immigrantchildren.ca

The Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario will host the 3rd annual conference of the Canadian Association for Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (CARFMS) from May 6-8, 2010.

From the call, as posted on the forced migration discussion listserv*:

“In recent years, the idea of change has charged political debate in countries around the world and has, in some cases, catalyzed the election of new governments and the creation of innovative programs and policies. This period has also been one of significant change for the field of forced migration.  New policies and increasingly securitized perceptions of forced migration have created new practices such as interdiction, detention and expedited deportation that have changed the protection landscape in both the global North and South. At the same time as scholars have questioned the labelling and bureaucratic categorization of forced migrants, the United Nations has piloted new approaches to improve the protection and assistance available to members of traditionally marginalized categories, particularly internally displaced persons. Massive displacement in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and Cyclone Nargis raised the profile of environmental refugees as an issue predicted to grow in importance as the impacts of climate change become increasingly evident. In Canada, the government has recently announced that it is preparing a package of changes to the refugee determination system, including the fast-tracking of claims from countries that are generally considered safe. As a precursor to more sweeping anticipated changes, the government has already imposed visa requirements on Mexico and the Czech Republic in an attempt to stem the flow of refugee claimants from those countries.

“The 2010 CARFMS Conference will bring together researchers, policymakers, displaced persons and advocates from diverse disciplinary and regional backgrounds to discuss the changes and challenges faced in the field of forced migration. We invite participants from a wide range of perspectives to explore the practical, experiential, policy-oriented, legal and theoretical questions raised by different processes of change affecting forced migrants at the local, national, regional and international levels.

“Proposals are being sought from the following broad sub-themes:

• Asylum, protection and durable solutions: Needs, current practices and prospects for reform
• Theorizing the changing field of forced migration
• Experiencing displacement: Changes and challenges”.

250-word abstracts for proposed conference papers and panels are due by January 29, 2010 and must be submitted via the conference website. For more information, contact Heather Johnson – johnsohl@mcmcaster.ca.

* The Forced Migration Discussion List is moderated by the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), University of Oxford. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the RSC or the university.

Refugees International presents Futures Denied: Statelessness among infants, children and youth. According to tthe childtrafficking.com listserv, some 11-12 million children, “though born and raised in their parents country of habitual residence” are stateless or without effective nationality.

Stateless was a concern raised when new citizenship policy, impacting first generation of international adoptees, was introduced by the federal government in the Spring of 2009. The new regulations offered an option to grant immediate Canadian citizenship to adopted children, but put limits or conditions on any children they might have outside of Canada. The rationale for the policy change was to provide an additional option for adoptive parents who were pursuing citizenship status for adopted children through the naturalization process. For more info, including to external links, see the posts at immigrantchildren.ca and chidinterrupted.ca.

On Their Own: Protecting the Rights of Immigrant Children is the theme of this year’s annual conference hosted by the (US-based) National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children.

The conference will be held Oct 7-9/09 in Washington DC and will attract advocates from the legal sector as well as participants from the wider non-profit sector, including policy makers, academics and researchers. The conference seeks to examine and challenge current practices and policies and develop best practices for supporting unaccompanied children.

For more info, see the website.

Which Way Home tells the story of several unaccompanied child migrants as they journey through Mexico en route to the United States via a freight train they have nick-named The Beast. Directed by Rebecca Cammisa, the film tells the stories of “children like Olga and Freddy, nine-year old Hondurans who are desperately trying to reach their families in Minnesota, and Jose, a ten-year-old El Salvadoran who has been abandoned by smugglers and ends up alone in a Mexican detention center, and focuses on Kevin, a canny, streetwise 14-year-old Honduran, whose mother hopes that he will reach New York City and send money back to his family. These are stories of hope and courage, disappointment and sorrow” (Source: uscri.refugees.org listserv).

Airs Mon Aug 24/09 et/pt at 9pm on HBO.

