6

Refugee, Immigrant, and
Migrant Children

Returning to what Wertlieb referred to as the misleading notion of “margins,” Joan Lombardi said that if one adds up all of the children at the margins, they become the central focus.¹ According to data from the European Commission, of the several hundred thousand refugees seeking asylum in the European Union, one in four are children. Lombardi described these children as those who have experienced violent conflicts, economic hardships, and forced migrations, sometimes traveling without their families. In addition, thousands of unaccompanied children are trafficked into and throughout the European Union. These vulnerable children form a diverse group in terms of culture, language, religion, and educational background. For Lombardi, there is a clear framework to provide refugee children with education and early childhood services. She encouraged workshop participants to take action to address the current Syrian crisis and other crises that hundreds of thousands of children face around the world.

A GLOBAL VIEW OF FORCIBLY DISPLACED PERSONS WORLDWIDE

Eskinder Negash presented a global picture of forcibly displaced people worldwide,² a number which is at its highest point since World

__________________

¹ Joan Lombardi is a senior advisor to the Bernard van Leer Foundation and based in the United States.

² Eskinder Negash is senior vice president for global engagement with the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.

War II. He began by providing definitions of internally displaced persons, asylum seekers, and unaccompanied and separated minors.

• Refugee: Someone outside his or her country of nationality who is unable or unwilling to return because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or a political opinion (UN General Assembly, 1951)
• Internally displaced person: Someone who has been forcibly uprooted and displaced within their own country (UNHCR, 2015a)
• Asylum seeker: Someone who has applied for refugee status and is awaiting a determination of status (UNESCO, 2016)
• Unaccompanied and separated minor: Unaccompanied children under the age of 18 who have been separated from both parents or legal caregivers and are not being cared for by an adult (International Committee of the Red Cross et al., 2004).

In 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported 19.5 million refugees, 38.2 million internally displaced persons, and 1.8 million asylum seekers around the world (UNHCR, 2015a). Of the refugees, 51 percent were under age 18—children, as defined by international law—who are vulnerable, dependent, and developing (UNHCR, 2015a). At the end of 2014, Syria was the largest source of refugees (4.6 million; overtaking Afghanistan who had held the position for 3 decades) and reported 7.6 million internally displaced persons, the highest figure in the world (UNHCR, 2015a). Of the nearly 4.6 million current Syrian refugees, slightly more than half are children (UNHCR, n.d.).

Negash pointed out that although the current focus is on the conflict in Syria, millions of people are internally displaced or remain in protracted refugee situations. According to UNHCR, as of 2014, the five countries of origin for most refugees seeking resettlement are Syria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Iraq, and Somalia (UNHCR, 2015b). In sub-Saharan Africa alone, there were 3.7 million refugees at the end of 2014 (UNHCR, 2014). The countries from which the majority of refugees in Africa originate are the Democratic Republic of the Congo (53 percent), Somalia (23 percent), Eritrea (8 percent), Burundi (3 percent), and Sudan (3 percent). Dadaab, in northern Kenya near Somalia’s border, is the world’s largest refugee camp. Pakistan and Iran host nearly all 2.6 million Afghan refugees who have been living outside of Afghanistan for 30 years (UNHCR, 2014).

To address the high number of refugees and displaced children, Negash recommended recognizing displacement caused by gang violence and sexual orientation prejudice, as well as developing policies to

grant “child protective status,” which prevents the movement of children for the duration of the designation. He also suggested strengthening and creating uniformity in regional and national frameworks that include child-welfare standards to ensure protection. He encouraged UNHCR to work with additional resettlement countries to build capacity to receive new refugees. Finally, he recommended that the U.S. government prioritize raising the number of unaccompanied refugee minors accepted into the country. For Negash, this is the crisis of our time and encouraged workshop participants to take action.

THE MOTHER CHILD EDUCATION FOUNDATION, TURKEY: WORKING ACROSS RESEARCH, PRACTICE, AND POLICY

Suna Hanoz described the Mother Child Education Foundation’s (ACEV’s) efforts to provide educational programs and services to underresourced populations.³ According to Hanoz, ACEV was founded in 1993 in Turkey and performs research, develops and implements programs,⁴ and creates policy. As the education system is very centralized in Turkey, she explained that ACEV partners with the ministries of education, agriculture, and family and social affairs to implement their programs. Through ACEV’s programs, 900,000 children, parents, and illiterate adults have benefited from services offered via 11,000 trained professionals and paraprofessionals.

ACEV offers a 10-week intensive preschool and family support program for the marginalized Kurdish population living in underdeveloped regions of southeastern Turkey. According to Hanoz, this population typically has a low socioeconomic status. This group is also deprived of early childhood education services owing to the scarcity of such services in the region. She said this group faces challenges with language, as well. The majority of the children speak Kurdish at home, but school curricula are taught in Turkish. The ACEV program is implemented over the summer, in Ministry of Education schools. Trainers administer a paired curriculum for mothers and their children, aimed at 6-year-old children who have previously not received any early development services. The program aims to prepare children for entry into first grade in Turkish public schools. Simultaneously, trainers equip mothers with knowledge and skills to support their child’s development. Hanoz said an evaluation of the program shows that children have enhanced cognitive, linguistic, physical, and socioemotional development and are better prepared for school compared to control groups that did not attend the program

__________________

³ Suna Hanoz is a senior specialist with the Mother Child Education Foundation (ACEV).

