Shattered spaces of migrant childhood: Camps,borders and uncertain status

The spatial dimension of camp from the margins

The informal refugee camp of Calais caught international attention due to its significant growth as a shantytown on a wasteland not far away from the French–British border. Thousands of migrants, who resided in the camp, were hoping to slip across the border and start a new life in the UK. The camp was not given legal approval by the local authorities and French government. The ‘Jungle’ was ultimately demolished in October 2016 and its residents were relocated. The book by Agier and his collaborators is a contribution to the history of the camp, because it describes what has been happened at the local area for the last 15 years and more, with a pivotal interest in the period between April 2015 and October 2016, the dates of the opening of the encampment and of its destruction. The description of the historical context of the camp is crucial for a broader understanding that the phenomenon of the ‘Jungle’ was not exclusively connected to what has been called in Europe the ‘migrant crisis’, but it had long-term roots in older contexts of the violence of borders and migrant control. The historical background helps to realize that when the ‘Jungle’ was merely presented in the media as a calamity, many details were unnoticed or separated from its historical roots that created subsequent camps in the local area as durable social-spatial formations, so that it came to be interpreted as a dreadful accident of the ‘migrant crisis’. The camp of 2015/2016 had its long-term story in the history of displacement and confinement of undesirable migrant populations who had resided in early local settlements. Therefore, the book documents how political mechanisms and events enabled France and the United Kingdom to create the camp’s conditions of permanent temporariness. Both national governments further benefited from the camp’s conditions of permanent temporariness for the sake of controlling undesirable and dispossessed subjects. In his introduction to the book, Agier notices how calling the camp a ‘Jungle’ helped to depict it as a negatively exotic and disturbing place, more distant that it was in reality, and less humane. The camp’s conditions of permanent temporariness were the result of some deep-rooted understandings of sovereignty and statehood reliant on the idea of exercising the power of borders for migrant control on the one side and spatial confinement on the other.

The temporariness of the camp played a key role in state strategies, embraced in keeping out migrants from entering. The camp had regularly turned into a site of spatial confinement and exclusion, ultimately becoming an easy to use political device for the management of migrant marginality through arbitrary governance actions. The camp was never recognized officially by the French authorities, hence forcing its inhabitants into a state of precariousness. The unnamable and informal camp reduced its inhabitants to a mere precariat of deprived subjectivity because people were forcibly lumped together into one peculiar category of the destitute. In many ways, the ‘Jungle’ was a dead end to them as well. Migrants were surely unable to resolve the formal obstacles to their asylum requests, but at the same time, they never abandoned the attempt to reach Britain. Rejected but not deported, yet they lived in the camp under the condition of permanent temporariness. The condition of permanent temporariness reflected well in the formation of the camp, which permuted from temporary to permanent constructions. The ambiguity of the formation process lay in what could be called an indefinitely permanent temporary dimension. The camp residents experienced time as a dimension which was constructed as instant and never-too-far-away to come to an end. However, any camp arrangements, which seemed to be bound to temporariness at first, became even more permanent in the process.

Agier and his colleagues offer a look at everyday life in the camp beyond assumptions of victimization, passivity and hopelessness. With his call for an urban ethnography of the camp, Agier has been essentially concerned with the process of the transformation of the refugee camp into a space of urban sociability. And camps, especially refugee camps, have been investigated by Agier in his previous works exactly from an urban lens. The Jungle is not an exception in that research programme, with its strong focus on issues of solidarities and political actions in the camp. According to Agier, the Calais ‘Jungle’ showed that even under precarious conditions, it was vital for opening up possibilities for new political subjectivities. In that sense, the space of the camp became a strategic property by which different ethnic groups of camp inhabitants and volunteers were constituted as a cosmopolitan community. Due to the lack of formal support offered by governments and aid agencies, grassroots organizations, run by volunteers, played a key role in providing humanitarian assistance for camp inhabitants.

One of their urgent tasks was to take day-to-day responsibility for children. In many cases, however, improvisation played a pivotal role in channelling volunteering activities as volunteers respond to a humanitarian emergency depending on what is urgently needed. The solidarity movement of volunteers who mobilized on behalf of the Calais ‘Jungle’ offered an interesting insight into alternative approaches to humanitarian aid, because of its informality. The case of the ‘Jungle’ camp helps to cast light on the tensions that exist in humanitarian aid work, bringing to the fore some of the complex aspects of unaccompanied minors. Despite humanitarian efforts, numerous concerns was raised about the conditions in which unaccompanied children lived in the camp. A waiting period in deteriorating camp conditions had a detrimental impact on children’s learning, socialization and care. It is necessary to understand that without the institutional structures and recognition, the standard mechanisms of international child protection were not often put into practice. In the case of unaccompanied children, the reality of living in the camp has more to do with a space of utter exclusion than with a space of political subjectivities that exceeds that of bare life.

The experience of liminality

The lived experience of illegality has been changing dramatically over years. The frightening prospects of apprehension at the border have increased, as have the severe consequences of being apprehended. However, the undocumented child population has grown in numbers. The growth has come as an unintended result of recent policy attempts to tighten up the border, which increased migrant efforts in settlements and altered the complexity of the undocumented family. As Gonzales shows in his book, the undocumented minor population has strong social ties to the US and the long-term experience of living in the country. Compared to their parents, undocumented youth are much more connected to the people and places that surround them. Nevertheless, the stigma of illegality puts a stamp on their childhood and the rest of their life.