The Canadian Coalition for the Rights of the Child has released its discussion paper, Best Interests of the Child: Meaning and Application in Canada. The paper was prepared for the conference, held February 2009 and includes content gleaned from conference sessions. Each section contains an introduction to a particular issue, a discussion of the issue, suggestions for action and/or further research.

Three sections will be of particular interest to immigrantchildren.ca readers: Children in the Refugee and Immigration System; Early Childhood Learning and Care; and Children and Cultural Diversity. This post highlights only some of the issues and suggested actions. For a complete review, consult the full paper on the CRC website.

Children and Cultural Diversity

Discussion of Issues ~ “In Canada, immigrants often want to preserve the culture they brought with them, even though it may be changing in the country of origin to reflect more modern conceptions of children’s rights (frozen culture). Children often get caught between a parent’s desire to preserve their past and young people’s desire to be accepted in the new country. In some ways, Canada’s multiculturalism policy has fostered the continuation of “frozen cultures”.

Suggestions for Action ~ “Top priority was given to community-based approaches to education about the rights of children, as well as school-based education. Community programming can create safe spaces for dialogue between young people, parents, and community leaders on these matters”.

Children in the Refugee and Immigration System

Discussion of Issues ~ “Canada lacks a clear policy framework to protect the best interests of children who are unaccompanied asylum seekers, in spite of recommendations for this from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2003 and in the 2007 Senate Report on children’s rights …Trafficking of children is a growing concern; it is important to consider differences between children and adults and include the BIC in the development of strategies to prevent trafficking, prosecute traffickers, and provide services to victims”.

Suggestions for Action ~ “Make the BIC and the Convention part of Canadian law to protect the rights of children in all policies and programmes for refugees and immigrants…Give special attention to children in the development of strategies to prevent trafficking, and consider the BIC in provision of services to victims and prosecution of traffickers”.

Early Childhood Learning and Care

Discussion of Issues ~ “Social science research has documented that supporting families with affordable, high quality options for early child learning and care has benefits for child development and for the social and economic well-being of communities. Yet Canada does not have a national policy framework for early childhood education and well-being; provincial policies vary widely, resulting in equity for children across Canada; and funding for services in support of early child development is inadequate”.

Suggestions for Action ~ “National leadership is needed to develop a deeper understanding and vision for child development and the purpose of education in Canada, based on giving priority to the BIC. This would include greater awareness of how children learn to belong and contribute to the community, developing early notions of what it means to be citizens in Canada”.

Related resources:

• United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child
• The Senate of Canada Committee on Human Rights report on Children: The Silenced Citizens

The Development Research Centre on Migration, Globalisation and Poverty (Migration DRC) examines the lived experiences of children who migrate to countries to seek work – from their perspective. The report finds a “significant gap between how children see their own experiences of migration and the way that child migrants are often represented”. See Voices of Child Migrants: A Better Understanding of How Life Is.

Related resource: The Migration DRC Child Migration Research Network, a site with research and resources on child migration, unaccompanied children and child refugee issues.

CERIS (Joint Centre of Excellence for Research in Immigration Studies) hosts a screening of the National Film Board documentary, Everybody’s Children (directed by Monika Delmos, produced by Anita Lee) on Friday, May 29/09, 12pm-2pm at the CERIS office in Toronto.

From the flyer: A year in the lives of two African youth seeking asylum in Ontario arrive under age and alone, often traumatized and seeking asylum in a country completely alien to their own. … these unaccompanied refugee minors have surprisingly no government system in place for their care after arriving. This documentary is a cinematic portrait of a year in the life.

Dr. Francis Hare, CERIS Domain Leader, Family, Children and Youth, will moderate a forum on unaccompanied children with Anne Woolger-Bell, Matthew House. 

RSVP to ceris.reception@utoronto.ca or call 416-946-3110.