⁴ In addition to Turkey, ACEV works in Brazil, Germany, Laos, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

(Bekman et al., 2011). Moreover, through the Mother Support Program, mothers in the program have increased awareness, knowledge, and skills related to child development and have decreased negative disciplining methods.

Since 2011, ACEV has implemented a 25-week Mother–Child Education Program with Palestinian refugees in long-term settlement camps in Beirut, Lebanon, in partnership with the Arab Resource Collective. The program teaches mothers to effectively interact with their preschool-aged children (4 to 6 years old). According to Hanoz, this program explores the extent to which early mother–child education programs can promote peaceful societies through building peaceful families and compassionate communities. Evaluations of this program show children’s acquisition of socioemotional skills, executive function, and cognitive development, and mothers’ improved patterns of parenting through responsiveness to children and less harsh discipline (Oweini and Issa, 2015).

ACEV plans to implement these programs with Syrian families in the future, as at the end of 2015, Turkey was home to 2.5 million Syrian refugees, half of which were under the age of 18. Importantly, 1.7 million of those refugees are not in camps. Rather, they are spread throughout Turkey. Early on when Turkey opened its borders to refugees, the government was slow to develop effective cooperation, said Hanoz. As time progressed and officials realized refugees were not likely to return home, relations between the government and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) improved. Nevertheless, she said, many challenges remain, including that 70 percent of Syrian children are out of school and Syrians cannot work legally in Turkey. Hanoz indicated that there are inadequate resources to support Syrian refugees for short stays or long-term harmonization, and there are rising tensions between Turks and Syrians. To address these obstacles, Hanoz recommended working with families to build resilience and harmony within the family unit, providing children with the tools necessary to succeed, and learning as much from the current situation as possible to improve responses to and prevent future crises.

CHILD MIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES—AN ADVOCACY PERSPECTIVE

Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigates and documents human rights abuses in 90 countries, exposes findings to the media, and advocates for policy change. Alison Parker highlighted the human rights concerns facing four categories of migrants in the United States⁵: (1) unaccom-

__________________

⁵ Alison Parker is director of Human Rights Watch’s programs in the United States.

panied child migrants, (2) families separated across the United States–Mexico border, (3) children migrating with family members, and (4) child migrant workers. According to Parker, unaccompanied child migrants in the United States generally arrive via the United States–Mexico border, arriving from Mexico and Central America. She stated that 41,000 unaccompanied child migrants arrived in the United States in 2015 (Gordon, 2015). This vulnerable group has endured sexual violence; trafficking; involvement with criminal groups (gangs); lack of access to food, water, shelter, and education; and fear for their lives, according to Parker. For HRW, Parker said the greatest concern is that United States law does not require border authorities to consider the best interests of the children in their custody.

Parker stated that every day, families are separated across the United States–Mexico border. United States citizen children remain in the United States, and their undocumented parents are deported back to Mexico or Central America. Parker said there are 4.1 million United States citizen children who have undocumented parents living in the United States (Dwyer, 2014). She pointed out that these parents are constantly at risk of deportation and are faced with the difficult decision of returning to their birth country, a place no one in the family has connections to, or to agree to be deported without their children. If they are deported, parents generally try several times to cross the border to be reunited with their United States citizen children, Parker said. Children facing family separation often face increased levels of anxiety and psychological harm. In addition, the well-being of these children is worsened by the limited resources of family members who have taken them in; these children often perform poorly in school, as well (Urban Institute, 2004).

Many children traveling with their parents to the United States from Mexico are first held in Border Patrol facilities, said Parker. Through their work with families, HRW has heard countless stories of freezing temperatures and insufficient food in the facilities leading to illness. Afterward, families are sent to detention centers for several weeks and are sometimes separated from one another in different family detention facilities across the country. These families suffer from premigration trauma, psychological and health consequences from the hostile conditions of detention centers, and several have attempted suicide (Pilkington, 2015a,b). Parker said that through HRW’s advocacy, the average duration of family detention has reduced (Human Rights Watch, 2015; Preston, 2015).

According to Parker, the United States has between 300,000 and 800,000 children working in the agricultural industry (National Center for Farmworker Health, 2012). Although child labor is outlawed in the country, there is a major exception for farm work, she said. Children as

young as 7 years old have shared stories with HRW about picking strawberries in Florida, shucking peas in Virginia, and hoeing cotton in Texas. These children have dropped out of school, incurred injuries from farm equipment, have been exposed to pesticides, and endured physical abuse, Parker said.

