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REFERENCES
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Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Journal of Social History
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS
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938 journal of social history summer 2005
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 939
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940 journal of social history summer 2005
begin to understand the degree to which children have a hi
ern world and one that, as many historians have demonstra
doses of child labor, will the readers of the New York Times b
Kristof's point.9
While the history of child labor is useful for our underst
"see" contemporary globalization, our knowledge of the his
other necessary part of our vision. As a consequence of earl
United States became both a land of different races and a nati
a product of the intersection of several worlds and of immigr
continents. The migrations ofthe 17 th and 18th century v
subsequent generations. Sometimes they had treacherous c
the case of Africans caught in the Atlantic slave trade, and t
destruction of native peoples in the Americas. But the mov
ways proceed in these fearsome and humiliating ways that
photographs portend. Many immigrants to the United Sta
and expectantly starting in the 18th century because they
which America became a byword as a promising outcome of m
rians of the United States have taken note of the fact that m
varied consequences for children with some becoming succ
of the migration, while others became its victims, and that m
ences were sharply etched along racial lines.11 More recentl
as Alejandro Portes have usefully distinguished between vol
migrations and observed how these tend to be racially pattern
not all, immigrants who came willingly to the United States
century were European and even among these some were "rac
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is to say that t
scribed as if they were distinct races.13 It is yet to be determ
current immigrants, almost all of them of non-European ori
similar sharply drawn racial boundaries, or whether they will
racial tendencies have subsided. The degree to which migra
to be racially defined will have huge consequences for thei
race, unlike ethnicity, has historically been viewed as an inhe
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the presence of large number
ties (Africans and Amerindians) was a distinctly American
experience. Today, unlike the past, even countries like Den
the Netherlands have substantial numbers of racial minorities who have mi-
grated as part of the globalizing process. Will their children remain ostracized
outsiders, like the Jews of early twentieth century Europe or like the Chinese of
the late 19th century United States (who were voluntary migrants but viewed as
racial outsiders)? Or will the children of millions of non-European immigrants
in today's Los Angeles be like European immigrants into early twentieth century
New York, strangers with hopeful futures?14
Between 1955 and 1991, the numbers and proportion of Asians and Latin
Americans who have migrated voluntarily to the United States has mush-
roomed. In the two years, 1990-1991, a total of almost three and one-half mii?
lion immigrants were admitted legally to the United States?a number larger
than at any previous point in American history. Of that number, less than 10
percent were of European birth, while the rest were a combination of Mexican,
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 941
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942 journal of social history summer 2005
understudied product of contemporary migration, especially sin
of those who leave has dramatically changed.
Family migration has never been a process in which all member
necessarily move together. Indeed, much of migration history c
assembling of families in order to underwrite a family process of
success. Like those who migrate today, people in the past also m
across borders, with relatives in far distant places. Today, in th
stant communication and rapid transportation, this is becomin
normal way of life. Globalization has not only made migration
but has affected the family decisions that frame migration. Man
thousands of Filipino women (some have estimated the total to b
lion) have traveled to Europe, the Middle East, and to the United
other people's houses, take care of their elderly, their sick and thei
most cases, these women leave their children behind with grand
fathers or other relatives as they send good parts of their wages
the lives and prospects of their children and other family mem
to return to better lives in the Philippines. Very often these mi
for a few months, but for many years.
Historians are quite familiar with the pattern of transient mig
the height of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, i
teenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of me
including children, behind when they came to the United Stat
Brazil to find work. They sent back their wages on a regular bas
ten themselves returned after several years' absence. Sometimes,
and forth repeatedly. The Chinese tried to do the same, but wer
the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, singled them out as the fir
whom a specific embargo was imposed and thereby stopped most
tory process. But Italians and Poles did it regularly and Mexic
do so into the twentieth-first century. In Mexico today, 41%
heads have had some migratory experience to the United States,
households have a social connection to someone living in the U
Americans today are governed by ideals of family reunification
decided that the family's physical preservation is a desirable par
icy, a policy enshrined in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. (As I writ
being re thought by the Bush administration in its proposals for te
ers.) So we tend to find migration that disrupts a family's phy
troubling and even pathological. But, international migrations,
pany international capital and information as part of globaliza
as in the past, do not take issues of family preservation into a
day, as in the past, families adapt and use the pressures and or op
presents. Family life, it is well to remember, is a process as muc
fact, and migration often accentuates one part of that process
the 17th and 18th centuries, when travel was hard, expensive,
the rupture of movement over the seas for the poor, such as inde
was usually permanent. In the 19th and 20th centuries, as the
improved and became faster and cheaper, family ruptures were m
porary. With travel ever cheaper and faster and when people
go almost anywhere by air, some families have become genuinely
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 943
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944 journal of social history summer 2005
tion for children today. Identity for women on the move and fo
they leave behind are deeply caught up in this process as tradit
social reproduction are altered. Similarly identity is changing for
may shuttle between schools in the United States or Europe wh
the care of their working mothers, while spending vacations wit
in Latin America or elsewhere.
