Université de Poitiers (France). Elle a précédemment travaillé pour l'Observatoire de la Migration des Mineurs (Université de Poitiers/ MIGRINTER - CNRS) dans des projets de recherche-action auprès de mineurs non accompagnés récemment arrivés en France, analysant leur accès aux services de protection et leur stratégies d'intégration locale avec des institutions et des organisations locales. Ses recherches portent sur l'analyse des trajectoires des mineurs non accompagnés vers et en Europe, leurs expériences de passage des frontières et les moyens d’expression des migrants en transit.

Media coverage and discursive repertoires on migrants in Chile

By Andrea Cortés Saavedra

Media discourses represent migration in a differentiating manner. By constructing a dichotomy between Latin American/ European and migrant children/migrant adults, the media reproduce a colonial ethos and childhood view as passive, dependent and one-dimensional.

(Español abajo)

Immigration in Chile is not a new phenomenon. However, the continuous increase of the number of migrants in recent years and new nationalities arriving have captured the national press’ attention. As part of international rhetoric in which migration is positioned as a problem, Chile's media discourses have exacerbated coverage in which migrants appear as disruptors of the social order. Indeed, the "illusion of cultural homogeneity" and the "denial of a mestizo identity" have been historically reproduced by the Chilean media. This is how colonial legacies and relations are replicated and reinforced in which the European migrant is welcome, and the racialised Latin American migrant is undesired. The media has discursively constructed South-South migration as a spectacle of this difference. Accordingly, the "imagined community" is altered and weakened. Likewise, media accounts of human mobility represent migrant children and migrant adults in differentiated ways, mostly linking migrant children with the notion of innocence and vulnerability and migrant adults with the idea of ​​crime and threat. Drawing on my doctoral research, which included a school ethnography, policy analysis and media analysis, here I share some analytic insights regarding media discourses of migrants in Chile.

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“Schools are not prepared to welcome children who migrate to Chile.” La Tercera.

Framing social difference in Chile

Estimates indicate that 1,492,522 foreigners resided in Chile in 2019; that is, almost 8.3% of the total population. This is a doubling of the migrant population in 2017, which reached 4.35%. Out of migrants in Chile, approximately 10% are children between 0 and 14 years old. The main migrant groups come from Venezuela (30.5%), Peru (15.8%), Haiti (12.5%), Colombia (10.8%) and Bolivia (8.0%). Thus, the European migration of the 19th and 20th centuries promoted by the Chilean State has been replaced by a regional and spontaneous labour-oriented migration. The media has been framed the social difference as a problem when the origins of migrants are not European. Therefore, the racialised migratory flows that include indigenous peoples and “Afro-descendants” are “otherised” and discursively assembled as a disadvantaged group in Chile. In this sense, the politics of difference reinforces a media narrative founded on a colonial ethos.

Media discourse analysis of the two mainstream Chilean newspapers suggests that Latin American and Caribbean adult migration is frequently criminalised and framed from a conflict sphere. Media coverage highlights the ruptures that adult migrants generate in Chilean daily life. For example, in many cases, adult Caribbean migrants are portrayed as associated with violence and crime and as people who have negatively transformed the neighbourhoods in which they reside. In other cases, the media use discursive repertoires which label migrants as a disadvantaged group without tools or networks to improve their living conditions. This reduces adult migration to the problems that they might produce in Chile and to the issues they suffer as a uniformly “othered” group.

Child migration occupies less space in the Chilean press than adult migration. Further, children in Chile have a minimal presence in public discourses produced and disseminated by the media. ​​In the study "Boys, girls and adolescents in the media. Construction of stereotypes in the press and television in Chile", UNICEF (2019) identified that children and young people were made invisible in the media. Also, UNICEF showed that the media coverage addressed a reduced range of issues that affect children and the portraits were stereotyped. Likewise, childhood used to be represented as passive and without children being the protagonists of their own stories. The passivity attributed to children displayed in the Chilean media rhetoric was an element that was repeated in the media analysis that I conducted. Specifically, migrant children were portrayed from two predominant spheres: the adult world and the education field.

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“How to learn without speaking Spanish.” La Tercera Newspaper.

On the one hand, migrant children are usually framed in relation to with the adult world, thus assuming that children are in an inferior status and do not experience vicissitudes like those faced by autonomous adult migrants. In this regard, migrant children are portrayed as mere "luggage" that accompanies their parents and as passive figures without their own migratory trajectories and decision-making capacity. The media reinforces this dependency condition through discursive strategies when reporters piece together accounts of migrants’ experiences. The vulnerabilities in which racialised migrant children live in Chile are attributed to irresponsible and uneducated parents and to the negligent caring practices of those migrant parents with a "different parental culture." The figure of the abandoned migrant child without agency capacity is cast as a reality.

On the other hand, migrant childhood as a concrete and particular phenomenon is addressed from the sphere of education. That is, when children are not portrayed in terms of the adult world in the media, they are examined from the education field, as a social sphere dedicated to childhood and a traditional space for children engagement. Educational settings are protected spaces considered appropriate for migrant children and thus conceal the taken-for-granted assumptions about the ideal childhood trope. The media echoes the increase in migrant flows and pays attention to the potential problems resulting from a rise in enrollment of migrant children in schools in Chile. The reproduction of the colonial ethos becomes evident when the media portrays migrant childhood by creating hierarchies among nationalities and questioning the educational system's capacity to integrate these different and racialised migrants. For instance, the media privileges school testimonies in which teachers describe the contribution of Peruvian children because of their good behaviour and obedience, unlike Haitian children who are portrayed for their difficulties integrating and for their experiences of discrimination. Consequently, migrant children are made visible in the spaces where they are expected to socialize and where “protective” institutions of the schools might educate them away from their "disruptive cultures."

About the author

Andrea Cortés Saavedra is a Chilean PhD candidate at the Institute of Education at University College London. She is a journalist, and she holds a bachelor’s in social communication and a master’s in social sciences and sociology of modernization from the University of Chile. She has worked as postgraduate teaching assistant in courses on communication, childhood, social identities, methodologies of social research and migration. She has also participated as a research assistant in projects on Latin American migration in Chile; media and indigenous people and social memory. Her doctoral research focuses on the social positions of migrant children in Chilean schools. She also studies the media coverage and media discourses on migration and childhood in the context of migratory transformations in Chile. Her research interests include migration, refugee studies, education policy, media discourses and childhood studies.

References

Anderson, B. (2016). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised ed.).

Orellana, M.F., B. Thorne, A. Chee, and W.S.E. Lam. (2001). “Transnational Childhoods: The Participation of Children in Processes of Family Migration.” Social Problems 48: 572–591

Tijoux, M. E. (2013). Las escuelas de la inmigración en la ciudad de Santiago: Elementos para una educación contra el racismo. Polis Revista Latinoamericana, (35).

Unicef, (2019). Niños, niñas y adolescentes en medios de comunicación. Construcción de estereotipos en prensa escrita y televisión en Chile.

Valenzuela-Vergara, E. M. (2019). Media Representations of Immigration in the Chilean Press: To a Different Narrative of Immigration? Journal of Communication Inquiry, 43(2), 129–151.

Cobertura mediática y repertorios discursivos sobre migrantes en Chile

Los discursos de los medios de comunicación representan la migración de una manera diferenciadora. Al construir una dicotomía entre latinoamericanos/europeos; y niños migrantes/adultos migrantes, los medios reproducen un ethos colonial y despliegan una mirada reduccionista de la infancia como pasiva, dependiente y unidimensional.

Por Andrea Cortés Saavedra

(English above)

La inmigración en Chile no es un fenómeno nuevo. No obstante, el sostenido aumento en el número de migrantes en los últimos años, y la llegada de personas de diferentes orígenes y nuevas nacionalidades ha captado la atención de la prensa nacional. Como parte de una retórica internacional en la que la migración se posiciona como problema, los discursos de los medios de comunicación de Chile han exacerbado la cobertura inquisitiva en la que los migrantes aparecen como disruptores del orden social. En específico, la "ilusión de homogeneidad cultural" y la "negación de la identidad mestiza" han sido históricamente reproducidas por los medios chilenos. Es así como se replican y refuerzan los legados y relaciones coloniales en las que el migrante europeo es bienvenido y el migrante latinoamericano racializado es indeseado. La prensa chilena ha construido discursivamente la migración Sur-Sur como un espectáculo de la diferencia, por lo que la "comunidad imaginada" se vería alterada y se debilitada. Asimismo, los relatos mediáticos sobre la movilidad humana representan a los niños y adultos migrantes de manera diferenciada, vinculando mayoritariamente a los niños migrantes con la noción de inocencia y vulnerabilidad y a los adultos migrantes con la idea de crimen y amenaza. A continuación, presentaré algunas ideas analíticas sobre los discursos de los medios sobre los migrantes en Chile que se basan en mi investigación doctoral, que incluyó una etnografía escolar, análisis de políticas públicas y revisión de prensa.

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“Las escuelas no están preparadas para acoger a los niños que migran a Chile.” La Tercera.

