Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing: Stories of Life in Transition 9781529209051

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YOUTH MIGRATION AND THE POLITICS OF WELLBEING Stories of Life in Transition Elaine Chase and Jennifer Allsopp

First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 e: [email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5292-0902-0 hardcover ISBN 978-1-5292-0903-7 paperback ISBN 978-1-5292-0907-5 ePub ISBN 978-1-5292-0905-1 ePdf The right of Elaine Chase and Jennifer Allsopp to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the authors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: Blu Inc Front cover image: © Mohamed Keita www.mohamedkeita.it Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed in Great Britain by CMP, Poole

Contents List of Figures iv Acknowledgements v Foreword by Jacqueline Bhabha vii ‘Future’ x 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Introduction Conceptualizing Wellbeing in the Context of Migration and Youth Transitions Capturing Wellbeing in Transition: An Alternative Approach ‘Iron Rod’ or ‘Colander’? Welfare Regimes in England and Italy The Pursuit of Safety and Freedom Legal Integrity and Recognition Identity and Belonging Constructing Viable Futures as ‘Adults’ Emotional and Mental Wellbeing Friendships, Connections and Relationships Transnational Family and Connections Conclusion

1 19 37 55 75 93 113 135 153 173 191 209

Endnotes 229 References 231 Index 257

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List of Figures 6.1 8.1

Abdul: photo of a peaceful protest at an immigration detention centre, Indonesia, November 2016 ‘The Illusion of Italy’, a picture drawn by Ahmed in a workshop in Italy, 2 February 2016

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Acknowledgements None of this work would have been possible without many very special people. From the outset, there were a number of organizations that fully ‘got’ what we were trying to achieve and wholeheartedly supported us. In particular, our dearest thanks go to the Refugee Support Network, After 18, Children’s Society, Asylum Welcome, Shpresa, Praxis, Refugee Resource, Aver Drom, MAXXI and Pigorini Museums, Jesuit Refugee Service, Caritas, Newham Partnership for Complementary Education, MiCLU (Migrant and Refugee Children’s Legal Unit), Save the Children and Baobab Experience. Through these organizations, we were able to build the fantastic team of young people who have been core to our project and made this book possible. Although this is a co-authored book, a range of multi-authored and co-created outputs from the project are available via the project website, www.becomingadult.net. And with that, our heartfelt thanks go to Gul, Habib, Klesti, Migena, Mohammed, Raymon, Semhar, Shafiq, Winta, Yusif, Mohammed, Mortezza and Loni. And to Elvis, Maranata and Elona – wherever you are now, we hope that life is treating you well. Your thoughts and insights into the early stages of the project have not been forgotten and are so appreciated. It is difficult to capture the breadth of the contribution of the team. On a practical level, they brought a wealth of insight, knowledge and expertise from their own experiences – multiple languages and a diverse range of skills, from cooking chicken biriyani to developing new research methodologies. They found time for the project often when working multiple jobs during the day and in the evenings (in pizzerias, nightclubs, international human rights organizations and art galleries, to name just some). Many were also studying full time. Still, they became guides, administrators, interpreters, interviewers, experts in analysis and fantastic conference speakers – but most of all they became true friends: always reliable, always at the end of email or phone, and always generous in thought and spirit. We owe a huge debt to them in getting this work out there.

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Thanks to our fantastic research team members: Nando Sigona, Francesca Meloni, Rachel Humphris, Dawn Chatty and Giulia Olivieri; and to Khadija Abbasi, Tamsin Barber, David Bozzini, Nick Mai, Alessandro Monsutti, Hai Nguyen and Samia Tecle for their significant contributions to this work. We would also like to thank our advisory board members for their invaluable support in helping us navigate this ambitious research: Synnove Bendixsen, Judith Dennis, Ilse Derluyn, Nadine Finch, Catherine Gladwell, Roberto G. Gonzales, Lilana Keith, Ravi Kohli, Michelle LeVoy, Adrian Matthews, Virginia Morrow, Jenny Phillimore, Ilona Pinter, Liza Schuster, Jim Wade, Charles Watters and Natalie Williams. Particular thanks for support with the Italian research go to Andrea Anzaldi, Lucio Fabbrini and Stefania Vannini, and for the UK research to Alison Birch, Martin Pinder, Luljeta Nuzi, Kamena Dorling, Baljit Sandhu, Benny Hunter, Erfan, Javid and Zakir. With immense gratitude for intellectual fellowship, along with our core team, we would like to acknowledge the contributions of Robert Walker, Fran Bennett, Mary Daly, Stuart Gietel-Basten, Katy Long, Liza Schuster, Emily Bowerman, Aoife O’Higgins and Ellie Ott, among countless others. And huge thanks also go to the following individuals who worked with us throughout the project to share what we were learning with others: Alessandra Fasulo; Mike Chase; Yasmin Sidhwa (and Mandala Theatre Company); Ben Dix, Majid Adid, Emily Oliver and Rachel Shapcott (Positive-Negatives) and Ida Persson and Vanessa Hughes (ActReal). And to our families and friends who came with us for various parts of this journey, we send our heartfelt gratitude. Alongside many extraordinary people, this book was written in several special places, from Mevagissey to the shores of Lake Atitlán. Jennifer would especially like to thank Joyce Maynard for the gift of a ‘rancho of one’s own’. We would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council, which funded and supported this research, Shannon Kneis for her editorial support and Mohammed Keita for allowing us to use his photograph as our cover illustration. And our sincere appreciation goes to Jacqueline Bhabha for kindly writing the forward to this book. But it is to all the young people out there in England, Italy and countries further afield who took part in the study and to whose experiences we can only hope we have done justice that this book is dedicated. We send you our deepest thanks and best wishes for the future.

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Foreword Jacqueline Bhabha

After decades of neglect by policy makers and scholars in both the migration and child welfare domains, child and youth migration is now receiving sustained attention as a critical aspect of contemporary migration. The scale of the phenomenon, the tragic humanitarian disasters it has generated, the legal, economic and social complexities it gives rise to have all contributed to the development of a robust, interdisciplinary engagement with issues of the movement of children and youth. Thus, over the past decade, state and civil society actors alike have devoted special resources to the needs of unaccompanied child migrants, whether as asylum seekers stranded on the Greek island of Lesvos or detainees held by the US immigration authorities. Legal representatives have advanced claims for refugee protection based on newly developed doctrines of childspecific persecution, while inspiring educators and health providers have crafted interventions specially targeted at the needs of the child migrant or refugee populations within their care. International organizations too have been responsive to the advocacy pressure to attend more explicitly to the distinctive needs of child migrants: UNHCR and the Committee on the Rights of the Child have crafted special guidance regarding the treatment of migrant and refugee children, the International Organization for Migration has developed programs geared to safely repatriating and reintegrating child migrants prevented from reaching their hoped-for migration destinations, and the two 2018 migration-related UN Global Compacts, on Refugees and Migration respectively, both include specific references to the rights and needs of child migrants and refugees. Despite this welcome expansion of the migration and child welfare fields, much remains undone. In many rich societies that formally celebrate their commitment to ‘diversity’ and ‘multi-culturalism’, child and

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youth migrants continue to lack adequate access to legal, safe and regular migration opportunities – either because they remain subsumed within a broader (if outdated) conception of ‘family migration’ or because the class, race and wealth disparities that enable some but hinder most youth migration continue to be neglected. As a result, a disproportionate share of child and youth migration is irregular, with all the legal, social, economic and health consequences that flow from the absence of a legal status. Yet the transformative impact for child and youth migrants of legal status, and – closely related – the devastating effect of the absence of legal status has received little attention. For example, large numbers of child migrants (in refugee camps, in informal working and living arrangements in large metropolitan centers, in transit situations) lack access to education and to health care, and to the benefits of social membership, of mentorship, of protective accompaniment that are associated with those forms of state social provision. Migration may be ‘the stuff of dreams’ but it is often also the engine of exclusion and marginalization, the driver of extreme forms of material and psychological precarity. This precarity may endure even once a legal status has been achieved, particularly if – as is often the case – the legal status is time limited. Prolonged endurance of limbo is a risk factor to wellbeing that can vitiate the ability to thrive for years to come. Elaine Chase and Jennifer Allsopp’s book Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing: Stories of Life in Transition makes a very significant contribution to this neglected and essential contemporary issue. The book combines wide-ranging and perceptive exploration of relevant literature – from law, social science and health – with rich empirical data, a welcome integration across still regrettably siloed disciplinary domains. But it does more. It makes a powerful case for radical rethinking of current approaches to the protection of children forced to seek safety alone far from home. Teachers, health visitors, immigration officials, social workers, shelter staff, medical professionals, parents of school-aged children, lawyers and civil society actors – all these constituencies increasingly encounter migrant and refugee children in their personal and professional lives. They come face to face with the lacunae resulting from the profound disconnect between current migration and child welfare policies and the quotidian realities that these children and young people navigate – whether in the form of acute traumatic responses, or unobtrusive depressive conditions, whether presented as instances of apathy and social withdrawal or anxious sociability and extroversion, resilient coping or profound despair. The fact that for many child migrants, the prolonged limbo of irregular or insecure migration status coincides with the transition to legal adulthood (after reaching 18 years of age) adds an additional layer of complexity and, often, stress.

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Chase and Allsopp present a rich and compelling case for accelerating the wellbeing focus on child migrants and youth, a new generation in the making whose resources for future survival and flourishing continue to be neglected. Their empirical material centers on two research sites in Europe, but their findings and their conclusions have much broader relevance, touching as they do on core policy issues as relevant to Europe as they are to contemporary America or Australia. Their urgent call for a new and more sustained consideration of the resources that our societies make available to address the needs and desires of hundreds of thousands of young people involved in migration, and to sustain child and youth migrant wellbeing at different stages of the process deserves widespread attention. Public health experts concerned with the unequal and discriminatory impact of pandemic related morbidity would do well to factor into their considerations the compounding effect of irregular migration status and the failure to address child and youth migration aspirations on vulnerability and exposure to stigma and exclusion. State and regional policy makers engaged with the challenge of protecting access to education at a time of global preoccupation with the risk of contamination and perilous social congregation might benefit from including in their calculations of risk and harm the spin-offs of educational segregation and exclusion that continue to negatively impact the lives of thousands of child and youth migrants, in transit and at different stages of their migrations. The politics of wellbeing for the community as a whole require, for their efficacy and sustainability, a concerted focus on the most vulnerable and disconnected within the community; in many cases that must include child and youth migrants, who increasingly are part of our societies even though much public policy and practice continues to suggest otherwise.

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Future Optimistic Looking forward eyes toward the sky Hopefully we’re gonna get there Heads up high Try to face the music and dance The system is not fair Hope is to achieve better in life Hope is to have a life not just survive For better days ahead leaving bad ones behind. (Poem compiled by young people on a residency in Cornwall, summer 2016)

1

Introduction ‘I don’t know what to do, I’m walking round like a wild chicken.’ These were Dan’s words, blurted down the phone.1 He had just heard that the United Kingdom (UK) Home Office had finally agreed to give him indefinite leave to remain. For nine years he had been stuck, his life defined by a legal status that variably categorized him as ‘failed asylumseeker’, ‘appeal rights exhausted’ and ‘undocumented’. During this time, he was unable to study or work and had no secure place in which to live. He did not know where he would next find food or a way of clothing himself and he was unable to make any plans for the future. He was, as one young person in our study described his similar experience of life without documents, living ‘life with the pause button on’. Being finally recognized as a bona fide human being has transformed Dan. He is happy, he looks different and he has acquired an air of confidence and calm. In less than a year, he has a job, somewhere to live, has been able to visit family in Europe, is making plans for university and is having fun. When we catch up on the phone, Dan chats about day-to-day occurrences at work and his plans for the weekend with friends: normal stuff, unclouded by the status issue that has dogged him for so much of his life. These used to be such different conversations: no matter how hard we tried, we would inevitably circle back to the corrosive effects of his precarious immigration status. Finally, though, he has found what he came in search of: the elusive netsanet, a word meaning freedom in Tigrinya, one of the languages spoken in his native Eritrea. During a research project lasting more than three years and directly involving over 100 unaccompanied young refugees and migrants, the majority of whom had come to England and Italy to flee persecution, violence and other extreme hardships, we encountered many young people living in situations of protracted limbo that lasted many years.

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We witnessed the profound impact this had on them. Even when young people were granted leave to remain, the transition to adulthood was not plain sailing. After being defined for so long by their ‘status’, the sudden reversal of their situation could be overwhelming. Exercising new freedoms to make plans and look forward demanded a determination to accept that the system was not fair, and not to let the past losses, impossibilities, limitations and sheer waste of life cloud the moment and hold them back.

The starting point: life projects and dreams in transition At a conference in Brussels in 2010 on irregular youth migration from Africa to Europe, because of visa restrictions just a single African delegate was able to attend. When asked by a European participant why people were not responsive to the warnings and propaganda regarding the risks of irregular migration from Africa, the woman’s response was mocked for being overly simple. ‘The thing is’, she remarked, ‘migration is about dreams.’ She continued: ‘Until we can find a way to get inside these young people’s heads and reprogramme their dreams, we will struggle to ever fully control migration. Dreams’, she concluded, ‘are the hardest thing to regulate of all.’ One respected policy expert at the time tweeted in response to these comments, ‘It’s guff like this that gets in the way of evidence-based policy making.’ So, what have life projects – the stuff of dreams – got to do with controlling irregular migratory movements? The answer, we argue, is that the policy context in which substantial amounts of money are spent on managing irregular migration is often as poorly researched as it is cash rich. Certainly, youth migration needs to be understood in relation to its negative drivers of persecution, violence and unsustainable lives in countries of origin, factors that motivated the flights of many young people in this research. But at the same time, there is a need to recognize that such adversity also fuels individual and collective dreams and aspirations for better lives. Without acknowledging this, politicians will, as our African colleague stated so powerfully, struggle to formulate meaningful and workable asylum and immigration policies. Some migration and refugee studies scholars have considered how to match the skill sets and career pathways of economic migrants, asylum seekers and refugees with the economic needs of host states (for example, Ruhs 2013; Betts and Collier 2017). The migrants’ quest for a viable

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Introduction

future of their own making beyond this economic frame is, however, largely dismissed by politicians as too perplexing to engage with. So, while the real-life Odyssey is staged repeatedly at our shores, migration policy makers claim to get on with the ‘serious work’ of controlling borders through increased investments in fences and militarism. This book pushes back against the dominant paradigms driving migration governance and instead considers youth migration through the realities of young people’s lives: why they left and what they strive for through their mobility. Such an analysis reveals a profound disconnect between policy intentions and their real-world relevance, and raises questions as to why policy makers continue to ignore the significance of dreams for evidence-based policy. In placing the life projects of young people at the centre of its analysis, this book takes seriously the intentions – mistaken as they may or may not have been – of the thousands of young people who have died in or crossed the Mediterranean, fleeing violence and seeking better futures in Europe. We also recognize the 10,000 unaccompanied children registered as ‘missing’ from institutional care in 2016 (ECRE 2016), and the hundreds more who are moving across Europe’s borders as we write in March 2020, seeking better opportunities. In starting with the notion of dreams, this book remembers all those who have died and celebrates the achievements of those who succeeded against the odds. The book draws on retrospective accounts gathered through the Becoming Adult project,1 a longitudinal study of the wellbeing outcomes of those who arrived on their own in England and Italy as children (defined as ‘unaccompanied minors’) and then made the transition to institutional adulthood at the age of 18.2 In the UK, the research was conducted in four cities across England and involved working with young people from Afghanistan, Albania and Eritrea.3 In Italy, unaccompanied migrant young people from a wider range of countries of origin took part in the research, all based in one major city where they were either living or were in transit to other parts of Europe. The work captured the varying trajectories of young people between the ages of 16 and 25. For some, this meant being granted temporary or permanent legal status. For others, it involved being forcibly removed to countries of origin, becoming forced to live illegally or continuing to face extended periods of waiting for a decision to be made either on an asylum application or on a claim for extended leave to remain in their European host state. For the sake of consistency and comparability, this book includes primarily the experiences of participants in Italy who originated from Afghanistan, Albania and Eritrea. Where relevant, some experiences of young people from other origin countries are included to illuminate differences and commonalities across immigration control and social care systems in

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England and Italy, and to elucidate the importance of cross-cultural and transnational social ties to young people’s wellbeing. While, for reasons we go on to explain, most of the young people included in the research were male, around 10 per cent were female. Having life put on hold is one of a number of outcomes for young people in the study. At the time of writing, some participants continue to live through an endless process of rejection, onward migration and increasing isolation and detachment. Others are thriving in their new lives in the UK, Italy and further afield. This book explores the impact of these diverse trajectories on young people’s wellbeing and considers what might constitute a meaningful policy response.

Migrant children arriving in Europe, the UK and Italy Sparked by growing instability and conflict in North Africa, the Middle East and surrounding regions, the year 2015 heralded what became known as a global refugee crisis. Europe, like many regions, experienced a rapid increase in arrivals of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children and young people. The official number rose from an average of some 12,000 a year to almost 90,000 (Eurostat 2016a). The UK received just over 3,000 applications for asylum from unaccompanied children in 2015, the majority aged 16–17 (57 per cent) and 91 per cent of them boys and young men (Eurostat 2016a), while in the same year Italy received 3,958 (Italian Ministry of Work and Social Policy 2016). At the time of this research, unlike in the UK, unaccompanied children arriving in Italy could be categorised as asylum-seeking or non-asylum-seeking minors, with the opportunity to regularize their status through the asylum system and/or the labour market under certain conditions. A total of 62,672 unaccompanied minors were recorded as arriving in Italy between 2011 and 2016, in the main from Eritrea, Egypt, Gambia, Nigeria and Syria. Despite the different asylum options available to them, most minors transit through Italy to other European Union (EU) member states (Save the Children 2017). By way of example, during our research in a transit centre for migrants in Italy between July 2015 and February 2016, 15,000 unaccompanied minors – mostly from Eritrea – were counted as having passed through the city en route to other European destinations, including England. An unknown number of unaccompanied children arrive in Europe undetected, coming to live in private fostering arrangements or to work in the irregular economy (European Agency for Fundamental Rights 2009, 2011). These children, who may be survivors of human trafficking

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Introduction

(EU Agency for Fundamental Rights 2009; Anderson 2012), commonly originate from low income or war-affected countries, including Albania, Bangladesh and Vietnam. Previous research has shown that across these sub-groups (asylum-seeking minors, non-asylum-seeking minors known to the authorities and undetected minors), children come to Europe unaccompanied for a combination of reasons beyond their primary search for safety (Hopkins and Hill 2008; Kanics et al 2010), including education (Gladwell and Elwyn 2012; Refugee Support Network 2012), to support their families financially (Nicolini 2010) and in the hope that they will be able to build a better future (Brighter Futures 2013). Whether or not children migrating alone into Europe are granted refugee status is in theory determined by the specifics of their claim to asylum and their ability to articulate a credible account of having a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ in accordance with the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. However, our work confirms past research that indicates young people’s country of origin, ethnicity and gender, and not just individual claims to asylum, are highly significant in predicting the outcomes of asylum claims. Hence, overall, outcomes for young people from Afghanistan are demonstrably different from those for young Eritreans. The challenges faced by young Albanians in having their asylum claims recognized are often even more complex. This research also notes important differences between England and Italy. Despite attempts at EU level to harmonize policies with respect to asylum processing and reception and care arrangements for unaccompanied migrant children and young people, Italy had at the time of this research a higher protection rate than England for asylum seekers, especially from certain countries such as Afghanistan. This is largely because Italy was also more likely to grant humanitarian protection (not refugee status but leave to remain owing to recognition of the fact that it would be unsafe to return someone to the country from which they had migrated). In England, meanwhile, most unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors were granted time-limited discretionary leave to remain, which expired at the age of 17½. This was rarely extended. Unlike in Italy, return to wartorn Afghanistan after the age of 18 was, as we shall see, a reality for many young people in England. Wherever the young people end up, immigration and welfare structures and systems have the power to directly impair or enhance their wellbeing outcomes. Such institutions and their protagonists categorize young people into ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’, ‘bona fide’ or ‘bogus’, ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’. The way these systems were experienced by many young people in this study – arbitrary for some, impenetrable for others – raises fundamental questions of social justice, human rights and equality.

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Migrant children becoming ‘adult’ That the UK accords most ‘unaccompanied minors’ one of a number of time-limited periods of discretionary leave until they turn 18, rather than refugee status, stems from a shared commitment to international policy frameworks, such as the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that children migrating alone are vulnerable and require protection. However, such discursive frames largely ignore the imminent transition to institutional ‘adulthood’ for most young people soon after they arrive in Europe. As argued elsewhere (Chase 2016), it is paradoxically at this juncture that migrant young people often become increasingly exposed to risks and adversity and potentially more vulnerable than during their childhood. Given the concentration of previous research and policy on the unaccompanied migrant child, this work purposefully shifts the emphasis towards young people’s outcomes after 18, a time when the political and social commitment to the refugee child typically wanes and they become subsumed within adult asylum and immigration procedures and the largely negative and xenophobic discourses surrounding these. At the time of the research, Italy, unlike the UK, provided a legal alternative to the asylum system, enabling unaccompanied minors to regularize their status at the point when they turned 18. The distinct configuration of immigration, welfare and labour market policies in Italy relative to the UK creates a different political and policy climate for the reception and treatment of young people, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 4. Whether they turn 18 in England or Italy, without secure legal status, young people’s access to a range of rights and protections are diminished. Becoming ‘adult’ can signify losing access to education, a reduction or total withdrawal of social care support, financial insecurity, no eligibility for accommodation and the end of access to legal support. At the same time, former cared for migrant children may be confronted with new risks and uncertainties, such as the possibility of forced repatriation or the prospect of being forced to live ‘illegally’. Conversely, being granted the right to remain through one of a number of possible legal statuses can be transformative, creating both a secure basis for wellbeing and possibilities to fulfil the sorts of futures that young people aspire to for themselves and family members. The central importance of legal status aside, as this book explores, young people’s migratory trajectories and outcomes are also shaped by their own interrelated and mutable considerations pertaining to safety, work, education, perceived level of welfare and protection, language, family decisions, as well as social networks and intimate relationships. Equally, young people’s histories and identities, including age, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and socio-economic status prior to migrating to

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Introduction

Europe, all influence what happens to them post-18. Child migration is intrinsically gendered, the large majority of minors migrating alone to Europe being boys and young men. While there are some important experiences of girls and young women included in this work, these are somewhat muted by the many more perspectives from boys and young men. Nonetheless, the book does highlight differences in how girls and boys are received, perceived and treated within asylum, immigration and related systems, as well as some of the fallible assumptions underpinning these. For example, at a high-level gathering in 2017, it was asked whether the nine countries of the EU (including Italy), which at the time practised genital examinations as a component of age assessment procedures for unaccompanied minors, had adopted any gender-sensitive guidelines in this regard. One official commented, ‘Well of course, no one should put a girl through that.’ Such examinations were, however, deemed largely unproblematic for boys, despite growing awareness of the sexual violence experienced by boys and young men as well as girls on the move (IFRC 2018; Women’s Refugee Commission 2019). We consider other gendered and often intersecting racialized experiences of transitioning to institutional adulthood throughout this book, and seek to capture some of the plurality of young people’s experiences accordingly. Importantly, the outcomes for young people in the study are not entirely negative. Amid accounts of marginalization, exclusion and despair, the book incorporates examples of human flourishing. Such accounts illustrate how young people frequently refuse to passively accept the hand dealt them by migration governance systems and instead reclaim control over whatever aspects of their lives they can in order to construct their own futures within the constraints imposed upon them.

The politics of definition As reflected elsewhere (an example being Lems et al 2019), the language surrounding child and youth migration fundamentally frames how the issue is understood and shapes the policy response. Roger Zetter (1991; 2007) in particular has drawn attention to the importance of bureaucratic labelling practices in determining policy pathways and wellbeing outcomes for different institutionally defined ‘types’ of refugees and migrants. Such procedures with respect to separated migrant children and young people include the social care and support categories to which young people are bureaucratically assigned, the management of transitions between these policy categories over time (and especially as young people move between the institutional classifications of ‘child’ to ‘adult’) and the ways in which

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migrant children and young people are spoken and written about in the media and in policy and public discourses. Later in the book (see in particular Chapter 6), we explore further how these policy and discursive constructions of young people are juxtaposed with young people’s own conceptions of themselves, the realities of their day-to-day lives, their identities and the sorts of futures to which they aspire. The term ‘migrant young people’ used in various forms in this book and elsewhere is problematic and inherently political. The same goes for the variety of other bureaucratic tags used to define children and young people who arrive in Europe alone. The ‘asylum-seeking’, the ‘unaccompanied’, the ‘separated’ child – or commonly the institutional code UASC (unaccompanied asylum-seeking child) – are all used to distinguish such children from others within social care, health and education systems and to differentiate them in immigration and asylum statistics. These terms all have political underpinnings, whether normative in the sense of providing markers of bureaucratic processes or in the sense of being designed to humanize the discourse surrounding migrant children and young people, as in the term ‘separated child’, used widely by non-governmental and civil society organizations (Separated Children in Europe Programme 2010). Irrespective of their ideological roots, the terms fundamentally essentialize young people’s migratory trajectories, largely ignoring other aspects of their lives and identities. Our research began as the contestations around the variably termed refugee or migration ‘crisis’ (Baldwin-Edwards et  al 2019) peaked in 2015. While humanitarian concern shone the spotlight on the number of refugees dying in the Mediterranean, other agendas directed attention to the numbers (the ‘floods’ and the ‘waves’) of migrants threatening the status quo within nation states and across Europe as a whole. The response to the crisis, however construed, was what has come to be known as the New European Agenda on Migration. This well-invested and consolidated strategy constituted a swathe of Europe-wide policies that largely prioritized the fortification of Europe over concerns to protect the rights or wellbeing of those on the move (BaldwinEdwards et  al 2019). The Agenda has increasingly given licence to Europe to extend its tendrils of immigration control into Libya, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and Turkey through a series of bilateral and ad hoc arrangements with these countries and regions, in the name of securitizing Europe and protecting its interests. The lessons of this book therefore transcend Europe. The outsourcing of immigration controls beyond the borders of Europe has created a network of sorting spaces that divide people into the bona fide and the bogus, the good and the bad, the deserving and undeserving refugee. These tropes were

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Introduction

used repeatedly to define and categorize the young people in this study within Europe’s borders. The young people in the current study are all protagonists in one way or another of the crisis of migration management (Collyer and King 2016; Crawley 2016; Allen et al 2018; Baldwin-Edwards et al 2019), in that their hopes and dreams were frequently thwarted by, and sometimes hard won in the face of, mechanisms designed to strengthen borders around Europe and externalize border controls beyond the continent. In this book, we meet Jamal and Abdul, previously unaccompanied migrant children in the UK and at the time of writing held in Indonesia, after having tried to remigrate towards Australia following deportation once they turned 18. We also meet Bashir, who continues to seek out a future for himself by moving between Europe’s borders, and Noor, who, after being forcibly returned from Britain, now struggles to sustain himself in Afghanistan. These life trajectories, shaped by immigration control policies and the various forms of violence that they mete out, epitomize what De Vries and Guild (2019) have termed the politics of exhaustion. The net result for many is child migration, culminating in protracted limbo in young adulthood. Such embodied liminality often stretches for as long as and beyond a decade, having individual and collective impacts. And while we can trace the immediate effects on the individual (and consider how these interact with a young person’s own sense of agency, resourcefulness, networks and opportunities), we need also to consider the collective impacts of such uncertainty over time and on wider communities.

Differing journeys, convergent experiences This book is primarily concerned with how young people have fared after arriving in Europe, and not with the journeys they took in order to arrive there or the horrors that drove them to leave their homes in the first place. These are topics that have attracted much previous research attention. Nonetheless, it is useful by way of background to enquire into the general patterns that emerged in terms of travel from different countries of origin and the sorts of reasons known to have influenced young people’s migratory decisions.

Journeys from Eritrea The early discussions with young people from Eritrea began in 2015 against a backdrop of daily news stories of unprecedented numbers

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of people, many of whom were their compatriots, drowning in the Mediterranean Sea as they attempted to make their way to Europe. With rare exceptions, such as Helen, who had travelled to the UK by plane at the age of 14 several years previously, most young people had travelled across land and sea. Several young Eritreans we spoke with had arrived within the previous months, their migratory experiences still raw. Journeys typically involved crossing the border into Ethiopia and then continuing through Sudan and on to Libya. Young people faced the sequential hazards of the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea, of periods of imprisonment, of destitution and frequent episodes of police brutality and gang violence. The overriding reason for young people leaving Eritrea was to avoid enforced and indefinite military service, known as Sawa. At the time of writing, the expectation by the Eritrean government is that as soon as their formal education comes to an end, all young men and women must enter military service for an unlimited period of time. Aaron, aged 21, explained the system: ‘We know that we study until 10th grade … 11th grade and then in 12th grade you have to go to, it’s called Sawa [Defence Training Centre] … it’s a military training. So everyone starts 11th  grade but then some people they don’t want to go there so they run away. So I was studying 8th grade … so I had three years more to study and then go to Sawa  … so I will decide like, you know, I don’t need to go there … better to leave, you know, then maybe survive you know.’ Aaron spoke of the horrific conditions in the military training camps, where young people were expected to work in 40-degree heat with inadequate food or water and where many reportedly died without their families ever knowing that they had done so. Besides the inevitability of their own forced conscription, young people spoke about the impact of having fathers whom they never saw or got to know because they were forced to work indefinitely for the military away from home. Aaron spoke angrily of how his father was enslaved to the military while they struggled. With his father absent, like many others, he was forced to leave school and find work to support his family. In doing so, he risked being conscripted indefinitely into the army himself. Young people spoke of how they had developed imaginaries about how they would travel to Europe before they left Eritrea; for example, they had heard of the desert and the sea they would need to cross, yet they had no real sense of the scale or significance of these phenomena. As

10

Introduction

David commented, ‘they are just ideas, you don’t know what they are’. An Eritrean elder volunteering in a migrant camp in Italy captured the fantasy thus: ‘They go [to Europe in their minds], even before they leave.’ Most young people we spoke with said they had not consulted families or even said goodbye before leaving Eritrea, calculating that it was easier just to go rather than raise the fears of loved ones about what might happen to them on the journey. David was 17 and close to his 18th birthday when we first met him, just eight months after he had arrived in England. He described elements of his journey, including three months in a Libyan prison: there he was locked up for most of the day in a stifling container with little food and under constant armed guard. He described how a group of them took their chances and ran from the prison compound with the guards firing at them. One of the girls he was with was shot in the leg. David eventually arrived at the coast, where he secured a place in a small boat across the Mediterranean that was paid for by family members back in Eritrea. After several days at sea, the boat was intercepted by a large Italian shipping vessel, which took them aboard before handing them over to the Italian immigration authorities. Reflecting on his journey and how his siblings back in Eritrea were likely to follow him, David commented: ‘You can’t even wish this to my enemy, let alone on my brother and sister, yeah? Because we came through the Sahara where you can die in Sahara. We came through the Mediterranean Sea when you can die in Mediterranean Sea. We crossed a lot of difficulties. We crossed a lot of death and like tragedy so, I can’t wish them that. But if they decide to come, then there is no way to go back … that’s the problem. That’s why I can’t tell them to come. I know they are facing a lot of difficulty in Eritrea but I can’t tell them to come through because I know when they come out there, I know there is lots of risks … it’s very difficult.’ David was among several Eritrean men who spoke of the specific risks facing girls who crossed the Sahara. A young woman at one of the UK youth groups where we conducted ethnography for this research told us that she had been raped during this passage. Meanwhile, a group of three young Eritrean women in transit in Italy spoke of multiple experiences of sexual violence during the journey – and not just in Libya, though they did not wish for the details to be on the record and so had not reported these attacks. One youth worker explained to us that ‘with the girls, you almost assume it’.

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The ‘Jungle’ in Calais, France, was a key landmark in the journey for those who had passed through Italy and a place where young people often spent significant periods of time before finally managing to smuggle themselves into a lorry heading to the UK. Almaz described spending almost two months sleeping in a small container with five other young Eritreans, trying her luck each night to get to the UK and eventually arriving in England aged 16 with three other girls, whom she had met in Calais. For her, the most distressing aspect of the journey was having been separated from her 11-year-old brother who, at the time of the research, she had still not managed to locate. From Italy, where he was fingerprinted, Aaron similarly travelled through France and then by lorry to England. When he arrived aged 17, he was unlawfully detained for a period of three months before his case for asylum was accepted and he was given five years leave to remain in the UK. Others came to Italy and took onward trains to complete their journeys. Alan, for example, spoke of how he spent time sleeping in the train station in Venice before managing to take trains to Nice and then on to Paris. Two young people from Eritrea participating in the study in England had previously spent time in the transit camp in which the Italian fieldwork was conducted. Eritreans in Italy spoke of how they were reluctant to stay in the country because of a combination of the poor living conditions, the fact that they had English language skills they wanted to use, social networks elsewhere and also the relative likelihood, compared with other nationalities, of being granted asylum elsewhere in light of the widely recognised human rights violations in Eritrea. There is, however, at the time of writing, evidence that a growing number of Eritrean young people are applying for asylum in Italy. This may be influenced by increased restrictions at Europe’s borders, which make it harder to seek sanctuary elsewhere. It may also be in part because they have heard of friends being refused asylum or facing difficult living conditions in other countries. It is important to note that for many Eritreans, as for Afghans, the journey onwards to the UK from other parts of Europe was motivated by a desire to reunite with family members. This is something to which they had a legal right under the Dublin III regulation,4 and yet the mechanism was poorly operational at the time of research across most EU countries (Starfield 2018). In 2016, the average time necessary to process cases under Dublin III was reported to be ten or eleven months (Red Cross 2016). In the space of a single year, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in Calais reported that three boys with a legal right to be reunited with family members in the UK had died while trying to travel illegally after becoming frustrated with long delays in the system, coupled with the appalling conditions in the Calais camp (Safe Passage 2018).

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Introduction

Journeys from Afghanistan Unlike young people from Eritrea who, on the whole, claimed they themselves took the decision to leave, young people from Afghanistan, or neighbouring Iran or Pakistan, spoke of how it was normally an adult that made the decision for them to leave and found the resources to fund their transit in order to protect them from or get them out of dangerous situations. At the age of 15, Noor faced forced conscription into the Taliban. He was taken to a nearby camp where he was given military training, taught how to use an AK47 and shown anti-American propaganda videos. After ten days, he fled back home where a relative, recognizing that Noor’s life was in danger, sold some land to raise enough money to pay intermediaries to take him to the UK. Journeys were routinely described as difficult, involving many borders and many dangers. Memories of the ‘Jungle’ evoked particularly fearful memories. Ahmad associated it with large animals he had never seen before and the beatings he received as he repeatedly attempted to board a lorry to cross the Channel: ‘one day my nose was bloody, one day mouth bleeding, one day I had like a bloody arm wound’, he explained. It had taken him more than a month and half of regular attacks, being pepper sprayed by police and kicked as he slept on the streets before he was finally able to make the journey. Noor attempted to board a lorry 20 times. Each time he was found by French police, put in prison for the night and the next day released. On his 21st attempt, he successfully managed to cross the Channel. Kamran reflected on how, despite such hazards, people would continue to make the journey from Afghanistan to have ‘a better life, to save themselves, you know, to come and educate themselves, people take the risk’. He had witnessed several people die on the way, either in the boat or being hit by cars, but those who arrived safely at least had the possibility of a life, something that he contrasted sharply with existing in Afghanistan. It was, he said, a choice between ‘no life and a good life’. Journeys to England were described in sometimes mythical ways. In one discussion, Janan and Habib laughed about how people in Afghanistan evoked the imaginary of London. Janan commented, ‘London is the furthest country in the world … you can’t reach London, like you can’t reach the moon.’ To which Habib replied, ‘It’s like a golden ticket you know?’ Janan then explained how London was used in dialogue the same way in the UK we threaten to send someone ‘to Coventry’ (stop talking to them) if they do or say something upsetting. He explained, ‘I say to you, “I’m going to London, you can’t reach me” … it means, just respect me like a good friend.’

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Overall, Italy was perceived by young Afghans as a ‘lesser’ alternative to the opportunities offered in England, even if it might be easier to obtain papers. Some young Afghans had, however, claimed asylum in Italy and succeeded with varying degrees to integrate, usually with the legal status of humanitarian leave. Among these was Erfanullah, who was aged 26 when we spoke with him and 13 when he arrived in Italy. He was granted asylum and has since set up a successful sushi business with his family, whom he was able to have resettled in Italy. He now offers traineeships to unaccompanied minors to help them regularize their status through finding a job and financial independence when they turn 18. Another Afghan in Italy, Hal, explained that though the process of getting papers had been slow and difficult and the welfare system was scant in comparison with the UK and other European countries, now he was doing ‘OK’. Alongside finding work, he had been able to develop his creative side through volunteering with an NGO as a videographer. Another dimension of the journeys from Afghanistan concerned a relatively small but nevertheless important movement of Afghans who feared detention in and deportation from the UK going back to Italy. ‘In Italy, it’s not like the UK with CCTV’, explained Izatullah, aged 23, who had twice been detained in and then deported from England. In Italy, he said, ‘it’s easier to be invisible’. Takir, a 24-year-old Afghan who arrived in England aged 14 to seek asylum and was refused, was able in the end to secure humanitarian leave in Italy after, in his words, ‘fleeing’ the risk in England of detention and deportation to Afghanistan. As a representative from the Italian Ministry of the Interior also conceded in an interview for this research, ‘The difference with the UK, what is it? That [here] if they have no documents no one will escort these lads to the border.’ These different welfare and protection opportunities in Italy and the UK for unaccompanied migrants post-18 are discussed further in Chapter 4. Finally, some young Afghans were making the journey to Europe for a second time, after having been forcibly removed to Afghanistan. At the time of research, neither the UK nor Italy was forcibly returning people to Eritrea. The situation for Albanian young people was more complex, and while our research revealed their frequent disappearance in order to avoid forced removal from the UK, we were unable to follow individuals who had returned to Albania or capture examples of return migration to England after deportation. Of those young people who migrated a second time from Afghanistan, their opinions varied in terms of which journey had been the most difficult. Bashir unhesitatingly said that the second journey had been toughest because the first had been arranged and supported by family members and he had been much younger – most decisions were therefore

14

Introduction

out of his hands. The second time he had little money and no agent to negotiate the way for him. He relied mainly on a global positioning system (GPS) phone application, which he said eventually got him to his destination. The advantages were not having to pay anyone and a shorter sea crossing, although the GPS route was longer. The disadvantage was the possibility of losing his way, which inevitably happened. Bashir recounted his journey in detail and jokingly recalled all the countries he had passed through: ‘How many borders? You count them. From Afghanistan to Pakistan, from Pakistan to Iran, from Iran to Turkey, from Turkey to Greece, Greece to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Serbia, from Serbia to Hungary, from Hungary to Czechoslovakia, from there to Austria, from Austria to coming here (Italy) [he laughs] … like more than like eight, nine countries.’ Jamal spoke about the high expectations and hopes he had of his first journey to the UK, believing that his life would from then on be ‘sorted’. As we will see in later chapters, this was far from the case. Similarly, Noor endured five months on a dangerous journey to get to England, during which he risked his life many times. After finding safety and a new life, he was put on a plane in the middle of the night to the place he feared the most: Afghanistan. This is where he remains, despite having made several unsuccessful attempts to leave again.

Journeys from Albania Though it is arguably easier to travel from Albania to Italy and on to England, the most striking aspect regarding the journeys narrated by young Albanians was the less obvious, and frequently unrecognized, forms of persecution that had sometimes sparked their flight (Allsopp et al 2018). Indeed, children and young people from Albania form the third largest group of asylum-seeking children in the UK (Eurostat 2016b). Reasons for flight regularly include blood feuds and familial conflict, often associated with the centuries-old Kanun of Lek Dukagjin, known widely as Kanun Law. Blood feuds in Albania are an historic and often intergenerational phenomenon: they stem from a dispute between families that may relate to an accident, a perceived insult, a property ownership disagreement, a conflict over access to electricity, water, fuel or similar. Where this dispute leads to a death, the other family is said to be ‘owed blood’, and a feud can be passed down through generations.

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In the north of Albania in particular, blood feuds are reportedly still often managed according to Kanun Law, a system described by the UK Home Office as ‘a primitive constitution regulating not only their community life, but also their private lives’ (Home Office 2016). The Kanun is implemented by elders, sometimes with the assistance of negotiators. Reports by the UK Home Office, NGOs and international organizations have stressed that such feuds are increasingly affecting girls as well as boys (Home Office 2016; Shpresa et al 2017). Apart from Kanun Law and family conflicts, Albanians in the research also reported facing persecution based on their sexual orientation, that they had been or were at risk of trafficking or domestic violence and, to a smaller degree, were at risk of religious radicalization (Shpresa et al 2017). The Kanun Law was the reason Idriz gave for fleeing Albania when he was 15. He recounted how it took five days to travel to the UK, where he arrived exhausted and dehydrated on the outskirts of a city. He hadn’t eaten for the duration of the journey. Idriz travelled with two other young people in the back of a lorry carrying cars to Europe. The lorry was intercepted in France, at which point they were taken out of the lorry, registered by immigration officers and then allowed to leave. Through the support of a cousin of one of his companions, Idriz then took another lorry and eventually arrived in the UK. Besmir similarly spoke of how his parents were insistent that he left Albania at the age of 16½ because he was ‘in danger’, but it was never explained to him why. Through his uncle, they arranged for him to travel in the back of a lorry, and he was eventually dropped, disorientated, on the high street of a city in southern England. It was only after his arrival that he began to fully understand the ‘traditional law’ that put his life at risk and why his parents had been so keen to get him out of the country. The story of Antigona, a young Muslim woman, was one of trafficking, sexual abuse, being forced to sell drugs and multiple journeys between Albania and other countries in Europe. She ended up in the UK after being raped by the driver of the lorry who brought her to the city in the Midlands where she was living at the time of the research. For a long time, Antigona was too worried to recount these experiences because she feared the repercussions of her involvement in illegal work and thought it likely she would be imprisoned or forcibly removed to Albania as a result. The evidential base on which asylum decisions are made for young people from Albania in Britain has been highly criticized as patchy and inconclusive. At two events organized by Shpresa (an Albanian community-based organization in London) and the Becoming Adult project at the UK’s Parliament and University College London, it was

16

Introduction

concluded that a significant dearth of evidence exists regarding the threats facing Albanian youth in their country of origin. Policy and practice implications are hard to conclude, it was argued, without a stronger ‘research and evidence base’ (Shpresa et al 2017: 5) about the reasons for flight. This theme permeated our research with young Albanians in England, who repeatedly spoke of not being believed and their claims to asylum being rejected. Unaccompanied young Albanians in Italy combined those who sought to stay for work and education and others, seeking protection from harm, who tended to transit through Italy towards the UK or other parts of Europe. Kil, aged 17, for example, explained: ‘I’m currently working, let’s say “informally”, but it’s not a fixed job. For now, my main priority is school and other things, I’m getting support with that for now. Then after that, they’ll [Italian support workers] even give me a hand getting set up with a proper job.’ Young people such as Kil were sometimes able to make the most of the structural opportunities that existed for acquiring documents and training and employment post-18 outside the asylum system. They typically intended to stay in Italy for a few years before returning to Albania with new skills, which they hoped would expand their employment opportunities. The Albanian migrant population in Italy and historic ties between the two countries facilitate their absorption into the job market. At the time of the research, there was a growing political backlash against unaccompanied Albanians coming to Italy to study and receive free accommodation and schooling. By contrast, young Albanians fleeing violence often chose to carry on to England, where it might be easier to go undetected and where there was a perception of a greater level of protection. The pre-established Albanian community in Italy and its perceived links with corruption and criminal gangs, including the Mafia, was one reason given by Albanian young people as to why they wanted to move on to England. Another important difference was that, unlike young Albanians in the UK who usually described being on their own in the country, in Italy, young people could frequently draw on pre-existing social networks of distant family members or friends of friends who were able to set them up with work. Nevertheless, they were usually still classified as ‘unaccompanied’ since, as discussed in Chapter 11, for various reasons they were often unwilling or unable to disclose these contacts to the authorities.

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Aims and structure of the book In the remainder of this book, we focus on how asylum, immigration and social care procedures are operationalized once unaccompanied children and young people arrive in the UK and Italy, and the impact that these bureaucratic processes have on them over time. The aims of this book are threefold. First, to conceptualize subjective wellbeing through the voices and narratives of young people experiencing migration and who are making the life course transition to ‘adulthood’ within the contemporary geopolitical landscape. Second, to revisit existing conceptualizations of wellbeing from a range of disciplines and consider their usefulness and limitations in the contexts of the migratory experiences of the young people studied. And third, to foreground the inherently political nature of wellbeing and its implications for how we respond appropriately to the needs of migrant and refugee young people undergoing multiple and simultaneous transitions in their lives. Bearing in mind the words of the late Barbara-Harrell Bond,5 that refugees are ‘ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances’, a final aim of this book is to capture the human faces, warmth, humour and bravery of the young people behind the bureaucratic labels. Chapter  2 offers a conceptual framework for rethinking wellbeing through a political economy lens in the context of migration and multiple transitions. After we have examined the methodology for the research in England and Italy in Chapter 3, Chapter 4 elaborates core differences in how young people experienced the asylum/immigration and social care nexus in Italy and the UK. Subsequent chapters focus thematically on the core aspects of wellbeing identified by young people as those that they most valued. Chapter 5 considers the fundamental need for safety and freedom. Chapter  6 examines the centrality of legal status as a building block for security and constructing a future in Europe. Chapter 7 explores identity and belonging as central tenets to young people’s subjective wellbeing. Chapter 8 considers how young people seek to construct viable futures through the process of migration. Chapter 9 engages with the central importance of health, and in particular mental health, to a sense of wellbeing. Chapters 10 and 11 focus on how social ties and networks both in host countries and transnationally provide the connectedness that is so vital to young people sustaining their sense of feeling well. The Conclusion returns to the core questions addressed through the research and considers the implications of the findings for rethinking policy and practice.

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2

Conceptualizing Wellbeing in the Context of Migration and Youth Transitions Introduction With its numerous meanings and associations, the concept of wellbeing is as nebulous as it is prolific in contemporary life. This chapter considers some dominant notions, definitions and attempts at measuring wellbeing. It then goes on to consider the relevance and application of these conceptualizations of wellbeing to the lives and circumstances of unaccompanied migrant young people undergoing multiple transitions. The fact that young people on the move have unequal access to the resources they value as constitutive of their own wellbeing makes their different trajectories in the context of migration undeniably political. This means that wellbeing lends itself to a political economy analysis, something that is somewhat lacking in current work in the field. In this book, we build on the more established political economy critique of health, understood in its broadest sense (Illich 1976; Doyal and Pennell 1979; Navarro and Shi 2001; Nazroo 2003; Navarro 2009; Marmot et al 2020), and consider the dynamic, temporal and spatial aspects of wellbeing through a political lens. The chapter highlights the limitations of prevailing and dominant understandings of wellbeing, in particular their propensity to depoliticize it when its pursuit is fundamentally political, and to individualize it when it is inherently relational (White 2016).

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Widening the lens on health and wellbeing Over the past 50 years or so, there have been some important changes in how health and wellbeing are conceptualized and understood in Western health and wellbeing theory. One of the most important shifts has been away from a biomedical and pathological focus on what makes people ill and the sorts of micro-level interventions that might alleviate symptoms (for a good overview and critique, see Moore 2013). Alternative understandings around health have been developed by scholars such as Antonovsky in his theory of salutogenics (1979). His ideas about what promotes health, rather than what causes ill health, emerged from research with women who had survived the concentration camps of the Second World War. Antonovsky argues that despite having experienced extreme adversity, people can re-establish a sense of wellbeing through seeking out a sense of coherence – or a pervasive, dynamic feeling of confidence that life is predictable, manageable and meaningful. A sense of coherence, however, Antonovsky claims, is contingent on having access to and being able to use what he termed general resistance resources – biological, material and psychosocial factors that make it easier for people to perceive their lives as consistent, structured and understandable. Other key Western theorists have also been pivotal in influencing how we conceptualize health and wellbeing in Europe. Of particular note, but by no means intended to capture the broad corpus of related work, several scholars have fundamentally shaped our understandings. Ivan Illich’s seminal work Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (1976) was central to problematizing how medicine has fundamentally impacted on and in many ways been harmful to the ways in which society copes with normal life course events, such as birth and death. This is of particular relevance, as we will see, when we discuss the dominant medically focused response to young people’s experiences of mental and emotional wellbeing in the context of migration. Michel Foucault’s work, most notably The Birth of the Clinic (1973), has been similarly influential in demonstrating the power of the medical profession and the dehumanizing impact of separating the body and bodily functions from a person’s identity. Similarly, cultural anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, since almost a century ago, have focused on the crucial importance of understanding how wellbeing and key life transitions such as adolescence, or what she termed ‘coming of age’, are culturally and contextually determined (Mead 1928). These paradigm shifts have not only profoundly transformed ideas about what constitutes health and wellbeing, they have also widened the scope of enquiry. They point to the importance of understanding different aspects of the life course in

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Conceptualizing Wellbeing

context, taking account of the wider cultural, social and political norms that may simultaneously enhance wellbeing and undermine it. Ideas borne out of these bodies of work laid the foundations for new approaches to promoting health through frameworks such as the Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (WHO 1986). Prior to this, such ideas were behind the Primary Health Care movement of the 1970s, which sought to demedicalize health, redress power and resource imbalances to give people greater control over their own lives and wellbeing, and reclaim health from the clutches of a powerful medical profession (Macdonald 1993). Several other theorists have drawn a conceptual link between wellbeing and other concepts thought to be indicative of a ‘good’ or ‘meaningful’ life. Nussbaum (2011), for example, makes a direct connection between wellbeing and whether or not people are able to secure dignity. As discussed in Chapter 8 of this book, dignity, alongside pride, honour and autonomy, were identified as important factors for young people in maintaining a sense of wellbeing as they sought to secure viable futures through migration. While such holistic and expansive understandings of health and wellbeing help us to critically engage with these concepts in the context of migration, they nonetheless constitute a Westerncentric appreciation. Other important literatures have sought to culturally situate concepts related to migration and displacement in local and regional understandings. Recent work in the Middle East, for example, has identified the difficulties of translating certain ideas associated with wellbeing such as hospitality (Berg and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2018); meanwhile, literature stemming from this region and other parts of the world has demonstrated the central importance of honour and duty in migration projects among tight kinship societies (Coe et al 2011). Throughout the volume, we draw on young people’s subjective understandings of wellbeing and how these are also shaped by other non-Western traditions. These culturally situated ideas of wellbeing and migration are further explored in a forthcoming edited volume (Chase et al forthcoming) and in a series of working papers, available on the project website.1

Measuring wellbeing The expansive conceptualizations of wellbeing referred to above have in some ways become increasingly embedded in policy and practice intended to enhance people’s health outcomes. For example, in the United Kingdom (UK) in recent years there has been a proliferation of social prescribing to help alleviate clinical conditions through widening

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people’s access to a broader spectrum of services and opportunities known to be conducive to promoting their wellbeing. These include gym memberships and access to debt advice or to different cultural activities. Yet, paradoxically, such conceptualizations can often sit alongside more intransigent views of health held by elements of the medical profession and reflected in entrenched and inflexible modalities of providing health care and support. At the same time, this widened focus on wellbeing brings to the fore a different set of deliberations and dilemmas about what it means and how we capture and evaluate it in a meaningful way. While fundamentally wellbeing is about what is intrinsically good for us as human beings, Bradley (2015) points to the fact there is still no philosophical consensus concerning the nature of wellbeing, the constituent elements of wellbeing or the factors determining the wellbeing of a population. Despite the lack of consensus about what wellbeing is, what its constituent parts are and what determines whether or not (and how) people experience it, extensive investment has been made in recent years in attempts to measure and quantify it. A number of composite measures for wellbeing have been devised in order to enable national and international comparisons and to set benchmarks for policy and practice. Indices designed to quantify and measure wellbeing at global and national levels include the Human Development Index (HDI) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s ‘wellbeing’ measure.2 When wellbeing is considered within a framework of poverty alleviation, there are similarly rubrics that attempt to capture its multidimensionality: among these are the important work of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and the evolving Multidimensional Poverty Index. Importantly, these efforts are very much work in progress. At the time of writing, an evolving body of work is gaining traction that highlights the central importance of working directly with people living in poverty in order to determine which aspects of poverty and their impact on wellbeing are most salient in capturing the experience (ATD Fourth World 2019). This work has illuminated the central importance of embedding in such measures the often ignored psychological and social impacts of poverty, including the role of shame and stigma (Chase and Walker 2013; Walker 2014; Chase and BantebyaKyomuhendo 2015; Roelen 2017). At the same time, various new frameworks have been developed to capture and compare subjective wellbeing. The New Economics Foundation (NEF 2008) conceptualizes wellbeing around five key actions (connect with others; be active; take notice; keep learning; and give). Since 2012, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) has meanwhile

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Conceptualizing Wellbeing

embedded a four-part measure of personal ‘well-being’ within its Annual Population Survey. The four questions, for which respondents are asked to give a rating of between 1 and 10 (with one being the lowest rating and 10 being the highest), are: (i) Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?; (ii) Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things you do in your life are worthwhile?; (iii) Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?; and (iv) On a scale where nought is ‘not at all anxious’ and 10 is ‘completely anxious’, overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday? One framework that has been extensively applied to health and social care practice is the Every Child Matters (ECM) framework, launched in 2003 (TSO 2003) in the UK. Even though it is less commonly talked about in contemporary policy discussions, the ECM is still embedded in many frontline health and social care policies and practices relating to children and young people in England. The framework conceptualizes childhood wellbeing around five key markers – enjoying and achieving; being healthy; staying safe; (making a) positive contribution; and economic wellbeing. These same five elements are widely used by practitioners working with unaccompanied children and young people, such as in care and pathway plans (tools designed to help young people plan for a range of possible future outcomes: see Wade 2017). In other ways, wellbeing has been conceptualized according to a myriad of tests, ranging from symptom checklists through to assessments of perceived individual strengths and difficulties. All of the above approaches, and many others not cited here, adopt a similar perspective that wellbeing can be constituted as a set of measurable variables. These are used as evaluative tools to capture changes in a fixed set of wellbeing components over time and to enable comparisons between different countries, regions or other jurisdictions, or to make comparisons across different constituents of people (such as by gender, age, ethnicity or between rural, urban or peri-urban populations). Such measures and frameworks arguably serve their purpose in developing the evidence for holding policy makers to account and highlighting important global and national inequalities and injustices. They have also been instrumental in pushing the boundaries of how we conceptualize wellbeing at the macro‑level, for example through broadening the constituent components of measures to include impact on the environment – such as through the Happy Planet Index (NEF 2006) – and shifting ideas about development and wellbeing away from purely economic measures. Through spotlighting persistent failures to meet the basic needs of millions of people across the globe, frameworks such as the HDI have also indirectly informed the design of comparative global measures of development such as the Sustainable Development Goals (UN 2016)

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and their predecessors, the Millennium Development Goals, particularly as they relate to universal aspirations for good health and ‘well-being’ (Goal 3); Good Education (Goal 4); Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions (Goal 16); No Poverty (Goal 1); Gender Equality (Goal 5); and Decent Work and Economic Growth (Goal 8). Nonetheless, these approaches have their limitations. The composite variables they employ are reductionist, largely homogenizing people and their experiences and ignoring the complexities of their lives and circumstances over time. As noted by Andresen and Ben-Arieh (2016), there are also many potential pitfalls in attempting to capture wellbeing in a comparative perspective across different contexts, since there is always the risk of making normative judgements about what key concepts such as family, vulnerability, care and agency may mean in different cultural as well as socio-economic contexts. Their usefulness notwithstanding, for the most part such frameworks lead to largely decontextualized assessments of wellbeing. The challenges of measuring wellbeing in any meaningful way became apparent in our early discussions with young people in the study. We attempted to use the personal ‘well-being’ questions embedded in the ONS framework outlined above. For each question, respondents are asked to apply a scale of 1–10 (1 being the lowest measure, 10 being the highest). One question asks, ‘how happy did you feel yesterday’? At the end of our first meeting with 21-year-old Aaron from Eritrea, we posed this question. Aaron first reflected on the fact that, despite multiple challenges, he was still managing quite well to do things, had a strong social network and sense of purpose of where he was going – and so responded, ‘nine … no perhaps 10’. He then faltered and said, ‘No, actually I was sad yesterday because in that time I was watching a video … it was very, very emotional.’ Aaron went on to relate how his friend had put on a video about Eritrea that had really affected him emotionally, and so he felt it put him back to zero on the scale. Researcher: Aaron: Researcher: Aaron:

‘Zero?’ ‘Yes, ’cos that will make me think too much about things.’ ‘So an event like that really affects how you are feeling?’ ‘Yes, because it raises questions about why I am working hard, mentally it affects you.’

