Nearly a decade after a collective awakening to the crisis of unaccompanied minor migration in 2014, migrant children have reemerged in (im)migration debates as the public learns of the pervasiveness of their entry into hazardous low-wage labor occupations. Recent reporting tells of children exposed to exploitative labor practices, illness, injury, and, in the most egregious cases, the loss of workers’ limbs or lives. Migrant children have been found working in construction, food manufacturing and packaging factories, and other occupations across 20 states (login required), including Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, and Virginia; in Nebraska slaughterhouses; doing fish processing and house roofing, and in greenhouses and restaurant kitchens across Massachusetts (login required); in Alabama’s Hyundai Motor Manufacturing plants; and meatpacking plants (login required) in Wisconsin.
That children endure these conditions is often framed as connected to neglect at best or trafficking at worst. Some suggest that the U.S. government’s unwillingness or inability (requires login) to provide oversight in the settlement of children placed with sponsors has something to do with this. Others demonize children’s families and respond with the imprisonment and threat of deportation of parents who permit underage children to work. Reports that children who are placed with nonparent sponsors feel obligated to repay migration debt and are charged with assisting in daily expenses, however true, reinforce the notion that it is individual decisions and behaviors that lead to child migrant labor.
This essay offers a different perspective. I first situate Latin American-origin child migrant labor within its historical and contemporary context to argue that child migrant labor in the U.S. is not new, but an artifact of exploitative industries. Then, following a critical youth studies perspective that centers immigrant youth’s agency, I rely on my research to explain several reasons why unaccompanied minor migrant youth enter into and persist in exploitative jobs. These reasons include their urgent financial need to independently care for themselves in order to survive in the U.S. and moral obligations to support their left-behind families and communities. Knowing this, an adequate response to unaccompanied child migrant labor should move away from punishing immigrant families and instead support them by turning attention to the political and economic conditions that relegate children to exploitative jobs.
Unaccompanied Minors in Context
Despite claims that the United States is in the midst of “a new child labor crisis,” historians find evidence of European- and Asian-origin child migrant labor that dates as far back as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with Mexican-origin children joining the ranks of child laborers in the U.S. in the 1920s. Ivón Padilla-Rodríguez explains that in the early twentieth century, “undocumented Mexican children arrived to the United States with the help of transnational human smugglers known as coyotes; had their labor exploited on commercial farms; were denied educational opportunity and subjected to the U.S. deportation regime as unaccompanied workers and members of ‘wet farm families’ in the 1940s and 1950s.” Child migrants were among those recruited and smuggled into the U.S. during the Bracero Program (1942‒1964) as a means to redress labor shortages in the agriculture and railroad industries during World War II. The rise of Mexican and Central American migration after 1965 brought with it a rise in the number of children migrating north, including unaccompanied youth in search of work.
Child migrant laborers arriving to the U.S. are oftentimes already workers in their origin countries. Across Latin American countries, the average working age is between 13 and 17, but some research shows children as young as six or seven, or in my work, children as young as three or four, engage in paid labor in the public sphere or unpaid care work at home. Children grow up making decisions about their lives independently or in collaboration with adult figures and establish aspirations for their futures within the structures of opportunities available to them, however constrained. Migration—whether seasonal, internal, regional, or international—is one pathway to survival for some and mobility for others.
Unaccompanied child migration is also addressed thoughtfully in a survey study of 375 children by sociologists Erin Hamilton and Maryann Bylander. Their study shows that adolescent migrants (aged 12‒17) are more likely to migrate than their younger counterparts (aged 0‒11) and to do so without a parent. Given their life stage at migration, adolescent migrants are more likely to make migration decisions with consideration for their transition into adulthood. And while many migrate to escape conditions of poverty, violence, and environmental degradation that displace them personally, they also set out to change the lives and living conditions of those that they love.
What existing research shows us is that migration has long been a response to structural violence and oppression—a strategic decision migrant families, including children, employ to secure a safer, more livable future for themselves and their families in the short- and long term. My research in Los Angeles corroborates this. Spanning 2012‒2018, I conducted ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with 75 Central American and Mexican young adults who arrived as unaccompanied minors ages 11‒17 between 2003 and 2013. This work, which focuses on how unaccompanied youth workers grow up in the U.S., shows us that migrant child labor has sustained contemporary industries such as garment manufacturing, fruit packing, construction, janitorial and hospitality, and domestic work in the decade prior to the 2014 migrant crisis.
Unlike many of the young people included in recent reporting on this issue, the participants in my research entered the U.S. undetected. That is, they were not apprehended and detained by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security or processed to be placed with a sponsor through the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Though not designated “unaccompanied children” by the state, these young people experienced the full reality of growing up unaccompanied, which relegates them to low-wage labor for survival. Though unaccompanied, however, many of these young migrants were not alone. Their stories tell us of migrant children mindful of family futures and embedded in cross-border care networks.
Leaving Families Behind
Unaccompanied children express mixed motives for migration and an array of family dynamics that inform their decisions to migrate. It is often the case in my research that study participants (and their older siblings) are the first in their families to migrate, leaving parents behind to seek work in the U.S. This means parents often have not been able to provide children with first-hand information about the migration journey or how to make a new life in Los Angeles. Still, having grown up in poverty and with little opportunity for meaningful education and work that would support the futures youth imagined for themselves and their families—including access to stable housing, food, and medicine, as well as the right not to migrate—young people make decisions to leave families behind.
Youth leaving is not without resistance. When 17-year-old Jesse left El Salvador, he explained, “Yo no quería venirme… I didn’t want to come here but my grandma—my mom’s mom—she’s sick. I would work in the fields with my grandma, that’s what I was used to. I didn’t want to leave her. I didn’t want to leave them [mother and grandmother] but it was necessary, I didn’t have an option.” Jesse lacked options in a El Salvador, a country with a high rate of poverty that is, in part, driven and perpetuated by low education levels and high crime rates, which affect access to health care, food, and sanitation. Without “an option,” Jesse’s moral obligation to care for his sick grandmother, with whom he grew up and worked, prompted his migration.
A Guatemalan Maya woman, Caterina, also migrated at 17. She explained that she worked with her mom at the time: “I would help her in the fields, and we would make food for the workers and everything. When I told her I wanted to leave, she said, ‘No, don’t go. I know it’s not fair that you must work, but don’t leave.’” Caterina contemplated her mother’s request but resolved to migrate anyway. “I want to get ahead,” Caterina explained, “My dream is to be a doctor to help impoverished children in Guatemala that can’t study or afford their basic needs. I told her, ‘I want to go.’ A part of me didn’t want to come here. I didn’t want to leave my mom alone but another part of me did want to come here because I had no way of getting ahead. So, I told my mom, ‘I’m going to go. I’m very sorry, but I want to study. I don’t have that possibility here.’”
During interviews with Jesse and Caterina, both participants described imagining a Los Angeles full of possibilities. Jesse recalls that he “imagined that it would be like… I don’t know. I didn’t think it would be like this because you see the movies and everything. But you go through a lot to get here and then you suffer once you’re here.”
Care across Borders
I’ve written extensively about the efforts that unaccompanied youth workers make to survive. Many, like Jesse and Caterina, find that arrival in the U.S. is not the reprieve they envisioned. Instead, arrival is the beginning of the journey of repaying migration debt, which ranged from $3,000 to $11,000 among my study participants. It is also the beginning of learning what it means to be unaccompanied in the U.S. having to locate housing, employment, food, and clothing, alongside learning that, in this country, “se paga todo.” That is, everything costs money.
For Caterina, arrival in Los Angeles did not secure an education or the possibility of “getting ahead.” Being unaccompanied meant that she, too, would have to focus on survival within the punishing occupations that journalists have so vividly described. This focus creates what I refer to as “work primacy” in which work and workplaces become the central organizing features of youth’s lives.
Caterina entered the garment industry, where she worked Monday through Friday, and later found weekend work at a restaurant. Her seven-day workweek schedule left little time to do much else: “Having to work seven days per week is tough because I also have other responsibilities like cleaning the house, or having to wash my clothes, or cooking for myself. I have responsibilities at home and then responsibilities outside [of home].”
