Demanding Rights and a Future: Adolescents on the Move for a Better Life

This chapter examines the entitlements that child migrants have as a matter of international and domestic law, along with the reality behind these entitlements. It first explains how access to fundamental rights protection for young people without a government remains elusive before discussing how rightlessness impinges on the material and psychological well-being of adolescent migrants. It then considers two issues that complicate the enforcement of adolescent migrant rights: the relative importance of family unity as a factor in assessing the best interests of children, and the relevance of socioeconomic rights, including access to employment opportunities, in assessing an adolescent's best interests. It also explores the political pronouncements and practical realities regarding the rights of undocumented migrant adolescents and concludes with an assessment of how some states have interpreted their obligations to provide two important sets of human rights for migrant adolescents: access to education and right to health care.

Family Ambivalence: The Contested Terrain of Intercountry Adoption

This chapter examines intercountry adoption and how it affects children moved from the “majority” to the “developed” world each year to become part of a new family. The assumption that children belong within a nurturing family environment forms a bedrock of international human rights law. It is also a key feature of immigration and citizenship law. The chapter explains how intercountry adoption gives rise to heated public controversy over what constitutes the “best interests of children.” It considers several causes for skepticism about the value of intercountry adoption, including increased uncertainty about the unqualified benefits of “plenary adoption.” It also shows how increasing commercialization and the lack of adequate safeguards are resulting in criminal abuses including child trafficking, abduction, and sale. Finally, it discusses intercountry adoption as a form of child migration and argues the need to improve the current system of intercountry adoption.

Under the Gun: Moving Children for War

This chapter examines the transport and exploitation of child labor in situations of armed conflict. It first considers some of the main reasons why children are recruited and used in armed conflicts before discussing the process of bringing children within the scope of international criminal law as part of efforts to prosecute political leaders and senior military figures responsible for war crimes. In particular, it looks at the Special Court for Sierra Leone and describes its conviction of war criminals for the recruitment of child soldiers as an important human rights milestone. It then explores the human rights entitlements of former child soldiers and how transitional justice is implemented through the DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) process, along with its shortcomings. The chapter concludes with an overview of enforcement of long-term social and economic rights of former child soldiers after the conflict.

Introduction

This book examines the complexity of child migration, focusing on three nonmutually exclusive migration groups that pose dilemmas for child migrants, their families, and their advocates, as well as for policy and decision makers: family-related migration (comprising family reunion, family-related deportation, and intercountry adoption); exploitation-related migration (including child trafficking and recruitment related to armed conflict); and survival-related migration (covering refugee- and asylum-driven migration, and economic migration). Piecing together the diverse strands of policy development, law enactment, and institutional implementation, the book shows from the lens of child migration how human rights principles can move from theory to practice. It explores child migration for family reunion and considers a significant aspect of child migration—that primarily driven by the search for survival, opportunity, and a viable life. The book argues that child migrants need to be viewed as agents whose aspirations are relevant to institutional decision making.

David and Goliath: Children’s Unequal Battle for Refugee Protection

This chapter examines the obstacles faced by children in their quest for refugee protection, asking why the commonsense expectation that child asylum seekers would be treated generously—indeed more generously than adults—does not materialize in practice. After providing an overview of the situation of children living in refugee camps as well as the hardships they encounter after they manage to leave or avoid refugee camps to seek asylum in developed states, the chapter considers the perilous journeys that child refugees have to endure as well as the legal challenge surrounding the scope of asylum protection for children. It also discusses the three different forms of child persecution and how child asylum seekers are affected by extreme brutality and persecution within gangs.

Targeting the Right Issue: Trafficked Children and the Human Rights Imperative

This chapter examines the flourishing industry in transnational child trafficking leading to different forms of exploitative child labor in peacetime, along with its human rights implications. It begins with a discussion of important innovations in the representation of trafficked children who use the asylum protection system to secure a lawful permanent status, as well as progress in dealing with child victims of trafficking outside the asylum system. It then considers some of the complexities involved in curbing the “supply” of trafficked children, questions regarding the magnitude of human trafficking and how best to counter it, and the assumption that trafficking is simply a form of modern-day slavery. It also describes the law enforcement approach to child trafficking and public education campaigns for at-risk children about the danger of being trafficked. The chapter concludes by suggesting alternatives to existing strategies aimed at stemming the flow of trafficked children.

Staying Home: The Elusive Benefits of Child Citizenship

This chapter examines the dilemmas confronting citizen children whose parents are refused permission to reside in the children's home country and who thus face “constructive deportation” from their own country. It begins with two contrasting immigration stories, both concerning families of U.S. citizen children and noncitizen mothers who must make the choice between family separation and exile from their family home. It then explains the importance of citizenship as a social fact and as the legal correlate of territorial belonging, along with the primacy of nondeportability as an incident of citizenship. It also considers the political and legal attack, in the United States and elsewhere, on the citizenship rights of children, and birthright citizenship in particular. The chapter goes on to compare European and American approaches to child citizenship and highlights the ambivalent legal framework in the United States regarding the rights of citizen children.

Looking for Home: The Elusive Right to Family Life

This chapter examines how legal and social structure affects the exercise of family life, noting that the right to family life is a crucial bedrock of a just migration policy. It first provides an overview of attachment and belonging as key components of childhood, arguing that delays and other, more enduring legal obstacles to reunion unsettle the bedrock of family life on which children are meant to be raised. It then considers the difficulties facing refugee families and immigrants who leave home to improve their economic prospects, along with the different hurdles to family reunification for children left behind by immigrant parents. It also discusses children's right to family reunion, European human rights law, and children's reunification with parents in the United States. The chapter concludes by looking at smuggling as a means of family reunification.