Children in Global Migations

Children in Global Migrations
Author(s): Paula S. Fass

Source: Journal of Social History, Vol. 38, No. 4, Globalization and Childhood (Summer,
2005), pp. 937-953
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3790483
Accessed: 23-04-2018 18:45 UTC
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS
By Paula S. Fass University of California at Berkeley
The growing reality of movement across borders has become a twenty-first

tury theme and increasingly a focus for the anxieties and uncertainties
change in our time. When it is paired with children, its potential as a mo
form of brutality becomes an almost irresistible excuse for sadness and poig
reflection. The Brazilian photo-journalist Sabastiao Salgado is hardly alon
reaping the emotional and aesthetic harvest of this theme, but his movin
hibit "Migrations: Humanity in Transition?The Children," provides an e
tionally vivid perspective on this issue.
At the Berkeley Art Museum, one ofthe stops the exhibit made in 2002, it
seen by thousands of people. The normally empty exhibit spaces were jam
and extra galleries were opened to accommodate the huge range of his ph
graphic record as he toured the world through the Americas, Europe, the M
East, Africa, and the many parts of Asia to observe children, willingly and
willingly on the move (mostly the latter). Here is a quote from the pamp
that accompanied the exhibit: "In every crisis situation?whether war, pov
or natural disaster?children are the greatest victims. The weakest physic
they are invariably the first to succumb to disease or starvation. Emotio
vulnerable, they are unable to understand why they are being forced from
homes, why their neighbors have turned against them, why they are now
slum surrounded by filth or in a refugee camp and surrounded by sorrow.
no responsibility for their fates, they are by definition innocent."
Children are usually also the most attractive of their species and, how
much they may be hostages to fate, their attractiveness is very effectively
nipulated by the photographer toward his many purposes. I will argue later
children are hardly entirely victims or entirely innocent, but for now, 1 w
to claim for them the aesthetic appeal of which Salgado and all those gat
to see his work were undoubtedly deeply aware. In today's PR world, where
image often becomes the reality, it is appropriate for us to begin with the i
that Salgado, among others, has imprinted in the public imagination as the
ture of child migration. As humanity in transit takes center stage in the tw
first century, it is the children that are most memorable. Again, in the wo
the exhibit pamphlet: "Migrations is the story of humanity on the move. I
story of our times, with profound implications for the generations to come
It is important for us to consider those implications, and I take for this purp
Salgado's exhibition as my opening text since it helps to define the public m
space usually occupied by children's migration in the context of globaliz
We need first to question the assumptions that lie behind this exhibit: that
normal state of child life is stability, and that children are naturally inn
and dependent. These assumptions have become deeply embedded in a W
ern ideal of childhood that is increasingly broadcast through Western med
international agencies to the rest of the world. In this sense, Salgado's exhi
938 journal of social history summer 2005
an expression of globalization as much as it records the migr

nies it. By situating Salgado's sensibility deep within the mod
of childhood and understanding how that sensibility now tak
as its subject, we can begin to appreciate some of the tension
of the subject we hope to understand.
Contemporary images of child migration usually assume th
is both a new phenomenon and a threat to the stability nec
and its proper development. In this paper I will examine mig
as a subject long familiar to American historians, and as a c
nomenon that has new features and significant new consequ
tions to come." This is not an easy task, not least because the
subjects that historians value is not realizable when examinin
tean as globalization, and one that is both now expressing its
ing. Historians are nevertheless quite well situated to mak
because, unlike a photographer such as Salgado, historians
recording change. Whatever Salgado's philosophical and eth
is first of all an aesthetic project one of whose goals is to tra
photograph into something new and more commensurate w
it seeks to record. Salgado longs to expand what photographs
For historians, however, fluidity and change define our im
stitute the mental world of our discipline. And American h
are especially well situated in this task. I have written else
believe that the history of the United States provides an un
of departure for understanding globalization. Suffice it to sa
of the ingredients of globalization?a large zone of free trade
peded market development, the strategic contribution of rap
to that development, and mass immigration and cultural ex
verse groups?have been familiar features of American expe
two hundred years. I take these to be critical aspects of wh
call globalization in the modern world.
Migration and Children in the American Past and Present
The mass movement of populations, whether associated with

nomic change (and since these are frequently related, to bo
During the last several decades, colonial American historia
at work demonstrating the fluidity of the 17th and 18th cent
when empires collided and brought large portions of the Am
Asia into the European force field. So expansive was that wor
rian, David Hancock, has described its innovative and wealt
Citizens ofthe World? These collisions created the strong cur
immense migration within the Americas, in Africa, and acro
Indian Oceans. Whatever else they are, today's migrations ofte
paths and social patterns established at that point in history.
these studies demonstrate, they make clear that many Euro
and African children could expect very little in the way of s
and home. The upheavals of the 17th and 18th centuries p
their train, among them those as young as 9 or 10 who were
CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 939
don and elsewhere to become indentured serva