The example is just one of many that demonstrate that such transient and shifting feelings of wellbeing are arguably too difficult to capture by a

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measure at any point in time. While there were some efforts to continue to use the scale to capture elements of young people’s wellbeing, the team soon concluded that attempting to understand wellbeing in any abstract quantitative sense outside its temporal and contextual dynamics was a largely meaningless pursuit. The survey questions did, however, prove to be useful prompts in eliciting young people’s understandings of wellbeing and how it was culturally and linguistically determined. Considering this, we sought a more nuanced understanding of what wellbeing meant for young people over space and time. As well as gaining a better grasp of what it was, we needed also somehow to capture its dynamics – how could we understand the concept in contexts of transition and uncertainty? Nowhere is this question more relevant than in the context of migration, when people on the move may not only have limited access to the types of resources required to sustain a sense of wellbeing, but also when the wider legal, political, social, and economic frameworks governing their lives are in a constant state of flux, thus undermining their chances of gaining or staying in control over the constituents of their wellbeing over place and time.

Applying a sociological lens to understanding wellbeing Another way of conceptualizing wellbeing is to use what C. Wright Mills (1959) refers to as the sociological imagination. Investigating the health and wellbeing of individuals or groups of people through a sociological imagination requires us to understand what else is going on in their lives now and what has happened previously. ‘Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both’, Wright Mills explains (1959: 3). Understanding the link between history and biography captures the temporality of life experiences and their impact on wellbeing as well as its wider social, economic and political determinants. Importantly, and of particular relevance to the current work, Wright Mills focuses on the importance of power and the power ‘elite’ who dominate and largely determine what aspects of life and society come to be considered important policy issues and thus garner a response. Such processes, he argues, frequently ignore those individuals and communities with least power and representation, meaning that their daily ‘troubles’ tend to be considered as personal problems or failings. The role of the social scientist, asserts Wright Mills, is to translate personal troubles into public issues. This book picks up the challenge to demonstrate how what is happening at the personal level of migrant young people’s lives can only

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be understood through an analysis of the wider social and political world in which they move and live. This is what we mean by the politics of wellbeing in transition. Throughout this work, wellbeing is certainly considered objectively to some extent, focusing on aspects such as physical and mental health, education, housing, employment, legal status and family and community life. However, the book premises the subjective and relational elements of wellbeing – that is, the things that young people valued in terms of their own sense of wellbeing. Adopting the sociological imagination of health and wellbeing means that we can analyse it through the structural and historical features of the sociocultural system. In doing so, as we will demonstrate, we end up with a less utilitarian understanding of wellbeing to that captured by the sorts of measures presented earlier. Instead, we can begin to situate the lives and experiences of migrant young people within the wider and constantly shifting global geopolitical landscape. Ideas similar to those of C. Wright Mills arguably emerge through Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (1979). And while there are important differences between the early versions of Bronfenbrenner’s original theory and the later somewhat adapted bio-ecological (or process, person, context, time) model and its application (see Tudge et al 2009), there are continuities in the core theory. Essentially, it is based on the idea that a person’s development reflects the influence of five interacting environmental systems–the micro-, meso-, exo-, macro- and chronosystems. The microsystem is any immediate environment in which a person spends most of their time interacting with other people and things. For unaccompanied migrant young people, the most important microsystems are likely the sorts of relationships they establish with peers and practitioners, in care or accommodation settings, school or college, place of worship, workplace, youth group, leisure spaces, nongovernmental organization drop in service and so on. Since young people spend time in more than one microsystem, the interrelations between these different microsystems is very important to understand. Experiences in one microsystem affect experiences in other microsystems. For example, difficulties with respect to their legal status, poor accommodation or stemming from past experiences will have a knock-on effect on their ability to learn in college or school. This interaction between the different microsystems is known as the mesosystem level. The exosystem level covers those contexts that have important indirect influences on individuals’ development and wellbeing. This system could include different education, health and social care infrastructures to which young people might be referred or which determine what they do and do not have access to in terms of support. For example, a national government

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or municipality may set policies or introduce programmes that have a positive or negative effect on access to education for refugee or migrant young people or indirectly affect the sort of living arrangements in which they are placed – even though young people may not be aware of the influence of these structures and systems on their circumstances and wellbeing. The macrosystem was defined by Bronfenbrenner as the broader context shaping people’s lives. This might include belief systems, values, laws, cultural ideologies and practices, resources, hazards and opportunity structures, which all impact the individual. In the context of migrant young people, the macrosystem level fundamentally shapes the direct experiences of unaccompanied young people. For example, at the time of this research, national and international policies on migration and the related contemporary media and public discourses combined to generate a predominantly hostile environment, largely disbelieving of the plight of young people making claims for asylum. The final element of the social ecological model is the chronosystem, which refers to the patterns of events and transitions over time. These may be triggered by life experiences that occur both internally (within the individual) or externally (in the environment). Examples include events in a young person’s biography leading to their migration or how their migration experience impacts them at different times. Of particular relevance to the work reported on in this book is the critical point of turning 18 for unaccompanied migrant young people and how this impacts their wellbeing. The social ecological model requires a critical application if it is to usefully recognize and engage with the power struggles and inequalities that determine health and wellbeing outcomes. The multilayered structures and systems governing the lives of migrant and refugee young people mean that every point of their trajectory is profoundly politicized, beginning with how they are discursively considered in policy, through to how they are responded to on an individual basis as they are funnelled through bureaucratic processes and procedures. Hence, young people’s lives are governed and deeply influenced by global and national geopolitical, social, cultural and historical factors that transcend the minutiae of their day-to-day existences.

Wellbeing and the capabilities approach The human development literature is primarily concerned with alleviating poverty and enabling communities around the world to improve the quality of their lives. It thus speaks directly to notions of wellbeing. Over

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the last few decades, through the work of Robert Chambers (1983), Amartya Sen (1993) and many others, development in this regard has been reconceptualized to move us beyond models that are primarily about economic growth. The multidimensionality of wellbeing engages with notions of human rights, power, agency, ownership, participation and voice, and with emotions of dignity, self-esteem and self-determination. These approaches are premised on ideas of equity and solidarity that see development as inherently relational rather than individual or about selfaggrandisement (White 2009). Stemming from this body of work, a final conceptual framing of wellbeing in relation to the lives of migrant young people is the capability approach. This foregrounds what young people value as being fundamental to their wellbeing. The approach, developed by Amartya Sen (1993) and others, pushes back against ideas of human development understood solely in relation to human capital, where people are viewed as means of production. Drawing on ideas ranging from Aristotle’s Eudaimonia, or human flourishing, to Marx’s notions of human freedom and emancipation (Clark 2006), Sen argues that we should make the quality of people’s lives the ultimate goal, and see production and prosperity as a means to allow people to live the lives they value (Sen 1993). The capability approach provides a useful analytical tool (Robeyns 2006, 2016) for understanding the factors that promote or undermine migrant young people’s wellbeing. To start with, it helps in distinguishing between young people’s capabilities, the freedoms and opportunities to be and do what they most value, and functionings, what they are able to be or do in reality. Nussbaum (2002) makes the case that we should be more concerned with the political goal of expanding capabilities or opportunities than with actual functionings, despite the complexities in determining what opportunities and freedoms are in fact available (Zimmermann 2006; Walby 2012). Equally important is to understand the process factors that constrain or promote young people’s agency. This includes the factors affecting their ability to access and make the most of freedoms and opportunities (Burchardt and Vizard 2011), and the power relations and struggles surrounding agency that determine what constitute ‘genuine choices’ for action (Wolff and de-Shalit 2007; Dean 2009). Beyond highlighting the importance of capabilities (or opportunities and freedoms) over functionings (or outcomes), a further important distinction in the capability approach is between negative and positive freedoms and the notion of capability expansion (Sen 1993; Landau and Duponchel 2011). For example, Nussbaum (2002) among others (Burchardt and Vizard 2011) has criticized certain human rights and humanitarian frameworks for being overly concerned with negative

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freedoms – such as protection from harm (Landau and Duponchel 2011) – rather than with enhancing positive opportunities to enable people to lead lives they value. Others have also critiqued applications of the capability approach for their over emphasis on reducing external constraints and interferences, rather than offering real opportunities for self-development (Zimmermann 2006; Dean 2009; Walby 2012). Bearing in mind these critiques, the current work attempts to shed new light on the freedoms that migrant young people perceive they have in order to live the lives they most value and whether they have a capability set that Nussbaum (2002) defines as ‘truly human’. Our goal is to provoke reflection on how protection might be redefined to incorporate opportunities for expanding human agency, enabling young people to move from basic capabilities to higher order capabilities linked to personal fulfilment and the realization of dignity, dreams and aspirations, all of which, as we will see, are at the heart of how young people in the study understood wellbeing.

Wellbeing and multiple transitions Returning to the importance of capturing wellbeing in contexts of rapid change and upheaval, it is worth outlining the complex range of transitions that migrant young people are likely to simultaneously experience. This is all the more important since, in our experience, there is a tendency across the growing body of work on young people crossing international borders to essentialize their migratory experiences over the fact that they are, first and foremost, young people (Bhabha 2016; Lems et al 2019). The most significant shift for migrant children arriving in England, Italy or other parts of Europe is the institutional or bureaucratic transition to adulthood at the age of 18. As recognized in the sociology of childhood literature, this transition may have in real terms happened long before (Mayall 2004; Morrow and Boyden 2018); while migration scholars have highlighted migration as a key marker of a transition to adulthood, or more specifically to manhood for boys and young men, irrespective of what age it occurs at (Monsutti 2007; Crivello 2011). At the same time, young people’s transitions across multiple borders (as well as, importantly, relocations within country borders) also coincide with shifts in cultural and social norms. These include exposure to new languages, food, social mores, customs, religious or faith practices. While some cultural spaces may be inclusive and supportive, others can be exclusionary, isolating and discriminatory. Moreover, and as we capture in detail in the following chapters, young people also experience forced transitions across bureaucratic spaces that bring with them shifts in entitlements, rights, degrees of support,

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financial resources and educational opportunities. These transitions often come with geographical relocations and disconnections from social networks, such as being moved to a different city if a young person turns 18 and enters the adult asylum system in Britain, or being moved across a city and from school to school when relocating from one accommodation placement to another within the UK or Italy. In their often sudden transition from privileged rights holders as ‘children’ – who are afforded the same rights as citizen children by law in (most) European Union member states – to ‘adults’, unaccompanied migrant and refugee young people occupy a unique position in relation to the welfare state, the immigration regime and to what Sainsbury (2012) has referred to as the associated political dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. As children, they may receive free education, shelter and health care, whereas once they ‘become adult’ this may cease to be this case (Wade 2017). Throughout these movements, young people are constantly making cognitive transitions as they strive to grasp and respond to new environments, learn different languages and attempt to navigate myriad bureaucratic, social, political and emotional spaces. There is a growing literature on life transitions as they relate to young people. Such work has demonstrated the central importance of place and space in determining their access to the resources that enhance or constrain their life opportunities (Thomson et al 2004); the centrality of social networks in explaining young people’s outcomes in contexts of social risk (Blakeslee 2012); the role of political developments and social change (Honwana 2012); and the importance of capturing young people’s meaning-making over time (Holmegaard et al 2015). As argued by Morrow (2013), with these exceptions, much literature on youth transitions is framed by the idea of ‘youth at risk’ or ‘youth as risk’ – largely ignoring the other social, economic and other contextual factors, such as gender, class, caste, ethnicity or sexual identities, that shape these transitions. Instead, positive transitions to adulthood are most often evaluated in terms of human capital success – such as entry into the labour market or participation in higher or further education. This highlights the importance of using the concept of transition critically and at the same time recognizing that the contexts of young people’s lives are in constant and rapid transition (Morrow 2013).

Wellbeing and migration The context of migration arguably presents one of the greatest challenges for capturing or measuring wellbeing in any meaningful way. This is

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because in situations of mobility, the multiple constituents of wellbeing are experienced concurrently in complex and fluctuating ways. Grønseth (2013) has highlighted how in contexts of migration, wellbeing – and its converse ‘suffering’ – are fundamentally embedded in social relations and in a constant state of change. Any study of wellbeing is not an investigation of a static condition, but rather an exploration of a quest for different experiences, sensations and feelings of comfort, contentment, security, joy, pleasure, achievement and success which may occur in various degrees along a continuum between illness and health as it shifts in different everyday moments and phases of a life-span. (Grønseth 2013: 13) The quest element of this quotation takes us back to a core constituent of wellbeing discussed earlier, that of agency – or the ability to take action and move forward towards realizing life goals. Grønseth points particularly to what she terms ‘existential agency’, a ‘bodily experience of intersubjectivity, made up of paradoxes, contradictions and ambivalences’. This gains force not from an individual will towards self-realization or authenticity, but from the everyday struggle to create continuous intuitive, idealistic and opportunistic changes of course that suggest more or less satisfactory solutions to the events that form the life lived. (Grønseth 2013: 13) As will be seen, such ‘existential agency’ featured prominently in the narratives young people recounted to us as they made sense of their lifeworlds and sought to realize the lives they aspired to in the face of limits and borders. Grønseth also refers to the notion of ‘borderlands’, between self and other and between different life-worlds (for example, where one has come from and where one travels to). People on the move strive to engage in these borderland spaces, where they generate new practices and new identities in their efforts to secure a sense of wellbeing and prosperity. Grønseth’s understanding of engagement in the borderland suggests the idea of not just being, but of ‘becoming’; of reinventing or re-presenting oneself. The borderlands are simultaneously spaces of ‘disruptions, sufferings and desires’ (Pinelli 2013: 40). While generating difficulties and being spaces of marginalization and isolation, borderlands can also lead to creative action (Georgiadou 2013) and change, and enable migrant people to reject labels of victimhood and take back control over

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those aspects of their lives most important to them. This can emerge from connecting their past experiences to their present everyday lives. Thus, the migratory experience situates people at a juncture at which they must negotiate emotions generated by memories, the here and now, and dreams for the future (Grønseth 2013). Determining whether or not it is possible to begin to measure these dynamics of wellbeing in any meaningful way is beyond the scope of this work, but is, nonetheless, an important focus for future enquiry. It is this dynamic conceptualization of wellbeing that we strive to capture as we present our analysis and discussion.

Cross-cultural perspectives on wellbeing We are aware that our framing of wellbeing primarily adopts the lens of Western literature and that much is lost in cultural and linguistic translations of the concept (see, for example, White 2016). While there is much written on understanding health in different cultural contexts, there appears to be surprisingly little written on how concepts such as health or wellbeing carry across different languages and cultures – ideas of equivalence or distinction. This is not something we can address in any depth here. During discussions with our research team, we asked young people to write down words that connoted ‘wellbeing’ in the language with which they were most familiar. While in Pashto (one of the languages spoken in Afghanistan) the words qabil-liet and tawanai were said to mean having the energy to perform a task, seyhat (the latter used also in Farsi and Tajik) was said to capture ideas about health, being used as a form of greeting – ‘seyhat tan khub hast?’ (are you well?). The words tandaroostee and salamatee, meanwhile, were said to refer to good health through good sleep. In Tigrinya, the word for health was Tee’na, and this was considered to refer narrowly to physical or mental health rather than a holistic definition of health akin to the notion of wellbeing. Many young people from Eritrea referred to the word netsanet or freedom in the context of migration (see also Tecle and Bozzini forthcoming), suggesting migration was a search for freedom to do and be what young people valued (perhaps an idea akin to the capability approach discussed earlier). Similarly, the word Mebet was said to refer to the right to freedom of expression and to hold opinions without interference, also something that young people might seek through migration. Research assistants who spoke Albanian said that the word Mirëqënie captures quite expansive and collective ideas of wellbeing. It is used to refer to a situation when the means of subsistence are not lacking and when all material, family, cultural, economic and spiritual needs of the society have been met, including the

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wellbeing of the working class. This is, however, considered to be a term used by academics. Common everyday words to denote wellbeing include Begati – which means having an abundance of everything, life with good and lasting wellbeing; while the term Vit l begat means a prosperous year. The word bereqet, or blessings, is said to be used in good times, such as when there has been a good harvest; while the word bollëk denotes abundance and having more than you need in terms of food and water.

Wellbeing as inherently relational In contrast to dominant notions of health and wellbeing, which tend to focus on the individual, young people in the Becoming Adult study mostly referred to wellbeing as a collective pursuit, inextricably linked to ideas of connectivity, relationships, duties and responsibilities towards others. Giving back to community, concerns about family back in other countries, and reconnecting and forging links with others through places of worship, football pitches or other community settings were key to how young people spoke about what helped them to feel well. Individual wellbeing was discussed in relation to others with whom they were connected, either in the UK and Italy (including those they had migrated with or met along the way) or in countries of origin or transit. Many carried with them responsibilities for securing the futures of families, fully aware that their migration constituted a collective investment for which they felt obliged to repay in whatever ways they could. Sometimes, they carried their family members with them in physical reminders: a piece of jewellery, a tattoo or a photo on their phone. A desire or perceived duty to fulfil familial obligations brought with it a combination of additional pressures, but also pride and a sense of achievement. For those whose migratory journeys had not been successful or who remained in situations of legal limbo, the impact of their personal struggles on their health and wellbeing were frequently exacerbated by feelings of inadequacy, guilt and shame for being unable to meet the expectations and needs of others. At the same time, these national and transnational connections and ties could have a hugely positive impact on young people’s senses of wellbeing, sustaining feelings of security and continuity despite multiple upheavals and changes. These insights point to the importance of bypassing the common conceptual distinction between subjective and objective wellbeing and instead centring on how wellbeing is inherently relational, socially and culturally constructed, rooted in particular contexts and points in time. Moreover, we can consider wellbeing as a process which traverses the

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life course rather than a state and something that is also, fundamentally, a field of power (White 2016). For this reason, developing a better grasp of the complexities of these relational dynamics through the meanings and associations afforded to wellbeing by young people was a core pursuit in our empirical work and analysis.

The politics of wellbeing in transition One of the central intentions of this book, as noted earlier, is to repoliticize thinking about health and wellbeing. Conceptualizing wellbeing through the lens of freedom to pursue viable futures renders it inherently political. To date, there has been some work on the political economy of wellbeing (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009; NEF 2011); increasing attention given to the interface between health and migration (Villalón 2010, 2015; Ullman et al 2011; Renzaho 2016; Thomas 2016); and a growing focus on postmigration stressors and how they can adversely impact the health and wellbeing of people subjected to forced migration (for a good overview see Li et  al 2016). This book bridges and consolidates these distinct bodies of work, while at the same time shifting the emphasis away from past experiences and their impact on wellbeing towards the intersection between wellbeing and futures. In doing so, it explores connections between the politics of immigration, asylum and care, and the direct impact of such politics on migrant young people who are becoming adult and striving for futures within a world seemingly bent on suffocating rather than giving life to their aspirations and dreams. To conclude, this work seeks to capture how we might understand wellbeing in transition. It does this within the framework of migration studies (engaging with ideas of forced migration, citizenship and transnational personhood). Yet we are equally concerned with the sociological imagination of health and wellbeing, and, in keeping with the socio-ecological model discussed earlier, seek to understand individual and collective wellbeing through traversing policy fields of immigration, law, social care, education, health and family life. A political analysis of health and wellbeing, we argue, points to policies that are radically transformative rather than reproductive of the status quo and its inherent inequalities. If, for example, we ask what accounts for the pervasive anxiety and poor mental health of many young people with no secure legal status, and what the appropriate response should be from a health and wellbeing perspective, a depoliticized analysis might suggest that such anxiety results from an individual inability to cope with previous trauma or current uncertainty. It is equally likely to suggest the

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use of medication or therapeutic interventions to alleviate the symptoms. Addressing these questions through a political lens suggests an entirely different approach, in terms of what the response should be and the range of actors and institutions who have a duty and responsibility to act. Our view is that, for too long, the frailties, vulnerabilities and difficulties associated with some migrant young people have overly emphasized the individual without engaging with the highly politicized contexts within which they strive to function. This book seeks to resituate wellbeing within its political frame and to push the boundaries of thinking in how we analyse and respond to wellbeing in situations of multiple transitions.

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3

Capturing Wellbeing in Transition: An Alternative Approach On one of our team residential trips to Cornwall, we took a walk along the stunning coastline between Boscastle and Tintagel, chatting as we went. A conversation sprung up between two of our team, one from Albania and one from Afghanistan. Offshore was a small rowing boat, and the Albanian colleague asked the other whether he had ever been rowing. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I’m quite good at it.’ When asked how come, the response was, ‘I learnt coming from Turkey to Greece … it took about ten hours.’ There was a long pause as realization set in. Then came the follow up question: ‘Oh … so you made it then?’ ‘Yes, I made it.’ ‘Well done, mate!’ They both laughed. In that brief moment, a friendship was cemented.

Introduction This anecdote captures much of what the project set out to do. We wanted to bring to light the diversity of young people’s experiences and counter some of the homogenizing narratives concerning migrant young people that have come to dominate policy and practice, moving away from an objective analysis of young people’s migratory experiences and instead presenting them as human personal challenges and triumphs.

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A key component of this was to design and execute a methodology that was inclusive, mutually beneficial and enriching. This chapter provides an overview of the methodological approach to the research. It describes its participative and collaborative nature, which involved working closely with a team of young people who had previously migrated alone to the United Kingdom (UK) and Italy as core members of the research team. It outlines the rationale for the approach, how the countries of origin were selected, details of research participants, including how access was negotiated, and how contact was maintained with them over time. The chapter then goes on discuss how beliefs, ideas and meanings surrounding wellbeing were reached inductively through questions that sought to determine what young people valued in their lives and what helped them to feel well and happy. There follows a discussion of how the analysis of findings was conducted, before some reflections on the ethical considerations and dilemmas posed by the research as well as its limitations and challenges.

Research design This research builds on a body of existing research in this area to which we contributed through scoping work conducted between 2012 and 2015 (Chase 2013a, 2013b; Chase and Allsopp 2014; Allsopp et al 2015). We also draw on background knowledge of the issues involved that is garnered from several years of our respective working and volunteering with non‑governmental organizations (NGOs) and youth organizations supporting migrants in accessing welfare and humanitarian assistance in Europe.

Overall approach The study adopted an interpretivist approach to understanding the experiences of migration and wellbeing outcomes of young people from three main countries of origin – Afghanistan, Albania and Eritrea – in the UK and a more diverse range of countries of origin in Italy. Research was carried out in four cities in England and in one city (across two sites) in Italy. Our aim was to understand wellbeing issues beyond a statecentric approach and instead understand how experiences, policies and practices are to some extent localized (Crow 2013). Working at the city level allowed for rich ethnographic case studies to be developed. At the same

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time, it means that, owing to local peculiarities and specificities, there should be caution in over-generalizing findings. For several reasons, systematic comparative analysis in this area of research is difficult. This is because of a range of inconsistencies in how policies are operationalized across diverse levels of governance: at the European level, country level (in the UK context, this includes differences across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and local level (European Migration Network 2010). This research therefore adopted Clasen’s definition of comparative research, which ‘systematically investigates one or more phenomena in two or more countries or “nations” as given contexts for actors and institutions’ (1999: 2, italics added). England and Italy were chosen as national contexts for the study since these nation states – in their historical, political and institutional specificities – provide rich contexts for comparison. Importantly, the research did not set out to make systematic generalizations about young migrants’ experiences in Italy or in England but rather, through a localized, qualitative case study approach that has emerged in social policy since the 1990s, to shed light on young people’s everyday experiences of implementation and practices of social policy (Daly 2003). We refer to England rather than the UK throughout this chapter in recognition that although some aspects of relevant policy (in particular immigration control) have a UK-wide jurisdiction, others do not. For example, Scotland has a number of provisions for unaccompanied young people not available to them in England. These include legal guardianship for all unaccompanied minors and policies that facilitate their access to higher education (Rigby et al 2018). England and Italy were chosen as national contexts for six main reasons, on the grounds of both commonalities and differences. First, both countries are host to thousands of unaccompanied minors. Second, both states have adopted social care models that shift entitlements significantly for this group as they ‘become adult’, as institutionally defined, at the age of 18. Third, Italy and England have very different political ideologies of welfare and different traditions of immigration, which generate distinct possibilities and constraints regarding the inclusion of young migrants once they have made the transition to institutional adulthood. Fourth, Italy and England, while party to European Union (EU) law and policy on unaccompanied minors, in effect have implemented two different types of policies and practices in relation to this group, exemplifying variation in policy application more broadly across Europe (European Migration Network 2010; EU Agency for Fundamental Rights 2011; Chase and Allsopp 2014). This variation includes the levels at which policies concerning this group are governed; the ways in which unaccompanied

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minors are typically institutionalized (as asylum-seeking minors in England versus unaccompanied minors or asylum-seeking minors in Italy); and the options open to them as they turn 18. Fifth, earlier scoping work for this research conducted in 2014 and 2015 indicated some mobility of unaccompanied young people between Italy and England in both directions, suggesting the importance of moving away from social policy research that is locked into a single country (Clasen 2013) and of shedding further light on the under-explored phenomenon of secondary migration (Andersson 2014). These shifting mobility biographies (Frändberg 2014) represent an important new development in European migration patterns and how the state as a force of regulation, control, surveillance and potential violence (through detention or deportation) shapes secondary migration across both regions and nation states. The fact that young migrants make choices informed by how easy it is to evade the state once they become undocumented, and adopt strategies of visibility or invisibility, is nevertheless documented in some prior research (Gonzales 2011; Bloch et al 2012, 2014; Allsopp et al 2015). The current project enables further exploration of these issues. Sixth, although the main countries of origin for unaccompanied minors vary between England and Italy, certain groups, such as Afghans, Albanians and Eritreans, are common between them (Eurostat 2013). This allows for consideration of the similarities and differences in outcomes for migrant young people from these countries in both Italy and England. While this book focuses its comparative insights primarily on individuals from Afghanistan, Eritrea and Albania, it also draws some insights from ethnographic work and additional interviews conducted in Italy with individuals from other countries of origin, including, for example, Sudan, Egypt, Iran and Ghana. A further consideration is that the research team had pre-existing connections in England and Italy and skills in both English and Italian languages. This helped us to secure access to participants in the two field contexts. An important bias in the research was our starting point of greater familiarity with the English context, having worked as researchers (and the second author as a support worker) in this setting for several years prior to beginning the research, as well as both being British ourselves. Supported by the first author through a field visit and regular contact, the second author conducted all the research in Italy and contributed to the research in England as part of a grant-linked studentship that followed and added to the methodology of the main Economic and Social Research Councilfunded research project. In both countries, interviews were conducted with practitioner and policy stakeholders as well as with young people. While the voices of young people are foregrounded in this volume, these policy and practice insights were essential to informing the analysis presented

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herein. Further detail of these insights can be found in other project publications (Humphris and Sigona 2018; Meloni and Humphris 2019). Throughout the research, the methodology and analysis consistently worked from the ground up, from young people’s lived experiences to the structures in which they are situated and in which they situated themselves (in keeping with the social ecological model outlined in Chapter 2). This involved an inductive and open approach to theorizing wellbeing based on observation (Mabbett and Bolderson 1999; Glaser and Strauss [1999] 2017) and engaging with wellbeing as a sensitizing concept (Blumer 1969; Charmaz 2006). The approach sought to emphasize the ways in which individuals are bounded by and connected to others – at local, national and transnational levels; how agency and structure generate complex dynamics with respect to what people can and cannot do and what they are willing to do or the risks they will take; and how actions and transitions are shaped by time and space. Amid this shifting terrain is the fact that many young people themselves are also ‘on the move’. The epistemological challenge is to find theories, approaches and methods that can capture the individual experience embedded within dynamic configurations (Archer 2007; Thomson 2011). For the young people in the current study, the elements of such configuration include, among other factors, nationality, gender, ethnicity, age, legal status, class, sexuality, health and family. Hence, biographical motifs illuminate beyond the individual situation and experience, connect to others’ experiences and demonstrate their broader implications. The research is informed by our recognition of the enduring importance of national policy frameworks, and in particular of both the symbolic and very real violent impacts of border controls on individuals’ lived experiences (Joppke 2006; Abizadeh 2010; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Bloch and Schuster 2005; Andersson 2014). At the same time, it is driven by a desire to avoid ‘methodological nationalism’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2008), which takes for granted that the nation state should be the unit of analysis – something that seems counter-intuitive given what we had already gleaned about young people’s mobilities. We achieved this by adopting an understanding of multiple and fluid identities and forms of belonging (Yuval-Davis 2011), and also through integrating the role of transnational and collective networks within considerations of welfare and wellbeing.

Participatory peer research The research was designed according to theories of participatory and peer research and informed by feminist and postcolonial critiques of

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conventional research methods (Pain 2004; Beazley and Ennew 2006; Dentith et  al 2012). These share the conviction that being actively involved in processes affecting one’s life is a basic human right (Beazley and Ennew 2006; Crivello et al 2009; Fargas-Malet et al 2010; McCartan et al 2012; D’Amico et al 2016). They involve participants and researchers working together not only to describe and interpret social reality, but also ultimately to change it and enable participants to derive benefits from their involvement (Maguire 1987; Cahill 2007; Cook 2012; Dentith et al 2012; McCartan et al 2012). Peer researchers were identified and appointed as research assistants with the support of local NGOs with whom we had worked in the earlier scoping study and during the early stages of our research design. Where they had legal status, assistants were paid through the university pay roll. Where their legal status was insecure, meaning that they had no right to employment, they were compensated for their time through other, non-monetary, means. In England, ten peer researchers (three young women and seven young men) took part in various stages of the research with a core team of six who managed to stay involved for the duration of the project. All originated from the same core countries of origin that were the focus of the study (Afghanistan, Albania and Eritrea) and were within the same age range. In Italy, meanwhile, we worked with three peer researchers between the ages of 17 and 25 who were living in different types of accommodation in different parts of the city. They were male and came from Afghanistan, Albania and Ghana. Despite attempts to recruit young women, in practice this was not possible since most of those we encountered in Italy were either in transit or in protected accommodation arrangements because of concerns of trafficking, among other identified risks. While some team members had to cease or cut down their involvement over time owing to other commitments and complications in their lives (including issues related to their own immigration status), they nonetheless made valuable contributions to the research, particularly in the early design phases of the work. Research assistants played a crucial role in all aspects of the research process from refining the design, identifying ‘hard-to-reach’ interviewees (such as those outside the care system) and maintaining contact with them over time, through data collection and analysis, to shaping the outputs from the research including writing for publication. These included a song and music video,1 in addition to the three-minute animation Dear Habib,2 which narrates the life project of one Afghan participant. We coordinated work between the team of research assistants and our other colleagues on the project, Nando Sigona, Dawn Chatty, Francesca Meloni and Rachel Humphries, through a series of strategy retreats. Research assistants were

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trained in basic research methods and ethics at the start of the project at a summer school hosted at the University of Oxford and led by members of the research team, and subsequently through a combination of followup trainings and on-site mentoring and support. During the process of data collection, research assistants always worked directly with a senior member of the research team. However, they independently maintained contact with research participants, often taking on the roles of befrienders, signposting young people to other services and support when necessary and appropriate.

Methods The research comprised five integrated methodological elements: 1)  critical policy analysis; 2)  narrative interviews; 3)  participant observation/ethnography; 4) arts-based methods and 5) elite interviews combined, in England, with freedom of information requests to all local authorities.

Critical policy analysis The research adopted a multilevel analysis of asylum and immigration governance, which involved critical analysis of a range of local, national and international policies governing the lives of unaccompanied young migrants and refugees. This work helped to develop understanding of the different policy pathways and bureaucratic practices relevant to their experiences and life projects and of the ideas that inform them. Policy analysis involved coding the policy documents according to key normative themes and operational principles, as well as detailing recommended processes and bureaucratic procedures. This analysis served as a point of comparison with what was observed on the ground during the fieldwork. Analysis was presented to a group of policy experts for feedback and refinement.

Semi-structured narrative interviews More than 100 young people participated in narrative interviews on the topic of wellbeing, aspirations and life projects in England and Italy. They were all unaccompanied migrants between the ages of 16 and 25 and, in keeping with the broader demographic profile of unaccompanied minors

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in Europe, 90 per cent of them were boys and young men. We maintained contact with a diverse sub-sample of interviewees over time via social media and telephone, and conducted a series of follow-up interviews with some of the young people in order to capture how aspects of their wellbeing changed over time and, for many who had migrated again within or across national borders, over place. A precedent for maintaining contact through these methods with a similar cohort of young people was established by documentary film-maker Margreth Olin, who had followed the trajectories of unaccompanied young people becoming adult within the asylum system in Norway and with whom we were in contact as we designed the research. Contact was maintained with a subset of young people over a substantial period of time, while others took part in a single interview. The diverse nature of young people’s involvement was a result of a combination of personal preferences of the young people taking part, pragmatic decisions about the feasibility of maintaining contact and to some extent serendipity – in that some young people went off the radar for a while but then reemerged at a later stage in the research. Follow-up interviews sometimes raised methodological challenges that are important to note, if only for the fact that there appears to be little previously written on these issues and the sorts of dilemmas they raise for researcher and participant alike. Sometimes a young person had shared a dream or aspiration with the research team at one point but at a subsequent meeting or interaction was reluctant to reveal that they had been unsuccessful in progressing this plan to its next stage (McDowell 2001). At other times, young people gave different accounts of aspects of their past experiences, current situation or future intentions at each interview, making it hard to piece these together in a coherent narrative. We made sense of these disjointed accounts by situating them in contexts of change and upheaval that are by their nature fragmented, and by avoiding forcing the expectation of coherence through alluding to these inconsistencies, which we considered would represent a form of epistemic violence (Spivak 1988). In all field locations, we sought out participants who had a range of levels of contact with institutional support, as well as those embedded within institutions, so as to maximize variability. Interviews were conducted in the languages spoken by the research team (including the research assistants): English, French, Italian, Tigrinya, Amharic, Albanian, Arabic, Dari, Farsi and Pashtun. Interviews were simultaneously interpreted if not conducted in English and either audio-recorded or typed/handwritten then transcribed. Where appropriate (for example, if the participant was particularly shy or fluency of language was an issue), we complemented the interviews with participatory methods using photos, maps, diagrams,

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lifelines (timelines), artefacts or proverbs, as has been the practice in past biographical narrative studies with young people (Henderson et al 2007; Giorgi and Fasulo 2013). It was common for young people to take out their phones and show us photographs spontaneously as part of explaining their life and/or migratory projects. All members of the research team were encouraged to take field note observations, documenting how they perceived the interviews to have gone, how participants seemed to respond, the things that seemed to go well and how we might learn from and improve on the research approach in future. As such, reflexivity was built into the research process throughout.

Participant observation/ethnography Participant observation was of primary importance given the focus on young people’s lived experiences. Our approach drew on ideas related to symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1969) and the phenomenological importance of discourse, narrative and language in social policy and in refugee and migration studies. Understanding through observation how institutional procedures were enacted with respect to unaccompanied migrant young people was especially salient. This included the placement of young people into diverse policy categories (child/adult; refugee/failed asylum seeker; unaccompanied child/asylum-seeking child, for example); the management of transitions between these different categories over time; and the range of bureaucratic actors and their different roles. Smith explains the relevance of ethnography as a method for exploring people’s lived experiences of social policies thus: [W]orking from people’s experience of their own doings, knitting different perspectives and positions together, and exploring text-based forms of organization provide a means of constructing representations of how things work … through such analysis we can arrive at an organic understanding of power, of intentions, desires, opportunities, impediments, blockages and powerlessness. (Smith 2005: 183) The participant observation/ethnography involved spending substantial periods of time within all research sites, frequently moving around in the company of one or more research assistants. The second author spent eight and nine months respectively volunteering at three support centres for unaccompanied migrants and refugees, in one city in England and two locations in Italy (one for undocumented migrants in transit who

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were primarily Eritrean and the other for documented unaccompanied minors who were staying, at least for a while, in Italy). In both sites, her participation included collaborating with museums on a series of art workshops and exhibitions. The relatively long length of time spent in each field location was important to build trust with participants and to observe how life projects changed over time and in response to the range of possible factors identified in the research questions. A Memorandum of Understanding was formalized between the research team and each of the host organizations. This governed the nature of the partnership and how the research would be conducted. Where possible, the second author accompanied individual young people to appointments, such as age assessments and housing visits, to help develop an overall picture of the welfare, asylum and immigration control systems. Participant observation also generated involvement in the research by individuals willing to participate in interviews and provided a source of data through detailed field notes and individual profiles.

Arts-based methodologies Arts-based activities were used in Italy and England in keeping with the overall intention of employing an anti-oppressive approach to the research (Capous-Desyllas and Morgaine 2018). The arts were used as a way of soliciting narratives rather than being interpreted as data in and of themselves (Banks 2008; Bagnoli 2009; Drew and Guillemin 2014). Various media were used, including painting, modelling, museum visits and the creation of ‘museums of self ’. This latter method was designed by the second author with participants and involved them identifying objects of importance to their lives that they would choose to curate in a museum (see examples in Allsopp et al 2016). Other methods included photography (Meloni et  al 2017), writing and performing comedy sketches (facilitated by a comedian and participatory video arts education project), animation and comic representations, poetry writing and a theatre in education project. In total, some 80 or more young people participated in a range of different art workshops throughout the lifespan of the project. While some took part in narrative interviews as well, others chose to limit their involvement in the research to the arts-based activities; thus we were able to widen participation through the flexibility of methods. Art exhibitions were held in both field research locations, and booklets were published as collaborative outputs funded by the EU (in Italy), a local museum, NGOs and the Becoming Adult research project (in England).

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Interviews with welfare and support providers and officials Interviews were conducted with a range of professionals working within the domains of social care and immigration and asylum control (25 in Italy and 54 in England across four local authorities).

Freedom of information requests from all local authorities in England Data were gathered through a freedom of information request to all local authorities in England to understand what information was available on the longer term outcomes of former unaccompanied minors who had previously been in care in each of the authorities (Sigona and Humphris 2016).

Analysis of data Analysis of interview data drew on an integrated biographical narrative analysis approach. Narrative analysis, like the narrative method, is primarily concerned with the relationship between events and how people understand, explain, come to understand and organize experience (Clandinin and Connelly 2000; Wiles et  al 2005; Andrews 2014). It considers narratives to be the means through which people make sense of the world. In particular, we drew on theories of critical moments (Thomson et  al 2002), turning points (Holmegaard et  al 2015) and fateful moments (Giddens 1991). Because of the importance of narrative, transcripts were read and analysed as ‘wholes’ and, where follow-up interviews took place, as ‘sequences’. This mixed narrative/thematic coding approach was informed by the relative success of the cross-sectional analytical approach employed in the influential Inventing Adulthoods study of British youth transitions (Thomson et al 2004). It also echoes the dual analytical approach employed in Young Lives, the longitudinal survey of childhood and youth poverty based at the University of Oxford (Morrow 2013).3 This mixed analytical strategy allowed us to situate individual experience in a wider structural context in order to ensure its widest possible relevance (Thomson and Holland 2003). Analysis involved a combination of the data management programme NVivo 11.1.1 to store and code data, creating a priori and emergent codes to thematically analyse them, and narrative analysis. Each thematic node was contextualized alongside a summary of the young person’s

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migratory project, including their past, key facts about their life, the main objective(s) of migration and their interaction with statutory and other sources of welfare and aspirations. Using framework analysis, we crosschecked the themes and sub-themes against different kinds of interviewee to deduce some general observations.

Ethics Ethical approval for the research was received from the University of Oxford and University College London. The research raised important ethical questions, some of which are discussed throughout this book. These pertain to participants’ ages (some were minors aged between 16 and 18) and to their potential vulnerability (most had experienced some form of persecution, forced labour and/or violence, among other human rights abuses). A range of unforeseen ethical issues were also encountered in the research and dealt with on a case-by-case basis. This was done with the support of partner organizations and following flow charts which were approved as part of our university ethics applications. These flow charts were shared with host and partner institutions and continuously redrawn according to changing opportunities, networks and knowledge, as advised by Alderson and Morrow (2011). As is often the case in the transition from research design to practice, there were some unforeseen ethical issues that emerged when conducting the research. As we began field research, the geopolitical context in relation to migration fundamentally shifted. Planning for the research took place before the dramatic increase in refugee movements to the EU in 2015. This raised several ethical challenges for the research as well as presenting new opportunities. First, because of the extreme and unforeseen demands placed on the reception infrastructure, at the time of the research in Italy, the second author was compelled to volunteer her services in situations that had not been anticipated and in which referring vulnerable individuals to other actors was not always possible. Second, while we had expected that some participants might say that they were younger than they were as part of a strategy to access certain social rights, we had not foreseen that others might reveal that they were in fact minors when they had chosen to place themselves in institutional structures designed for adults. In situations such as these, the primary concern was the wellbeing of the young person, alongside previously negotiated understandings of confidentiality and anonymity.

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Positionality and reflexivity Adopting a relational methodology, which recognizes that stories and knowledge are co-created (Jackson 2013), was central to the research. With this in mind, it is important to note that while the arguments presented in this book have been driven by rigorous empirical and theoretically driven work, they are unquestionably shaped by our position as white, feminist, European academics with a relatively liberal view of the world (Cockburn 2007). As a research team, we have discussed reflexivity extensively, acknowledging the ‘connection, intellectual and emotional, between the observer and the observed’ (Behar 2014: 14). Our approach drew on Thomson and Holland’s (2003) reflections on how they conducted their longitudinal study of youth transitions in the UK: We neither sought to make an intervention into young people’s lives, nor denied that we might well be doing so. We recognized that it is not a ‘normal’ part of young people’s lives to be invited to participate in regular in-depth interviews by researchers from a university, and that the impact of the research process would have to be addressed in the process of data collection, analysis and interpretation. (Thomson and Holland 2003: 239) We were acutely aware throughout the research of young people’s daily struggles to build and maintain a sense of ontological security on a stage that was constantly shifting and with limited support and guidance. We observed how they were frequently let down by those responsible for their care and support and watched as they approached the precipice of adulthood with limited or no safety nets. In such situations we could occasionally play a small part, through, for example, writing reference letters to support appeal hearings or assisting them with accessing basic advice and services. In doing so, we recognized our potential, from positions of relative privilege and power, of helping shape, however minutely, young people’s outcomes. Throughout, we were ethically driven to do what we could to indirectly ameliorate circumstances whenever this was possible. While these questions of positionality were not always easy for the authors, they raised particular and unique dilemmas for the research assistants who had previously experienced similar situations to the study participants and who, to varying extents, shared their own narratives as part of the research. This important dynamic between the researcher and the researched emerged throughout the project, and the team reflected on the

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related quandaries and ethics of assuming these roles. These include how best to negotiate and articulate one’s position in the field; the emotional labour involved in working as peer researchers on highly sensitive, complex and emotive issues; and how best to do justice to the voices of young people while sustaining the combined roles of interpreter, interlocutor and befriender (Haile 2020; Haile et al 2020; Haile et al forthcoming).

Strengths and limitations of the research There are a number of limitations to the research that merit further attention. We recognize the value in constructing a transparent narrative of the research and have purposefully sought to avoid over-simplification of the process or to fall into what Lubet warns of as the trap of ‘sculpting data’ to fit a ‘preferred theory of the world’ in order to tell a ‘compelling story’ (Lubet 2017: 130). By bridging the academic divide between social policy, youth studies, migration studies and refugee studies, this book seeks to advance a new understanding of how a particular group of migrant young people and potential citizens in the making (Drammeh 2010) comprehend, interact with and at once shape and perform their life projects over space and time in relation to statutory and non-statutory forms of welfare and immigration control and governance. Life projects, in this context, are understood as individual or collective hopes and aspirations and related decision-making as young people transition towards adulthood in a state of mobility and/or exile. The limitations to our approach are outlined here in relation to issues of sampling, the nature of evidence and the use of arts-based approaches

The limits of the sample The predominance of young men in the sample is reflective of the demographic of unaccompanied young people (estimated in both the UK and Italy to be around 80–90 per cent). Nonetheless, we faced particular challenges in engaging young migrant and refugee women in the research. In Italy, it was particularly difficult to negotiate access to young women since many were involved in trafficking investigations. Except for two interviews with Eritrean women, all interaction with female participants in Italy took place through arts-based projects or participant observations. In these cases, participants were mostly Albanians, who had been settled in Italy for some time, or Eritreans, who were in transit. In the English sample too, all female participants were either Albanian or Eritrean. As discussed in Chapter 1,

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unaccompanied youth migration from Afghanistan is overwhelmingly a male pursuit. Efforts were, however, made to engage the smaller population of young women in our research. The arts projects were designed in discussion with female research assistants and potential female participants as research strategies that might help them feel more at ease than participating in interviews. Young women took part in comedy and photography workshops in England and in a range of art projects in both countries. Important differences between the Italian and English samples included the fact that individuals within the population in Italy were more likely to be in transit to other countries, which may have influenced the relative candidness of some of their responses. Other shortcomings with the sample included problems with comparing England with Italy when we had four field sites in England and just two (within a one large city) in Italy. The Italian context, however, was host to a very large number of unaccompanied young people. It was also in many ways more open, meaning that it was easier to recruit participants. We suggest in Chapter 4 that this openness to research and relative absence of mistrust was in itself a feature of Italy’s ‘colander welfare regime’ as well as a function of the second author’s status as a ‘transitory migrant’ there herself. Participants in the study were highly mobile, which posed certain challenges to many aspects of the longitudinal component of the research. However, these challenges were mitigated to a large extent by the peer researchers, who were invaluable in sustaining contact with research participants over time. Given the focus on narrative and storytelling throughout this book, it is important to recognize, as noted in previous research, the importance of silence – of what is not said or not heard (Kohli 2006; Chase 2010). A key risk with the methodological approach is that marginalized voices can fall by the wayside, with the research serving to further amplify the voices of the most outspoken and minimize, by contrast, those in the most subaltern positions (Spivak 1988). To avoid privileging the most ‘stimulating’ narratives, we were mindful of these considerations throughout our thematic coding and narrative analysis. Moreover, when we spoke to service providers, we made efforts to ask about particularly vulnerable groups who had not participated to any great extent in the research. These included unaccompanied young migrants and refugees who were too unwell mentally or physically to participate in interviews and survivors of trafficking.

Questioning what is evidence By adopting throughout this work the epistemological framework of narrative and storytelling, which recognizes the socially constructed

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nature of knowledge, we are aware that we have blurred the boundary between what is considered fact and fiction in research evidence (Clandinin and Connelly 2000; Lubet 2017). Often, going over our interviews and field notes, we realized that rather than using the term ‘data’, we were employing the language of stories. We prefer this term, since it links to the inherently narrative aspect of life projects, and recognizes that evidence presented in this book stems primarily from moments of knowledge creation that were situated in a specific place and time, and which we were in part co-constructing through our presence – both through the act of listening, and through creating a space in which such stories could be told. A final shortcoming of the evidence presented is the fact that the policy landscape under study was one that was rapidly shifting. This book seeks to capture events unravelling across various sites over a fixed period of time; as such, some of the findings related to specific mobility strategies may be no longer relevant to the policy context. It is hoped that findings related to life projects are more resounding.

The strengths and limits of artistic methods and the ‘tyranny of participation’ Artistic methods were successfully employed as means of eliciting narrative data, as a source of analysis and as a way of communicating findings in a sensitive way that could be understood by many difference audiences, including by research participants and the wider public. The use of artistic methods, it is hoped, helped to shift the locus of knowledge production from a positivist extraction model (Kuntz 2016) to one that embraced a plurality of voice and difference. Yet we acknowledge that while artistic methods helped some young people who felt shyer in speaking out come forwards, they also may have served to alienate other young people who felt embarrassed by their lack of artistic skills or experience. We are also mindful of the notion of ‘the tyranny of participation’, the naive fetishization of participation as something inherently good when in fact processes of engagement can ignore the power structures that facilitate or hinder meaningful participation (Cooke and Kothari 2001). It also refers to activities that can become tokenistic and do not, in practice, give participants space to speak at all (Haile et al 2020). We sought throughout the research to generate authentic opportunities for young people to become involved in the research and to sustain control and choice over the nature of their participation.

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The politics of voice and the ownership of stories Narrative methods were employed to create spaces in which young people could articulate their life projects. Narrating their stories – biographical histories, current lives and future hopes and dreams – was sometimes enjoyable for participants. Such spaces allowed for power hierarchies to become unsettled and identities to be transformed, and they could enable private experiences to be transformed into shared and public ones. Several participants were explicit about wanting to help improve the lives and circumstances of others through their participation. Over the course of the research, we created spaces for young people who had participated in the research in various ways to discuss the impact that the research was having on them, including through creative means. As noted earlier, a number of peer researchers have reflected on their experiences through writing published articles and think pieces. We also facilitated the involvement of participants in several high-level policy events, an example being a conference organized by the European Platform for Integration and Migration in Palermo in December 2017. During this occasion, several participants from England and Italy met in person to discuss, among other topics, their involvement in the research. This provided fertile ground for us to refine our analysis and understand the strengths and shortfalls of our methodologies. A clear limitation, however, is that such public outputs privilege participants who are more outspoken and who have greater mobility than others. We sought to mitigate this by linking participants though Skype for involvement in certain outputs, such as the Becoming Adult song that was recorded in two studios in England and Italy. Still, certain voices were unquestionably sidelined, and we felt terrible when one young person from the UK was twice denied a visa to an event in Italy (although we later succeeded in facilitating his attendance at a related workshop in Johannesburg). We also recognize that, despite careful attention to language capabilities in the research space, whether or not young people had the relevant language skills largely determined whether or not they could access and engage with the related public and policy spheres of the research.

The politics of migration research Finally, we must note that migration studies is a discipline that we recognize to be highly political. In a climate in which migrants and refugees are political targets for racialized and gendered scapegoating,

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there is a risk of research perpetuating harmful social stereotypes. In an effort to be transparent as well as ethical, we have not shied away from contentious issues in migration and youth studies. These include, for example, topics such as mental health (Chapter 9), the sexual and relational lives of young refugee men (Chapter 10) and the question of credibility (Chapter 6). Given the significant numbers of young people who have arrived in Europe in the last few years, we believe that their emotional and relational lives and needs are too important for their successful long-term integration to be ignored. As for the question of lies and truth, we feel satisfied that Wolff and De  Shalit’s (2007) framework for a new right to not have to lie to access basic rights is a solid foundation on which to have this discussion responsibly (Chapter  6). This question is, of course, ultimately one of political philosophy; its significance goes far beyond the realms of migration and asylum and affects us all. Participants also repeatedly asked us to raise these issues, which influenced our decision to do so. We also agree with Lubet that transparency is a prerequisite of serious evidence-based ethnography in research (2017). We hope that our candour in not ignoring certain difficult topics is taken in good faith, alongside our attempt to provide rigorous analyses and a rich contextualizing of these phenomena. We are aware that fieldwork is a deeply personal and political endeavour in which questions of how we can do justice to experience are linked to questions of social justice (Jackson 2013). While in this research we have sought to situate migrant young people within a wider set of social, political and institutional relations across space and time, we are also conscious that the research risks reifying the migrant subject as ‘other’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2008). It is important to note, without in any way dismissing the hardships they have endured, that some things experienced by young people in this research could be true of many non-migrant young people. Indeed, as has been documented previously, youth in and of itself is a time of transition, mobility and displacement that is experienced in myriad, complex ways (Thomson and Holland 2003; Honwana 2012).

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4

‘Iron Rod’ or ‘Colander’? Welfare Regimes in England and Italy ‘In England there is good work but no papers, but in Italy there are papers and no good work!’ (Takir, Afghanistan) We had both travelled to meet up in Rome, and having reunited at the Termini train station two hours previously, we were now walking around the Colosseum. That day, we were both tourists in a new city. We ate gelato and smiled as we passed the living statues of Pavarotti and Julius Caesar. It had been two years since we had seen Takir, when he was living in England. He hadn’t changed much, but he seemed happier and more relaxed. As we walked past a police horse, Takir petted it on the nose and the officer laughed. In England, Takir, who had been refused asylum by the United Kingdom (UK) Home Office, would have run a mile at the sight of the police. Although he still lacked evidence of his right to remain in Italy, he did have a document saying that his claim had been processed and that he had been assigned humanitarian leave.1 It was now just a question of waiting for the actual piece of paper to make him ‘legal’. Takir said he felt a relative sense of security. He held himself differently; he was funnier, lighter. As we walked through the old Roman Forum, he quipped, ‘You know what, it looks like Afghanistan here. Why have all these Americans come all this way to see these old stones?’ Italy, Takir lamented, was different from England. The buildings were older, the work was not as well paid and the reception centres weren’t as nice. But, crucially, there were papers, and that was his primary need at that point in time to avoid deportation to persecution in Afghanistan. Takir was one of several young people in our study who made the choice to

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move between England and Italy based on perceptions of their different immigration and welfare regimes and the relative security these afforded. An Italian social worker explained the perception that in England the nexus between welfare and legal status was policed by an ‘iron rod regime’ of entitlement and control in which young people were firmly placed on one side or the other. In Italy, meanwhile, there was more of what she termed a ‘colander regime’. The ‘colander regime’ metaphor captures the less regulated and more decentralized nature of the welfare system in the country, as well as the fact, at least at the time of our research, that young people could access welfare services largely independent of immigration control. It also captures the reality that in Italy there are more opportunities for young people to move between irregular and regular status, most significantly through finding work. The iron rod/colander welfare regime model resonated with the accounts of young people in our research, particularly those who had spent time in the two countries. England was seen to offer greater opportunities for work and study. Moreover, for those granted asylum, the level of protection offered and welfare provided pre- and post-18 was widely perceived to be superior. But these freedoms came at the cost of a greater presence of state policing and, for those on the wrong side of the iron rod without the protection of legal status, a greater likelihood of being picked up by the police. For Takir, and several other Afghans we encountered who had made a similar journey ‘backwards’, Italy, despite offering fewer social and economic rights, provided relative safety from forced return: a kind of ‘DIY asylum’ (Allsopp 2018: 126). This chapter explores how young people’s outcomes and opportunities varied according to the different welfare state and immigration control architectures they encountered in England and Italy. As we will see, both systems had intrinsic advantages and inadequacies that created different kinds of opportunities for individuals at different points in their migration journeys. Of most significance is the fact that the two countries’ immigration and welfare regimes differed so substantially in the first place. This finding challenges the notion of a common European asylum system, and common standards across the European Union (EU) for upholding the rights of unaccompanied minors and children more broadly. The experiences of the young people in this study also challenge several assumptions regarding the traditional welfare regime typologies that have been used by some to account for differences in support provision between EU member states (Esping-Andersen 1990; Sainsbury 2006; 2012; Allsopp 2018). In this chapter, we identify and discuss three main structural factors that distinguished the English and Italian welfare contexts for unaccompanied

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young migrants: 1) the role of the state in the provision of welfare relative to non-statutory actors (the welfare mix) and the perceived quality of care; 2)  the intersection between welfare provision and immigration enforcement; and 3) the labour market and opportunities for regularization. We explore how, in response to these different arrangements, some young people moved strategically between relationships of proximity to and distance from welfare and immigration control spheres as they sought progress in their lives. Often, this was not just despite the state, but also – as in the case of avoiding detention or deportation – actively because of it (Bloch and Schuster 2005; Schuster 2005; De Genova and Peutz 2010). For some participants denied legal residence (or facing that prospect as they turned 18), their strategy involved ‘going underground’ in the country in which they found themselves refused. For others, like Takir, it involved secondary migration. Indeed, the ways in which young people in the study understood the relationship between immigration control and welfare regimes in different EU countries, coupled with their related perceptions of the likelihood of obtaining safety and freedom in each of these, generated significant traffic between them (Allsopp 2017c). Individuals deemed to be over 18 are required, in accordance with the EU’s Dublin Regulation, to claim asylum in the first country they enter within the EU. They can be forcibly returned to the country of entry if they are found in another country or if there is evidence of them having passed through another EU member state. Several young people we spoke with knew of people who had been returned from the UK back to Italy. The regulation does not, however, apply to children: they have the right to claim asylum and have their application processed in the member state in which they present themselves to the authorities. Under the Dublin III Regulation, they also have the right to be transferred and have their asylum claim processed in a member state where they have a family member. However, at the time of research this system was barely functional (Safe Passage 2018; Starfield 2018). Some individuals in the study who were under 18 and seeking to transit through Italy to claim asylum elsewhere still took precautionary measures to avoid their presence in Italy being recorded. Some had been given wrong information about children’s immunity to transfers under the Dublin Regulation. Others knew about such immunity but were aware that an age assessment procedure could mistakenly categorize them as adults. Precautionary measures taken by young people to avoid forced transfers included fleeing from state-run reception centres for fear their fingerprints would be taken and, if they were, in more than one incident burning their fingerprints off.

