Though months have passed since the Trump administration ruthlessly enacted a “zero tolerance” family separation policy at the US–Mexico border, punitive deterrence policies remain the dominant governmental response to humanitarian emergencies. These policies violate longstanding constitutional values and institutional norms as well as national and international legal obligations to non-citizens. This chapter outlines these obligations; details the inhumane, futile, and violative policies deployed by the Trump administration to block or otherwise deter the entry of humanitarian migrant children and families; and proposes several alternatives to achieve a more equitable, effective, efficient, and law-abiding immigration policy. Key recommendations include increasing regional economic and civic collaboration; reinstituting supervised family release and legal representation to families and unaccompanied children; establishing special immigration policies that prioritize credible and well-regulated refugee status reviews particularly for children and families fleeing violence and persecution; expanding refugee resettlement programs at the federal, state, and local level; and subsidizing scholarship programs for at-risk children and adolescents. Reforms that protect the health and human rights of non-citizens not only advance equity, but also benefit the economic, social, and political interests of United States.

After decades of neglect by policy makers and scholars in both the migration and child welfare domains, child and youth migration is now receiving sustained attention as a critical aspect of contemporary migration. The scale of the phenomenon, the tragic humanitarian disasters it has generated, the legal, economic and social complexities it gives rise to have all contributed to the development of a robust, interdisciplinary engagement with issues of the movement of children and youth. Thus, over the past decade, state and civil society actors alike have devoted special resources to the needs of unaccompanied child migrants, whether as asylum seekers stranded on the Greek island of Lesvos or detainees held by the US immigration authorities. Legal representatives have advanced claims for refugee protection based on newly developed doctrines of childspecific persecution, while inspiring educators and health providers have crafted interventions specially targeted at the needs of the child migrant or refugee populations within their care. International organizations too have been responsive to the advocacy pressure to attend more explicitly to the distinctive needs of child migrants: UNHCR and the Committee on the Rights of the Child have crafted special guidance regarding the treatment of migrant and refugee children, the International Organization for Migration has developed programs geared to safely repatriating and reintegrating child migrants prevented from reaching their hoped-for migration destinations, and the two 2018 migration-related UN Global Compacts, on Refugees and Migration respectively, both include specific references to the rights and needs of child migrants and refugees.

Despite this welcome expansion of the migration and child welfare fields, much remains undone. In many rich societies that formally celebrate their commitment to ‘diversity’ and ‘multi-culturalism’, child and youth migrants continue to lack adequate access to legal, safe and regular migration opportunities – either because they remain subsumed within a broader (if outdated) conception of ‘family migration’ or because the class, race and wealth disparities that enable some but hinder most youth migration continue to be neglected. As a result, a disproportionate share of child and youth migration is irregular, with all the legal, social, economic and health consequences that flow from the absence of a legal status.

The importance of primary and secondary education as fundamental drivers of empowerment, achievement and inclusion is widely acknowledged. So is the increasing need for higher education (HE) – education that extends beyond secondary school graduation and that delivers academic, technical or professional instruction – as an essential prerequisite for advancement in contemporary, global society.

One in every hundred Romani youth enters higher education in Europe. To justify this educational dearth, policymakers, scholars and practitioners have often reproduced the same racecraft about Roma: they form part of an inferior culture that does not value education. This racist ideology has not only fed a false moral justification but also buried any potential sense of concern and urgency among policymakers regarding the dramatic underrepresentation of Roma in higher education. In this chapter, we argue that public education has historically been an institution designed for gadje (non-Roma) (although less so for gadjo girls and the poor), while Romani children and youth, seen as ‘inferior and nomadic others’, have had no functional option for quality education and even less for higher education. We explore patterns of exclusion, fear, racism and racialised poverty. We show that schools and universities today remain highly unwelcoming for Romani children and youth, failing in large measure to address pervasive structural racism or to advance inclusion and equity. We conclude that education reform needs to start by dismantling the racecraft of ‘inferiority’ from ideology, policies and practice.

This chapter summarises the findings of a mixed methods research project carried out with 639 young women from across Rajasthan, India, in 2014. We examine the experiences of young women who progressed to tertiary level education despite having parents with little or no formal education. We classify this cohort as the ‘College’ group. We compare their experiences with other girls, matched by age, location and parental education level, who dropped out during lower secondary school. We identify the triggers of educational success, paying particular attention to how the two groups differ in individual and family characteristics. The College group reported higher perceived levels of emotional support from one or both parents, more flexible familial attitudes towards marriage arrangements, as well as some reductions in expectations for household work. In addition, the College group were more than two times less likely to have grandparents or extended family that strongly disapproved of their continuing education than their non-College counterparts. Despite parental engagement, the College group reported experiencing acute financial strain and difficulties navigating the educational system in areas such as institution and subject choice. These challenges were exacerbated by a lack of formal institutional supports for these first-generation learners.

INTRODUCTION

The paradigmatic migrant has long been considered an able-bodied, adult male who leaves home to seek his fortune or save his life. Some of the principal components of international migration law – attribution of nationality, regulation of border crossing and protection of forced migrants – have been shaped by this perception. In the sphere of nationality, well into the twentieth century, women in many countries lost their nationality of origin on marriage to a foreigner, confirming the prevailing notion that allegiance to a sovereign and rootedness in a State were inherently male attributes. In terms of immigration control, until the mid-1970s and public acknowledgement of the so-called ‘feminisation of migration’, immigrants were generally assumed to be young, single, male workers, conveniently providing their host States with a discrete unit of labour. It came as something of a shock that workers were attached to families. And in the sphere of forced migration, refugees too were primarily seen as male political activists fleeing state oppression because of aspects of their civic status (such as their race, religion or political opinion). As a result, the foundational Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) (‘Refugee Convention’), drafted after the Second World War, did not include gender as a possible ground of persecution. There was only one exception to this early masculinist view of migration: nineteenth- and early twentieth-century laws criminalising what we now call trafficking took it as axiomatic that the victims needing protection were women, especially young women.

Over the past three decades, a more complex and accurate understanding of migration has gradually taken root. Despite some residual gender bias, most notably in United States jurisprudence, nationality law in Western democracies is generally non-discriminatory between men and women. Immigration regulations relating to labour migration now acknowledge the presence of both male and female workers as primary migrants. Refugee law has been substantially reshaped from its narrow early focus on adult males to encompass both gender- and child-based persecution as possible bases for the grant of asylum. International anti-trafficking laws now encompass not only young women, but children, both girls and boys, as well as persons with disabilities.