Parker closed by offering some suggestions and lessons drawn from her experience working with the many types of migrants within the United States. She called on workshop participants to do the following:

• Recognize children can experience trauma before, during, and after migration.
• Examine the reception of children and their families at the border.
• Embrace the best interests of children when creating policies.
• Keep families and children together.
• Prohibit the detention of child migrants as a means of migration control.
• Prohibit the employment of children.
• Recognize that some child migrants are victims of criminal organizations around the world.
• Provide holistic services—health, legal, and social—to migrant children and families.

THE TRANSATLANTIC FORUM ON INCLUSIVE EARLY YEARS

Jan Peeters presented the work of the Transatlantic Forum on Inclusive Early Years,^6,7 which was organized by the Centre for Innovation in the Early Years and the Migration Policy Institute, with support of the King Baudouin Foundation and 10 foundations from Europe and the United States. The forum, composed of 120 policy makers from the United States and Europe and 110 leading researchers from around the world, convened seven times between 2013 and 2016 to discuss relevant issues in early childhood education and care, focusing on children from low-income, refugee, and migrant families (Peeters and Vandekerckhove, 2015). Meetings covered such topics as

• Access to early childhood services;
• Curriculum innovation and workforce preparation;

__________________

⁶ Jan Peeters is coordinator of the Centre for Innovation in the Early Years at the Research Centre for ECEC (VBJK) at Ghent University in Belgium.

⁷ For more information on the Transatlantic Forum on Inclusive Early Years, please visit http://www.europe-kbf.eu/en/projects/early-childhood/transatlantic-forum-on-inclusive-early-years (accessed April 1, 2016).

• Parent engagement; monitoring and evaluation;
• Integrated systems and effective transitions in early childhood; and
• Multilingualism and multiple identities/belonging.

Access to early childhood services was an important topic for the forum, Peeters remarked. He said that accessibility, affordability, and availability are just as important considerations for high-quality services as desirability, usefulness, and meaningfulness to migrant families. During the Forum he also stated that clear arguments for the benefits of these services are necessary to convince parents to use services (Vandenbroeck and Lazzari, 2014). As discussed during the Forum, Peeters said that the real problem is it is not hard to reach parents; it is hard to reach services.

Peeters researched workforce competencies that are necessary at the team and individual level when working with migrant and refugee children and children at risk (Peeters and Sharmahd, 2014). He recommended openness to dialogue with parents, colleagues, and children on the basis of reciprocity; an engagement and ability to work toward social change; the ability to reflect critically on one’s own pedagogical practice and that of the team and the institution working in these hyperdiverse contexts; and the ability to create new pedagogical knowledge and practice.

Regarding parent engagement, Peeters said the Transatlantic Forum on Inclusive Early Years stated that there needs to be a shift toward “demand-led” services. Rather than requiring parents and children to adapt to available services, the forum encourages decision makers to engage in reciprocal relationships with migrant parents to cocreate programs and services that have meaning to migrant families. Also, in understanding that parent participation has different meanings in different contexts, Peeters encouraged workshop participants to see participation as more than just parents reading to their children, but having parents engaged in important decisions in early childhood centers that affect their children’s lives.

In addressing the large number of refugees coming to Europe, the Forum emphasized the need for integrated systems, particularly in regard to how the educational sector, child protection sector, and health care systems should work together to ensure smooth transitions between home and early childhood education. Peeters said that school readiness does not mean that only the child is ready. Rather, children, families, schools, and communities all need to be prepared for the transition (Dumcius et al., 2014). He remarked that if parents—particularly parents of refugee children—are not familiar with the educational system, it is difficult for them to prepare their children for the next step. This is particularly true for families who speak languages other than what is taught in school.

BREAKOUT SESSION ON MIGRANT, IMMIGRANT, AND REFUGEE CHILDREN

Janna Patterson summarized the discussion from the breakout session on migrant, immigrant, and refugee children.⁸ According to her, participants focused on best practices in the integration of services across sectors and engaging migrants in programming. Participants discussed one case from Chile in which a baby died after her family was denied health services because she was not registered in the system. The death of this baby led the government to establish offices for registration for unified services across health, education, nutrition, and other sectors, she said. One participant remarked that this registration system led to better capacity to address issues across stages of life.

Breakout session participants highlighted the Head Start program for migrants in the United States as well as the United States resettlement program, both of which have contributed to positive outcomes for migrants. Also, a few participants noted that Belgium places the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child above national law, which has benefitted migrants via increased funding for schools that serve migrant populations. In turn, schools see migrant students as a positive asset as they are tied to funding resources and also bring with them a diversity of experience that benefits the entire school.

To further engage migrants, participants said that in many areas, young migrants are becoming advocates for themselves. Participants cited the DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) movement in the United States as a prominent example. Some participants suggested combining data and personal stories to lift up migrant experiences and show positive examples of how immigrants hold prominent places in society and have strengthened the fabric of their new societies.

__________________

⁸ Janna Patterson is a senior program officer, Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.