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This chapter thus also engages with a critical debate at the time of writing on ‘missing children’ – the growing phenomenon of unaccompanied youth disappearing from statutory support structures across EU countries. In 2015 alone, 10,000  unaccompanied children were registered as ‘missing’ from institutional support, 5,000 of these in Italy (ECRE 2016).2 Many more young people disappear as they turn 18 and lose access to the formal rights previously accorded to them as children (Kohli 2011; Chase and Allsopp 2014).

The welfare mix and suitability of statutory care provisions In all EU member states, social care departments are required by law to take on the role of corporate parents for unaccompanied minors. This entails enabling access to accommodation, basic needs such as clothing, food and transport, education and a broader range of less essential but nonetheless life-enhancing opportunities – such as links to social and recreational spaces. If young people are recognized as children when they arrive, these services are provided without question, even though there may be variation in quality between and even within different local authorities. However, such provision can change quite significantly and rapidly when young people turn 18. Many young people who arrive in Europe on their own are highly dependent on the care provided to them through social care departments, which can make the sudden disconnect when they turn 18 – whether through choice or enforcement – especially hard. This is particularly true in England, but also for those individuals in Italy who have more limited social networks and access to informal work opportunities. This is commonly the case for Eritreans and Afghans and less so for Albanians and other more established populations in Italy, including Egyptians and Bangladeshis. Within local authorities, access to benefits and social care services is politicized at multiple levels. In England, the welfare mix was shaped at the time of research by policy-driven austerity cuts that affected social care provision, housing and other services (Humphris and Sigona 2018; Meloni and Humphris 2019). In Italy, meanwhile, a persistent economic recession has long inhibited the provision of comprehensive care services for unaccompanied young people (Matteucci and Halliday 2017). These wider political and economic factors firmly dictated young people’s access to and quality of social care and the associated wellbeing outcomes that followed from these.

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The care system: pre-18 Accommodation was often the first encounter with the welfare system in the new country, and this constituted a mixed experience. Aida, who had arrived in England from Eritrea aged 16, spent just a few weeks in foster care before being moved to shared accommodation. She spoke of the difficulty of being moved several times within a short period and without having any real say in the matter. She found these changes destabilizing and upsetting, and described what she experienced as difficulties in having to repeatedly start over in building new relationships and friendships. Julia, also from Eritrea, arrived at the age of 17½. She similarly spoke of how after just six months in foster care she was forced to move into shared accommodation with limited support. She felt extremely anxious and unsafe as a result of the ‘things’ she had previously experienced and witnessed, and, she said, had not had a chance to develop a strong enough grasp of English to get by or to understand how things worked. Julia concluded that the only way she had coped was through the informal support her Eritrean foster family continued to offer her. Alex, aged 17, by contrast, struggled with the lack of freedom he experienced in foster care. He was not, for example, able to attend national celebrations at his Eritrean church (a very important part of his wellbeing and identity) since he was not permitted to travel independently and didn’t have the resources to attend these events. And while he valued the educational support he received through foster care, he found the contrasting treatment he received as a child in the UK and Eritrea disconcerting. In Eritrea, his access to education had been limited, but he had contributed to his family economy from a young age, driving a donkey and cart to transport goods from one place to another. Unlike in the UK, where unaccompanied migrant and refugee minors are integrated into the same care system as all children, regardless of whether they are migrants or citizens, in Italy unaccompanied migrant minors are cared for via a separate system. In Italy, we therefore met fewer young people in foster care. Most lived in residential arrangements known as ‘family houses’ (case famiglie) in which several young people lived together with a carer, or in large centres of up to 100-plus minors. Some such centres accommodated adults together with minors, even though they were meant to be separated. In one case, adults and children were located on different floors, while in another they had separate entrances. In both cases residents passed easily between the two spaces, even after hours. The poor quality of food available in the shelters and the lack of resources for residents to cook their own food in many of them was a common lament. As in the UK, minors in Italy also expressed frustration

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with curfews that limited their leisure and informal work activities. As a consequence of this, several unaccompanied minors in the Italian research were recorded as formally ‘missing’ by their accommodation providers after they stayed overnight with a friend without permission, or, in one case, came home just a couple of hours after curfew having gone out for pizza. Inconsistent reporting between different centres and municipalities, and a failure to distinguish different types of absence in official data at the time of research, was one of the key problems regarding the reliability of data on ‘missing’ children (Sigona and Allsopp 2016). Although practice varied from region to region, at the time of research there was a severe lack of accommodation for unaccompanied minors in Italy. This resulted in overcrowding in large centres, where young people frequently experienced violence, theft and – in their own words – felt uncomfortable and unsafe. Abil, from Albania, explained that, as one of the few Albanians in his accommodation centre, he was scared of other ethnic groups with whom he shared no common language and whom he felt ‘ganged up on him’. He tried to learn Arabic to establish himself, and on occasion complained to staff at the centre about the poor behaviour of other residents. He reported having his phone stolen on multiple occasions. Abil explained the ethnic tensions after he had his phone stolen, when he insisted on sharing a room with other Albanians and wrote a notice on the wall declaring ‘no Egyptians’. He described one situation in which several minors were so upset about the lack of heating in the centre that they disassembled their wooden beds and set them on fire to stay warm. Because he felt unsafe, Abil left the facility during the day and only returned at night. He envied, he said, his Albanian friends who were able to stay with family members and get by without relying on state support. Other young people in Italy were not able to access accommodation at all and slept on the streets, where they were frequently the target of racialized and other forms of abuse. The poor quality of statefunded accommodation was an important reason, though not the only one, why some young people chose to disengage from it and seek out alternative arrangements, such as squats or informal settlements supported by volunteers, where they often felt safer, less policed and more at home. Young people were aware of the politics of care in both country contexts, and frequently spoke of feeling commodified or of being fobbed off with poor care because they were migrants and/or children. In England, Helen, from Eritrea, described how she had observed wide variation in care for unaccompanied minors among her friends and associates placed across different local authorities. She also described her own first-hand experience of being moved from a local authority foster care placement to one that was organized via a private fostering agency.

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The standard of care in the latter, she said, was markedly higher, more caring and more young person focused. She believed this was at least partly the result of the relatively few unaccompanied minors placed via the agency and the fact that the service primarily supported UK-born young people in care. She explained: ‘People who were, you know, looked after by X [local authority] they don’t speak out, so it was very difficult in that sense and … I feel like lots of times they undermine the unaccompanied minors’ views simply because we don’t, like, I don’t know, like they just don’t think highly of us I guess … they don’t think of us as, you know, people, as equally as, I don’t know, I don’t want to say they are racist, but sometimes it just feels like you are discriminated because … you are not from here.’ Meanwhile, in Italy at the time of research, because of the dramatic increase in numbers of unaccompanied minors needing housing, several dubious corporates had taken over hostels, only later to be found to be in breach of basic human rights and wellbeing standards and operating under conditions of corruption and even Mafia collusion (Pianezzi and Ashraf 2020). As one Mafia boss was widely quoted to have said at the time, ‘migrants are more profitable than drugs’ (Latza Nadeau 2018). ‘Yes, migrants, and minors in particular, for whom you get more money for housing,’ one social worker put it, ‘are big business.’ In both countries, young people commented on the lack of transparency and consistency in provision of services and support. In Italy, several young people reported they had not been given the allowance to which they were entitled. In England, Aida described her confusion over what support she was eligible for and how such entitlements seemed to change randomly. So, for example, for some time it was possible for her to get assistance with money to be able to travel to her church in London; at other times, she was told this was not possible. David explained he was worried about questioning what seemed to be the random allocation of funds for things such as clothing prior to receiving his papers, in case making such enquiries jeopardized his case for asylum. Haile spoke of the challenges he had in negotiating access to accommodation. He had been given a reference number by his social worker so he could pick a flat, but it did not work (likely to be a problem with accommodation allocation through an online system that Haile did not fully understand). He commented that he was not the only one who struggled, but that many other young people he knew were in a similar

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situation. He noted how, after four years, he had the skills in English to be able to negotiate and find out what he needed to do, whereas others really struggled with the language and consequently were not getting the support they required. In both countries, knowing the language was important for standing up for one’s rights and navigating the system. Even in Italy, basic English was often the lingua franca spoken between care providers and young people to help direct them to services.

After 18 Local authority housing provided by the UK government after young people turned 18 was deemed by many to be unsuitable. Abdullah, from Eritrea and aged 18, had come to the UK two years previously. He talked about how he felt secure with papers, having the right to work and so on, but he really disliked the housing he was in, which he described as dirty and rat-infested. He had moved to various cities to find suitable housing but was still facing difficulties. The problems with poor quality housing provided to asylum seekers in the UK has been well documented, especially in relation to the inadequate maintenance of properties through contracted out services (Dwyer and Brown 2008; Allsopp et al 2015). While some young people with ongoing asylum claims or papers in Italy managed to secure housing post-18, conditions were generally worse than in England. In addition, after an initial six-month period, they were generally ineligible for further state-supported accommodation. A few young people in our research who had won the favour of their hosts had managed to remain in the centres where they had stayed as minors, trading menial work such as cleaning and keeping an eye on the younger residents for a bed. One cooked for the residents in exchange for a meal himself. Homelessness was also a fact of life for some in England who found themselves on the wrong side of the iron rod. Having not been recognized as a looked after child when he arrived at the age of 17, Dan, from Eritrea, was ineligible for any support from social services once he turned 18. From then on, his accommodation was a piecemeal arrangement of sleeping between the homes of an aunt, a range of friends and his girlfriend (whose parents were supportive and were willing to give him somewhere to stay). The constant vagrancy got him down at times, but he felt lucky, he said, to have this support available, and had also managed to access help with his education from various charities. Charities played a crucial role in the welfare mix in both countries, providing spaces for recreation and education as well as food and clothes

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to young people. In two of our field sites in England, youth clubs partly funded by government grants were nevertheless preparing to close because this funding had been cut. This was experienced as an acute loss by many young people, one of whom said the volunteers at the club had been his ‘lifeline’. In Italy, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that provided educational and recreational services to unaccompanied young migrants and refugees were less reliant on government funding. They drew on a diverse range of sources, including EU grants, religious foundations and private donations. In both countries, NGOs reported advantages and disadvantages to receiving government money. Being independent of it meant they were not obliged to share any data with the government, for example. Charities independent of government funding could also take the government to task for failures to provide the appropriate level of support for unaccompanied minors. Means of doing this included public campaigning and strategic litigation to national and regional courts (Starfield 2018). In summary, in our research we observed a welfare dynamic in which access to social rights was considered less comprehensive in Italy than if you were in England and within (rather than excluded from) the care system. Moreover, the Italian state played a more subdued role in financing, providing and regulating social care services. In practice, this commonly meant greater possibilities for working irregularly to secure an income in the absence of statutory support or being able to rely on religious or other charitable infrastructures. In the next section, we explore how these differences in welfare architectures and the relative importance of the state played out in important ways in the lives of migrant and refugee young people.

Intersecting welfare provision and immigration enforcement In all matters concerning adults, immigration enforcement trumps welfare rights. In both countries, this was the case regardless of whether a young person was considered to be a ‘care leaver’ (as in the UK) or ‘former unaccompanied migrant minor’ (as in Italy). The consequences of deliberately blurring the division between social care and immigration and asylum policy means that, in what may seem a paradoxical situation, a minor who is given full entitlement to welfare provision as a ‘care leaver’ (up to the age of 25 in some cases in the UK) can simultaneously be detained and deported from the country from one day to the next as they turn 18.

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Unaccompanied migrant and refugee young people often reported feeling isolated or at risk from the very structures that were designed, on paper, to help them as they pursued pathways through European welfare, asylum and immigration regimes. Such alienation became acute in both England and Italy as participants turned 18. At this point, safe spaces were vitally important for young people who had fallen into irregular immigration status. These were arguably more accessible and less likely to be policed in Italy than in the UK.

The UK’s ‘hostile environment’ At the macro-level, the perceived lack of safe institutional spaces in England was influenced by the spectre of Brexit and the constantly shifting terrain of immigration control systems. In particular, the government was pursuing a deliberate policy to create a hostile environment in order to prevent the undesirable entry into the country of certain categories of people (Carrera et al 2018a). These neo-liberal articulations of the wider debate on migration undoubtedly shaped the care politics, policies and practices that young migrants encountered (Rosen et al 2019). A further policy measure that limited young people’s access to care at the macro-level was the increasing integration of immigration and social care provisions, including housing and health. This resulted in the deliberate ‘everyday bordering’ (Yuval-Davis et al 2018) of such services. For example, housing provided to young people with no secure legal status in the UK served as a mechanism for the Home Office to keep track of them and force them to comply with immigration controls. This included regular signing on at a local police station. Failure to do so would mean an end to any provision of housing support. Restricting access to welfare for certain categories of migrants and making access to welfare conditional on consent to immigration control was a deliberate UK government strategy aimed to deter future arrivals. The explicitness of this strategy was demonstrated by the existence of a ‘hostile environment working group’ in the UK Parliament (Webber 2019). For unaccompanied young migrants in England, the hostile environment meant being forced to choose between, on the one hand, being traceable for the purposes of immigration control in order to be eligible for the ‘safety’ and security of somewhere to live; or, on the other hand, being destitute and free from such conditionality, but at the same time having to resign themselves to the insecurities of living on the street and being constantly in fear of being found and detained by the police or forcibly returned to their country of origin. The sense of surveillance that came

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with this dilemma was acute. When Takir identified the UK as the ‘land of CCTV’, he was speaking from experience. Entering a residential accommodation for 18- and 19-year-old former unaccompanied minors as part of the England fieldwork, we were shocked to see very visible CCTV cameras in the entry hall and communal areas. One resident commented, ‘They like to spy on us and check what we are up to.’ A support worker had a different account of the purpose of the cameras, stating that they were there to ‘keep the young people safe’ and keep a record of people visiting in case of ‘any incidents’. The increasing proximity between powers of immigration control and welfare access had other consequences too. Omid, aged 19 and from Eritrea, explained how he found himself faced with the hostile environment in England when he broke his leg playing football and was rushed to hospital, only for staff to call the Home Office. The receptionist at the hospital also called the Eritrean Embassy, a move that could potentially have put his life and that of his family back home at risk. As an asylum seeker, Omid was entitled to free treatment from the British National Health Service. However, if he had been a refused asylum seeker, it remains unclear whether the hospital would have been required to charge him medical fees and report him to the Home Office. According to the Department of Health, the Home Office made 8,127 requests to them for data in the first 11 months of 2016, and this led to 5,854 people being traced by immigration enforcement teams (Bulman 2017). Colleges and universities in the UK have also been required to conduct document checks, a situation that led to several young people in this research being unable to pursue their education. Such everyday bordering practices can give extraordinary powers to ‘street level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky 1980: 3). Their discretion can serve or hinder individual trajectories. Sid and Ali, aged 18 and both from Eritrea, were unable to take courses at college because they were refused asylum seekers and had been asked for papers. They explained that a friend who was in the same position, however, had been able to keep studying at another college in the city because the institution turned a blind eye, enabling him to continue his studies for several years, even though he was in effect appeal rights exhausted and had no formal right to education. Meanwhile, their friend Tig, aged 18 and from Eritrea, who had been in England for two years at that time, could study whatever he liked, having been granted refugee status several months previously. The situation felt especially cruel to Sid, since he and Tig had travelled together and were sharing accommodation in the city, having fled what he perceived as an analogous situation of persecution. As we have argued elsewhere, there is an important disconnect between what the state feels to be in young people’s ‘best interests’ and their own

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subjective ideas of wellbeing that change over time (Allsopp et al 2015; Chase 2020). Two core assumptions appear to underpin policy ideas about best interests with respect to unaccompanied migrant young people. The first is that European host states share a common understanding of best interests with the young people for whom they are responsible; the second is that young people will comply with the institutionally defined version of their best interests. Our research suggests a frequent tension between the young person’s conception of their best interests and the requirements of the state, leading them to disengage with authorities and look to alternative means to pursue their goals. Young people under 18 refused asylum in our UK sample, in particular, were all too aware that the same statutory actors currently looking out for them might abandon them when they turn 18.3 One social worker commented that in her experience minors in this position pursue one of two routes: disengagement or ‘the ostrich’ (not thinking about the future). We know that around 3,000 former unaccompanied minors leave the care system in the UK each year (Pinter 2012), although we have little idea about what happens to them or what subsequent contact they have (if any) with immigration control structures (Gladwell and Elwyn 2012). Our current work confirms the lack of institutional knowledge of the outcomes of former unaccompanied minors who have spent time in the care of local authorities across England (Humphris and Sigona 2016). For those remaining in England who have exhausted all legal opportunities to remain there, the iron rod system often led to extreme consequences. Dalmat, from Albania, spoke of how he had recently run away when an immigration control van appeared in the neighbourhood where he was living surreptitiously with friends. His friend Adnan then shared his experience of running out the back door of his former foster carers’ house during lunch. He had gone to pay them a visit when a police van arrived on the housing estate. Such scenes, however sinister, are the reality for young people who sit on the wrong side of constantly shifting immigration rules and regulations. Throughout the research, it proved very difficult to engage with young people from Albania. This reticence was explained to us as resulting from a generalized fear and anxiety about authorities and a pervasive mistrust. One conversation between Adnan, Dalmat and Tony touched on their views of whether it might be possible to talk to other young Albanians who had no legal status and were allegedly living in the cities where we were conducting the research. Dalmat summed up his thoughts: ‘They can talk, but they’ll be scared. I’ll be honest with you … they will still think like, “what if she calls immigration or

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something like that”. ’Cause they’ll think, why is she calling and asking me these questions  … and they’ll be paranoid, they’ll think she’ll probably call the police.’ It has been increasingly documented how young migrants in England may disappear or abscond from social and immigration control services if they turn 18 without a legal right to remain. In doing so, they hope to shield themselves from the possibility of deportation by purposefully disengaging from bureaucratic processes (Kohli and Mitchell 2007; Sigona and Allsopp 2016). This phenomenon of disappearing has been observed in other European states with active detention and deportation regimes, such as Norway and Sweden (Olin 2012; Refugee Children’s Consortium 2013; UNHCR/Council of Europe 2014). Kushan, from Afghanistan, explained the dilemma he faced on becoming appeal rights exhausted in the UK and how he came to make the decision to disengage from institutional processes: ‘I wanted to go and sign and submit my fresh application but I told my solicitor, “If I get detained are you responsible? – can you do anything?” And she said, “No … I cannot guarantee anything.” And so I said, “I am not going to sign” [at the Home Office], because if you go … there is very little chance to get detained in the first, second or third week to go for signing. But after that you will most likely be detained, you know? I wasn’t like strong enough to make that decision to say “OK I am going to go for signing” – because I have seen so many of my friends that have been deported … so I just decided, that’s it … I just quit.’ Importantly, a couple of years after living without legal residence in England with all its inherent difficulties, Kushan made the decision to make a fresh claim for asylum. This decision was based on his rationale that the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan would make it less likely for him to be forcibly returned and more likely that his fresh claim for asylum – and a safe future – in the UK would be successful.

Italy’s slightly less ‘hostile environment’? In contrast to the English context, where the provision of welfare and control of immigration are in many respects intrinsically bound together, Triandafyllidou and Ambrosini (2011) highlight the separation and contradictions between internal and external migration management

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policies in Italy. Once in Italy, they argue, it is relatively easy for migrants to avoid detention and removal. Moreover, as we have seen, for some it is possible to find safety and security in alternative spaces to state provision. The more limited role of the state as a provider of services, coupled with the greater distance between statutory service providers and immigration control, created a dynamic whereby young people in the research reported experiencing more freedom in pursuing certain goals and maintaining their wellbeing, even if this meant that the support and services they sought were often inadequate or not available. Meanwhile, even among many of those who chose to stay under the radar and not seek documents in Italy, either because they were in transit or because they did not qualify for a legal right to stay, Italy was seen to be a more favourable context where ‘it’s easier to be invisible’. As a representative from the Italian Ministry of the Interior conceded in an interview for this research, ‘The difference with the UK, what is it? That [here] if they have no documents no one will escort these lads to the border.’ As Driss, aged 20 and from Mali, explained in conversation with a newly arrived Eritrean young person, ‘Amico, in Italy there are some advantages to not being strict about the rules…’ The possibility in Italy to act independently of the state is an important but under-theorized capability for this population, for whom the state is a more ambiguous actor than is traditionally considered in European social policy (Ruhs 2013; Delvino and Spencer 2014). There are, in other words, different types of opportunity holes in the Italian colander welfare model, and an element of more flexibility in moving in and out of regular and irregular status and evading deportation. In Italy, day-to-day care interactions with young people were facilitated by legal guardians and cultural mediators. They represented useful bridges between young people and the statutory and non-statutory welfare support infrastructures, as well as a way of them staying connected to their cultures of origin. Importantly, these mentors advocated on behalf of the safety and wellbeing of young people independently of the state. In England, by contrast, the daily interface between social care and young people was mediated by a variety of social workers, key workers or personal advisors employed directly by the state. These actors were less well placed to act independently and, as has been argued elsewhere, are often positioned in ambiguous and conflicted positions vis-à-vis young people’s rights and access to social care and related services (Humphries 2004a, 2004b; Humphris and Sigona 2018; Meloni and Humphris 2019). In Italy, the contracting out of services for asylum seekers to agents independent of the state (and since 2015 often financed directly by the EU) created a de facto firewall between service providers and the

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immigration control powers of the state – but it also in some cases exacerbated poor transparency and corruption. In England, meanwhile, services for unaccompanied minors are run by the state, or, where they are contracted out – for example, to private fostering arrangements – are bound by strict data sharing agreements and statutory controls (Humphris and Sigona 2018). It is important to stress that since the fieldwork for this research was conducted, Italy’s migration and welfare agenda has become increasingly rigid and hostile. Italy has placed growing restrictions on migrants’ freedom of movement through a series of ‘hot spots’. Meanwhile, their safety and choice has become further regulated through the systematic destruction of informal camps. This shift has been identified as being partly influenced by populist politics and partly by wider migration governance dynamics perpetrated by the EU and its respective Home Affairs agencies (Allsopp 2016; Allsopp and Manieri 2016; Carrera et al 2018a). One consequence of this shift has been statutory as well as non-governmental assistance becoming increasingly the target of humanitarian policing by national and EU Home Affairs agencies (Allsopp 2017b; Carrera et al 2018a, 2018b). All of this suggests that the make-up of the Italian ‘welfare mix’ identified in this chapter might be changing for young migrants and refugees and becoming more aligned with the rigid UK model.

Labour markets Finally, the migration projects of the minors who chose to stay in Italy rather than transit the country were often dependent on the structural opportunities that existed for acquiring professional training and legal employment post-18. On separate occasions, both an NGO worker and a local authority official referred to this policy respectively as an ‘ERASMUS scheme’ and ‘boarding school for Albanian minors’. Sibal, aged 20 at the time of our first interview, for example, arrived unaccompanied in Italy at the age of 16. At 18, he was able to extend his permit in order to pursue a tailoring apprenticeship. The company had since employed him, enabling him to stay in Italy on a work visa. ‘I’ve been through so much … but now I try to look forward,’ he remarked. ‘It’s hard for other guys … there’s a lot of homelessness, but I already had this skill so it’s easier for me.’ Yet Italy’s pathway to legality for unaccompanied non-asylum-seeking minors also has multiple problems, not least the fact that its classically Mediterranean welfare focus on social insurance and commodification frequently led to situations of labour market exploitation. Interviewees spoke of ‘friends’ who had paid employers for them to grant them the

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contract needed for an adult visa, and most of them had, at some point, been expected to work for free. Working in the unregulated labour market was thus often required as a condition of entry into the formal labour market. Indeed, in Italy’s dualist labour market model there exists significant fluidity between the two. In both Italy and England, we met young people working in exploitative conditions. Two young men in Italy had been promised job contracts, only to be let down when they turned 18. A social worker explained that a large part of his job was going around to show his face and essentially threaten the kids’ bosses to ensure they delivered on their promises; he also called in favours from friends to help the boys and girls get into schools or internships so that they could extend their visas as they turned 18. ‘This is how we do things here in Italy,’ he joked. ‘Call it what you want – it’s our Mafia heritage, or what anthropologists call clientelism.’ Joshi, aged 24 and from Afghanistan, worked unpaid in appalling conditions for months, hoping to receive a contract at the end of it. Declaring that ‘migrants are the new slaves of the world’, he was now committed to only ever working for ‘good Italians’. Because of the time limitation of the post-18 Italian work and study visa, many young people experienced trying to find a job as a ‘race against time’, or felt restricted to opportunities available within their social networks because of a range of factors, including poor Italian language skills. In contrast to the situation in Italy, unaccompanied minors in England have scant possibility of regularizing their status outside the asylum system. It is generally illegal for young people refused asylum to work, but some young people in the research were taking this risk to earn money to pay legal fees for appeals no longer financed by the UK government, as well as to send money to relatives back home. Common jobs included car-washing, restaurant work, food delivery, cleaning and, in the case of one young woman, sex work. This unregulated work was being done at a double cost – exploitation by employers on the one hand, and with the risk of arrest by the state on the other. The nefarious mechanisms of control that employers can exercise over precarious workers such as refused asylum seekers have been well documented in past scholarship (Lewis et al 2015). Several young people commented that wages were much higher in English cities than in Italian cities – even for irregular work – but that such jobs came with a greater risk of being caught. Takir, with whose story this chapter began, was detained for several months following a Home Office raid on a phone shop where he was working without papers in England. In both England and Italy, many young people were enrolled in vocational courses, but there was a perception that in England it was

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more difficult to find skilled work (as a mechanic or a chef, for example) without qualifications. This was less so in sectors such as catering and the hotel trade. Moreover, as discussed earlier, several young people in both countries were barred from accessing courses because they were waiting for or did not have documents. Young people often made a trade-off in education and training between short-term and long-term gains. In the UK, Ismael explained that he chose to drop out of his mechanics course, although his grades were good, because he had a more immediate priority to send money back to his parents and could earn money as a pizza courier. In Italy, Erfanullah, aged 26, could bring his mother over through family reunification rights, but it was expensive, he explained. He had to ‘work like a dog at three jobs’ with no time for leisure or education. The different national – and city-level contexts – offered different challenges and opportunities in terms of earning money and getting papers in the short and longer term. One 23-year-old Afghan who had arrived in England unaccompanied at the age of 13 was earning an annual salary of £24,000 in a restaurant where he had worked as a skilled chef for over four years. Despite this secure labour market position, he was facing deportation from England following a refused asylum claim. In Italy, if he had a similarly supportive employer and secure employment, he would have had the opportunity to regularize his status. Despite its significant problems, Italy’s post-18 regularization pathway for former unaccompanied minors is one of the few EU models that seek to provide pragmatic pathways to legality and labour market integration for this group. With the exception of two individuals, all the unaccompanied minors in the Italian sample who sought to stay in Italy and were enrolled in statutory support had acquired, or were in the process of acquiring, some form of legal documentation and most were engaged in an internship or training programme. It should be noted that this was largely because of the herculean efforts of individual care workers to force the system to deliver. Moreover, as discussed in later chapters, the impact of delays in receiving documents on young people’s ability to progress into work or education after 18 was huge. Nonetheless, such pathways to legality, however difficult they were to access in practice, contrasted starkly with the high numbers transitioning into illegality (Gonzales 2011) as they became adult in England. Moreover, statistics on recognition rates suggest that most young people from countries including Bangladesh, Egypt and Albania who had secured employment in Italy, and been able to stay after they turned 18, would probably have been refused asylum and/or detained and returned to their countries of origin from England. Moreover, while England routinely refuses asylum applications from West Africans, many young people in the research from countries

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including the Gambia, Ghana and Senegal could stay in Italy – albeit often in adverse conditions – with some form of humanitarian protection and without the fear of deportation to the country they had fled.

Conclusion A range of factors influence why, how and when young refugee and other migrant young people engage with statutory and non-statutory sources of welfare and methods of immigration control as they ‘become adult’ in Europe. Because of what has been articulated elsewhere as the nexus of ‘care and control’ (Sales and Hek 2004), young people in the research navigated care and opportunity structures that changed over place and over time. This involved moving within countries, counties and even between parts of the same city where it was more or less easy to be ‘invisible’. While local context is key, our research suggests that the different welfare, labour market, and asylum and immigration control policies in Italy and England at the national level interacted with different types of aspirations and choices to shape different outcomes for young people over time. This chapter has laid out how outcomes and opportunities for unaccompanied young migrants in our study varied according to the different welfare state, immigration control and labour market architectures with which they came into contact. We have characterized these as an iron rod system in the UK and a colander welfare system in Italy. We have seen evidence in both countries of good practice and poor practice in relation to how the wellbeing of unaccompanied young migrants and refugees is integrated in the design and function of immigration control, welfare and labour market regimes. Sadly, we have observed that the policy priorities directed at migrants and refugees are often primarily shaped more by hostile migration and welfare policies and insufficient funding than by considerations of their wellbeing. In order to make sense of how young people navigate systems and structures in pursuit of the type of legal status that affords them the freedoms they aspire to, we need to be mindful of their lived experiences, critical of what constitutes ‘genuine choices’ and aware of the complex factors shaping their decisions (Wolff and de-Shalit 2007). For example, as this chapter has shown, the assumption that an interventionist welfare approach is always in the ‘best interests’ of young people fails to recognize how for some young people accessing generous state support can expose them to greater immigration enforcement. In order to navigate the constraints imposed by the complex web of immigration and welfare structures, young people are forced on occasion

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to bend the truth or lie, sometimes with the consequence of breaking the law. Indeed, the fact that the law itself is already in play for these young people, given that most have travelled ‘illegally’ to Europe, is one reason why it is important to break this institutionalist bias in studies of welfare and immigration policy. As Williams and Baláž (2012) have argued, a statecentric framework struggles to explain risk. Wolff and de‑Shalit’s framework of understanding ‘genuine opportunities for secure functionings’ (2007: 84) is more helpful in explaining such patterns of behaviour. Young migrants make certain choices and take certain risks as they come of age and navigate shifting contours of legality and rights. At the same time, they are not purely rational agents interacting with static or predictable opportunity structures. Instead, as the following chapters explore in more detail, luck, fear and serendipity all play their part in determining their fortunes.

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The Pursuit of Safety and Freedom ‘You just realize in the moment you have to run away, that’s all you think. You don’t think whether I am gonna be here, or I am gonna be there  … Because the thing is, you just think in the moment, ‘oh, I have to run away from here’ … But when you reach here, you will know that, in the future, you will come to the better country. Because I know that I passed the worst things … It’s not easy as a lady, as a girl, at a young age … you know things are not gonna be easy but you passed like the worst things. Just when you left the country.’ (Julia, Eritrea)

Introduction Julia arrived in the United Kingdom (UK) at the age of 17 having fled Eritrea suddenly because of events linked to her religion. She travelled with the support of an agent via Sudan and then to France, where she stayed for several months. Every day she tried to make the crossing via lorry to the UK. She found the journey incredibly hard: ‘You face a lot of things, a lot of abuse. It’s not just physical abuse but also emotional, it’s just general abuse.’ But she believed that whatever she endured, it was better than what she had left behind. Julia was granted indefinite leave to remain within a short period of time and was able to slowly start building her life in relative safety in the UK, despite at times, as we will see, an acute lack of support. Jamal was 24 when we met him. He had left Afghanistan as a child many years previously and since then had spent most of his life on the move still in search of somewhere safe to live. Arriving as an unaccompanied child

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in the UK, he spent several years in a city that he loved and then, after turning 18, was refused any permanent legal status to remain and forcibly removed to Afghanistan from where, seeking to migrate to Australia, he became stuck in Indonesia. He reflected on the irony of how seeking safety had at the same time jeopardized it and how, even when you did get a sense of what it was, it could easily be taken away again: ‘Making all these journeys made me realize how hard life can be. I was risking my life to make all these journeys and crossing the borders to get to the other country was risk-taking. It is really difficult … When I arrived in UK for the first time, I was really, really happy and I was thinking my life is sorted now therefore I was hoping for a better future. When I have been refused, I was fearing for my life and running away from government to avoid deportation to Afghanistan. I didn’t mind to risk my life to go to another country but not to Afghanistan, so that is why I have made all this journey.’ The search for safety and freedom as components of wellbeing emerged as central to young people’s migratory decisions. They were often combined into the all-encompassing quest for a ‘better future’, which captured the driving force behind initial departures and subsequent migratory decisions. Perceptions of how and where they could secure this ‘better future’ shaped the ways in which they engaged with immigration control, asylum and welfare policies, and also whether and how they maintained relationships and identities related to their country of origin (see Chapter 11). As noted in Chapter 4, in their quest for these elements of their wellbeing, some young people become completely alienated from formal systems and structures and embarked on a new phase of their migratory experience, which often had other unintended consequences. Such resolutions could result in becoming ‘illegal’ or, like Jamal, being forced through structures beyond their control into seemingly endless global journeys of exclusion and marginalization. This chapter illuminates how safety and freedom are highly political constructs. For the period that they are recognized as children, there is arguably some degree of congruence between young people’s conceptions of these aspects of their wellbeing and those of welfare and immigration structures, policies and systems. However, as they turn 18, there is frequently a growing chasm between their own and others’ perceptions of the sorts of safety and freedoms most conducive to the lives they want to lead. ‘Safe country’, for example, means completely different things to diplomats and politicians negotiating returns to Afghanistan or Albania

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than it does to young people having fled these ‘safe countries’ and who are then considered deportable. Likewise, relatively expansive ideas of freedom for young people who have spent their formative years in the UK or Italy are at odds with notions of freedom they can expect if they are no longer able to stay there legally, or are expected to return ‘home’. The chapter reveals how young people are willing to take significant yet calculated risks, believing that the lives they can hope for following their migration are infinitely better than those they have left behind. Ultimately, safety and freedom are aspired to and sought after within complex, multilevel geopolitical spaces that determine for whom they are attainable and for whom they are not.

The search for safety As noted in Chapter 1, while some young people themselves made the choice to migrate, for many it was parents or other relatives who made the decision and provided the resources to enable them to leave. Izat, from Afghanistan, commented: ‘At that time, we were very little, we didn’t even know where we were going, but you know that the circumstances were such that your parents want you to be in a safer place. Because what they have in mind is, “OK we are past our ages now – we didn’t achieve anything so at least our kids can have a brighter future.” That’s what I remember my parents saying. “Listen, you just focus on your future, don’t worry about us – we have nothing to lose, we have everything to gain.”’ Izat recognized a naivety in his parents’ actions. Although they had his best interests at heart, in reality they had no idea whether he would be OK, but nonetheless sacrificed a great deal to send him to a place they conceived to be ‘safe’. As Izat grappled with an immigration system that repeatedly refused his claim to asylum and constantly undermined his mental health through the threat of return, he contemplated: ‘You can only pray for them because you know they sacrificed their life. They probably had some savings and they spent it all on you. And just for you to have a safer life. So, they don’t know the system here or they don’t know that you will have support here – they are not aware of anything. All they know is that at least you will be safe. That’s their main concern,

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that you will be safe. And so we can only pray for them and be grateful.’ The paradoxical risks taken in search of safety were generally accepted as inevitable, and young people reasoned that they were willing to suspend any modicum of safety in order to have a life worth living. Yet such decisions to look for a future elsewhere were not taken lightly. A conversation with Kushan, from Afghanistan, pushed home how opting to leave meant both ‘gambling with life’ and being prepared to face the possibility of death. He explained: ‘So many people are dying this way. We know, we have seen them … and the situation that we have been through – there are more chances to die. I crossed the sea you know in Turkey, and I was, basically you have no hope that you can get across it. Because that ship that you have been provided with – you know it wasn’t basically … you could have drowned easily.’ Kamran, also from Afghanistan, reflected on what he called a ‘hard, difficult journey – I don’t want anyone else to go through it … it’s really hard’. But he went on to explain that people he knew would still make the journey ‘to have a better life, to save themselves to, you know, come and educate themselves  … people take that risk’. As a young person in Italy put it, ‘Go, go, go, the pressure is so much … even if the sea is BOILING, they will try to cross it!’ For individuals who had fled situations of family-related violence or persecution in their country of origins or experienced trafficking on route, the pursuit of safety was primarily about creating distance between themselves and past events and creating some sort of protection from similar events in the future. This distance and its relationship to subjective feelings of safety and security was temporal as well as spatial. There was a need to be physically away from threats to their security, but they also required reassurance that they would not have to face them again in the future. On occasion, young people described situations of living without papers in England and Italy in the same language they had previously used to describe the instability and fear of persecution in their countries of origin, using words such as ‘scared’, ‘anxious’ and ‘uncertain’, and articulating a threat to their sense of ontological security shown by prior scholarship to be an important component of their wellbeing (Chase 2013a). Young people who were granted some form of legal status past the age of 18 often experienced an odd combination of safety and insecurity at the same time. While they might not face immediate threat to their lives,

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they felt the real effects of the transition from institutional ‘childhood’ to ‘adulthood’ as feelings of disruption, uncertainty and lack of care, quite the contrary of what they had expected or intended through their decision to migrate. Contrasting the feelings of insecurity that the search for safety illogically generated, some juxtaposed times of turmoil in navigating welfare and immigration or education systems in Europe with times back ‘home’ when life was cosseted and less complicated. Yet they rarely had opportunities to share those aspects of their past lives, since such complexity sat at odds with the constraints of a system that was based on providing evidence of persecution and framed young people as victims. Aaron, for example, left Afghanistan as a young child and reminisced on something of an idyllic childhood where, he said, he felt sure of his place in the world. He contrasted that sense of security with his arrival in the UK and its associations with isolation and alienation: ‘There were so many activities I can remember that we used to do and still we had time to go to the mosque and for the food for the family, for the house, for religious studies, even for learning English. We had so many things – it was different and then at the end after dinner going to bed and waking up exactly on time, there was no need for an alarm. There was no need for any fight whatsoever, everything was just perfect. No one shouted. I was always – I had lots of friends. They had me as their friend you know, a group of people who were just my age doing the same things, in the same class, everything. Yes, until I got here where nobody is willing to [be a friend] and nothing is safe. Everything is different to do, just being picked on. Here … I would hear giggles which put me off … no-one is inviting me, so I was just watching. And that was my childhood, compared to when I used to be brave and cheeky and full of energy. And everybody knew they would turn back home. We knew our time, we knew our place, we knew our game.’ Reminiscences of childhood and family often evoked vivid scenes, shared moments and portraits of past relationships that they missed in their new exile. In his ‘museum of self ’ (Allsopp 2018), in which he drew images of his ‘favourite things’, Lika, from Albania, included his house, his mother, a beach and his favourite teddy bear. He missed Albania, but also Greece, where he had once felt safe and had spent time growing up before he moved to Italy:

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‘I love these things. And I miss some of them: my house in Albania, my brother–he is not with me now  … He’s two years younger. I was talking to him yesterday. In Greece the time was 1 am and we were talking for one hour. Here it was midnight … I miss my house in Albania – there – because my grandmother and my grandfather are there and I miss them … I was nine years old when I left Albania. In Albania we lived with my grandmother for six years as my mother and father were working in Greece so my grandmother was looking after us. I was living with her. I can talk to her now on the phone or on Skype, but my cousin there who has internet spent it all a few days ago so I couldn’t talk with her this week … There [indicating in the picture], that’s my house where I lived when I was in Greece. When I was in Greece we went to the beach. It’s a very beautiful country.’ Several young people, including Lika, commented how much they enjoyed having the chance to talk with the research team about some of the more positive aspects of their lives back in their countries of origin. One young Afghan lit up as he described the smell of orange blossoms on Afghan streets; a young Eritrean woman spoke fondly of tending to livestock on their family farm. She was proud that she could skin a chicken – did we want to see how? The research encounter for some was thus a relatively safe space for certain stories that stood in contrast to them having to focus purely on the ‘bad bits’ for their asylum and welfare claims. There was a rather accurate perception among most young people that if they said anything positive about life back in their country, it might fundamentally undermine their claim of persecution. Some expressed the sentiment that, in being required to constantly repeat narratives about how bad their countries were to make the case for their need for sanctuary, they felt guilt sometimes, as if they were betraying the countries and families who had made them who they were (see Chapters 7 and 11).

The politics of safety However visceral young people’s need for safety and refuge was, the likelihood of this being afforded was politically driven at every level. At the macro-level, the insecurity, lack of safety or sheer impossibility of having a viable future in countries of origin or host countries initiated the search for safety and security elsewhere. Yet whichever country

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they ended up in, young people were subject to the vagaries of policies governing whether or not they were likely to be granted legal status, as well as the multiple ways in which such policies were interpreted on the ground by an extraordinary array of actors (themes we will return to).

Safe country The disconnection between institutional and young people’s own conceptualizations of safety and security was often stark. The most obvious was in relation to the notion of a ‘safe country’, a label assigned to Afghanistan and Albania but not to Eritrea, which remains classified, at the time of writing in 2020, as ‘unsafe’. Young people from Afghanistan and Albania struggled to make sense of the discrepancies between these political categorizations and their own lived realities. The lack of safety in Afghanistan was repeatedly reinforced by the testimonies of young people who had been returned (all of whom, apart from one, had migrated again) and the constant references made by young people still outside Afghanistan about what they had read or seen on social as well as national and international media, which belied any idea of increasing safety and security. Nonetheless, according to the Refugee Convention of 1951 and its 1967 protocol (UNHCR 2011: 3), in order to avail themselves of the right to refugee status, a person has to demonstrate: a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. Under this definition, witnessing or being frightened of generalized violence is not recognized as constituting grounds for refugee status. Nevertheless, living in constant fear of or being surrounded by violence was the paramount reason many young people decided to migrate or why their migration was instigated by parents or other family members. Given its ‘safe country’ branding, Albanian young men and women, particularly from the North and the East, repeatedly explained the difficulties of articulating why they did not feel safe there. Bledar

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acknowledged how it might be difficult for those unfamiliar with the context to understand why anyone from Albania might need support: ‘Yeah, because we are different from another country ’cause we don’t have a war or something like that but still the life in Albania is very difficult, very difficult for people our age. ’Cause most of the people – most of the young people in Albania they don’t have family they have to work quite young. I was 15 when I first started working in a car wash. That time when you start growing up and then you go straight away to work and then you get skinnier and skinnier. I think the life is like we are lucky we don’t have war but we have other things, bad things you know. Lots of people work for free you know, the rich people use them to work for them for free. Just to give them food.’ Eduard, reflected on the degree of disbelief he had encountered in trying to articulate his need for asylum as a young gay man: ‘When I came here like everyone wanted to know like, they were just asking me why did you come here and there was this – they told me like they didn’t believe or they was asking so much like they don’t believe me and like this and it was so hard for me like who to trust and who to express myself to.’ Eduard’s application was refused, as was his later appeal. By the end of the research, he was increasingly worried about his legal situation and appeared stressed. Once appeal rights exhausted, he became non‑contactable, and the last we heard he was living homeless somewhere in the UK, the organization that had been supporting him at a loss as to how they could continue to help him. Prior to leaving Albania, Elvis had escaped police custody and was, he said, known as an outspoken member of a family politically active against the government. As a result, several members of the family had been persecuted and at least one had been killed. He claimed that the widespread belief that Albania was an open democracy was misplaced and that his life would be in danger if he returned. A conversation between Adnan, Dalmat and Tony focused on the lack of understanding of the complexities of violence in Albania, the role of different strands of ‘mafia’ activity and how, in their view, these groups went unchecked because they fed the government’s own economic interests. Police corruption and bribery were widespread, they said, and there was a pervasive mistrust in institutional structures and services. Hence, they felt the simplistic

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way the British government labelled Albania a safe space to send young people back to was highly flawed. While recognizing that some people did come for economic reasons, there were, they said, viable reasons why many young people were coming to the UK in search of safety, including blood feuds linked to Kanun Law and strong family traditional norms and practices. Dalmat explained: ‘Because even if you go with a girl and her brother sees you … he will kill you. You will bring shame to their family. Yeah, in England that’s like, no one cares about that. But in Albania because of a book written 400 years ago “blood have it taken with the blood” – so it’s everything like literally.’ They went on to talk about the lack of police intervention in ‘family matters’, meaning there was no way to get official protection from police or other authorities in matters of Kanun Law (see Chapter 1). Dalmat, laughing along with Adnan, commented about the police: ‘They’ll say, “if he kills you, we will send him to jail”, well that’s not really the problem … they can’t do nothing before that.’

Safe return Nowhere was the politicized nature of policies more evident than in situations where young adults who were formerly unaccompanied children became resigned to signing up to ‘voluntary return’. The governmentfunded and International Organization for Migration-administered Voluntary Assisted Return and ReIntegration Programme allows people who have no legal right to remain in a country to ‘choose’ to go back to the ‘safe’ country they came from. This return is at the expense of the host government and includes the receipt of a small sum of money (as of 2019, £1,500 in the UK for a single person) to facilitate reintegration into the country of origin. In the several cases within our research where young people agreed to sign up to the voluntary return programme, all of them expressed reaching a point of desperation and exhaustion with their precarious situations, thus removing any real sense of choice in these situations. In an early conversation with Izat, from Afghanistan, he spoke about how he had just signed up for the return programme and when asked why he had done so replied: ‘Because there was no choice … you either get deported or at least that way then you continue with support – you can still

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live in your flat if you have filled the form in and you have applied for voluntary return, then at least you have somewhere to stay for the time being.’ The same constricted idea of safety, and being resigned to what you could have, emerged in Janan’s reflections on his time in detention and how this contrasted with being homeless. After being age assessed as an adult at age 16, Janan ended up living on the streets for many years and spent 35 days in detention prior to an attempt to deport him to Afghanistan. In the end, his forced removal was prevented through the intervention of a non-governmental organization and the support of local media. Ironically, he commented how, given what he had experienced on the street, his stint in the detention centre was one of the few times he felt safe and secure. Prison, he said, ‘was easier than being an asylum seeker in the UK … when you are outside you fight for your life’. During those days in detention he had access to computer and English language classes, gym and even a tennis court. He had three meals a day and most importantly had access to a toilet, a warm room and was able to take a shower for the first time in months. Jamal’s reflections contrasted sharply with the traumatic experiences of immigration detention described by other young people (discussed later in the chapter). The political dimensions of safety are also revealed starkly when former unaccompanied children are forcibly removed to so-called safe countries of origin as young adults. Given the assumed role of the state as ‘corporate parent’ while the children are residing in Europe, such measures speak to the most extreme forms of neglect. They also illuminate the contradictory relationships between care and immigration control systems. While on the one hand these are inextricably intertwined – care contingent on legal status – on the other hand they are systems comprising separate arms that appear to be able to function morally independently of each other. Moreover, there is currently no legal obligation on governments to follow up on what happens to former children in care once they are returned to their countries of origin. This total indifference is even more troubling considering previous aborted attempts through international arrangements to establish safe reception centres for returning children to countries such as Albania, policies that were ultimately deemed unworkable (Lemberg-Pedersen and Chatty 2015). Dalmat, from Albania, commented on what he saw as the dismissive attitude of the UK government once young people had been forced out of the country: ‘They [UK government] will never probably see that person again but that’s a human. That might be anyone. You don’t

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know what’s the problem. OK, they refuse this young man and they gonna go back to Albania but what about where they go there, what happens to them?’ The most striking example of how the politics of safety played out in the current research was in the number of young people who had been forcibly returned to Afghanistan by the UK government. As discussed in Chapter 1, at the time of research and writing, Italy was not engaged in such deportations. But out of 32 Afghan young men who took part in the study in England, 11 of them had been forcibly returned to Afghanistan from the UK at some time during the recent past. Of these, ten had remigrated and, at the time of the research, were variously living back in the UK, or in Indonesia, Germany, Italy, Bulgaria and Pakistan. Moreover, almost half (n=14) of participants from Afghanistan had spent at least some time living irregularly in the UK, often prior to being detained before return to Afghanistan. By the end of the research project, 12 of our Afghan research participants had indefinite leave to remain in the UK and two of these had gone on to secure full UK citizenship. Many of those who had finally begun to find safety and security through being able to regularize their legal status had arrived at this point after significant periods of hardship, uncertainty and deprivation. By the close of the study, the remaining 19 young people continued to live with a various range of statuses, including temporary leave to remain, waiting for the outcome of an appeal or fresh claim for asylum, waiting for extension of leave to remain, or appeal rights exhausted. Only one young person, Noor, who had been removed to Afghanistan remained there by the end of the research. He continued to wander from province to province in search of a safe place to live and build a future for himself. The irony of the safe country was evident in the pictures he sent on WhatsApp of bombings that he had witnessed in several places, although miraculously he avoided being wounded or killed. When asked what he would say to politicians in the UK about their policy of returning young people to Afghanistan, Noor replied: ‘I will just say to them that if they send people back to Afghanistan it’s very bad because they spend many times hard days in different countries you know by walking [migrating]. You know there are many problems in the way, by illegal way. When they reach their destination and they hope that they can stay and make a good life and be safe … but when they are sent back to their own countries its really, really bad, you know? For them the situation is really bad and there are some

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problem for their mind and health you know? If they send back it’s not good for them, they shouldn’t have this – sending people back to their countries.’ Dalmat and Tony went on to discuss how they knew people who had arrived to the UK from Albania in their early teens and now 15–20 years later were in their 30s – still living precariously but whom they knew now would never return to Albania. Dalmat rationalized how once people had spent 13 or 14 years of their life in the UK, there is no going back: they have tasted a new life of freedom and usually changed as a result. The pair went on to talk about the lack of rules and law in Albania compared with the UK and what they referred to as a lack of discipline in Albania. In England, by contrast, they said, you learned how to work within the rules in a more disciplined way. Tony summed it up by saying that in Albania ‘You don’t have to have a seatbelt. You know?’ – at which everyone laughed. Dalmat went on to say, ‘Even now like, when I come on a drive, I feel so weird if I don’t put it on, I’m like it’s so insane.’ The metaphorical seatbelt, symbolizing the rules and structure within which you were expected to function, was an important part of feeling safe and secure. The motif was also repeated in the Italian fieldwork, where another commonly heard metaphor was wearing a helmet on a scooter or motorbike.

Freedom Bisrat had been in England for five months when we first spoke to him. He said the biggest difference between being in the UK and in Eritrea was ‘freedom … There is nothing better than freedom.’ As yet, he had not had his interview with the Home Office and did not know whether or not he would receive refugee status. His hopes for the future had been to have a ‘peaceful and worry-free life’ but he had not yet found what he was looking for: security and freedom were very much symbolized by having documents. His situation was complicated by the fact that he was being age disputed, the Home Office claiming that he was 18 years old already (and not 16 as he had claimed on arrival). He spoke of how this was ‘stressful’ and left him feeling ‘in limbo’. Fifteen months later, things had fundamentally changed for Bisrat. He had finally been granted asylum and was doing well at college –where he was about to make the shift from an English Language programme to a nationally recognized plumbing course. The age dispute had been resolved and the Home Office had accepted that he was the age he said

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he was. Although he had been in what was supposed to be temporary YMCA accommodation for a period of ten months, he liked it, had many friends and it was cheap – he only had to pay £10 a week. He was now accessing Income Support through the Job Centre, no longer via social services, but still had a social worker and a key worker whom he really liked and got on well with. Reflecting on how he now felt more grown up, he commented that this was the result of not just turning 18, but also ‘I have my papers, I can do whatever I want, whenever I want – all this adds up to feeling grown up.’ As noted earlier, Eduard had been victimized and persecuted in Albania because he identified as being gay. Although this is not illegal in Albania, a highly traditional society meant that Eduard found it impossible to live safely in a society that was widely damning of anyone who expressed a non-heterosexual identity. He compared his experience of living in Albania and his more recent life in the UK: ‘Yes, like in Albania it is the law, their law is that it is all right to be gay, but the people they don’t accept it. So it is just like a law, no one care about it even though the police are something like everyone, so it is just like a law. But here the people accept you how you are and the law it gets respect. No one can like bully you because you are gay and so it is like freedom.’ Having experienced persistent violence in Albania, Elvis contrasted this to life in the UK in terms of the notion of freedom and what this meant day to day for his quality of life: ‘I cannot forget what happened with me, and how the life happened but I have found in UK that I have changed as a person. Now I feel free to speak, I feel free to think, I feel free because before I didn’t feel free … I think that I have changed you know in college, you know coming from Albania where I have been always persecuted and here they [teachers in college] have teached me that here you are free to think what you want, to be what you want, to stay with who you want, to not stay with who you don’t want, to speak what you want. It doesn’t mean swearing, but speak how you feel, how you think is right for you to speak, to ask for your rights because at least we are born to die and we haven’t want to live with being scared from some person or being scared because he is more powerful than me. Because in Albania is the law,

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who is strongest, who has more money, who is more powerful he can do everything …but here, no.’ The association between education and positive freedoms was repeatedly made. Lodi, an aspiring artist who had come to Italy in search of new artistic freedoms, explained that ‘studying is what life is about, because life is one big education’. He explained that being unaccompanied in Italy gave him permission and freedom to explore his artistic pursuits without the weight of burden of family responsibilities or ‘baggage’ from back home: ‘I chose to study art, my dream has always been to study art, this is why I crossed the whole of Albania to come here to Italy, to study art … this was the possibility I sought. After Italy, I don’t think there’s a place in the world where there’s more art, no? Where people work and study and speak art! This was my dream, and I decided to come, because in my country I couldn’t study art.’ Lodi contrasted his own experience to that of peers seeking asylum, stressing that he was not fleeing persecution, but rather that the type of freedom he sought was something different. Nevertheless, the context of instability in his country was, he felt, part of what stifled his freedom to pursue his particular dream: ‘The reason I left was the possibility of having a future, because there aren’t many opportunities to create one in my county … you can’t create the future you want, because there isn’t work. There are many other problems, including political problems. Basically, nothing works, I mean, Albania is a beautiful country, it has everything, but without work? Without the possibility to study and have many other things? This is why I came here … my dream was always to go to England, but Albanians can’t go to England [without claiming asylum].’ As we saw in Chapter  4, different opportunity structures available in different countries, and their compatibility with the pursuit of different types of freedoms and dreams, is something that appeared frequently in the research. Besmir, who had claimed asylum in the UK, spoke of the real sense of safety and freedom he had there in comparison with Albania, where his movements were monitored and curtailed for his own safety. Such freedom had widened his opportunities and enabled him to do

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things that he could never have contemplated back in Albania, where he had had to stop going to school because his parents considered it unsafe for him to be away from the house. Several young women from Albania and Eritrea in the UK and Italy expressed a particular attachment to the political ideas around equality and women’s freedom that they encountered in their new countries. During one of our research retreats, Albana became visibly angry as she discussed how some of her friends were being taken out of school back in Albania because they were getting married. At this point, one of the Afghan boys teased, ‘Ah, so what, you’re one of these feminists?’ Mariam, from Eritrea, immediately leapt to her defence: ‘Yes, yes we are, and you better be too!’ For some other young women, negotiating a new acquired independence was a tricky transition that required aspects of deception and guilt in relating their new lifestyles to family members and friends back home. Salalah, aged 17 and from Eritrea, explained she had two Facebook accounts – one for her English friends, where she could post pictures with boys and wearing make-up, and another for her family back home. These, she explained, were mostly church pictures. A cultural mediator working in an Italian shelter (casa famiglia) explained that an important part of their role was to reassure parents over phone or Skype that they were protecting their daughters from men in the contexts of their new-found freedoms (we discuss this topic further as part of our discussion of transnational connections in Chapter 11). Many young people juxtaposed their own situations of relative safety and freedom with those of others they knew who continued to struggle with ‘their papers’, fearing deportation and having to go through repeated appeals processes. Often those with relative freedom in this context experienced something like ‘survivor’s guilt’ and would go out of their way to seek to help those in a less fortunate position. These issues are discussed in more detail in Chapters 10 and 11 on friendships and relationships and social and transnational networks, but they are also central to the way in which young people in the study understood questions of freedom and autonomy and how these related to their subjective wellbeing.

Individual and collective wellbeing and freedoms A tension was commonly articulated among research participants between the individualistic conception of freedom and choice promoted in the West (as epitomized in a view of wellbeing focused on an individual holder

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of human rights) versus the more collective ideas of duty and collective obligation associated with cultures in their countries of origin. Cole (2015) has shown in relation to Eritrea, for example, that the migration of one person in one family – usually a young man in a transnational breadwinner model – can provide a survival line through remittances to generations of family members. In this way, she identifies the important relationship between family, economics and migration. Problematizing the contrast between asylum and forced pursuit of safety on one hand, and economic migration and labour market integration as a voluntary endeavour on the other hand, such strategies can be understood in the context of the growing academic literature on mixed migration (Castles et al 2013) or survival migration (Betts 2010). Away from their families and with a new-found sense of choice, some young people explained feelings of confusion or guilt at suddenly having free rein to explore substances such as alcohol or pursue intimate relationships in a way that they had been unable to back home. Some also articulated a sense of guilt and confusion at being torn between pursuing more individualistic aspirations and collective pursuits (see Chapter 7). Those young people in the research who were still in touch with people back home or in refugee camps or urban settings in the global East or South, sought to straddle their individual freedoms and family obligations, sometimes with acute dissonance: the duty to study and earn more money from a profession in the long term had to be juggled against the competing demands or desire to send money home quickly (see Chapter 8). Meanwhile, for some, the freedom to have a romantic life of their choosing in Europe had to be set against a duty to respect the input and say of family members back ‘home regarding their future spouse’ (see Chapters 10 and 11). One social worker in Italy commented that the years before they turn 18, once they get to Europe, can be for many unaccompanied young migrants the first and only time that they sense freedom. Before and after, she commented, they are expected to shoulder heavy family obligations. ‘Sometimes’, she observed, ‘once they arrive, you note a bit of a regression in their behaviour as they get used to being treated as and acting like kids.’ Although restrictions on certain unaccompanied minors working were experienced as an imposition by many young people, it is important to stress that experiences were not homogeneous, and some others (albeit a minority) felt it offered them a moment of repose. This was especially the case in Italy, where cultural mediators were able to explain to family members back home that the young people were not able to work, and that doing so could put their residence at risk in the medium and longer term.

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Detention: absconding as freedom from harm Finally, a chapter on safety and freedom would not be complete without recognizing the impact of immigration detention on research participants. For young people in both countries who had been detained (whether in ‘hot spots’ in Italy or immigration detention centres in either Italy or the UK), this was mostly experienced as an acute abuse of freedom and something that they felt to be at odds with the human rights they had come to Europe in search of. After being refused asylum, in preparation for being deported at the age of 18, Abugul was placed for four months in an immigration detention centre. During this time, his mental health deteriorated badly after months of bullying and a period in solitary confinement for ‘breaking a shower tap in a moment of annoyance at the ten-second bursts of water’. Traumatized by his experience in detention, Abugul absconded once he was released, an act that breached the conditions of his bail and constituted a crime. This one act of freedom went on to impact his claim for asylum for the next seven years. Solicitors refused to take his case because, owing to his absconding, he was deemed to be of ‘bad character’ and ‘untrustworthy’. This example raises, again, the tension between young people’s ideas of freedom and those imposed by the state. For some, absconding was seen as a way of protecting their freedoms in the face of hostile governments; while for the governments, the human rights of the young migrants were nevertheless a commodity to be balanced against the perceived freedoms and best interests of national security and immigration control. The UK remains, as of 2020, the only country in Europe with no time limit for adults in immigration detention. The maximum length of detention for adults in Italy for immigration purposes, meanwhile, has changed several times in recent years and could be up to one year for asylum seekers at the time of research. It should be noted that while in both the UK and Italy there are time limits for how long children can be legally detained, in reality we came across cases in both countries where children had experienced protracted periods in detention. Usually this was because age assessments had been conducted erroneously and were only later remedied. One social worker told us about two Albanian teenagers who had been released from detention in England after several weeks only after one of the cooking staff noticed them and, the mother of two teenage boys herself, complained to the staff, pointing out that they were ‘clearly underage and too young to be in here’. The idea that a cook can serve as the arbiter of freedom in this context (a space inaccessible to journalists and the general public in both England and Italy) is indicative of a system rife with injustice, chance and serendipity.

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Conclusion While, on the surface, safety is a fundamental basic need, undisputedly a universal human right, it is nonetheless intrinsically highly politicized. Understood as an anchor to freedom and having choices to live the lives they valued, in reality any permanent or reliable sense of safety for many young people remained at best something transitory and at worst elusive. Jamal’s pursuit of safety had left him waiting in Indonesia for an outcome of his claim for a space of refuge anywhere in the world: ‘At the moment I am desperate for my safety and I don’t want be sent back to Afghanistan, so therefore I don’t mind where I go as long as I get out of this situation. My life was in danger in Afghanistan, that is why I left Afghanistan, therefore I just want somewhere safe, where I can carry on with my life.’ We have seen that unaccompanied young migrants and refugees usually had clear – albeit malleable – ideas about the objective(s) of their migration. Their own ideas about safety, freedom and choice influenced how they engaged with the range of systems and structures they came into contact with, particularly as they made the transition to adulthood at 18. Such ideas were frequently in stark contrast to those of the various policy actors who sought to assist and/or govern them. This book seeks to transcend Jamal’s plea for the basics of somewhere safe to live and consider how, in contexts of migration and transition, notions of safety and freedom might be constituted around opportunities for expanding human agency. Being able to move from basic capabilities, or just surviving, to higher order capabilities linked to personal fulfilment, realization of dignity, dreams and aspirations were, after all, at the core of young people’s migratory intentions, or emerged as they saw horizons expanding through the process of migration. Either way, safety and freedom were crucial prerequisites to securing wellbeing for themselves and others.

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Legal Integrity and Recognition ‘That’s why I say the papers are very important for everything. Because they will change your life, you know? Your brain, everything is gonna be replaced. My brain is not relaxed to be honest. Everything is completely changed if you got a right to stay, everything. The people right here they have a right, I can’t do nothing. But hopefully everybody have it, hopefully one day I gonna have it.’ (Aslan, Afghanistan) Aslan came to the United Kingdom (UK) when he was 16, and for the first 18 months or so he was supported by social services, provided with accommodation and able to attend college. Everything changed when an age assessment determined that he was over 18 and shortly afterwards he was refused asylum. No longer eligible for publicly funded support and scared of being deported, Aslan continued living in the UK without papers for a couple of years before he was arrested, detained for five months in three different detention centres and then forcibly removed back to Afghanistan. Finding life in Afghanistan intolerable, within a couple of months he had migrated again. This time he ended up in Italy, where he was given a temporary visa that could be extended contingent on finding work. Despite his best efforts, Aslan was unable to find work in Italy. He had no ties or connections there and could not speak Italian. After more than 15  attempts to get to the UK via France, he finally arrived hidden in the back of a lorry, made his way back to the city he considered ‘home’ and where, at the time of the research, he continued to live precariously through the support of friends and networks and picking up piecemeal, low paid work in car washes, building sites or restaurants. Almost ten years since he had first arrived in the UK, Aslan was still hopeful that one day he would gain the illusive ‘papers’ he needed to build his future.

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This chapter engages with the realities of living with or without legal recognition in England and Italy and the impact this has on young people such as Aslan. It considers these experiences within international and national frameworks of young people’s rights and ‘best interests’, alongside the serendipitous ways in which access to such rights are in fact socially constructed. As we highlight, the arbitrary allocation of papers generates an inequitable set of life opportunities, or capabilities, as unaccompanied migrant young people become adults within the constraints of immigration control.

Legal and policy instruments at European level An unaccompanied young person’s legal status is determined by a range of multilevel policy instruments. At the international level, the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC 2005) offers certain protections to migrant children and young people up to the age of 18. A related framework, which in theory may have greater leverage, is that of ‘best interests’. Article 24 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights stresses that ‘[in] all actions relating to children, whether taken by public authorities or private institutions, the child’s best interests shall be a primary consideration’. Article 24 was given legally binding force through the Treaty of Lisbon (2007).1 The concept of ‘best interests’ has emerged in the last three decades as part of a broader recognition of the rights of the child and is enshrined in Article 3 of UNCRC 1990. Article 3.2 links ‘best interests’ to the protection and care necessary for a child’s wellbeing. For those transitioning to institutional ‘adulthood’ at 18, however, these frameworks become largely immaterial. The UNCRC General Comment No. 6 (2005) is explicit that state responsibility post-18 depends on national legislation. So, for example, in the UK, young people may meet the criteria to become a ‘care leaver’ through which some rights can be extended under certain conditions until the age of 25 in accordance with the Children (Leaving Care) Act 2000. In practice, however, there is frequently no consistency in the eligibility criteria for such provisions or in their application. This lack of clear policy provision post-18 highlights the need for states to find more ‘durable solutions’ for unaccompanied minors once they come of age. Couched within this same discourse of the ‘best interests of the child’ and the need to find ‘durable solutions’, several Europe-wide tools and best practice frameworks for work with migrant young people have been devised, including the Council of the European Union (EU)

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Conclusions on Unaccompanied Minors, adopted in June 2010, and a 2010–14 EU Action Plan on Unaccompanied Minors. A prime example of policy harmonization for unaccompanied minors is the Life Project planning framework (Drammeh 2010). Adopted by the 47 countries in the Council of Europe (Recommendation (2007)9), the framework is explicitly referenced within the 2010 Council of the EU Conclusions on Unaccompanied Minors and similarly endorsed by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (2011). The Life Project planning framework is intended to respond to the prevalence of temporary legal statuses accorded to unaccompanied migrant young people, the common associated experience of waiting and the inherent difficulties of planning for the future in a context of such uncertainty. Its stated aim is to ‘contribute to finding lasting solutions for and with unaccompanied migrant minors that will help them to build life projects guaranteeing them a better future’ (Council of Europe 2008: 7). As previously argued (Allsopp and Chase 2017), the operationalization of the Life Project Planning Framework centres on several core normative and highly contestable assumptions with respect to what constitutes ‘durable solutions’ and what is in the ‘best interests’ of migrant young people. One further, fairly tacit, response based on research by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Council of Europe (2014) has been the recommendation that a ‘transition category’ should be introduced for migrant young people turning 18 in order to inform appropriate policy responses that work with the best interests of young people in this age range. In practice, as we complete this book in 2020, there is still no clear legal definition of best interests (Engebrigtsen 2003) and there is a very top-down approach as to how it is conceived and operationalized in practice (Statz and Heidbrink 2019). Moreover, much ambiguity remains as to its usefulness in planning ahead for what happens when young people come of age. Some have argued that while in theory the best interests principle should be extended up to the age of 25 or, in the context of one UK case (KA (Afghanistan) & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2012] EWCA Civ 1014), that there can be no bright line rule around age when dealing with age-related persecution, for all intents and purposes the ‘best interests’ principle appears largely redundant for young people once they turn 18 (Freeman 2005; Dixon and Wade 2007; Bolt 2018). There is, however, some evidence of the UN infrastructure seeking to bridge the gap in explicitly identifying continuity in gender-related human rights protection for young people, as in the 2016 UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) for Youth document (Khanna and Kimmel 2016). CEDAW (1979) is an international bill of rights for women and

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girls. It was instituted in 1981 and has been ratified by 189 states, including the UK and Italy. More generally, since the late 1990s, the lives of unaccompanied young people in Europe have been largely governed by the increasingly unified European Agenda on Migration noted earlier. With respect to asylum, this agenda has sought to harmonize reception, integration and return procedures for migrants while synergizing immigration policies and strengthening economic and political collaboration between EU member states (Lindstrøm 2005; Ruffer 2005; Schuster 2005). Many such policies have been criticized for normalizing discriminatory and exclusionary practices (Uçarer 2001; Watters 2007; Düvell 2009), including specifically in relation to children and young people (Enenajor 2008). More recent work indicates that the push for strengthening the borders around Europe and outsourcing border controls beyond Europe overrides any concern for the best interests of migrant people (Baldwin-Edwards et al 2019).

Legal and policy instruments at national level Despite various efforts towards the harmonization of migration policies across Europe, as discussed in Chapter 4, there remain some important policy differences with differential impacts on young people across jurisdictions. In the case of the UK and Italy, most notable is the fact that while all unaccompanied migrant minors arriving in the UK who make themselves known to immigration authorities are automatically channelled through the asylum system, Italy has devised an alternative legal route for unaccompanied minors not seeking asylum, affording them some legal ‘wriggle room’ and the possibility of longer term legal security. Italy’s non-asylum-seeking pathway to residence nevertheless comes with important restrictions. Unaccompanied minors must receive a positive appraisal from care workers and have spent a certain period of time in the country. They must also provide evidence that they are embarked upon an ‘integration pathway’ related to education, work or training until the age of 19. If they can obtain a work contract in this time, they can then extend their legal residence on a rolling basis. By contrast, the exacting demands on children in the asylum-seeking system in the UK to provide adequate evidence of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’, as required by the Refugee Convention, often generate protracted legal wrangles associated with loss of credibility. In the run up to their 18th birthday, young people who have not been accorded leave to remain in the UK on the basis of their asylum claim have to formulate a legally recognized case as to why they should be

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allowed to remain for an extended period of time. To do this, in theory they can draw on other instruments, notably Article 3 (protection from torture or degrading treatment) and Article 8 (a right to a private and family life) of the European Convention for Human Rights. With respect to Article 8, scholars such as Joseph Carens (2009) have emphasized the importance of taking an expansive view of ‘family’ that recognizes the social ties and connections central to young people’s sense of wellbeing, an issue we return to later. Nonetheless, there is increasing evidence that, in the case of the UK, such claims for extended leave to remain are likely to be refused (Refugee Council 2018). If this happens, then there are situations in which it is possible to make an appeal against the decision or it may be possible to make a fresh claim for asylum (for example, as a result of new evidence coming to light regarding their asylum claim). In Italy, children who go through the asylum system also face the prospect of refusal, or they may be accorded a status with less comprehensive rights, most likely humanitarian protection. While not having papers could still exclude young people in Italy from accessing education and/or legal work in addition to accessing social rights such as housing, not having legal status was slightly less significant as a barrier to important legal protections while they were under the age of 18. This is because Italy, unlike the UK, has a constitutional ban on forcibly removing children, so the young people were accorded some security or status in the country as long as they were recognized as minors. Turning 18 without papers in Italy nevertheless brought with it many of the same difficulties experienced by young people in England. The ‘integration pathway’ in Italy, outlined in Chapter  4, was in practice often fraught with bureaucratic delays. Many young people were well into their 18th year before their post-18 visa arrived and allowed them to start seeking formal employment. The one-year time limit on the visa meant that finding a job was stressful, and they felt pressured to accept substandard work or poor quality contracts. Abil had recently turned 18 and was waiting for his permesso di soggiorno (permit) to continue studying and working. While his school was sympathetic to the delay and allowed him to keep studying, in the meantime, his lack of documents affected his access to other services, including health care. One day, he started experiencing heart palpitations. He explained: ‘I went to the doctor, I said, “I need to see a doctor, I have a thing here” [points at heart] … it was going super-fast, the guy said, “Sounds like nothing,” so I said, “Well I want to see a doctor!” But he said, “No, no,” like it was nothing, “go

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away, if you want to see a doctor, go somewhere else, go get some documents.” You understand? I refused and stayed there, I needed to see a doctor. I was a mess … I waited until 9 am and they said, “You have to wait two weeks, three weeks,” and I was like, excuse me, and if my heart stops working, then what?’ When we met, Abil was still concerned about his heart and waiting for a hospital appointment. ‘If I don’t have work I have no papers, and if I don’t have papers I’m not here,’ he explained.

Access to legal advice and services The asylum-seeking process is founded on a very particular set of legal procedures and bureaucratic technicalities, requiring expert professional legal advice and guidance. Furthermore, it is a criminal offence for a non-qualified practitioner to offer legal advice on an asylum or immigration claim. While in the UK most unaccompanied minors had access to a solicitor and legal support for their initial claim for asylum, acquiring legal guidance was far more difficult for the purposes of making a case to remain in the UK as they approached the age of 18 and once their discretionary leave to remain as children had expired. In Italy, the approach of 18 came with a scramble for renewed applications for further leave to remain on one of a number of grounds. While for some this was a straightforward application to extend their status, for those who for whatever reason were refused, it often signalled the beginning of a protracted and costly legal process to appeal such a decision. In both countries, there were many accounts of poor quality or inconsistent legal advice (Gill et al 2018). Moreover, the costs of legal services became increasingly prohibitive as young people lost their eligibility for financial support from public funds. Aslan, for example, spoke of how he had paid a solicitor in England to help him who ‘hadn’t done anything but just took my money’. The cost of the initial legal advice on its own had been several hundred pounds, which he raised through piecemeal work and help from friends. While legal aid cuts throughout the UK have led to catastrophic reductions in access to judicial services for anyone with limited or no economic resources, wider cuts affecting non-governmental agencies and organizations have meant that pro bono legal support, previously provided by these organizations, is stretched to breaking point and unable to meet the legal justice demands of an increasingly disenfranchised group of

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young people within immigration processes. These services, however, proved to be crucial to young people who otherwise had no legal recourse. Izat was 21 when we spoke to him for the first time. He had arrived from Afghanistan at the age of 14, and prior to turning 18 had made an application to remain in the UK – which had been refused. After some delays and adjournments, he was able to bring his case to a lower asylum tribunal, where it was again refused. It was then taken to the upper tribunal, where it was also refused. When we last spoke to him (a year later), he was waiting for his case to be heard in the High Court. Throughout this whole process, he had been completely reliant on a non-governmental organization (NGO), which had funded his access to legal representation. Similarly, Janan came from Afghanistan at the age of 14. He was 16 when he had his application for asylum refused and, following an age assessment that determined he was over 18, he was refused all further support from social services. Janan became homeless, and subsequently spent many years sleeping rough and relying on help from friends for food. He spoke of how he had no access to legal support and how one solicitor wanted £1,600 to even start to build a case for him to be able to remain in the UK. He eventually became so unwell living on the streets that an NGO intervened, providing him with temporary accommodation and as Janan said himself, ‘a solicitor who fought for me.’ For others too, the cost of legal advice was prohibitive. In total, Adnan reckoned that he had paid more than £2,000 on legal fees himself (in addition to the statutory legal support he had received at the start of his application). He had raised the money from saving his social services allowance, helping with chores around the house while in foster care and doing construction work for which he was paid cash. ‘I’ve been saving and saving and saving and saving,’ he said. Several young people from Afghanistan described how they secured access to legal support through a church after converting to Christianity. They were then able to make claims for asylum based on their faith and the risk of persecution as a result of being a Christian minority within an Islamic state. Kamran, for instance, after several years of living with insecure legal status, spoke of how his church found him a solicitor for which they paid and helped him with all the necessary references, commenting that ‘everything I have is because of them’. Dalmat said that although his solicitor had not represented his case well, he had no choice over who represented him in court. For Elvis, the main difficulty was the lack of continuity in legal advice and the fact that once you were allocated to a solicitor’s firm, you found that you were always talking to somebody different and having to explain the situation

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repeatedly. Others spoke of the difficulties around having an interpreter in court hearings and the frustration of hearing mistranslation of what was being said but being unable to intervene. This relates to a rule in procedure in British asylum courts whereby the claimant has to decide whether or not to use an interpreter when they represent themselves in court. They are not allowed to switch between English and their first language or to rephrase or question how the interpreter presents their words to the court (Gill et al 2016). In Italy, meanwhile, access to good lawyers was also serendipitous and often brokered though university law schools and NGOs. In the Italian system, a legal guardian is assigned to each unaccompanied minor with the aim of overseeing their welfare, including legal procedures, with a degree of continuity. Often, guardians were overburdened with the number of young people in their care, one reporting being responsible for over 100 minors. NGO workers, care workers and lawyers interviewed for this research lamented that the need for them to formally sign legal papers often drastically slowed down the legal process and left young people in extended periods of legal limbo.

The serendipity of legal status Throughout the research, young people alluded to the unpredictability of who would be given papers and why, and the apparent unfairness over who was and who was not eligible for services and support. The examples of Izat, Janan and Kamran are illustrative of the fact that while claims relating to asylum and immigration rights and appeals are legal processes, it is vital to understand the sociological processes at play that determine how rights operate in practice (Turner 1993; Benton 2006; Landman 2006; Morris 2006, 2009; Douzinas 2009). Previous analysis suggests that unaccompanied migrant young people’s access to due legal process is in fact more serendipitous than in any sense equitable or universal (Chase 2019). In effect, such access is stratified in complex and dynamic ways from the moment young people enter the asylum and immigration system. In England, the first step in the process, soon after arrival, is that children complete a statement of evidence form in the presence of a solicitor, detailing the events leading up to their forced departure from their country of origin, their journey and what they perceive would be the consequences of return. This ‘interview’ is often conducted through an interpreter and usually (but not always) takes place in the presence of a social work professional or foster carer (or potentially a legal guardian if in Italy).

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The asylum appeals process is an opportunity for those who have failed to prove a ‘well-founded’ fear of persecution to argue before an immigration judge that they should either have their application for refugee status reconsidered or be granted further leave to remain beyond the age of 18 on human rights grounds. During the hearing, the appellant is examined by either their legal representative, if they have one, or by the judge. In the UK, they are then cross-examined by a presenting officer or a barrister who represents the Home Office. There is also an opportunity for both sides to present experts or witnesses. At the end of the hearing, both sides make submissions to the judge, who usually gives a decision on the case in writing two to three weeks after the hearing. A picture thus emerges of the complex range of actors who to greater or lesser extent all help shape and influence the outcome of the ‘due legal process’. Throughout these processes, young people are, by definition, judged and positioned in an inferior power relationship to government representatives – who represent society – and the deciding judge in the tribunal. While it might be argued from a classical or doctrinal legal position that the role of judge is simply to apply the rule of law, this has been widely contested, with various scholars pointing to judges’ discretionary influence over cases in formal and informal, substantive and procedural ways (Bone 2007; Moorhead and Cowan 2007; Tata 2007; Fielding 2011; Gill et al 2018). The interpreters, representatives, witnesses and experts also play important intermediary roles. Previous scholarship has detailed the degree to which the subjective judgement of court actors is influenced by emotions (BID 2010). It has similarly shown the power of discretion on the part of individual stakeholders and officials engaged in the asylum process, such as social workers (Kohli 2006; Chase 2019; Burridge and Gill 2016; Gill et al 2018). On the peripheries of these legal processes are a whole range of other actors who may position themselves in ways that facilitate or conversely obstruct young people’s access to the legal guidance and counsel they require. They include an eclectic mix of social workers, key workers, foster carers, teachers, tutors, general practitioners, advocacy services or other civic society organizations, local government representatives (Members of Parliament in the UK, deputati in Italy) and friends or elders within the community. Such people variably gave advice on where to get legal support, provided pro bono legal services, lent money to enable young people to purchase legal services or advocated on their behalf when they were denied access to legal services. Young people unable to muster these forms of support were at a profound disadvantage with respect to accessing due legal process. ‘If it were not for Andrea [a resident volunteer at his accommodation facility],’ said one young Albanian in Italy, ‘I really don’t

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think I’d still be here.’ Others accommodated in informal shelters in Italy spoke of the vital support in accessing legal advice provided by volunteers. These different protagonists assume a stance in relation to each migrant young person with respect to whether they classify them as ‘deserving’, ‘credible’ and ‘sincere’ rather than ‘undeserving’, ‘devious’ or not acting as they ‘should’. Ultimately, young people’s outcomes vis-à-vis their status, rather than being legally determined, are thus largely socially constructed and highly contingent on the moral positioning and leverage of this combination of actors in relation to a particular young person and the extent to which they can muster what Turner (1993: 1) defines as ‘collective moral sympathy’. Allsopp et al (forthcoming) has written about how these dynamics play out in asylum tribunals, with the appellant constructed as a subject of empathy or hostility. One young person said of his experience in the UK asylum tribunal, ‘I felt like a criminal, like I was on trial for killing someone, not trying to save my own life.’ More broadly, research has documented geographical inequities in terms of legal recourse in the asylum and immigration system. A study by Gill et al (2018) found that the success of an asylum appeal in England, for example, is shaped by a range of factors, including the location of the tribunal in which the case is heard. And in Italy, it was common for young people to explain that they had chosen to seek asylum in one city or place over another on the guidance that it would be quicker or slower, or harder or easier to obtain papers there. On a larger scale, there is a significant body of evidence detailing how the rates of success for asylum at the point of initial application or appeal varies substantially across EU member states, despite the myth of a Common European Asylum System in which legal processes are deemed to be coordinated. Moreover, the evidence from the study (and from supporting data) suggests that young people are collectively treated differently by immigration and asylum systems depending on their country of origin (irrespective of the fact that the determination of refugee status should be done on a case by case basis). As such, and as evidenced in national data (Refugee Council 2018), young people from Albania were, with the rare exception, routinely denied refugee status and typically only ever successful on appeal after protracted and costly legal interventions on the part of civil society organizations. Access to lawyers and due legal process was even more elusive in other migration ‘processing’ settings, such as immigration detention centres or ‘hot spots’. These are often experienced as liminal spaces that are distant from the jurisdiction of the countries for which asylum is being sought. Many young people in the research, including Jamal and Abdul discussed later, faced these judicial barriers and bore the brunt of indefinite periods

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of time in limbo as they waited for the mechanics of global legal processes, such as the UNHCR refugee resettlement system,2 to grind into action. Young people who were undocumented also lamented not being able to visit and support friends who were detained in these spaces prior to forced removal, since in both countries you are required to present proof of identity before entering. Because young people’s legal status is both socially constructed and inherently political, and since many of the legal categorizations given to them are time limited, it is frequently subject to change. Young people, particularly from Afghanistan and Albania, in the course of the research, went from being subjects non grata and ineligible for any access to public funds to, through timely access to legal redress, becoming legally recognized young people in need of international protections and social support; or from bona fide children in need to removable citizens from one day to the next. Yet such statuses could also shift as a result of young people changing how they interacted with the asylum system. The case of Ali typifies the fear surrounding the UK asylum system and how the threat of rejection impacts as profoundly on young people’s lives as its actual orchestration. Arriving in the UK at the age of 16 in 2008, Ali, from Afghanistan, did not claim asylum for over six years because he had heard there was too much of a risk of him being deported back to Afghanistan. In the year before we spoke to him, he had finally claimed asylum and was granted refugee status. As we pursued the discussion with one of the research team, also from Afghanistan, he confirmed the logic of Ali’s decision back in 2008 since this had been a time when there was a perceived rise in deportations to Afghanistan. During those six years, Ali stayed with friends, ‘one day here; one day there’, some of whom had legal status while others did not – and he saw one of his own friends deported. He earned cash in hand working in a car wash, enough to buy food and contribute to the household. In 2015, deciding he could not carry on living with such uncertainty and insecurity, Ali decided to claim asylum. He was aware that the violence in Afghanistan had escalated and believed he would therefore be less likely to be forcibly removed. He cited a news report of how a deportation flight scheduled to return 59 people to Afghanistan had been grounded at the airport because it was considered to be too unsafe to return people to a situation of escalating violence (BBC 2015). After claiming asylum, which involved concealing the fact that he had already spent six years in the UK, Ali spent a month in a detention centre and ended up being granted a visa within about a month. He commented, ‘I am relaxed now, I go to work, I do for myself everything.’

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Legal status hampered by age assessments Given the typical lack of documentation available when children arrive on their own in a host country, age assessments are commonly used to determine young people’s age. In the UK, it is considered appropriate to carry out an age assessment when all of the following criteria are met: the claimed age of the child is doubted by the receiving government; the applicant claims to be a child but is suspected of being an adult, or they claim to be an adult but are suspected of being a child; and there is little or no reliable supporting evidence of the claimed age. The policy rationale is to ensure ‘age-appropriate’ treatment, appropriate access to necessary services and support, and the safeguarding of children in the UK care system (Home Office 2019). An estimated one in four children claiming asylum were age assessed in the year 2016/17 with around 65 per cent determined as being over the age of 18 (Bolt 2018). In England, assessments are typically performed by a social work professional in accordance with standardized Merton guidelines.3 The inconsistencies in age assessment processes and their negative impacts have been written about widely, notably first brought to public attention by Heaven Crawley (2007). In Italy, while practice varies significantly, age assessments are generally only conducted on males and may include a range of genital and/or dental examinations, a psychosocial assessment and an X-ray. At the time of writing, nine countries in the EU were still conducting genital assessments as part of an age assessment procedure, despite the associated ethical concerns discussed in Chapter  1. The inadequacies of widely used medical procedures such as bone X-rays, dental checks and genital examinations have now been well established (Aynsley-Green et  al 2012; Feltz 2015; Kenny and Loughry 2018). Moreover, these overly intrusive methods (Feltz 2015) undermine human dignity and are counter to children and young people’s best interests. It is now widely recognized that age assessment processes are hugely politicized (Abubakar et al 2018), yet they continue to frequently determine whether or not young people can access the care and support they require and more broadly their longer term trajectories and outcomes. Even though UK policy states that when there is uncertainty about age, children should be given the ‘benefit of the doubt’ (Home Office 2019) and accepted as the age they claim to be, often this is not the case. In practice, disagreements between and across different bureaucracies about age often result in young people being the focus of age disputes and asylum tribunals at the same time (Dorling 2013). Many young people participating in the study in England reported being age assessed. The process fundamentally affected their access to legal and social care support,

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was detrimental to their sense of self and identity, and undermined their credibility. In Italy, young people reported a notable racialized component to these disputes, a common perception being that young black men were more likely to be age disputed than other migrant young people (Allsopp 2017a). In the Italian fieldwork, most Albanians arrived with some kind of documentation showing their age. Afghans, meanwhile, mostly arrived without documents but appeared less likely to have their age contested than young people from Africa (Eritreans, as noted earlier, were rarely lodging a claim for asylum). Over the course of the research, we encountered dozens of young men from West Africa who were age disputed, in one case from age 15 to 25. Several of those who were homeless as a result had finally been granted access to reception shelters after managing, often at huge cost and risk, to get documents giving proof of their age from relatives back home. Tired of waiting for his documents in an asylum shelter for minors in the south of Italy, Bilal, from Mali, on the advice of one of his teachers, left for a city in the north where he had both his age and asylum claim disputed. He was consequently living in a squat with no access to welfare services and barred from education. In this case, interference from a well-meaning care provider had backfired, demonstrating the risks of having front-line workers who were poorly equipped in terms of knowledge and experience. This became a growing concern during the fieldwork as individuals became more and more dependent on ad hoc humanitarian assistance in the face of limited state capacity (Carrera et al 2018a).

The waiting Young migrants awaiting the outcome of decisions that will determine their right to remain in a country of migration are commonly depicted by advocates and researchers alike as being ‘in limbo’, suspended between belonging and exclusion (Vrecer 2010; Gonzales 2015). Waiting often took place in hostile environments, such as detention centres (where there is no legal time limit for how long people can be detained in the UK) or hostels. Waiting was commonly linked to depression and lethargy (Allsopp et al 2015). The randomness in terms of how long it took the government to make a decision on an application for asylum or leave to remain on other grounds, and how they arrived at decisions, was a recurrent theme in young people’s narratives in the UK and Italy. Alan, from Eritrea, was 17 and had been in the UK for more than a year and half but had still received no decision on his asylum application. He

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spoke of how he watched others who had arrived with or soon after him having their cases resolved and receiving their ‘papers’ while he was still waiting. He described the impact of this on him as ‘stress, stress, stress’. By contrast, David, aged 17, had been in England for less than eight months and had been granted his legal status. He was relaxed and jokingly spoke how, compared with Eritrea, Libya and Sudan, this place (England) was ‘amazing’. He had received excellent support from his social worker and solicitor and could now think about building his life in the UK. Although, in the UK, young people from Eritrea generally appeared more likely to have their leave to remain extended than those from Afghanistan or Albania, some Eritreans said they knew of some compatriots who had been refused an extension of their leave to remain. This, they believed, could be as a result of engagement in criminal activity or because they didn’t seem serious about getting on with their lives. Aaron, for example, commented: ‘But if you just keep safe all these things, then you should be OK. You work and you pay your rent, you pay your taxes. It’s just, they need someone who has determination to do something and they say, “OK this guy is coming from far. He wanna live his life, he wanna change. He’s not gonna come here to just, you know do stupid things. He’s trying you know, he’s trying to work hard,” so when they see that it should be OK.’ Sadly, such faith in the fairness of the ‘system’ often appeared ill founded, and perceptions of how the legal system functioned could be based on myths and hearsay rather than on realities. One small town in Italy was mentioned by a number of Afghans in Italy as a kind of El Dorado of asylum where accommodation was good (in abandoned hotels with swimming pools) and the legal process was fast because of a lack of demand. Meanwhile, there was a perception in England among some individuals that private solicitors were ‘better’ than government funded legal aid representatives. For some, this stemmed from a common mistrust of the state – shaped, in part, by their reasons for flight and experiences of corrupt governance in their countries of origin and as they passed through countries in Europe.

Genuine choices? Lying, legality and the rule of law Establishing a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ in accordance with the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol centres on a

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coherent and consistent narrative of the events leading to migration and why a person is in need of asylum. The perceived credibility of the ‘story’ told is therefore crucial to whether or not young people are accorded refugee status. The pressure and constraints of the asylum process often meant that young people ended up trapped in unforeseen legal quagmires and faced accusations of poor credibility (Anzaldi and Guarnieri 2014; Save the Children 2017). In their pursuit of what might constitute a ‘viable story’ for the purposes of asylum, young people spoke of being advised or led by conversations they had with others throughout the journey. There were accounts told of what the government was likely to believe and what they would dismiss. This sometimes confused those arriving, who were not sure how closely to stick to their actual account of events. Dan outlined the dilemmas he faced in 2007 as he decided how to frame his need for international protection, and what he should and should not say to immigration officials: ‘When I came here – we personally we were hiding a lot … even me, I will tell you, I wasn’t telling the whole story because we … when I came to Calais, people used to tell us, “OK, if you tell them this, they won’t accept you. If you tell them this, they will ask you this – you are going to get refused; you are not going to be allowed.” You hear the bad things and think, “So what should I say?” Because you don’t want to get refused if you know something’s going to get refused. They say to you, “Say this and don’t say this”, and so you try to the … basically you get that advice that is not good – now basically we didn’t know what to do or say.’ Dan reflected on how he had no idea that what he had said when he first arrived would haunt him for the next eight years. He had, without realizing it, become a non-credible witness, and everything he subsequently said to officials from the Home Office was disbelieved. This was, he said, akin to being viewed as having murdered somebody: ‘The Home Office see me like I’m a criminal – like I killed people or … that’s what I feel like … It feels like rejection, rejection, rejection. I made a mistake – I am trying to learn from what I did but it’s still holding me back because of what I did when I was 17.’ In the transit camp in Italy, as Eritrean young people heading to the UK and other parts of Europe discussed among themselves the very real

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dangers they had fled, but also how they might box these stories into palatable form for European asylum actors, Dan’s gamble was ever in our minds. Some young people treated the asylum interview as an exam that they would have to train for, while others had a blind faith that their honesty would be rewarded, only to find their hopes bitterly shattered upon arrival. The stakes are extremely high, given that once an individual has claimed asylum and embarked on a given story, there is no going back. ‘There is for these young people’, as one lawyer in Italy explained, ‘no second “once upon a time”.’ Yet there appears to be an acutely myopic analysis as to why unaccompanied young people transitioning to adulthood within the confines of contemporary immigration and welfare governance systems might find themselves needing to lie or bend the truth in order to get by. As discussed in Chapter 4, our research found that the increasing meshing of welfare with immigration control systems, particularly in the UK, is a key determinant of whether unaccompanied young migrants who are refused asylum ‘go missing’ in institutional terms, how they interact with statutory and non-statutory welfare provision and whether they are likely to break or obey the law – and tell a version of the truth or not over time. Meanwhile, several young people in our research were denied legal status on the grounds that they had ‘bad character’ because of interaction with the criminal justice system. These included crimes such as working irregularly and stealing food to eat. Even when a crime is committed under the age of 18, it has a bearing on whether the individual is able to stay in the country past the age of 18. In some cases, the illegal means through which the young person entered the country was used against them as evidence of ‘poor character’, even though such application of the law is forbidden under the 1951 Refugee Convention. One participant explained that an Afghan friend of his had a conviction for carrying a knife, which was unfair because, in his words, ‘nobody explains to us, fresh out of fighting for our lives in the “Jungle” in Calais when we arrive that that is not OK! If you don’t carry a knife in Calais you’ll be dead, but they don’t understand that, and now he’s facing death by deportation!’ Karim, also from Afghanistan, had applied for indefinite leave to remain (ILR) after his initial five years to remain had come to an end. He was anxious that he was not going to be granted ILR because he had been arrested after getting into a fight. Although not given a custodial sentence but seventy hours’ community service, Karim was concerned that the reason he had no response from his case was that he might be refused on

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the grounds of his criminal record. This anxiety was causing him huge stress and sleepless nights. Of four Eritrean friends who committed suicide within the space of 16 months in the UK, one had expressed explicit fear that his recourse to using marijuana to cope with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder would be used to strip him of the safety he had found in the UK (Gentleman 2018).

The global search for legal status For young people who receive a government letter dictating their removal and decide to become ‘invisible’, or those who move away and hide in order to avoid receiving the letter, the outcome is living underground and in fear of police and immigration services. For a number of young people, the search for legal integrity and recognition meant they embarked on further journeys across multiple borders where they encountered other barriers and challenges in regularizing their legal status. This was more common among Afghan young people, and to a lesser extent Albanians. As noted in Chapter 1, Jamal and Abdul ended up in Indonesia after having been forcibly removed from the UK to Afghanistan and attempting to remigrate to Australia. They were intercepted in Indonesia and had both spent a period of at least 18 months in an immigration detention centre by the time our research was complete. Jamal reported that he had been told that it could take up to seven years for a decision to be made on his application for asylum by the UNHCR, which would then mean that he could be granted refugee status anywhere in the world. Six months later, when we spoke to Jamal again, he had been transferred to a ‘camp’, what he described as an immigration detention centre, some 15–20 minutes’ drive from the city, where he had spent the past three months. Allegedly, there were 13 similar camps in Indonesia and he was now living with 235 other single young men all waiting to have their applications for refugee status processed. Jamal believed that apart from a few Somali, Iranian and Pakistani people in the other camps, the majority of people kept there were from Afghanistan. Over the preceding six months, no progress had been made with his application and there was no sign of anyone coming to talk to them about their legal application. He explained: ‘The situation over here is bad, I am tired of waiting … we are left here with an uncertain future. It seems no one cares about us in here. We want the authority to process our applications, how long do we have to wait like this? … It’s a slow process

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and already waiting nine months. Nobody ask for us and no interview, nothing is happening … I am slowly losing hope now and I really getting stressed about everything. I don’t really know what is happening and I do not know long it’s going to take to make decision about me to send me somewhere, therefore I have uncertain future here and I don’t know what will happen.’ Abdul’s search for legal recognition had also brought him to Indonesia, where he had been told by his smuggler that he would be allocated a place of safety by UNHCR. Having been deported to Afghanistan from the UK already, he knew that if he attempted to return there he would be sent back to Afghanistan again. He said, ‘I am not here to go anywhere [in particular], just a safe place.’ He had been granted refugee status in Indonesia and that had made him feel positive about the country. However, it didn’t change the fact that he was still in a process of protracted waiting. After having already spent 15 months in the detention centre, he commented, ‘Honestly we are in … I don’t how to say … in limbo, exactly in limbo if you understand me.’ Abdul believed that the sheer numbers of people seeking asylum via Australia’s offshore immigration system in Indonesia had meant that the process, which had previously taken an average of 10–12 months, was now taking up to and beyond 27 months, during which time people had to stay in detention camps. He sent pictures of recent demonstrations in the camps about the conditions. Inmates had been on hunger strike for four days and nights but this had no impact. Figure 6.1: Abdul: photo of a peaceful protest at an immigration detention centre, Indonesia, November 2016

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A year later, when we spoke to Abdul again, things had started to slowly change. After 22 months in prison, as he said, ‘without doing any crime’, he had finally been given a ‘refugee card’ and the following day was to be transferred to a major city in Indonesia where he knew he would get accommodation and would then have to wait for the next step. He was fully aware that it might take at least a further two years before he would end up in a country of refuge. He was still not allowed to work, and likened the situation to the National Asylum Support Service system in the UK, where you are provided with accommodation and food and he would also have access to English classes: ‘You’re not allowed to do some work, just eat and sleep and English classes.’ Asked what he thought the next step would be, Abdul said it was totally unclear. Many people, he said, tried travelling to the crowded UNHCR offices about an hour a way to talk to a case officer, but without any result. The previous month, some officials, including two Australians, had come to speak to them and tell them that they could either stay and be patient or return to Afghanistan, something that they were being encouraged to do. Abdul said one friend in the hostel had already been waiting ‘patiently’ for the past seven years. Jamal in the meantime remained in the camp with another 200– 250  Afghans, all ethnically Hazara, who had come directly from Afghanistan. He explained how he was waiting to be interviewed and anticipated that even once he was given a refugee card (which could take a further three to six months), he was likely to have to wait for a further year or more before he would be able to leave the camp. He felt reassured, however, by the fact the specific forms of persecution experienced by Hazara people were internationally recognized and that he might eventually be granted refugee status and resettled in a safe third country. The lack of documentation and tracing of young people post-removal or once they become appeals rights exhausted means that it is very difficult to systematically assess how common it is for other young people to experience similar outcomes to Jamal and Abdul. At least one other young person, Takir, spoke of how, while he continued to struggle to find legal recognition, a friend of his who had left Afghanistan a few days after him had arrived in Australia and received his documents almost immediately. Other people in the research spoke of friends who had been deported to Afghanistan from the UK and who subsequently left for Iran or Pakistan in search of family members, and in one case to work in Dubai. Another was in Turkey, but seeking a way back to Europe in the medium term. Some people, such as Aslan, chose to continue to live in the UK once they became undocumented, lying low and adopting strategies of invisibility. They learned ways in which to survive and go undetected by authorities. Meanwhile, in Italy, some young people took advantage of

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the poor coordination between regions in Italy to try their luck with a new claim elsewhere, hoping that their fingerprints would not have been put into the system or had been lost.

Conclusion The capability approach (outlined in Chapter 2) offers an understanding of wellbeing linked to having the freedoms to be and do what one most values. The time-limited legal statuses and common experiences of waiting for the outcomes of asylum and regularization claims, as we have seen, presented young people with a series of dilemmas and impasses. For many, it meant having to constantly assess what was and was not a ‘genuine opportunity’ and foregoing certain opportunities or rights in the present in order to possibly widen their possibilities for the future (Wolff and de-Shalit 2007; Allsopp et al 2015; Chase 2020). Legal status – or ‘having papers’ – was in many ways the Holy Grail to young people’s wellbeing. Being refused status or experiencing protracted bureaucratic delays while awaiting a decision from the authorities could have catastrophic effects. As we go on to explore in the remaining chapters, rights and entitlements to housing, social protections, education, training opportunities, health and dental care, along with any other statutory services, were all contingent on having a recognized legal status. Yet the impact of having or being denied legal status played out at a far more visceral level, closely associated with feelings of pride, dignity and belonging on the one hand, and stigma, alienation and discrimination on the other.

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Introduction We were in the pub watching football as Sayel pulled out his phone and showed us the footage of the English Defence League (EDL) marching on the town he now called home. Sayel didn’t drink beer when he first arrived, but he now enjoyed an occasional pint after work. ‘OMG, I’m so British,’ he quipped. ‘Don’t tell my mum!’ His fellow Afghan friend who was with us did not consume alcohol. He said he felt a bit uneasy in the pub in case he was seen and people assumed he was drinking, but it was, he added, worth it to see the football on the big screen. In the video, Sayel is heard telling the nationalists to ‘go back to your city’; ‘we don’t want you here’. The crowd of EDL members who have bussed in from across the United Kingdom (UK) are met by a throng of anti-fascists, several whom are migrants including Sayel. ‘I’m just like, piss off mate,’ he explained. ‘This is our city … and most of those EDL guys aren’t even from around here!’ Like Sayel, the young people we met throughout the research often had an immense sense of pride in the cities and localities they had come to call home. In anthropological terms, this can be seen as ‘placemaking’ – the transformation of living spaces into places that feel like home (Massey 1998). The new immigrants supported their local football teams, university reputations and, well, London was London – living there a source of pride in and of itself given its place in the global imaginary. When they arrived, a few young people already had distant family or friends in the country and basic language skills. But for all of them, a key part of settling into their new environments was to build relationships to support and sustain them (see Chapter 10).

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While seeking to belong in their new homes, young people from all countries simultaneously maintained a sense of duty to ‘give back’ to their home countries. For some this was in real time through remittances or other forms of transnational support, while others imagined futures in which they would be in a position to help rebuild communities as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lawyers or business investors. This chapter examines identity and belonging as fundamental elements of young people’s conceptualizations of their subjective wellbeing. The two were found to be closely intertwined, intrinsically linked with a sense of being part of the social, religious, economic and political spheres of the communities in which they lived. We explore how cultivating and maintaining a sense of identity was often experienced as a temporal process of becoming different to how one was before, and the subsequent impact this has on their ideas of belonging. As in previous chapters, young people’s subjective ideas are juxtaposed with those contained within political and policy discourses about where young people should belong.

Coming to belong Migration was a transformative experience for the young people in the study. It required a process of negotiation between the social and cultural norms with which they had grown up and those they came to understand and appreciate in Europe. Language, ethnicity, food, social and religious practices and notions of community were all important in establishing and performing identity. Many spoke of how they felt they belonged to the cities in which they had lived since arriving. Local life gave them more of a sense of grounding than an abstract idea of a nation state, with which their primary interaction was a fear-inducing asylum and immigration procedure. The importance of the local context for supporting a sense of belonging among migrants and refugees has been widely recognized, as demonstrated in the popularity of initiatives such as sanctuary cities (Darling 2010). But this is something policy makers are often still slow to recognize (Spencer 2018). In the UK and Italy, asylum seekers can be dispersed among cities and other locations, on the assumption that all places are the same to those in need, and little thought or consideration is given to the importance of ties and connections they have established. Having spent their earlier years in largely homogeneous cultural contexts, many young people reflected on the value of living in multicultural spaces in certain European cities. Most had spent time living outside their birth country in states such as Sudan, Libya or Turkey and

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experienced travelling to Europe in mixed ethnic and national groups. So already by the time they arrived, many had a profound experiential sense of difference and other worlds and peoples to which they had begun to forge attachments. Coming to belong was frequently narrated as a process that took time but also involved rapid adjustments – being able to quickly make sense of very unfamiliar worlds. Learning and reading signs and signals of how to be and do in a new culture posed multiple challenges. Omid, from Eritrea, described how he had failed to understand the queuing system in England. On his first shopping trip, he was shouted at by people for not lining up and couldn’t understand what they were saying. Meanwhile, Besmir, from Albania, captured the transition well in his reflections about early challenges and long-term gains, ‘It’s been hard at the beginning, it was the transition … I was totally alone. No friends, no family, no relatives, couldn’t speak English, I was confused of the culture here. I couldn’t take it. If you compare especially at that young age, if you’d have to experience both cultures, Albania and the English one … especially moving from Albania to England or vice versa, it’s completely different, it’s like two different … like water and fire, they’re completely different cultures, they are totally different. So, it was confusing for me to kind of understand it, to take in and accept and adapt to this lifestyle here. But thankfully, I’ve been able to like meet people from different cultures, being able to experience diversity in college, everywhere, in the street. Make me more open minded and see that everyone is different. It’s just a matter of adapting to each other, accepting it, and just living peacefully together.’ For Eduard, the cultural and traditional differences centred on his sexuality as a young gay man and the difficulties of having his identity accepted in Albania. And while he felt safer in the UK and knew he might find acceptance, he still felt unable to talk about his sexuality and identity openly for fear he would be judged by others: ‘Because as I say like my personal life, if I say to someone like I am gay or something I think maybe they will judge me because I am still not like learned to say that, so that’s why.’ Aaron, from Afghanistan, spoke about his naivety at the time of his departure. He couldn’t understand why everyone was so sad at his leaving,

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yet he was excited at the thought of ‘going on a trip’. He hadn’t realized, he said, ‘that the journey was basically forever, that I would be having a different life and I wouldn’t be coming back home, and how long that journey would be’. It was only when he arrived, he explained, that he recognized the enormity of it: ‘And that sort of feeling of all this new environment and not being the same, like when I used to wake up back home it was different, there it was sunny, it was nice, you could have tea with your family. Talk with them and eat. But here it wasn’t like that, everybody would go to work, you would just have tea by yourself. And the type of tea is not the same and then you can’t go out to play, there is no school. You know we have so many games when we were children like to play marbles, we played chess, we played cricket, we played there are another – I don’t know the name – but we have lots of games. We would invent games and there used to be a group of us we just roam around the streets or wherever, yes so I missed friends, friendship, freedom and the games in childhood I had … It was emotional, it is like you have moved on from one to another life and you have embraced it and then you are going back to your old life and you are in a conflict between both two different worlds and you have to choose how you are going to cope with one or another.’ Many others similarly alluded to ideas of metamorphosis through their migration as a result of their exposure to new ideas, attitudes and ways of being. Dalmat explained that ‘our mentality, the way we became different here, it doesn’t work in Albania. It doesn’t work.’ Nonetheless, coming to belong was not a straightforward process. It involved concentrated effort, emotional labour and hard work. A different Aaron, who came from Eritrea, spoke directly to these points: ‘The way I think five years ago and the way I think now is a little bit different. A lot of things gone on you know, you just have to [long pause] connect [pause]. What I believe is, if you’re living in here you just have to be like here. So if you go to central [name of town] you have to be like the people who live in central [name of town]. The way they behave, the way they are – you have to connect with them. If you don’t, you’re not going to get on … you just have to learn the way people live, that helps you. If you’re speaking the language,

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that helps a lot. And make friends … you just got to follow the culture isn’t it, and that helps you know.’

Multiple belongings In many respects, belonging was not necessarily spatially bounded and, in line with previous scholarship (Yuval-Davis 2011), young people frequently alluded to multiple senses of belonging – to their new city and country, to their country of origin, with family and friends in Europe or elsewhere in the world, and through virtual and online spaces. Questions and dilemmas about belonging came up repeatedly, and despite having one foot firmly in Europe, young people often missed countries they had come from, their families and loved ones, and spoke nostalgically about the places in which they had spent their earlier lives. Many from Afghanistan talked of the beauty of the mountains and valleys, the food, the lifestyles, the fact that time seemed to stretch before them incessantly and people had time for each other, whereas in Europe time passed far too quickly and people were always ‘rushing’. The shift for many from rural to urban settings was especially hard in this respect. Those from Albania reminisced on life there and were keen to stress that, despite all its problems and challenges, they retained a sense of pride particularly in the people of Albania and their sense of community and generosity. Adnan, encouraging a visit, said, ‘I think, well if you go in the summer it’s a very beautiful place.’ A sense of belonging in the UK or Italy was frequently juxtaposed with the impossibility of living in countries of origin. Aaron from Eritrea, when asked about where he felt he belonged, cut to the core of the question: ‘That’s a good question [laughs]. At the moment I’m in England. But I dunno what happens – if you asking about where home is I’d say X [name of locality] innit? If you’re asking me UK, I dunno UK. I don’t see myself going back there [to Eritrea] ’cause there’s nothing there, there is nothing you can hope for. I don’t have no friends there. The friends I used to know they’re not there any more.’ When asked whether he thought he could ever ‘feel’ British, Aaron spoke more to what generates a feeling of belonging, above all a sense of acceptance and not being subjected to racism or discrimination. This was something that he felt one was more likely to encounter in other parts of Europe (Italy and Greece) than in the UK,

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‘I’ve not experienced that kind of … never I’m never even worried about that in England. That’s the reason I think lots of people choose to come here. They feel safe, they feel connected to the people, they feel respected.’ But not everyone shared Aaron’s positive assessment of life in the UK, and some spoke of how, through the attitudes of others, they could be made to feel like an outsider. Haile, also from Eritrea, commented that while sometimes he felt at home in the community where he had spent the past four years, at other times he felt unwelcome: ‘because other people here remind you that this is not your home – some people from this country they will see you as less because of the way you speak, they don’t really get why you are here – and that makes it hard on you’. Aslan described how he had come to feel ‘comfortable’ in England, despite his irregular status there. Although he could live in Italy, where he had managed to regularize his status (after a process of deportation from the UK and then return to Europe), he had, he explained no sense of belonging there: ‘I want to be clear, you know what I mean. I don’t want to be hiding for nothing. I’ve been hiding for ten years, that’s a long time, innit. It’s like Italy is OK for me, I’ll give you an example, I have the document everything, but I don’t like it. I don’t speak the language, I don’t have no friends. I just … it’s not easy to be honest ’cause you need to know language to make friends. That’s what I mean. I cannot do it and I don’t want to do it. I like it here. Even if I’m black [undocumented] I like it here in X [name of city]. I grew up here, to be honest.’ Such sentiments were echoed by Mohammed, who explained that he felt he belonged to his city in England and to Afghanistan. His sense of belonging in the UK was what led him to remigrate after deportation: ‘Obviously, I couldn’t stay in any other country in Europe because I get used to the life of the UK. I grew up here, I studied here, my language. It became like basically my own place. It doesn’t matter I’m not from here, it doesn’t matter I’m Afghani or I’m Pashtun.’

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Language If young people had learnt any European language before arriving in Europe, for most it was English, although a few Eritreans spoke limited Italian. Even when they had difficulties speaking, many indicated that they understood almost everything they heard. There was a sense that if you could speak English, you could go to many places in the world, and learning English was a major factor in young people’s decision to not stay elsewhere in Europe but move on to England. Learning the language was often a transitional barrier to young people accessing other aspects of life in their new country. Quite a few from Eritrea, perhaps owing to the relatively short time they had been in the UK, were hesitant about speaking in English when participating in the research and many discussions took place in Tigrinya, even when young people were meeting us for a second or third time, sometimes with more than a year’s interval in between. Nonetheless, they all spoke about how they enjoyed learning the language and saw their steps through the English for Speakers of a Second Language (ESOL) programmes as the foundation for pursuing wider learning and career aspirations. Young people who had decided to stay in Italy expressed a keen desire to learn both Italian and English. Some young people spoke of how it became gradually harder to read, think and talk in their mother tongue, describing the feeling of English taking its place in their minds. Janan, from Afghanistan, laughed as he recounted his journey to Iran to marry and visit family from Afghanistan, after nearly ten years of waiting to secure his status in the UK. At his wedding he had, he said, stood up in front of a crowd of his Afghan compatriots and began to address them in English without thinking about it. This made everyone laugh and took him totally by surprise. Moreover, living in highly diverse communities, learning English was imperative to enable young people to connect with others. Indeed, it was often the main language of communication in shared accommodation. English was also often the lingua franca among young people from Albania and in some cases Eritrea who had recently moved to Italy. Omar, from Eritrea, commented, ‘English is everything  … Study is everything. Improve English. If you improve English you talk with people, and if you don’t, you don’t go with people and somehow go alone.’ One Albanian interviewed in Italy switched between Italian and English throughout the interview, and clearly derived a sense of pride in doing so. ‘Are you able to follow my Italian or would you like me to switch to English or slow down?’, he asked the interviewer (also not a native Italian speaker). Several young people commented that the interview had been a helpful exercise for them to practise their English or Italian.

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Aside from English, most young people took pride in their ability to speak multiple languages and use them to explore different parts of their identity. Abugul, for example, told us he had completed his driving theory test in Hindi, because while his mother tongue was Pashtun, and he also spoke reasonable English, his vocabulary related to cars had been primarily picked up from watching Bollywood films back in Afghanistan. Those who spoke minority languages or just one language could nevertheless feel excluded. Abil, from Albania, lamented that he was forced to share a room with Egyptians and then Senegalese minors in the shelter in Italy. When he complained to the support workers, they encouraged the residents to all speak Italian as their mutual language, but Abil said that nevertheless they continued to talk in French and Arabic. He was, he explained, slowly learning Arabic, reciting a range of phrases from memory. ‘You have to at least know the insults so you can know what they are saying about you,’ he remarked. At the time of the interview, Abil was waiting to be moved to a room with fellow Albanians, something the centre had tentatively agreed to. A social worker at a smaller youth shelter (casa familiare) in Italy explained that they tried to find a balance between pairing boys in rooms by the language they spoke, but equally encouraging everyone to communicate in Italian during supervised mealtimes. Social workers explained that it was frustrating for them when they did not share a common language with the young people they were meant to be caring for. Cultural mediators had an important role in such contexts, but this was a service that was hugely under-resourced. In both countries, social workers were required in cases of emergency to rely on telephone interpretation, which was often inconsistently delivered and of variable quality.

School and college Besides the opportunities it generated for learning and carving out futures (discussed further in Chapter 8), school or college was an important place to cultivate belonging. This was also the space where friendships were formed with people from many different cultures and identities. Such diversity was valued and helped young people feel they could fit in. Alex, from Eritrea, jokingly spoke of how while he loved having a mix of friends from different cultural backgrounds, when he first arrived at his school in a multicultural city in England, he thought he had ‘arrived in India’: ‘The first day I went to school, everyone is Indian! The boss is Indian, the principal is Indian, the students are Indian …

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and the weird thing is they speak English. So, I was like “OK, I’ll be the Eritrean who speaks English.”’ Some young people experienced difficulties adapting to school, especially when they had previous limited experience of education and when school was a melting pot of different ideas and histories. Jamal, for example, explained that he and other Afghan boys were picked on when they first came to the UK and sometimes got into fights. ‘The worst was the poppy day’, he explained, referring to the commemoration of the end of the First World War that is marked each year with a minute’s silence in public spaces and the wearing of poppies by many members of the public in remembrance of those who have died in wars. At school, they had had a special assembly on the topic of war and certain students had accused the boys of being Taliban members. Most young people we spoke to had found adjusting to school hard and felt that teachers often showed poor understanding of their backgrounds. Often, they were segregated into separate classes to help them learn English or Italian, which made them feel excluded. Bilal, also from Afghanistan, explained how he experienced life at school: ‘The first time in my life I been to school and college in England … this is something I wanted to do because I was embarrassed I can’t even write my name.’ Yet this transition proved difficult, and Bilal described how he was subjected to constant teasing and bullying by another boy his age to the point where he became ‘out of my mind, completely mental. And I grabbed him and I put the sandwich on his face and I rubbed it like that [gestures it] in front of everybody. And EVERYBODY was watching, making video and then I dropped him down, PROPER hit him and police came.’ Individual teachers were also sometimes said to play an important role in helping young people ‘fit in’ in new school environments, going out of their way to provide extra support. One teacher bought a student extra books from home; another came to the young person’s asylum appeal to advocate for them, taking the morning off work with the school’s approval to do so.

Politics Certain young people alluded to a connection to their new country based on cultural, historical and political ties. Some Albanians in Italy,

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for example, felt they had a privileged relationship with the country based on their consumption of a range of common cultural media, such as television shows (Mai 2004; Allsopp et al 2018); meanwhile, some young people from nations in Africa that had previously been colonized by European powers expressed a view that ‘they were here because we had been there’. Several Afghans expressed the opinion that the UK had a specific duty to support them, having invested in a war effort to liberate the country. The idea of asylum as reparation for past injustice (Souter 2014), or as inherently linked to geopolitical and international affairs (Price 2009) has been discussed in past scholarship theoretically, but rarely from the perspectives of refugees themselves. Several young people were keen to discuss shifts and changes in politics in their new countries as they took place. Over the research, the UK saw many political changes including the appointment of Theresa May as Prime Minister in England. The significance of her previous role in the Home Office was not lost on young people. One young Afghan anticipated what he thought the impact of her premiership would be: ‘It’s gonna be horrible. That’s what I was thinking … she was the, er, what was it, secretary of … Home Secretary yeah? So, imagine that, she became Prime Minister now. What will she do? It’s “let’s chuck them out, chuck all the refugees out!”.’ In both the UK and Italy, certain participants had become as absorbed in the quagmire of Brexit as anyone else. They expressed concern for their European friends and what might happen to them as a result. Aslan’s concerns about Brexit were also more collective; he was really concerned about the impact that leaving the EU would have on the country in general. During a lengthy discussion on Brexit, one of the research assistants commented, ‘You see Aslan is really concerned about the future of this country.’ To which Aslan replied emphatically, ‘I’m part of this country.’ Several young people expressed disillusionment that the country they associated with democracy and human rights had treated them so badly. In Italy, in response to footage of rescue boats being abandoned at sea in the Mediterranean, and the growth of the far right Lega Nord party, several young people participated in demonstrations to call for assistance for fellow refugees and against racism. These were organized primarily by Italian and other European volunteers who were motivated by a concern for the future of their country, coupled with a desire to ‘hold space’ for those who, because of their lack of papers, were less able to speak out openly about their suffering. There was a localized element to many of

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these protests, with two young people brandishing signs for one protest reading ‘[name of city] welcomes refugees’. Two others, with the support of Italian volunteers, went to visit a Member of Parliament to discuss their concerns for their fellow refugees stuck at sea. Other individuals were scared to be involved in public displays of political action for fear it might harm their legal cases. They nevertheless often expressed gratitude and a sense of belonging that was fostered by this collective mobilization. Some used art as a way of documenting their political struggles in a way that was anonymous. Several Eritreans contributed to a street art mural in one Italian city, for example, which included slogans including ‘Human rights for all’. Young people were also keen to take the chance to participate in a range of art projects linked to this research by which they were able to express political messages and aspects of their identity that they found hard to put into words. In one art project in England, while many young people enjoyed drawing flowers and natural symbols and using art as a way of relaxing, others used the space to express and display their emerging political identities. One Eritrean girl drew a picture of two hands holding up the earth, with the caption ‘We are all in one world’. Examining this picture, another Eritrean commented, ‘Ah yes, I like this, it’s very Martin Luther King!’ Creating spaces with public audiences who were there to listen and watch as young people articulated their new identities was a powerful process. Several attendees at a presentation of artistic outputs at a museum in Italy were moved to tears by the young people’s art and stories, and made comments expressing their gratitude to them for sharing these. The importance of unaccompanied minors having a voice in decisions that affect them is stressed in the guidelines on unaccompanied minors that detail ways in which the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is applied to this group. In North America (Corrunker 2012; DeAngelo et al 2016) and France (McNevin 2011), there has been substantial collective action on the part of young people to ‘reclaim’ the labels pertaining to their ‘undocumented’ status, for example in the French sans papiers movement, or the American Dreamers movement where tens of thousands of young people took to the streets to declare themselves ‘undocumented and unafraid’. By way of contrast, there has been limited civil society activism in the UK or Italy, and young people found it difficult to draw parallels between the sort of collective action seen in the United States (US) and their own situation and potential for collective resistance. This was often dismissed as something that people were too scared to consider, combined with the fact that they were too ground down by the exhausting and allencompassing process of sorting out their own legal status to be talking

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about it with others or considering how they might bring about any change. A snippet of a conversation between Dan and Aaron, both from Eritrea, sums up some of these feelings: Dan:

Aaron:

‘I experience it and I have been over my situation so many times, over and over, I experience it but I don’t want to talk about it [with others], I just want to get through it.’ ‘Yes, I think that’s the reason why they don’t want to get involved, it’s not because they don’t want to help, but they just want to get through it.’

As well as showing an interest in political developments in their countries of migration, many young people followed political developments in their countries of origin closely and shared and discussed key events with friends via social media. Adnan talked about politics in Albania and how the Mafia in his view made it hard to change anything. Yet he hoped that one day he, like others educated outside Albania, could go back and help move the country forward. Young people from Afghanistan constantly referred to the latest developments in their country and the rising violence and unrest, Noor frequently sending pictures directly of bombings and their ensuing devastation as he witnessed them first hand.

Religion Religious affiliation was a vitally important element for many young people’s individual and collective wellbeing. For many, the church or mosque was a place of connection with others and an integral part of their ideas about belonging, and for others a space in which they had been reunited with friends they had become separated from on their journeys. For many of those not regularly attending places of worship, their faith was still a part of their identity and something they felt very rooted to. For Eritreans especially, the church gave them a sense of community and, given that there were typically fewer places of worship available to them than for young people attending a mosque, they would travel for hours in order to attend services with friends in other cities. Religious practices also gave an element of continuity to young people during their journeys, and some Eritreans spoke of attending the impromptu church that was built at the ‘Jungle’ camp in Calais. While the church was a space that all young people from Eritrea referred to, practices of attending varied and for some this involved attending only

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occasionally. For young women, however, attending church frequently became the event around which their weeks were structured. Almaz and Eden, both from Eritrea, were close friends. They spoke of how they went to church every weekend, although to different churches, Almaz attended a Pentecostal church while Eden attended the Orthodox Church, where she sang in the choir and had many friends. This was an important part of their weekly routine. Julia spoke of how she tended to move between Ethiopian and Eritrean churches since she was able to speak both Tigrinya and Amharic. That way she could go to whichever was closest to where she was living and whichever was more affordable to get to: ‘Yes, I speak both so I don’t mind to go anywhere, to any church, even though I am from Eritrea, some of my part is in Ethiopia … so I don’t mind to go to any church even, as long as I can understand the language. Even I used to go, with my foster mum, to Catholic Church. It’s in English. So, I feel that, whenever I go, if I pray, God will be there. So I can have answers. So I don’t mind as long as it is a church, I can tell whatever I want to the God … I can tell my … my feelings and express myself. I will get relief … I love going there every church, I don’t mind [laughing].’ Bilal spoke of his fascination in learning about different religions. While himself a Muslim from Afghanistan, the foster family he had been placed with for some time were Hindu. He was of a view that the plurality of religion was no big deal and that religious freedom was important: ‘Everyone knows there is one God to be honest. But when you’re seeing different, different types of religion, like, some people believe in cow and um … and some people believe in something else. I’m like, where do you need to go? Just go and do your thing [shrugs].’ Sometimes the distance between where they were living and the church services created problems, particularly when no money was available to pay for their transport. Aida, for example, was less comfortable than Julia was about moving between different churches, and spoke about how she really missed not being able to take part in church services that took place in the Orthodox church far from where she was living. Young men from all three countries varied in terms of their adherence to their faith and religious practices. Some were very involved in their

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mosque or church, while others spoke of how religion had become less a part of their lives, even though they still had to keep up the pretence to others that they still practised their faith. Aaron, for example, spoke of how in Eritrea church services would typically last many hours and involve waking up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to arrive at the church on time. Religion was deeply engrained as part of living in a community, including within the education system, where daily prayers were practised. Even though he no longer attended church, whenever he spoke to his parents he would say that he attended church every Sunday – ‘to keep them happy’. For family, especially mothers, back in Eritrea, he said, believing that their children were attending church regularly gave them a sense of reassurance that they were on the right track. His sporadic attendance aside, Aaron spoke of how he appreciated the values that came from the Church, ideas about being ‘good’ and ‘helping others’ in his life. In conversation with Dan, they drew an interesting line between their two identities, in that while they said they had learned to use swear words in English, they had never sworn in their own language, Tigrinya. At least three young men from Afghanistan in our study had converted from Islam to Christianity since arriving in the UK (see Chapter 6). Syed spoke of how his conversion had at first been met with hostility by people within the Afghan community: ‘When I go to church there are lots of, I have lots of friends, lots of different countries, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India, Africa, from everywhere. I don’t worry about that. When I go to church, I’m very comfortable. Very hopeful. But Afghan people, they are saying negative things about my Christianity, my religion and saying, “We no eating with you, we no drinking with you, we no shaking your hand, you are dirty.”’ Nonetheless, he had refused to respond negatively to what people were saying and gradually others, he said, had listened to him. Eventually, fifteen Afghan young people had begun to attend the church, which made him feel very happy. For Syed, the church afforded a sense of belonging as well as clear benefits to his mental health: ‘I feel free, because the first time I go to church I was absolutely different. Depression, Depression, I, last January I take medicine, but this year I stopped all the medicines and I’m a very positive person.’

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Food The question of food and identity and belonging was sometimes linked to religion. This was most apparent during religious holidays, when youth clubs and religious venues played an important role in sourcing traditional food that young people would otherwise struggle to access and afford. Young people spent a lot of time talking about and preparing food. There was sometimes a gendered dimension to this, with girls overall being more capable and experienced in cooking, and some boys needing more assistance. Classes were offered in a range of shelters in Italy and England. At one youth club a discussion, facilitated by the youth workers, focused on the need for the boys to step up and do more to support the girls. The youth worker explained that the Eritrean girls in particular had automatically taken on the role of preparing the food and cleaning up, and that there was also an expectation by some of the boys that the girls would serve them and wait for them to eat first before eating themselves. It was a delicate balancing act, the youth worker explained, between respecting the fact that many of the girls took pleasure in hosting and making sure the boys didn’t become complacent and learnt how to cook and clean for themselves. Other young men, often Afghans, took pride in cooking and serving traditional food. At a residential event with the research team, the Afghan assistants took great pleasure in inverting kitchen gender stereotypes, travelling for hours to purchase halal chicken and a vegetarian option in remote Cornwall to ensure that everyone could eat the food, and refusing to let the Albanian girls help with anything, including clearing up. The girls joked that they ‘could get used to this!’, and laughed at the contrast to ‘home’ where, as women, they were expected to do all the cooking and cleaning. The act of hosting as ‘giving back’ emerged as an important component of wellbeing. In this respect, food was an important currency that could temporarily empower young people by blurring the line between their role as ‘guest’ and ‘host’ in their new countries. With this in mind, as discussed in Chapter 4, the lack of autonomy over cooking and the food they ate was raised repeatedly by young people in the research, echoing concerns raised in previous studies (Red Cross 2016). Taking these cultural ties seriously is important to developing a responsive reception system, and yet it is something that support structures in both English and Italian contexts frequently struggled to reconcile with responding to more basic needs. In Italy, one of the main reasons minors gave for staying in an informal settlement rather than a Red Cross reception camp was the quality and authenticity of the food served there. The serving of food at the informal camp was an important welcoming

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ritual and a performance of welcome on the part of volunteers, and one in which guests who had stayed at the camp for longer than a week were invited to participate. The chefs insisted on every person having a seat to eat – even when the numbers were up to 700 – and of having different plates for different courses, in keeping with Italian culinary tradition. Once, during the research, in a rush to serve the hundreds of people who were eagerly queuing, many having not eaten since they arrived in Italy by boat in the days before, the second author mistakenly served a pasta dish to a young Eritrean girl without offering her a shaving of fresh parmesan. The Italian chef immediately grabbed the plate and chastized her Britishness, apologizing profusely to the young Eritrean and giving her an extra-large helping by way of atonement. For the young people, and many of their host community, food was not to be trifled with.

Performing identity and keeping up appearances As referred to earlier, coming to belong in the spaces and places the young migrants now occupied was a form of labour. It required strategizing, reading codes and signals and second guessing what would happen next and how people would respond to you. How they presented themselves to others was often bound by context and audience, and many showed deftness in moving between different parts of their identity (a phenomenon known as code switching), whether shifting between languages, clothes or ways of being. When they attended their asylum appointments or tribunals, they often wore a suit and would present themselves as professional. This often contrasted with the image their lawyers sought to paint of them as ‘vulnerable children’. One solicitor explained she told her unaccompanied clients to dress in a childlike way – ‘hoodies and the like’ – so that they appeared younger and more vulnerable to the judge. Representing self and keeping up appearances was fundamentally important to people throughout the different stages of their migration. It was striking, for instance, how in one transit camp in Italy one of the first amenities to emerge was a hair salon, where people would queue up to try out a new style before they made the next step of their journey. The young Eritrean women there would often ask for nail varnish and make-up, and doing each other’s nails became a way of building rapport and friendships. Similarly, the acquisition of certain material goods was often central to images of themselves that young people wanted to present to others both in countries of residence and transnationally. Having material goods was about being able to tell a story of oneself as the successful migrant to those

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back home. This was done, for example, through posting pictures of a nice new haircut or a watch on social media. For young people who had status and work, being able to post pictures of a car was an ultimate symbol of success and freedom. Having certain items, especially designer shoes and clothes, also helped those without papers to partake in a practice which Angela García has defined in the US context as ‘legal passing’ (2019). By adopting certain clothing styles and hairstyles, young people could present themselves as ‘fitting in’ and were less likely to be stopped by the police and asked to show papers, for example. Bacha, 23 and from Afghanistan, explained that his different circles of friends spoke to different parts of his identity and rarely met. His work colleagues were mostly British and European. He enjoyed, he said, the British sense of humour and often recounted pranks they played on one another. Bacha started baking after watching the UK television show The Great British Bake Off. ‘My friends keep telling me to send in an application for the next series,’ he remarked. ‘We don’t really bake in Afghanistan, so I’m learning!’ With his Afghan friends, meanwhile, he was able to enjoy music in his native Pashtun and wear traditional clothes. When his asylum appeal came round, he confessed he was initially concerned how the different groups would get on (several of his friends and colleagues came to the tribunal to offer support and give evidence of his good character). As it was, ‘it was fine’, he said. ‘But mostly it was just embarrassing to have this whole event and they had to take time off work for me.’ Aaron, from Eritrea, similarly spoke about his experience of code switching when working on a construction site where many of the contracted workers were from Ireland. He comically described how he played games with his workmates, telling them he was from Asia or from Africa, since, he said, they didn’t seem to know about other parts of the world. Nonetheless, he and his colleagues shared the experience of framing their identity from the perspective of having come from outside England. Aaron explained: ‘They’re very friendly. One time they ask me where I’m from, I say “I’m English.” They start laughing. I say, “Why you laughing?” They said, “I’ve been in this country for over 40 years and I don’t call myself English!”’

Imposed identities, labelling and discrimination In Chapter  1, we problematized some of the bureaucratic categories assigned to young people in the research. Most were acutely aware of how

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the migratory aspects of their lives frequently became their essentializing feature, largely determining how they were perceived and responded to by others. They often adopted bureaucratic labels in the ways in which they situated themselves in everyday shorthand, such as ‘I am a UASC [unaccompanied asylum-seeking child]’ or ‘I am ARE [appeal rights exhausted].’ A number of people talked about how they didn’t want to be defined by the fact that they were seeking asylum and had a particular story, but wanted, they said, to be recognized for who they were, their dreams, ideas and aspirations. Elvis, from Albania, summed this up: ‘I don’t want all the people to get affected from my story when they speak to me or they just say, “Oh look at him, he has the best story.” I don’t want this. I want them to say, “Oh, he is Elvis,” not “He is a person that came from Albania for this reason.” That makes me sad.’ Unaccompanied young migrants who are making or have made the transition to institutional adulthood are an invisible population in terms of the lack of attention given to them in policy and also, in many cases, owing to their active resistance to being made visible to a system that puts them at significant risk. At the same time, they have periodically been rendered hypervisible through media discourses and in racist and discriminatory ways that have undermined their credibility and arguably confined many to the camp of the ‘bad migrant’. A prominent example of this concerns the arrival in the UK of a group of unaccompanied minors from the Calais ‘Jungle’ camp as part of a deal reached between the UK and French government following the camp’s demolition in spring 2017. Much of the campaigning to resettle the unaccompanied minors from Calais had drawn on the idea of the Kindertransport, an arrangement through which, in the weeks running up to the Second World War, the UK took in nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from across Europe, including Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Under the leadership of Lord  Alf Dubs, a Kindertransport refugee himself, Britain made an obligation to help today’s separated refugee children through a piece of legislation called the Dubs Amendment, which sought to resettle unaccompanied children with family and friends in Europe. When they arrived, however, the age of these young people, and which side of adulthood they were on, became a topic of national debate (Starfield 2018). The national tabloid newspapers published photos of a line of unaccompanied young men, waiting to claim asylum, suggesting their ages, estimated via a phone app, went as high as 42 years. The image

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of an Arab teen with facial hair was not the identity that much of the public had in mind when they thought of child refugees. Throughout the research, on countless occasions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and human rights groups lamented how difficult it was to mobilize on behalf of these young men when there was such a discrepancy between the idealized image of the refugee ‘child’ and the reality of young men on the cusp of adulthood. Believing that current categories were unable to accommodate the complexity of their identity and needs, one international NGO at the time of research referred to 16–17-year-old unaccompanied young men as ‘Europe’s new vulnerable’. Many young people in both the UK and Italy, and especially those who were non-white, were aware of how they were portrayed and perceived by hostile elements of the public and media. The terrorist attack on the Bataclan Theatre in Paris in November 2015 left young people worried that they would be picked on and associated with terrorists. Two young Muslim Arab men who were planning to migrate onwards to France changed their plans after the attack and chose to stay in Italy. Meanwhile, Besmir, from Albania, spoke of how he and his friends struggled not only with their legal status in the UK but also the stereotypical portrayals of Albanians, which constantly undermined their case for asylum: ‘Always you get judged by people “Oh you’re this, you’re…” like that stereotype of Albanians are criminals, are bad people, they don’t do a lot, always doing bad things. So, I mean, it’s all these things that influence them.’ Black young men sometimes commented – especially in Italy – that they felt subjected to institutionalized forms of racism, an issue that has received scant attention in the context of migration governance (Hubbard 2005; Edwards 2012). This was highlighted particularly in relation to age assessments, which were remarked upon by young people and some practitioners as discriminatory based on ethnic lines. Kal, who reported he was 17 at the time of the research, had been wrongly age assessed as 25 years of age. He commented, ‘I was just like what on earth is this? I thought this country was meant to be civilized. It was mostly the black guys,’ he continued, ‘the Arab boys got through.’ Another young black man, Driss, expressed frustration that even outside ‘the system’ community volunteers responded to him differently as a young black man. He felt pressure, he said, to ‘perform’ for the volunteers. ‘If I don’t smile, they think I’m shifty,’ he remarked, ‘but I don’t want to smile! … I’m going through so, so, so much.’

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Meanwhile, in some ways young people from Albania found ‘legal passing’ (García 2019) in the UK or Italy easier than those arriving from other countries. Besides experiencing aspects of ‘culture shock’, they typically picked up the language easily, could blend in effortlessly because of their skin colour and built strong networks of support.

Conclusion As we have argued elsewhere (Chase and Allsopp 2014; Allsopp and Chase 2017), European policy often carries an assumption that the long-term ‘best interests’ of young migrants are best served through their return to their countries of origin. This is predicated on a number of normative assumptions regarding membership and belonging that do not necessarily reflect young people’s lived experiences. The European policy framework adopts a myopic view of migration as a linear, episodic, reversible process that is to be tackled from the point of arrival in the host state. This chapter has shown that such an approach overlooks the lived experiences of identity and belonging of many young migrants, which do not map so neatly onto geographies, especially across time. Rather, most young people in the research saw the creation of their adult identity, as it relates to their migration, as an ongoing and multisited transition. The extent to which young people were able to develop and sustain a sense of belonging varied markedly. This depended on how they were perceived and responded to by others, including the general public, the media, politicians and professionals with whom they came into contact. In different times and spaces, they described alternating feelings of being included and accepted and times of exclusion and marginalization. They occupied different and highly contested spaces of legality and illegality (Coutin 2005, 2011), liminality and certainty, invisibility and visibility, and practised institutionally recognized and unrecognized forms of citizenship (Bauböck 2017; Gonzales and Sigona 2017), which generated both fractured and transnational senses of belonging (Levitt and Schiller 2004; Coutin 2011). Nowhere were identity and sense of belonging brought into question more than when young people were faced with the possibility of being returned to countries of origin. This possibility raised important ontological insecurities concerning self and whether one could live and survive in places where one felt unsafe, alienated and no longer fitted in. Frequent references were made to feeling, looking and acting differently from how they had before and how this would expose them as ‘outsiders’ should they be returned. Issues of safety or economic insecurity meant

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that there was little prospect of returning to places where they had been born or lived prior to migrating. More likely, they would be expected to locate to a capital city or other province where they had no ties or connections. Ultimately, the temporal and dynamic aspects of identity and sense of belonging that young people described – ideas of becoming or coming to belong – are not recognized in legal and political discourses surrounding migration, which are bounded by what Malkki (1995: 495) determines the ‘national order of things’ (an automatic twinning between country of origin and where people should be).

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Constructing Viable Futures as ‘Adults’ ‘Because with everything that happened, I know I can write my life, which way shall I go. I can go the road that I want. Before now, everywhere was junction and block, sealed off and I can’t jump.’ (Janan, in the UK)

Introduction This chapter considers the opportunities and constraints encountered by young people in the study as they sought to realize the sorts of futures they aspired to. As such, it brings to light the bordered realities of their becoming. While many young people arriving in England, and to some extent in Italy, alluded to the expanding futures emerging in Europe, they frequently saw these new horizons shrinking as they approached adulthood, particularly if they still had uncertain legal status. At the juncture between institutionally defined childhood and adulthood, the notion of vulnerability, used by immigration and social care structures and systems as a sorting mechanism for deciding who is and is not eligible to support, takes on very different economic, social and political meanings. No longer meeting the institutional criteria of the ‘vulnerable child’, young people may paradoxically become more vulnerable as they encounter the multiple uncertainties of having an undetermined immigration status or, even when they do have status, are propelled towards independence with little preparation or support. Refocusing the lens away from individualized factors and circumstances typically associated with vulnerability towards more fundamental questions of the precarity – or the ‘politically-induced’ nature of precariousness (Butler 2006, 2009), we argue, forces a reconsideration of policies and

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practices and how they fundamentally determine young people’s wellbeing outcomes, and whether or not they can construct the sorts of futures they aspire to.

Viable futures through becoming adult Young people in the research commonly saw their personal priorities for moving forwards with their lives as a set of intersecting motives including finding safety, securing work, pursuing their education, family reunification and the right to a private life. Such pursuits were linked to achieving a degree of autonomy and greater responsibility which they associated with ‘becoming adult’. In Europe and North America, much research on transitions to adulthood has examined the trajectories of ‘disadvantaged youth’, especially men, in urban areas (McDowell 2001; Thomson et al 2002). More globally, youth transitions research has tended to focus on labour market participation and education (Abrego and Gonzales 2010; Beegle and Poulin 2013; Morrow 2013) with a significant normative focus on social mobility (Rudd and Evans 1998). Such work has tended to be dominated on one hand by notions of human capital that construe economic wellbeing and independence as markers of success; and on the other hand by a narrow understanding of human development derived from Western developmental psychology that tends to focus on youth ‘at risk’, or youth ‘as risk’ (Morrow 2013: 86), often ignoring how other factors, such as class, gender, socio-economic status – and, of particular relevance to the current study, legal status, largely define young people’s lives and transitions. The transition to adulthood is typically defined as a problematic phase in the life course, arrived at after young people have completed a series of cumulative milestones (Morrow 2013), some with greater success than others (Lloyd 2005; Blakeslee 2012). Within this same frame, adolescence is used globally as the term to mark the space between childhood and adulthood, often caricatured as a tumultuous time during which young people may be labelled as ‘mad, bad or sad’ (Aggleton and Warwick 1997: 78) and incapable of making rational decisions conducive of their own wellbeing. In itself, the term transitions, as noted earlier, is problematic and should be used with caution (Morrow 2013). Some scholarship has nonetheless begun to recognize that pathways to adulthood are ‘increasingly non-linear and heterogeneous’ (Thomson et al 2002: 335), involving multiple and connected, and sometimes fractured, elements, including education, employment, training, housing, family, income, consumption and relationships with others (Thomson et al 2002;

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Shildrick and MacDonald 2007). Much of this literature frames itself in the context of the ‘individualization turn’, a theory developed by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens in the early 1990s that explores the ways in which young people have been increasingly portrayed as creators of their own lives (Giddens 1991; Beck et al 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2008) or ‘choice biographies’ (du Bois-Reymond 1995, 1998; Woodman 2009). A substantial body of work has sought to capture the complexity of becoming adult during an era of risk and uncertainty (Beck et al 1992; Ruddick 2003; Heinz 2009; Holmegaard et al 2015), and in contexts of unequal choices and pressure on young people to justify the choices they make (Frändberg 2014). A particularly helpful concept is Jeffrey’s (2010) notion of ‘vital conjunctures’, which perhaps best captures the unique ways in which life events coincide to create both opportunities and challenges at different points in time. Despite an expanding literature exploring new youth identities in the postmodern context, few studies (Heidbrink 2016, 2020) have considered how this uneven choice architecture plays out in young people’s global migration. This is highly significant given the increasing numbers of unaccompanied young people on the move (UNHCR/Council of Europe 2014) and the fact that beyond the generalized risk and uncertainty of modern life transitions described by Beck et al (1992) and others, migrant young people encounter further uncertainty through structures and systems imposed on them as a result of their cross-border movement (Gonzales 2015). With or without papers, becoming adult was a critical moment that offered young people in the study diverse choices and options. In one workshop in which participants were asked to sum up what becoming adult meant to them, statements varied from ‘feeling free and responsible’ and ‘able to work and learn what I want’, to (more commonly) statements such as ‘the government and system have so bad treatment with me, there is no help and no support’ and ‘it is a time when I will not have any care from my family or any guider and I may go the wrong way’. One statement written by a young man participating in a comedy workshop summed up the feeling of total abandonment that many others felt: ‘When a person turns 18 they will kick him out from any care or houses for under 18 and he or she need to apply for housing. But the silly thing is that this may take more than six months and for this period you need to sort it out. To go to somewhere like charity for homeless or be in a homeless [shelter]. Or find any friend to stay with him or her for you don’t know how long. And the funny thing is, the government

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don’t care about your study or who will give you money or what.’

New possible futures through migration Most young people in this research looked back on their arrival in Europe as transformative, a time of significant change that they associated with a combination of bewilderment and awe. Many talked about new opportunities presented to them as including feelings of safety, access to education and social care support. They began to imagine and try to shape bigger futures than they could have previously dreamed of, each new experience and opportunity expanding ideas about what was achievable. Bledar was 18 when we interviewed him. He had arrived in England aged 16. Although he was studying business and tourism in college, his real dream was to be a professional footballer. This was something he considered you could do on your own merit in the UK, unlike in Albania where, he said, you had to pay money to get into the professional training programmes and where people in poverty never stood a chance. Dalmat similarly contrasted the new possibilities he saw in front of him to his life in Albania, ‘To be honest it opened a lot of opportunities for me, a lot of opportunities. I started something that in Albania I could never do, you know?’ Elvis aspired to become a doctor or, failing that, a criminal lawyer. He likewise spoke of the impossibility of realizing these ambitions in Albania: ‘I was the less powerful person and if you are the less powerful person you are the bad side because money buys everything … power influences everything … In Albania most of the time I have been discriminated and pushed away from people … feeling that I am not good there.’ There was a sense among those arriving in Italy that young people were better supported to fulfil their dreams in England. In a workshop in which participants were invited to express a feeling about their life through drawing, Ahmed, who had come as an unaccompanied minor from Egypt, drew the following image and wrote the accompanying narrative: ‘This is me and my cousin. He’s in Italy and I’m in Egypt and we’re talking on the phone. I ask him, “So how’s Italy?” and he says, “Good. In Italy there’s work, there’s money, there’s everything you could want. You have to come to Italy!” Then I come to Italy and Italy isn’t like this. This picture tells this story.’

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Figure 8.1: ‘The Illusion of Italy’, a picture drawn by Ahmed in a workshop in Italy, 2 February 2016

Others in the workshop laughed and nodded in agreement. Yani, 16 and recently arrived from Albania, said he could strongly identify with the feeling of disappointment. ‘I thought I’d have a motorbike by now,’ he joked. ‘We don’t even have a TV.’ As well as contemplating their own futures, young people also focused on the collective lack of viable futures in their countries of origin. During one café conversation between Dalmat, Adnan and Tony in England, they considered all the factors that held people back in Albania. They started with the total lack of transport and how people could not travel between home and other places, for example to study. Yet the biggest issue, they said, was personal safety and young people being killed regularly on the streets. This was the result, they conjectured, of young people having no options, nothing to do and no evident futures, combined with extreme inequalities. This was personified, they said, by a prime minister who lives in a big house and is ‘getting richer and richer every day’. Although there was education, their experience was that you had to pay bribes to teachers just to be able to take your exams, and any chance of a future depended on having money. Adnan reflected that ‘even if you are clever enough, most young people could never afford to pay their way to university’. The only way forward in Albania, they said, was through networks and connections, which meant having money. They spoke of how the situation was even worse for young women who, even if they did well at school, because of tradition would most likely be confined to the home and expected to get married after completing their education (see Chapter 5). Shamal, from Afghanistan, spoke of how, despite the challenges of coming to Europe, people came because there were no options for them

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back in their country of origin or (as was sometimes the case) in the neighbouring country of displacement, such as Iran or Pakistan. Shamal felt he had found safety and security and was just hoping that he could stay in the UK, though had been waiting for several years to get a decision on his application to remain. He commented: ‘There are too many borders to get into this country, and we come for a reason and the reason is to have a bright future … I think because why all these people are coming here is because they don’t have any job in there, they don’t have good education in there, their life is not safe, that is how everyone just wants to go somewhere. If it’s me, you, anybody, they want to have a good life  … So when you are living somewhere that there is no evil, and we know that this country or other countries (in Europe) they are safe countries, you got opportunities for education, you have got opportunities to get a good job, and settle down.’ Ahmad’s future was more secure in the UK. He had plans, he said, ‘to study business or engineering, buy a house, make my future, marry and have two children’. He couldn’t ever really contemplate a life back in Afghanistan since he had no remaining family there. He would love to see his country again, he said, but didn’t see the prospect of returning in the near future when he saw such racism and discrimination against other Hazaras like himself. His own view was that it might take several hundred years before ‘people stop being stupid, or start being clearer and for things to change’. Malek, having been removed from the UK back to Afghanistan, was now making his life elsewhere in Europe. He spoke similarly about how although he would love to return to Afghanistan, he saw no future there and felt there was no hope, ‘The politicians are Taliban, Isis, government, they are American, British … even our neighbours Pakistan, Iran, they are making terrible in Afghanistan.’ During the comedy workshop in which participants wrote and performed sketches, mainly parodies of the systems and structures they had come across since arriving in the UK, they were encouraged to think about their imagined futures. Taz drew a picture with ‘futures’ written in the middle and a series of arrows heading off in different directions as follows : ‘Open my own pizza shop; get a good full-time job; goals and achievements; dark future; dentist; learning language; looking after myself; money; family; good life.’ The strapline to his drawing read, ‘From zero to hero – be a hero in your own life.’

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Curtailed and uncertain futures approaching 18 Turning 18 and ‘being migrant’ was a vital conjuncture (Jeffrey 2010) often marked by dwindling hopes of new possibilities and the realization that futures aspired to were contingent on certain social and political rights, eligibility to which was not predictable, equitable or logical. In England, the run-up to young people turning 18 was framed around a system of institutional planning operationalized through a ‘pathway plan’, which is used for all young people in public care. In theory, the plan is co-written by the young person with their social worker and is intended to provide a road map of possible options during and after the transition from care. At a broader European level, such pathway plans map onto the Life Project Planning Framework (Council of Europe 2008), discussed in Chapter 4. In Italy, a similar plan is supposed to be created for unaccompanied minors in discussion with the young person’s care workers. This should then be shared with their legal guardian, though our research suggests that this process was rarely applied in any systematic way. While a few young people reflected on the pathway planning and its usefulness, most were unaware that they had a pathway plan or were very dismissive of it. Dalmat talked about how his pathway plan had focused on the possibility of return to Albania, an idea that he was simply not willing to entertain, adamant that should he be returned he would leave again immediately. Besmir, also from Albania, was similarly cynical of the process. He recounted how during the three years he had been supported by social services he had only ever ‘received’ (rather than cowritten) one pathway plan. He was, he said, ‘surprised’ by it and joked that he ‘discovered things about myself I didn’t even know’. This was because he believed the plan had been written for someone else and then just copied into his own plan – he had no idea where the material had come from but it bore no resemblance to his own interests or his own situation. Many other young people spoke about the top-down approach to designing possible futures that social workers were forced to engage them in, reflecting on how the process was not about choices and options but what they were and were not permitted to do within the frame of immigration control. The gap between young people’s intentions regarding their futures and the limitations and constraints imposed by the policies governing their lives widened as they approached 18, when the shift from being eligible to ineligible to support could be stark. Two young women participating in the comedy workshop wrote and performed a sketch about their own experience of the ruthlessness of the system. The piece centred on an analogy of taking a train journey a few minutes before turning 18 using a

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child’s ticket. At midnight, the train stops and the young person is thrown off the train by a security guard and told there is no one to help them. At the same time, many of those with legal status had made relatively successful transitions to adulthood. They were beginning to pursue the things they valued and their own aspirations for life. Yet it was not just a simple dichotomy of having or not having papers that determined young people’s future trajectories. Some spent so long without papers that the transition to adulthood and its associated markers became skewed and their lives were out of kilter with those around them. This protracted transition sometimes lasted more than a decade. There are parallels between this and the phenomenon of ‘waithood’, described as a prolonged transition to adulthood experienced by many unemployed and uncoupled African youth by Honwana (2012). After ten years, Janan was finally granted indefinite leave to remain in the UK. Having only recently secured his legal status, he was struggling with the hoops he was forced to jump through with no preparation, little support and having had barely any access to education. Despite the length of time he had spent in the UK, he spoke very little English and was unable to read or write. He reflected on how his lack of literacy had many impacts on his daily life. He had no idea about what he was entitled to in terms of housing or other social benefits and, not being computer literate, he was unable to check these entitlements or get advice online. Being unable to read the tenancy agreement from his landlady left him feeling he was being taken advantage of, and when looking for jobs through the job centre he was told to use a computer when he had no idea how to even switch it on. After being assessed as not having made enough effort to find work, he was threatened with having his benefits taken away. ‘The job centre,’ he mused, ‘they stick the knife in here’ (pointing to his throat). At one point, Janan was forced to go and work in a city more than a hundred miles away from where he was living, before he eventually found work in a factory closer to home. This involved packing boxes and was paid below the minimum wage because it was classified as an apprenticeship. The only benefit was that his employer, whom Janan now described as ‘like a big brother’, was committed to helping him learn the job despite his lack of training and absence of CV. Janan’s experience illustrates the highly normative ideas about what constitutes a successful transition to adulthood. Completing an education, living independently, moving on to higher education or finding work are all assumed to be par for the course in how young people assert themselves in the adult world. Yet he had been trapped within a set of structures that had denied him any of the building blocks to be able to move forward; in his own words, he had ‘lost ten years of my life’. Janan compared himself

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to Nelson Mandela who was locked away for all those years, although the similarity, he said, stopped there. Mandela was able to do so much with his life after leaving prison because ‘he was a man of influence, he had education’. When asked how he now saw his own future, he lamented, ‘On my right hand the future has gone, on my left hand I lost everything.’ Yet in time things got better for Janan, and his outlook the next time we met, a year or so later, was significantly brighter. He had a job as a tailor (a trade he had learned as a child) and was fond of his employer who, he said, made him feel respected and valued for the skills he could bring to the job. He reflected on how the adversity of life in Afghanistan as a child had in fact prepared him well for his future in the UK, despite his lack of education: ‘I started working when I was very young in Afghanistan – when Mr Bush, his father, come into power he bombed our land, our farms destroyed. Yeah, we lost everything. Obviously, not my time, my father’s time. I am the worst generation – we are the worst because everything was lost. No education. When we lost everything, I was a kid. I went somewhere that was not bombed and they had business, tailoring and mechanic.’ The last we saw of Janan, life was even better. He had been to Iran to get married and retold the event in detail. His challenge now was to be able to earn enough for his wife to join him in the UK. He had, in many ways, been transformed through finally having a secure legal status. When asked about the hopelessness he described when we first met him, he reflected as follows: ‘It’s like this thing I saw with the tiger which was held in India in a very little garden for five years. A tiger which is the fastest animal on earth. And when they released the tiger in the jungle the tiger was very you know … the tiger was so scared. Tigers are not scared of anything you know, they kill lions. But this tiger couldn’t do anything, just went to sleep … that’s how I felt … Yeah, it just remind me because the tiger was free in the jungle. And I felt the same thing.’

A rite of passage? What becoming adult means The transition to so-called adulthood and its interconnection with notions of viable futures emerged as fraught with contradictions. Many young

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people considered their progression to adulthood having happened from when they began their migration alone (Chatty 2007; Monsutti 2007; Crivello 2011). For others, becoming adult was about understanding life, or it was a process triggered by a major life event. Abil, from Albania, talked about seeking his future in Italy as he approached institutional adulthood, and how it revealed the clash between institutional and biological definitions of adulthood and his lived experience: ‘The next day, well the same day, the casa famiglia [youth shelter] sends you on your way. Once you’re 18, you can’t stay there one day more … but it’s not that you become an adult as soon as your papers say you’re 18, I think you’re an adult from the moment you start to understand life, what it’s all about. I mean, you can be an adult at 13 years if life has, well, if you have behaved like it, if at 13 years you were forced to, well, you became adult in that moment because of circumstances. Or maybe you become an adult at 50 years old, because up until that point you have no idea what life’s about, that actually you’re not a kid any more, but actually, I think you never really stop being a kid [laughs]. Are we ever really grown up?’ Despite having made often momentous journeys alone to pursue pre‑existing dreams, many young people arrived in Europe to find themselves placed in care settings where they were expected to comply with care and immigration structures that dictated the parameters around their possible futures. In Italy in particular, many struggled to understand why, in order to remain in the accommodation centre, they should be forced to attend school rather than be able to work, the former not having been part of their migratory plan or that expected by families. Moreover, some young people simultaneously found themselves assuming both roles of child and adult, for example under the care of social workers or other institutions, while contributing by whatever means possible to the livelihoods of families elsewhere in the world. A further set of contradictions emerged when these same systems and structures created barriers to young people performing the normative expectations of adulthood; so not having the right to work was effectively a denial of independence and autonomy. No access to education meant that academic and vocational learning trajectories were interrupted. Lack of status also put a halt on moving forward with other aspects of life, such as building meaningful relationships or taking on caring or financial responsibilities for others.

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A catch-up with Dan towards the end of the project revealed that things continued to go well for him since he received his indefinite leave to remain in the UK after so many years. Nonetheless, he was still living hand to mouth and struggling to pay rent, despite having two jobs. He was, he said, more than happy to do absolutely any job just as long as he never had to experience the dependency on others he had known for years. He reflected on how it was difficult to reach the markers of adulthood expected of him. He still hadn’t made it to university, an increasingly unlikely prospect in the foreseeable future as he had to afford to live independently, and was stuck in a minimum wage job from which it was hard to create a space to improve his earning options. Adding to this, pressures were mounting from family, living elsewhere in Europe, as to why, at the age of almost 27, he was not yet married. Dan contemplated how he felt constantly behind with everything and was struggling to try and make up for lost time. He felt, he said, that he was a decade behind everyone else. Even young people who, at the time of the research, were in positions of relative privilege often struggled with emotional and practical dilemmas and difficulties related to securing viable futures. While Rokhan’s life was going well, he reflected on how there was a time when the process of trying to make his life in the UK was so exhausting that he had felt like giving up and seeking his future elsewhere. Moreover, once Rokhan had managed to sort out his own situation, he then spent several years trying to make sure that his younger brother could remain in the UK. They had been separated from each other on their journey from Afghanistan and then reunited after several years. Rokhan explained the struggle: ‘He didn’t have papers, he couldn’t get into school, then university. Like moving him to X [name of city], you know, was a big issue because he wasn’t living here before, he was living somewhere else.’ It was not uncommon for young people, once they had secured their own legal status, to help others navigate the process. For Bacha, the journey to become documented in the UK had taken eight difficult years, during which he had struggled with acute mental health crises. Once he received his papers, he was inundated with requests for support from the Afghan community, requests that he was keen to help with, but were nevertheless quite overwhelming to manage alongside a full-time job. He was also faced with the prospect of bringing his new wife to the UK from Afghanistan and helping his brother make it to the UK from Greece. Bacha’s situation highlights the risks of seeing unaccompanied minors in isolation. Even if they are successful in obtaining documents

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permitting them to stay in Europe, their wellbeing may be shaped by the insecure status of their family and friends elsewhere (see Chapters 10 and 11). In the United States, much has been written about the psychological toll of ‘mixed status families’ (Enriquez 2015; Oliveira 2018; García 2019). However, the label ‘unaccompanied minors’, coupled with the dearth of research among this population after the age of 18, appears to have prevented the interconnected aspects of status for this group from becoming a line of inquiry.

Seeking viable futures through education and work While education was not the selected pathway for all young people, it was certainly central to how many constructed their futures and something they went to extreme lengths to pursue. In a moving account of his journey through education in the UK, after having never previously been to school, Habib reflected on the impact that it had made on his life: ‘Education is the most important thing in my life as it gives me hope for the future and allows me to make a positive contribution to my community. Education has basically turned a mirror into a window. You can see things from a different point of view.’ Habib was speaking after finally getting secure legal status after more than seven years of living in the UK, a time of stress, uncertainty and anxiety about the future. As he said in passing, ‘You can’t learn if your mind is not relaxed.’ In a similar vein, Kamal, who was facing the prospect of deportation to Afghanistan at the time of our interview having recently turned 18, explained that he found it hard to stay engaged in learning with the pressures of such uncertainty: ‘Sometimes you know I’m sat there and I’m trying to do my maths [shows mock GCSE paper he has half completed] and I get bored you know, I think, why do I do this? How will this help me if I go Afghanistan? And I’m just looking out of the window at people going by … I know so many people and they had such a bad experience. I can’t believe anything, it’s all luck.’ Some young people such as Habib achieved exceptionally well in education and were continuing academic pathways; others had built

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technical skills and secured work and livelihoods connected with these; while others were still forging possible pathways for themselves through ongoing education and training pathways. Rokhan, for example, was in his final year of a degree in pharmacology and loving it. He was planning to complete postgraduate studies and eventually set up his own pharmacy, even contemplating the possibility of one day being able to do this in Kabul. The last time we met Rohan, he had completed his undergraduate studies, had secured an opportunity to do his postgraduate studies and was well on the way to fulfilling his aspirations. Many others, grappling with their legal status and associated priorities of housing and income, found it difficult to even think about learning when so many other issues in their lives needed to be sorted. Others still seemed to get stuck in endless years of English or Italian language classes, a prerequisite to accessing wider curricula. They found it difficult to get to the level required to diversify their studies, particularly an issue for young people who arrived in Europe in their later teens. Moreover, educational pathways could be abruptly interrupted as soon as a decision by the government was imposed. In this way, education was bordered in numerous ways. Eduard wanted to finish his studies in health and social care at college and then train as a social worker. This was something that in the short term at least was not going to be possible given the failure of his asylum appeal. As a result, he struggled, he said, to envisage a future in England, and described his frustration with how the Home Office had a view of the situation in Albania that was at odds with reality, yet which had enormous implications for his own future: ‘Because I don’t know if I will be here. I don’t know what to plan or like sometimes when I go to college like I am thinking like why I am doing that because it is like so hard for me to build a future, because one thing they do, it can destroy all my future and so it is like everywhere where I go is like dark for me and I cannot see my future.’ Adnan was waiting on a decision about his legal status and during this time was ineligible to even work part time. He explained how working was not just a question of earning money but also a chance to gain experience, build a CV and demonstrate a breadth of skills for future work or studying prospects. Nonetheless, Adnan continued to study hard at college and aspired to go to university. When we met him again, he had gained exceptionally high grades in his B-Tech examinations. Still waiting on the outcome of his application to remain in the UK, he

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was nonetheless excited about the fact he now had the grades to study engineering. Several months later, Adnan had been turned down again by the Home Office and was submitting an appeal, aware that this could take more than a year. Despite having the requisite points for his chosen university degree, he decided to return to college and study for an A level in maths. He was trying hard, he said, to ‘stay positive’ but often struggled to concentrate. Faced with the prospect of no longer being able to remain in England, he began considering possibilities elsewhere in Europe and, whatever happened, said he was determined to keep going: ‘You know what? I have to, I have to … Giving up is easy. There’s no point in giving up … Struggling that’s what makes it interesting.’ The last we saw of Adnan, he was heading off to study somewhere else in Europe where, he said, he had family contacts. Having now become appeal rights exhausted, he said he could not remain in the UK where he was ‘like a shadow – unable to study, work or anything’. In the meantime, Besmir had finally been given five years leave to remain in the UK. He reflected on the fundamental difference it made to his life: ‘I had to live with the fear of not knowing what the tomorrow’s got for me … if it’s my last day in this country, if I’ll get a letter saying I’ve been refused, I’m getting deported. I have to live with suspicion, every day. Every day. I always was in doubt, is it actually worth it, going to college, studying. Trying to work, and one day they’re just going to come up to me and say no you can’t stay here. It was stressful. It was stressful. Yes. It gave that feel of uncertainty all the time, not knowing what’s going to happen.’ Once he heard that he had been granted leave to remain, Besmir insisted that there was no time to celebrate. He had to make the very best of the opportunity, ‘having so much opportunities here, it has just made me hungry literally. Greed in a good way, like I want the best, I want to do as much as I can, I want to reach high in life.’ Despite his initial excitement about his prospects, Besmir found it hard to move forward with his studies, and a year or so later he was taking time out to rethink his future and decide what he really wanted to do. He was, he said, still struggling to make sense of his whole migratory experience and why he had been sent away for his own safety. His father would not

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talk openly about the reasons why, but he hoped that over the years he would be able to piece together what he referred to as the ‘puzzle’ of what had happened. The conjoined immigration and social care system, apparently at whim, provided and then abruptly revoked educational opportunities for young people. At the same time, it created powerful psychological barriers to learning, requiring as it did a great deal of human strength to be able to study despite the pressures of insecurity and uncertainty generated by the system. Yet, ironically, educational achievement can be one of the crucial factors in persuading some asylum and immigration appeal judges of the value of enabling young people to remain in the UK. A further twist, however, in the convoluted tides of immigration control is that other judges may be swayed by the opinion that the resilience of pursuing educational pathways under such difficult circumstances is in fact evidence of a young person’s ability to cope, thus providing justification for their return to countries such as Afghanistan. Second-guessing how best to navigate these constant fluctuations and inconsistencies was in itself a superhuman challenge.

Rethinking futures: going with what’s possible For those forced to spend time living irregularly in Europe, the resultant pressures took their toll, severely impacting on young people’s health and wellbeing as well as on their sense of self-worth and dignity. Kamran eked out an existence for more than three years and spoke of the exhaustion of feeling dependent on others and the constant sense of discomfort: ‘Yeah, so I was living with friends, one night here, one night there, I stayed six months in one place [city], six months in the other, with friends. It was rough … I was feeling like back to Afghanistan…’ Others who came to the end of the legal road, and were unable or unwilling to continue living precariously in the UK or Italy, were forced to look to building viable futures further afield. For those who had spent their formative years in cities in England before being detained and deported back to Afghanistan, a lack of safety and prospects meant they left Afghanistan again. Fearing redeportation if they returned to the UK, they typically embarked on journeys either to other parts of Europe or beyond. Here they made fresh claims for asylum, often based on the horrors and persecution they had been subjected to after being forcibly returned.

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Malek had spent almost five years in the UK from the age of 16 before being deported. He then remigrated to Iran and was forcibly returned to Afghanistan before setting off again and eventually arriving elsewhere in Europe, where we spoke to him. Asked whether he saw his future in that country, he commented he was unsure since he had no way of telling what the government there would do or say next, or the sorts of agreements that might be made with the Afghan government. ‘They are saying different things every day’, he said. Asked why he thought governments where he lived believed that Afghanistan was a safe country, he replied: ‘I think like British and the Western government, I mean like politicians, they don’t care about people. In Afghanistan, British government or Western government, they can do anything to Afghani people because they’ve got the power so Afghani politicians listen to them. You know like British government says anything to Afghani politicians, they will obey. They obey Americans, they obey British. So now they can do anything to Afghani people.’ Malek had an acute sense of being a pawn in global geopolitics, which had very real consequences for his own life. He was poised to move on if he had to, used now as he was after so many years into his migratory experience of rolling with the policy punches. As we saw earlier, following deportation to Afghanistan, Jamal and Abdul had attempted journeys to Australia and, in doing so, had unwittingly become trapped in another part of the global asylum system. Jamal had spent time in the UK as a child, growing up in the same city as some of the research team – who introduced him to the research project and invited him to take part. Like Jamal, Abdul, who also arrived as an unaccompanied child, was forcibly returned to Afghanistan. However, this was under the misassumption that he had come from there. In reality, Abdul had left Afghanistan as a young child with his family and had grown up in Iran before setting off on his own to the UK. On landing in Kabul, he had no knowledge of the city nor how to begin to make a life there. When all else failed, he began selling alcohol in order to earn a living and for which there was a widening market. As a result, he was threatened by the Taliban and so fled to Kabul, where he found someone who produced passports – and then he set off again. In the meantime, Jamal had tried to work as a taxi driver but, faced with the prospect, he said, of being killed by the Taliban, Isis or other faction on a daily basis, he too decided the only viable option was to leave again.

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Australia outsources its border control to other countries, such as Indonesia, which has set up immigration detention centres, allegedly designed to help register, protect and find ‘durable solutions’ for these people without them ever having to set foot on Australian soil. The poor living conditions in these centres have been well documented, as have the prolonged and indefinite periods of detention while applications are supposedly processed (Global Detention Project 2016). Our inquiries with international NGOs working in Indonesia revealed that it was ‘pretty much impossible to generalize how long it would take to process a claim for asylum’ and that ‘it can be anything from a couple of months to a couple of years’. It seems that monitoring and accountability of these processes is low, despite the fact that holding people indefinitely for the purposes of immigration control is against the UN Refugee Convention.

Conclusion On the whole, most young people in the study shared similar aspirations for futures that centred on being able to build their own independence and take control over their lives. These typically included furthering their education and/or finding work and economic independence, establishing their own homes and building intimate relationships with others. Like any other young person, they also wanted to learn to drive, open a bank account or take a holiday that involved crossing a border. In practice, the system and structures governing their lives often had the impact of stifling such personal growth and independence and reinforcing institutional dependency. Where they no longer had recourse to any public funds, they frequently faced exploitation through forced illegal work and constantly living in hiding from police and immigration authorities – while any possibilities for building futures were put on hold. Futures were contingent on rights and entitlements that were unfairly distributed, and there were no clear rules as to who got to live the futures they aspired to – and very little to explain the serendipity of outcomes (Chase 2019). Having coffee with Dan one day close to his home, he nodded to a young man from Eritrea who passed by the café window. He reflected on how they had both arrived at the same time having made the same journey, but that the other person had been given papers almost immediately and was, at the time, completing his final year of university. Dan alluded to how his own legal status impacted his social relationships. This other guy, he said, often asked what Dan was up to and how things were going. He seemed constantly surprised that Dan was still completing his Higher National Diploma and had not progressed with his education.

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The sequential bordering of young people’s futures emerges as something akin to a computer game or a pinball machine: as they avoid one blockade, they face another as they try to navigate a path towards futures that are, after all, as Kamran said, just ‘normal’. Yet we have seen how in the face of shrinking capability freedoms, young people show incredible powers of adaptation as they strive, nonetheless, to move forward with their lives: to go ‘from zero to hero’ and sometimes back again. Back in Indonesia, 18 months on, and Abdul had finally moved out of the detention centre and was being accommodated in an asylum support hostel somewhere outside a major city. He had been granted refugee status by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, but there was nowhere to send him. While relieved at having left the detention centre, the reality was that he still had no immediate possibility of moving on to a permanent situation. He spoke of how, having got through the first hurdle (getting out of the detention centre) after more than two years, he was now faced with the prospect of having to wait for a further seven years before he could have somewhere permanent to live and where he could put down roots: ‘Before we were trying to get out of the detention centre. Now it’s worse because there are many people waiting for five, six years. I have a friend who has been waiting here … he is here, just let me ask him [speaks in the background] … He’s been here for around seven years now, since April 2010.’ Putting his own situation in perspective and providing a sense of scale of this phenomenon of global migration from Afghanistan, Abdul spoke of how he was surrounded by about 300 other young refugees, like him, waiting to be allocated to a country of refuge, and that the majority of them were Hazara from Afghanistan. Despite all the challenges he faced in securing his future, he was, he said, determined to still live his life. He had started to take on a role in the local community, and through a church organization was offering his services as an interpreter for his Afghan compatriots, by his own admission his English being ‘very good’. This sense of living ‘mini-futures’ while waiting to lead the lives they valued for themselves and others is what enabled many young people to cope with the relentless setbacks to futures that were dreamed of but, for now, were unrealizable.

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Emotional and Mental Wellbeing ‘The main thing is that if you get refused, the Home Office would like to send you back home. And you can’t stop thinking about it even if you take a tablet or anything, so in the end the tablets won’t help at all. But the only thing you will think of is that you need to get your documents and settled down and establish your life here. And if they say “no” to you and you keep thinking about, what to do now to get your documents? How to live? Where to get support from? So these are the things you have to do whether you take the tablets or not. And if these things get sorted – you don’t need a tablet.’ (Kushan, from Afghanistan)

Introduction Throughout the book, we have adopted an expansive understanding of subjective wellbeing, situated in young people’s lived experiences, one that is inextricably tied to the notion of a viable future and typically a collective rather than an individual pursuit. As noted in other work (Chase et al 2019), much research has focused on the adverse impacts of migration on the mental health of children and young people and the difficulties in identifying and appropriately responding to their mental health needs (Bean et al 2007; Bronstein and Montgomery 2011; Children’s Society 2018). Far less attention has been given to how post-migration stressors also adversely affect these young people’s mental health (Fazel et al 2012; Li et al 2016; Gentleman 2018). In this chapter, we consider the factors that negatively impact mental wellbeing of migrant young people not so much in terms of presenting symptoms and biomedical responses, but largely as products of systems and structures that are incompatible with their lives and aspirations (see Chapter 8). We highlight how anxieties

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surrounding the uncertainty of legal situations, indefinite periods of time waiting for decisions and the devastating impacts of receiving a refusal from the state immigration authorities took a significant toll on young people’s wellbeing. Even those who were granted secure legal status often aged out of care when struggling with inadequate support or still reeling from the impact of many previous years of precarious living and the barriers this created to being able to move forward with their lives. Whatever their legal status, turning 18 often meant their circumstances were compounded by lower level financial allowances, uncertainty about accommodation arrangements, the end of educational opportunities and a whole range of other enforced transitions that could have devastating effects. The chapter brings out important practical, cultural and emotional factors, such as fear and lack of trust in accessing mainstream services, as well as the various strategies and sources of support that young people draw on to sustain feelings of mental and emotional wellbeing. It highlights not only how poor health outcomes are often products of immigration and social care structures, but also how health services are no longer safe, neutral spaces. Instead, in the contemporary hostile environment (Abubakar et al 2018; Ammar 2018), health services can act as additional arms of immigration control and surveillance systems. The chapter discusses the controversial logic in the clinical use of anti-depressants and other drugs to manage conditions that are essentially socially and politically constructed, as well as the incursion of the criminal justice system into the arena of addiction and behavioural disorders. Hence, in keeping with the argument of the book as a whole, the chapter politicizes mental wellbeing in the context of migration and problematizes the many assumptions that currently inform how medical and social care systems respond.

Challenges to health and wellbeing There were common references made in England and Italy about how young people sought to sustain their physical health. These included making sure they had adequate and good food and maintaining bodily strength through taking regular exercise, usually going to a gym, playing football or running. The physical dimensions of health were mostly seen as intricately interwoven with emotional wellbeing. Kamal, from Afghanistan, for example, lamented the fact that he was ‘too skinny’ and had been told by his doctor to eat more. He was, he said, too stressed to eat enough and despite his best efforts couldn’t sustain a healthy weight. Others with irregular status struggled to get dental or doctors’ appointments for health problems and had to rely on accessing medical

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services through overstretched non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This often meant waiting many weeks. One young person, having felt unwell for a long time, finally saw a doctor via a charity and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Another had been living with a persistent toothache for weeks while he waited for a dental appointment. In Italy, even young people staying in state-funded accommodation who were entitled to free health care would sometimes seek out the services of volunteer doctors at the transit shelter with the perception that it was ‘safer and quicker’. One young Eritrean who had a bad skin infection refused to go to the hospital for treatment, despite the reassurances of the NGO doctors, for fear they would ‘take his fingerprints’ and that this might prevent him from seeking asylum in Germany, where he planned to reunite with his sister. After sleeping rough for a number of years in England, Janan reflected on the indignity, shame and sense of total rejection he felt as a result. In the end, it was his poor physical health that relieved his situation. He became so ill that, through a local charity, he was assessed by a doctor who told the local authority that he would die unless he was found accommodation. He described how his hands and feet had turned almost black with frostbite and showed us the after-effects of infection around his knuckles. Yet it was the psychological scarring of Janan’s time on the streets that stuck with him, a time when he had begun to believe that there was ‘no humanity’. Throughout the research, physical health concerns aside, young people tended to focus more on the emotional aspects of their lives and circumstances. Indications that they were struggling ranged from reported generalized anxiety, difficulties with sleeping, feelings of isolation and depression through to attempts at self-harm and suicide.

Alcohol, drugs and gambling Whether cause or effect of mental health problems and difficulties, most likely an interaction of both, we frequently heard about how alcohol, drugs and gambling impacted the lives of young people, either because they struggled with these issues themselves or because they were worried about others. These sorts of coping strategies often had a domino effect, further undermining health and wellbeing and generating other social and economic difficulties. Some participants had friends who, they said, gambled everything they had. Even when they didn’t have money, some would reportedly still go to casinos or betting shops to observe others gambling for the buzz or in the hope that those having a good day might pass on some handouts from their winnings. Some were placed in the tricky position of being asked to

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lend money to friends to help them out with gambling debts or to help finance a gambling habit. They spoke about the power of advertising, and how in the English cities where they lived there was practically a bookmaker’s shop on every street. Gambling addiction was reported to a lesser degree in Italy. Ahmad, from Afghanistan, was concerned for his close friend, stemming from the interwoven difficulties of gambling and mental health. He explained: ‘I have a friend, he works very hard and he keeps playing the money because he loses the money in the casino and he get a depression. Two times he tried to kill himself, one time he cut his wrist and one time he had tablets … He cannot really stop [gambling]. We are his friends, we try to stop him, but we can’t. Nobody can stop him.’ A member of our research team explained how he also repeatedly witnessed the desperation that came from gambling losses. Not only did it lead to depression and even attempts at suicide, but it also directly impacted relationships with others: ‘They can’t send money back and can’t speak to families when they have gambling problem because it is too embarrassing to say you have no money to send and you can’t help out.’ Bashir, who by the end of the research was living in another European country, admitted to having struggled himself with gambling while he was in England: ‘I been gambling as well … like for eight, nine months I done that. I put a lot of money. Yeah and I don’t get nothing … you know what, I lost everything.’ Importantly, it was not only those with uncertain legal status who struggled with gambling. Kamran talked about how gambling, drinking and smoking had taken over the lives of people he knew ‘with papers’ and, when asked why he thought this was the case, he said: ‘I don’t know, maybe because they’re isolated, they feel alone, they feel down. That’s when they stop thinking for the future and they start gambling or drinking. It’s difficult to find a job as well.’

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For others, alcohol was often associated with an attempt to alleviate stress and anxiety. Karim, from Afghanistan, spoke about his ongoing problem with alcohol use and how he had been trying hard to stop going to nightclubs. He was feeling very low and anxious about the outcome of a pending and prolonged asylum application and said alcohol made him feel better for a few hours. He admitted, ‘Honestly, I drink a lot,’ while lamenting ‘It’s no good.’ Izat, from Afghanistan, attributed what he saw as the growing problem of drug and alcohol use among young men in the community largely down to the stress of their situation: ‘I think it’s the stress, the stress gets to them and then they think to get rid of that so they start to smoke and then it goes to cannabis and when you start smoking cannabis you’re in the wrong crowd. And the one thing leads to another. And by the time they realize they’re addicted and depressed they have no job and it just gets worse and worse … But I think it’s mostly the stress … You don’t know what’s happening, what the future holds for you. Then it just leads you to the wrong path and once you go at the wrong path, it’s difficult to get out of it.’ There was, however, a more disturbing aspect to Izat’s account that related to reports, at the time, of the UK Home Office infiltrating migrant and refugee community and religious groups (Taylor and Busby 2019). He said that young people with alcohol and drug problems and no secure legal status within his local Afghan community were being coerced into accepting ‘voluntary’ return to Afghanistan. Since we had last spoken to him, some ten months previously, he reported that a lot of people had taken voluntary return because they were so depressed: He explained: ‘Since I last spoke to you a lot of people got sent back as well … they deported themselves … they got sent back home to get rid of their addiction. Because a lot of them were depressed, some of them were become addicted so they won’t come back.’ Izat went on to explain that while he believed the mosque community would probably support people facing these difficulties, young people were unlikely to go near the mosque when they were doing things considered forbidden: ‘You can do it, people will help you go but that inner feeling like, “I’m doing the wrong things, how can I go to a holy place?”’ Helen, meanwhile, talked about how many of her friends, usually men, from Eritrea were struggling with their mental health, but that it was a

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taboo issue that was also culturally difficult to address. She spoke of the constant pressures many young people were under to send resources back home when they could not find work, were in ‘shitty jobs on crap money’ or were in full-time education. She reflected: ‘I don’t know if I can diagnose it as a mental health problem, but I know that with my closest friend he just like, he just can’t, like for example he can’t speak without having two cans of beer or three cans of beer, because he can’t sleep, or he will have to smoke some weed to be able to, because he is just constantly worried, he is constantly thinking about you know like what he needs to do.’ Those who had previously suffered extreme hardship emphasized how crucial it was to survival to be able to navigate the risks of problematic drug and alcohol use. Janan was convinced that one of the things that had helped him get through living on the street for so long was not taking drugs or alcohol, which he felt would have been his downfall. The search for a distraction from the pressures of a precarious legal status through excessive alcohol or drug use was also reported among young Albanians. Adnan explained: ‘Some people start drinking, some people start doing drugs. That’s always a distraction isn’t it? So I think prepare yourself psychologically and try to be psychologically strong. You can’t overcome stuff otherwise.’ Elvis spoke a lot about loss and sadness, and how he didn’t trust himself to go out alone when he was sad because he would end up drinking: ‘I will drink because I am sad and this will make me destroy quite some more.’ Although alcohol use was sometimes associated with young people struggling to make sense of new freedoms and lifestyles they were exposed to in a culture that placed fewer social constraints on them, in most cases problematic use was associated with pain and suffering and sheer lack of support. Some felt deeply ashamed to ask for help for addictions and were concerned that it would ‘go on their record’ and count against them. Others were worried they would disappoint their support workers who might then, in turn, give up on them. Neither of these fears was unfounded. While many support workers were sympathetic and saw problem drug and alcohol use in the context of poor mental health, a minority were less compassionate. One commented that once they’d ‘gone down that road’ there was little they could do besides ‘shield the others from it’.

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One of the most tragic series of events unfolding during the lifetime of the project was the suicides of four young Eritrean men (Gentleman 2018). Despite speculation that this was the result of their lack of legal status, in fact all but one had some legal security at the time of their deaths. One of the young people, Isaias, had a history of problematic alcohol use, which was a significant factor in his death. He was initially an asylum seeker and then later undocumented after he became unable to complete the asylum application owing to alcoholism. A subsequent analysis of the events leading up to the end of his life by those who knew and worked closely with him revealed a series of systemic failures in providing him the support he required, including not facilitating his legal transfer from Calais to the UK in a timely fashion despite his eligibility under the initial Dubs Amendment (see Chapter 6); not providing adequate services and support to respond to clear symptoms of post-traumatic stress (as a result of events that occurred during his flight through Libya and Calais); inadequate access to help with a chronic and persistent alcohol problem; and exposing him to further stresses, including an age assessment, which resulted in him being accommodated with little support and denied him access to appropriate Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS). This research has begun to highlight the complex intersection of mental health and problematic gambling, alcohol and drug use among some migrant young people. It also reveals the dearth of accessible and appropriate support services available to those struggling with these issues. This lack was acutely felt, often despite the best efforts of friends and peers, who did what they could to try and fill this gap but frequently found themselves unable to help.

Mental health problems as products of the system The longitudinal work revealed significant shifts in young people’s mental health and wellbeing over time, often, but not exclusively, in direct relation to their immigration status. Poor mental health was often related by participants to feelings of rejection, loneliness and isolation and their inability to pursue their aspirations.

Feelings of rejection Young people repeatedly spoke of how they found it hard to reconcile the welcome and support they had received as children with the harshness of rejection once they became or were considered to have become young

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adults. In one of the comedy workshops through which young men and women wrote and acted sketches that parodied their interactions with asylum and immigration systems and structures in the UK, one young man from Afghanistan asked jokingly, ‘Why in the Home Office door is it writing [sic] “Welcome” in so many languages.’ In reality, so many experienced anything but welcome, and spoke with anger and frustration at how they had been accused of lying, subjected to intrusive age assessment, denied access to the support they required or misrepresented and vilified in the media. Very often, such feelings of rejection emerged over time, and we saw examples of the shattering impact as it dawned on young people, after having been nurtured, supported and praised for their efforts and abilities to integrate, learn English, apply themselves academically or to learn new skills (see Chapter 7), that they could be abruptly discharged and often nobody cared what happened to them. Adnan commented: ‘It was literally like a stab in the back because even the social workers they supported you in the beginning but as soon as I had the appeal denied, everything just switched for them as well.’ When we first met Dalmat, from Albania, he was happy, joking all the time, and said that his health ‘was great’. He admitted being a bit anxious about a forthcoming court hearing concerning his application to remain in the UK and stressed by the fact that he had been asked to leave his social services accommodation. Nonetheless, he was upbeat, enjoying his plumbing course at college and looking forward to moving up a level in the programme so that he was eligible to begin an apprenticeship. He spoke about coping with the stresses of the forthcoming hearing by throwing himself into his work. ‘Till that day I’ll be at work, so my life is somewhere else.’ At our next encounter, Dalmat was much more candid about the effect that the uncertainty of his situation was having on him. While still chatty, there was an observable change in him and the situation was clearly taking its toll. He talked about being stressed, but how his friends had been encouraging, one in particular constantly reassuring him that ‘It’s gonna be all good. Why do you think the worst?’ He confided that he did in fact expect the worst because he had seen so many of his friends being refused by the Home Office. The effects of this turn around in legal status was a constant refrain throughout the work. Izat, from Afghanistan, summed up these feelings: ‘You have spent all that time here studying and making the connections with community … like basically adapting and

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then all of a sudden you have to think about going back now. So it was so stressful, I had to take stress release tablets to not go into depression. But those tablets don’t help … you know the actual main point, why the stress is there and it could go away but it is the thing you can’t do anything about … it’s not in your hands, and that’s what makes it difficult.’ Elvis, from Albania, was in a similar situation, and described what felt at times like an overwhelming anger: about all the things he had lost, about the loss of control he had over his own life and about everything he was unable to do. He had recently discovered that running very fast helped him to manage his anger, so, he said, he began each day at 5 am with a long run: ‘Running has helped me be more calm, helped me to stay away from my mind for some moments. I get tired so I will not think more about what is wrong, what is right, so I will just think about what I am going to do tomorrow. Because if you have energy and you, then you are still, your mind it will start rethinking because you finish what you have to do for college and now the other part of the day you have to do something, and that is why first I cried in my room, like a kid, I didn’t know what to do, I was alone.’ The gym was used by young men and women in the research to relieve stress and meet with friends. Several participants in the UK explained how they had to argue with their social workers to make the case of how their gym pass was crucial to their wellbeing. In Italy, many young men and women made use of public parks and gyms; though again, several reported that they had to battle with their support workers to justify the cost of good trainers to be able to participate in sports activities.

Loneliness and isolation Being abruptly uprooted from living arrangements and the associated networks of support once they turned 18 could lead to loneliness and isolation. Besmir, from Albania, had been age assessed as over 18 and moved to a part of the city away from his friends. He was placed in a shared house where he didn’t know anyone and everyone was out all the time. Having little command of English, unable to access school (because they had no space for him) and with no friends, he spent the day

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wandering up and down the street feeling abandoned and trying to work out why his family had sent him to the UK. He explained: ‘It was the hardest year because I was all alone, I was 16, I had to take care of myself. I had to cook, clean, take care of myself, study – everything, literally everything. There was a lot of pressure … on me. Especially the first three months, it was crazy. Literally I couldn’t sleep, I was scared, I was stressed, anxious, I would be walking up and down the streets on my own crying, I had no idea what I’m doing here … I was still trying to understand why I’m here, why do I have to be alone? On the weekend it was really bad for me, so … that was at the beginning, depressing.’ Idriz, also from Albania, became caught up in a wrangle between the Home Office and the local authority in which he had been accommodated. While the Home Office accepted his age as 16, the local authority had refused to believe him and denied him any support. After the court ruled that the local authority was legally obliged to accommodate him, they housed him outside the city he had lived in for almost six months and refused to help him access any education. Idriz felt desperately alone and unsupported: ‘So, you know, I was back again but I couldn’t get to school … they were not taking me in any activities and stuff like, so I was just staying at home on my own while all my friends were going to college … I was staying at home, just watching TV and that and then I just decided to end my life and I went in front of the cars…’ Luckily, the cars stopped in time and the police took Idriz to social services. He explained that he wanted to end his life because he had come to the UK for a better future but felt let down and abandoned. After Idriz tried to take his life and although he was only 16 years old, the fact that he had been assessed as 18 meant that at this critical time, rather than receiving appropriate treatment through CAMHS, he ended up on an adult psychiatric unit, an experience he found traumatizing. After being discharged from the unit, he saw a doctor who made an inquiry into why this had happened, and then provided what Idriz described as excellent follow up support. He felt safe with the doctor, who encouraged him gradually to reduce and then stop the medication that he was on in order to prevent, he said, possible addiction to it. After Idriz was discharged,

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he was nevertheless again moved away from his friends to a town some 15 miles away. Here he was placed in bed and breakfast accommodation; this was supposed to be for ‘three days’, but he was still living there when we met him 15 months later. He was angry and frustrated, and lamented the fact that he was forced to live on takeaway food on a budget of £57 a week because he had no kitchen. On the plus side, he had finally been granted indefinite leave to remain, was coping better and hoping soon to restart his education. In the week running up to her 18th birthday, Julia, from Eritrea, was abruptly moved from her Eritrean foster family after just six months and placed in shared accommodation in another part of the city. She spoke about the impact of the lack of support and social isolation: ‘It was so lonely like. I go to college, when I finish college I come back home … I was always scared in the night, when I got in. I thank God at that time I didn’t drag myself to different bad things. You know? But it was very, very easy to drag yourself into very bad situations … like, smoking, drinking become like, what I can say … become like someone who doesn’t value themselves.’ More generally, many young people had a deep sense of isolation stemming from having no family close by. Kamran, describing his emotional health said, ‘It’s up and down, being alone, without parents, without relatives, I always have that emotion.’ Karim summed it up as ‘All Afghans who migrated got problems, got family back there, obviously you feel upset.’ Antigona, from Albania, following a succession of events involving trafficking and sexual violence, spoke of how she felt unable to articulate what had happened to her. She frequently felt depressed and on more than one occasion had considered taking her own life. Worse than anything, she said was the overwhelming sense of loneliness: ‘Sometimes I am very down. I just think, I am depressed. I even went to the psychiatrist once, when I tried to commit suicide. Because why to live, without family. Even if outside I am like this and I can be smiling, inside everything is broken. All my heart. Everything got broken. Everything is a fracture. I am empty. Alone. This loneliness. If this room [she says expanding her arms as if to contain the bare walls of this room] was filled with money, it would mean nothing to me. It is still empty.’

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Inability to pursue aspirations As we have reported elsewhere (Allsopp et al 2015; Chase 2016, 2020), the inability to move forward with life – the ‘quest’ element of wellbeing (Grønseth 2013) referred to earlier – could have devastating effects. Even if they were not immediately rendered ineligible for education, many young people struggled to concentrate, lost hope and no longer saw the point in continuing. Izat, despite achieving 12 GCSEs and having completed four AS levels, gave up on education on being refused by the Home Office since he reasoned that even if he got his A levels he still couldn’t go to university. He was also experiencing so much stress that he could hardly stay awake in college: He explained: ‘I couldn’t cope with the exams and also my court case … so I wanted to get one out of the way so that I could concentrate. Because I had high hopes at college and I was doing really well … but I did not want my court case to affect my studies. Because then there’s no point doing it and you end up with getting low grades – you can’t do anything with the low grade.’ Karim had had very limited access to education and learning opportunities since his arrival, owing to the amount of time it had taken to resolve his immigration issue and age assessment. When we asked Karim what made him feel well the first time we met him, he replied through a member of the team who was interpreting as follows: ‘He says it’s very difficult to say things make us happy because our life is wasted, you know? The first time when he came here obviously if the Home Office give him visa then now he would have a better life, probably would have gone to school isn’t it and got some education. Then obviously when he had that problem that time he got depression, he still … he says that he is still thinking about it, a lot of pressure, what happens to his family back in Afghanistan, so he is always thinking about something, that affects his health isn’t it.’ Rasheed, from Afghanistan, had just turned 18 when we first met him. He had come to the UK when he was 14, had done extremely well in education and was passionate about learning. When his application to remain was turned down by the Home Office, his mental health spiralled downwards. He was extremely stressed and anxious, and tried to cope

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by taking large doses of sleeping tablets. ‘There is no way to reduce your stress or anything unless you’re with someone,’ he explained. ’I couldn’t sleep, you know. I had like six tablets in one night.’ After being made homeless by the local authority where he had been accommodated, Rasheed became extremely unwell. A key worker at the college he had been attending recognized this and intervened. Through the support of an NGO, Rasheed had been given shelter with a family that, he said, was very caring and supportive. But he still felt very low and sad. Above all, he was finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the stress. While his host family were lovely people who helped him a lot, he said, it was the inability to do anything that was really getting to him: ‘The status and stuff and blah, blah can’t work and can’t do this, this or this … it’s too much.’

Deteriorating mental health The physical effects of emotional turmoil were often observable in how young people looked or responded when they met us. When we caught up with Adnan several months after our initial meeting, out of character he arrived late having over slept and looked anxious. He explained that he had been refused by the Home Office, and spoke at length about his hearing, which he had found tricky. They had asked things that he was not expecting and seemed irrelevant to his case. He said they did not really consider the ‘human rights stuff’. He also felt a clear lack of continuity between his previous hearing and this one, saying that they picked up on different things and had a different logic. Adnan commented on the toll this was all taking on his health, and described a lifestyle that contrasted starkly with his previous regime of the gym, studying and playing football: ‘I’ve been smoking a bit to be honest with you. Which I shouldn’t really do, it’s because of all the stress and stuff. And obviously you get used to it and you try to do it because you’re just trying to relax your mind. And yeah, I’ve been eating not great – I’ve been eating loads but just mainly takeaway.’ When we last saw Dalmat, he had become appeal rights exhausted and immediately started to talk about how anxious he was about his health. He was mistrustful of why we wanted to talk to him and asked a lot of questions about what the research was for and whom we would share the findings with (all things we had previously discussed at length). He worried, he said, about not being able to have a health check-up, and recounted how someone he knew (quite a lot older) had only recently

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discovered that he had terminal cancer because he could not get health checks before. Dalmat’s outlook had changed considerably, and the relaxed, affable young man we had come to know was now racked with angst. He was living with friends, was in constant fear of being picked up by the police and was scared about what would happen next. We arranged for some support through an NGO to help him access health and dental advice but soon afterwards lost contact. The last we heard he was still living irregularly somewhere in the same city and hoping to be able to submit a fresh claim for asylum. Rasheed’s health also deteriorated rapidly over the course of the research. On separate occasions, he attempted to take his life through crashing a car and taking large doses of medication. He said that every day he contemplated jumping off a bridge. At one time, he talked about how he had burned all his belongings, including books, clothes and everything else he owned. When asked if he had any regrets, he promptly said, ‘No, I couldn’t look after myself so how could I look after all this stuff?’ At just 18, Rasheed was sad, withdrawn and isolated. He didn’t meet up with anyone any more or play football, and commented, ‘I don’t have the feeling and stuff to start things. I’m not like I used to be.’ The stress, he lamented, was causing him to lose his hair. He wanted, he said, to resume volunteering in a local charity shop, but was worried about letting people down when he couldn’t sleep and get up on time. Rasheed’s account of one incident portrays the extent of his turmoil. As he spoke, he showed pictures on his phone of his motorbike smashed against a lamppost and another of his crumpled helmet: ‘I had an accident, really serious accident. I couldn’t sleep all night and then I woke up and I went for a ride to X [name of place] and then I just sit there. And then I really sometimes get so emotional and I went back on the motorbike and I tried to dry my tears from inside the helmet. That’s how somehow I lost control on everything. I was lucky because no cars or anything. I hit the lamppost and it went through in my helmet. My whole bike was completely damaged. But I was lucky there’s many people who have lost their lives that way.’ Later on, we heard through the network supporting Rasheed that he had attempted to take his life again. He was hospitalized for two weeks in a psychiatric unit. During that time, the hospital notified the Home Office of his irregular status. On his discharge, Rasheed received a letter pursuing payment for his hospital fees and telling him to leave the country immediately. We heard that a group of people, including his host family,

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were working in order to help him place a fresh claim for asylum, but that Rasheed, for now at least, had given up all hope and was really struggling to see a future for himself. At around the same time, a UK NGO contacted us to raise concerns that they were seeing a pattern in unaccompanied minors’ claims being processed unusually slowly. Some young people were waiting increasingly long times for their substantive interviews, while others had been waiting over two years for an answer to their initial claim. The net result, they said, was an increasing number of claims being made by children when they arrived, who then technically became adults while waiting and, as a result, had no chance to appeal as a child or even make another application for an extension later on. The organization was witnessing the impact on the mental health of those who were unable to engage in learning or other aspects of their lives, since they could not sleep or focus on anything owing to the stress and anxiety generated. Abdul and Jamal meanwhile reported that in the detention centre in Indonesia where they were being held individuals were also suffering acutely from poor mental health. They linked this directly to the protracted delays in refugee status processing. In a conversation in December 2016, Abdul reported being shocked at recently hearing the lengths that young people in the detention centre were going to out of desperation: ‘How long this situation going on? These people are all young, juniors missing their time. It’s even worse than Afghanistan you know. We call here like the green heaven. It’s exactly the same. You may never heard but almost a month ago, five of those people all around 25 years they’re all dead. They just went out in the night time to swim in the sea and they just made themselves drunk and tried to kill themselves. Two of them sank and three of them survived it. Many people are getting depressed, I know many people here like talking by themselves.’

Inappropriate and inadequate response Sometimes young people received medical responses to mental health difficulties they faced. Several spent time in specialist units after suicide attempts or because of other acute mental illness. Others described benefiting from counselling services and had received what they described as excellent care. A number spoke of struggling with mental health problems prior to migrating to Europe. Ahmad, for example, had

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a long history of depression that, he said, pre-dated his departure from Afghanistan and had been something he had felt since his childhood. Grappling with it had become part and parcel of his life. For a number of years, he explained, he had been taking anti-depressants and had been under the care of a psychologist. Nonetheless, most emotional difficulties were associated with events that occurred during young people’s journeys and after arriving in the UK or Italy. The fact that so much of the stress they felt resulted from the system and structures governing their lives was not lost on them, as illustrated by Kushan’s logic in the quote at the start of this chapter. He was adamant that the pressures of having to live illegally and living in constant fear of authorities were not things that could be resolved by pharmacology. When asked whether he had sought any help about how he was feeling, Karim struggled with the idea of whether he might be experiencing ‘depression’. He didn’t really understand, he said, what it meant. He had seen a doctor who had prescribed paracetamol, which he said didn’t help, and he saw no point in going back to the doctor. He believed that despite his legal status issue, the state of his mental health was also related to trauma and the difficulties he had experienced in Iran, where he lived for some time before coming to the UK. He had tried to explain some of this to the doctor, but they had not understood. He had, he said, very vivid memories of what had happened to him in the past, but struggled to remember things in the short term, such as where he had placed his wallet or keys. He also said he had a very short temper, struggled on a daily basis and wasn’t sure how to deal with it. Further illustrative of the perceived disconnect between day-to-day realities and proposed remedies, Kamal from Afghanistan articulated how he was confused by the advice given to help alleviate his headache symptoms and insomnia through meditation practices: ‘I got headaches innit, when I left Afghanistan from then to now … When I think of something, when I got tension my head is going around because my case and Home Office situation, family situation, all the things it makes me worried. Bad headaches! I went two times to see [doctor] and they say, “When you sleeping you have to think about a nice place, dreaming, like a park.” I’m laughing. How am I supposed to do that? I tried it, I did. I think about playing football with my friend. Fours later still no sleep. They are good but, but you have to … these thing, you do need to think about. And they say, “Don’t worry, forget everything.” They say, “Think about

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today, you’re a kid, don’t think about the future.” But when you got something that comes, then if you’re not thinking, what decision will you take?’ In Italy, we also saw young people’s mental health deteriorate over time as a result of feeling let down by ‘the system’ in which they had entrusted their futures. We also observed a mixed response from support services. Sometimes support workers went out of their way to help young people. One NGO worker, for example, took it upon himself to visit, in his own time, a number of psychiatric hospitals that had refused on paper to admit Ben, a 17-year-old suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who had come into his care. Because of this advocacy, the boy was finally admitted, but not before the completion of a lengthy legal procedure. The NGO worker explained that often it came down to one determined individual or one timely intervention to make the difference as to whether someone was ‘drowned or saved’. Over the course of the Italian research, we also met Fanon, a 17 year old from a West African country, who was also struggling to get support to help manage his PTSD and behavioural problems. But unlike Ben, Fanon had nobody to advocate for him. ‘Nobody wants him because of his history,’ explained an Albanian boy he had lived with in a previous accommodation arrangement. ‘He’s bad news.’ Fanon explained to us that he sometimes lost his temper and broke things. The rage he felt was new, he said, and ‘beyond his control’. He sobbed with shame as he described how he had ‘lost himself ’ in a previous casa famiglia (family home), smashing a mirror and threatening the other boys whom he considered his friends. Fanon had then been moved to an adult centre as an ‘interim’ measure and was on a waiting list for a psychiatric assessment. Mario, the caretaker at the casa famiglia where Fanon had been staying previously, explained his own moral dilemma. While he had turned a blind eye to some of Fanon’s earlier outbursts, he explained that eventually he had to call the police. He knew there was a risk this might go on Fanon’s record and count against his application for leave to remain as evidence of ‘bad character’, but he had to balance this concern with his obligation to protect the wellbeing of the other boys in his care. He explained: ‘Fanon looked at me the next morning as he packed his stuff to leave with a look of total, and I mean total hate. He said something to me in X [his dialect] but I didn’t need a translation, I knew exactly what the words meant, I’d betrayed him … [sighs] this is what we have to live with.’

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While beyond the scope of this book to explore in any detail, it is important to note that many support and social workers expressed feeling overwhelmed by the level of need and were often distressed by their inability to provide appropriate or timely help. This was a recurrent theme in both countries, and particularly in Italy where centres were overcrowded and resources scarce.

Conclusion There is now an impressive body of research detailing the link between the sorts of trauma and upheaval associated with migration and its impact on mental health and wellbeing. We are not suggesting for a moment that the mental health difficulties experienced by young people in the current study were uniquely policy induced. We do suggest, however, that such policies play a significant role in undermining young people’s mental health and wellbeing and exacerbating pre-existing mental health difficulties. They do this in a number of ways. First, such policies for many are fundamentally about rejection. Young people describe feeling over time the extremes of care and protection followed by total rejection by the same actors and systems. Secondly, for those who are appeal rights exhausted, such policies represent the ultimate threat of forced return, which is wielded like the sword of Damocles. This was described as the cause of not sleeping, recurring nightmares of being returned to war and conflict, of generalized anxiety, depression, attempts at suicide and in some cases seeking solace in alcohol, drugs or gambling. Thirdly, even for those who are able to remain in Europe, the lack of ongoing support and guidance post-18 is pitiful. Young people describe feeling isolated, alone, unable to cope and cut off from all sorts of support. Finally, and probably the most sinister impact, is the ways in which services that should be associated with safety and security, such as doctors and hospitals, have, through the devolution of immigration control powers, become places of threat for those who have precarious legal status. For some, therefore, accessing health care meant jeopardizing rather than protecting their safety and security (see also Chapter 4). For those exhibiting behaviours that intersected with criminalized acts, such as taking illegal substances or acting out through violence, the involvement of the criminal justice system could have a devastating impact on their futures, regardless of the condition of poor health or desperation that had led them to such extremes. These findings raise major questions for the sorts of policy and practice change required to offer adequate support to young people experiencing

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these difficulties and problems. They also indicate the need for critically engaged health and social care practitioners who question policy directives such as conducting age assessments or unquestionably conforming to immigration control requirements without considering the likely impact on human rights and social justice (Humphries 2004a, 2004b). They speak to the need to widen primary care and public health practice in ways that could be more conducive, or add value to, the promotion of migrant young people’s mental health and wellbeing, for example by working with other agencies to support holistic models of care and support and think outside the clinical frame. More generally, in the insidiously hostile environment of immigration control that infiltrates all aspects of public services, the public health community needs to consider how it might more robustly respond to the complex needs of unaccompanied migrant children and young people that are to a large extent politically induced, and thus ultimately require a political and not purely medical response.

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Friendships, Connections and Relationships There wasn’t much sleep in the boys’ room at the transit shelter in Italy that night. They sat atop their bunks chatting excitedly about who would stay and who would leave the next day. The shelter, it transpired, was primarily a space for rest, recovery and for building new networks and sharing information. Why, we asked several individuals among the hundreds who would sleep there each night, didn’t they go and stay at the non-governmental organization (NGO) dorm a little way away, where there were more comfortable beds? ‘Because they don’t have the type of information we need,’ explained Em, aged 15 from Eritrea. ‘They will tell us to stay here, and also … well, it’s not fun!’ The shelter was full of bed bugs and was a catastrophe measured by any formal hygiene standards, especially when contrasted with the orderly rows of the NGO tent facilities. But Em was also right: the camp was often fun. That morning it had been visited by an itinerant German clown troupe and, as we talked, music was blaring from a car outside while kids danced and chalked pictures in the street. The social and relational aspects of migration are often given scant attention in political and policy spheres, but they emerged as a crucial aspect of wellbeing and an important determinant in the choices made by young people in our research. For those waiting to move on from Italy to other places in Europe, getting a ticket to travel to the next destination (if, that is, they had one in mind) was contingent on access to a range of social and financial networks. Friends, family or contacts had to be approached at the destination and tickets had to be purchased, often with the assistance of agents. Many of those who spent extended periods at the transit shelter were waiting for money wired from ‘back home’ or were doing odd jobs in the irregular economy to save up enough to afford the next step of their journey.

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While the Eritreans we met were relatively well networked and organized, minority nationalities who arrived at the camp usually had less access to information. Using the lingua franca of pidgin Arabic picked up in the camps they had initially fled to in Sudan and Libya, young people from different backgrounds shared knowledge of which routes were open and more easily accessible and which routes were closed – over pasta, tea and, for some, the occasional beer. One of the volunteers had drawn a map in chalk on the fence, and they used this to plot their routes. They were standing before this map when Khalid and Bilal made their decision to separate. The two Palestinian young men had met in Libya two years previously and been together ever since. Now they had finally arrived in Europe, but Khalid had money to join the Eritreans who were leaving the next day, whereas Bilal was still waiting for money to be sent from home. ‘Go, go!’ insisted Bilal, as one of the Eritreans passed Khalid a second-hand rucksack, ‘we’ll meet again.’ Field notes from that morning read: ‘There is a real excitement – like they are heading on an adventure, or a school trip. They’re all smiling, laughing and have their bags packed ready to go … It’s crazy how in two days Khalid has totally changed his plan and is now saying goodbye to a companion of two years – how quickly things can change, and based on one incidental meeting.’ Migrant journeys are often about planning and perseverance. But they are also often about new relationships forged from trust and serendipity. The next day, at 5 am, at the station, we waved them off to Germany. Bilal joined in with the Eritrean rituals, and there was singing and abundant hugging as people said their goodbyes. As Bilal and Khalid kissed each other on the cheeks and foreheads, they both had tears in their eyes. They were ‘brothers’, they repeated, ‘forever brothers’. An older Eritrean who was a volunteer at the camp turned away to hide his tears. ‘I just know what it’s like,’ he said. ‘This life [as a migrant] is a series of goodbyes.’ The bus driver and ticket collector joked that the young migrants, like the young Italians before them, were heading north in search of work. Almost all people on the bus were black except for the single Palestinian. They all carried small backpacks. The coach journey to Germany was around 12 hours, said Bilal, and he didn’t intend to sleep. He was too excited. Kamal had come along for the farewell. Ten years old and Eritrean, he was spending some time at the camp in Italy in the hope that he and

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his 17-year-old sister would eventually find a way to reach Sweden. He shared his sweets with Khalid to cheer him up. His sister, Maria, was still sleeping, and she had entrusted her brother to the care of the group. We did not know it, but three months on, it would be the two siblings whom we would be waving off under more sober conditions. While the vignette here describes what was observed as a relatively common occurrence of bonding in the camp across ethnic, religious and national lines, friendship groups and the distribution of knowledge and resources were also often influenced by where someone was from. When fighting broke out between individuals of different religious and national groups three months later and the camp was threatened with closure by police, a group of volunteers pooled together to buy Kamal, Maria and several other young people bus tickets, enabling them to escape.

Social networks on the move As demonstrated in this encounter, social networks are fundamental to life on the move. Ties, connections and friendships were central to young people’s narratives and their wellbeing. They often began in the countries they came from and continued – whether in person or via virtual means – over substantial periods of time. Friendships made on the journey were strong, founded on the shared experience of risk and survival. They shaped decisions about movement, provided support in times of risk and danger, and moral guidance and care when people described losing hope. To get to Europe, the young people in this study had to rely on a range of actors to facilitate their travel and access to basic services. On the road, wellbeing was mediated by smugglers, who are, as past research has documented, a diverse group comprising the good, the bad and various manifestations of human behaviour in between (Andersson 2014; Aloyo and Cusumano 2018). Food and water were also provided by humanitarian actors, actors whose work, as we have documented elsewhere, is increasingly being restricted and policed (Allsopp 2018; Carrera et al 2018a, 2018b). Volunteers in Italy explained their concern that their own actions to support migrants were increasingly controlled in a way that left space for ill-meaning smugglers to fill the void. Most significantly, however, in their accounts of whom they most relied on for their wellbeing throughout their journeys, the young people in the research spoke of ‘each other’ – friends, fellow travellers and extended family. Throughout her journey, Ruby, a 21-year-old Eritrean woman, explained, friends were the only constant, even though they changed from place to place along the way.

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This book has documented already how dreams and life projects related to migration emerged across cultural contexts often as collective endeavours. This sometimes led young people to set off as part of a group of two or more friends. For many young people, the romance of life on the move soon became a nightmare, in which the companionship of others was a lifeline as they endured hardships including kidnap and extortion, detention and forced labour and the human connection and friendships forged in adversity were what stopped them losing hope. Jal recalled working in a mine in Libya in appalling conditions. The boys would come back with various injuries that they would take it in turns to tend to. Sometimes, he reminisced, they would braid each other’s hair early in the morning and gather round mobile phones to watch the football. He pulled out his phone to show a photo of him with cornrows. ‘Cool, eh?’ Bisrat’s journey had started in Eritrea. Like many other young people, he had set off with three friends. By the time they reached, via Ethiopia, Sudan, six of them were travelling together, but they were later split up in Libya when they were all detained and imprisoned in separate centres. Bisrat spent a total of four months in a Libyan prison and managed to escape before his friends did. They went their separate ways from Libya, but are now reconnected via Facebook. At the time of the research, Bisrat’s friends were making their lives in Germany, Sweden and elsewhere in Europe.

Community, peer support and collective capabilities Migrant-to-migrant or refugee-to-refugee assistance has frequently been ignored in academic studies, which have tended to focus on a ‘top-down’ model of welfare (Bloch et al 2012, 2014; Wells 2011; Berg and FiddianQasmiyeh 2018). Yet we know that peer-to-peer relationships in the form of emotional, practical and material assistance are an important composite of wellbeing and play a crucial role in young people’s ability to access emotional and practical resources. For almost every person in our research, helping others was an important capability. As discussed previously, the importance of social networks to accessing services in Italy was fundamental, whether the young people were seeking to stay there or in transit. This, as we have identified, was primarily because the services provided by the state were scant or because young people were unable or unwilling to access them. Yet friendships, connections and relationships were equally vital to young people’s wellbeing in the UK

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and provided a similar lifeline for those without papers. Understanding young people’s wider relationships and social networks in the context of the mixed economy of welfare and ‘iron rod’ model of welfare in England (see Chapter 4) is particularly important. This is because it is in relation to these different networks that they situate themselves when making calculated decisions related to their own welfare and wellbeing, and when pursuing calculated strategies of visibility or invisibility vis-à-vis the state, which has – for them – formal responsibility (Kohli 2006; Wells 2011; Bankston III 2014). The community as a space of care and support was described by many young people, particularly those with precarious legal status. It was a space where practices of citizenship (Bendixsen 2017; Parisi 2017) provided food, shelter, moral and emotional support to those most in need, typifying Watters’s (2007) moral economy of care. In both Italy and England, we repeatedly observed how young people, within a short space of time, would take on roles as caring for others. This took forms such as hoovering up after a youth club, preparing food and cleaning common spaces, interpreting and accompanying each other to appointments. There was often nothing exceptional about the ways in which the young people enacted their friendships: if you have a car, you give your friend a lift; if you have two nice dresses and a friend has a date, you let her borrow one; and so on. Where young people did not take part in these rituals, they were often chastised by or isolated from the group. Aaron and Dan spoke of their plans of setting up an Eritrean community group for young people in the local area – to ‘keep people together’. They had had initial conversations with a local councillor to see if there was a way of finding a space for them to use. This would be a place particularly through which they could help those, such as the young person they had spoken about earlier who was struggling with drugs and had nowhere to turn for help. At the time of research, in a worrying development, several social clubs were being closed for this target group. One youth club worker who was soon to lose his position when the club closed commented, ‘I don’t know where these guys will go now. To be honest, it’s a false economy.’ It was common to see young people pool resources to support one another in the face of inconsistent and what was perceived to be unfair distribution of resources by the statutory and other welfare and asylum systems. This collective nature of achieving certain capabilities among young people is crucial, and it is one that in policy and practice circles is often overlooked or ignored (Rosen et al 2019). The ways in which young people shifted in some cases between individual and collective life projects is at odds with an asylum system that seeks to individuate them and isolate their case for protection from the wider context.

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It has been demonstrated in scholarship that irregular immigration status is a master status (Gonzales 2011), which affects not just the individual but also those in their immediate social network, including family, friends and peers. We know, for example, that in mixed status families where one individual has legal status and others do not, the individual with legal status often uses their position of relative advantage to deliver security for the wider family. Individuals with legal status would frequently offer cash and material support to friends. Where they had housing and friends were made homeless owing to a lack of papers, in the UK in particular, difficult situations arose in which young people were faced with a conflict in their duty to help their friend, and duty to abide by the rules of UK welfare, which state that welfare recipients in their position are not permitted to allow individuals with irregular status to reside in their homes. Indeed, we encountered situations where young people, especially Afghans, had been threatened with having their housing taken away for hosting undocumented peers. Elsewhere, research has shown how mixed status families and friendship groups might mitigate collective risk by, for example, sharing National Insurance numbers or bank accounts (Bloch and McKay 2016). Such actions do not come without risks, since in a context, especially as we have seen in the UK, where immigration control and welfare provisions are coordinated, the decision to assist a friend in need can put one at odds with the law. Friendships were often forged through core ideas about empathy and reciprocity. Fenan, having been in the UK for a year and half, spoke of how he was first of all reliant on others to communicate in English on his behalf. Now he proudly recounted situations when he could step in and interpret for others from Eritrea who had just arrived and were unable to communicate. Dan’s friendship network had stood by him for many years and, if anything, had got stronger. While he remembered times when he often had nothing to eat, he spoke of how the continued support of friends still surprised him, and how they all worked hard to keep his spirits and make him believe that eventually the protracted situation he was in would be resolved. After he mulled, ‘They have been helping me for a very long time, you know?’ we asked whether they ever made him feel bad about his situation. He promptly replied: ‘No, no, they don’t make me feel like that … if it was like that then I wouldn’t be going to them at all … they always say like “It’s gonna finish, don’t worry, don’t worry … like it will get sorted man, don’t worry” … like they make me think

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like forget everything. They start with some new conversation and we forget about it.’ Dan went on to discuss the unconditional terms of help and support that were typically offered in Eritrea to a ‘brother, sister or friend’ and the expectation that you should always accept the help you need. Dan knew some people who out of pride would refuse food even when they were hungry. He reflected on how it was easier to be among friends because people just shared things without making a big deal about it – but it was still painfully difficult for him to ask for things and to always have nothing. As one of his friends who had been talking with us left, he discreetly passed a gym pass to Dan, commenting that it would be valid until the end of the month and that he didn’t need it any more as he had just joined a new gym in a nearby area. These frequently observed small acts of kindness spoke volumes about the strength of networks and ties. Knowing how important the gym was to Dan in being able to cope with the stresses in his life, this exchange had enormous significance. And so many other examples of kindness, hospitality and sheer good heartedness demonstrated how young people so often went out of their way to help each other: to pick up the phone to check on others they hadn’t heard from in a while, or to cajole and encourage people when they were drinking too much, hiding away in rooms or getting themselves into trouble gambling. It is, however, important not to assume that young people’s practical, social and emotional needs always related to their migration status. Alongside migrant support NGOs, other types of organizations available to the general population were important in both countries for young people in the study to secure support and make new friends. Examples included LGBTQI+ NGOs, religious groups, women’s groups, groups for survivors of sexual violence and trafficking, groups for individuals suffering from chronic illnesses and groups for young mothers. Young people also took on roles of providing support to others about different issues, as well as seeking advice and guidance themselves. Julia, from Eritrea, for example, was volunteering with an organization supporting girls and women who had experienced genital mutilation. Eduard, on the other hand, talked about the difficulties he had found in getting the peer support he craved as a young gay man arriving newly in the UK from Albania and being completely at a loss in terms of whom he could contact for support: ‘I don’t know – the first thing is like I didn’t know the language and know who to talk to, who to trust and what

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to do and this was really, really hard and very hard starting when I got here.’ One unaccompanied young East African woman said she knew nobody else from her country and that her support network primarily came from a group of British women who suffered from the same chronic illness as her, and their families. She had been introduced to this group through a nurse at the hospital. Two young Eritrean women, meanwhile, regularly spent time with an older woman in their city who had herself fled to the UK as a refugee child through the Kindertransport. Although over 60 years separated their life experiences, they found mutual comfort in their common companionship. ‘Having the girls around is a total joy to me,’ the woman explained. ‘They’re like my grandchildren.’

Getting involved with the wrong crowd Young people were aware that being connected to the ‘wrong’ kind of social networks could be damaging to their future prospects, and there was a general fear of getting in with the wrong crowd. A handful of young people cited moving on from certain places within Europe so as to avoid nefarious networks, including Mafia groups in Italy and criminal gangs in Calais, France. The issue of the fighting that broke out in the Italian camp, mentioned earlier, is a case in point. As discussed in detail in Chapter  9, almost every young person in the research reflected on people they knew with no legal status and no entitlements to support who had turned to drugs and drinking, and had, in their word, ‘lost’ themselves. Dan commented, ‘Once you lose yourself, it’s always hard to come back.’ He reflected on how his friendships and networks had been crucial to enabling him to stay on track: ‘I had people around me at the time, but if I had no people around me at the time, that’s the time when you meet bad people that’s the time that you find yourself homeless; that’s when you find cigarettes, start chain smoking … other things; that’s the time you give up because you have no hope. For me, I have some people where I can sleep, where I can eat food so the same time they direct me; so I am not spending the whole day thinking about what is going to happen tomorrow. I am going out and about, I’m doing things, I’m using my body – that’s why I am doing OK.’

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Young people’s friendships could be disrupted by perceived and very real inconsistencies in the ways in which they were treated by ‘the system’. Awate and Tig, from Eritrea, travelled together to England after meeting in Calais and had recently turned 18 and 19 respectively. Despite having the same story, however, post-arrival Tig had been believed and granted asylum, and Awate had been refused. In a stark relief of the importance of legal status, Tig was able to study at college, whereas Awate was forbidden. In an example of inconsistencies within the care system, both young men were still staying with their previous foster carers where they shared a room. Tig was keen to explain that he shared his college resources with Awate and educated him by proxy after class.

Social networks and integration As well as being fundamental to maintaining a sense of wellbeing while on the move, social networks were equally important to processes of integration once young people sought to settle. Yet building such bonds was contingent on wider political and legislative factors. When young people were forced to move on, they frequently referred to missing the connections that they had with friends and the memories these conjured. Ties were first established in multiple spaces, from the football field where many young men described meeting together for the first time after they arrived (though never discussing their legal status or personal lives); to the mosques, Orthodox churches and other spaces or communities of faith that brought people together; or to youth groups or safe spaces created by NGOs where young people could hang out and seek advice, support and guidance. These were also sometimes spaces where old friends found each other again after being separated on their way to Europe. Being connected to others was vital for coping with practical and emotional problems, but also a significant source of enjoyment, laughter and fun. Abdullah spoke of not being able to find the ties and connections he needed in the city he was currently living in. He had his sights on moving to another city, where he said there was a larger Eritrean community, a bigger church and where there were not the sorts of divisions between different elements of the Eritrean community that he had perceived where he was living at the time of the research. He spoke of ‘gangs’ of Eritreans being in dispute and fighting in the city where he lived. Although he had made friends, it had been difficult and the cultural shift from Eritrea – where everyone was ‘always welcome’ – had been a shock for him.

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Having friends from many different cultures was very much valued, and it was also seen by many as the best way to learn English. David had spent two years in a shared house with other young men from Albania and Afghanistan. He really enjoyed this time and commented on how there were never fights or arguments between them. Besmir, from Albania, meanwhile spoke of how he loved his job in the nightclub because it enabled him to earn money, but also because of the connections and ties he was building with people from all over the world – from Poland, Turkey, Portugal, Jamaica and so on: he really liked that. Many young people in the research had forged friendships with British, Italian and other non-asylum-seeking or non-unaccompanied young people, which brought much to their lives. These citizen friends (and often their families) could play an important role in helping them navigate the asylum system since they had access to different kinds of resources. Examples of how citizen friends provided particular help included reading over documents to correct language; providing spaces to spend holidays; accompanying them to asylum tribunals and giving evidence as to their good character; and helping them navigate cultural differences surrounding, for example, romantic relationships. Some friendships between established UK residents and the young migrants in the study had been made in camps outside the UK, for example in one of a number of volunteer projects in Greece, Italy or France that sprang up in response to the unfurling humanitarian crisis at Europe’s borders from 2015. We knew of several young people who had met up with the British volunteers who had helped in other parts of Europe once they had arrived in England, and they often provided a warm welcome and support. One young British man we met during our research had befriended in Calais one of the Eritrean boys who later went on to take their lives after their arrival in England (see Chapter 9). He explained how he repeatedly expressed concern about his friend to the authorities during his final months of suffering, but to no avail. He has dedicated a large part of the last three years of his life campaigning – alongside several of their family members in Eritrea – for justice for the boys and other unaccompanied minors struggling with the transition to adulthood in the UK’s ‘iron rod’ regime. His work is a testament to the power of friendship across all manner of borders. Other young migrants in our study spoke of the disappointment they felt when they called numbers given out enthusiastically by British individuals they had met in Calais or Greece for help and were disappointed to receive no response. As discussed in chapters 7 and 11, straddling affinities and commitments towards one’s home country and co-nationals with the desire to make new friends was nevertheless something certain young people struggled with.

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Recreating family In a context in which their ‘unaccompaniedness’ often defines them and serves to assign them bureaucratic labels that entitle them to services, young people may be required to be silent about certain facets of their identity (and relationships – see Chapter 11) in order to conform with – and to progress along – a certain narrative arc that is necessary to access certain rights and entitlements in the welfare and asylum system. One 16 year old in Italy, for example, refused to disclose that he had an uncle in the city, for fear he would be forced to move in with him. Silence has been identified as a coping strategy among unaccompanied minors (Chase 2010; Kohli 2006): not just what they say, but what they choose not to say can have a significant bearing on their asylum claims and life trajectories. Not declaring relationships was particularly common among the Albanian community in Italy for fear that they would be forced to leave state-funded accommodation. Elsewhere, young people sought to move in with family members only to find that Western ideas about how families should live and be constituted clashed with ideas of family held by the young people. During our Italian fieldwork, we observed a meeting between a social worker and a young person and ‘his uncle’ in Italy. The young person was distraught to find that because he would not have a room of his own this would not be possible. It was absurd, he commented, since in his country of origin he had shared not just a room, but also a bed with two siblings. For him, there was no question that being with this relative was in his best interests, but the authorities disagreed. As his social worker explained, denying him the opportunity to live with family placed him at a high risk of ‘going missing’. The care system’s failure to consider the relational needs of the young people led to a range of other incidents where people in the research went missing. In Italy, when young people were late or failed to return to their shelters one night, they were sometimes reported as missing, even when they returned. Mohammed explained how at the reception centre in Italy where he was staying, despite being 17, he was under a curfew and wasn’t allowed friends to visit. This got in the way of his social life. During an exercise at an Italian museum where young people were invited to transform objects into something that spoke to their lives, Mohammed depicted a sword as a closed door. ‘This object is a shield, but it makes me think of a door,’ he explained. ‘Doors make me think of home. At my friends’ houses the doors are always open. These doors represent me and my friends.’ In contrast, he observed, ‘In Italy often the doors are not open.’

