Integration of unaccompanied migrant youth in the United States: a call for research

ABSTRACT

Between October 2013 and July 2016, over 156,000 children travelling without their guardians were apprehended at the U.S.–Mexico border and transferred to the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). During that same period, ORR placed over 123,000 unaccompanied migrant youth – predominantly from Central America – with a parent or other adult sponsor residing in the U.S. Following placement, local communities are tasked with integrating migrant youth, many of whom experience pre- and in-transit migration traumas, family separation, limited/interrupted schooling, and unauthorised legal status, placing them at heightened risk for psychological distress, academic disengagement, maltreatment, and human trafficking. Nonetheless, fewer than 10% of young people receive formal post-release services (PRS). This paper addresses the paucity of research on the experiences of the 90% of children and youth without access to PRS. To bridge this gap, this article: (a) describes the post-release experiences of unaccompanied youth, focusing on legal, family, health, and educational contexts; (b) identifies methodological and ethical challenges and solutions in conducting research with this population of young people and their families; and (c) proposes research to identify structural challenges to the provision of services and to inform best practices in support of unaccompanied youth. [196 words]

KEYWORDS:

• Unaccompanied minors
• refugees
• child migration
• Central America
• post-release services

Acknowledgements

This manuscript is a product of inter-disciplinary collaborations originating from the ‘Undocumented, Unaccompanied, and Citizen: Charting Research Directions for Children of Immigration’ Conference held at the University of Texas, Austin, February 25–26, 2016.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This statutory definition of an unaccompanied minor is a child, under the age of 18, without lawful immigration status who is apprehended in the U.S. and is without a legal guardian in the U.S. or within geographic proximity at the time of the child's apprehension (Manuel and Garcia 2016, 2). Until recently, the juridical term has been ‘unaccompanied alien children’. In contrast, we utilise the term unaccompanied migrant youth because it more accurately reflects the demographics of young people we reference (majority of youth are 15–17 years old) (ORR 2016) and, importantly, avoids the stigmatization of terms such as ‘alien’. For further discussion of the definitional challenges related to scholarship on unaccompanied children, see Menjívar and Perreira's introduction to this special issue.

2 Absent protection under TVPRA, the majority of Mexican youth elect to voluntarily return to Mexico or face expedited removal.

3 Distinguishing what is known about unaccompanied youth from what is known about undocumented children generally is challenging. Though unaccompanied child migration is not a new phenomenon, TVPRA-mandated changes in how these youth are processed through the U.S. immigration system have drawn attention to the unique integration experiences of this subset of immigrant children. These procedural changes have given rise to a nascent scholarship in the U.S. focused specifically on unaccompanied youth released into sponsor care. Prior research among immigrant children in the U.S. infrequently distinguished between accompanied and unaccompanied youth, making it difficult to determine in retrospect how many youth in a given sample were unaccompanied. Throughout the article, we have attempted to signal those studies involving unaccompanied youth, while recognizing that ambiguity around their representation in the broader literature on undocumented children is largely the result of the evolving nomenclature of immigration.

4 For information about unaccompanied migrant youth in Europe, see Kanics, Senovilla Hernández, and Touzenis (2010) and Menjívar and Perrerira's introduction to this special issue.

5 For more detail on immigration benefits available to unaccompanied youth, see ILRC (2014).

6 Here we are referring to the juridical category of ‘unaccompanied children’, encompassing only those children apprehended and detained by federal authorities. A considerable number of young people, accompanied and unaccompanied, arrive to the U.S. and evade apprehension.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities under Grant [R13 MD010415-01].