Settlement Arts, a new Toronto-based organization established to raise awareness and increase education on immigration and settlement issues presents their first exhibit “Waiting for My Children”, a collaboration between Curator Lisa Wyndels, Photographer Anna  Hill and Editor, Sally Dundas.

From the description:

There are parents in our community who are forced to wait for many years to be joined by their children, after they first arrived in Canada as immigrants or refugees.

The impact of the separation of children from parents is profound, and increasingly so as the period of waiting becomes prolonged.  A period of separation of many years creates risks of children being exposed to multiple harms, including severe psychological damage. We know of instances of depression, suicide attempt, and even death.  Children who arrive in Canada after years of separation from a parent are often at real risk of not integrating well, either into family or into society.

The show runs from May 13-23 at 1080 Queen St. W. For more info, visit the website.

Call for papers for a conference from the Association for Research on Mothering (ARM), as posted on the mnchp-l listserv: Mothering and Migration: (Trans)nationalisms, Globalization, and Displacment. The conference will be held February 18-20, 2010 at the University of Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico.

Submissions are welcome from scholars, students, activists, government agencies and workers, artists, mothers, and others who work or research in the area. Cross-cultural, historical and comparative work is encouraged. Topics can include (but not limited to):

Representations/images of mothers and migration and (trans)national issues; globalization of motherhood; empowering migrant mothers; reproduction and movement of mother workers; migrant and (trans)national mothers and capitalism; migrant and (trans)national mothers and activism; public policy issues.

For more information, contact the ARM at arm@yorku.ca or 416.736.2100 ext 60366. Or visit the ARM website. Abstract and bio deadline is Sept 1/09.

A new study by Dorsey and Whitney, LLP for the Urban Institute raises several issues with regard to the impact of immigration policy on immigrant- and citizen-children of immigrants in the US.

Severing a Lifeline: The Neglect of Citizen Children in America’s Immigration Enforcement Policy begins with the startling statistic that of the 5 million “illegal immigrants” in the United States, 3 million are actually children citizens, born in the USA.

From the executive summary:

“US citizen children are the victims of immigration laws that are out of step with the manner in which we address child welfare issues in other areas of the law. The “best interests” of the child find little or no hearing in the process of detaining and deporting undocumented parents. The hard suffered by the citizen child who loses a parent to deportation, or the citizen child who loses his or her prospective future in the United States in the interests of maintaining family unity, is thus the natural consequence of systemic shortcomings in US immigration law and policy.

“The primary goal of this report is to reveal, and to prompt meaningful and reasoned debate regarding, the deficiencies in this country’s immigration laws and enforcement scheme relative to the interests of our citizen children”.

The study includes a series of comprehensive recommendations for reform.

From the International Detention Coalition (IDC) March 2009 e-Newsletter:

“The IDC is undertaking a research project to investigate the incidence and impact of immigration detention on children at national, regional and global levels”. As part of a larger international campaign, the research project will include a literature review, stakeholder interviews, and a survey of IDC members.

Survey deadline is April 28th. For more information, contact brkessler@gmail.com.

Terre des Hommes International Federation has released a study on unaccompanied children, now available at the childtrafficking.com digital library. From the tdh listserv:

“Children who leave home and migrate, either within their own country or to another country, are entitled to far better efforts to protect them from abuse and exploitation, says the Terre des Hommes International Federation…

“In a new report, Kids Abroad, Terres des Hommes reviews a wide range of initiatives to support children who leave home without being accompanied by any other family member, discussing the situation in Western and South Eastern Europe and also in West Africa, Central America, South Asia and South East Asia…

“As a matter of public policy, most governments encourage children to attend school and to remain there, at least until they complete their primary education. However, millions do not do so and set out to seek their fortune while still adolescents or even before reaching puberty. While public policy may not want to approve or encourage their actions, thousands of NGOs around the world are engaged in efforts to protect and assist such children, particularly when they are far from home and vulnerable to abuse because they are cut off from the families or home communities who could help protect them.

“Recommendations include: