Children in global migrations.

The growing reality of movement across borders has become a twenty-first century theme and increasingly a focus for the anxieties and uncertainties about change in our time. When it is paired with children, its potential as a modern form of brutality becomes an almost irresistible excuse for sadness and poignant reflection. The Brazilian photo-journalist Sabastiao Salgado is hardly alone in reaping the emotional and aesthetic harvest of this theme, but his moving exhibit "Migrations: Humanity in Transition--The Children," provides an exceptionally vivid perspective on this issue.

At the Berkeley Art Museum, one of the stops the exhibit made in 2002, it was seen by thousands of people. The normally empty exhibit spaces were jammed and extra galleries were opened to accommodate the huge range of his photographic record as he toured the world through the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the many parts of Asia to observe children, willingly and unwillingly on the move (mostly the latter). Here is a quote from the pamphlet that accompanied the exhibit: "In every crisis situation--whether war, poverty, or natural disaster--children are the greatest victims. The weakest physically, they are invariably the first to succumb to disease or starvation. Emotionally vulnerable, they are unable to understand why they are being forced from their homes, why their neighbors have turned against them, why they are now in a slum surrounded by filth or in a refugee camp and surrounded by sorrow. With no responsibility for their fates, they are by definition innocent."

Children are usually also the most attractive of their species and, however much they may be hostages to fate, their attractiveness is very effectively manipulated by the photographer toward his many purposes. I will argue later that children are hardly entirely victims or entirely innocent, but for now, I want to claim for them the aesthetic appeal of which Salgado and all those gathered to see his work were undoubtedly deeply aware. In today's PR world, where the image often becomes the reality, it is appropriate for us to begin with the images that Salgado, among others, has imprinted in the public imagination as the picture of child migration. As humanity in transit takes center stage in the twenty-first century, it is the children that are most memorable. Again, in the words of the exhibit pamphlet: "Migrations is the story of humanity on the move. It is a story of our times, with profound implications for the generations to come." (1)

It is important for us to consider those implications, and I take for this purpose Salgado's exhibition as my opening text since it helps to define the public mental space usually occupied by children's migration in the context of globalization. We need first to question the assumptions that lie behind this exhibit: that the normal state of child life is stability, and that children are naturally innocent and dependent. These assumptions have become deeply embedded in a Western ideal of childhood that is increasingly broadcast through Western media and international agencies to the rest of the world. In this sense, Salgado's exhibit is an expression of globalization as much as it records the migration that accompanies it. By situating Salgado's sensibility deep within the modern Western vision of childhood and understanding how that sensibility now takes global childhood as its subject, we can begin to appreciate some of the tensions and complexities of the subject we hope to understand.

Contemporary images of child migration usually assume that mass migration is both a new phenomenon and a threat to the stability necessary to child life and its proper development. In this paper I will examine migration historically, as a subject long familiar to American historians, and as a contemporary phenomenon that has new features and significant new consequences "for generations to come." This is not an easy task, not least because the distance on their subjects that historians value is not realizable when examining a subject as protean as globalization, and one that is both now expressing itself and still changing. Historians are nevertheless quite well situated to make these evaluations because, unlike a photographer such as Salgado, historians are accustomed to recording change. Whatever Salgado's philosophical and ethical purposes, his is first of all an aesthetic project one of whose goals is to transform the static photograph into something new and more commensurate with the movement it seeks to record. Salgado longs to expand what photographs can convey and do. For historians, however, fluidity and change define our imaginations and constitute the mental world of our discipline. And American historians, I believe, are especially well situated in this task. I have written elsewhere about why I believe that the history of the United States provides an unusually good point of departure for understanding globalization. (2) Suffice it to say here that many of the ingredients of globalization--a large zone of free trade and largely unimpeded market development, the strategic contribution of rapid communications to that development, and mass immigration and cultural exchange among diverse groups--have been familiar features of American experience for the last two hundred years. I take these to be critical aspects of what we have come to call globalization in the modern world.

Migration and Children in the American Past and Present

The mass movement of populations, whether associated with war or with economic change (and since these are frequently related, to both), is hardly new. During the last several decades, colonial American historians have been hard at work demonstrating the fluidity of the 17th and 18th century world, a period when empires collided and brought large portions of the Americas, Africa, and Asia into the European force field. So expansive was that world, that one historian, David Hancock, has described its innovative and wealthy beneficiaries as Citizens of the World. (3) These collisions created the strong currents that led to an immense migration within the Americas, in Africa, and across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Whatever else they are, today's migrations often follow the trade paths and social patterns established at that point in history. And whatever else these studies demonstrate, they make clear that many European, Amerindian, and African children could expect very little in the way of stability of hearth and home. The upheavals of the 17th and 18th centuries pulled children into their train, among them those as young as 9 or 10 who were kidnapped in London and elsewhere to become indentured servants in the New World. (4) When they were put to work in the "plantations" of North America, they displaced native children from stable villages and practices. (5) By the end of the 17th century, they were likely to meet on those plantations other young people who had been brought in shackles from Africa.

These strangers from three continents were hardly viewed in the terms of our time. Where in today's global perspective we see children, kidnapped or stolen, 17th century ship captains and planters saw cargo and a source of much needed labor (and if the young were girls, also fair sexual game). They were no more or less precious than 20 year olds. In this sense, the picture is entirely altered today, as journalists and others document the plight of 8 or 9 year-old girls working on cloth in India, or 11 year old girls drawn into prostitution in Thailand and Cambodia.

That leap in our imagination of what children ought and ought not to do is the product of Western history and of the development of humanistic sentiments during the last two hundred years. Today, these victims are no longer as they once were, merely a subset of poor people whose poverty makes them vulnerable or desperate. Instead we respond to them as children in a special way and see their exploitation or abuse as unacceptable. This diffusion of western sensibilities to embrace the children of the globe is a significant ingredient of globalization. The change from the 18th century to the 19th century that resulted first in outcries against slavery and finally in organizations against the abuse of children in factory labor required an alteration in Western sensibilities and a new humanitarianism that has been studied by Thomas Haskell and others. (6) By the end of the 19th century, this sensibility was prevalent among the middle classes in Britain, the United States, France, and in other places in the Western world. (7) Because we have inherited that sensibility, globalization today has a very different face than its antecedents did in the 17th century. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Western superiority was clothed in various guises of culture, color, and religion. Today, our western commitment to child protection often incubates a similar sense of superiority which lays a claim to virtue in the vision of a proper childhood. As a result, at just the point when globalization is making knowledge of diverse childhood patterns widely available, age has become a sorting device by which we allocate sympathy and parcel out favor.

What is happening to children in other parts of the globe today is refracted through a Western lens. Some journalists, such as Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times, are conscious of the complex contradictions that these changes introduce, recognizing that for many of the children in third world countries factory work opportunities where they are made available by globalization are often far superior to the work which children have long done exploiting dung heaps for scraps or in home manufacture. For his insights, he has been showered with outraged letters from readers. (8) But historians need to make the public aware that their current view of children (our view of children) is a product of a particular history. This will not resolve the ethical or intellectual dilemmas that globalization poses to the modern sensibility, but it can provide a much wider aperture from which pictures about the present can be viewed and evaluated. In this sense, the new history of children and childhood has come at a strategic moment as a necessary corrective to current popular fixations. Only as we begin to understand the degree to which children have a history in the Western world and one that, as many historians have demonstrated, includes large doses of child labor, will the readers of the New York Times begin to understand Kristof's point. (9)

While the history of child labor is useful for our understanding of how we "see" contemporary globalization, our knowledge of the history of race is another necessary part of our vision. As a consequence of earlier migrations, the United States became both a land of different races and a nation of immigrants, a product of the intersection of several worlds and of immigration from several continents. The migrations of the 17th and 18th century variously influenced subsequent generations. Sometimes they had treacherous consequences, as in the case of Africans caught in the Atlantic slave trade, and the disruptions and destruction of native peoples in the Americas. But the movement did not always proceed in these fearsome and humiliating ways that many of Salgado's photographs portend. Many immigrants to the United States came willingly and expectantly starting in the 18th century because they saw the change for which America became a byword as a promising outcome of migration. (10) Historians of the United States have taken note of the fact that migration had highly varied consequences for children with some becoming successful beneficiaries of the migration, while others became its victims, and that many of the differences were sharply etched along racial lines. (11) More recently, sociologists such as Alejandro Portes have usefully distinguished between voluntary and forced migrations and observed how these tend to be racially patterned. (12) Most, though not all, immigrants who came willingly to the United States before the last half century were European and even among these some were "racialized" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that is to say that they were often described as if they were distinct races. (13) It is yet to be determined whether the current immigrants, almost all of them of non-European origin, will experience similar sharply drawn racial boundaries, or whether they will face a world where racial tendencies have subsided. The degree to which migrant groups continue to be racially defined will have huge consequences for their children, because race, unlike ethnicity, has historically been viewed as an inheritable trait.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the presence of large numbers of racial minorities (Africans and Amerindians) was a distinctly American variant of Western experience. Today, unlike the past, even countries like Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands have substantial numbers of racial minorities who have migrated 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 mushroomed. In the two years, 1990-1991, a total of almost three and one-half million 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, South American and Asian immigrants. In the previous decade, between 1981 and 1990, a total of over one and one half million came from Mexico alone, one half million from the Philippines, over 400,000 from Vietnam, 388,000 from China, 338,000 from Korea and 145,000 from Laos, and more than a quarter million from India. In addition, hundreds of thousands came from a variety of other Latin American countries, the Caribbean, and Asian societies. (15) Today, almost twenty-seven million people in the United States (legally) are foreign born, with a large percentage of these children. (16)

The result is an enormous new American immigrant society, composed of groups whose presence is either entirely new to American experience, or newly important because of sheer size. These migrants are recreating the nature of American cities in all regions of the country where they and their children now often make up one-half or more of the population. Thus in Los Angeles (62%), New York (54.3%), Miami (71.5%), and Orange County (53.7%) immigrants and their children are becoming the dominant population. (17) In the United States, the reopening and massive increase of Asian migration and the unprecedented levels of Latin American immigration hold out the promise of a new non-racialized future. According to Richard Rodriguez, this future will be a hybridized "brown" future. (18) Is this something that all parts of the world, or even the United States with its fraught racial past, can truly hope to realize? If the future of the United States is a brown one, it will be because children lose their consciousness of race in the process of their interactions to create a new hybridization (in both culture and bodies) that was once called assimilation when applied to European immigrants. If contemporary globalizations erase markers of race, as immigration over time and in the context of schooling and youth culture once effectively erased markers of ethnicity, then in the future the United States can once again expect to be at the forefront of a new kind of world identity just as it once created a trans-European identity. This would be a real expression of changes introduced by globalization. At the same time, it is well to remember that the evidence we have for children's interaction in school, on which so much of that future depends, indicates that over the last ten to fifteen years, American schools have become more, not less, segregated by race, hardly a good sign for the integration of children into a newly hybrid future. According to studies by Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Harvard Project on School Desegregation, "For Latinos, an even more severe level of segregation [than for African Americans] is intensifying across the nation." This segregation is "particularly affecting our rapidly growing Latino communities in the West." (19) If this continues, American children will hardly be provided with the community and school context from which to create a new global society. Instead, globalization will mean a more complex world with more different kinds of people living side-by-side (in school systems as well as cities), and a culture with more diverse elements, but hardly a truly brown society.

Migration is often a family strategy that affects children even if they stay put

Our vision of globalization will be very much enhanced if we understand that migration affects not only those who move but those who stay. This is usually left out of contemporary mental pictures of child life, but is quite an important and understudied product of contemporary migration, especially since the character of those who leave has dramatically changed.

Family migration has never been a process in which all members of the family necessarily move together. Indeed, much of migration history concerns the disassembling of families in order to underwrite a family process of survival and/or success. Like those who migrate today, people in the past also maintained bonds across borders, with relatives in far distant places. Today, in the context of instant communication and rapid transportation, this is becoming an ever more normal way of life. Globalization has not only made migration more possible, but has affected the family decisions that frame migration. Many hundreds of thousands of Filipino women (some have estimated the total to be over six million) have traveled to Europe, the Middle East, and to the United States to clean other people's houses, take care of their elderly, their sick and their children. (20) In most cases, these women leave their children behind with grandmothers, aunts, fathers or other relatives as they send good parts of their wages back to improve the lives and prospects of their children and other family members. Most hope to return to better lives in the Philippines. Very often these migrants stay not for a few months, but for many years.

Historians are quite familiar with the pattern of transient migrations. During the height of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of men left families, including children, behind when they came to the United States, Argentina or Brazil to find work. They sent back their wages on a regular basis, and then often themselves returned after several years' absence. Sometimes, they went back and forth repeatedly. The Chinese tried to do the same, but were cut off when the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, singled them out as the first group against whom a specific embargo was imposed and thereby stopped most of this transitory process. But Italians and Poles did it regularly and Mexicans continue to do so into the twentieth-first century. In Mexico today, 41% of all household heads have had some migratory experience to the United States, and 73% of all households have a social connection to someone living in the United States. (21) Americans today are governed by ideals of family reunification because we have decided that the family's physical preservation is a desirable part of public policy, a policy enshrined in the Hart-Celler Act of 1965. (As I write that policy is being rethought by the Bush administration in its proposals for temporary workers.) So we tend to find migration that disrupts a family's physical coherence troubling and even pathological. But, international migrations, as they accompany international capital and information as part of globalization today, just as in the past, do not take issues of family preservation into account. And today, as in the past, families adapt and use the pressures and or opportunities this presents. Family life, it is well to remember, is a process as much as a physical fact, and migration often accentuates one part of that process over others. In the 17th and 18th centuries, when travel was hard, expensive, and dangerous, the rupture of movement over the seas for the poor, such as indentured servants, was usually permanent. In the 19th and 20th centuries, as the means of travel improved and became faster and cheaper, family ruptures were more often temporary. With travel ever cheaper and faster and when people everywhere can go almost anywhere by air, some families have become genuinely bi-national as children travel back and forth from the United States to the Caribbean or Latin America or India to visit with grandparents. Some stay long enough during the difficult teen period to become truly bicultural in their orientation.

Perhaps the most potentially destabilizing part of the modern version of transitory migration which maintains family bonds is related to gender. Rarely in the past did women leave children behind as they sought to raise their family's prospects for survival or success, although single women could and did travel by themselves. Only in the context of the modern world in which female labor is often as valuable as, or more valuable than, male labor and where children no longer work in the countries to which their parents migrate has this become likely. (22) While journalists remind us that globalization often pulls children into new work contexts this is very unlikely in Europe or the United States precisely because, after the late 19th century, Westerners began to view child labor as unnatural and abhorrent. We might want to recognize that by maintaining this posture toward children, a globalized 21st century makes it more likely that women will leave their children behind for long periods of their lives as they seek the work that is now available to them, but not to their children, work paid in valuable dollars and euros. This means that women often have to depend on extended kin for child care arrangements. This confirmation of dependence on intergenerational ties is utterly unlike the model of nuclear family mobility posited by Talcott Parsons in the 1950s when he argued that only the integral nuclear families cut off from obligations to kin could allow for the movement essential for social mobility in the modern world. (23)

The female out-migration I am describing introduces genuinely new elements into the history of migration. In fact, there is no better demonstration of the potential for gender change that globalization offers (and threatens) than this new pattern. (For a related effect on gender see Jennifer Cole's article in this volume.) Rhacel Salazar Parrenas shows that some Filipino women use migration as an alternative to seeking divorce for an abusive marriage in a deeply Catholic culture. So family maintenance may be less an issue than a new female boldness and the desire for self determination that is using the possibilities offered by globalization. Thus, migration makes a kind of latent female empowerment thinkable and, in this case, a permanent rupture in family relations may well result from the contemporary phenomenon that Arlie Hochschild and Barbara Ehrenreich have called, "global woman." (24)

We know far less about the children left behind than about the women who move. But, the increasing dependence of working women on child care arrangements in the West is apparently affecting far flung parts of the world. Parrenas and others have noted that the modern pattern of globalized female employment results in a progressive lowering of the status of child caretakers as European and American women employ lower caste immigrant women and these women, when they cannot turn to kin, employ much needier and lower class women to care for their own children. This process of "diverted mothering" is now an international phenomenon. (25) Gender patterns and maternal obligations lie deep within culture and contemporary trends affecting married women's migration in the context of globalization have as much, if not more, potential for cultural destabilization, as child labor or child migration do. We need to understand this much more fully than we do as we think about the consequences of globalization for children today. Identity for women on the move and for the children they leave behind are deeply caught up in this process as traditional means of social reproduction are altered. Similarly identity is changing for children who may shuttle between schools in the United States or Europe when they are in the care of their working mothers, while spending vacations with grandparents in Latin America or elsewhere.

Migration, Education, and Social Mobility

In order best to understand the effects of migration on education and authority, it is important to remember what social historians take for granted, that children's movement will have different consequences depending on where they move from, where they move to, why they move, and how old they are. Neither migration nor childhood is an undifferentiated experience. We need to bring these differences to the fore as we examine globalization. While globalization is having effects worldwide, those effects are neither the same everywhere nor have uniform consequences.

Salgado includes in his exhibit (for the sake of symmetry I think), Russian Jews who migrate to the United States. But the children of Russian Jews are markedly out of place in the implicit lamentation that defines the Salgado exhibit. They do extremely well in the United States, where they benefit from educational opportunities which they know how to utilize. In fact, however, effectively using educational opportunities is part of the phenomenon of contemporary migrations generally, and Russian Jews are not alone in doing well in school. We are all familiar with the extraordinary success of the children of Asian immigrants, including the Vietnamese boat-people. (26) Many Caribbean and other Latin American children also benefit educationally from migrating to the United States. This is true despite the fact that Chicanos are perceived as lagging behind in high school graduation rates and college attendance as compared to other immigrants. As two of the most highly regarded researchers in this field, Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco observe, "research suggests that immigrant children are healthier, work harder in school, and have more positive social attitudes than their nonimmigrant peers. Every year, the children of immigrants are overrepresented in the rosters of high school valedictorians and receive more of their share of prestigious science awards.... Immigrant children in general arrive with high aspirations and extremely positive attitudes toward education." (27)

