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Introduction

  • Chapter
Mobile Childhoods in Filipino Transnational Families

Part of the book series: Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series ((MDC))

Abstract

Family-related migration has been the main channel of legal entry to many major immigrant-receiving countries since the 1970s (Kofman, 2004). In 2005, around 40–60 per cent of long-term migrants in these countries (except Japan and the UK) were actually family-related migrants (International Organization for Migration [IOM], 2008, p. 157). The number of children among them is difficult to determine (White, Loire, Tyrrell, & Carpena-Méndez, 2011, p. 1160), but the prevalence of family-related migration in many countries today strongly suggests the presence of child migrants (accompanied or non-accompanied). These young people originate from various countries, mostly in the global South. They move not only to classical immigration countries, such as the US and Canada, but also to newly emerging ones, like Italy and Japan. In their destination country, they are compelled to deal with a variety of ‘contexts of reception’ (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001): the immigration policy, the school system, the immigration history of their ethnic group and its position in the existing social order, and so on. The plurality of places of origin and destination of these young migrants underscores their diversified and differentiated ‘routes’ (Clifford, 1997), which raises significant empirical, theoretical, and methodological questions. How does family-related migration affect the life trajectories, sociality, and identity of children? How can we capture the lived experiences of young migrants who have undergone childhoods within two or more different social settings due to migration? In what way should we approach their childhoods thus characterized by individual and familial mobilities?

[I]f contemporary migrant populations are not to appear as mute, passive straws in the political-economic winds, we need to listen to a wide range of ‘travel stories’ (not ‘travel literature’ in the bourgeois sense).

(Clifford, 1997, p. 38)

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Authors
  1. Itaru Nagasaka
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  2. Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hiroshima University, Japan

    Itaru Nagasaka (Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology) (Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology)

  2. Catholic University of Louvain, France

    Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot (FNRS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Belgium Research Associate) (FNRS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Belgium Research Associate)

  3. URMIS, Paris Diderot University, France

    Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot (FNRS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Belgium Research Associate) (FNRS Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Belgium Research Associate)

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© 2015 Itaru Nagasaka and Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot

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Nagasaka, I., Fresnoza-Flot, A. (2015). Introduction. In: Nagasaka, I., Fresnoza-Flot, A. (eds) Mobile Childhoods in Filipino Transnational Families. Migration, Diasporas and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137515148_1

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