Punishing or excluding an undocumented parent may be socially and politically pictured as justifiable even if the consequences for her or his child are devastating and contradict the child’s best interest approach. Excluding a child is often considered as a sad but convenient subsidiary instrument of immigration control. Children should not be punished for the guilt of their parents, yet state actions against undocumented parents can radically alter the course of a child’s entire life. The interests of the state seeking to enforce immigration control are constructed as more compelling than the interests of the family. The perspective of the child is strikingly absent. In addition, for the children, illegality like childhood itself is a status in process. It means that the circumstances of children are changing with the pivotal moment of their coming of age experiences in education and the workforce. Lives in Limbo highlights an important dimension of the transition into adulthood that is called by Gonzales as learning to be illegal.

As Gonzales describes, his respondents spend their childhood and early adolescence in a state of suspended illegality. During these periods, immigration status does not severely limit activities. In childhood, unlike adulthood, legality is not a perquisite for participation. Through school, children are socially integrated and develop a deep sense of emotional attachment about belonging to. With the question of unauthorized status temporally suspended, children have more opportunities for membership in social networks. Indeed, for children, surroundings also influence values, worldviews and rules of behaviour. In many cases, children develop aspirations rooted in the belief that they are part of the American society and will have better opportunities than their parents. They speak English fluently, socialize alongside their native-born and legal resident peers, and acculturate to the norms and values of the American life. However, as undocumented youth enter early adulthood they engage in a process of learning to be illegal. During this period of adult transition, they find difficulty in connecting with previous sources of support to navigate the constraints on their lives and to mitigate their stigmatized identities. It means that previous plans and aspirations for the future are reshaped accordingly to a change in the way they experience their precarious legal and social circumstances.

In the US, 18 is the legal threshold when a child ceases to be considered a minor and assumes control over her or his actions and decisions. Gonzales notes that most of his respondents conveyed that they were not prepared for the dramatic limits of their rights. Even though many began to experience some shifts in the early stages of their lives, some tried to believe that their legal situation would change before they reached maturity. The movement into adulthood is typically associated with a normative timeline of expectations that should be matched by a certain age. For undocumented youth, the transition to adulthood is extremely complicated. The transition to adulthood means the transition to illegality. Laws aimed at narrowing the rights of the unauthorized prevent them from participating in key adult rites of passage. In addition to the legal consequences of coming of age, undocumented youth have to copy with the trauma of the exclusion from a place, where they were raised and developed a deep sense of emotional attachment. The result is, as Gonzales argues, a derailing of the life-course trajectories of thousands of young adults every year.

Newly embraced undocumented status combined with the transition to adulthood and fear of rejection leaves young people in a state of limbo. They are trapped in a liminal situation, in which they are not certain what to do next and cannot take action to grasp at a brighter future. Their new lives are marked by uncertainty and instability in many typical everyday realms such as further education, employment, housing, not to mention their physical and emotional well-being. Moreover, the length of their stay in the country where have been lived so far is uncertain. The liminality of life in the shadows seems to be indefinite. In sociological terms, illegality is often associated with an enforced orientation to the present. It means that individuals have taught themselves that all they have can be taken away in an instant. As Gonzales concludes, each event that forces them to confront their legal limitations and each threat of apprehension and deportation reminds them of the stark reality that at any moment their lives could change.

A state of limbo

Greater attention to child migration brings more sophistication to a general discussion on migration. As acknowledgement of the various migrant possibilities concerning the child experience has extended, the more nuanced understanding of the child’s capabilities of decision-making in the migration context complicates a more traditional meaning of the best interests of the child as applied to the boundaries of a single nation. There is a growing recognition that unaccompanied minors are usually adolescents with complex life stories that challenge the simplicity of ‘undeserved and undocumented’ labels. The autonomy and adolescent aspirations of child migrants are a relatively new focus of concern, which questions previous orthodoxies built up around simplistic return-home policies, and in that way are not consistent with the assumption that children are merely passive victims of migration. Nevertheless, protective policies omit their aspirations for agency that express their choice-making about future preferences (whether experts considered them in their best interests or not).

Most unaccompanied and undocumented minors live in irregular situations. The conditions reflect an evident reluctance in the destination states where they reside to move the discussion from immigration enforcement to integration. These children require education, health care and social services – investments that are already cut, since welfare provisions and services provided by the government are reduced in the pursuit of neoliberal governance. Comparing refugee camps and border enforcement to other forms of treatment for undesirable populations, such as ghettos and hyper-ghettos, shows a similar regime of governance based on functions of containment and the control of the undesirable. Permanent temporariness plays an important role in spatial confinement, where the adolescent aspirations of many child migrants are blocked and where they are inducted into migration itineraries which do not provide safe passages into adulthood.

Permanent temporariness means uncertain futures and limited means through which to make successful transitions to adulthood. Most unaccompanied and undocumented minors are trapped in a time dimension which is detached from the future and reduced to an indefinitely permanent temporary dimension. However, while uncertainty creates an experience of a time-spatial dimension detached from linearity and situated ‘in between’, eventually children age into adulthood. Both books, The Jungle and Lives in Limbo, translate a rather abstract concept of permanent temporariness into a framework for understanding the intricate realities of migrant children – caught in camp and border places. It is important for readers to understand the ambivalence reflected in society’s perceptions of vulnerability (poor and innocent children) and otherness (but not like our children), which produces ambiguous social policy responses to unaccompanied and undocumented minors, mired between the pressure to protect migrant ‘children’ and the barrier to keep out frightened and resentful ‘alien juveniles’.