Over time, youth learn that unlike in their home countries, other immigrant and nonimmigrant teens growing up in the U.S. are often not low-wage workers themselves. Developing what I’ve termed an “emergent frame of reference,” minor migrants compare their everyday lived experience to children with parents who work so that their children can attend K‒12 schools.
The pain of leaving home, the disillusionment of life in the U.S., and the financial and physical burdens of low-wage labor exploitation are compounded by youth’s sense that they would not have endured such hardships had their parents been with them. As Caterina put it, “Sometimes I say to myself, ‘If I had my parents here, thing would be different. They would support me and encourage me.’ Unfortunately, that’s not the case. It makes it hard for me.”
Because so many youth are members of transnational families, meaning that their families are split across national borders, they not only consider the financial and emotional costs of their survival, but that of left-behind families. Some young people might have a directive, such as building a home, starting a business, or, as in Jesse’s case, securing medical care for an ailing relative. Others are charged with the everyday expenses of their household. One study participant explained that his mother and grandmother, “Usan el dinero para comprar comida, ropa, jabón para lavar (use the money to buy food, clothes, soap to wash [their clothes]).” Another participant said, “my mom uses the money for water, the telephone, to pay for some little thing here and there, but also for food and bills.”
Again, time does not stand still for unaccompanied youth workers. While coming of age in the U.S., youth’s families are aging across borders. As parents leave the workforce and become ill or pass away, the siblings and cousins who remained may face the same limited opportunities that migrant youth had themselves faced. Thus, these siblings and cousins embark on their own age of migration as they feel the weight of displacement.
One unaccounted for component of youth’s persistence in low-wage labor is the desire to protect families from the deep suffering that they have endured. To exemplify this, I tell the story of a young Salvadoran man, Danilo, in my forthcoming University of California Press book, Sin Padres, Ni Papeles (expected 2024). Danilo arrived in northeast Los Angeles at 15 with the goal of sending money home to his mom and siblings so that she could protect them from the gang violence and poverty that motivated his migration. He explained that ten years after his arrival in Los Angeles and working a series of hospitality jobs, he continues to work low-wage jobs to keep his siblings in school and to “keep them busy” by buying “Playstations, computers, so I could keep them home, not outside,” where they would be exposed to gang violence. This is common for undocumented low-wage workers who arrived in the U.S. as unaccompanied minors and wished to buffer their loved ones from sharing their fate.
Imagining Family Futures
The stories of migrant child laborers in the U.S. that I and several others tell as past and present promise to be our foreseeable future if we stand idly by. And, while growing awareness of the conditions under which children work in the U.S. motivates calls for the immediate eradication of child labor, it is important to acknowledge the myriad forces that contribute to youth’s entry into and persistence in low-wage work. In the absence of opportunities for education and employment and under conditions of extreme poverty, children begin working in home countries to support themselves and contribute to families at young ages. Origin-country governments must act on behalf of children by investing in access to public education, health-care services, and employment that restores fair wages, safe work conditions, and the human dignity of children’s caregivers.
In the U.S., the absence of immigration policies enacts violence on immigrant families and communities and forces children to migrate alone to secure their individual and familial survival. Border enforcement strategies that do little to stop migration but do much to increase the cost of migration result in children’s debt bondage, which increases the urgency of finding work, however exploitative.
As such, our response should not be punitive toward children or families. We should aim to foster conditions that defend the right of children not to migrate and, if they do, to protect these children once in the U.S. We can do this by clearing immigration backlogs that keep migrant adults and children in legal limbo, thereby granting the opportunity for authorized labor and the confidence to report labor violations. We must also stop treating family separation as a viable deterrence tactic, as it not only renders some children unnecessarily unaccompanied but also makes more dire the family circumstances to which children feel morally obligated to respond.
If unaccompanied children are not alone but embedded in family units and in networks of care that motivate their endurance of living and working conditions that so violently harm them, perhaps the solution is for us to also care.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