One of the strongest predictors of success is the reason that the migration took place and the generation to which the young belong. Of the 24 million Americans in the United States today who migrated since 1960, 40% came as children under the age of eighteen, that is to say of school age. (28) Scholars of migration and schooling, such as John Ogbu as well as Carola and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco have taken note of the unusual school success of these children. (29) Thus, children born in the Caribbean and in Mexico are more academically successful, despite the apparent handicap of language than their siblings born in the United States. The latter are more quickly and easily absorbed in local black and Latino peer cultures that often turn them against school. The "identities" of migrating children are often lodged in a self-conscious exploiting of opportunities while the American-born long for acceptance in the anti-intellectual peer culture of inner city blacks or Latinos, something that is exacerbated by the increased segregation of these groups in the recent past. The very "marginality" of these migrating children makes them more ambitious and better students. As Ogbu has shown, young migrants who know how much better their opportunities are as a result of migration than in their countries of origin, take advantage of the education they are offered, even if this is in poor neighborhoods with dilapidated schools. The experience of migration through its very dislocations and the contrasts it encourages, one might argue, has its privileges. Ogbu also differentiates the experience of minority groups who continue to view and define themselves as colonial dependents from voluntary immigrants who assume they are free to succeed. The latter arrive with purpose and a sense of potential opportunities, while the former expect to be discriminated against and do not expect much benefit from their migration. His data tend to bear out this distinction, though I think it is not conclusive. But Ogbu's work does encourage us to invest with significance the distinction between children who were born elsewhere from those who are born into resident ethnic groups. (30)

The growing and complex literature on the schooling of immigrants is not alone in suggesting that the migration of children has important consequences for life-defining factors such as risky behaviors in delinquency and substance abuse. Indeed some of the evidence suggests that length of residence in the United States as well as generation may influence these matters. The United States, as well as other countries to which migrants have gravitated (Denmark, the Netherlands, and Great Britain), provide excellent places in which the fact of migration can be distinguished from ethnicity and historians would be well advised to take note of this new work on youth migrations. For a long time, American historians, like Joel Perlmann, (31) have documented differential school success along ethnic lines, and these distinctions have provided us with important information about immigration and schooling. Most of these studies have compared different ethnic groups at a particular time as well as the changing patterns of mobility of members of specific ethnic groups over time. Although ethnicity cannot be entirely separated from migration, one can begin to suggest that studying contemporary migrations requires that we examine the experience of young people according to migration status regardless of ethnicity. I do not know of any historians who have done this, because the dominant "assimilation" model that grew from European experience in the United States assumes that greater success comes with time and steady generational acculturation.

The assimilation model, which I have questioned elsewhere as inadequate to understanding the education of American high school students, may now be altogether misleading, based as it was on the experience of European immigrants who came into a blue collar work world. Where blue-collar parents could once produce white collar children or grandchildren, such a gradual ascent may no longer be meaningful or likely in a globalized world. In today's white-collar-dominant West, where a combination of schooling and youth culture determine children's lives and their future, the simple assimilation model is likely outdated and confusing. Thus, contemporary globalization may be effectively distinguishable from earlier migrations in its altered effects on patterns of social mobility. (32)

Today, many upper status and highly mobile students from around the world migrate to take advantage of American higher education, especially its graduate and professional schools. Some of these students are privately funded, others are supported by their governments who save themselves the expense of investing in advanced laboratories and facilities. It is possible to imagine that a parallel migration is taking place, one in which poorer young people migrate for white collar skills. For these aspirants, even deprived and unsightly American elementary schools and high schools provide rich resources. We might also want to rethink some of the conclusions about educational deprivation that we have come to as historians. As Kathryn Anderson-Leavitt shows in her paper in this volume, the desire to get beyond the school-yard gate, no matter how poor the school, may depend on where you stand. Those migrating from poor countries may find the universal education offered in the United States a really golden opportunity. In the early twentieth century, many of these migrating young people were simply incorporated into work at an early age. In the United States today, high school attendance requirements mean that migrating teens must attend school, and bilingual classrooms have become a necessary part of their integration into an age-defined curriculum. As a result, ambitious teenagers have far greater opportunities than in the past.

In the United States, it is also possible that we are seeing a situation in which the competitive educational success of migrants (from Russia and Asia, for example), may actually be displacing older ethnic groups from routes of mobility in a newly redefined and globalized economy. The effects of globalization for education in the United States are not hard to find. Over the past two decades, we have become familiar with recurrent educational "crises" as statistics on achievement at various school levels reveal deficiencies among American school children. The schooling speed-up that has resulted as we try to cram more information into students earlier in their lives and measure them against international norms, culminating most recently in the "No Child Left Behind Policy" of the Bush Administration, is beginning to squeeze our definition of childhood and the role of play and a leisurely child-centered development in schooling. At a time when the social placement and success of their offspring has become ever more urgent and consequential to middle class families eager to maintain their own and their children's status, the new globalized economy may be on the verge of redefining childhood expectations in the West as Asian children and children from elsewhere displace those who had assumed they were at the head of the line. (33) Thus, not only our definitions of assimilation, but our definitions of childhood may be forced to change in the context of the global realignments of the present day.