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In Italy, over the course of 2015, because of the lack of reception accommodation coupled with young people’s various reasons for avoiding them (for example, because of the fear of being reported to the authorities and frustration with curfews and rules), a range of informal fostering arrangements were enacted with mixed success. Kal, a 17-year-old asylum seeker, was taken under the wing of a well-meaning Catholic family while staying at a homelessness shelter in Italy as he awaited documentation to disprove an erroneous age assessment. The mother of the family had met him there and invited him back for dinner. Having initially dined with them once a week, he was now invited every day and was even asked to stay over. The mother of the family offered him the bedroom of their 15-year-old daughter to share. Kal, who had taken a liking to the girl, was deeply confused. In the context he grew up, it he would have interpreted that situation as the mother ‘offering him’ her daughter, he explained; but he had been in Italy long enough to know there must be another meaning. Together, as we discussed age restrictions on sex in Italy along with his feelings, we realized that the misunderstanding had probably begun with the mother, who saw him as a totally de-sexualized, vulnerable ‘refugee boy’. Kal’s response to the situation was to stay away from the family for a while and take comfort in his faith, learning to ‘avert his gaze’. He later showed us a YouTube channel that broadcast Islamic advice for men, including ‘how to get over a girl’. The example shows the value of proper training for foster carers and the pitfalls of well-meaning humanitarianism (Allsopp 2017a). As discussed in Chapter 4, in the UK foster care arrangements were more commonplace than in Italy. This gave some young people a positive experience of family. Relationships with foster carers, when they worked well, frequently transcended young people’s departures from care at 18 and, as noted elsewhere (Wade et al 2012), became vital sources of support as young people became ‘adult’ irrespective of their legal status. Foster carers could be woefully inadequate, but also go beyond the call of duty. Julia spoke of how her Eritrean foster parents and foster sister had continued to provide crucial support after she had been forced to move out of their care after just six months. They allowed her to continue to stay at weekends and during college holidays, and had helped get her an advocate to contest the placement move. While the appeal to social services had been unsuccessful, Julia still deeply appreciated the efforts the family had gone to and the care they had shown her. Yet just as important was the sense of being part of a family and playing a role. Rokhan reflected on how his previous foster carer had been rather elderly and weak; he did a lot to help provide care for her as well as being cared for by her: it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. The second

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time we chatted to Adnan he had just turned 18 the previous week, and on the same day that we met he had just returned from the hospital with his foster mother who required a procedure under anaesthetic – she needed an adult (someone over 18) to care for her while she came round. Adnan had been asked to do this and felt very proud to be able to help and be recognized in this way. However, several months later, Adnan became appeal rights exhausted and was unable to maintain regular contact with his foster carers. He had a particularly strong bond with his foster father, whom he described as ‘amazing’. He described what it was like trying to maintain contact after having been refused: ‘I keep in touch with them. Obviously they keep it a bit secretive because they don’t want social services to get involved with us. But I do keep in touch with them. They’re extraordinary people. They said you can come with us, you can come and live with us. I don’t want to it’s just the Home Office or something like that comes there. ’Cause you never know with this lot. And if you do get caught with an illegal – well I’m not technically illegal – but you have to pay a fee of like 20,000 pounds … First of all, I don’t wanna put them at risk, second of all I just, I mean I appreciate what they done for me and everything but I can’t just really go there any more.’ Similarly, Eduard had a very positive experience of foster care for one year before, at the age of 18, he was made to move into a shared house. He really valued the support from his foster carers and missed their input and guidance, and reflected how although he was now 18 and supposedly an adult, he still felt he needed the feeling of family support that they had provided.

Intimate relationships, sexuality and marriage Establishing intimate relationships was also central to how young people saw themselves becoming adult and building their futures. And yet, interestingly, this aspect of their lives has been sparsely reported. The intimate lives of migrant young people is discussed more in African scholarship, in Honwana’s excellent volume (2012) and in a growing body of literature on undocumented migrants in the United States (e.g. Enriquez 2020). Our research suggests more attention ought to be paid to this important topic, representing as it does a key aspect of young people’s emotional and physical health. For some, amorous or

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intimate relationships were more complex than they were for others. Relationships were dogged by the insecurities of their legal status and what would happen next in their lives. Some young people described how this forced them to live together when they may not have been ready for such a move (since they had nowhere else to go); how other family members mistrusted their intentions; or how they felt uncomfortable about constantly having to ask others to provide without being able to reciprocate. Some young people (especially black men in Italy) felt they were being racialized and sexualized by host populations (see Chapter 7). Girls also faced important challenges in navigating coming of age, sometimes without older sisters, aunts or female confidantes. On a trip to the beach with a group of young people, the supervising youth worker insisted that we chaperone the girls, even though they were over 18, as she was concerned that they would receive attention and not know how to respond to it. For many young unattached individuals, integrating in Europe naturally posed a range of dilemmas and challenges, some undoubtedly stemming from a lack of familiarity with the gendered norms in the new country. Several young people discussed childhoods growing up in polygamous families in countries including Mali, Senegal, Ghana, Gambia, Sudan and Libya. Some talked about how they had little or no experience of intimate relationships themselves, and explained that they felt they were becoming adult in Europe without really understanding related norms and values about sex, sexuality and relationships. Others raised the issue (it was not something that we asked) that they had no knowledge of contraception methods, and there was a sense that most individuals were embarrassed to discuss some of these issues with their carers or support workers for fear of being stereotyped as promiscuous. It was not uncommon during fieldwork for young participants to ask us for relationship advice, and when we responded the reaction was one of gratitude and interest. As one unaccompanied 21-year-old Muslim man with refugee status in the UK explained over coffee, in his country the families ‘sort all that out – marriage and stuff’. He was grateful for the freedom to choose a partner for himself now that he was in the UK, but that time was not on his side. ‘I have a huge amount of pressure from my family back home and’, he joked with his head in his hands, ‘I have absolutely no idea where to start!’ For those with legal security, relationships with partners were seen as a normal part of their life course. They frequently involved crosscultural unions encompassing complex navigation through differing cultural norms and values. But in general, relationships were perceived and

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lived as part of the process of normalizing their lives and constructing futures, after what had often been extended periods of uncertainty and limbo. Some young people were scared of pursuing friendships or intimate relationships with people from England or Italy because of shame regarding their legal status. Bacha spoke at length of his love for a European girl, but explained that it would be dishonourable for him to make a move until he had legal status and could offer her security. For others, intimate relationships were seen as off limits because of an inability to perform rituals of gift exchange because of a lack of money. Honwana (2012) has explored this aspect of relationships among youth in situations of ‘waithood’ in Senegal. ‘Girlfriends are too expensive’, participants would commonly quip. One female research participant explained the importance to her of such gift exchange in discussing her own relationship with her new fiancé, boasting that he had bought her a state-of-the-art phone and a diamond ring. Another girl who was present left the group at this moment in tears. This was a world that she seemed to wish to be part of, but which was off bounds – since without her papers it was impossible to make such plans for the future. Several Muslim young people explained that a key barrier to them pursuing the intimate relationships they desired was a lack of trust from girls’ families. Others spoke openly of experimenting with dating apps such as Tinder and, on trips, would take photos for one another to use for their profiles. Many young people spoke of how from a point of relative security in terms of their legal status, a job and place to live, they had started to build intimate relations. Young men from Eritrea typically also had partners from Eritrea. Aida had known her current boyfriend in the UK from back home in her village, and coming to the UK was partly about following him. However, it was purely by chance that they had ended up together in the same city, and that he had become her guide to life as well as her partner. Like most other young people, at the time of taking part in the research, one of the main things going on in Eden’s life at 18 was coming to terms with the fact that she had just split up with her boyfriend. The ‘fun’ of exploring youthful romantic relations had to be balanced frequently against significant pressures to work and fulfil different responsibilities in relation to those ‘back home’. Dan had met his girlfriend in the UK, the sister of a friend whom he had met through the church. At one point, while considering the potential of joining family members elsewhere in Europe now that they eventually had legal status there, he was left in a quandary about where that would leave his relationship. He liked the idea that she would accompany him but knew this might not be possible. This

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exemplifies how feelings of belongings and ties evolved, and gave young people a sense of laying down roots in certain places. Some young people were able to pursue relationships and changed their life projects accordingly. But border control could thwart their romantic hopes and dreams. Bilal, 22 and from Afghanistan, arrived in England aged 16 after a year of travelling, having fled Afghanistan aged 15, fearing forced recruitment into the Taliban. Once settled, he fell in love with Karima, a fellow minor in care, and they dated for over three years. Bilal’s promising future was curtailed when he turned 18, as it is for many others in his position, when he was refused asylum, detained and deported. Without family and fearing for his life, Bilal left Afghanistan for Dubai, returning only briefly to Afghanistan, whence he set off back to Europe – specifically to the city from which he had previously been deported. Asked what his primary motivation for remigration was, Bilal gave an answer that stood out from the fear and economic insecurity that past research has shown fuel the remigration of many deported Afghan youth (Schuster and Majidi 2015): ‘Love’. The fantasy of being reunited with Karima made it possible for him to ensure the hardships of multiple displacement and remigration. He could frame himself as the hero of his own love story and maintain a sense of purpose. Despite the power of the story in and of itself as a coping strategy for Bilal, his homecoming had been mixed materially and emotionally. After his perilous second odyssey, he had not returned triumphant but destitute. While Bilal struggled abroad to stay afloat, motivated by the prospect of a reunion, Karima had received documents and moved on. As in many tragedies, Bilal had been thwarted by time. Karima had a new boyfriend and was pregnant with her second child. At the time of our interview, Bilal was seeking to lodge a fresh asylum claim and was reliant on volunteers to survive. ‘For now there’s no one else except God,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure what will happen this time because if this time they send me back I will go crazy; I will go mad. I’m only 22, I look like 40.’ Several young people in the research who had successfully acquired papers and been able to trace their families (often in neighbouring states, such as Pakistan and Iran for those from Afghanistan) were pursuing arranged marriages. While some felt this was convenient and a family duty, others were more torn with how to reconcile this expectation from their families with the new romantic freedom they had experienced in their new countries (see Chapter 11). Joseph Carens (2009) has argued that it is time and ties that make the compelling case for unaccompanied young migrants and refugees to claim belonging in a country. Yet often, because of young people’s insecure legal status at the time of embarking on intimate relationships, these were

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frequently seen as invalid in the eyes of the law, and scant weight was accorded them in asylum or appeals processes.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated that, like all of us, unaccompanied migrant and refugee young people are individuals driven by feelings and impulses as much as they are rational actors. Time and time again, we were struck by how quickly friendships were formed. Young people took extraordinary risks to protect their friends, and these actions shaped their trajectories; for example, lending important sums of money, hiding friends in their housing in breach of the law, and even, in one case, risking travel to dangerous parts of Afghanistan post-return to seek out documents to help the asylum cases of friends still in Britain. Sometimes the question of where young people ended up staying in Europe was the result of the friendships they forged there, both with co-nationals and in other cases with members of the host community, such as civil society volunteers who made them feel welcome. This chapter has documented how as they sought to construct their own lives, young people also sought to reach beyond their subjective aspirations to help one another, build and sustain relationships and live within communities of care. In this context, the collective aspect of capabilities is important. The ways in which young people work together to support one another was never more apparent than in our research team itself. This entire research project would have been impossible without the ties of trust and friendship forged, renegotiated and strengthened within the team over time, and which have been sustained beyond the life of the project.

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Transnational Family and Connections ‘She sits next to me and strokes me hair and says, “Son, I can’t believe it’s you, that you’re here, that it’s really you, that you’re real.”’ This message arrived from Abugul via Facebook one afternoon. His location revealed that he was now in Belgium, and the picture that accompanied a string of excited messages informed us that after ten long years he had finally been reunited with his mother and brothers from Afghanistan. We read the messages and took in the emotional weight of the moment. He had captured it with a camera phone and sent it to us over 4G. We Facetimed. Everyone was crying with happiness. Abugul had found his family through a non-governmental organization family tracing programme after losing touch with them when he left Afghanistan on his own 11 years previously. It had been a decade since he arrived in England as an unaccompanied minor at the age of 14. In the six years since he had turned 18, he had lived an undocumented life. As he moved in and out of immigration detention, he had ‘learnt to be illegal’ (Gonzales 2011: 602). When the research began in 2015, Abugul was working in a phone shop in a part of London he described to us as ‘mini-Africa’. He stayed in a small room with other young Afghan men. He worked seven days a week for a poor wage and rarely got out into the city. He was supported by a group of Afghan and English friends who accompanied him to legal appointments and a doctor’s clinic for undocumented migrants (he was entitled to primary health care, but was too afraid to use the National Health Service). Because he had absconded and been off the radar for years, Abugul’s prospects for regularization were not favourable in the United Kingdom (UK). In what we have elsewhere referred to as a tricky temporal game of ‘tactics of time and

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status’ (Allsopp et al 2015), his was a strategy of wait and see. During this time, he frequently wrote on social media of his loneliness and thoughts of ending his life. It was hard to comprehend, as the balloons bobbed in the background of the scene live streamed on the mobile phone, that this was the same man. His mum had had a cake made with his face on, reading, ‘Welcome Home My Son!’ There were paper streamers and food galore, and two other young Afghans with papers had driven overnight from the UK to Belgium to join their friend for the reunion and celebration. ‘This is the best moment of my life,’ said Abugul, ‘I don’t know what to say. My life has meaning again.’ He joked that he would immediately stop the anti-depressants that he had been taking for several years to manage his ‘condition of illegality’ in London, and the stress associated with this status. Of course, we warned him of the risks of abruptly stopping medication. But it was clear that this moment was one that would forever change his fortunes and his life. His family now had legal status, which was likely to have positive implications for his own, and ten years of longing were suddenly over.

Transnational identity This penultimate chapter demonstrates that while young people strive to establish an anchor in Europe as a place where they feel safe and can imagine and construct futures for themselves, they simultaneously derive a sense of subjective wellbeing from their transnational ties and personhood. Given the geopolitical framework that kept them apart from loved ones elsewhere, the transnational elements to these relationships were central to their daily lives. Losing contact with family, friends and loved ones was at the core of young people’s experiences of migrating alone and the sense of loss and distress of missing relatives. The distress of not knowing whether or not they were alive or being unable to make contact with them was often palpable. Sometimes, especially in Afghanistan, the protracted nature of the conflict meant that families left behind were displaced multiple times and often disappeared off the map as they moved either within the country or across its various borders in search of safety. For some young people from Afghanistan, Eritrea and Albania, making contact with their families could put those families at risk or was just too difficult to contemplate, particularly when they had not been able to fulfil the collective family aspirations for their migration. Others had fled persecution from within their families, as in the case of blood feuds in Albania and parts of Afghanistan, which passed down through generations.

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Cutting off contact with family members in such contexts was a strategy of survival and self-protection. There has been a burgeoning interest in practices of transnationalism (Vertovec 2009), and the empirical work in this study reveals the complexities and dynamics of such ties and interactions for young people transitioning to adulthood in a context of migration. At least four domains of transnationalism were revealed in the research. The first was transnational family connections. This included, as in the example of Abugul, families left behind or who were missing and the emotional absences and strife this caused (sometimes involving long journeys to search for family members). This dimension also included the sense of responsibility young people felt for meeting transnational economic expectations (for example, through sending remittances); connections with family members in other parts of Europe; and experiences of transnational marriage and parenthood (where young people – usually post-forced return – had been married and established families before remigrating and leaving them behind). A second dimension was that of transnational friendships. This included ties with friends in a country of origin who never migrated; friends returned to countries of origin; friends in other parts of Europe from whom they were separated during the journey; friends influencing ongoing migratory journeys; and providing for/supporting friends in other countries through money or moral/emotional support. The third way in which the transnational space featured in the young people’s lives was through virtual connections. This included networks such as Facebook, Viber and WhatsApp, through which friendships were sustained. These were spaces of learning and keeping up with news from ‘home’; spaces of political engagement and discourse (though seldom involving direct political participation); and spaces of transnational philanthropy – through organizing collective support (financial/resources) to send to compatriots. The fourth and final aspect of transnationalism we observed as important in young people’s lives was that of building transnational futures and aspirations. This included seeking opportunities elsewhere in Europe (such as Italy and Germany), usually when there was no possibility of remaining in the UK; imagining futures in other places, and thinking ahead and planning logistics for these; as well as being forced to return alone to countries such as Afghanistan and, in the absence of support there, remaining largely dependent for survival in this context on transnational links previously built in the UK or Italy. Whether young people assumed the transnational elements of their lives from the safety and security of a future in the UK or Italy or whether they were forced to take on or imagine the physical embodiment of transnationalism, it emerged as a key theme in almost all their lives. The

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ability to fulfil the responsibilities and expectations of others elsewhere in the world was a source of strength and comfort; meanwhile, being unable to do so was a source of stress and anxiety. Successfully building transnational bridges between lives in Europe and connections in other countries widened options for those who were forced to move on and provided potential spaces of future comfort and security elsewhere. As has been discussed throughout this book, the term ‘unaccompanied’ migrant or asylum seeking minor, though unquestionably useful in policy terms as a shorthand, is problematic for the ways in which it obscures the transnational and localized social, cultural, economic, emotional and familial/relational networks in which such young people are situated.

Transnational family ties With reference to data from the Young Lives study on young people living in poverty in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, Virginia Morrow suggests that young people’s obligations to family, combined with a sense of destiny, constrained by gender norms, helps to explain transitions that are ‘interconnected and depend on each other’ (2013: 86). Young people’s transitions are influenced by ‘powerful norms’ and an acute awareness of family indebtedness (97). Morrow explains that although the dominant international transition model focuses on the individual, there is ‘some acknowledgement that family and community relationships may be valued more highly than autonomy in some cultures’ (87). For many young people in the research, seeking a better future not just for themselves, but also for their families back in their countries of origin or displacement, was a key motivating factor for their migration. As Erfanullah, from Afghanistan, explained, ‘Most of the kids who come want to work straight away to help their families.’ Both the UK and Italy nevertheless have immigration and asylum systems that create largely unfavourable conditions for young people to stay in touch with their family members and openly exercise this aspect of their transnational identities. Unaccompanied minors in the UK have no rights to family reunification, even if granted asylum. Meanwhile, in Italy, while this right exists, it is hard to realize in practice because of a range of bureaucratic delays and inefficiencies. Only one young person in the Italian research, who was from Afghanistan, had been able to bring their family to be with them, and this had taken several years. Prior to his mother coming to Italy, Erfanullah had had to travel back and forth to Pakistan, where she was living, to help her access medical care. Now he worried about her isolation in Italy:

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‘She’s 52 years old with health problems and physical problems. It’s hard for her, she doesn’t have friends, doesn’t speak the language … it’s pretty tough. But we’re here, and we’re safe and she has us, so that makes her happy.’ He reflected on seeing other young Afghans struggle to support their families when he was working in a reception centre, and the way this evoked an affinity in him: ‘I feel, it’s sad, no? I also left my family when I was young. I lived without them for many years, I made it on my own, without my family. And I would have given my life for my family, I would have done anything. So, to see these kids who end up in the middle of the street and you think about your own family. Because if I hadn’t managed to do something to help my own family, it would have been something, well, you feel mortified. So I know these guys feel mortified, they feel let down by the reception system and the kind of life they are leading because it’s nothing like the life they wanted here.’ In Italy, because unaccompanied minors are protected in the constitution from being forcibly deported, in some cases there was more freedom for them to be open with their social workers about being in touch with their families. Sometimes, social workers would even Skype or call family members in the country of origin with the help of cultural mediators to discuss aspects of the young person’s wellbeing or life. One guardian interviewed for this research referred to this arrangement as a kind of ‘tripartite guardianship arrangement’. In the UK too, sometimes social workers confessed to knowing about family members whom the young people were in touch with, but this put them in a difficult position as, on paper, they were legally obliged to report such information to the authorities. Often the young people who were in touch with their families struggled to process difficult news from exile, especially when they could not talk to support workers about it. Adnan had not really spoken to his family for a long time after he left Albania because of the family-related difficulties that had forced his migration. After a couple of years, he gradually made some contact with his mother. He had recently heard that his uncle, his mother’s brother, had passed away and was devastated by this since he had been very close to him. He commented: ‘I couldn’t even speak to my mother because her voice was shaking what she was speaking. Her voice was just like I had

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– like everything happened at the same time and everything. That was what sort of put me into a “wow”, like. Because I’ve always sort of been a person that’s been like be positive with your life go for it but there’s certain things that just… [sighs]’ Adnan’s reflections on the impact that migration had had on his uncle, leaving him feeling depressed and isolated when his brothers all gradually migrated because of the problems in Albania, echoed the importance of family ties not just for those who go, but also those who are left behind: ‘What happened was he used to work for the government back in Albania. He was a part I think of the civil service after communism. He was really strange about those things. But after the 2000s, ’cause like all of my mum’s brothers they like migrated abroad like to America etc., they all spread out as well. He was left you know, the only brother left. He sort of went into depression because he was always with the brothers like a big group you know like always together doing everything together.’ Tig, 18, from Eritrea, explained that he found it hard to talk to his mother on the phone as she would cry and that was difficult to hear. When he left Eritrea, like many other young people, he didn’t tell his mother he was going because he was worried she would try to stop him. He first contacted her when he was in Calais, and that was when she first cried. Now, he said, she was happy he was safe. Many young people from Eritrea spoke of how difficult it was to maintain contact with family back ‘home’, how their calls were monitored by authorities and that they had to be careful what they spoke about. This constrained the sorts of conversations they could have. Part of young people’s transnational identity was an acute sense of duty to their families, and they often worried about the impact their emigration had on those left behind. Transnational duties were gendered and shaped by reasons for flight and the situation in the country of origin. Many young people faced pressures to send money home quickly, to pay off debts for their journeys or to save money to bring family members over once they had secured a legal status that granted them rights of family reunification. Bisrat spoke of the high cost of transit from Ethiopia to Sudan, which had to be organized through agents. He had managed to raise the money for the journey from two of his siblings living in Israel. Young people in the study would frequently seek to fund their friends or family members to set off on an irregular

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route, or help them get out of situations in which they ‘became stuck’, making the journey from Calais to England or when held in situations of ransom in Libya, for example. With these obligations came an immense sense of pressure and responsibility for which they received no statutory support and which they rarely shared with those in authority. Instead, they would often rely on one another, including giving each other small financial loans and pooling networks and knowledge, as discussed in Chapter 10. Young people often made a trade-off in education and training between short-term and long-term gains, which were also a trade-off between individual and collective goals, and local and transitional aspirations. Because young people in the UK in particular were often unable or unwilling to disclose their relationships with transnational networks, and the pressures derived from these, they often described support workers as being unable to understand their decisions when, for example, they chose to work rather than pursue their educational trajectories. This could manifest in feelings of frustration, or a sense among some newer support workers, who were unfamiliar with the context, that the young people were ungrateful for the education they were being offered. The sense of responsibility to support family elsewhere meant that low paid and exploitative minimum wage jobs often proved inadequate. For young people with no legal status, irregular work was paid as little as £2 or £3 an hour. Work that did pay more came with greater risks, and included selling drugs and sex work, a phenomenon that has been documented among the Albanian unaccompanied youth community by Nick Mai (2011). While just one case of sex work was reported in our research among young people from the three focus countries of this study, we did come across several young Egyptian men in Italy who were engaging in these strategies to secure money. We also met a number of young people in the UK who were doing work that was perfectly legal, but which they themselves described as ‘risky’ for reasons related to health and wellbeing. Esatullah, 22, from Afghanistan, arrived in England at the age of 13. When we interviewed him, he was working with the British army as an actor to help train soldiers in role play scenarios. He would sometimes play the role of an Afghan civilian, sometimes a Taliban soldier. He was concerned that the work retriggered his symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, and more than once he had seen other actors injured, but he could not turn down such work, he explained, because it was so well paid. He felt responsibility towards his sisters, whom he had managed to help get safely to Turkey and were now getting married. His duty was to pay for his sisters’ weddings and dowries. He explained:

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‘They was in Afghanistan. I bought them into Turkey because there was a war going on … and I would send them money, get the passport and brought them to Turkey and now they got married now. A hell of a lot of money, to be honest. For their wedding, for their leaving … before they married, it was a big responsibility for me to look after them and obviously I spend money for their wedding but now their life is sorted, like, their life is sorted and I’m happy for them because probably my parents is happy for me and to be honest that was my aim, sorted [laughs]. For myself, to be honest I wasn’t worrying about myself. That was the big issue which is sorted. They got their life now. That’s fine for me.’ Aaron spoke of the challenges in faced in sending money back home and how, even though he wanted to help, he was unable to send adequate money through to family in Eritrea because they were severely restricted in how much money they could withdraw in any single period. Sometimes, the money young people sent back was to pay off debts, from which agents took an important cut. An Italian social worker explained: ‘Many of those who arrive still have a debt. They have to pay off the debt back home … often families have to rely on not very nice people to borrow the money. And so it’s not just the parents putting pressure on the kids to send money. The kid wants to work to get money to send home to avoid something awful happening to their family.’ One social worker told us that one young person was so distressed after the money sent home had been stolen that she paid out of her own pocket to make a Western Union transfer to ensure that the family received something. Where they couldn’t find work, sometimes young people would save the meagre allowances they received or sell clothes in order to at least have some money to send home. Julia described how difficult it was for her to stay in contact with her family in Eritrea when she had the constant feeling that she was letting them down and not fulfilling her obligations: ‘You can’t have the potential to do, to change stuff. So that will make you feel so bad, when you have the potential, when you have the money, at least you have things basic to change stuff, to send money, you can call and talk. Calling for me, I

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can’t do things [so] … it doesn’t help me, it doesn’t help … but, also I am not helping them.’ Helen was also from Eritrea, and considered herself to be relatively free of the pressures she described facing many of her young compatriots: ‘I must say, for females as well, not just males … there is that extra pressure and it’s a constant vicious circle that you don’t come out of because you are constantly sending money but at the same time you are not doing anything like your lifestyle, you know your quality of life is not improving because obviously you have a bad job, and you don’t have time to go to school, if you want to go to school you are not focusing, so it’s just horrible.’ While resources were often sent from Europe to family and friends elsewhere in the world, it is also important to note that sometimes it went the other way. Some young people had family members in other parts of the world who had funded elements of their journey when they were stuck on route to Europe, or had put up money to help them remigrate after they had been forcibly returned to Afghanistan. We also observed several small transnational exchanges as demonstrations of love and care. One Albanian in Italy had received a parcel from his mother for his birthday, and at one reception centre, two Egyptians from more well-off backgrounds received packages with clothes from their parents. There was something bittersweet about this, commented the social worker who intercepted the package: ‘the clothes are much too small for them, it’s like the mothers want to keep this idea of their children being the same as when they left…’. There is scant research on parenting practices from a distance among the transnational families of unaccompanied minors in Europe. The accounts given by young people in this research nevertheless suggested an often profound sense of suffering and loss on the part of parents whose children had left, with or without their consent, even if, as has been documented in the Americas, such feelings are tempered with hope and aspirations for better futures (Oliveira 2018). For those young people who have secure legal status in Europe, there is evidence that the question of family obligations also becomes more important later on in the life course, once they come of age and reach their early and mid-twenties. The rite of passage of the ‘journey home’, or to visit family members in refugee camps in the region, was cited by several participants as a duty, whether they personally viewed it as a burden

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or something to which they looked forward. Several young people from Afghanistan who had successfully been issued with legal documentation in Europe had married Afghan women in Iran or Pakistan and brought them to live with them in Italy and England. Several others were struggling to be reunited with spouses, and found themselves embroiled in new and costly legal situations in order to be able to do so. Janan, for example, having struggled for many years to gain legal recognition himself as a refugee, was now in the process of trying to bring his wife to live with him in the UK from Iran, where he said she was being treated badly and had allegedly had her refugee status taken away because she was now married to someone with a British passport. He said that although people from Afghanistan sought safety in Iran since they shared the same religion and language, they also suffered badly owing to widespread racism and discrimination, lack of educational opportunities, no rights to buy property or have their own goods or businesses, and no free movement across Iran (being confined to just three main cities). He commented: ‘[Afghan people] can do street cleaning and work in the farm. But they can’t work with any kind of food because they are described as a dirty human beings you know?’ Janan was working many long hours in order to prove he was able to raise the required income, at that time almost £19,000 a year, to make him eligible to bring his wife to come and live with him from Iran. At least two other young people from Afghanistan had married after being forcibly removed to Afghanistan, partly in an attempt to fulfil the cultural norms and expectations which might facilitate their reintegration into Afghan society. In both cases, they found themselves forced to leave wives and young children behind as their lives became untenable and they migrated again. Abdul spoke of his heartbreak on having to leave behind his five-month-old daughter: ‘Oh that was incredible. It wasn’t easy, simply. Many times when I was trying to leave home, I tried to come out and go and say one more time please and I went back to the crib and yeah she was sleeping there and she was not able to know something. Many, many times, three or four times I went back … and now I am thinking about my little girl, her name is Fatima, she’s over two years old now and she start talking, she start talking to me. And I miss her a lot.’

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The dream of family reunification was commonly articulated as part of participants’ life projects, alongside the idea of a grand return home. This trip back was a rite of passage that several participants with papers had realized, and of which they spoke proudly, also often in epic terms (Allsopp 2018). Although unable to return to Afghanistan, once he had finally secured his papers, Janan spoke of the pride he felt in being able to legally travel to Iran to reunite with family, and how he was treated with such respect and dignity, feelings that were so alien to him during the many years he lived on the streets in England. Sibal, from Bangladesh, was aged 20 when we met him in Italy. He explained that for him, the trip home was difficult. While he was glad to see his family after several hard years trying to make it on his own, he felt obliged to project an illusion that all was well when it wasn’t. Yes, he had security of status and a job in Italy, but he was still poorly paid, and this was something that his family was not able to understand. Once he had got papers in Italy, he had felt compelled to borrow money to buy presents for his family and fly to Bangladesh on holiday to see them. He couldn’t tell them, he explained, that he shared a room with six others and didn’t even have a lamp to read by. Eritreans, Albanians and Afghans in our research all spoke of maintaining similar illusions. They felt they could not tell their families how things really had been because it would worry them. Abugul, with whose story we began this chapter, for example, warned us not to tell his mother or siblings about the fact he had been detained – ‘better mum doesn’t know’. As past research has shown, in the context of deportees to Somaliland (Peutz 2010), for example, migrants are often stigmatized by detention and deportation by individuals outside the national context who are unable to comprehend the idea that such serious legal processes could be imposed without there being an element of fault on the part of those subject to them. Past research has shown that, as well as being shaped by collective and family migration strategies, young people’s life projects adapt and evolve once they are in Europe (Kanics et al 2010). Those young people in the research who were still in touch with people back home or in refugee camps or urban settings in the Global South, sought to straddle their individual dreams and family obligations, sometimes with acute dissonance: the duty to study and earn more money from a profession in the long term had to be juggled against the competing desire to send money home quickly; meanwhile, for some Pashtun Afghans in particular, the desire to date and have a romantic life in Europe had to be set against a competing recognition that they would one day be expected to marry a Muslim woman from ‘back home’.

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Others had given up the fantasy of Europe. They coped with adversity by dreaming of the illusion of a mythologized homeland in which conditions were better. Khalid, a 19-year-old Egyptian who had been refused asylum, contrasted his ‘bullshit life’ without papers in England with an idealized account of growing up in the Egyptian countryside. ‘I was young that time,’ he reminisced. ‘That life was happy life.’ Because he was seeking political asylum, however, it was not safe for Khalid to return. By contrast, Habi, a 16-year-old Egyptian in Italy who self-defined as an economically motivated migrant, was looking forward to the prospect of a return trip to his region, commenting that it was his primary motivation. He similarly idealized his homeland. For Habi, the main difference was that back home he had family. His home-sickness deeply affected his experience, leaving him feeling lost and insecure: ‘I feel like it’s been ten and a half years not one and a half years since I saw my dad’, he explained. The collective idea of the mythologized homeland has been noted by other scholars working with refugees (Malkki 1995). Young people turned to music and YouTube videos as well as religion, food and traditional dress to maintain their home identities and practise these collectively (see Chapter  7). Youth clubs were an important safe space for these performances, a type of home from home. Where youth clubs that we visited as part of this research were host to different ethnic and national groups, there was usually a tacit understanding that sometimes one group would be allowed to take a lead and perform their culture on a particular evening or for an event that coincided with a particular religious festivity. Sometimes, cultures would merge: Albanian girls would join boys in Pashtun dancing; different types of food would be shared and enjoyed on the same plate.

Transnational friendships A key feature of the youth diaspora from Eritrea and Afghanistan was that it had a global reach, and young people described being connected to others across Europe and further afield either through ties they had made on their own journeys or through the networks established through previous waves of the diaspora. Unlike some young people from Albania, who stayed in touch with friends back home though means that included playing online video games, young people from Afghanistan and Eritrea often reported that almost all of the young people in their networks had also migrated. Aaron spoke of how his older brother had already left Eritrea and was currently living elsewhere in Europe. He reflected on how, at the time of

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our conversation, his younger sister still had two years of school before she would be old enough to do her military service. He commented, ‘I don’t know what she’s going to decide.’ Although most young people set off with at least one other young person, they frequently became separated along the way, and many spoke of friends who had ended up settling, at least temporarily, in other parts of Europe. They stayed connected online and shared stories and posted pictures of their new lives. David, from Eritrea, commented on how online they spent a lot of time reflecting on the journey and what they had been through; an endurance, he said, that would always connect them. He spoke of how, when speaking to friends elsewhere in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Scotland who were still waiting to hear about their legal status, they would give each other hope and reassure them that, whatever happened, it could never be as bad as the journey they had been through. Aaron was thankful that the friends he had left Eritrea with also survived and were living in Germany and Italy. Journeys from Eritrea recounted by research participants spanned an extensive time period, and there were some important temporal distinctions between them. While Dan had set off on the long journey to Europe in 2006, Bisrat arrived in 2015. The journey was the same, equally difficult and risky, but they experienced it at different points in time in terms of the political framing of migration issues, the scale of movement of people from Eritrea and the modes of communication that were possible throughout. Whereas Bisrat spoke of how he was immediately in contact with friends he had travelled with and had made on the journey after they had arrived in different countries across Europe, Dan reflected on how he had lost touch with the young people he originally left Eritrea with, indicative of the increasing accessibility and sophistication of modalities of communication. For those who had secured papers, visiting one another, and seeing Europe was a dream, although this had to be balanced with saving money to support family and friends. Bledar was in regular contact with a close friend he had known since childhood: they had plans to meet up in Europe (somewhere probably bordering Albania, although he had no plans to ever go back there). In Italy, sometimes Afghans and Albanians would travel to other parts of the country for short-term jobs or to visit friends. One young person expressed their frustration that, being homeless, they had nowhere to put up their friends. Lib, from Albania, was 17 at the time of the research and staying in a reception centre for unaccompanied minors. He was upset and had fallen out with the two social workers who ran the centre when we met him, since they had told him that his brother, who would shortly arrive from Albania to visit, could not stay with him in the centre. This put him at a high risk of absconding

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to be with his brother, the social workers reported, so they were looking into alternative arrangements. It was striking that when the research assistants from the project accompanied the research team to national and international conferences, they would almost always have friends to visit there. These networks also went way beyond Europe. Accompanying the research team to a conference in Johannesburg, one of the research assistants caught up with a friend he had shared lodgings with during his journey through Libya.

Transnational virtual connections Young people drew on a wide range of technologies to remain in contact, mostly accessing each other through apps on mobile phones. Facebook was an important tool for finding estranged friends and family members, but young people were also hyper-aware of the risks associated with sharing personal information online. Not only did they fear that using such sites could put their families at risk back home, but they also worried that the European authorities would hack into their accounts and use evidence against them in their asylum cases. This fear was often well founded, since in the UK, for Afghans and Albanians who face a real risk of deportation if without legal status, having contact with family or friends in their country of origin was deemed a factor that made their deportation more workable and legitimate in the eyes of the law. In asylum tribunals, we observed on occasion Home Office officials drawing on social media to argue that young people were in touch with support networks in their countries of origin and could thus reintegrate easily. While it is well documented that young people, ‘the app generation’ (Gardner and Davis 2014), create online identities that are at once removed from their lived realities, for the young people in this study, such myths became collective and could sometimes entrap them. Facebook was a lifeline for many, but also came with the pressure to keep up appearances. Facebook – and its role in propagating migratory fantasies – was like a ‘scab’, joked a group of Eritreans in transit in Italy: ‘You keep scratching it and it itches more and the scab gets bigger and bigger!’ They found relief in being able to joke about their common predicament as they lent each other nice clothes to take selfies to send home. Young people sometimes reported that they would know when their friends were struggling as they would disappear from the online space. It was then that they’d give them a call and check in. Sometimes they discovered that friends had been detained because they stopped replying to messages and had had their phones confiscated (in the UK and most

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parts of Italy, phones with cameras are not allowed in immigration detention centres). Afghans often shared content online about developments in their home country. Indeed, the internet provided a space where they could collectively grieve about the ongoing conflict, and on more than one occasion during the research, the reported deaths of friends or family members back home. Seeing the images of explosions back in Afghanistan was distressing. Young people were also upset and equally curious to follow news of developments in Europe, and especially conditions in the Calais camp at the height of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015–16. They would report that they recognized individuals branded as ‘faceless’ in news reports. It made them sad to see their friends living in those conditions. One field note reports: ‘We discussed what is happening in Calais and Abugul said he’d seen a video on Facebook which showed someone he knew crying in the “Jungle” but when they were a child. It was a boy called Akmal. Abugul was confused about why they were circulating this old video of his friend. Had something happened to him? I looked at the video. It was an old one, so it made sense it is his friend. Abugul said another Afghan friend had picked it up and shared it with him as it was recently shown on the BBC news. He said he thinks the boy in the film is now living in Belgium, but they are not really in touch any more. He’s going to try to look him up. He’s worried about him. “Why is he being shown on the news now?” Abugul kept asking me.’ Many of the young people in the research were concerned about the way ‘their people’ were portrayed in the media. It is important to note that displaced individuals also watch the news and read the papers from their countries of exile. What might appear to some parts of the European population to be a generic image of a refugee camp to provide the backdrop to a news report is, for others, a portrait of a lost friend. The internet was an important space for organizing and sharing knowledge of political realities and countering dominant media narratives that dehumanized them and their friends. Izmir, 18, was from Afghanistan and scared of the prospect of removal from the UK to Kabul. He explained: ‘We know it’s not safe … The country was a good country but now people are not going as you go now and you come back

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with no life innit, people used to go for holidays. But now I hear loads of things … It’s true, it’s not made up – you can see in the news. Really the people and the things I’ve seen, really. I saw a guy before, two weeks ago, they kidnapped him. He was 14 or 15 years old and they kidnapped him and told him “give me a million money” innit. He cut his finger off innit and sent it back to his family and the family seen it and they said “give more or we kill your son” and they said they cannot get money. They killed their son and I’ve seen so many pictures. 13, 14 year olds. I see that and I feel so bad for my country. I get so mad … there was a war innit and everything is gone … The government didn’t even ask who did it. That would not happen in this country – if that happened they’d catch him and he’d go to prison straight away.’

Building transnational futures and aspirations Katy Long (2010) has written that mobility and onwards migration can be considered a fourth ‘durable solution’ for refugees who have fled, alongside resettlement, local integration and return. This indeed was the preferred option for some young people in the research, for whom maintaining transnational networks was key to keeping open possibilities for future onwards migration. Adnan, once all appeal rights were exhausted, was able to make contact with an uncle in Europe who, he said, had helped him arrange to study there, as he would be able to live with his uncle and study throughout the three years: ‘I called him and explain what’s happening ’cause I haven’t spoke to him for about two years. Just quite a shock when he called me. I said how did you get my number? And he said I just had a look in the phone register and books and all that. And he just said what’s the plans what you doing and I said that my migration status is all finished and I’m looking to go somewhere abroad, X [name of country] or Germany, and he said well just come to X [name of country]. You got family here at the end of the day.’ Meanwhile, as we followed the fortunes of Bashir on his complex migratory journey between Afghanistan, the UK and Italy, the last time we spoke to him there had been a new development and he was now in Serbia. When asked why, he said that in the end there was nothing for him

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in Italy and it was impossible to find work. He had spoken to his friend in Serbia who had persuaded him to go that way. He then mused that despite going all that way, ‘There is still nothing to do here … no nothing!’ When we last spoke, he was contemplating moving on to Slovenia or Croatia. However, he found himself in the situation that while he had an Italian document that enabled him to travel to these different countries, his friends in Serbia were still waiting to receive their documents and so were not able to move on. For now at least, he had no intention of abandoning them and going on alone. In Italy, people who had recently arrived would frequently ask to use a phone or laptop to contact people in other countries to assess their options and help decide where to go next. On one occasion, a young Eritrean asked for help in transcribing and posting a letter that he wanted to send to an English man he had met in a refugee camp in Sudan. He only had contact with him through an address in America, which he had brought with him to Europe on a scrap of paper. He didn’t yet have a phone number, so he gave the number of his sister in Norway. Asked if he was trying to reach her, he replied, ‘Yes, that is my plan, for now…’ The letter began, ‘Always I am thinking of you. First of all I wish you a great health and life above the border…’.It continued, ‘I am leading my life with a good hope and moral’; and ended, ‘I am planning to come to US [United States] now from Italy.’

Conclusion: lost in the world, a transnational responsibility Ongoing ties to family and social networks, both in countries of origin and elsewhere in the world, shape in complex ways young people’s trajectories and their emotional and wellbeing outcomes. Previous research has shown how social networks influence young people’s decision making. Blakeslee’s 2012 study of youth ageing out of child welfare custody in the US, for example, found that the support and resources embedded in social networks are of great significance in shaping the risk outcomes during this transition from care, insights that were clearly reflected in our own work. Looking through the lens of wellbeing, the transnational ties and networks identified through this book create a complex web of opportunities and constraints on young people. On the one hand, they are sources of moral and emotional support and love; of information and up to date intelligence about migration routes, how to navigate them and likely outcomes; of material and financial resources to facilitate journeys or to help people to remain where they are, depending on their preferred

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intentions; and of a means of sustaining cultural capital and keeping young people grounded in a sense of norms and values of who they are and where they have come from. More than anything, in their positive sense, transnational ties provide a mesh of mini-anchors during times of turmoil and upheaval and generate spaces for agency and control in circumstances when migrant young people are so often controlled by the immigration and welfare systems and structures governing their lives. Yet these intense and powerful networks are also firmly imbued with notions of duty and responsibility – to family, to friends and to communities. Such duties are not easy to fulfil and can generate enormous pressures and anxieties, particularly, as is often the case, when young people have not realized their intended migratory aspirations. Maintaining the illusion of success, through the use of social media and other forms of communication, can sometimes undermine the authenticity of these ties and connections as they become conduits for hiding reality and concealing the shame and stigma associated with migratory projects that have gone awry. The lack of recognition by welfare and immigration systems and structures of the importance of these ties and connections for unaccompanied migrant young people mean that their attempts to fulfil family and collective responsibilities are misread and misrepresented. Continuing to conceive of the ‘unaccompanied’ young person as the ‘unconnected’, ‘free-floating’ individuated atom denies young people a right to their collective identity. At no time are these broader expectations on young people more pronounced than during their transition to adulthood and its diverse meanings and associations across time, space and cultures. More fundamentally, the constant recourse to the individualized young person undermines the possibilities of fulfilling what are perceived as some of the most basic markers of ‘adulthood’ across cultures – such as establishing a family life. It further stands in the way of young people exercising their internationally recognized right to family life through family reunification.

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12

Conclusion As the public watched the so-called refugee crisis unfold across Europe in 2015, increasing awareness and public debate emerged about what the policy response should be for those children arriving without any adult and for whom the international community had a duty of care. Since that time, interest in the wellbeing of these children has waxed and waned in tune to the shifting policy, media and public discourses surrounding immigration and asylum laws and practices. Such discourses, we argue, have consistently adopted a myopic view of migrant children, situating them in some Peter Pan Neverland and refusing to acknowledge that many are on the cusp of adulthood. This is a term that, despite its multifarious cultural and social meanings, is very strictly defined in institutional terms as reaching the age of 18. This book has exposed a dearth of policy engagement with the question of what should and does happen to unaccompanied young people subject to immigration control once they cease to be children. The current research set out to uniquely better understand the outcomes of former unaccompanied migrant young people who find themselves in this policy vacuum. We have brought to this debate a new way of looking at the issue through a longitudinal and participatory research approach and documented how transition to adulthood for many means being thrown back into the precarity of a migrant status, which is unbounded in terms of time and undefined in relation to what it brings with respect to rights, citizenship and opportunities for a viable future. In this final chapter, we reflect back on ideas associated with wellbeing in the context of migration, such as life satisfaction, happiness and quality of life in ways that capture their temporal and spatial dynamics. Above all, we reiterate the case for considering wellbeing not as a neutral objective state but as something that is inherently political and ultimately demands a political response.

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Currently, migrant young people becoming adult frequently encounter policy systems and structures that are inadequate, violent and discriminatory. Our call is to consider how these structures can become more conducive not only to the wellbeing of migrant young people but also to society as a whole. Extant policies are built on normative assumptions that are often in direct opposition to how young people live and aspire to live their lives. As such, they are unworkable. If this book aims to do one thing, it is to unsettle such assumptions and to encourage a rethink of how we might better respond to a growing number of young people across the United Kingdom (UK), Italy, Europe and the world who will, despite the legal and political constraints on them, continue to strive for viable futures for themselves and the significant others in their lives. As noted by our colleague from Africa speaking in Europe, ‘migration is about dreams’. Contemporary policy responses to migrant young people becoming adult, we argue, struggle to grapple with notions of best interests, rights or meaningful durable solutions, let alone the stuff of dreams. Instead, such policies are straitjacketed by global, international and national discourses on migration that perpetuate a crisis frame of reference and sustain the primary objective of controlling borders rather than enabling human flourishing.

Wellbeing as politically undermined Young people make the journey to Europe without an accompanying adult for many complex reasons. We live in a world in which lives can become unsustainable overnight as a result of persecution, conflict, war, famine, drought or a whole range of other economic, social and political factors that play out at individual, family and community levels, as well as on a national and global scale. Despite Italy and the UK being adherents to the same relevant European Union (EU) policy frameworks in relation to unaccompanied migrant children, across all chapters, and in Chapter 4 in particular, we have observed their markedly different enactment and application, and discussed the implications of the diverse trajectories for young people that are consequently constructed. To recapitulate, all children arriving in the UK unaccompanied and without any relevant documentation are obliged to claim asylum. This process involves being able to prove a well-founded fear of persecution in accordance with the Refugee Convention. This requires a level of proof and documentary evidence as testimony to persecution that most children migrating alone are unlikely to be able to access. As a result, most are not granted refugee status but instead some form of

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discretionary or time-limited leave to remain while they are children, since it is considered unsafe to send them back to their countries of origin. Since 2013, there has existed a new form of time limited leave called unaccompanied asylum-seeking child leave. This is a less secure status than asylum or humanitarian protection – and once young people turn 18, it is increasingly difficult for them to claim extended leave to remain. In Italy, meanwhile, unaccompanied children are more likely to be granted a form of humanitarian protection and have the option of passing through an asylum-seeking route or a second route for non-asylumseeking unaccompanied minors. At the same time, unlike in the UK, where minors are integrated into the care system for all children, across Italy, at the time of research, most regions operated a separate care pathway for unaccompanied migrant minors aged 16 and over. The UK’s treatment of migrant children and young people involves the policing of eligibility to welfare support and the right to reside in the UK according to very strict rules and boundaries – referred to in this work as ‘iron rod’ welfare. The jurisdiction of these rules is, nonetheless, left to the discretion of a wide range of actors. This paradox of stringent regulation combined with flexibility in its interpretation introduces a high degree of ambiguity and serendipity in terms of outcomes, resulting in young people frequently falling off a metaphorical cliff edge in terms of support once they reach the age of 18 and are considered no longer eligible. This can result in catastrophic outcomes, such as sudden homelessness, destitution, possible detention or deportation, or going underground in order to avoid other adverse outcomes. Italy, by contrast, has invested nowhere near the same resources for care and support of migrant children, meaning that they arguably receive less care when within the system – what we refer to in this book as ‘colander’ welfare. However, the openness of the asylum and care systems, particularly the fact that children arriving unaccompanied in Italy are not obliged to seek asylum in order to receive support, means that as they ‘age out’, a wider range of options are on offer – including certain pathways towards regularization that are unavailable to those going through the UK system. While the situation in Italy still has many flaws, it does suggest alternative ways of enacting policy that may be more conducive to the realities and aspirations of migrant young adults. And there are similar models across Europe that policy makers could look to, such as the Contrat Jeune Majeure, or young people’s contract, which provides transitional support to young people up to the age of 21 years in France. Turning 18 in both contexts is a pivotal point in migrant young people’s lives, when multiple factors contrive to unsettle their lives – in some ways irrespective of their legal status. In the UK, if the decision from the Home

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Office is that they are appeal rights exhausted, all social care support can be stopped, sometimes abruptly. We have spoken to young people who have been made homeless from one day to the next as they turn 18 since, based on the decision from the Home Office, the local authority in which they are residing is no longer funded to continue providing support to them. Some authorities may in fact continue to provide some basic support based on a statutory human rights assessment, although this is a discretionary rather than universal concession. Sometimes further claims to remain in the UK are successfully made on human rights grounds, such as Article 8 (a right to private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights, for example, when young people have been in the country for a number of years and can prove that they have established a family life. However, making such a claim is complex and requires a high degree of costly legal expertise to which few young people have access. In Italy, we have also reported the stories of individuals forced to leave accommodation in the early hours of their 18th birthday. In the words of Abil, from Albania, who had been staying in a casa famiglia (family home) for over a year since his arrival in Italy, ‘What happy birthday?’ Moreover, those seeking residence at 18 through the alternative work or education integration pathway face another set of challenges. They need to secure a work sponsor as well as evidence of good conduct and the necessary proof of residence in Italy for long enough at the time of application to be eligible for this. In the wider scheme of things, the rules and procedures governing what should happen to migrant young people becoming adult are prone to constant shifts and changes and applied in seemingly arbitrary and inconsistent ways. In Italy, at the time of writing in 2020, the separate pathway to temporary integration into education or the labour market outside the asylum system is in jeopardy. In recent years, Italy has faced growing right-wing pressure, led by former Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, to drastically reduce such legal pathways to work and protection. Additionally, new immigration control measures have been implemented, including the ‘hotspot approach’ proposed in the European Agenda on Migration, by which unaccompanied children as young as 12 are now routinely detained in conditions that have been documented as seriously violating their rights. This includes being routinely placed with adults in ‘closed’ detention and reception centres, in clear violation of constitutional law, and being subjected to coercive methods used by the Italian police to obtain fingerprints (Amnesty International 2019). At the same time, protections on offer from humanitarian and community assistance are increasingly policed and criminalized (Carrera et  al 2018a; Allsopp et al forthcoming).

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As we have seen, young people may be forcibly removed to countries such as Afghanistan and Albania by the UK, or alternatively, as was the case with Izat documented in Chapter  4 and Rasheed in Chapter  8, encouraged to agree to ‘voluntary’ return. When it is not legally possible to deport them, as is the case with Eritrea at the time of writing, individuals may be transferred to the adult National Asylum Support Service – this usually means dispersal away from community, friends, educational opportunities – and so young people may resist this. The fear of deportation at this point of transition is real and generates immense anxiety. It is estimated that more than 2,000  former unaccompanied minors were forcibly removed to Afghanistan from the UK between 2007 and 2015 (and close to a further 700 former minors returned to other countries such as Iraq, Iran and Syria over the same period). Limited research in terms of how young people have managed after deportation depicts extremely difficult circumstances and poor outcomes for most (Gladwell et al 2016). Our research indicates that the very real fear of deportation is arguably the main cause of unaccompanied young people going missing across northern Europe, since they are left with no pathways to regularization, diminished appeal rights and no future in their country of origin. Previous studies of mobility in the lives of refugee youth have tended to focus on retrospective narratives drawn from one point in time (Eastmond 2007), frequently concentrating on past trauma and flight experience. There has equally been much previous work exploring refugees’ narratives of journeys and how they make sense of these (Zetter 2007; Sigona 2014). With respect to the health and wellbeing literature noted in Chapter 2 and unpicked in more detail in Chapter 9, there has tended to be a dominance of medicalized evaluations of how past trauma impacts directly on young people’s present lives and abilities to cope. This book has refocused the debate on how the systems and structures encountered through the course of their migration often impact more directly on young people’s health and wellbeing than whatever has happened in the past. This observation has profound implications for how we consider wellbeing in transition. We have seen how young people’s wellbeing is profoundly undermined through processes of real and symbolic violence played out at local, national and global levels. Moreover, we have observed how the services that previously ‘cared’ for them often end up being the greatest perpetrators of such violence. Young people spoke of how, over a short space of time, they went from being told they would be cared for to, in the phrase of one young person, ‘rejection, rejection, rejection’. The symbolic and institutional violence they experience through these systems and structures leave many living in perpetual fear and anxiety. Whether

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forced into homelessness, experiencing the indignities of intrusive age assessments or being made to feel that, despite all the efforts they have made to integrate and belong, they are no longer valued or wanted, are just a few of the ways in which young people experienced such assaults. At the wider societal level, young people are subjected to other forms of violence through the racist and discriminatory caricatures banded across the media. As the policy-induced hostile environment came increasingly to the fore throughout the course of our research, we witnessed the vilification and taunting of unaccompanied young people in the media. For instance, young people arriving from Calais under the Dubs Amendment, designed to facilitate the reunification of minors with other family members in the UK, were exposed to public assault in the media for not fulfilling some idealized stereotypical image of the ‘innocent child’. Images of young people were plastered across tabloid newspapers, buying into tropes of the deserving/undeserving and genuine/phony child. There is a profound irony in the fact that many young people in our study fled different forms of explicit violence and witnessed further violence through their journeys, only to then be subjected to the insidious forms of violence that infiltrate the systems and structures they became bound by, and that they believed were there to provide care and security. Meanwhile, as this book has documented, many young people arrive with ideas of realizing human rights and with a will to citizenship. Refugee status can be seen as a repair in ruptured relationships of trust between the state and citizen; many refugees go on to become citizens of the states that receive them. In contrast to the expanding literature on the opportunities generated by mobility for more privileged youth (Holmegaard et  al 2015), studies on refugee youth tend to assume a negative relationship between mobility and choice. So while mobility is rightly, in many cases, recognized as a pathway to safety, often young refugees are assumed to be vulnerable passengers who have little or no choice or agency in the context of their own migration. The current research has presented a more nuanced picture of how young people caught up in the vagaries of migratory processes may simultaneously or sequentially be made vulnerable and be agentic. Throughout, we have avoided ideas of vulnerability that are directly linked to particular identities (such as child, migrant child, unaccompanied child) and instead engaged with the idea that vulnerability is politically induced, the result of often deliberate policy structures and systems that place young people, or mean that young people have no choice but to place themselves, in situations of apparent risk. This is indicative of what Beck et al (1992) refer to as the uneven spread of risks throughout society and the fact that such risks have social, political and ecological causes.

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Notions of inherent vulnerability are intentionally solidified in discourses surrounding young people seeking asylum in Europe – and this is, in itself, a political process. In essence, it absolves governments and policy makers of the responsibility for causing or failing to respond to such precariousness other than relieving its symptoms at the point of crisis – for example, by conducting human rights assessments with no longterm response when young people hit a crisis of destitution in the UK, or through a biomedical or pharmaceutical response when they experience a crisis in mental health. Acknowledging that legislation, policies and practice decisions are not apolitical, but in fact perpetuate these different forms of precarity, has multiple implications. Policy perspectives and responses are often devised in relation to specific peoples deemed to be vulnerable who as a result demand a more specialized or targeted response. Social work practice, health care provision, public health initiatives and other facilities, such as housing, are frequently designed according to a matrix of needs assessment, prioritizing concerns and then designing appropriate interventions accordingly. Much less is written or said about the imposed vulnerability by welfare systems and structures working in tandem with immigration control procedures, which simultaneously respond to politically viable forms of ‘vulnerability’ in one space while reconstituting new forms of vulnerability in another (Fassin 2001, 2011; Anderson 2013). When many young people first arrive in Europe, they experience and are encouraged to make the most of more expansive possibilities for their lives than may have previously been entertained. Yet such opportunities are then often abruptly blocked once children reach adulthood. Hence, the social care and immigration and asylum systems serve to contain them and seemingly grind them down rather than offer any longer-term viable futures. There is, we suggest, an inherent cruelty in how they are encouraged to throw themselves into these new lives and make the best of their opportunities, only to have these taken away again. While Adnan described this sudden abandonment after having been previously praised for his achievements as akin to being ‘stabbed in the back’, another story reported by a non-governmental organization worker hauntingly captures the sinister effects of such abrupt abandonment. She explained: ‘Paradoxically, it was the brace that he’d had fitted in England that became such a problem for him after he was deported. It needed tweaking every few months, you see, and then expertly removing. When I next saw him, it had been left unattended for well over a year. It had started to deform his teeth and it

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pained him so badly he’d tried to chisel it off himself with a stone. Well, you can imagine.’

