Elżbieta M. Goździak

Introduction: Migrant Children at the Crossroads

In the globalized world of the twenty-first century, migration has become a powerful social force affecting families and individuals of all ages. The precise number of migrant children is unknown, but commentators have argued that “in some countries the percentage of young people migrating can be as high as 50 percent” (Dall’Oglio, 2008: 1). A World Bank study estimated that 330,000 children between 6 and 17 years of age—9.5 percent—lived away from their parents (Kielland and Sanogo, 2002). Of these, 160,000 had migrated for work. Some child migrants cross international borders; others migrate within their countries of origin. Some are fleeing persecution by oppressive governments or recruitment by insurgent guerillas. Others are victims of abuse, caught up in human trafficking operations for sexual or labor exploitation. Still others migrate in search of family reunification or are motivated by social imaginaries which include the possibility of a better life elsewhere. Indeed, many youngsters migrate willingly and perceive the migratory experience as an opportunity to enhance their social and economic status, as well as facilitating their transition to adulthood (Jeffrey and McDowell, 2004; Punch, 2007).

Biała emigracja: variegated mobility of polish care workers

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes migration of Polish healthcare and eldercare workers since Polands accession to the European Union. The research indicates that while many Polish doctors, nurses, and caregivers ‘left’ Poland, they did not necessarily ‘stay’ abroad. Contemporary Polish migration has become ‘liquid’ and has often taken on a form of ‘pendulum’ or ‘circular’ migration and, in some cases, transnational commuting, especially in the early years following Polands accession to the EU. These patterns are particularly evident among healthcare and eldercare workers whose flexible working schedules or life stages allow for retaining employment positions and households in Poland while taking short-term or prolonged leave of absence to work abroad. The research also suggests that different migration patterns are related to the characteristics of the place of migrant origin and the geographic distance or proximity of the destination countries. Residents of border towns can easily commute to cities on the other side of the frontier, while those who want to work in geographically more distant countries and cities must, by necessity, consider longer-term or permanent arrangements. The analysis of the variegated mobility of elder care workers is situated in the context of policy discussions related to care drain and care supply as well as quality of migrant care.

Culturally Competent Responses to the Effects of Armed Conflict on the Well-Being of Refugee Women

Armed conflict is often conceptualized as a gendered activity where fighters are men, and where women and children suffer, often differently and disproportionately. Sadly, “Violence is no longer merely the business of male combatants and trained militaries” (Rajasingham-Senanayake, 2004, p. 145). The postmodern wars and armed conflicts in the Balkans and in Africa that targeted and involved large number of civilians, including women and girls, present a fundamental challenge to how we conceptualize war and peace (Rajasingham-Senanayake, 2004) and analyze the effects of these “new wars” (Kaldor, 1999) on their survivors. Girl soldiers, women suicide bombers and women in battle fatigues carrying guns begin to blur both gender roles and conventional distinctions between military and civilian actors. As evidenced by the violence in Rwanda and Bosnia, for example, civilians can be both victims and perpetrators, sometimes seemingly in equal measure.

Forced Victims or Willing Migrants? Contesting Assumptions About Child Trafficking

Human trafficking continues to capture the imagination of the global public. Gut wrenching narratives about children sold into domestic servitude appear on front pages of major international newspapers, in academic journals, and books sold in university and commercial bookstores. Public discourse emphasizes the particular vulnerability of trafficked children, related to bio-physiological, social, behavioural, and cognitive phases of the maturation process and underscores the necessity to act in the children’s best interest. Trafficked children are nearly always portrayed as hapless victims forced into the trafficking situation and hardly ever as actors with a great deal of volition participating in the decision to migrate. In this chapter, I contest some of the prevailing assumptions about trafficked children and adolescents , especially issues of volition and agency, vulnerability and resiliency, victimhood and survivorship. I contest some of the myths “woven from solid data, conjecture, cultural assumptions, and organizational and political agendas” (Frederick in The wretched of the earth (Richard Philcox, Trans.) (Reprint ed.). New York: Grove Press 2005, 127–128) about the forced nature of the trafficking process and juxtapose them with the experiences as narrated by the survivors of child trafficking. I contrast the image of “the forcibly trafficked child” whose childhood had been lost and needed to be reclaimed with the diversity of experiences and voices that need to be heard in order to facilitate long-term economic and social self-sufficiency of survivors of child trafficking.

What Kind of Welcome? Addressing the Integration Needs of Central American Children and Adolescents in US Local Communities

Unaccompanied child migrants from Central America and Mexico arriving at the US southern border became national news in the summer of 2014. Child advocates called for protecting the children and ensuring due process in immigration proceedings. The attention centered on the push factors driving the arrival of unaccompanied children and their treatment while in government custody. This chapter focuses on integration challenges these young people face while awaiting their immigration hearing. It aims to answer the following questions: How will they fare in the families and communities to whom they have been released? Will their relatives embrace them? How will antiimmigrant sentiments affect their daily lives? Will they be integrated into US schools or even go to school? Who will support them?

Introduction: Durable Solutions During Transient Years

Ensor and Goździak open this book by outlining the most salient themes emerging in the current wave of international interest in children during forced migration. Scholarship, policy, programming, and advocacy efforts undertaken on behalf of these youngsters and their families have remained fragmented, with forms of child displacement often treated in isolation from one another. At the same time, interventions have continued to be dominated by a state-centric, sedentarist mentality that also has tended to ignore intergenerational and gender-based differences in the experiences of young forced migrants. This chapter lays out the structure of the book and introduces the subsequent contributions. Contributors examine the progress and challenges facing worldwide efforts to protect forcibly displaced children and youth in a variety of contexts, attending especially to the juxtaposition between the transience of childhood and the so-called “durable solutions” to forced migration.

Looking Ahead: Contested Childhoods and Migrancy

At the beginning of this book, we explained how our interest in globalization ’s changing ideas and practices of childhood led us to propose ‘contested childhoods’ and ‘growing up in migrancy’ as twin conceptual tools. The purpose was to understand the migration , governance, and identity processes currently involving children and ideas of childhood. In this final chapter, we return to this conceptual pair and reflect on some of the theoretical and policy implications of the concepts as emergent throughout the book. Whose children are we talking about? This question, raised in our first chapter, pinpoints the link between ‘contested childhoods’ and ‘growing up in migrancy’ . Whose children are trafficked, seeking refuge, taken into custody, active in youth organisations, struggling and juggling in identity work? Which societies can claim them as their own, and build individual and societal futures accordingly? These are questions with far-reaching implications of a theoretical as well as a practical and policy-oriented nature. In the following, we draw out and discuss some of these implications.

The Way Forward: Conclusions and Recommendations

At the beginning of the second decade of the 3rd millennium, the global forces that have propelled the increasing pace of human mobility show no signs of abating. In 2005, there were some 191 million international migrants worldwide, nearly two-and-a-half times the figure in 1965 (UN DESA, 2006). In 2008, only three years later, the number of international migrants was already in excess of 200 million (IOM, 2008: 2). Migration has indeed become a ubiquitous global phenomenon shaping the economic, social, and cultural life of every country. Both international and internal migration patterns are becoming increasingly complex as they connect individuals and communities in an expanding variety of personal circumstances and social arrangements.