Migration as a Move Toward Cities

As we consider the specific nature of the migrations taking place, their motives and consequences, we also want to pay attention to matters such as the rural-urban trajectory of the migration. In the American South after the Civil War quite a lot of migration (both white and black) took place, but much of it was rural to rural, a pattern that also defined much of the Okie exodus to California in the 1930s. Most historical studies I have seen suggest that rural to rural migration rarely helps the young or their parents to move out of poverty, although the migration may be necessary for individual and group survival. In fact, rural to rural migration may also have a greater tendency to cement intrafamily authority and encourage patterns of cultural continuity. (34)

Changes often attributed to migration generally are more likely a consequence of movement from countryside to city or from smaller urban places to larger urban places, than simply a result of movement alone. (35) Thus, unlike these earlier domestic migrations, the huge internal migration that took place in the United States during World War II was heavily toward city-based war industries that uprooted tens of millions of Americans. Despite the often described discomforts and difficult conditions to which these migrants were subjected, most believed that their lives and those of their children were greatly improved. (36) Today's migrations are overwhelmingly toward cities. As Wolf Schafer suggests in his comments in this volume, the massive movement toward the cities that affected Europe and the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries is now taking place throughout the world. It would be useful for us to remember that these movements were fraught historically just as they are today, and that the transition to city life often meant a confrontation between different mores, cultural disruption, squalor, and uneven economic development. Globalization is currently playing this out on an even grander scale, as large cities become huge, and smaller towns become substantial cities.

It is in this context that child prostitution becomes significant today. This is always one of the most disturbing issues in contemporary journalism and certain to incite reader revulsion. A recent feature in the New York Times Magazine has brought this home yet again. (37) In the late 19th and early 20th century the issue of "white slavery" also evoked spasms of reformist rage as young country girls were supposedly abducted for the purposes of sexual exploitation, a widely feared phenomenon common to both Europe and the United States. According to many reports, girls (and boys) today are also being misled into believing that they are migrating for respectable employment and are then absorbed into prostitution rings, or they are quite literally abducted for that purpose. The campaign against the sexual slavery of children today reminds me of that earlier campaign. (38)

It is far from my intention to dismiss the current concern or to question its validity. Nevertheless, understanding how it repeats earlier historical experience is useful and necessary. First, we need to recognize the degree to which the journalism is addressed to the fears and sensibilities of the Western world. Most historians understand the 19th century campaign against white slavery as, in good part, a form of journalistic titillation feeding middle class appetites about the experiences of the inhabitants of the city's lower depths. (39) The campaign came at a time when reformers were eager to redefine adolescence as an extension of childhood and to shelter girls from 13-18 under the protective umbrella being opened by upwardly revised age of consent laws. (40) In today's outrage at child sexual exploitation, we are at once repeating our fascination with the sexual irregularities of "other" people who may seem to be very distant but have become our unknown neighbors, and reconfirming our own commitment to child protection.

Child prostitution is not new either in the Western or non Western context. In Thailand, as Kevin Bales has shown, a form of child prostitution where young country girls (from especially impoverished regions) were sold by their families to urban brothels has long provided a means for family survival, and a form of mobility for the girls. (41) Bales also makes clear that the contemporary globalized sex industry has vastly exacerbated this local pattern and that AIDS has made its need for young girls both insatiable and ever more dangerous. It is worth understanding that prostitution has long been a rural to urban migration route for those we today define as children, but whom their families and communities may designate as merely young earners, providing supplementary income to family coffers. Like so many other features of globalization, modern western beliefs about what is appropriate to childhood as well as when childhood begins and ends are deeply implicated in the discussion. It may well be the case that because of the differences in how childhood is defined in various parts of the globe, child prostitution may actually be growing in places where it exists, and it may also be encroaching on younger children. Today, globalization makes possible access to children for sexual purposes, including for internet pornography, almost anywhere in the world. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that child prostitution is still available in other places while sex with children is now largely taboo in the western world. The very construction of the innocent child in the West may thus increase the exploitation of children elsewhere. This makes the subject especially vexed, since it at once titillates our imaginations and calls forth our most vociferous condemnations. It may also be an area where globalization is seriously increasing child endangerment.

Children can often be an active driving force in migration

The New York Times recently featured the story of a Holocaust survivor who lived with his family in a hole in the ground of a Polish farm to which they had fled when the Germans arrived. All of them were kept alive through the insistence and tenacity of the children who sustained their parents as they suffered from despair, hopelessness and thoughts of suicide. (42) This is, in fact, not so unusual. Despite their so-called "innocence" children are remarkably insightful, resilient, and resourceful, and adolescents especially can sometimes initiate migration demands. In our conference discussions of children and globalization, we have come to acknowledge important differences between young children and older children. That children are a differentiated social group is important to our rethinking of the dominant images of childhood--as innocent, passive, and dependent. In fact, children today, especially older children, as well as children in the past, have often acted with intent and purpose.

