30 Years of Research on Migration and Displacement at UNICEF Innocenti: Reflections and next steps

This is an excerpt from an Innocenti article, for the full piece visit our website.

By: Evan Easton-Calabria , Josiah Kaplan, PhD , and Ramya Subrahmanian

As global displacement rises, there is a pressing need to understand and respond to the migration experiences of children. This article provides key insights from a comprehensive review of Innocenti’s research on migration and displacement over the last 30 years. It provides a foundation upon which Innocenti’s current evidence strategy on child refugees and migrants is being built, blending past learning with research on pressing current and anticipated future needs and trends.?

Context

Today almost?37 million children are displaced worldwide?– the highest number ever recorded. These figures are consistent with the vast scale of global displacement, with over?100 million people in the world displaced?due to war and conflict, extreme weather events, and other crises. Displacement has a compounding negative effect on the ability of families to access services and enjoy the stability needed to foster the healthy development and well-being of children.??

The growing rate and impact of displacement is set to continue as conflicts remain protracted and climate hazards grow in frequency and severity. Concerted action is urgently needed to mitigate existing risks and identify the most effective ways to reduce disruptions to services, livelihoods, and child and family well-being, including for the estimated?31.7 million migrant children, who often lack similar safeguards and access to services to those who are displaced. There is a pressing need for data and evidence to guide effective aid responses; identify good practices for guaranteeing the rights of children, and to ensure the protection and well-being of children who migrate or are displaced. Children’s lived realities also need to be better understood.??

Since 1992, UNICEF Innocenti has produced a wide array of rigorous, mixed-methods research studies on child migration and displacement in diverse countries and contexts. Within this work, studies have focused on the many different legal and other statuses that intersect with migration and displacement, including refugee, internally displaced, irregular and ‘voluntary’ migration statuses. Innocenti’s studies of and with these varied populations has reaffirmed that, regardless of status,?migrant and displaced children are first and foremost children with rights enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.??

Over 50 Innocenti publications have focused on topics including the protection and wellbeing of unaccompanied minors, how refugee children are situated within global and national policy frameworks, and the ways in which migrant child protection risks are related to exploitation, trafficking, and labour. Looking back over these 30 years of evidence-building, what are some of the key lessons from Innocenti’s child migration and displacement research – and where should this work lead us in the future???

What have we learned???

1. The impacts of migration on child well-being are complex, varied, and contextual???

Migration is often viewed through simplistic and polarised lenses that position it as a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ experience, especially when discussing child migrants. However, the impacts and outcomes of migration on children are complex, varied, and contextual - depending on how children migrate and with whom, or how they are affected by adult migration even if they remain in their communities of origin. Research from 2005 focusing on?Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, for example, found that children ‘left behind’ (i.e. whose parents migrated without them) had improved material conditions. These improvements are likely attributable to parents sending income home, which positively affected both children’s health and their education.??

However, positive impacts are not necessarily a given. The same?2005 study?noted mixed evidence on the emotional and psychosocial impacts of children separated from their parents when the latter migrate. While some findings and an expert informant cited in the study described cases of child-parent estrangement occurring due to migration, the paper highlights other research that finds little or no evidence that children of migrants experienced more significant psychological problems than their non-migrant peers. Indeed, the paper discusses the importance of strong social connections as a mitigating factor in psychological distress, noting that:??

Virtually all research on migration in the Philippines emphasizes that children and their parents do not have to cope with the effects of migration on their own. Just as the extended family plays a major role in the decision to migrate, in the preparations for migration, and in the spending of remittance money, it also helps fill the gap left by the absent parent. (p7)?

Migration may also not confer positive benefits on all migrant families and children. As evidence of the contextual nature of child wellbeing outcomes,?research from Bangladesh and Vietnam on education, urban poverty, and migration?conducted in 2012 found that:?

[R]ural-urban migrant households have fewer assets, live in worse housing conditions and in areas less well served by public schools, have fewer social connections in the area where they live, and contain adults with lower educational levels than for urban native households. Even conditional on these household characteristics, educational expenditure and grade attainment were both lower for children from migrant households than urban natives. (p4)?

Likely also negatively affecting children’s wellbeing was the finding that migrant households were generally unable to access assistance programmes such as school fee waivers.?This evidence illustrates the roles that policies and rights play in supporting or reducing opportunities and assistance for migrant children.?

Other Innocenti research points towards a strong interlinkage between students’ immigration background and family socioeconomic status in industrialised countries such as in Europe and North America. A 2016 working paper evaluated?students’ educational achievements across 39 industrialized nations?from 2000-2012. This research found that family socio-economic status is a key predictor of low achievement across different educational systems and across time, with students' immigration background strongly interlinked with family socio-economic status. However, immigration status is found to affect low achievement independently. The study identified that “‘language disadvantage’ is one of the possible channels through which immigration can increase risks of low achievement.” However, it is also important to note that many studies using census data in industrialised (and other) countries do not account for irregular migrants who may remain undocumented, and thus such research may lack comprehensive findings across migration statuses. This represents both a key methodological limitation as well as an opportunity for more targeted research on child migrant wellbeing and outcomes.?

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