they were put to work in the "plantations" of No
tive children from stable villages and practices.5
they were likely to meet on those plantations ot
brought in shackles from Africa.
These strangers from three continents were har
time. Where in today's global perspective we see
17th century ship captains and planters saw carg
labor (and if the young were girls, also fair sexu
less precious than 20 year olds. ln this sense, the
as journalists and others document the plight o
on cloth in India, or 11 year old girls drawn in
Cambodia.
That leap in our imagination of what children ought and ought not to do
is the product of Western history and of the development of humanistic sen?
timents during the last two hundred years. Today, these victims are no longer
as they once were, merely a subset of poor people whose poverty makes them
vulnerable or desperate. Instead we respond to them as children in a special way
and see their exploitation or abuse as unacceptable. This diffusion of western
sensibilities to embrace the children of the globe is a significant ingredient of
globalization. The change from the 18th century to the 19th century that re?
sulted first in outcries against slavery and finally in organizations against the
abuse of children in factory labor required an alteration in Western sensibili?
ties and a new humanitarianism that has been studied by Thomas Haskell and
others.6 By the end of the 19th century, this sensibility was prevalent among the
middle classes in Britain, the United States, France, and in other places in the
Western world.7 Because we have inherited that sensibility, globalization today
has a very different face than its antecedents did in the 17th century. In the 17th
and 18th centuries, Western superiority was clothed in various guises of culture,
color, and religion. Today, our western commitment to child protection often
incubates a similar sense of superiority which lays a claim to virtue in the vision
ofa proper childhood. As a result, at just the point when globalization is mak?
ing knowledge of diverse childhood patterns widely available, age has become a
sorting device by which we allocate sympathy and parcel out favor.
What is happening to children in other parts of the globe today is refracted
through a Western lens. Some journalists, such as Nicholas Kristof in the New
York Times, are conscious ofthe complex contradictions that these changes in-
troduce, recognizing that for many of the children in third world countries fac?
tory work opportunities where they are made available by globalization are often
far superior to the work which children have long done exploiting dung heaps
for scraps or in home manufacture. For his insights, he has been showered with
outraged letters from readers.8 But historians need to make the public aware
that their current view of children (our view of children) is a product of a par?
ticular history. This will not resolve the ethical or intellectual dilemmas that
globalization poses to the modern sensibility, but it can provide a much wider
aperture from which pictures about the present can be viewed and evaluated.
In this sense, the new history of children and childhood has come at a strate?
gic moment as a necessary corrective to current popular fixations. Only as we
begin to understand the degree to which children have a hi
ern world and one that, as many historians have demonstra
doses of child labor, will the readers of the New York Times b
Kristof's point.9
While the history of child labor is useful for our underst
"see" contemporary globalization, our knowledge of the his
other necessary part of our vision. As a consequence of earl
United States became both a land of different races and a nati
a product of the intersection of several worlds and of immigr
continents. The migrations ofthe 17 th and 18th century v
subsequent generations. Sometimes they had treacherous c
the case of Africans caught in the Atlantic slave trade, and t
destruction of native peoples in the Americas. But the mov
ways proceed in these fearsome and humiliating ways that
photographs portend. Many immigrants to the United Sta
and expectantly starting in the 18th century because they
which America became a byword as a promising outcome of m
rians of the United States have taken note of the fact that m
varied consequences for children with some becoming succ
of the migration, while others became its victims, and that m
ences were sharply etched along racial lines.11 More recentl
as Alejandro Portes have usefully distinguished between vol
migrations and observed how these tend to be racially pattern
not all, immigrants who came willingly to the United States
century were European and even among these some were "rac
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is to say that t
scribed as if they were distinct races.13 It is yet to be determ
current immigrants, almost all of them of non-European ori
similar sharply drawn racial boundaries, or whether they will
racial tendencies have subsided. The degree to which migra
to be racially defined will have huge consequences for thei
race, unlike ethnicity, has historically been viewed as an inhe
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the presence of large number
ties (Africans and Amerindians) was a distinctly American
experience. Today, unlike the past, even countries like Den
the Netherlands have substantial numbers of racial minorities who have mi-
grated as part of the globalizing process. Will their children remain ostracized
outsiders, like the Jews of early twentieth century Europe or like the Chinese of
the late 19th century United States (who were voluntary migrants but viewed as
racial outsiders)? Or will the children of millions of non-European immigrants
in today's Los Angeles be like European immigrants into early twentieth century
New York, strangers with hopeful futures?14
Between 1955 and 1991, the numbers and proportion of Asians and Latin
Americans who have migrated voluntarily to the United States has mush-
roomed. In the two years, 1990-1991, a total of almost three and one-half mii?
lion immigrants were admitted legally to the United States?a number larger
than at any previous point in American history. Of that number, less than 10
percent were of European birth, while the rest were a combination of Mexican,
South American and Asian immigrants. In the pr

and 1990, a total of over one and one half million c
half million from the Philippines, over 400,000 f
China, 338,000 from Korea and 145,000 from Lao
million from India. In addition, hundreds of thou
other Latin American countries, the Caribbean, a
almost twenty-seven million people in the Unite
born, with a large percentage of these children.
The result is an enormous new American immig
groups whose presence is either entirely new to Am
important because of sheer size. These migrants
American cities in all regions of the country wh
now often make up one-half or more of the pop
(62%), New York (54.3%), Miami (71.5%), and
migrants and their children are becoming the do
United States, the reopening and massive increase
unprecedented levels of Latin American immigra
a new non-racialized future. According to Richar
be a hybridized "brown" future.18 Is this somethin
or even the United States with its fraught racial p
If the future of the United States is a brown on
lose their consciousness of race in the process of
a new hybridization (in both culture and bodies)
tion when applied to European immigrants. If cont
markers of race, as immigration over time and in
youth culture once effectively erased markers of eth
United States can once again expect to be at the for
identity just as it once created a trans-European i
expression of changes introduced by globalization
to remember that the evidence we have for childre
which so much of that future depends, indicates th
years, American schools have become more, not les
a good sign for the integration of children into a n
to studies by Gary Orfield and his colleagues at t
Desegregation, "For Latinos, an even more severe le
African Americans] is intensifying across the natio
ticularly affecting our rapidly growing Latino co
this continues, American children will hardly be p
and school context from which to create a new glo
tion will mean a more complex world with more di
side-by-side (in school systems as well as cities), an
elements, but hardly a truly brown society.
Migration is often a family strategy that affects c
Our vision of globalization will be very much enh

migration affects not only those who move but those
out of contemporary mental pictures of child life,
understudied product of contemporary migration, especially sin
of those who leave has dramatically changed.
Family migration has never been a process in which all member
necessarily move together. Indeed, much of migration history c
assembling of families in order to underwrite a family process of
success. Like those who migrate today, people in the past also m
across borders, with relatives in far distant places. Today, in th
stant communication and rapid transportation, this is becomin
normal way of life. Globalization has not only made migration
but has affected the family decisions that frame migration. Man
thousands of Filipino women (some have estimated the total to b
lion) have traveled to Europe, the Middle East, and to the United
other people's houses, take care of their elderly, their sick and thei
most cases, these women leave their children behind with grand
fathers or other relatives as they send good parts of their wages
the lives and prospects of their children and other family mem
to return to better lives in the Philippines. Very often these mi
for a few months, but for many years.
Historians are quite familiar with the pattern of transient mig
the height of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, i
teenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of me
including children, behind when they came to the United Stat
Brazil to find work. They sent back their wages on a regular bas
ten themselves returned after several years' absence. Sometimes,
and forth repeatedly. The Chinese tried to do the same, but wer
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, singled them out as the fir
whom a specific embargo was imposed and thereby stopped most
tory process. But Italians and Poles did it regularly and Mexic
do so into the twentieth-first century. In Mexico today, 41%
heads have had some migratory experience to the United States,
households have a social connection to someone living in the U
Americans today are governed by ideals of family reunification
decided that the family's physical preservation is a desirable par
icy, a policy enshrined in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. (As I writ
being re thought by the Bush administration in its proposals for te
ers.) So we tend to find migration that disrupts a family's phy
troubling and even pathological. But, international migrations,
pany international capital and information as part of globaliza
as in the past, do not take issues of family preservation into a
day, as in the past, families adapt and use the pressures and or op
presents. Family life, it is well to remember, is a process as muc
fact, and migration often accentuates one part of that process
the 17th and 18th centuries, when travel was hard, expensive,
the rupture of movement over the seas for the poor, such as inde
was usually permanent. In the 19th and 20th centuries, as the
improved and became faster and cheaper, family ruptures were m
porary. With travel ever cheaper and faster and when people
go almost anywhere by air, some families have become genuinely
children travel back and forth from the United Stat

America or India to visit with grandparents. Some s
difficult teen period to become truly bicultural in th
Perhaps the most potentially destabilizing part oft
sitory migration which maintains family bonds is
the past did women leave children behind as they so
prospects for survival or success, although single w
by themselves. Only in the context of the modern w
is often as valuable as, or more valuable than, mal
no longer work in the countries to which their pare
likely. While journalists remind us that globalizatio
new work contexts this is very unlikely in Europ
cisely because, after the late 19th century, Western
as unnatural and abhorrent. We might want to rec
this posture toward children, a globalized 21st centur
women will leave their children behind for long p
seek the work that is now available to them, but
paid in valuable dollars and euros. This means that w
on extended kin for child care arrangements. This c
on intergenerational ties is utterly unlike the model
posited by Talcott Parsons in the 1950s when he ar
nuclear families cut off from obligations to kin cou
essential for social mobility in the modern world.23
The female out-migration I am describing introduc
into the history of migration. In fact, there is no be
tential for gender change that globalization offers (
pattern. (For a related effect on gender see Jennif
ume.) Rhacel Salazar Parreftas shows that some Fil
as an alternative to seeking divorce for an abusive m
culture. So family maintenance may be less an iss
ness and the desire for self determination that is us
by globalization. Thus, migration makes a kind of
thinkable and, in this case, a permanent rupture i
result from the contemporary phenomenon that A
Ehrenreich have called, "global woman."24
We know far less about the children left behind
move. But, the increasing dependence of working w
ments in the West is apparently affecting far flung
and others have noted that the modern pattern of g
results in a progressive lowering of the status of
and American women employ lower caste immigran
when they cannot turn to kin, employ much needie
care for their own children. This process of "divert
ternational phenomenon.25 Gender patterns and m
within culture and contemporary trends affecting
in the context of globalization have as much, if not
destabilization, as child labor or child migration do.
much more fully than we do as we think about th
tion for children today. Identity for women on the move and fo
they leave behind are deeply caught up in this process as tradit
social reproduction are altered. Similarly identity is changing for
may shuttle between schools in the United States or Europe wh
the care of their working mothers, while spending vacations wit
in Latin America or elsewhere.
Migration, Education, and Social Mobility
In order best to understand the effects of migration on educ

thority, it is important to remember what social historians take for
children's movement will have different consequences depending
move from, where they move to, why they move, and how old th
migration nor childhood is an undifferentiated experience. We
these differences to the fore as we examine globalization. Whi
is having effects worldwide, those effects are neither the same e
have uniform consequences.
Salgado includes in his exhibit (for the sake of symmetry I t
Jews who migrate to the United States. But the children of Ru
markedly out of place in the implicit lamentation that defines
hibit. They do extremely well in the United States, where they
educational opportunities which they know how to utilize. In
effectively using educational opportunities is part of the pheno
temporary migrations generally, and Russian Jews are not alon
in school. We are all familiar with the extraordinary success of t
Asian immigrants, including the Vietnamese boat-people.26 M
and other Latin American children also benefit educationally fro
the United States. This is true despite the fact that Chicanos a
lagging behind in high school graduation rates and college atte
pared to other immigrants. As two of the most highly regarded
this field, Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozc
search suggests that immigrant children are healthier, work ha
and have more positive social attitudes than their nonimmigran
year, the children of immigrants are overrepresented in the rosters
valedictorians and receive more of their share of prestigious sc
Immigrant children in general arrive with high aspirations and e
tive attitudes toward education."27
One ofthe strongest predictors of success is the reason that the
place and the generation to which the young belong. Of the 24 m
cans in the United States today who migrated since 1960,40% c
under the age of eighteen, that is to say of school age.28 Scholar
and schooling, such as John Ogbu as well as Carola and Marce
Orozco have taken note ofthe unusual school success of these ch
children born in the Caribbean and in Mexico are more academ
ful, despite the apparent handicap of language than their siblin
United States. The latter are more quickly and easily absorbed
and Latino peer cultures that often turn them against school. T
of migrating children are often lodged in a self-conscious exploit
tunities while the American-born long for accep

peer culture of inner city blacks or Latinos, someth
increased segregation of these groups in the recent
of these migrating children makes them more amb
Ogbu has shown, young migrants who know how m
ties are as a result of migration than in their count
of the education they are offered, even if this is
dilapidated schools. The experience of migration t
and the contrasts it encourages, one might argue
differentiates the experience of minority groups w
fine themselves as colonial dependents from volunt
they are free to succeed. The latter arrive with pur
opportunities, while the former expect to be disc
expect much benefit from their migration. His d
tinction, though I think it is not conclusive. But
us to invest with significance the distinction betw
elsewhere from those who are born into resident e
The growing and complex literature on the scho
alone in suggesting that the migration of children
for life-defining factors such as risky behaviors
abuse. Indeed some of the evidence suggests that
United States as well as generation may influenc
States, as well as other countries to which migran
the Netherlands, and Great Britain), provide exce
of migration can be distinguished from ethnicity
advised to take note of this new work on youth m
American historians, like Joel Perlmann,31 have do
success along ethnic lines, and these distinctions h
tant information about immigration and schoolin
compared different ethnic groups at a particular
patterns of mobility of members of specific ethni
ethnicity cannot be entirely separated from migra
that studying contemporary migrations requires th
of young people according to migration status rega
know of any historians who have done this, becaus
model that grew from European experience in th
greater success comes with time and steady genera
The assimilation model, which I have questione
to understanding the education of American hig
be altogether misleading, based as it was on the e
grants who came into a blue collar work world. Wh
once produce white collar children or grandchildre
no longer be meaningful or likely in a globalized w
dominant West, where a combination of schooling
children's lives and their future, the simple assimi
and confusing, Thus, contemporary globalization m
able from earlier migrations in its altered effects on
Today, many upper status and highly mobile stud
migrate to take advantage of American higher education, e
ate and professional schools. Some of these students are privat
are supported by their governments who save themselves the
ing in advanced laboratories and facilities. It is possible to i
allel migration is taking place, one in which poorer young
white collar skills. For these aspirants, even deprived and u
elementary schools and high schools provide rich resources. W
to rethink some of the conclusions about educational depriv
come to as historians. As Kathryn Anderson-Leavitt shows in
volume, the desire to get beyond the school-yard gate, no m
school, may depend on where you stand. Those migrating f
may find the universal education offered in the United States
portunity. In the early twentieth century, many of these mig
were simply incorporated into work at an early age. In the U
high school attendance requirements mean that migrating
school, and bilingual classrooms have become a necessary part
tion into an age-defined curriculum. As a result, ambitious
greater opportunities than in the past.
In the United States, it is also possible that we are seeing a
the competitive educational success of migrants (from Russia
ample), may actually be displacing older ethnic groups from
in a newly redefined and globalized economy. The effects of g
ucation in the United States are not hard to find. Over the p
have become familiar with recurrent educational "crises" as st
ment at various school levels reveal deficiencies among Am
dren. The schooling speed-up that has resulted as we try to cr
tion into students earlier in their lives and measure them ag
norms, culminating most recently in the "No Child Left Beh
Bush Administration, is beginning to squeeze our definitio
the role of play and a leisurely child-centered development
time when the social placement and success of their offsprin
more urgent and consequential to middle class families eage
own and their children's status, the new globalized economy m
of redefining childhood expectations in the West as Asian
dren from elsewhere displace those who had assumed they
the line.33 Thus, not only our definitions of assimilation, bu
childhood may be forced to change in the context of the glo
the present day.
Migration as a Move Toward Cities
As we consider the specific nature of the migrations taking

tives and consequences, we also want to pay attention to m
rural-urban trajectory of the migration. In the American Sou
War quite a lot of migration (both white and black) took p
it was rural to rural, a pattern that also defined much of
California in the 1930s. Most historical studies I have seen su
rural migration rarely helps the young or their parents to m
although the migration may be necessary for ind

fact, rural to rural migration may also have a great
family authority and encourage patterns of cultura
Changes often attributed to migration generally a
of movement from countryside to city or from sm
ban places, than simply a result of movement alo
lier domestic migrations, the huge internal migr
United States during World War II was heavily tow
that uprooted tens of millions of Americans. Des
comforts and difficult conditions to which these m
believed that their lives and those of their childr
Today's migrations are overwhelmingly toward citi
in his comments in this volume, the massive mov
affected Europe and the United States in the 19t
taking place throughout the world. It would be use
these movements were fraught historically just as
transition to city life often meant a confrontation
tural disruption, squalor, and uneven economic d
currently playing this out on an even grander scale
and smaller towns become substantial cities.
It is in this context that child prostitution becom
always one ofthe most disturbing issues in contem
to incite reader revulsion. A recent feature in the
brought this home yet again.37 In the late 19th and e
"white slavery" also evoked spasms of reformist rag
supposedly abducted for the purposes of sexual expl
nomenon common to both Europe and the Unite
reports, girls (and boys) today are also being misled
migrating for respectable employment and are the
rings, or they are quite literally abducted for that
the sexual slavery of children today reminds me of
It is far from my intention to dismiss the current
lidity. Nevertheless, understanding how it repeat
is useful and necessary. First, we need to recognize
nalism is addressed to the fears and sensibilities of
torians understand the 19th century campaign agai
part, a form of joumalistic titillation feeding mi
experiences of the inhabitants of the city's lower d
at a time when reformers were eager to redefine a
childhood and to shelter girls from 13-18 under t
opened by upwardly revised age of consent laws.4
sexual exploitation, we are at once repeating our
irregularities of "other" people who may seem to
come our unknown neighbors, and reconfirming o
protection.
Child prostitution is not new either in the Western or non Western context.
In Thailand, as Kevin Bales has shown, a form of child prostitution where young
country girls (from especially impoverished regions) were sold by their families
to urban brothels has long provided a means for family surv
mobility for the girls.41 Bales also makes clear that the conte
sex industry has vastly exacerbated this local pattern and t
its need for young girls both insatiable and ever more dan
understanding that prostitution has long been a rural to urb
for those we today define as children, but whom their famili
may designate as merely young earners, providing supplement
ily coffers. Like so many other features of globalization, mod
about what is appropriate to childhood as well as when childho
are deeply implicated in the discussion. It may well be the
the differences in how childhood is defined in various parts
prostitution may actually be growing in places where it exist
be encroaching on younger children. Today, globalization m
to children for sexual purposes, including for internet pornog
where in the world. The problem is exacerbated by the fact t
tion is still available in other places while sex with children i
in the western world. The very construction of the innocent
may thus increase the exploitation of children elsewhere. T
ject especially vexed, since it at once titillates our imaginat
our most vociferous condemnations. It may also be an area
is seriously increasing child endangerment.
Children can often be an active driving force in migration
The New York Times recently featured the story of a Holoc

lived with his family in a hole in the ground of a Polish f
had fled when the Germans arrived. AU of them were kept
insistence and tenacity of the children who sustained their p
fered from despair, hopelessness and thoughts of suicide.42 Th
unusual. Despite their so-called "innocence" children are rema
resilient, and resourceful, and adolescents especially can some
gration demands. In our conference discussions of children an
have come to acknowledge important differences between y
older children. That children are a differentiated social gro
our rethinking ofthe dominant images of childhood?as inn
dependent. In fact, children today, especially older children,
in the past, have often acted with intent and purpose.
Contemporary American adolescents have become much mo
generally then those of a generation or so ago, mostly beca
exposed to the costly allurements of a consumption-obsess
choose to work part-time in order to buy the CDs, jeans,
tickets and others necessities of teenage identity in our time
elsewhere in the world whose identities as "children" hardly
one hundred years of history have provided to those in the U
nevertheless be eager to be adolescents?and to buy the ide
with this designation in the world today. I believe that ado
become a universal identity in the context of globalization as
and culture of youth have spread everywhere through the
define globalization. While modern adolescence w

early twentieth century as an extension of childh
schooling and a means to protect older children fro
became a distinct product of Western capitalism.45
still remain somewhat culturally specific, adolescen
it may have become a globalized identity expressed
other consumer habits. Adolescents may actively
ways, by working, by consuming, by rejecting par
against their parents' ways, and by urging migration
to improve their chances elsewhere. They may also
it on their own, as many young migrants did histo
to the United States.46 That loosening of youth fr
is part and parcel of what globalization is all about
Unlike their parents who cling to their homes an
to hope ofthe future. Migration may or may not offe
helpful to imagine that children, especially older c
passive in the process of change that defines today
that are part of it. In that sense, we students of ch
ourselves from the connection made early in the t
good reason at the time) between children who w
were 13 or 14. We can, I believe, do this without
to continue to shelter and protect older children
process of global migration is just now becoming
nation and thoughtful appraisal. We should begin
effort to understand both the active roles that olde
and to understand just what children introduce int
tend to reduce authority in traditional societies to
children are always at the bottom. But, a more car
that even in the most traditional and hierarchica
of significant change, children may in fact be seen
We know that they are often the first to be put
whether in factories or on the streets,47 and we ar
derstand how they operate at battle frontiers in
fighters.48 Here, they may gain knowledge and kn
their families in the immediate situation, but pr
about the change that would come with migratio
become the translators at the margin between cu
and between the past and the future. As informa
gins, children provide just the kind of outlook an
migration choices and facilitates migration once i
It is exactly young people like these whom one
well in school, as John Ogbu found to be the case
Urged toward the future and imaginative in find
setting, children can be the heroes as well as the v
are more and more part of what the modern globa
By examining migrations in the past and today, h
tribute to the current discussions about globalizati
growing knowledge about the history of children
Those discussions should include an understanding of educatio
mobility, of family relationships, as well as subjects such as ch
and other survival strategies among children on the margins.
understand how the images of children we carry around as citize
have been framed historically and how these frames organize
rary responses. An exhibit like that of Salgado makes us aware
our world is changing, but that alone cannot be enough. As t
before our eyes, we want to know exactly how it is changing, w
ticipate from our historical knowledge and what kinds of chang
der changes in migration patterns, are almost entirely unanticip
children's migrations needs to be situated in a much larger fie
knowledge than even the very best journalist can provide.
University of California, Berkeley

Department of History
Berkeley, CA 94720
ENDNOTES
1. Sabastiao Salgado, "Migrations: Humanities in Transition?The Children," Un

versity of California Berkeley Art Museum, January 16-March 24, 2002. Salgado h
book which contains many of these images. Migrations: Humanity in Transition (Apert
2000).
2. See Paula S. Fass, "Children and Globalization," Journal of Social History (Summer
2003), 963-977 for an explanation of why I believe the United States provides a good
basis for exploring issues of globalization in many parts of the world today.
3. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the
British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995).
4. See Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage ofthe Peopling of America on the
Eve ofthe Revolution (New York, 1986), 302-312.
5. See Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and
Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst, MA, 2003).
6. Thomas Haskell's articles on humanitarian sensibilities, which first appeared in the

