Children’s Mobility Experiences into Focus

Lauren Heidbrink’s Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State opens by recounting the story of five-year-old Elian Gonzalez, who was taken to Miami as an unaccompanied child in 1999. Elian’s mother and stepfather died while attempting to bring him from Cuba to the United States, leaving him at the centre of a legal battle between his extended family, United States immigration enforcement, and Cuban authorities, each claiming to have his best interests at heart. In sharing this story, Heidbrink sets the tone for the rest of the book, which focuses on the contradictions within the care and immigration systems in the United States, with particular reference to the way these systems affect unaccompanied migrant children and their families.

The book provides a thoroughly investigated and well-presented account of some of the tensions, contradictions, and competing interests between American state and federal laws and its immigration and care policies. Central to Heidbrink’s endeavour is showing how unaccompanied migrant children are positioned, from a legal perspective, between their families and the state. They are essentially caught between two discourses: one that depicts them as victims who are deprived of the care and attention they are thought to need, another that portrays them as illegal dissidents who pose a threat to national security. Rather than dwell on the contradictions themselves, however, Heidbrink’s focus is on the agentic ways migrant children respond to and reflect on the opportunities and constraints they face.

Heidbrink’s particular emphasis on the experiences of migrant children is unique; as she points out, there have not been many studies that emphasize the perspective of migrant children, let alone unaccompanied migrant children, despite the large number of children on the move today and throughout history. The tendency to overlook the agency of children and to view them simply as dependants or as members of family units and/or households is a primary reason for this absence. Another problem, however, is the lack of data on migrant children, which may be attributed to the diverse ways in which they are classified by immigration regimes and to the broad range of migration programs they move through. Her study, therefore, makes a major contribution to the field insofar as it uses an ethnographic approach that highlights the experiences of a highly inaccessible group: unaccompanied young people moving through hard-to-reach spaces such as immigration detention centres, border stations, and immigration and family courts.

Heidbrink approaches the subject matter of her book with great sensitivity. This is evident from the effort she made to seek ethical clearance from multiple research review committees (within the academy as well as some of the other organizations under study) prior to starting her research. She also sought the guidance and approval of numerous other individuals and organizations who were well positioned to assist her in securing the well-being of her participants (13). The study is based on an ambitious research design and an impressive amount of material collected over a three-year period. Heidbrink conducted a detailed survey and interviews with eighty-two children in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and (with the assistance of an interpreter) Mandarin. She also did fieldwork and made observations at three federal detention facilities for unaccompanied children in Texas and Illinois and within four federal foster care programs in Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Finally, 250 individual stakeholder interviews were conducted with government and NGO staff, attorneys, guardians ad litem, judges, Congress members, community leaders, Border Patrol agents, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, consular officials, foster families, teachers, researchers, and policy-makers. Some of these interviews were even conducted off United States soil, in El Salvador and Mexico. Heidbrink also analyzed paperwork concerning the cases of certain unaccompanied migrant children in federal custody.

The 196-page book is made up of six chapters and a brief conclusion. Chapter 1 lays out the theoretical framework, the methodology, and key definitions for the study. It also...