Contemporary American adolescents have become much more work oriented generally then those of a generation or so ago, mostly because they have been exposed to the costly allurements of a consumption-obsessed America. Many choose to work part-time in order to buy the CDs, jeans, movie and concert tickets and others necessities of teenage identity in our time. (43) So too, youths elsewhere in the world whose identities as "children" hardly had the depth that one hundred years of history have provided to those in the United States, may nevertheless be eager to be adolescents--and to buy the identities that come with this designation in the world today. I believe that adolescence may have become a universal identity in the context of globalization as the accoutrements and culture of youth have spread everywhere through the very channels that define globalization. While modern adolescence was created in the West in the early twentieth century as an extension of childhood play and leisure through schooling and a means to protect older children from abuse, (44) adolescence soon became a distinct product of Western capitalism. (45) Today, while childhoods can still remain somewhat culturally specific, adolescence is less and less so. As such, it may have become a globalized identity expressed through fashion, music, and other consumer habits. Adolescents may actively pursue this identity in many ways, by working, by consuming, by rejecting parental authority, by rebelling against their parents' ways, and by urging migration on their parents as they hope to improve their chances elsewhere. They may also leave their parents to pursue it on their own, as many young migrants did historically when they came earlier to the United States. (46) That loosening of youth from their moorings in the past is part and parcel of what globalization is all about.

Unlike their parents who cling to their homes and possessions, children cling to hope of the future. Migration may or may not offer them this hope, but it is not helpful to imagine that children, especially older children, are either helpless or passive in the process of change that defines today's world, and the migrations that are part of it. In that sense, we students of children's history need to detach ourselves from the connection made early in the twentieth century (often with good reason at the time) between children who were 5 or 6 and children who were 13 or 14. We can, I believe, do this without giving up entirely our desire to continue to shelter and protect older children. The role of children in the process of global migration is just now becoming a subject for careful examination and thoughtful appraisal. We should begin by looking to the past in an effort to understand both the active roles that older children especially can play, and to understand just what children introduce into the migration calculus. We tend to reduce authority in traditional societies to a one-way hierarchy, in which children are always at the bottom. But, a more careful reflection will let us see that even in the most traditional and hierarchical societies and during periods of significant change, children may in fact be seen as the salvation of the family. We know that they are often the first to be put into new working situations--whether in factories or on the streets, (47) and we are increasingly coming to understand how they operate at battle frontiers in wars as lookouts and guerrilla fighters. (48) Here, they may gain knowledge and know-how that not only benefit their families in the immediate situation, but provide them with information about the change that would come with migration. Once they migrate, they become the translators at the margin between cultures, between generations, and between the past and the future. As informants and as people on the margins, children provide just the kind of outlook and knowledge that encourages migration choices and facilitates migration once it takes place.

It is exactly young people like these whom one could expect to do especially well in school, as John Ogbu found to be the case in many parts of the world. Urged toward the future and imaginative in finding ways to develop in a new setting, children can be the heroes as well as the victims of the migrations that are more and more part of what the modern globalized world is all about.

By examining migrations in the past and today, historians can begin to contribute to the current discussions about globalization, especially by bringing our growing knowledge about the history of children to bear on these discussions. Those discussions should include an understanding of education, of work and mobility, of family relationships, as well as subjects such as child prostitution and other survival strategies among children on the margins. We also need to understand how the images of children we carry around as citizens and scholars have been framed historically and how these frames organize our contemporary responses. An exhibit like that of Salgado makes us aware of how rapidly our world is changing, but that alone cannot be enough. As the world shifts before our eyes, we want to know exactly how it is changing, what we can anticipate from our historical knowledge and what kinds of changes, such as gender changes in migration patterns, are almost entirely unanticipated. For that, children's migrations needs to be situated in a much larger field of historical knowledge than even the very best journalist can provide.

ENDNOTES

1. Sabastiao Salgado, "Migrations: Humanities in Transition--The Children," University of California Berkeley Art Museum, January 16-March 24, 2002. Salgado has a book which contains many of these images. Migrations: Humanity in Transition (Aperture, 2000).

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 of the Peopling of America on the Eve of the 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).

6. Thomas Haskell's articles on humanitarian sensibilities, which first appeared in the American Historical Review, are reprinted in Thomas Bender, ed. The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolition as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, 1992); Larry Wolff, "When I Imagine a Child: The Idea of Childhood and the Philosophy of Memory in the Enlightenment," Eighteenth Century Studies, 31 (1998), 377-401.

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. I 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.