American Historical Review, are reprinted in Thomas Bender, ed. The Anti-Slavery Debate:
Capitalism and Abolition as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, 1992); Larry
Wolff, "When I Imagine a Child: The Idea of Childhood and the Philosophy of Memory
in the Enlightenment," Eighteenth Century Studies, 31 (1998), 377-401.
7. One of the earliest public examinations of child sexual exploitation which I have
seen was in France in the mid-nineteenth century. See Ambrose Tardieu, "Etude Medico-
Legale sur les Attentats Aux Moeurs," Annales d'Hygiene Publique et de Medicine Legale,
ser. 2, vol. 9 (1858), 137-198.1 would like to thank Katharine Norris for this reference.
8. Nicholas Kristof, "Inviting All Democrats," New; York Times, January 14, 2004, p.
A23. For the flood of condemnatory letters, see, New York Times, January 16, 2004, p. 22.
9. For child labor, see Robert Bremner, et al, Child

part 5 (Cambridge, MA., 1971); Paula S. Fass and Mar
America (New York, 2000); Hugh Cunningham, Childr
ety Since 1500 (New York, 1995); David Levine, "Eco
Societies: From Agriculture to Industry," in The Encyc
History and Society, Paula S. Fass, ed. vol. I (New Yo
10. Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American (New Y

Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in
1977); David M. Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Th
York, 1985).
11. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery/American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Vir?
ginia (New York, 1975), has made the boldest statement concerning how white and black
immigrants were played off against each other in the 17 th century. This argument about
the uses of "whiteness" has been pursued by a host of other historians; e.g. David Roediger,
The Wages ofWhiteness (New York, 1991).
12. Alejandro Portes and Dag MacLeod, "Educational Progress of Children of Immi?
grants: The Roles of Class, Ethnicity and School Context," in Interdisciplinary Perspectives
on the New Immigration: The New Immigrant and American Schools, edited by Marcelo M.
Suarez-Orozco, et al. (New York, 2001) and the contributions by an array of historians in
Coerced and Free Migration: Gbbal Perspectives, edited by David Eltis (Stanford, 2002).
13. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (Boston, 1948), Reed Ueda, Postwar Immigrant
America: A Social History (Boston, 1994).
14. For the racialization of Mexican migrants in the Southwest early in the twentieth
century, see Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Child Abduction (New York, 1999).
15. Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America, 58-80, Table A-7, p. 163.
16. Ruben G. Rumbaut, The Immigrant Experience for Families and Children, ed. Richard
D. Alba, et al., Congressional Seminar, June 4, 1998, Spivak Program in Applied So?
cial Research and Social Policy: American Sociological Association (Washington, D. C.
1999), 9.
17. Douglas S. Massey, in The Immigrant Experience for Families and Children, 10.
18. Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York, 2002).
19. Gary Orfield, Mark D. Bachmeier, David R. James, and Tamela Eitle, "Deepening
Segration in American Public Schools: A Special Report from the Harvard Project on
School Desegration," in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the New Immigration: The New
Immgirant and American Schools, eds. Suarez-Orozco, et al., 121.
20. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Servants of Gbbalization: Wbmen, Migration and Domestic
Work (Stanford, 2001), Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Gbbal
Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York, 2002).
21. Massey, in The Immigrant Experience for Families and Children, 5.
22. Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study of International Invest?
ment and Labor (Cambridge, 1984); Sassen, "Notes on the Incorporation of Third World
Women into Wage Labor through Immigration and Offshore Producti
Migration Review, 18 (1984), 1144-67. For single migrating women ear
eth century see Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor
Generation (Ithaca, 1990).
23. Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Int
(Glencoe, IL, 1955), especially 3-131,
24. The term is taken from Hochschild and Ehrenreich.
25. Perrafias, Servants of Globalization, 69-19.
26. For Asian immigrants, see Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America, Rh

Golden Door. For Vietnamese boat-people migration, see, Nathan Capla
more, and Marcella H. Choy, The Boat People and Achievement in Am
Family Life, Hard Work, and Cultural Values (Ann Arbor, 1989).
27. Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, Children of Im

bridge, MA., 2001), 2.
28. Ruben D. Rumbaut, in Immigration Experience for Families and Chil
29. Margaret A. Gibson and John U. Ogbu, Minority Status and Schoolin
Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities (West Port, CT, 1991),
Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco et al, eds., The New Immigrant and American
30. The marginality of youth is discussed in Global Youth, Peace and