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 945
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946 journal of social history summer 2005
migrate to take advantage of American higher education, e
ate and professional schools. Some of these students are privat
are supported by their governments who save themselves the
ing in advanced laboratories and facilities. It is possible to i
allel migration is taking place, one in which poorer young
white collar skills. For these aspirants, even deprived and u
elementary schools and high schools provide rich resources. W
to rethink some of the conclusions about educational depriv
come to as historians. As Kathryn Anderson-Leavitt shows in
volume, the desire to get beyond the school-yard gate, no m
school, may depend on where you stand. Those migrating f
may find the universal education offered in the United States
portunity. In the early twentieth century, many of these mig
were simply incorporated into work at an early age. In the U
high school attendance requirements mean that migrating
school, and bilingual classrooms have become a necessary part
tion into an age-defined curriculum. As a result, ambitious
greater opportunities than in the past.
In the United States, it is also possible that we are seeing a
the competitive educational success of migrants (from Russia
ample), may actually be displacing older ethnic groups from
in a newly redefined and globalized economy. The effects of g
ucation in the United States are not hard to find. Over the p
have become familiar with recurrent educational "crises" as st
ment at various school levels reveal deficiencies among Am
dren. The schooling speed-up that has resulted as we try to cr
tion into students earlier in their lives and measure them ag
norms, culminating most recently in the "No Child Left Beh
Bush Administration, is beginning to squeeze our definitio
the role of play and a leisurely child-centered development
time when the social placement and success of their offsprin
more urgent and consequential to middle class families eage
own and their children's status, the new globalized economy m
of redefining childhood expectations in the West as Asian
dren from elsewhere displace those who had assumed they
the line.33 Thus, not only our definitions of assimilation, bu
childhood may be forced to change in the context of the glo
the present day.
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 947
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948 journal of social history summer 2005
to urban brothels has long provided a means for family surv
mobility for the girls.41 Bales also makes clear that the conte
sex industry has vastly exacerbated this local pattern and t
its need for young girls both insatiable and ever more dan
understanding that prostitution has long been a rural to urb
for those we today define as children, but whom their famili
may designate as merely young earners, providing supplement
ily coffers. Like so many other features of globalization, mod
about what is appropriate to childhood as well as when childho
are deeply implicated in the discussion. It may well be the
the differences in how childhood is defined in various parts
prostitution may actually be growing in places where it exist
be encroaching on younger children. Today, globalization m
to children for sexual purposes, including for internet pornog
where in the world. The problem is exacerbated by the fact t
tion is still available in other places while sex with children i
in the western world. The very construction of the innocent
may thus increase the exploitation of children elsewhere. T
ject especially vexed, since it at once titillates our imaginat
our most vociferous condemnations. It may also be an area
is seriously increasing child endangerment.
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 949
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950 journal of social history summer 2005
Those discussions should include an understanding of educatio
mobility, of family relationships, as well as subjects such as ch
and other survival strategies among children on the margins.
understand how the images of children we carry around as citize
have been framed historically and how these frames organize
rary responses. An exhibit like that of Salgado makes us aware
our world is changing, but that alone cannot be enough. As t
before our eyes, we want to know exactly how it is changing, w
ticipate from our historical knowledge and what kinds of chang
der changes in migration patterns, are almost entirely unanticip
children's migrations needs to be situated in a much larger fie
knowledge than even the very best journalist can provide.
ENDNOTES
2. See Paula S. Fass, "Children and Globalization," Journal of Social History (Summer
2003), 963-977 for an explanation of why I believe the United States provides a good
basis for exploring issues of globalization in many parts of the world today.
3. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the
British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (Cambridge, 1995).
4. See Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: A Passage ofthe Peopling of America on the
Eve ofthe Revolution (New York, 1986), 302-312.
5. See Evan Haefeli and Kevin Sweeney, Captors and Captives: The 1704 French and
Indian Raid on Deerfield (Amherst, MA, 2003).
