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Abstract
This study appraises the particular challenges that minor asylum-seeking migrants who are in the 16–18 age category confront when pursuing their studies in a vocational college in Malta, a central Mediterranean island which is the smallest EU member state. The study explores how they exercise resilience in their desire to forge a future for themselves and traces their passage from Africa to Malta and their prospective aspirations to eventually settle elsewhere. It also explores how they integrate their lives as college students with these aspirations and how they see this as contributing to their lifelong education and ongoing processes of personal growth.
Notes
1. All migrants become 'asylum seekers' when they request some form of national or international protection. In Malta, this request is normally made by means of a preliminary questionnaire that precedes a formal interview with the Refugee Commissioner. In most cases, it is made when adult asylum seekers are in detention. However, in the case of minors, this may take place when they have been released from detention and are living in the community.
2. While international studies observe that asylum seekers and refugee populations could sometimes be homeless (Beiser, Citation2005; Paradis, Novac, Sarty, & Hulchanski, Citation2008), the context of homelessness did not surface in this study, since all the unaccompanied participants either managed to rent a place with friends by sharing the cost of the rent or were living at government-run shelters, or in the case of the accompanied minors, at home.