Enmarcando la diferencia social en Chile

Al año 2019, en Chile residían 1.492.522 personas extranjeras, es decir casi un 8,3 por ciento de la población total, doblando la cantidad de población migrante en 2017 que llegaba a un 4,35%. De los migrantes en Chile, se estima que un 10 por ciento son niños entre 0 y 14 años. Los principales colectivos migrantes provienen de Venezuela (30,5%), Perú (15,8%), Haití (12,5%), Colombia (10,8%) y Bolivia (8,0%). Así, la migración europea de los siglos 19th and 20th que era promovida por el Estado chileno ha sido reemplazada por una migración regional y trabajadora. La diferencia social ha sido enmarcada por los medios como un problema cuando los orígenes de los migrantes no son europeos. Por lo que los flujos migratorios racializados que incluyen indígenas y afrodescedientes son otrerizados y ensamblados discursivamente como un grupo desventajado en Chile. En este sentido, es posible aseverar que la política de la diferencia refuerza una narrativa mediática fundada en un ethos colonial. 

Mi análisis de los discursos mediáticos de dos diarios chilenos sugiere que la migración adulta latinoamericana y caribeña es frecuentemente criminalizada y enmarcada desde el conflicto. La cobertura mediática destaca las rupturas que generan los migrantes adultos a la cotidianidad chilena. Por ejemplo, los migrantes caribeños adultos son retratados en muchos casos asociados a la violencia y delincuencia y como personas que han transformado negativamente los barrios en los que residen. En otros casos, los medios usan repertorios discursivos en que se construyen al migrante como un grupo desventajado sin herramientas ni redes que le permita mejorar sus condiciones de vida. Esta fijación de significados reduce la migración adulta a los problemas que los migrantes adultos producirían en Chile y a los problemas que ellos sufren como grupo uniformizado como otro social.

A diferencia de la migración de adultos, que los medios de comunicación destacan, la migración infantil ocupa menos espacio en la prensa chilena. Es más, los niños en Chile tienen una mínima presencia en los discursos públicos producidos y difundidos por la prensa. La Unicef en el estudio “Niños, niñas y adolescentes en medios de comunicación. Construcción de estereotipos en prensa escrita y televisión en Chile” identificó que además de que los niños y jóvenes eran invisibilizados en los medios, la cobertura mediática abordaba una gama reducida de temas que afectan a la infancia y los retratos solían presentarse de forma estereotipada. Asimismo, la infancia solía ser representada como pasiva e incluso sin ser protagonistas de sus propias historias (UNICEF, 2019). La pasividad atribuida a los niños desplegada en la retórica mediática chilena fue un elemento que se repitió en la media análisis que yo conduje. En específico, los niños migrantes eran retratados desde dos predominantes esferas: subordinados al mundo adulto y vinculados a el campo educacional.

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“Cómo aprender sin saber español” La Tercera.

Por una parte, la niñez migrante suele ser abordada desde su relación con el mundo adulto, asumiendo así que los niños están en un status inferior y que no vivencian vicisitudes similares a las que confrontan los migrantes adultos autónomos. De esta forma, los niños migrantes son retratados como un mero “luggage” (equipaje) que acompaña a sus padres y como una figura pasiva, es decir, sin trayectorias migratorias propias y capacidad de decisión. Esta condición de dependencia es reforzada en las estrategias discursivas utilizadas por los medios a la hora de reconstruir los relatos de las experiencias de los migrantes. Las vulnerabilidades en la que viven los niños migrantes racializados en Chile son atribuidas a padres irresponsables y menos educados y a negligentes prácticas de cuidado de esos padres migrantes que tendrían una “cultura parental diferente”.  La figura del niño migrante abandonado y sin capacidad de agencia es instalada como un verosímil difícil de quebrantar.

Por otra parte, la infancia migrante como fenómeno concreto y particular es abordada desde la esfera de la educación. En otras palabras, cuando los niños no son retratados en función del mundo son examinados desde la educación, como esfera social permitida para la niñez y espacio tradicional de la participación infantil. Los espacios educacionales serían los lugares protegidos considerados correctos para descubrir a la niñez migrante y cubrir así las ideas dadas por sentado sobre el símbolo de la infancia ideal.  Luego, los medios hacen eco del aumento de la migración y ponen atención en los problemas que produciría el crecimiento de la matrícula de niños migrantes en los colegios en Chile. La reproducción del ethos colonial se hace patente cuando los medios retratan la infancia migrante jerarquizando nacionalidades y cuestionando la capacidad del sistema educativo para integrar a estos migrantes diferentes y racializados. Por ejemplo, los medios de comunicación privilegian los testimonios escolares en los que los profesores describen el aporte de los niños peruanos por su buen comportamiento y obediencia, a diferencia de los niños haitianos que son retratados desde sus dificultades de integración y experiencias de discriminación. En consecuencia, los niños migrantes se visibilizan en los espacios en los que se espera que socialicen y participen como la institución “protectora” de la escuela que fue creada para educar y civilizar la diferencia social y las “culturas disruptivas”.

Sobre la autora

Andrea Cortés Saavedra es chilena y candidata a doctora en el Instituto de Educación de la University College London. Es periodista y tiene una licenciatura en comunicación social y una maestría en ciencias sociales, mención sociología de la modernización de la Universidad de Chile. En Chile y Reino Unido, Andrea ha trabajado como asistente en cursos sobre comunicación, infancia, identidades sociales, metodologías de investigación social y migración. También ha participado como asistente de investigación en proyectos sobre migración latinoamericana en Chile; refugio político, medios de comunicación e indígenas y memoria social. Su investigación doctoral se centra en las posiciones sociales de los niños migrantes en las escuelas chilenas. También estudia la cobertura y los discursos mediáticos sobre la migración y la infancia en el contexto de transformaciones migratorias en Chile. Sus intereses de investigación incluyen migración, estudios sobre refugiados, políticas educativas, discursos mediáticos y estudios sobre la infancia.

Referencias

Anderson, B. (2016). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism (Revised ed.).

Orellana, M.F., B. Thorne, A. Chee, and W.S.E. Lam. (2001). “Transnational Childhoods: The Participation of Children in Processes of Family Migration.” Social Problems 48: 572–591

Tijoux, M. E. (2013). Las escuelas de la inmigración en la ciudad de Santiago: Elementos para una educación contra el racismo. Polis Revista Latinoamericana, (35).

Unicef, (2019). Niños, niñas y adolescentes en medios de comunicación. Construcción de estereotipos en prensa escrita y televisión en Chile.

Valenzuela-Vergara, E. M. (2019). Media Representations of Immigration in the Chilean Press: To a Different Narrative of Immigration? Journal of Communication Inquiry, 43(2), 129–151.

Being young through conflict and displacement: changing meanings of “youth” among Syrian youth in Lebanon

By Hala Caroline Abou Zaki and Zoë Jordan

A ‘lost generation’, a source of potential instability, and the hope for the future: young people displaced by conflict are increasingly the focus of national and international attention and intervention. Yet there are limited representations of Syrian youths’ own perceptions and experiences of displacement.[i] Our research questions what shapes young people's trajectories from education to employment in protracted displacement in Jordan and Lebanon.  In this blog, we explore how the experience of conflict-induced displacement has altered the meaning of ‘youth’ and ‘being young’ for young Syrians living in Lebanon.

Shelter in Saida. Credits: CENDEP, Oxford Brookes University

The official Lebanese definition of youth – 15 - 29 years old – is our starting point; however, ‘youth’ is a contested category. Prescriptive linear models and generic age-based approaches are insufficient for understanding the meaning of youth. Instead, we engage with a more complex notion of youth transitions and of youth as carrying a socially-constructed meaning. Accordingly, we set out to understand with the young research participants how they themselves define youth and how they situate themselves in these categories.

Many of the young people we spoke to in Lebanon expressed the feeling of “not having had a childhood” or youth because of political violence and displacement.[ii] They explained how these events have changed the experiences and roles associated with specific periods and ages in people's lives. This emerged in particular through the question of aspirations, education, responsibilities and family roles and position.

Changing Aspirations and Ending Education

Mounir[iii] is 23 years old.  As he says, all of his aspirations changed with the displacement. In Syria, his aspirations were related to education and football, but in Lebanon, work became his main concern. Talking about the situation of other young people like him, he says:

“Each one of us had a dream, and they were studying to achieve it… When they were obliged to move and settle somewhere else, many things have changed… Their responsibilities have changed… They had to prioritize the house and family needs over their ambitions.”

Mounir arrived in Lebanon in 2011 with his family at the age of 13. He had completed grade 7 in Syria but had no certification from his school. In Lebanon, he enrolled in Grade 8 in an informal school that taught the Syrian curriculum. However, the school closed. Mounir did not want to try to register in a Lebanese school because he was afraid of being discriminated against as a Syrian and of not succeeding in the Lebanese system because of language barriers (much of the curriculum in Lebanon is in English or French). His family did not have enough money to pay the school fees so Mounir worked to help his family. One of his brothers was killed in Syria, the other is imprisoned in Lebanon, and his sister is married and lives far from her family. Mounir, alone with his parents, felt responsible for them.

