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Youth Migrants and Long-Delayed Family Reunification
Since the mid-2010s, there has been a notable rise in media attention toward so-called unaccompanied minors migrating to the United States from Central America without parents or legal guardians. While some minors travel alone and may have no family members in the United States, the great majority travel with siblings, extended family, guides, or other community members and migrate to reunite with close family members in the United States. Nonetheless, in the media and public discussions, they are typically depicted as solo travelers, uniquely alone and vulnerable. Such stories leave many puzzled. Why are these minors traveling across the border without their parents? And what happens to them after they arrive in the United States?
Media accounts often portray the rise in this category of migrant arrivals as unexpected and unprecedented. However, as sociologists who study migration and families, in our view, this trend is neither unexpected nor unprecedented. On the contrary, as we explain in our new book, Reunited, it was only a matter of time.
Reunited draws on interviews with migrant youth, their sponsors, and professionals who work with migrant populations in schools and nonprofits. We introduce the concept of family-propelled migration to explain how and why minors from Central America and other regions decide to migrate to the United States on their own. We argue that the decision to migrate is ultimately a family-driven decision, typically motivated and facilitated by the presence of family members already living in the destination country.
Many of the teenagers who crossed the U.S. border in the early 2010s were the children of parents who had previously left Central America, sometimes as many as 14 years earlier. Many of these youth were traveling with larger groups and heading toward existing migrant communities in the United States, often established by previous generations escaping civil war, generalized violence, and economic instability.
The presence of family in the United States, long separations of parents and children, children coming of age, and events on the ground in Central America—such as an increase in violence and youth gang recruitment—all help explain why these minors left when they did. Indeed, the minors we spoke with commonly cited educational disruptions and gang recruitment as factors in their decisions to leave.
Not only was this migration trend predictable, but there is precedent for the phenomenon of youth migrating to the United States without a parent. If migrant minors had been less visible before, it was only because the border had not been as intensely patrolled and because arrangements between Mexico and the United States allowed for Mexican minors caught at the border to be quickly returned to Mexico. Thus, few records documented this phenomenon. The same relative invisibility characterized the many minors from Europe and Asia who migrated alone in previous centuries, when the United States government was not deemed responsible for their safety once they reached its shores.
While family reunification may conjure up an image of parents and children living happily ever after, the reality is far more complex. When one family member joins another in a new country, they encounter numerous challenges, both internal and external to the family unit. In addition to the difficulties of navigating new surroundings, foreign cultural expectations, and an unfamiliar language, integration within the family can pose additional challenges.
The children and adolescents we feature in Reunited often had not seen their U.S. family members for many years—some not since they were small children. Given the high risk and cost of the undocumented journey to the United States and the restrictions placed on those not subject to legal permanent residency, green cards, or citizenship, parents who migrate to the United States without their children are seldom able to travel back to their home country to visit. They must instead parent from afar and send as many remittances as possible.
Moreover, families change. Upon arrival in the United States, many youth encountered new stepparents and step- or half-siblings. Some dealt with new forms or degrees of religiosity that their parents had adopted and expected their children to adopt, as well. For reunited youth, understanding and interpreting parents’ rules and deciding whether to follow them was often a difficult process. Emotional ties were tested after reunification, and new lives together required active negotiation.Besides the family, schools played an important role in youth migrants’ integration trajectory and experience of belonging. Our findings indicate that schools that invest in staff and social work programming can help migrant youth and their families make sense of their new lives and identities, help them to understand and reach their goals. We have seen much evidence of this among the youth we spoke with in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.
Reunited also highlights a paradox in the migration trajectories of Central American minors: while these youth are highly visible at the border, their experiences of integration are largely invisible. Both the border and the journey north play important roles in shaping migrant youth’s integration trajectories, as they often experience significant challenges that produce various forms of trauma. We argue that integration needs to be viewed, understood, and approached holistically, emphasizing the importance of strengthening new family, school, and community ties to effectively support migrant youth and families.
Ernesto Castañeda and Daniel Jenks are co-authors of Reunited: Central American Youth Migration and Family Separation. Ernesto Castañeda is Professor in the Department of Sociology at American University, where he also serves as the director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies and the Immigration Lab. Daniel Jenks is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