Role of Science and Technology in Contemporary Society, ed. by Yedla C.
1991).
31. Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Ital?
ians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (Cambridge, 1988). See also,
Paula S. Fass, Outside ln: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (Ox?
ford, 1989).
32. For a reassessment of the assimilationist model, see Richard Alba and Victor Nee,
Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cam-
brige, MA, 2003), also Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orosco, Children of Immigration, 4-5,
and passim.
33. For the squeeze on Japanese school children, see Norma Field, "The Child as Laborer
and Consumer: The Disappearance of Childhood in Contemporary Japan," in Children
and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton, 1995). Every where we look
today we hear more and more about the "hurried child," a concept that assumes that our
earlier view of childhood is immutable.
34. For southern rural migrations, see Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America's Un-
derclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York, 1992); for the Oakies, James Gre?
gory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York,
1989); for the rural to rural Norwegian migration, see Jon Gjerde, From Peasants to Farm?
ers: The Migration from Balestand, Norway, to the Upper Middle West (Cambridge, England,
1989).
3 5. Massie notes that most migration takes place from

of Mexico rather than directly from the countryside t
Experience for Families and Children, ed. Richard D.
Association) 4.
36. For the effect on children, see William M. Tuttle

Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (
37. Peter Landesman, "The Girls Next Door," The N

25, 2004, p. 30.
38. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution i

1982); Judith Walkowitz, City ofDreadful Deiight: Narr
torian London (Chicago, 1992).
39. Walkowitz, Dreadful Deiight, 15-39, 81-134.
40. Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and P

in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995),
41. Kevin Bales, "Because She Looks Like a Child,"

Hochschild, eds., 207-229.
42. The New York Times, January 14, 2004, p. A19.
43. For consumption and adolescents, see Gary Cross

York, 2000); for adolescence and work, Jeylan T Mo
Adolescents, Work, and Family: An Intergenerational
44- See Stephen Lassonde, "Learning and Earning:

and the Early Life Course in Late Nineteenth Centu
History, 29 (1996), 839-870. Fass, Outside ln, chapte
45. See Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the America
American Adolescent Experience (New York, 1999), and
Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-
46. This was true even for some young women, as show
As Richard Rumbaut notes, "Immigration," today "a
the young." Immigrant Experience for Families and Chi
47. David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work an

Hecht, Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American H
Hecht, At Home in the Street: Street Children of Nor
1998).
48. See, for example, Anna Peterson, "Latin America: Wars in Central America," The
Encycbpedia of Children and Childhood, ed. Fass, V. 2, 535-536, and Peterson and Kay
Almere Read "Victoms, Heroes, Enemies: Children in Central American Wars, in Hecht,
ed. Minor Omissions, 215?231.

Children in Global Migations

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Children in Global Migations

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Children in Global Migrations

Author(s): Paula S. Fass

By Paula S. Fass University of California at Berkeley

The growing reality of movement across borders has become a twenty-first

an expression of globalization as much as it records the migr

Migration and Children in the American Past and Present

The mass movement of populations, whether associated with

don and elsewhere to become indentured serva

South American and Asian immigrants. In the pr

Migration is often a family strategy that affects c

Our vision of globalization will be very much enh

children travel back and forth from the United Stat

Migration, Education, and Social Mobility

In order best to understand the effects of migration on educ

tunities while the American-born long for accep

Migration as a Move Toward Cities

As we consider the specific nature of the migrations taking

although the migration may be necessary for ind

Children can often be an active driving force in migration

The New York Times recently featured the story of a Holoc

define globalization. While modern adolescence w

University of California, Berkeley

1. Sabastiao Salgado, "Migrations: Humanities in Transition?The Children," Un

6. Thomas Haskell's articles on humanitarian sensibilities, which first appeared in the

9. For child labor, see Robert Bremner, et al, Child

10. Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American (New Y

15. Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America, 58-80, Table A-7, p. 163.

21. Massey, in The Immigrant Experience for Families and Children, 5.

24. The term is taken from Hochschild and Ehrenreich.

25. Perrafias, Servants of Globalization, 69-19.

26. For Asian immigrants, see Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America, Rh

27. Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, Children of Im

28. Ruben D. Rumbaut, in Immigration Experience for Families and Chil

30. The marginality of youth is discussed in Global Youth, Peace and

3 5. Massie notes that most migration takes place from

36. For the effect on children, see William M. Tuttle

37. Peter Landesman, "The Girls Next Door," The N

38. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution i

39. Walkowitz, Dreadful Deiight, 15-39, 81-134.

40. Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and P

41. Kevin Bales, "Because She Looks Like a Child,"

42. The New York Times, January 14, 2004, p. A19.

43. For consumption and adolescents, see Gary Cross

44- See Stephen Lassonde, "Learning and Earning:

47. David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work an

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