Alone but not home
Many child migrants in the US are destined for the underclass. Review: Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, Stephanie L Canizales, by Gavin O'Toole
Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in The United States, Stephanie L Canizales, 2024, University of California Press
There can be nothing more heart-rending than the stories of unaccompanied child migrants who make perilous journeys across international borders all alone.
There are a lot of them, and this problem is by no means confined to the US—indeed, in 2023 there were 40,415 unaccompanied minors among asylum applicants in the European Union.
Ethiopia, unexpectedly, is one of the major world destinations for unaccompanied and separated children, most of whom have fled conflicts in Sudan.
Nonetheless, it has been the scale of the problem at the US southern border in the last decade that has captured the headlines. Stephanie Canizales points out that in 2022 some 152,057 children were apprehended at the southern border, and in 2023 another 137,275. Since 2021, nearly 400,000 children have crossed the border by themselves. Thousands more enter the US clandestinely—their numbers never recorded.
At such rates, a breathtaking average of 380 child migrants are being encountered by US border forces every single day.
Statistics show that 70 per cent of unaccompanied minors at the US border are between the ages of 15 to 17, but the number of much younger children aged 12 or younger has been growing by 4 per cent since 2018.
The vast majority of these minors hail from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and some have experienced severe trauma or have been subjected to horrific exploitation en route.
It’s not hard to understand why so many people are leaving the Northern Triangle of Central America, given the complex crisis of violence, gang warfare and corruption, much of which had its origins in the US-sponsored authoritarianism of the civil war period.
Add to this endemic poverty, exacerbated by Covid, the climate crisis which is generating ever more extreme weather patterns in the sub-region, and historically bad governance—and you have a recipe for an exodus.
The problem does not end when these children are picked up by authorities, however.
The US Department of Health and Human Services is assigned the task of finding them homes with adult sponsors. Over a third will be reunited with families already in the US, but many thousands will end up living with strangers—Florida and Texas are key destinations for the relocation of these young people.
Once resettled, they often find themselves under pressure to work either from extended families in the US or in their home countries.
According to the New York Times, social workers, teachers and lawyers who engage with migrant children estimate that most of those assigned to live with non-parent sponsors end up working full time—often in dangerous jobs that violate labour laws. The newspaper highlights key cases of children who have suffered serious injuries at work or who have all but had to abandon their education.
Canizales notes that, according to the US Department of Labour, child labour violations have nearly quadrupled since 2015, while the unauthorised employment of minors, including immigrant children, has increased by 69 per cent since 2018.
It is this context that is the focus of Sin Padres, Ni Papeles, in which Canizales examines the difficult transition into adulthood of unaccompanied child migrants who have entered the US from Latin America, a theme that has fuelled heartfelt debate.
The author writes: “By 2023, the media was buzzing with news of the pervasiveness of the unauthorised employment of unaccompanied migrant children in hazardous low-wage labour occupations and exposure to exploitative labour practices, illness, injury, and, in the most egregious cases, the loss of workers’ limbs or lives.”
She points to the conflicting feelings this situation provokes in the US public: on the one hand, concern that children are migrating in such high numbers and hostility to the undocumented immigrant families who may be pushing them to work; and on the other, an inevitable outcry that exploitative child labour is taking place under their very noses.
Canizales aims to understand how such children can be “socialised”—that is, integrated—within a society that simultaneously sympathises with their plight yet marginalises them as they make the crucial transition into adulthood.
The system is such that many of these children are destined for futures in the low-wage economy with little prospect of ever being able to take advantage of the opportunities enjoyed by their contemporaries born in the country.
Immigration policies tend to make families vulnerable both to extreme poverty through labour exploitation and separation through deportation. That fear of being thrown out of the country, in turn, makes familial ties tenuous, and this has material and emotional consequences.
Growing up outside a family-led household denies young people normative childhood experience, which in turn has an impact on how they fit in at school—the two main socialising institutions that are seen as essential to incorporating young people into society positively and hence to a coming of age on equal terms to their peers.
As a result, notes Canizales, these unaccompanied migrant youth tend to become low- wage workers, often suffer emotional neglect, and treat education pragmatically.
Studying is sidelined by pressures to repay migration debts, send remittances to families at home, and survive in an expensive economy, and thus tends to be focused on simple, pragmatic goals, such as learning enough English to get by and get ahead.
Imagine the cumulative toll upon these young people—lacking access to supportive and meaningful social ties, they can experience profound social and emotional isolation.
The author writes: “Many unaccompanied migrant teens begin their lives in the United States in a state of material and social poverty and emotional disorientation—this while their identities and sense of self are developing in the transition to adulthood in relation to others and within institutions.”
She states that by all traditional metrics, these migrant youth would not experience successful incorporation in their host society but would be subject to downward mobility and lifelong exclusion in an “underclass”.
Yet her research on young Central American and Mexican subjects offers hope, by arguing that “success” is less an endpoint as a set of dynamic processes that occur over time in the social institutions of both the host country and their original homelands.
In short, the meaning these individuals attribute to success will change according to their own circumstances and objectives as well as over time—orientation and adaptation go hand in hand.
She writes: “As migrant youth evolve from newcomers to long-settled migrants during their transition to adulthood, they define their success subjectively, according to their metas for migration, their experiences in adaptation to or perdition in a new sistema, and their ever-expanding understanding of self and community.”
Canizales concludes with several domestic and transnational policy goals to safeguard the rights of these lost children which include establishing a right for young people not to migrate backed by direct US investment in communities within origin countries.
At the same time, the US needs to recognise its formative role in having created the conditions for migration, act to legalise migration routes for labour, and develop a far more sophisticated child migration system to end the dangerous criminalisation of asylum.
Far more must also be done to enforce national and state-level labour rules to liberate children from exploitation, thereby loosening the oppressive grip of work over immigrants’ lives and allowing them increased mobility earlier in life.
Nonetheless, Canizales is candid about the impact of such measures, and that much more needs to be done.
She writes: “This book has shown that it is the US immigration and legal system itself that propels children into work. Short of recognition of children’s refugee status and right to asylum and a full legalisation programme that grants immigrants the ability to harness the benefits of democracy, we are left patchworking …”