Migration Projects: Children on the Move for Work and Education
Author(s): S. Punch
So far, research on child migration has mainly emphasised child migrants as passive victims. However, the aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the key issues in the migrant lives of ordinary children and to thus contribute to migration debates by recognising that some children choose to migrate by themselves for work and/or education. Research has indicated that there are multiple reasons why children migrate. One of the key underlying factors is poverty but the motives are often not purely economic as there are many other social and cultural reasons why children seek migrant work. Macro-level effects such as natural disasters, political conflict and economic crisis must be taken into account too. Furthermore, parents may play an important role in the decision-making process, although it has to be recognised that children remain active participants in the process. For some children, the migration experience might be more negative than for others. However, defining whether the experience was positive or not is linked primarily to the reasons why children decide to migrate in the first place. The paper concludes that a more ethnographic approach, combining interviews with participant observation, should be adopted in order to develop a deeper exploration into children's everyday lives as migrants, by investigating different aspects of their daily lives and moving beyond work and education levels.