Violence and displacement ended Mounir’s education. For others, it temporarily interrupted their education for a few months or years.[iv] This is the case for Basma, now 15, who arrived in Lebanon in 2013; she was in Grade 1. She waited one year to resume her education until her family situation stabilised and they could locate an informal school she could attend. Continuing school is usually linked to family resources, the presence and proximity of formal or informal schools in the place of residence, and legal restrictions in the country. Indeed, many young Syrians cannot continue their education in the Lebanese school system as they do not have the required residency papers.

The issue of education, or lack of it, has created deep inequalities among Syrian youth and within families. Maher is 20 years old, the youngest of his siblings. He points out how his whole family is educated, except him. He left school at an early stage (he was in grade 6) compared to his brothers and sisters: his brother reached university, while two of his sisters finished secondary school and the third one completed Grade 9. Originally from Homs, Maher experienced several displacements in Syria before arriving in Lebanon in 2012 at the age of 11. He has since then turned away from school and started working.

Household responsibilities and family positions

Working to ensure family livelihoods is another critical factor that changed young people’s perception of life stage and age. Many young people had to help their family to secure food, housing, and clothes, a role that previously fell to parents and especially fathers. Our interlocutors insisted on the relation between being young and not having responsibility. Rania is a 17 years old girl from Aleppo’s countryside. Living in an informal settlement in the Bekaa area (east Lebanon), she works with her younger sisters in agricultural fields to provide for the family. Pointing the difference between life in Syria and Lebanon, Rania explained that “Today, at 15 years old, the person is becoming responsible for the family… If we were in Syria, it is at the age of 20 that they start having responsibility and working… today, at the age of 15, a person should be working”. That echoes what 23-year-old Anas told us. As he explained, before fathers would work and mothers would care for the house and family. Nowadays, everyone must contribute to secure family livelihoods. Conflict and displacement have reshaped generational and gendered roles and responsibilities within families and more largely the society. This invokes a heaviness in young people like Anas, preventing the carefree feelings associated with youth and thus affecting the perception of this life stage.

The changes in family roles are not only about the material issues of family life. Many young people identified how they have become emotional and symbolic supports for their parents. Ghassan was 12 years old at the beginning of the mass protests in Syria and the regime’s subsequent bloody repression. After the death of his brother and the departure of his father because of the divorce of his parents, he moved to Lebanon at the age of 17 with his mother and older sister. As the only male in the household, he felt responsible financially and emotionally. He explained that because of all the difficulties they endured, he decided not to sink into distress and to stay positive in order to alleviate suffering of his mother and sister. Similarly, 15-year-old Maha is trying to protect her parents. This young teenager from Deir Ezzor experienced life under ISIS, including the bombings and witnessing the beheading of her uncle. She never discusses her haunting memories with her parents so as to spare them further suffering, especially as they have lost many other family members.

Young Syrians displaced to Lebanon share an experience of physical and structural violence and are part of the first generation of those to be displaced by the on-going conflict in Syria. Despite these commonalities, the young people described different experiences of ‘youth’, revealing the diversity of positions and experiences of displacement. While young Syrians are frequently treated monolithically as “young refugees”, their experiences of conflict and displacement are varied, and exacerbate existing inequalities while creating new ones. These inequalities affect the way young people perceive themselves and their age position. To neglect of these dimensions risks further entrenching and exacerbating youth inequalities in displacement contexts.

About the authors

Hala Caroline Abou Zaki is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her research focuses on forced migration and exile in the Middle East (Palestinians and Syrians) from different perspectives: refugee camps, family relationships and youth. Her Phd (2017) dealt with social, urban and political transformation of Palestinian camps in Lebanon from the particular case of Shatila. 

Zoë Jordan is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), Oxford Brookes University, UK. She researches forced migration and humanitarianism, with a focus on how forced migrants respond to displacement in protracted and urban contexts. Her PhD (2020) addressed the act of refugee hosting among urban refugee populations in Amman, Jordan, primarily working with Sudanese refugees. You can find more information on her website or follow her on Twitter.

[i] Notable exceptions include Jordan and Brun, under review; Chopra and Dryden-Peterson 2020; Adji 2019; Gökçearslan Çifci and Dilek 2019.

[ii] All interviews in Lebanon were conducted by Hala Abou Zaki, Nadim Haidar, Cyrine Saab and Hamza Saleh between August 2019 and January 2020. A focus group was conducted by Hala Abou Zaki and Alexandra Kassir in December 2021.

[iii] All names have been changed to protect the privacy of participants.

[iv] See also Jordan and Brun (under review) ‘Vital conjunctures in compound crises: Conceptualising young people's trajectories from education to employment in Jordan and Lebanon’, Social Sciences Special Issue: Crisis, im/mobilities and young life trajectories

‘One of the guys’: Hosting relationships among young Sudanese refugee men in Amman, Jordan

By Zoë Jordan

Refugee hosting at the household level – the sharing of accommodation between people who, in non-displacement contexts, would not normally share a home – is a vital yet often overlooked facet of displacement. Described as “the silent NGO” due to the scale of support it provides to refugee populations, it nonetheless has remained largely overlooked in research, policy, and humanitarian response. This is particularly the case for young single refugee men. My doctoral research considered the role of hosting for young Sudanese refugee men living in Amman. In this blog, I discuss how hosting interacts with their identity as young men. [1]

Skatepark. Credits: Zoë Jordan

In Amman, Jordan, accommodation sharing between young Sudanese men is prominent. The largest proportion of Sudanese refugees in Jordan are young men, fleeing conflict and conscription into armed groups, though the number of women and children appears to be growing. As of late 2018, 31% of the Sudanese refugee population were young men between the ages of 12 and 35 (compared to 14% of the population being women in this age group, and 23% being men between 36 and 59).[2] Refugees have restricted access to formal employment and risk detention and deportation if caught working yet UNHCR and NGO funding is inadequate in the face of the scale of need.  As young non-disabled men, they are seen as capable of meeting their own needs and, as a result, receive little humanitarian support. The immediate impact of hosting arrangements is therefore on securing accommodation and basic needs. However, the young men also identify an important protective aspect of hosting, namely as support in case of physical attack, keeping an eye on one another, and for sharing information. Eight of the nine men involved in this stage of my research had lived in Amman for more than five years and, despite anticipating and working towards future resettlement, they felt largely pessimistic about the possibility of being selected. In such a context, hosting also provided the men with a community, a limited but present sense of home, and support in endeavours – such as continued education - to build networks and skills that would serve both in displacement and in the hoped-for future country of resettlement. In the words of Ali", “Sometimes I feel good, I’m with my friends, and I'm still alive and things are going well, I’m waiting. And sometimes, it turns around and I feel bad and like I'm away and restricted by rules, regulations, government, and stuff.” Living in host relationships is one response to these bureaucratic and social constraints.

The men I worked with gave multiple explanations for why they lived together.[3] Unsurprisingly, the most prominent among these was the common understanding of the difficulties of living in displacement and the economic and protection needs of the men. For the men, these hardships took on a specific form in light of the widespread discrimination they face as black, Sudanese, refugee men. They highlighted the common understandings that this engendered as a principal reason to live with other Sudanese men. In some cases, this was expressed in terms of their sense of community obligation to assist each other. In more in-depth conversations, it often became apparent that there was a preference for people with the same tribal background or place of origin, based on the idea that people with a shared background would have a shared understanding of how to act in ways that were acceptable to each other. Beyond this, there was also a connection between hosting and personal identity, particularly when men chose to seek out accommodation with friends who had something in common – whether an interest in studying, playing football, or attending social or cultural activities together.

The men’s gender, age, and lack of child-caring responsibilities, which limited demands for care that might otherwise have been placed on them, enabled their participation in shared group hosting arrangements was enabled by their. Despite this, the image of men as ‘care-free’ is inaccurate. When relations arrived in Jordan, the men often were obliged to support them and to incorporate them into their hosting arrangements. In some cases, the arrival of ‘real’ brothers supplanted caring arrangements with ‘fictive’ brothers. The capacity and willingness to engage in hosting relationships – most commonly described by the men as an open-ended reciprocal relationship, in which they had previously or would later help others – has become part of what it means to be a ‘good’ young man in Jordan.

“It’s not a problem to live with the family, but you don’t feel free like you do when you live with the guys…If you live with guys, you can talk with guys and you can share any problem you have, something like that. But if you live with a family, you can’t do that.”

— Adam

Further, sharing accommodation has become part of “being one of the guys.” Other participants had shared that young men were often required to move out of a family home and into shared accommodation due to concerns about unrelated men and women sharing a home. However, Adam felt that this was overstated and that living with other men was a rite of passage, a way to ‘be one of the guys’. In his words, “It’s not a problem to live with the family, but you don’t feel free like you do when you live with the guys…If you live with guys, you can talk with guys and you can share any problem you have, something like that. But if you live with a family, you can’t do that.” To him, moving in with other young men represented freedom, consolidating membership in the group of young men, and taking charge of his own behaviour.

Hosting provides an essential support for young Sudanese men in Amman to meet their basic needs. It also has become an important component shaping what it means to be a young Sudanese refugee man in Amman. The interdependencies of hosting provide an avenue for young men to demonstrate their belonging with others, but also to the city of Amman, allowing them to maintain their presence and inhabit the city.