7. One of the earliest public examinations of child sexual exploitation which I have
seen was in France in the mid-nineteenth century. See Ambrose Tardieu, "Etude Medico-
Legale sur les Attentats Aux Moeurs," Annales d'Hygiene Publique et de Medicine Legale,
ser. 2, vol. 9 (1858), 137-198.1 would like to thank Katharine Norris for this reference.
8. Nicholas Kristof, "Inviting All Democrats," New; York Times, January 14, 2004, p.
A23. For the flood of condemnatory letters, see, New York Times, January 16, 2004, p. 22.
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 951
11. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery/American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Vir?
ginia (New York, 1975), has made the boldest statement concerning how white and black
immigrants were played off against each other in the 17 th century. This argument about
the uses of "whiteness" has been pursued by a host of other historians; e.g. David Roediger,
The Wages ofWhiteness (New York, 1991).
12. Alejandro Portes and Dag MacLeod, "Educational Progress of Children of Immi?
grants: The Roles of Class, Ethnicity and School Context," in Interdisciplinary Perspectives
on the New Immigration: The New Immigrant and American Schools, edited by Marcelo M.
Suarez-Orozco, et al. (New York, 2001) and the contributions by an array of historians in
Coerced and Free Migration: Gbbal Perspectives, edited by David Eltis (Stanford, 2002).
13. John Higham, Strangers in the Land (Boston, 1948), Reed Ueda, Postwar Immigrant
America: A Social History (Boston, 1994).
14. For the racialization of Mexican migrants in the Southwest early in the twentieth
century, see Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Child Abduction (New York, 1999).
16. Ruben G. Rumbaut, The Immigrant Experience for Families and Children, ed. Richard
D. Alba, et al., Congressional Seminar, June 4, 1998, Spivak Program in Applied So?
cial Research and Social Policy: American Sociological Association (Washington, D. C.
1999), 9.
17. Douglas S. Massey, in The Immigrant Experience for Families and Children, 10.
18. Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York, 2002).
19. Gary Orfield, Mark D. Bachmeier, David R. James, and Tamela Eitle, "Deepening
Segration in American Public Schools: A Special Report from the Harvard Project on
School Desegration," in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the New Immigration: The New
Immgirant and American Schools, eds. Suarez-Orozco, et al., 121.
20. Rhacel Salazar Parrenas, Servants of Gbbalization: Wbmen, Migration and Domestic
Work (Stanford, 2001), Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Gbbal
Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York, 2002).
22. Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study of International Invest?
ment and Labor (Cambridge, 1984); Sassen, "Notes on the Incorporation of Third World
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952 journal of social history summer 2005
Women into Wage Labor through Immigration and Offshore Producti
Migration Review, 18 (1984), 1144-67. For single migrating women ear
eth century see Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor
Generation (Ithaca, 1990).
23. Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Int
(Glencoe, IL, 1955), especially 3-131,
29. Margaret A. Gibson and John U. Ogbu, Minority Status and Schoolin
Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities (West Port, CT, 1991),
Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco et al, eds., The New Immigrant and American
31. Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Ital?
ians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (Cambridge, 1988). See also,
Paula S. Fass, Outside ln: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (Ox?
ford, 1989).
32. For a reassessment of the assimilationist model, see Richard Alba and Victor Nee,
Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cam-
brige, MA, 2003), also Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orosco, Children of Immigration, 4-5,
and passim.
33. For the squeeze on Japanese school children, see Norma Field, "The Child as Laborer
and Consumer: The Disappearance of Childhood in Contemporary Japan," in Children
and the Politics of Culture, ed. Sharon Stephens (Princeton, 1995). Every where we look
today we hear more and more about the "hurried child," a concept that assumes that our
earlier view of childhood is immutable.
34. For southern rural migrations, see Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America's Un-
derclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York, 1992); for the Oakies, James Gre?
gory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York,
1989); for the rural to rural Norwegian migration, see Jon Gjerde, From Peasants to Farm?
ers: The Migration from Balestand, Norway, to the Upper Middle West (Cambridge, England,
1989).
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CHILDREN IN GLOBAL MIGRATIONS 953
45. See Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the America
American Adolescent Experience (New York, 1999), and
Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-
46. This was true even for some young women, as show
As Richard Rumbaut notes, "Immigration," today "a
the young." Immigrant Experience for Families and Chi
48. See, for example, Anna Peterson, "Latin America: Wars in Central America," The
Encycbpedia of Children and Childhood, ed. Fass, V. 2, 535-536, and Peterson and Kay
Almere Read "Victoms, Heroes, Enemies: Children in Central American Wars, in Hecht,
ed. Minor Omissions, 215?231.
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