Reclaiming wellbeing Many young people refuse to become passive recipients of what the system metes out to them and instead strive to build a sense of wellbeing through moving forward with their lives as best they can. Our research consolidates a previous body of work demonstrating how unaccompanied young migrants’ pursuit of subjective wellbeing consists of strategies to secure a modicum of material welfare in the short term while securing ontological security in the longer term (Chase 2020; Allsopp et al 2015). The search for what we have defined, according to Wolff and de-Shalit’s definition, as ‘genuine opportunities for secure functionings’ (2007: 84) often entails sacrificing one functioning for others and making decisions based on knowledge of policy opportunity structures that are often in themselves geographically shifting, time-limited, risky and insecure. As we have argued, immigration regimes, labour markets and welfare regimes interact to shape the opportunity structures and outcomes of migrant young people in convoluted ways over time. Wellbeing and ‘becoming’ are conceptually linked through ideas of human flourishing and eudemonic notions of deriving life satisfaction through having and pursuing a purpose in life. We have illustrated how the futures that young people aspire to are bordered in multiple ways and, as a result, are constantly having to morph and be readjusted to the opportunities and possibilities at hand. As a result, such futures typically take longer to achieve and are more tortuous and open to abandonment, but nonetheless may still remain attainable and intact – particularly given the powerful determination we have witnessed throughout this work. Evidence of young people’s efforts to evade the law and state structures, including their embedded processes of surveillance, through secondary migration or through making themselves undetectable by ‘disappearing’, raises a series of uncomfortable research, practice and, above all else, policy questions. The discord between lived reality and political intentions has been previously observed. Castles (2011: 311) explains that, from a ‘bottom-up migrant view’, immigration policies are seen as ‘setting opportunity structures’ whose potentialities for migrants may differ from the intentions of government: People lucky enough to enjoy a middle class position in developed countries tend to have a positive view of the state

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and the law. The majority of the world’s population, who live in inefficient, corrupt and sometimes violent states, may see things differently. They have to cope despite the state, not because of it. From this perspective migration rules become just another barrier to be overcome in order to survive. Potential migrants do not decide to stay put simply because the receiving state says they are not welcome – especially if the labour market tells a different story. Policies become opportunity structures to be negotiated  … migrants have developed forms of collective, individual and community resistance that undermine top down migration management. Sometimes, bottom-up perceptions of potential harms wielded by the institutions claiming to act in their best interests – and consequent justifications for breaking the law – have been vindicated. This was the case of Tarakhel vs. Switzerland (November 2014) in which the European Court of Human Rights agreed that individualized guarantees were required to protect vulnerable categories of refugees from potential harm prior to being transferred to Italy (Peers 2014). It is also arguably evidenced in the case of Takir and four other Afghans interviewed for this research who had remigrated to Italy following deportation from England to Afghanistan. The idea that youth migration constitutes a linear movement from ‘a’ to ‘b’ still dominates much literature – as does the policy discourse that young people unable to establish a well-founded fear of persecution can be returned from ‘b’ to ‘a’. Migration is considered an occurrence at a particular point in time in a person’s life history. While this may be the case for some, this research demonstrates that, for many others, migration becomes part of the life course, particularly when it is associated with the search for ever elusive and imaginary sustainable futures. The current work, and other work too (examples being Sigona 2014; Gonzales 2015), has given greater attention to young people’s own narratives and how mobility may be integral to the process of shaping their own lives over substantial periods of time. We set out to engage with articulations of futures and, where possible, to capture these in real time within unfolding contexts and constantly shifting circumstances. As we have seen, the process of creating such futures rests, in many cases, on continued movement, not least in order to circumnavigate the legal and institutional blocks and borders they encounter. This dynamic is akin to what De Vries and Guild (2019: 2156) have termed the ‘politics of exhaustion’. An alternative, more positive rendering of this mobility might draw instead on Katy Long’s work on facilitated mobility as a positive capability, and a fourth possible ‘durable solution’ to displacement (2014: 475).

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Wellbeing as a collective pursuit This book has taken understandings of wellbeing beyond the individual and engaged with it as a collective pursuit. This is in contrast to the current dominant public and media discourses, which are prone to pitch the wellbeing needs of some against those of others (Anderson 2013; Jones et al 2017). Throughout this work, it was evident that young people’s embodied wellbeing and converse insecurity were intrinsically bound to the wellbeing of other family and community members wherever they were in the world (Morrow 2013), and that individual experience was embedded within dynamic configurations of self in relation to others (Archer 2007). Our research has revealed that the very word ‘unaccompanied’, in itself an institutional categorization, is hugely problematic. Instead, we have emphasized the value in understanding young people as relational and networked beings. The very word unaccompanied has got in the way of our ability to see young people holistically, witnessed by the examples of rich and dutiful relationships and bonds explored throughout this book, and especially in Chapters 10 and 11. Yet, at the same time, it is important not to put too much store and expectation in the strengths of bonds of support: they all have their limitations, and over-romanticizing such generosity of spirit risks brushing over the harshness of young people’s circumstances. This includes the persistent lack of basic resources, the grind of having to sleep on people’s floors, feeling embarrassed and ashamed at not being able to contribute and being perpetually concerned with how long it is possible to remain in one place before being asked to move on, or feeling so uncomfortable that you move on anyway. Nonetheless, this work emphasizes the mutually constitutive elements of how individuals are bounded by and connected to others – at local, national and transnational levels. Turner’s (2006) theory of ontological frailty as a universalizing concept has particular resonance in this regard. Turner highlights the dynamic relationship between human vulnerability and the precarious character of social institutions. All human beings are therefore ontologically members of a community of suffering: ‘human frailty is a universal feature of human existence’ (504). And with this frailty comes the possibility for collective or moral sympathy: people have an awareness of their own frailty and so the strong can empathize with the weak, something that Douzinas (2009) refers to as the pursuit of a shared universal moral code. So, too, we need to be mindful of the intrinsically historical dimensions to migration and refugee histories. As Dawn Chatty’s (2017) work has clearly illustrated, tables turn over years, decades and even centuries, and yesterday’s refugees become contemporary hosts and vice

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versa. Moreover, there are complex historical and political links between sending and receiving countries – Italy with Eritrea and Albania; the UK with Afghanistan, for example (see Chapter 7), all of which speak to not only collective moral sympathy but to collective responsibility and accountability. Most young people in our study, without intending to canonize them in any way, demonstrated a profound sense of community and collective responsibility, a deep sense of shared universal moral code. They sought to contribute and give back to society and communities in any way they could, this sense of belonging and contribution being an important dimension to their wellbeing. We are conscious about reflecting on how we have highlighted the intricate national and international ties and connections between young people that can both facilitate or inadvertently impede the lives they aspire to, often influencing ongoing migration across Europe. In doing so, we are mindful of the need to distance these findings from the policy rhetoric of ‘asylum shopping’, which offers a top-down explanation for such movements. Our work emphasizes the strength and power of social networks and how young people seek out and use these in their search for security and a sense of wellbeing. We have seen how young people engage with real spaces to come together and connect, such as places of worship, football pitches or youth centres and/or create virtual spaces of safety and comfort, where they share hopes and dreams and unpack the events affecting their lives (from where they have come, where they are and where they are going) as they unfold. In such spaces, they share stories of the past and co-create possibilities for the future in which onward migration may be the option for some, stagnation for others. Ultimately, the situations of migrant young people and what should happen to them raise critical questions of what constitutes a healthy society and how it should engage with the fundamentals of humanity, diversity, integration and living well together. In the current European policy-orchestrated ‘hostile environment’, there has been an increasing criminalization of civil society actors assisting migrant communities (Carrera et al 2018a) and a pervasive devolution of immigration control across all services and structures, such as health, education and social care (Yuval-Davis 2011, 2018). The perpetuation of these policies is pathogenic to society. It undermines trust and generates anxiety and xenophobia. Rarely does media and public attention focus on the multiple contributions to society of migrant communities, whether in terms of net economic gains (Dustmann and Frattini 2014), or more fundamentally the richness and depth to the fabric of society. If we could bottle just some of the strength, tenacity, creativity and sheer gumption evidenced through the lived experiences cited here, the capacity for collective flourishing

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would be vast. Even if we put aside feelings, emotions, ideas of rights and humanity – which we would argue are the mainstay of any viable society – and stick to questions of utility and human capital, in a context of ageing Europe, why would a government dispose of such a rich resource of infinite youthful talent, particularly after having invested vast sums of money in fulfilling their international duties of care and protection? We hope that many of the insights in this book will be of more general relevance to debates on the sociologies of health and wellbeing, ideas about integration and practices of citizenship, and conceptualizations of wellbeing that are collective rather than individualized.

Making personal troubles policy issues The findings of this research suggest that we need a radical rethink of what should happen to children and young people who have arrived on their own into Europe as they transition to the status of young adults. At the start of this book, we drew on C. Wright Mills’s view (1959) of the role of the social scientist as being about translating personal problems into policy issues. Through the many individualized troubles illuminated through our work, we believe we have highlighted a number of specific issues requiring urgent political action. One factor that fudges rather than illuminates a realistic policy agenda for migrant children is the constant reference to ‘influx’, ‘flood’ and ‘tide’ of child migrant arrivals. While there has certainly been an increase in applications for asylum from unaccompanied children in the UK and Italy (and Europe as a whole) since 2010, taking a longer view tells a story of increases and decreases over time, and in fact the number of applications in the past few years is very similar to the number in the 2000s. Furthermore, to dispel any doubt concerning the capacity of an EU country to cope with current numbers of unaccompanied children, Sweden alone received in 2015 more unaccompanied asylum seeking children (about 35,000) than the UK received over the ten years 2006–15 (about 23,000). A global perspective, meanwhile, is also illuminating. Since 2012, over 800,000 undocumented youth in the United States alone received just one of a number of possible legal residence permits in the form of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, many of them fearing that they would be sent to situations of precarity and danger in Central America and Asia, among other regions. The Syrian refugee crisis remains the largest displacement crisis in the world at the time of writing, with over 5.6 million registered refugees, including over 2.5  million children living in neighbouring developing countries: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt.

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However we look at it, the fact that several thousand children will arrive on their own each year, despite annual fluctuations, is a phenomenon that is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Moreover, a significant number of minors are aged 16–17 on arrival. This has important policy implications, since this makes them close to becoming legally adult, a point at which their position in the EU states in which they reside needs to be reassessed. The fact that under the current system only a proportion of these children will be granted asylum, and that a significant number will become young adults with uncertain legal status, is a policy issue that has been ignored for too long and continues to have, as we have shown, widespread personal and collective impacts. Within England, the inability of local authorities to cope with the scale of new arrivals and the respective needs of unaccompanied children has led, we would argue, to a process of political scapegoating. In reality, the failure to respond to the needs of these children is more the result of draconian budget cuts imposed by the UK government than about the number of newly arriving unaccompanied minors, which remains at a level at which services were able to cope in the recent past. Italy has faced a different challenge in a context with fewer resources and higher numbers. Through other aspects of the current study, not reported on in detail in this volume, we have highlighted the impact of austerity measures on those working on the frontline of services with minimal resources and support in both country sites (Humphris and Sigona 2018; Meloni and Humphris 2019) and the failures of local authorities to follow up on what actually happens to young people once they lose any eligibility to publicly funded support (Sigona and Humphris 2016). Instead of investing further in support services (something that, it should be said, has worked to the detriment of all looked after children – not just unaccompanied minors), both governments have sought to spread the load for care and responsibility. The UK’s recent transfer protocol, for example, means that children arriving on their own are placed outside local authorities that have typically accommodated large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children (mainly in London and the South-East of England). In Italy, meanwhile, unaccompanied minors may be transferred directly from the new ‘hot spot’ centres in the South to one of a number of regions, with little say as to when or where. Many continue to be warehoused in large centres on the periphery of cities and services and held in hot spots for indefinite periods. Such measures fail to engage with the importance of young people’s connections and needs, and the fact that many authorities with no history of accommodating unaccompanied minors lack the experience or resources to do this adequately. Given the uncertainties of immigration control processes and their notoriously protracted nature, they impose an expectation that, as they

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approach adulthood, young people have to formulate a range of plans for different eventualities (Wade 2011). They are thus required to embody what Heinz (2009) has referred to as a prevailing norm of flexibility. Yet such flexibility is policy driven, intended to render people more malleable to structures and systems of control that rarely hold their best interests or rights as paramount. Rather than adhering to such expectations, young people respond in ways that enable them to retain a sense of control over their circumstances and elements of choice – processes that generate their own risks and sometimes also unintended consequences, which may be deemed detrimental to their wellbeing overall. Nowhere is the expectation of embodied flexibility more evident than in the European policy architecture of the Life Project Planning Framework for migrant young people approaching the age of 18. This has been applied in different ways in countries around Europe. In England, for example, it takes the form of Pathway Plans; in Italy, unaccompanied minors are supposed to co-develop percorsi (pathways). Such plans are in theory intended to be a negotiated strategy for the young person’s future. However, the current research has largely confirmed our previous analysis of their utility, in brief that they fall short of really engaging with young people’s lived circumstances and concerns. As argued elsewhere (Allsopp and Chase 2019), the EU framework and its application in Europe holds three key flawed assumptions. First, the notion of durable solutions for young people turning 18 is either integration (if they have indefinite leave to remain in the host country); resettlement to a third country (for example, in the case where they may have family in another country in Europe); or repatriation. In practice, the emphasis and financial investment has been largely placed on the latter – repatriation. Millions of Euros have been invested in trying to make repatriation and return more straightforward. The idea that forced return is a durable solution for young people and guarantees them a better future is, in our view, profoundly flawed. All evidence emerging for example from Afghanistan indicates that it is extremely difficult to return and reintegrate. Of the more than a dozen young men in this study who were forcibly returned to Afghanistan after having spent time in local authority care in the UK as children, only one of them, Noor, remained there by the end of the study and through choice. As for the others, they have become in some ways global nobodies, unrecognized or living under the radar in places as diverse as Pakistan, Germany, Italy, Serbia, the UK and, as we have seen with Jamal and Abdul in Chapters 5 and 7, Indonesia. There is no evidence in this study that return is a durable solution of any sort, and our findings have been corroborated by other work (see Schuster and Majidi 2015; Refugee Support Network 2012).

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Moreover, the focus on return assumes that young people belong in their countries of origin, even when they have spent their formative years in the UK, Italy or in other parts of Europe. As we have seen in Chapter 7, they talk about growing up in cities; their reference points are different; they describe themselves as different young people from when they arrived; they have often had learning and education opportunities previously denied them and have begun to imagine futures that were previously unimaginable. They have regional accents and favourite regional foods. As detailed in Chapters 10 and 11, they have also established strong friendship and community networks and have established relationships with partners. In these multiple ways, young people contest this notion that they automatically belong to countries in which they were born many years previously. The final assumption that this book has challenged is that young people can and will be made to comply with institutional processes. There is ample evidence here of how young people, fearful of removal and deportation, will do anything they can to avoid this, including disappearing from statutory services and support so that they cannot be monitored and face the risk of deportation. At a macro-level, at the time of writing Europe has become distracted by the intra-EU mobility question, the Brexit furore and the rise of populism in Italy as elsewhere. It has neglected to effectively engage with the ripple effects of its migration control policies beyond its borders – including the hand it is playing in the hardships suffered by young people even before they reach Europe through a number of bilateral and international deals, such as the EU–Turkey deal, which sees asylum seekers from certain countries returned to Turkey, and Europe’s support to the Libyan Coast Guard, which keeps people inside the county in weakly monitored situations of slavery and destitution. Yet, as we have seen, immigration control policies in Europe are part of a global phenomenon of the border as site of privilege or exclusion; of growing border externalization and poor accountability. In Australia, for example, the so-called Pacific Solution consists of outsourcing border control responsibilities to territories with fewer resources, such as Indonesia. After spending several years in one such detention centre, Jamal has now, like Abdul, been granted refugee status. He has reached the next stage of the waiting game, housed in a hostel in the city, unable to work or move forward with his life. He, like Abdul, is likely to wait for several more years before any durable solution transpires. The connection between the European and the Pacific ‘solutions’ to managing migration takes us back again to Wright Mills’s personal struggles (1959) – individuals subjected to the vagaries of these different solutions may, as a result,

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end up being shunted between them. A striking finding in our work is that as young people actively search for the ever elusive ‘better life’ – one that can offer safety, peace, economic survival and freedom – they actually join the dots between these different geopolitical systems and their apparently regionally devised immigration control policies. Finding themselves rejected in one region of the globe, others, such as Jamal and Abdul, may seek such security in another. In previous work, we rejected the notion that unaccompanied young people, in light of their mobility trajectories, should, or indeed could, be framed as citizens of the world (Drammeh 2010). We felt that such framing undermined responsibility for them on the part of individual nation states, and moreover risked romanticizing journeys that are often fraught with trauma and ended in the form of a limbo state of torturous illegality, which was often framed and experienced by young people as a form of ‘anti-citizenship’ – the feeling of belonging not everywhere but nowhere (Chase and Allsopp 2014). It is, nevertheless, the case that in their mobile trajectories, these young people are at the vanguard of a growingly recognized holistic ecological world view where ‘here’ and ‘there’ are forever more connected in real, affective and symbolic ways. In this vein, in speaking across the disciplines of public health, geography and youth studies, this book can be read in the context of a growing environmental consciousness that transcends borders, but in which human rights and national accountability remain key to the delivery of human dignity. This counter-punctual perspective (Said 1993) sees humans as part of a network of global relations that are at once diachronic and synchronic. As several young people repeated to us during the research, ‘We are here because you [the proverbial you of the colonial West] were/are there.’ At the heart of young people’s notions of futures is not only what they aspire to do but also who they aspire to be and become. In Chapter 2 of this book, we considered the idea of ‘becoming’ within the framework of the capability approach and the notion of capability expansion, or widened opportunities to be and do what a person most values. We have considered how, for most young people, such capability expansion is not sought after as an individual pursuit but is about what can be achieved collectively. Through their narratives, most young people see their own futures as situated in relation to the futures of others and the futures of communities they are now part of and/or which remain in their countries of origin. They often imagine how they might, one day, be in a position to contribute to these shared prospective futures in ways that uphold rather than infringe upon the rights and opportunities of others. Yet notions of ‘becoming’ are strikingly absent in relevant policy discourses, which treat migrant children and young people as fixed and determined

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entities on arrival. The implication is that, irrespective of the amount of time spent in their European host states, regardless of the new contexts, opportunities and lifestyles they engage with, and ignoring the cultural and societal norms and influences that begin to shape them, at the end of that period, if unable to secure legal status, young people in their ‘fixed’ forms can be returned whence they came and pick up from where they left off. The simplicity of these assumptions is staggering, yet they pervade policy discourses surrounding child and youth migration. As discussed in Chapter 7, while most young people hold strong connections and ties to their lives prior to migration, simultaneously becoming other is at the essence of their migratory experiences.

Conclusion Throughout, our research context epitomized what Thomson (2011: vi) refers to as a ‘moveable feast’. It encompassed multiple changes in policies, public responses, evolving theories and technologies as well as constant changes in the biographies of research participants and researchers alike. Life transitions are hence about the interplay of personal, social and historical processes. This work has situated these processes within a global and geopolitical frame, considering how transitions for young people in the current study were determined largely by immigration policies and systems that are interconnected and global in nature. At the same time, young people are subjected to highly complex systems of immigration control intertwined with social support – these are always changing – depending on their age, their status on the micro-level and, at the macrolevel, a constantly shifting political landscape. Despite these constant shifts, the broad direction of the policy response has remained fairly constant. It persists in being shaped by statecentric views of migration, static conceptions of belonging and a bias towards a political preference for return. Such path dependency, it is argued, underestimates young people’s agency and willingness to embrace risk in their efforts to secure viable futures. They are prepared to walk the line between legality and irregularity and to jeopardize orthodox ideas about wellbeing in the short term in order to take the longer view. The net result is a set of policies that fail to offer a durable solution or act in the best interests of either individual migrant young people themselves or society as a whole. Unaccompanied children becoming adult is a global issue, a highly political issue and one that needs to be brought further to the fore in contemporary politics. It raises huge questions of responsibility and care for these young people in an increasingly globalized and connected world.

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Yet the policy backdrop against which we are publishing this book in 2020 is in constant transition and change. It is nigh on impossible to know where to hang these ideas and what to try to influence. We are conscious of the pitfalls of tagging these findings against specific policy recommendations since, experience tells us, this leaves them prone to being rapidly dismissed as irrelevant or outdated. Instead, we conclude with some key questions that can be used to interrogate how policies are framed, structured and delivered into the foreseeable future and become points of reference as national governments and the international community continue to grapple with notions of best interests, durable solutions and viable futures for unaccompanied migrant children and young people. 1. What would durable solutions, best interests and viable futures look like if they were co-designed with young people subject to immigration control? 2. How can policies best plan for migrant and refugee young people’s transition to adulthood in ways that really uphold their best interests and meaningfully engage with the realities of their circumstances and the sorts of futures they aspire to? 3. Will the policy proposed recognize or undermine the capacities and capabilities for young people to pursue futures that are collective – involving responsibilities and obligations to family and community – as well as individual? 4. What are the benefits of forcing all unaccompanied migrant children to make a claim for asylum, and what other pathways to regularization could be put in place to enable young people to remain in their host countries once they turn 18? 5. What (if any) are the real benefits of forced removal of young people to countries of origin after they become adult, and what alternatives might they be offered? As we conclude, we leave Jamal and Abdul in Indonesia, Malek in Germany but poised to move on if he has to, Bashir somewhere in Eastern Europe and Bilal living in constant hope of one day being able to take the London Underground to work without the fear of being stopped by the police. And what of so many others, such as Dan and Janan, who have spent a decade in a state of what Honwana (2012), in the African context, has referred to as ‘waithood’ – wasted time that has delayed their transition to their own notions and understandings of adulthood and left them feeling as though they will never quite catch up? Such delayed transitions (Enria 2018) have profound effects on sense of self-worth,

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day-to-day wellbeing and ability to reach one’s own markers of adult life or the expectations of significant others. There are of course many others in our research who have fared well and have received amazing support throughout, despite the constant hacking away at resources for social workers and other frontline workers responsible for their care. Erfanullah is employing people in his food business in Italy and welcoming a new child, and Lodi just held his first solo art exhibition. Having finally tracked down his mother and brothers in a neighbouring European country after ten long years, Abugul and his family are looking forward to spending Ramadan together once more. Yet too many others remain in the quagmire of uncertainty and insecurity. Those who have shared their own personal stories here provide just a glimpse of the richness and potential of the countless others – all formerly migrant children who set off in search of a better future and now not so young adults who are still searching. Becoming adult in many cases means becoming forgotten – left to the vagaries of systems and structures that have done their bit for the migrant child and then, amid the rising tide of the xenophobic hostile environment, has spat them out into the stormy sea. To continue the metaphor, they become flotsam and jetsam in the tides of immigration control. There is no accountability for the actions of European governments for shirking their responsibility for the wellbeing and futures of young people who were previously in their care. These are the same governments that claim to be working to the principles of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child or under the guise of human rights. We hope this work invigorates critical reflection on what might constitute meaningful pathways to wellbeing in the context of youth migration, and what political responses are required to enable these to emerge.

227

Endnotes Introduction 1

All names used in the book are pseudonyms to protect the anonymity of participants.

Chapter 1 1 2

3

4

5

www.becomingadult.net. In this context, we mean without identified adult family members or legal guardians. Even though young people arrive alone, they sometimes leave their country of origin with other family members but become separated during their migration. We refer interchangeably to the UK and England throughout this book when referring to common welfare and immigration policy frameworks – as most young people in the research did – but we also identify devolved policies where relevant. Under the Dublin III regulation, unaccompanied children can apply to claim asylum in a country other than the one they have arrived in, if they have a close family member who has claimed or been granted asylum in that country. Barbara Harrell-Bond was a British–American social scientist who founded Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and fought tirelessly for the rights and dignity of refugees.

Chapter 2 1 2

https://becomingadult.net/resources/. We use ‘wellbeing’ rather than ‘well-being’ throughout this book unless ‘wellbeing’ is used in material cited.

Chapter 3 1 2

3

See project website for this and other outputs: www,becomingadult.net. This animation, produced with the assistance of the company Positives-Negatives, is available, along with accompanying comic and educational material, at the following link: https://becomingadult.net/2018/06/18/dear-habib-the-truestory-of-a-former-unaccompanied-asylum-seeking-child/. See project website: www.younglives.org.uk/.

Chapter 4 1

This is a ‘lesser’ form of humanitarian protection granted in some EU member states to individuals who cannot be returned to their countries for a broader range

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2

3

of dangers than those included within the Refugee Convention. These include, for example, generalized violence, as codified in the EU Qualification Directive, which is part of the EU’s so-called Common European Asylum System (see, for example, McAdam 2005). The reliability of this quantitative data has nevertheless been rightly questioned (see Sigona and Allsopp 2016). In practice, they may not experience as stark a cut-off as feared at the age of 18, owing to ongoing appeals processes during which they can still access certain rights.

Chapter 6 1 2 3

The Treaty of Lisbon was signed in 2007 and came into effect in 2009. www.unhcr.org/uk/information-on-unhcr-resettlement.html. In R (B) v Merton [2003] EWHC 1689 (Admin), the High Court set down broad guidelines as to how age ought to be assessed with respect to unaccompanied minors who arrive in the UK without documentary evidence to prove their age.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

A accommodation 59–62 food 127–8 foster care 4, 59, 60–1, 99, 180, 184–5 hosting undocumented peers 178 immigration/social care provisions integration 64 informal fostering arrangements 184 Italy, family houses/casa famiglia 59, 120, 144, 169, 212 Italy/UK comparison 59–62, 184, 221 lack of 60 NGO facilities 173 poor quality housing 62 poor quality of state-funded accommodation 60 post-18 62 shared accommodation 59, 119, 163, 185 transit shelter 4, 155, 173 YMCA accommodation 87 see also homelessness adulthood, transition to 2, 3, 6–7, 17, 18, 136–7, 227 ‘care leaver’ 63, 94 deportation, fear of 213 disengagement from authorities/ system 58, 66, 67 emotional and mental wellbeing 154, 159–60, 161, 170 feelings of disruption, uncertainty and lack of care 79, 137–8 ‘former unaccompanied migrant minor’ 63

homelessness 62, 84, 99, 211, 212 ‘individualization turn’ 137 institutional/biological definitions of adulthood 144, 209 as invisible population 130 Italy’s post-18 regularization pathway 71, 212 Italy/UK welfare/immigration regime comparison 6, 58, 62–64, 141, 211–12 legal status and 97, 142, 209 losing rights and protections 6, 30, 58, 141–2, 144, 159–60, 188, 209, 211–12, 215 multiple transitions and wellbeing 29–30 ‘pathway plan’ 141, 222 policy vacuum 209 protracted limbo in young adulthood 9, 142 rite of passage: what becoming adult means 143–6 state responsibility post-18 94, 227 successful transition to adulthood 142 transition to adulthood as problematic phase 136 ‘transition category’ 95 viable futures through becoming adult 136–8 see also futures Afghanistan 3, 38, 40, 152 deportation to 5, 14, 15, 76, 81, 85–6, 93, 103, 109, 110, 149–50, 213, 217, 222 drivers of migration from 13, 67

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Afghanistan (continued) families left in 192–3 Hazara people 111, 140, 152 journeys from 13–15 migrants from, and transnational friendships 202 outcomes of asylum claims for minors from 5 as safe country 81, 85, 150 secondary migration from 14–15, 93, 109, 118, 149–51, 188, 199, 217 the Taliban 13, 121, 140, 150, 188, 197 violence in 205–6 age assessment 57, 91, 93, 99, 159, 160, 162, 164, 184, 214 genital examinations 7, 104 legal status hampered by 104–5 racialized component of 105, 131 agency 24, 29, 31, 214, 225 Albania 3, 5, 38, 40, 71, 139 deportation to 14, 213 drivers of migration from 15–17, 82–3 families left in 192–3, 195–6 journeys from 15–17 Kanun Law/blood feuds 15–16, 83, 192 lack of rules and law in 86 Mafia 17, 82, 124 outcomes of asylum claims for minors from 5 reticence/mistrust of migrants from 66–7 return to 141 as safe country 81–3 UK, outcomes of asylum claims for minors from 16–17 appeal rights exhausted 1, 65, 85, 111, 130, 148, 165, 170, 185, 212 see also refused asylum seeker asylum/asylum system 1 access to legal advice and services 98–100 Albania, young people from 102 appeals process 101 applications from unaccompanied minors 4, 210, 220

asylum interview 108 asylum-seeking minors 4, 5, 8 ‘asylum shopping’ 219 Common European Asylum System 56, 102 ‘DIY asylum’ 56 Indonesia 110–11 Italy 96, 97, 106, 112, 211 non-asylum-seeking minors 4, 5, 69, 96, 182, 211 outcomes of asylum claims 5, 210–211 as reparation for past injustice 122 UK 71, 96, 102, 103, 210–11, 220 West Africans, applications by 71 see also refused asylum seeker Australia 9, 76, 109, 110, 111, 150, 151, 223 autonomy 21, 89, 127, 136, 144, 194

B Bangladesh, minors from 5, 71 Becoming Adult project 3, 16–17, 33, 46, 53 belonging see identity and belonging best interests 65–6, 210, 225 best interests principle 94–5 European Charter of Fundamental Rights 94 return to countries of origin as ‘best interests’ of young migrants 132 tension between young person’s idea of best interests and state’s requirements 66 UNCRC 94 borderlands 31 borders control of 3, 9, 41, 188, 210 increased restrictions at Europe’s borders 12, 96 outsourcing of border controls 96, 151, 223 Bronfenbrenner, U. 26–7 bureaucratic processes 27, 29, 43, 98 bureaucratic labels 5, 7, 8, 18, 130, 183 delays 112, 194 disengaging from 67

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C

D

Calais ‘Jungle’ (France) 12, 13, 108, 124, 130, 180, 205 CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) 159, 162 capabilities capabilities approach and wellbeing 27–9, 112, 224 capability expansion 28, 92, 224 collective capabilities 176–80, 189 care/immigration control nexus 72, 84 CEDAW (UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women) 95–6 charities 62–3 Council of the European Union 94–5 countries of origin 2, 3, 38, 40 freedom at ‘home’ vs host country 87, 88–9, 90 future at ‘home’ vs host country 138–40 ‘giving back’ to 114 ‘journey home’ 199–200, 201 missing home 79, 116, 117, 202 mythologized homeland 202 safety at ‘home’ vs host country 79–80, 139 sending/receiving countries historical and political links 219 see also deportation; return credibility 54, 96, 105, 107 lies and truth 54, 73, 107–8 crime/criminalization criminalization of civil society actors assisting migrants 69, 212, 219 criminalization of migrants 107 criminal justice system and addiction/behavioural disorders 169, 170 criminal record and legal status 108–9 culture cross-cultural perspectives on wellbeing 32–3 culture shock 115, 132 multicultural relationships 120, 182, 186, 202

Dear Habib 42 deportation 9, 68, 85, 195, 211 to Afghanistan 5, 14, 15, 76, 81, 85–6, 93, 103, 109, 110, 149–50, 213, 217, 222 to Albania 14, 213 avoiding deportation 57, 67 contact with family or friends in country of origin 204 to Eritrea 14, 213 fear of 213, 223 stigmatized by 201 unaccompanied minors, protected from being forcibly deported 195 see also return detention/detention centre 91, 93, 109, 211, 212 as abuse of freedom 91 avoiding detention 57, 67 emotional and mental wellbeing 91, 167 Indonesia 109–11, 110, 151, 152, 223 length of detention 91, 105, 151, 152, 167 safety while in 84 stigmatized by 201 dignity 28, 29, 92, 104, 112, 149, 201, 224 wellbeing and 21 dreams 2, 9, 32, 88, 92, 138, 176, 203 policy and 3, 210 see also futures drugs 16, 154, 155, 158, 170, 177, 180, 197 Dublin III Regulation 12, 57 Dubs Amendment 130, 159, 214 ‘durable solutions’ 94–5, 151, 210, 217, 225, 226 return as durable solution 222

E ecological systems theory 26–7 economic migration 90, 202 education 197 access to 65, 71, 144 legal status and 65, 86, 147, 181 paradoxes in 149 positive freedoms and 88

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education (continued) right to 58 school and college 120–1 seeking viable futures through education and work 146–9 undocumented migrants 65, 71 vocational courses 70 Egypt 4, 40, 71 emotional and mental wellbeing 34–5, 54, 145, 153–4, 170–1 alcohol, drugs and gambling 155–9, 170, 177, 180 anti-depressants/medication 35, 153, 154, 161, 165, 168, 192, 215 challenges to health and wellbeing 154–9 criminal justice system and addiction/ behavioural disorders 169, 170 detention centre and 91, 167 deteriorating mental health 165–7 friendships, connections and relationships 180, 181 health services as extension of immigration control 64, 65, 154, 155, 166, 170 inability to pursue aspirations 164–5 inadequate response to mental health problems 167–70 irregular migration, toll on health and wellbeing 149 legal status and 93, 103, 106, 112, 143, 145, 148, 153–4, 160–1, 164–7, 188, 192 loneliness and isolation 161–3, 170 mental health problems as products of the system 145, 159–67, 168, 169, 170, 213–14 NGOs 155, 165, 167, 169 politicization of mental wellbeing 35, 154, 171 post-18 154, 159–60, 161, 170 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 109, 159, 168, 169, 197 refused asylum seeker 77, 154 rejection, feelings of 159–61, 170, 213 suicide/suicide attempts 109, 155, 156, 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 170, 192

systems/structures incompatibility with migrants’ lives and aspirations 153, 154 see also health; wellbeing Eritrea 3, 4, 38, 40 deportation to 14, 213 drivers of migration from 10, 12, 75 families left in 192–3, 196, 198–9 journeys from 9–12, 75, 203 migrants from, and transnational friendships 202–3 netsanet/freedom 1, 32 outcomes of asylum claims for minors from 5 Sawa/military service 10, 203 as unsafe country 81 EU (European Union) 4, 46 durable solutions in EU framework 222 EU–Turkey deal 223 Home Affairs agencies 69 legal and policy instruments at European level 94–6 migrants’ traffic between EU countries 57 European Agenda on Migration 8, 96, 212 European Convention for Human Rights 97, 212 European Platform for Integration and Migration 53

F family-related issues Afghanistan, families left in 192–3 Albania, families left in 192–3, 195–6 Eritrea, families left in 192–3, 196, 198–9 insecure status of family and pressure on young migrants 145–6, 158, 186, 196–9, 200, 201, 208 mixed status families 146, 178 parents/family members’ decision on youth migration 13, 77–8, 81 sense of freedom away from home 90 transnational family ties 193, 194–202

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transnational marriage and parenthood 193, 199, 200, 201 wellbeing and 97 family reunification 12, 57, 71, 145, 191–2, 200–201, 214 family tracing programme 191 Italy 194–5 NGOs 191 right of 196, 208 UK 12, 194 fingerprints 57, 112, 155, 212 France Contrat Jeune Majeure/young people’s contract 211 see also Calais ‘Jungle’ freedom 29, 34, 86–9, 92 detention: absconding as freedom from harm 91 education and positive freedoms 88 Eritrea: netsanet 1, 32 at ‘home’ vs host country 87, 88–9, 90 individual and collective wellbeing and freedoms 89–90 legal status and 86–7, 88 migrants in Italy 68, 69 negative/positive freedoms 28–9 as political construct 76 search for freedom 76, 77 women’s freedom 89 friendships, connections and relationships 113, 173–5, 189, 219, 223 bonding in migration camps 174–5 citizen friends/families/foster carers 182, 184–5, 189 community, peer support and collective capabilities 176–80, 189, 197, 218 emotional and mental wellbeing 180, 181 getting involved with the wrong crowd 180–1 importance of 114 integration and 54 intimate relationships, sexuality and marriage 54, 90, 184, 185–9 along the journey 175–6, 202, 203 legal status and 151, 186–9 multicultural relationships 120, 182, 186, 202

NGOs and civil society groups 179–80, 181, 189 recreating family 183–5 religion 124 sense of duty and responsibility 208 sharing information 173, 174 social and relational aspects of migration 173 transnational friendships 193, 202–4 transnational virtual connections 193, 204–6 unaccompanied minors: no declaration of relationships 183 see also networks futures 34, 135, 151–2, 216, 224 a better future 5, 76, 95, 138, 162, 194, 217, 222, 227 building transnational futures and aspirations 193, 206–7 curtailed and uncertain futures approaching 18: 141–3 at ‘home’ vs host country 138–40 in Italy 138, 139 new possible futures through migration 138–40 rethinking futures: going with what’s possible 149–51 seeking viable futures through education and work 146–9 top-down approach 141 in UK 138, 140, 141 viable futures through becoming adult 136–8

G Gambia 4, 72 gender-related issues 50, 51 child migration as intrinsically gendered 7, 50 gendered transnational duties 196 see also girls and young women Ghana 40, 72 girls and young women 7 coming of age 186 human trafficking 42, 50 rape 11, 16 religion 125 women’s freedom 89 GPS (global positioning system) 15

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H health 213 challenges to health and wellbeing 154–5 cross-cultural perspectives on wellbeing 32 health services as extension of immigration control 64, 65, 154, 155, 166, 170 legal status and 97–8, 106, 112, 191 Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion 21 political analysis of health and wellbeing 34 Primary Health Care movement 21 undocumented migrants 191 widening the lens on 20–1, 22 see also emotional and mental wellbeing; wellbeing homelessness 69, 105, 155, 158, 178, 184, 203, 214 adulthood, transition to 62, 84, 99, 211, 212 Home Office (UK) 101, 122, 147, 204 age-related issues 86, 162, 212 criminalization of migrants 107 ‘hostile environment’ 64–5, 160 immigration/social care provisions integration 64, 65, 166 infiltrating migrant/refugee community and religious groups 157 raid by 70 see also UK host countries 2 freedom at ‘home’ vs host country 87, 88–9, 90 future at ‘home’ vs host country 138–40 safety at ‘home’ vs host country 79–80, 139 sending/receiving countries historical and political links 219 human capital 28, 30, 136, 220 humanitarian protection 5, 72, 97, 211 human rights 91, 122, 165, 214, 224, 227 claims to remain on human rights grounds 101, 212

human rights assessments 212, 215 violation of 61 human trafficking 4, 16, 42, 50, 51, 78, 163

I identity and belonging 41, 132–3, 188, 219, 223, 225 being returned to countries of origin 132–3 coming to belong 114–17, 128 food 127–8, 202 identity/belonging link 114 imposed identities, labelling and discrimination 129–32 language 119–20 multiple belongings 117–18 performing identity and keeping up appearances 114, 128–9 ‘place-making’ 113 political identities 123 politics 121–4 religion 124–6, 202 school and college 120–1 subjective wellbeing and 114 transnational identity 192–4, 196 UK, belonging in 117–18 illegality 72, 76, 108, 224 illegal living 6, 94, 166, 191, 192 unregulated/illegal work 70, 108, 151, 173, 197 see also irregular migration; undocumented migrant Indonesia 9, 76, 92, 222, 223, 226 asylum system 110–11 immigration detention centre 109–11, 110, 151, 152, 223 integration friendships and relationships 54 social networks and 181–2 invisibility strategies 14, 40, 68, 72, 109, 111, 130, 132, 177, 216 going underground 57, 66, 67, 109, 151, 191–2, 211, 223 IOM (International Organization for Migration): Voluntary Assisted Return and ReIntegration Programme 83–4 Iran 40, 200

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irregular migration 2, 64 irregular immigration status as master status 178 toll on young people’s health and wellbeing 149 see also illegality; undocumented migrant Italy 3–4, 38, 39, 211 Afghan young people in 14 Albanian young people in 17 asylum system 96, 97, 106, 112, 211 ‘colander regime’ 51, 56, 68, 72, 211 corruption and poor transparency 69 deportation from 68, 85, 195 economic recession 58 Eritrean young people in 12 freedom for migrants 68, 69 futures in 138, 139 humanitarian protection 5, 72, 97, 211 ‘The Illusion of Italy’ 139 leave to remain 5, 14 legal status in 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105 Mafia 17, 61, 70, 180 migrants back from England 56, 57 migrants in transit 4, 57, 173–5, 207 overcrowded centres and scarce resources 170 populism 69, 212, 223 work in 69–70, 71, 96 Italy/UK welfare/immigration regime comparison 14, 39–40, 55–7, 58, 72, 210–12, 221 accommodation 59–62, 184, 221 Italy’s higher protection rate than England’s 5, 71–2 Italy’s less hostile environment 67–9, 72, 211 labour market and opportunities for regularization 57, 69–72 post-18 6, 58, 62–64, 141, 211–12 pre-18 59–62 protection system 14, 56 UK, hostile environment 64–7, 72, 211 welfare mix and suitability of statutory care provisions 57, 58–63

welfare provision/immigration enforcement intersection 57, 63–9, 108 see also Italy; UK

J journey 76, 109, 174–5, 213 costs and debts 175, 196–7, 198 dangers and risks 11, 13, 15, 76, 78, 203, 224 death during 3, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 78 differing journeys, convergent experiences 9–17 friendships and relationships 175–6, 202, 203 from Afghanistan 13–15 from Albania 15–17 from Eritrea 9–12, 75, 203 imprisonment during 10, 11, 13 ‘journey home’ 199–200, 201 Mediterranean Sea 3, 8, 10, 11, 37, 69, 78, 122 planning and perseverance 174 Sahara Desert 10, 11 trafficking on route 78 violence and abuse during 10, 13, 75, 214

L labour asylum claimants 111 delays in receiving post-18 migrants’ documents 71 exploitation 69, 70, 142, 151, 191, 197 Italy 69–70, 71, 96 labour market and opportunities for regularization 57, 69–72 legal status and 111, 147 non-asylum-seeking minors 96 seeking viable futures through education and work 146–9 UK 56, 70 unregulated/illegal work 4, 70, 108, 151, 173, 197 working for free 70, 82 language 44, 62, 119–20 Arabic 44, 60, 120, 174 English 44, 119, 147, 178, 182 Italian 44, 119, 120, 147

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language (continued) language barriers 62, 119, 147 Tigrinya 1, 32, 44, 119, 125, 126 leave to remain 2, 5 claims to remain on human rights grounds 101, 212 extended leave to remain 96–7, 106, 211 humanitarian leave 14, 55 indefinite leave to remain 1, 75, 85, 142, 145, 163, 222 time-limited discretionary leave to remain 5, 6, 12, 75, 211 unaccompanied asylum-seeking child leave 211 legal guardian 100, 141 ‘tripartite guardianship arrangement’ 195 legal status 3, 6, 72, 85 access to legal advice and services 98–100, 101 adulthood, transition to 97, 142, 209 awaiting the outcome of decisions 97–8, 103, 105–6, 109–10, 112 cost of legal advice 98, 99 criminal record and 108–9 education and 65, 86, 147, 181 emotional and mental wellbeing 93, 103, 106, 112, 143, 145, 148, 153–4, 160–1, 164–7, 188, 192 freedom and 86–7, 88 friendships and relationships 151, 186–9 global search for 109–12, 224 health and 97–8, 106, 112, 191 intermediary actors 101–2, 105 Italy 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 104, 105 labour and 111, 147 legal limbo 33, 86, 100, 103, 105, 110 ‘legal passing’ 129, 132 legal and policy instruments at European level 94–6 legal and policy instruments at national level 96–8 legal status hampered by age assessments 104–5

lying, legality and the rule of law 106–9 NGOs and 99, 100 rights, entitlements, legal protections and 97, 105, 112 serendipity of 94, 100–3 UK 96–7, 98–100, 102, 104 see also irregular migration; leave to remain; undocumented migrant Libya 11, 114, 174, 176, 197, 204 Libyan Coast Guard 223 Life Project Planning Framework 95, 141, 222 life projects 2, 3, 4, 176, 201 limbo 1, 224 legal limbo 33, 86, 100, 103, 105, 110 protracted limbo in young adulthood 9, 142

M May, Theresa 122 media 122, 205, 209, 218, 219 hostile environment generated by 27, 130–1, 214 vilification of unaccompanied young people 160, 214 Mediterranean Sea 3, 8, 10, 11, 37, 69, 78, 122 see also journey mental health see emotional and mental wellbeing migration crisis of migration management 9 health and 34 migration crisis 8 migration governance 3 onwards migration 206–7 as part of life course 217 secondary migration 14–15, 40, 57, 93, 109, 118, 149–51, 188, 199, 216, 217 wellbeing and 30–2 see also economic migration; irregular migration; youth migration migration policy see policy missing minors 12, 58 registered as ‘missing’ from institutional care 3, 57–8, 60, 82, 108, 183, 213

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N National Asylum Support Service 213 networks 58, 176 contact with support networks in countries of origin 204 social networks, importance of 17, 30, 70, 176, 207–8, 219 social networks and integration 181–2 social networks on the move 175–6 transnational and collective networks 41 young people as relational and networked beings 218 see also friendships, connections and relationships NGOs (non-governmental organizations) 12, 38, 42, 46, 63, 130 accommodation facilities 173 family reunification 191 friendships and relationships 179–80, 181, 189 legal representation/status and 99, 100 migrants’ emotional and mental wellbeing 155, 165, 167, 169 targeted by national and EU Home Affairs agencies 69 Norway 67

P persecution 2, 78, 81, 192 based on sexual orientation 16, 82, 87 blood feuds 15–16, 83, 192 religious persecution 99 right to refugee status and 81, 106–7, 217 policy 211 adulthood, transition to 209, 210, 221 ‘becoming’ notions in 224–5 dreams and 3, 210 hostile environment 64–9, 72, 211, 219 immigration control policies 9, 72, 223, 224 as inadequate, violent, discriminatory 210 key questions on 226

legal status: legal/policy instruments at European and national level level 94–8 making personal troubles policy issues 25–6, 220–5 migration policy makers 3, 211, 215 policy harmonization for unaccompanied minors 94–5, 96 policy intentions/real-world relevance disconnection 3, 216–17 policy vacuum 209 political nature of 215 statecentric views of migration 38, 73, 225 welfare provision/immigration enforcement intersection 57, 63–9, 108, 154, 155, 166, 170 see also Italy/UK welfare/ immigration regime comparison; wellbeing politics geopolitics 150, 224 identity and belonging 121–4 political economy and wellbeing 19, 34 political identities 123 politicization of benefits and social care services 58 politicization of mental wellbeing 35, 154, 171 politics of exhaustion 9, 217 politics of migration research 53–4 politics of safety 76, 80–1, 85, 92 politics of voice and ownership of stories 53 wellbeing as politically undermined 210–16 wellbeing, political nature of 18, 19, 34–5, 209 pride, sense of 33, 112, 119–20, 127, 179, 201 in cities and localities 113, 117 wellbeing and 21

R racism 117, 122, 131, 140, 186, 200 age assessment, racialized component of 105, 131

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refugee crisis 4, 8, 48, 205, 209 Syrian refugee crisis 220 refugee/migration camps 69, 205 bonding in 174–5 visiting family members in 199–200 see also Calais ‘Jungle’ refugees as ‘ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances’ 18 mobility/choice negative relationship 214 refugee status 5, 107, 109, 210–11, 214 Albanians 102 persecution and right to 81, 106–7, 217 refused asylum seeker 14, 55, 66, 99 disengagement from authorities/ system 66 health services, access to 65 labour market 70, 71 mental health 77 see also appeal rights exhausted religion 124–6, 202 religious persecution 99 remittances 71, 90, 114, 193, 198, 201 research and methodology 3–4, 37–54, 225 aims 18, 38 analysis of data 47–8 arts-based methodologies 46, 50, 51, 123 countries of origin 3, 38, 40 critical policy analysis 43 ethics 48 evidence 51–3 freedom of information requests from all local authorities 47 interviews with welfare and support providers and officials 47 Italy 38, 39 Italy/UK comparison: research context and samples 51 limits of the sample 50–1 methodology: inclusive, mutually beneficial, enriching 38, 41 narrative and storytelling 51–2 overall approach 38–41 participant observation/ethnography 45–6

participatory peer research 38, 41–3, 53 politics of migration research 53–4 politics of voice and ownership of stories 53 positionality and reflexivity 45, 49–50 research design 38 semi-structured narrative interviews 43–5 social ecological model 41 strengths and limitations 50–1 strengths and limits of artistic methods and the ‘tyranny of participation’ 52 survey 24–5 UK/England 38, 39 unaccompanied minors 38 return 6, 9, 141, 213, 222–3, 225 as ‘best interests’ of young migrants 132 as durable solution 222 forced return 56, 170, 193, 222 governments’ neglect to follow up after 84–5 identity and belonging 132–3 repatriation 3, 222 return to the country of entry 57 safe return 83–6 ‘voluntary’ return 83–4, 157, 213 see also deportation

S safe country 76–7, 81–3, 85, 150 safety 92, 138 at ‘home’ vs host country 79–80, 139 politics of safety 76, 80–1, 85, 92 safe return 83–6 search for safety 75–6, 77–80, 92 Salvini, Matteo 212 sanctuary cities 114 Sen, A.K. 28 serendipity 44, 73, 91, 151, 174, 211 of legal status 94, 100–3 sexual orientation homosexuality 82, 87, 115, 179 persecution based on 16, 82, 87 sex work 70, 197

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Shpresa 16–17 smugglers 110, 175 social ecological model 26–7, 34, 41 social media 44, 124, 129, 192, 204, 208 Facebook 89, 176, 191, 193, 204, 205 transnational virtual connections 193, 204–6 WhatsApp 85, 193 sociological imagination 25–6, 34 statecentric approach 38, 73, 225 stigma 22, 112, 201, 208 Sudan 40, 114, 174, 176, 196 Sweden 67, 220 Syria 4, 213, 220

T Tarakhel vs. Switzerland 217 terrorism 131 transfers 57, 159, 221 transit from Italy to other EU member states 4, 57, 173–5, 207 transit shelter 4, 155, 173 transnationalism 193–4, 207–8 building transnational futures and aspirations 193, 206–7 lost in the world, a transnational responsibility 207–8 transnational and collective networks 41 transnational economic expectations 193 transnational family ties 193, 194–202 transnational friendships 193, 202–4 transnational identity 192–4, 196 transnational marriage and parenthood 193, 199, 200, 201 transnational virtual connections 193, 204–6

U UASC (unaccompanied asylum-seeking child) 8 UK (United Kingdom) 56 asylum system 71, 96, 102, 103, 210–11, 220

austerity cuts 58, 63, 98, 221 belonging in 117–18 Brexit 64, 122, 223 ‘care leaver’ 63, 94 England 3–4, 38, 39 family reunification 12, 194 futures in 138, 140, 141 ‘hostile environment’ 64–7, 72, 211 ‘iron rod regime’ 56, 66, 72, 182, 211 legal status in 96–7, 98–100, 102, 104 surveillance 64–5 time-limited discretionary leave to remain 5, 6, 12, 75, 211 unaccompanied minors arriving in 4, 220, 221 wellbeing 21–2 work in 56, 70 see also Home Office; Italy/UK welfare/immigration regime comparison UN (United Nations) Millennium Development Goals 24 Sustainable Development Goals 23 unaccompanied minors 1, 3, 38, 209, 210, 220–1 applications for asylum 4 as citizens of the world 224 drivers of migration 5 microsystems 26 origin of 5 policy harmonization for 94–5, 96 ‘unaccompaniedness’ 183, 194, 208, 218 see also missing minors UNCRC (UN Convention on the Rights of the Child) 6, 94, 123, 227 undocumented migrants 1, 14, 40, 93 collective action against labelling 123–4 education, access to 65, 71 fear and uncertainty 78 health issues 191 hosting undocumented peers 178 United States 220 see also invisibility strategies; irregular migration; legal status

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UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees) 95, 103, 109, 110, 111, 152 UN Refugee Convention (1951) and Protocol (1967) 5, 81, 106–7, 108, 151, 210 US (United States) 123, 146, 185 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals 220

V violence Afghanistan 205–6 domestic violence 16 during migration journey 10, 13, 75, 214 sexual violence and rape 7, 11, 16, 163, 179 symbolic and real violent of border controls 41 wellbeing, undermined by institutional and symbolic violence 213–14 vulnerability 135, 215, 217 ‘Europe’s new vulnerable’ 131 imposed by welfare systems in tandem with immigration control 215 ontological frailty theory 218 vulnerable children 6, 128, 184, 214

political nature of 18, 19, 34–5, 209 poverty alleviation 22, 27 reclaiming wellbeing 216–17 relational nature of 19, 26, 33–4 subjective wellbeing 18, 21, 22, 26, 66, 89, 114, 153, 192, 216 UK 21–2 undermined by institutional and symbolic violence 213–14 welfare provision/immigration enforcement intersection 57, 63–9, 108, 154, 155, 166, 170 young people’s wellbeing conceptions vs welfare and immigration structures 76 see also emotional and mental wellbeing wellbeing, measuring of 21–5 challenges of measuring wellbeing 24–5 ECM framework 23 HDI 22, 23 Human Development Initiative 22 Multidimensional Poverty Index 22 OECD, ‘wellbeing’ measure 22 ONS 22–3, 24 Oxford Poverty 22 Wright Mills, C. 25–6, 220, 223

X xenophobia 6, 219, 227

W ‘waithood’ 142, 187, 226 wellbeing 209 applying a sociological lens to understanding wellbeing 25–7 capabilities approach and 27–9, 112, 224 as collective pursuit 218–20 conceptualizations of 18, 19, 20–2, 23, 25, 28, 32, 216, 220 cross-cultural perspectives on 32–3 economic wellbeing 23, 136 identity and belonging 124 individualization of 19, 35 migration and 30–2 multiple transitions and 29–30 political economy and 19, 34 as politically undermined 210–16

Y Young Lives study 194 youth clubs 63, 127, 177, 202 youth migration 1–2, 4–5, 8, 54 migration as transformative experience 7, 114–17, 225 parents/family members’ decision on 13, 77–8, 81 politics of definition 7–9 ‘separated child’ 8 see also migration youth migration drivers 1, 2 freedom and safety 76 from Afghanistan 13, 67 from Albania 15–17, 82–3 from Eritrea 10, 12, 75 see also persecution

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“A perceptive and nuanced study of the circumstances of unaccompanied child migrants in England and in Italy. The authors provide a powerful case for radical rethinking of current approaches to the protection of children.” Jacqueline Bhabha, Harvard Law School

“This book offers a profound analysis of the concept of wellbeing for migrant youths, especially how they are affected by politics-driven public policies. It makes their voices – about their hurdles, strengths, fears and hopes – loud and clear.” François Crépeau, McGill University

Elaine Chase is Associate Professor in Education, Health and International Development at UCL Institute of Education. Jennifer Allsopp is Postdoctoral Fellow in International Migration at Harvard Graduate School of Education and Coordinator of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard University.

This book examines the factors affecting the health and wellbeing of young people as they transition to adulthood under the shadow of migration control. Drawing on unique longitudinal data, it illuminates how they conceptualize wellbeing for themselves and others in contexts of prolonged and politically induced uncertainty. The authors offer an in-depth analysis of the experiences of over one hundred unaccompanied young migrants, primarily from Afghanistan, Albania and Eritrea. They show the lengths these young people will go to in pursuit of safety, security and the futures they aspire to. Interdisciplinary in nature, the book champions a new political economy analysis of wellbeing in the context of migration and demonstrates the urgent need for policy reform.

ISBN 978-1-5292-0903-7

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