About the author

Zoë Jordan is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP), Oxford Brookes University, UK. She researches forced migration and humanitarianism, with a focus on how displaced populations respond to displacement in protracted and urban contexts. Her PhD (2020) addressed the act of refugee hosting among urban refugee populations in Amman, Jordan, primarily working with Sudanese refugees. You can find more information on her website or follow her on Twitter.

[1] While recognising the importance of intersectionality in understanding their experiences, here I forefront their youth. Due to my position as a young white British woman, there were some limitations on the extent to which I could accompany the men in their daily activities. The insights offered here therefore should be taken as indications that would merit further attention.

[2] Updated statistics are difficult to locate, and UNHCR has been requested to halt registration of Sudanese refugees (alongside other non-Syrian nationalities) in Jordan.

[3] A minority of the men mentioned an unwillingness to participate in hosting arrangements while they were in the less powerful position, for example while unable to work or following injury or ill-health. They were not concerned about their ability to ‘repay’ the assistance received, but did not wish to be seen as dependent, and did not want to be spoken about as someone who took from others.

Family Separation through Forced Migration

By Amanda Lubit

Family separation is a common by-product of the UK’s hostile immigration policies, which cause children to grow up without parents, and parents to live without children. Many women asylum seekers separate from family, husbands and children for years while they wait for refugee status.  

Due to its recent conflict history and geopolitical isolation, Northern Ireland receives relatively small numbers of asylum seekers annually. In my research I most commonly encountered individuals from Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia who arrived through smugglers, with no prior knowledge of Northern Ireland as a possible destination.  Many women asylum seekers come alone or accompanied only by their young children. Some are separated from family and children due to the circumstances of their forced migration. Other female asylum seekers believe that women and small children have the greatest chance of securing refugee status, so they separate from family, husbands, and older children as a way to maximize their chances. They hope that their refugee status, once granted, will entitle them to family reunification which would bring their loved ones to join them in the United Kingdom (UK).

Family separation is a common by-product of the UK’s hostile immigration policies, which cause children to grow up without parents, and parents to live without their children. Once a woman arrives in the UK and makes a claim for asylum, she enters an extended period of waiting and uncertainty—one that often persists for years. Without knowing what the future will hold and without any meaningful rights, these women cannot build a home or plan for their future. Instead, they remain stuck in the present, trying to survive separation from their children (Hani’s story, below) or the demands of single motherhood (Iman’s story).

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Credit: “Stop Separating Families” by vpickering is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. 

Between 2019 and 2020 I spent 15 months conducting ethnographic research with Muslim women in Belfast. Through this work I became involved with Sadiqa women’s space (the name has been changed to protect privacy), established by and for asylum seekers and refugees. Throughout the year that I volunteered there, I got to know the women and their stories. Although I share only two stories here (Hani and Iman - whose names have been changed to protect privacy), family separation was an extremely common theme in the lives of the women at Sadiqa.

Hani’s Story

Now in her early fifties, Hani has lived separated from her husband and nine children for fifteen years. Originally from Somalia, a sudden outbreak of violence near her hometown forced the family to flee. In the confusion that ensued, the family was separated and ended up at different refugee camps in neighbouring countries. Although Hani now knows where her mother, sisters, brothers, husband, and children ended up, at the time she was alone and uncertain who had survived or if she would even see them again. Ripped suddenly from her home and family, Hani spent months wondering “who is alive, who is not alive?” before her family was traced. Even after they were located in refugee camps, it took years before she would have the ability to contact them.

Hani’s displacement journey nearly ended in Ireland, where she sought and was denied asylum. Seven years later, she moved to Northern Ireland to start the process again. In total, it took Hani fifteen years to obtain refugee status. She describes those years as a time filled with loss, disconnection, isolation, and uncertainty. Her life remained on hold for this entire time, and the prolonged wait was compounded by her separation from everyone she knew and loved.

“It is absolutely hard life to be without your family … it was very, very hard. And it took me ten years to stop crying. I cry. And even this morning I want to just cry. But people who are here with their family, they are living better than me because at least they have some members of the family, their children, or husband and wife. But I left behind my whole - my children, my mom, my brothers, my sisters, my husband, everyone. And I felt really broke.”

After a long and painful wait, Hani was finally granted refugee status in Northern Ireland and allowed to begin planning the rest of her life. Unfortunately, refugee status has not solved the problem of family separation. Since her case took fifteen years to resolve, all but two of Hani’s children are over the age of eighteen and no longer eligible for family reunification under UK laws. For fifteen years, Hani often requested that the UK return her to Somalia, but despite repeated detention and denial of her asylum case, the UK refused, leaving her with no opportunity to return and reunite with family. As a result, her children grew up without a mother, and Hani missed the ups and downs of family life as they grew from young children into the adults they are today.

Now Hani faces the impossible decision of whether to return to Somalia and reunite with her family or to remain in Northern Ireland where she has created a new home. “I would like… to see my family to be reunite. But unfortunately I don’t think so… is not fair to leave some and to take some. Who you can take? Who you can leave?… Maybe tomorrow it will change, maybe tomorrow I will be with my family once again."

Iman’s Story

While Hani’s refugee journey required prolonged separation from children, Iman’s journey required her to navigate single motherhood. Iman arrived in Northern Ireland through the UK’s Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme. Under this scheme, the UK granted refugee status to a fixed number of Syrians living in refugee camps, allowing them to resettle in the UK. Iman qualified for the program as the mother of an infant son, but her husband did not. With the hope of eventual family reunification, Iman accepted resettlement in Belfast accompanied by her newborn son, Jamal.

Credit: “Hand in Hand” by mcdarius is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. 

Overnight Iman became a single mother, living alone in a foreign land where she knew none of the customs nor spoke the language. Upon arrival, the government placed her in temporary housing that was actually a hostel for the homeless. Many single mothers like Iman live in similar housing situations, trying to care for young children in temporary accommodations that also house homeless individuals with mental health and addiction issues.

For more than a year, Iman has lived in temporary housing watching Jamal grow from an infant to a toddler. In some ways time stands still as Iman waits for the UK to grant her request to reunite with her husband; in other ways time continues to move forward with Jamal learning to walk and conquering potty training within the walls of the hostel, all without his father nearby to witness these milestones.

Iman’s challenges extend beyond her housing. Although the government provides weekly support payments of £39.60 (plus £3 extra for a child under 3), that money is insufficient to pay for things like formula, wipes, diapers, and clothing that her growing son requires. Many weeks she, and countless women like her, must choose to forgo buying food for themselves in order to keep their children clean, dry and healthy. On a good week, a local charity has formula and diapers in Jamal’s size that they can provide.

Due to her circumstances, Iman spends every waking moment cooking, cleaning, and caring for Jamal. As a single mother with no support system, she never gets a break from motherhood. This is particularly problematic because without childcare, which friends and family would provide in Syria, Iman cannot attend English classes and remains unable to speak the local language. Her lack of language skills combined with her mothering responsibilities severely restrict Iman’s life. This is a situation she hopes will be temporary, coming to an end when her husband arrives.

A year into her resettlement, Jamal has grown into an energetic toddler and Iman always looks exhausted. Then one day her demeanor changed and a radiant smile brightened her features. She had received notification that her application for family reunion was granted and a date was set for her husband’s arrival in the UK. Unfortunately, her excitement was short-lived. Just weeks before the date arrived, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and all travel was suspended, plunging Iman and her family into another uncertain period of separation and waiting.  

Family separation and prolonged waiting are common in the lives of women asylum seekers and refugees like Iman and Hani. Their stories demonstrate the devastating effects of forced family separation which extend beyond immediate experiences of suffering or loss to the long-lasting physical and psychological impacts of state policies upon mothers, fathers, children and families.

About the author

Amanda Lubit is a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Queen’s University, Belfast. Her research focuses on gender, visibility, movement and space in relation to Muslim women in Northern Ireland. Further details on Hani’s story are scheduled for academic publication later this year. She is the current Reviews Editor for the Irish Journal of Anthropology and has two publications on embodied ethnography, protest and conflict. Previously she served as an adjunct professor of anthropology at George Washington University lecturing on gender, development, and humanitarianism. You can follow Amanda on Linkedin, ResearchGate and Twitter (@AmandaLubit).

Anthropologists Call On Biden to Cease the Separation of Im/migrant Families and the Detention of Children

Within the first three months of 2021, 33,000 unaccompanied children arrived at the United States-Mexico border. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responded by opening large-scale facilities, ranging from 1000 to 4500 beds, to house them. Yet most of these children did not travel alone; they were rendered “unaccompanied” by Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) policy enacted by the Trump administration that instructs US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to refuse entry to adults from a country where a communicable disease is present. Unlike adults, children from noncontiguous countries cannot be deported immediately.

DHS holding facility for unaccompanied children. Source.

Instead, minors are being detained in converted convention centers, stadiums, and military bases until they are reunited with family in the U.S., enter federal foster care, or are deported. These unlicensed influx and intake sites expose children and youth to severe physical and psychological trauma. Moreover, they reflect the broader criminalization of im/migrant populations in the United States, contributing to political frameworks that undermine the rights of children and families and leave them vulnerable to abuse and surveillance by state actors.

