Legal Integrity and Recognition

This chapter examines the centrality of legal status as a building block for security and constructing a future in Europe. It engages with the realities of living with or without legal recognition in England and Italy and the impact this has on young people. The chapter considers these experiences within international and national frameworks of young people's rights and 'best interests'. It also looks at the serendipitous ways in which access to such rights are in fact socially constructed. As the chapter highlights, 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.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of youth migration. 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. 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 struggle to formulate meaningful and workable asylum and immigration policies. The chapter then briefly outlines the differing journeys that young people took in order to arrive in Europe. The chapter explains that the book focuses 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.

Emotional and Mental Wellbeing

This chapter assesses the central importance of health, and in particular mental health, to a sense of wellbeing. It considers 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. The chapter 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, health services can act as additional arms of immigration control and surveillance systems. The chapter then 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.

Identity and Belonging

This chapter explores identity and belonging as central tenets to young people's 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. 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. The chapter then explores 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, it juxtaposes young people's subjective ideas with those contained within political and policy discourses about where young people should belong.

Constructing Viable Futures as ‘Adults’

This chapter investigates how young people seek to construct viable futures through the process of migration. 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 forces a reconsideration of policies and 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.