9. For child labor, see Robert Bremner, et al., Children and Youth in America, vol. II, part 5 (Cambridge, MA., 1971); Paula S. Fass and Mary Ann Mason, eds., Childhood in America (New York, 2000); Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (New York, 1995); David Levine, "Economics and Children in Western Societies: From Agriculture to Industry," in The Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, Paula S. Fass, ed. vol. 1 (New York, 2003), 295-299.

10. Thomas Archdeacon, Becoming American (New York, 1983); Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (Oxford, 1977); David M. Reimers, Still the Golden Door: The Third World Comes to America (New York, 1985).

11. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery/American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975), has made the boldest statement concerning how white and black immigrants were played off against each other in the 17th century. This argument about the uses of "whiteness" has been pursued by a host of other historians; e.g. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York, 1991).

12. Alejandro Portes and Dag MacLeod, "Educational Progress of Children of Immigrants: 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: Global 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).

15. Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America, 58-80, Table A-7, p. 163.

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 Social 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 Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work (Stanford, 2001), Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York, 2002).

21. Massey, in The Immigrant Experience for Families and Children, 5.

22. Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study of International Investment and Labor (Cambridge, 1984); Sassen, "Notes on the Incorporation of Third World Women into Wage Labor through Immigration and Offshore Production," International Migration Review, 18 (1984), 1144-67. For single migrating women early in the twentieth century see Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, 1990).

23. Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (Glencoe, IL, 1955), especially 3-131,

24. The term is taken from Hochschild and Ehrenreich.

25. Perranas, Servants of Globalization, 69-79.

26. For Asian immigrants, see Ueda, Postwar Immigrant America, Rheimers, Still the Golden Door. For Vietnamese boat-people migration, see, Nathan Caplan, John K. Whitmore, and Marcella H. Choy, The Boat People and Achievement in America: A Study of Family Life, Hard Work, and Cultural Values (Ann Arbor, 1989).

27. Carola Suarez-Orozco and Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, Children of Immigration (Cambridge, MA., 2001), 2.

28. Ruben D. Rumbaut, in Immigration Experience for Families and Children, 10.

29. Margaret A. Gibson and John U. Ogbu, Minority Status and Schooling: A Comparative Study of Immigrant and Involuntary Minorities (West Port, CT, 1991), and the essays in Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco et al, eds., The New Immigrant and American Schools.

30. The marginality of youth is discussed in Global Youth, Peace and Development: the Role of Science and Technology in Contemporary Society, ed. by Yedla C. Simhadri (Ajanta, 1991).

31. Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (Cambridge, 1988). See also, Paula S. Fass, Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (Oxford, 1989).

32. For a reassessment of the assimilationist model, see Richard Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambrige, 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). Everywhere 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 Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York, 1992); for the Oakies, James Gregory, 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 Farmers: The Migration from Balestand, Norway, to the Upper Middle West (Cambridge, England, 1989).

35. Massie notes that most migration takes place from newly industrialized communities of Mexico rather than directly from the countryside to the United States, in Immigration Experience for Families and Children, ed. Richard D. Alba, et al., (American Sociological Association) 4.

36. For the effect on children, see William M. Tuttle, Jr., "Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (New York, 1993).

37. Peter Landesman, "The Girls Next Door," The New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2004, p. 30.

38. Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900-1918 (Baltimore, 1982); Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (Chicago, 1992).

39. Walkowitz, Dreadful Delight, 15-39, 81-134.

40. Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 8-37.

41. Kevin Bales, "Because She Looks Like a Child," in Global Woman, Ehrenreich and Hochschild, eds., 207-229.

42. The New York Times, January 14, 2004, p. A19.

43. For consumption and adolescents, see Gary Cross, An All Consuming Century (New York, 2000); for adolescence and work, Jeylan T. Mortimer and Michael D. Finch, eds. Adolescents, Work, and Family: An Intergenerational Analysis (San Fransisco, 1996).

44. See Stephen Lassonde, "Learning and Earning: Schooling, Juvenile Employment, and the Early Life Course in Late Nineteenth Century New Haven," Journal of Social History, 29 (1996), 839-870. Fass, Outside In, chapters 2-3.

45. See Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager: A New History of the American Adolescent Experience (New York, 1999), and Kelly Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-1945 (New York, 2004).

46. This was true even for some young women, as shown in Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl. As Richard Rumbaut notes, "Immigration," today "as always, is mostly the province of the young." Immigrant Experience for Families and Children, 10.

47. David Nasaw, Children of the City: At Work and at Play (New York, 1985), Tobias Hecht, Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society (Madison, 2002), Hecht, At Home in the Street: Street Children of Northeast Brazil (Cambridge, England, 1998).

48. See, for example, Anna Peterson, "Latin America: Wars in Central America," The Encyclopedia 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.

By Paula S. Fass

University of California at Berkeley 

University of California, Berkeley 

Department of History

Berkeley, CA 94720