The Anthropologist Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees (AANIR) urges the Biden administration to cease separating im/migrant families through the use of Title 42 and to ease the myriad restrictions constraining individuals’ right to seek asylum., including the detention of children.

Title 42 is not an aberration; rather, it builds upon earlier policies of both the Obama and Trump administrations that have restricted asylum, including the “Remain in Mexico” program and the illegal asylum metering system at the US-Mexico border. Here, we draw on our expertise as anthropologists to historicize family separation and to argue for immediate action to defend the human rights of im/migrants and refugees. We specifically call for the end of administrative policies that render children unaccompanied and the abolition of the detention of migrant children in all forms.

Historicizing child-family separation

Title 42 is merely one among myriad ways in which immigration policy is separating children from their families– be it raids, stalled family reunification, visa quotas, or deportation. States have long employed this practice as a social, economic, and political strategy. Examples include the forced separation of Native American children in so-called “Indian schools”; the use of children in chattel slavery and subsequent fracturing of enslaved families; and the ways that Nazi concentration camps, Japanese internment camps, and the Argentine military during the dirty war—all used child separation and/or the threat of separation as tools of intimidation and repression. Additionally we can point to the ongoing hyperpolicing and mass incarceration of African Americans that separates families and displaces Black youth into the foster system. These examples serve as a reminder that child-family separation has long been used as a technique of political statecraft.

Forced family separation has both immediate and long-term effects. Anthropological research in general, and Indigenous scholarship in particular, understands trauma not merely as an individual response to an event, but also as a rupture of the social fabric. The consequences of this rupture are at once individual, social, collective, and enduring, necessitating an approach to violence against children that accounts for its function as a form of social violence that is explicitly transmitted across generations. For example, we see the reverberations of chattel slavery in contemporary experiences of trauma and disparate health outcomes of African American women. We are just beginning to understand and rectify the consequences of the Trump-era zero-tolerance policies that forcibly separated 5500 children from their families. However, historical precedent indicates that the implications of this action will be extensive and long-lasting. Notably the Pomona Fairplex influx facility for unaccompanied children is the very site where Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. Without a sharp course correction, the Biden administration is in danger of repeating harmful policies of removing young people from their families and networks of care, augmenting the trauma they experience.

Consequences of child detention and separation

The most recent iteration of child-family separation instigated by Title 42 poses serious consequences for the young people currently housed in HHS facilities. Experts concur that even brief detention and separation from parents can cause psychological trauma and induce long-term mental health risks for children and youth. Medical anthropologists have identified how experiences of prolonged detention negatively impact migrants’ mental and physical health and further contribute to increased vulnerability to COVID-19. These impacts are particularly dire for children. Research underscores that care practices (or lack thereof) in large-scale institutions can cause severe harm: Children who have been detained describe constant surveillance, limited communication with family, lack of fresh air and green space, prohibition against physical touch, and disturbingly, overmedication. They are also victims of sexual assault,  physical abuse, verbal abuse, and medical neglect. At the same time, children struggle to cope with the uncertainty of family reunification, procedural opacity, ongoing legal proceedings, and the possibility of deportation. Children’s case files, including mental health records, behavioral notes, and communications presumed to be confidential, can and have been used against children in immigration court.

The Long Beach Convention Center slated houses up to 1000 unaccompanied children. Source.

Recognition of the inadequacy of institutional care for child development and wellbeing has precipitated a shift away from institutional-based care for non-migrant children. Indeed, the federal government has codified that children in the domestic child welfare system should be placed in the least restrictive setting appropriate to their needs, prioritizing family and small group care. Yet, federal facilities for migrant children continue to grow in size. Detention centers writ large have come under heavy scrutiny from academics, politicians, and journalists. Meanwhile, privately contracted facilities like the Homestead Temporary Influx Facility in Florida—previously run by Caliburn, a Department of Defense contractor — have also been shown to be potentially harmful for the physical and developmental health and wellbeing of children and youth. Despite the dangers they pose, these facilities operate on a profit motive and benefit from government contracts. The continued development of large-scale detention facilities, in spite of clear evidence of the dangers they pose, is emblematic of what researchers have termed the “immigration industrial complex” whereby public and private power converge to expand systems of detention and surveillance. Detention centers are generally placed out of view with difficult accessibility, making it difficult to ensure accountability and augmenting the need for a critical anthropological presence in and around facilities. 

Despite constraints on the immediate deportation of children and youth from noncontiguous countries, hundreds of thousands of removal orders and voluntary departures effectuated on young people have increased deportations dramatically since 2013 and expanded the effects of coercive confinement and expulsion across time and space. Experiences of return may exacerbate vulnerabilities in countries of birth and have emotional, social, and material impacts. Not only may the often incomprehensible legal processes that lead to deportation be disorienting, but arrival is likewise distressing. Removal to unfamiliar deportation sites can generate anxiety that is compounded by the feeling that mobility and out-of-placeness itself may intensify difficulties securing adequate places to stay, being in contact with loved ones, and avoiding violent victimization. Moreover, for many people who are returned, physical and social distance from family in the United States is extended, amplifying the effects of separation over time, both within and outside of U.S. territory.

Call to Action

The Anthropologist Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees call upon the Administration to rectify the situation at the United States’ southern border by implementing a three-part approach that is monitored by independent experts and follows best practices in each:

1. Uphold and defend the basic human rights of asylum-seeking families at the border without ever separating adults from children, especially when they are under U.S. custody. This includes adhering to international refugee conventions and protocols and related international law protecting the rights of children and migrants and regarding racial, gender, and other forms of discrimination. This also includes ending internationally-condemned CBP practices such as abusive screening using “hieleras” or iceboxes, destruction of migrant water supplies, and illegal turning away or refoulement of asylum-seekers.

2. End administrative policies that produce unaccompanied child migration. Specifically, we call for a repeal of Title 42 which continues to separate children from their families, stopping the illegal asylum metering at U.S.-Mexico border checkpoints, and halting any remaining use of “Safe Country Agreements” to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Canada.

3. Quickly reunify all detained children with family members and close all detention facilities (private and nonprofit) for unaccompanied children, including facilities run by Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. The Biden administration must follow best practices in the placement and care of young migrants, including the placement of children in the least restrictive setting appropriate to their needs, prioritizing family and small group care. Children should live in family-based settings where the federal government provides legal representation and culturally- and linguistically-appropriate services, including mental health and educational support.

The Biden administration must acknowledge the historical, political, economic, and ecological factors forcing a new generation of young people to leave Central America, and the United States’ role in this history of displacement. Instead of policies that further militarize migration management across the Americas, the Administration must address the multifaceted causes of migration in ways that center the voices, experiences, and challenges of displaced and vulnerable communities in Central America, Mexico, and the US.

This statement was prepared in collaboration with the Anthropologist Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees and is endorsed by the Society for the Anthropology of North America, the Council on Anthropology and Education, and the Anthropology of Children and Youth Interest Group.

Becoming Workers: Internally Displaced Youth in “Post-Conflict” Colombia

By Gloria Clemencia Pérez-Rivera

In September 2016 the Colombian government signed a peace agreement with the guerrilla group FARC-EP. This agreement was an event that was internationally reported to mark an “end” to the more than fifty yearlong internal conflict, a conflict in which a range of actors including paramilitary armies, narcotraffickers, guerrilla groups, and state armed forces produced the forced displacement of approximately 8 million people. In particular, young people aged 12 to 17 years old account for nearly one million displaced people, and almost two million people aged 18 to 28 are registered as “conflict victims” with state institutions. [i]

Street art in the colonial area reflects the Afro-Colombian history of the city. Cartagena was a major slavery port of the Americas, and today is home to many Afro-Colombians.  Photograph by the author. Artist unknown. [Image description: A wall-high graffiti art image of the face of an Afro-Colombian woman looking down towards street level. She has kinky black hair and a piercing gaze. The wall is yellow.]

In spite of these demographics, most state programs targeted adults. How do young people navigate the everyday realities of socio-economic reconstruction in “post-conflict” Colombia and seek their own livelihoods?  

Redress for youth 

From 2017-2018 I conducted ethnographic fieldwork among internally displaced households in Cartagena, a tourist city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. During this time, I came to know many young people whose families were seeking redress for their displacement during the conflict, and I observed that education programs were one of the few reparation initiatives that youth were able to, and chose to, access. While families who registered as conflict “victims” were eligible to be granted a house for the family, titles were held by heads of households (often parents), meaning that youth, even if on the cusp of adulthood, could not claim a house for themselves or their future families. Monetary redress was similarly targeted to household units. This meant, for my interlocutors, that even if the redress money arrived—a remote possibility at best—in a household of five people each would get US $1000. This amount would be enough to buy a used scooter or two computers, not near enough for a young person to start their own business or put themselves through school.

This advertisement is an example of the goods and services that people from displaced households sell. One signs reads “fan repairs for $3000” pesos, or US $1. The other reads “there is ice, $1000” pesos (US$.05). Photograph by the author. [Image description: The side of a house painted in bright turquoise, with a black door on the left side of the image, and a panel of exposed pink brick on the right side. In the middle are two signs advertising goods and services for sale- one is orange, one is blue.]

El SENA: the business of technical education

In this situation, most of the youth I worked with took advantage of a free apprenticeship program offered through The National Apprenticeship Service—or SENA—offered with priority to demobilized paramilitaries, guerillas, and conflict victims. This program originally was created in 1957 by the Ministry of Labour with the goal of producing a reliable, qualified labour force for national and international employers. In 2014, it became a cornerstone strategy in the Colombian government’s transitional justice plans. 

In Cartagena, most of the people enrolled in SENA programs were displaced men and women in their 20s who had recently graduated from high school. SENA offers a range of programs, including laboratory assistant, 3D animator, carpentry, cooking, clothing manufacturer, construction, electricity, customer service in hotels and restaurants, and computer systems.  While SENA programs are free, students (and their families) invest significantly in bus fares, school supplies, and time. SENA does not promise jobs to students at the end of their programs. Still, to encourage young people to enroll in programs, SENA workers conveniently highlight the idea that employers continuously contact SENA when they need workers. In Cartagena, secure jobs have proven scarce for displaced young people with SENA diplomas, despite the city’s large touristic and port industries. However, SENA, through its programs, organizes an important exploitative flow of free or short-term contract labour from displaced people to well-off employers.

Streets in the colonial downtown are crowded with restaurants, bars and hotels, many employing SENA interns. Photograph by the author. [Image description: A street view of a downtown street. The street itself is brick. A stone wall and the front area of a yellow and orange building frame the image. People walk towards the camera.]

The revolving door of free workers

SENA apprenticeship programs have two parts. The first consists of classes for at least half a day for 6 to 18 months. For the second part, students must complete 6 to 12 months of an internship to obtain their diploma. On paper, internships are considered by Colombian labour legislation to be formal work. Employers should pay minimum wages, a transportation subsidy, and health and retirement benefits to interns. However, only some employers stick to the rules. Often interns only get transportation expenses, and a meal if their placement is in a hotel or a restaurant. The economic sectors that accept SENA interns in Cartagena are tourism, the port, and, to a lesser extent, government and healthcare institutions. Hotel and restaurant managers told me that SENA interns rarely become permanent workers because companies see them as “an endless supply of free, or almost free, labour.” One of these managers explained that while a worker hired with all benefits by a hotel would “cost” about 1.2 million pesos a month (US$400), a SENA intern costs from US$70 to US$200 depending on the position. When the student finishes their internship, SENA replaces them with a new one. A cargo company manager explained that the port sector enlisted SENA interns to avoid training costs while profiting from the cheap labour of SENA interns for jobs requiring minimal skills.  

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Young men gather at the entrance of the downtown tourist center to offer moto-taxi services, while street vendors sell products to passing tourists and locals. Photograph by the author. [Image description: The photograph shows a busy street intersection. Cars line the intersecting streets, and moto-taxi drivers line either side of the main street waiting for customers. Vendors with red carts walk along the street selling food.]

SENA is aware of this exploitative dynamic and actively targets socio-economically marginalized populations. Enrolment opens every month for displaced people and demobilized guerrillas and paramilitaries, and every three months for other populations. Most of the young people from displaced households that I met in Cartagena have earned one or two SENA apprenticeships. In 18 months living in the city, I never met a displaced youth who was hired in connection with the SENA training. More striking is that none of my interlocutors, old or young, had displaced family members or friends who secured a stable job after a SENA program.  

Young people know that SENA internships are exploitative, but it is difficult for them to find a job after graduating from high school. Their desire to acquire new skills and to get work experience motivates them to enroll. Young people enlist the internship to try to establish connections with other workers and employers outside of their marginalized neighbourhoods, hoping to get a job through those networks even when they saw near to no results. Others have decided to migrate to larger cities in the Andean region in search of employment.

Four years have passed since I lived in Cartagena. Since then, many young people have given up on the possibility that SENA apprenticeships could get them out of poverty or help them build livelihoods for their now-urban futures.

Subsistence entrepreneurs

They have also become young adults and are now eligible to enroll in income-generating development programs. Many youths I met are now joining their parents and embracing the idea that they, too, can or must become micro-entrepreneurs. Some have formed business partnerships with family members to produce goods and services for oversaturated neighbourhood markets: fried food, stationery, internet services. In one neighbourhood, for example, an NGO program had given materials for stationary shops to 25 income generating program participants, youth among them. Others work for informal workers for modest salaries (for example, peeling vegetables for soup vendors), or try their luck as moto-taxi drivers. Many are also having their own children; with no new home or land of their own, their multi-generational households are overcrowded.

In the meantime, younger and older generations alike continue to hope that state monetary redress will arrive and pull them out of poverty. They continue to enroll in programs, continue to learn, continue to work, and wait for true economic justice. 

[i] Status as a “conflict victim” can be gained by people who experienced displacement, sexual violence, kidnapping, among other violent actions during the conflict. Theoretically, it allows access to certain state benefits and reparations

About the author

Gloria C. Pérez-Rivera is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Vanderbilt University, and incoming SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research examines financialization as a set of debt and credit relations that shapes the work and labour relations of socio-economically marginalized groups. Gloria’s teaching and research interests integrate political and economic anthropology with labour studies, migration, justice and peace studies and critical criminology, with a regional focus in Latin America and Canada

‘Illegal immigrants’: The perfect picture

By Sarah Walker

Counter-narratives from young African men who sought asylum in Italy as children reveal how they contest the victimising ‘unaccompanied minor’ label. As Sarah Walker demonstrates, it is a label constituted through colonial and racial logics.

Amadou, a young Gambian who sought asylum in Italy as a hopeful sixteen-year old, has always drawn. I first met him in 2018 during ethnographic fieldwork in ‘Giallo’, a reception centre for unaccompanied male minors in Verde, a Northern Italian city, where he was then living. The fieldwork was part of my doctoral research where I studied the transitions to adulthood of young African men who made the perilous illegalised journey to Italy via Libya across the Mediterranean Sea. These are young men who, upon arrival in Italy, are not only transformed into ‘unaccompanied minors’, but who must also confront Italian constructions of Blackness. My research explores how art can function as an entry point to different life worlds (for details see Walker, 2019). This methodology also recognises how trauma can be difficult, if not impossible, to put into words.

Because of its geopolitical position as border of Europe and its complex racial landscape, Italy is a particularly compelling fieldwork site. In theory, though rarely in practice, Italy also offers young migrants a greater level of protection than other EU Member states via its provision of post-eighteen support. Under Law 47/2017 (the Zampa Law), unaccompanied minors are granted access to ongoing accommodation, training and a support worker beyond childhood. This challenges the ambivalent moral temporality of the EU’s socio-legal landscape, in which the unaccompanied child is temporarily entitled to conditional hospitality until the threshold into adulthood is crossed (Walker and Gunaratnam, 2021).

Amadou shares many drawings with me as part of my research, including the below, depicting young men carrying a boat to the sea in Libya. He explains:

‘It was night, this represents the storm, and this is us… holding the boat […] This is the perfect picture of … illegal immigrants [laughs]. So, they use us in everything. We carry the boat. With the machines and everything fixed. So heavy, so difficult. You have to drag it to the sea.’

Figure 1. ‘The perfect picture,’ Amadou

The picture is perfect in how it depicts the use and abuse of the racialised body – ‘they use us in everything’. The Black body has no value, save as labour; it is otherwise disposable. Amadou’s drawing can be understood through its reflection on the use of the Black (migrant) body in its own labour. It captures more than the helpless victims on the boats, an image so often portrayed in the media. Here, photos are usually taken from above and show packed (Black) bodies in overcrowded vessels bobbing helplessly in the sea. Instead, Amadou’s drawing reverses this image, showing the agency and complicity of those about to embark on the journey, as well as the way in which they are ‘used’ at every stage. The small boat, too small for so many people, held over their heads, at once a talisman of hope and a weight and burden.

This is also a visual representation of the politics of abandonment and European border controls, as a result of which the sea ‘has been made to kill’ (Heller and Pezzani, 2017). This is compellingly shown by Forensic Oceanography’s ‘Left-to-die boat’ . And yet people continue to embark on this journey more than once, knowing full well the risks that await (Rigo, 2018). It is risk-taking that reflects the geographies of violence and death stretching throughout migration trajectories. Yet, it also reflects the hope for a life ‘like everybody’ has, as Edrisa, a young Gambian, puts it. Put differently, it is what Kohli has called ‘thick’ stories, an expression of an ordinary wish to succeed in life. For young men like Edrisa and Amadou, the only way they come to see this ordinary wish being achieved is to risk death on a rickety boat across the Mediterranean Sea.

Adama, another young Gambian, tells me they ‘take the back way because Europe has closed the front door…’. In recognising ‘these are the routes that were made by Europe from Africa for the slaves’, Adama historicises his own movement, but does not quite capture the whole. In the past, the Mediterranean was traversed in the opposite direction by Italians. In Libya—an Italian colony from 1910-1947—some 13% of the population was made up of Italians in the 1930s (Chambers, 2017). Indeed, Italians themselves have occupied positions of subalternity in relation to constructs of whiteness and European imaginaries. Luigi D’Alife’s recent film The Milky Way highlights how the trajectories of today’s migrants seeking to cross the French border over the Alps are the very same as those made by Italians illegally crossing to France in search of work in the past.

Indeed, people have always moved. The 17th and 18th century sawvast movements across the globe , including children, as a result of Empire building, slavery and colonialism (Fass, 2005). Today's migration flows often follow the trade and social pathways established during that period. Yet it is only today that in Europe ‘migration’  has come to signify problematic mobility, implying the need for control (Anderson, 2013). Rather than mobility, the figure of the migrant relates more to race, gender, class and nationality. It is a construct that is inherently racialized, deriving from migration regimes based upon historical colonial frames of reference and cultural norms.

These young men’s counternarratives reveal themselves to be more complex political subjects than the vulnerabilising label ‘unaccompanied minor’ suggests. Aware of their postcolonial position of marginality, they seek to contest this through the rights they maintain they are entitled to, including the right to mobility. Inverting the Eurocentric lens draws connections between human mobilities across time and space and serves to normalise mobility rather than construe it as a ‘problematic’ threat.

 Viewing the movement of people through a historical lens shows how migration is simply a part of human life. It similarly illuminates the unjust and immoral border controls that enhance migrant vulnerability and exposure to harm, even death. Migration can be considered ‘an act not only of survival but of imagination’. Migration can be understood as a tactic of creating futures, of maintaining hope. It is simply that this hope for some young people is not accessible via legal channels, rendering some lives more disposable than others.

About the author

Sarah Walker has worked as a social justice researcher and a practitioner on migration for over a decade. Her research is inherently interdisciplinary, focusing upon borders, migration, gender, race, and coloniality. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna, Italy, working on the ClimateOfChange project which examines the nexus between climate change and migration. This blog piece is based upon research conducted as part of her ESRC funded PhD in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and discussed in Walker and Gunaratnam (2021) . You can follow her on twitter at @stowsarah.

What’s best for Pascual? A dignified life.

by Briana Nichols and Lauren Heidbrink

The Washington Post recently published “What’s best for Pascual? His Guatemalan parents sent him to the U.S. for a better life. Then they wanted their 9-year-old back.” The article traces the journey of a Pascual, an indigenous Q’anjob’al child, as he is wrenched away from his American foster parents and returned to Guatemala. Throughout, Pascual’s parents in Guatemala are cast as neglectful and ignorant, evidenced by his lack of formal education, poor dental hygiene, and inadequate diet. The story reflects an increasingly clear and consequential narrative that misunderstands the reasons for child migration and simultaneously pathologizes parents as neglectful, violent, poor, or otherwise deficient for presumably “sending” their children to the United States.

Guatemalan elementary school in the western highlands. Credits: Briana Nichols

In focusing on his family’s poverty, rather than the structures that create it, the article fails to consider the complex conditions and deep histories spurring migration of Indigenous children from Central America. Take, for example, education in Guatemala. While officially free and compulsory, inefficacy and corruption plague the public-school system. For rural indigenous youth, such as Pascual, schools are often geographically inaccessible, lacking in even the most basic supplies, and staffed by teachers who often do not speak the indigenous language of their pupils. Families frequently find themselves being asked to pay for desks, books, and even teacher fees when the government fails to pay their salaries. In interviews, young people describe their schooling experiences as “traumatic” and “demeaning”. Only 71.8% of children in Guatemala reach sixth grade. In the predominantly indigenous highlands, where Pascual is from, this number drops to 44%. This is not a result of parental neglect or ignorance, as the article suggests, but an outcome of the Guatemalan government spending a meager 2.8 percent of its GDP on public education, far less than the regional average. 

The article likewise reflects a common misconception among policy makers and the public of what child migration actually means to families. Youth and their families describe migration as “an act of love”, “an investment in their future”, and in the “possibility of a dignified life.” While it may shock American sensibilities for children to cross multiple international borders, Guatemalan families rely on migration as a rational resource to access opportunities often restricted to the more “privileged” in the Global North. Pascual’s parents never intended to relinquish their parental rights; he was entrusted to the care of his extended family. 

These misconceptions matter. The U.S. child welfare system has a troubling history of deeming income-poor black and brown parents as “unfit,” and in the process, inflicting harm on the very children they aim to protect. Parents of migrant children are no exception. For months, child welfare authorities did not permit Pascual to speak with his family in Guatemala, creating a chasm that, in turn, was used as evidence of parental neglect. Pascual’s parents only found out about the termination of their parental rights through the efforts of a non-profit organization. In our interviews, parents lament a lack meaningful access to child welfare determinations and legal proceedings that determine their fate. 

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Pascual with his sister. Credits: Daniele Volpe for The Washington Post

We are not the only ones reaching these conclusions. Decades of legal research underscores how state courts often make rulings informed by a child or parent’s immigration status or through anti-immigrant biases. Pascual’s experiences reflect pervasive realities we evidence in our research--institutions and legal systems struggle to understand the realities of transnational families. This pushes migrant children disproportionately into the state child welfare system, a trend exacerbated under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy which has resulted in scores of children still waiting to be reunited with their parents. 

With an influx of unaccompanied children currently entering the U.S., the number of migrant youth ensnared in the child welfare and custody proceedings is likely to rise. There is an urgent need for child welfare authorities and legal institutions to move away from pathologizing parents of migrant children. Denying young people the meaningful ability to advocate for themselves and their futures, diminishing their cultures and their language and legally separating migrant children from their families is not in migrant children’s best interests. 

What is best for Pascual? A dignified life, wherever that life may be. 

About the authors
Briana Nichols is a doctoral candidate in education and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania who studies Guatemalan youth living in contexts of extreme migration. Lauren Heidbrink is associate professor of human development at California State University, Long Beach and author of Migranthood: Youth in a New Era of Deportation (Stanford University Press 2020).

Maya migrant youths' experiences with Latinx students in schools

By David W. Barillas Chón 

In the United States, Maya migrant youth from Guatemala confront discrimination from Latinxs students based on their indigenous backgrounds. These are not new experiences; they are a transnational continuation of discrimination they experience in Guatemala.

Photos by James Whitlow Delano, National Geographic.

­­Schooling experiences in the U.S.­­

Education scholars, with some exceptions, have ignored Central American migrant youth in their research. In rare cases when Central American youths are centered, the experiences of Indigenous migrants remain overlooked. The invisibilization of Indigenous Central American migrants reflects a broader neglect in education studies of Indigenous migrants in the diaspora.

Some Critical Latinx Indigeneities scholars, however, are disrupting this inattention by noting the ways schools are complicit in the erasure of Indigenous migrant youth’s identities. For instance, English Learning programs, such as bilingual education, are predicated on the premise that Spanish is the “heritage” or first language of all Latinxs in schools. This presumption fails to recognize K’iche, Mam, and other Maya languages spoken by increasing number of Maya migrant youth in schools.

Some scholars also have noted that Indigenous migrant youth from Guatemala and Mexico are discriminated by Latinx[i] students, including non-Indigenous migrants, due to their Indigenous backgrounds. Maya youth are put down, made fun of, and picked on when Latinx students call them the racist epithet “indio”—an historical word used in many countries across Central America to mean someone who is inferior, dirty, and undesirable. Joaquín, a K’iche’ youth I met in my research with Maya youth in a high school in the Pacific Northwest, recounted how a Mexican coworker called his Guatemalan coworkers an “indio.” Asked whether he thought this was an insult or something negative, Joaquín responded, “no de [sic] algo bueno” or “not something good.” I have written elsewhere how so too, Mexican-descent youth use “oaxaquita,” a similar racist epithet as indio, towards Oaxacan youth, contributing to an unwelcome, even hostile, learning environment. These racist and dehumanizing practices are a transnational continuation of longstanding discrimination against Indigenous peoples across Abya Yala (Latin America) and Turtle Island (North America).

Experiences in Guatemala

To understand the treatment that Maya youth receive from Latinx students in the U.S. requires contextualizing their racialized experiences in Guatemala. Weas, another K’iche’ youth I encountered in my research, succinctly depicts the ways the Guatemalan government treats (or fails to treat) Maya peoples:

UNICEF/UNI328551/Volpe

“Algunos [que hablan k’iche’ fueron] encontraron muerto en la calle y no hacen nada [el gobierno de Guatemala]. No hacen nada porque [los de la comunidad] son indígenos (sic), sólo que hablan k’iche’, y no nos quiere ayudar el gobierno. Ayudan más lo que, lo que hablan español (sic)”

“Some [K’iche’ speakers] were found dead in the streets and they [Guatemalan government] don’t do nothing. They [government] don’t do nothing because they [people in his community] only speak K’iche’. The government helps more those that speak Spanish” (Barillas Chón 2019: 33).

Weas did not specifically refer to race as the reason why the Guatemalan government ignores his K’iche’ community. However, he signals to language as the reason. In this case, language is a proxy for race. (For further discussion of the ascription of race to language, see Flores & Rosa 2015; Salim, Rickford, and Ball 2016). The Guatemalan state has institutionalized neglect and poverty of Maya peoples through the systemic underfunding and under-resourcing of public services, including education and health in largely Indigenous rural Guatemala.

CHQETA'MAJ LE QACH’AB’AL K’ICHE’!

These conditions compel Maya youth to work in order to contribute to household economies, interrupting their schooling, and disrupting Spanish learning of monolingual Indigenous language speakers. As a result, Maya youth do not speak Spanish like monolingual-Spanish speakers. Ladinos (non-Indigenous Guatemalans) then perceive Maya youth as inferior because they lack proper language skills, becoming fodder for making fun of, putting down, and denying Maya peoples jobs and economic opportunities. And so, the structured neglect and poverty continues.

Transnational discrimination

Now I circle back to Maya youth’s experiences in U.S. schools. Maya youth continue to experience discrimination from non-Maya, non-Indigenous Guatemalans, and ladino migrants because the latter bring their ways of thinking into the U.S. Racist epithets and perceptions regarding Maya inferiority travel with them. These youth rely on their previous racial schema to map themselves onto a new context of reception. More specifically, previous racial schema now interact in formidable ways with other racialization processes already present in the U.S. regarding Latinxs. I and other colleagues untangle and make sense of these processes in another essay (Barillas Chón, forthcoming; Barillas Chón, Montes, & Landeros, forthcoming).

In this blog, I provide a brief outline of the discrimination Maya migrant youth experience from migrant and U.S.-born Latinxs. Maya youth and other Indigenous migrants, however, are not exclusively victims. For instance, Oaxacan-descent students and parents have campaigned to make the use of oaxaquita and indio illegal in Oxnard, California. This campaign is an important intervention in the racism that Indigenous migrants experience. Because this racism is transnational and persistent, larger campaigns within and beyond schools are needed in Guatemala and in the U.S. to address it. In the U.S. educational context, our work centers on teaching what is an overwhelming white teaching force the diversity within Latinx experiences. The work within Latinxs consist of unpacking and undoing the entrenched racism perpetuated with the use of indio and other treatments of Maya migrant youth.

David W. Barillas Chón is a Poqomam Maya in the diaspora and Assistant Professor of Education and Indigenous Education at Western University (ON, Canada). His work centers how Maya and other Indigenous youth from Guatemala and southern Mexico in the U.S. make sense of their Indigenous selves. For more on his work regarding Maya migrant youth and issues relating to their labor, language, identity, and navigating colonial codes of power visit Academia or ResearchGate.

[i] I use Latinxs as a gender inclusive term that includes people born across Abya Yala as well as those born in the U.S. who at various historical points have been racialized as Hispanic and/or Latino.

Black Maternal Mortality: The New Child Welfare Issue in the U.S.

by Tammy Owens

Reflecting on her relentless fears of dying as a pregnant Black woman, the author contends that Black women’s high maternal mortality rate is a significant threat to the safety of Black children, thereby making it one of the most pressing national child welfare issues in the U.S.

I had a baby last year as a 34-year-old black woman. Throughout my entire pregnancy, I loathed saying “I’m pregnant” aloud. I hated telling people that I was pregnant. The only people that I told about my pregnancy were the people I could not avoid and the individuals I imagined the medical team would call to inform about my death. There were no baby showers, pregnant-belly Instagram photos, or FaceTime calls to share the exciting news about the sex of the baby beyond an extremely small circle of loved ones. In fact, my loved ones had to beg me to set up a baby registry and accept essential gifts such as diapers and wipes. I was afraid that if I told people I was pregnant then the fact that I was carrying a human being, one that was fully capable of robbing me of my life in the same way that so many babies in utero had taken the lives of other black women, would be real. If I told people, then I could not turn back from the decision that I made to risk my life and have a child as a black woman in America. My fears or personal experience along with the statistics of way too many black mothers dying leads me to contend that black maternal death is one of the most critical child welfare issues in the U.S.

How do you tell people that I am excited to have a child but I’m terrified that this child will kill me? Really, how do you tell someone that as a black woman? Black women do not have space to be seen as living and breathing human beings, let alone as terrified mothers. Black mothers have endured a long history of racial stereotypes that have often depicted them as abrasive, unfeminine, bad mothers that either work too hard and thus neglect their own children or work too little and thus suck up too much of the nation’s welfare resources (Collins 2009).

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Billboard in SoHo, NY erected by Texas-based anti-abortion group. Photo by Hiroko Masuike, New York Times.

Black mothers have not only endured racist stereotypes about their ability to mother the children they birth, but their capacity to “gestate responsibly” is also constantly up for debate in the court of public opinion and in the criminal justice system. Black mothers have been disproportionately imprisoned due to myths such as the crack-addicted mother carrying the crack baby. This myth has taunted black women and their children for decades. The children of alleged crack mothers were deemed falsely as crack babies who could only ever grow up to be “super-predators” or threats to the safety of real American children and families. This myth about drug-addicted mothers and their children emerged during the 1980s crack epidemic, but its effects continue to haunt the lives of black mothers, especially if they seek any sort of economic assistance (Roberts 2016). This myth was accompanied by others that would emerge years later to support abortion campaigns that use pregnant black women as props in their movement while solidifying representations of black mothers as monsters. In 2011, a pro-life organization in Texas created a campaign in which they placed huge billboards around New York City proclaiming, “The Most Dangerous Place for an African American is in the Womb.” This pro-life group seemingly had no regard for the backhanded message they were disseminating, one that further ensconced black mothers in a web of racially-gendered stereotypes and catapulted them on to a national stage as the epitome of the “bad mother”.

Again, with the stereotypes of black mothers in mind, what is the right way to tell someone that you’re afraid of dying during childbirth in 2020? You can tell people that you are afraid of so many things about children and child birth such as the pain or how you will manage the sleeplessness and excessive thoughts about everything ranging from giving birth while wearing a mask because of Covid safety precautions to affording child care. But you cannot tell people that you are terrified of the child.

The terror that I felt during my pregnancy does not compare to the terror that the black women who have lost their lives in childbirth must have experienced in the moments leading up to their deaths. I’ve read so many stories of black women dying in child birth. My heart breaks every single time. The sting of the pinch never dulls. I read Sha-Asia’s story. I read Dr. Chaniece Wallace’s story. I cried and nearly vomited while reading both. I cried for their families, especially their children that survived. I cried for the black women who could never find anyone to listen to them when they felt that something was off. I cried because they didn’t have that doctor who was concerned enough about their life or the lives of black mothers to simply slow down and take just one more look. My heart doesn’t break for anything related to survivor’s guilt. It breaks because I imagine that they knew, as black women, as black mothers, that they could not tell anyone about their fears.

According to the CDC, black women over the age of 30 are four or five times more likely to die in child birth than white women. In fact, if you are a black woman who, like myself, managed to obtain a college degree, you are 5.2 times more likely to die in child birth than white women.

“Black mothers must be perceived as inherently valuable during their pregnancy and after they give birth. ”

Without valuing black mothers, we cannot value their children. These concepts go hand in hand. We cannot say that we are concerned about the welfare of black children without first being concerned about their mothers. Their mothers are dying to birth them. We must shift our understanding of child welfare issues to include black mothers’ safety as a chief concern in ensuring that black children will be born into safe conditions. If black mothers are not safe, then their children are not safe. Thus, black maternal death is a national child welfare issue. To care for black children means caring first and foremost for their mothers.

Given the number of black women who have died, we must consider the moment they learn of their pregnancy as a potential state of crisis for their families. In this moment, we must begin working to develop a plan to keep them safe and alive with tangible resources and support, including doctors who are trained on culturally-relevant issues that are specific to black mothers. Our social services teams must also plan to keep the mother alive by coming up with case management services that offer supports such as birth advocates and doulas for every black mother to ensure that there are multiple voices present during the prenatal appointments and delivery day. From gestation to delivery, black mothers need people with them who can ensure that the mother is alive when her baby leaves the hospital nursery. Treating black maternal mortality as a child welfare issue with the goal of KEEPING BLACK MOTHERS ALIVE is the only way we can protect their children and their families.

Thankfully, the medical team did not have to call my loved ones to inform them of my death. The baby, Victor-Charlie, and I made it! I apologize to everyone who may be finding out about him by reading this post. Please know that the thought of death seized me more and more each month that Victor-Charlie grew inside of me. As truthful as it is but rarely admitted publicly, that feeling of terror was bigger than the excitement for the baby. I am grateful for him, but I am most grateful that I lived through pregnancy to not only take care of him, but also to serve as a testament during a dangerous time that black women can survive pregnancy.

I did not die, but I did suffer. I’m still suffering. I was induced due to high blood pressure. I hemorrhaged and could not leave the hospital without a blood transfusion. Prior to having a baby, I never had any real health problems. Now, I have blood clots in both of my legs and both of my lungs. I experienced the top three complications that the CDC has identified as the leading causes of pregnancy-related deaths—postpartum hemorrhage, severe hypertension, and venous thromboembolism. But I did not die. Yet, my fears have found another way to haunt me as a black mother-survivor. I have to keep my Black and Puerto Rican son alive while living with my new terror—that he can be killed by anyone who perceives him as a threat.

About the author

Tammy Owens is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY. Owens is currently working on her book manuscript, Young Revolutionaries: Black Girls and the Fight for Girlhood from Slavery to #Sayhername. Owens’ research has been published in journals such as Women, Gender, and Families of Color and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research.