Abstract
Bonifacio presents an excellent collection of 15 essays that focus on youth migration and gender. Her introduction offers useful definitions and covers significant territory in the study of youth migration across regions and historic periods. She clearly outlines the goals of the volume and its examination of the ways in which gender and sexual orientation interact with the push–pull factors of migration and influence experiences of migrants both within and beyond the nation-state. The world’s population is young; in 2017, 42 percent of people were under the age of 25 and almost half of them live in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The introduction not only frames important issues but also provides valuable data for understanding the scope of the challenges facing young people as they negotiate their identities and livelihoods in both sending and destination societies.
The first section on “Imperial Histories” features three excellent chapters that offer various perspectives on child emigration from Britain between the years 1870–1939. Given high unemployment and economic distress at home, child welfare offices sent children from impoverished families in the United Kingdom to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Together these chapters that represent different methodological approaches with varying emphases on race, class, and gender illuminate the causes and challenges of youth migration during this period. And they do so by highlighting the experiences of the child emigrants along with an examination of public policy.
Four chapters constitute the next section on “Negotiating Identities.” Chapter five presents a very interesting comparative study of Senegalese young women settling in New York and Paris, and the differential ways in which migration empowered them and shifted their identities as women in the two destination cities. This chapter explains why the categorizations of youth differ so much from country to country. In the case of Senegal, Niang’s sample includes young women under the age of 35. Chapter six focuses on homophobia, transphobia, and the homonationalist gaze (Western homoexceptionalism) for young Bangladeshi homosexuals and transgenders in internal, rural-to-urban migration, and cross-national migration. While Bangladeshi urban life offered greater anonymity and community than rural life, many encountered different forms of discrimination (racial and religious) in Western “rights-bearing” countries that were more open and accepting of gays and transgendered people. In both contexts, socio-economic status influenced one’s experiences. Chapter 7 examines the intersections between illegality and queerness in the undocumented youth movement in the United States. It provides an interesting history of the process of “coming out” as undocumented, and the subsequent emergence of intersectional, autobiographical testimonies of “Undocuqueers”- a form of semantic activism in the fight for social justice.
The third section on “Education” includes chapters that focus on Filipino youth professionals in Alberta, Canada; children of military families in a French school in Alberta, Canada (this does not really addresses youth migration per se); an excellent chapter on second generation students navigating higher education in Italy, a country that does not grant citizen status to Italian-born children of foreign-born parents; a chapter on second-generation Arab American college women negotiating family expectations and higher education in ways that are quite different from their male counterparts; and finally a thoughtful and informative history of internal and external migration for Albanians since the early 1990s when opportunities for migration opened up, and the ways in which (im)migration is gendered. In this chapter, Danja also focuses on the support many young women receive from their families to migrate to Tirana, the capital of Albania, and how that defies the more stereotypical tension between “modern children” and “traditional parents.”
“Work” is the final section with chapters on Hungarian attitudes and intentions toward migration; an excellent quantitative and qualitative analysis of rural Ethiopian migration out of farming—this is the one chapter in the volume that addresses the impact of climate change on migration—and a complex and interesting discussion of various waves of migration to Istanbul from the Newly Independent States (ex-Soviet states). This chapter focuses on women, ethnicity, and age and the ways in which these intersectional realities influence women’s migration, work, and adjustment, and the public and law enforcements’ perceptions and expectations of them.
This is a valuable collection of essays that covers a range of migration experiences across and within different regions of the world, with a primary focus on youth migration and in most cases, gender. It should be of interest to a wide range of audiences from policy makers, scholars, and students. It is an essential book for libraries, especially since the cost of the book is prohibitive for many who will be interested in reading it.