Bordering through unchilding: The case of Britain’s child migrants

Abstract

Restrictive immigration and citizenship policies have targeted people on the move and those newly arrived in Britain for decades but have also been mobilised in a bordering of Britain in ways that revive the longstanding precarity and contingent inclusion of racially minoritised British citizens with family histories of migration. Theories of migratisation have helped to make these processes and connections visible, including the relationship between racialisation and migratisation by describing the processes by which people are categorised and engaged with as ‘migrants’. However, there is limited consideration of the significant relationship of childhood and children to bordering and, within this, gendered migratisation. In this article I explore how racially minoritised children, whether migrants or from families with migration histories, have been at the forefront of the contemporary bordering of Britain. I argue that Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concept of ‘unchilding’ can be drawn on and applied to examine how migratisation harms children imagined as ‘migrant’ and erases them from belonging in the British nation-state. Bringing into conversation theoretical interventions on ‘making’ the migrant – migratisation – and ‘unmaking’ the child – unchilding, I explore how these social processes connect to position child ‘migrants’ centrally in the politics of bordering Britain. I argue that intersecting racialised and gendered processes of migratisation have been mobilised to unchild racially minoritised children and young people who hold various legal statuses to exclude them from residency and belonging in Britain.

Keywords

belonging border child migratisation unchilding young people

Introduction

Restrictive immigration and citizenship policies have targeted people on the move and newly arrived in Britain for decades. They have also been mobilised in the contemporary bordering of Britain in ways that reanimate the longstanding precarity and contingent inclusion of racially minoritised British citizens with family histories of migration. This was evident during Brexit, and in the rhetoric and violence of the urban unrest across Britain in the summer of 2024. I argue that theories of migratisation¹ (Anderson, 2019; Tazzioli, 2019; Tudor, 2018) have made these processes and connections across legal status visible, including the relationship between racialisation and migratisation. This is through describing the social, political and legal processes by which people are categorised and engaged with as ‘migrants’. However, there is limited consideration of the significant relationship of childhood and children to bordering, specifically racialised and gendered childhoods.

In this article I argue that racially minoritised children, whether migrants or from families with migration histories, are central to the contemporary bordering of Britain and processes of migratisation. Seen as potential citizens in the making (Sirriyeh, 2020), they are key subjects within debates about the futurity of the nation-state, bordering and citizenship. Therefore understanding the processes of their exclusion, or contingent inclusion is vital. While child migrants can sometimes mobilise a ‘deserving’ immigrant status within a wider context of immigration restrictions, this is conditional and not equally available to all. These children and young people are caught up in conflicting moral and political frameworks. While children and young people are portrayed as vulnerable and as the future of the nation to be protected and nurtured, undesired migrants are presented as jeopardising that future (Anderson, 2013). In the context of an exclusionary politics of immigration and citizenship, migrant rights advocates have, with some success, activated ethical obligations grounded in the moral grammar of childhood to push back at the exclusions of migrant children and young people. They have mobilised a deserving immigrant discourse through foregrounding aspects of children and young people’s youthful identities –innocence, future contributions and capacity to assimilate (Patler, 2018; Sirriyeh, 2019). However, these limited openings are not available to all children and young people. Meanwhile, even where the state ostensibly commits to protecting and supporting some children and young people, in practice this commitment often falls short of what is provided to ‘citizens’ (Rosen, 2024). It is crucial, therefore, to understand how children and young people are excluded from recognition. Introducing unchilding into migration and border studies offers an analytical framework for doing so.

I suggest that Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s (2019) concept of ‘unchilding’ (describing the invasion and depletion and destruction of Palestinian childhoods) can be adapted and applied to describe the British state’s response to children and young people crossing and being crossed by Britain’s borders and the impacts of their migratisation. It enables us to see how racialised and gendered migratisation harms children who are imagined as ‘migrant’ and erases them from belonging in Britain. Through bringing into conversation theoretical interventions on ‘making’ the migrant – migratisation – and ‘unmaking’ the child – unchilding, I explore how these social processes connect to position child ‘migrants’ centrally in the politics of bordering Britain. I argue that intersecting racialised and gendered processes of migratisation have been mobilised to unchild racially minoritised children and young people with various legal statuses. This excludes them from residency and belonging in Britain and from narratives of deservingness that are drawn on to mobilise for inclusion. Bringing these theories into conversation makes a significant contribution to border studies and the sociology of social inequality by enabling an analysis of the connected inequalities and discrimination experienced by racially minoritised children and young people across various legal statuses in Britain who are imagined as ‘migrant’. This is important as it reveals how bordering is not only enacted on migrants but is also extended to racially minoritised citizens. In so doing it also moves beyond presentism in migration policy analysis to take account of enduring and reanimated legacies of earlier periods of migratisation enacted through decades-long immigration restrictions.

I begin by discussing ‘migratisation’ before introducing the concept of ‘unchilding’. I then bring these concepts into conversation through a discussion of three cases: first, the reception of unaccompanied asylum-seeking boys arriving in Britain from Calais, France in 2016; second, the citizenship deprivation of Shamima Begum, who left Britain in 2015 at the age of 15 to join ISIS; and, third, the question of Zambrano families’ (non-EEA parents or carers with British or EU citizen children) residency rights in EU Settlement Scheme negotiations after the Brexit vote in 2016. The cases have been selected to present how the theorisation introduced in this article can be applied to the experiences of children and young people across different legal statuses – citizens, migrants and children in mixed status families. I use discourse analysis to examine media and political discourse about these cases, focusing on what is achieved through discourse. The analysis examines the discursive devices used to make arguments with an action orientation, to explain and justify actions, or to support or undermine positions and actors.

Limited connection has been made in research across cases involving different legal ‘categories’ of children moving to and from the British Isles as well as children and young people who have not moved but who are impacted by migration and citizenship policies. Siloing through a reification of state-imposed migration and citizenship categories has obscured the relationship between policy making and lived experiences in these cases and their connections to Britain’s national politics of bordering and citizenship. I argue that migratisation scholarship, and specifically Anderson’s (2019) concept of ‘migrantizing’ and Tudor’s (2018) concept of ‘migratism’, provide analytical tools that bridge the cases discussed in this article to explore what they reveal about Britain’s politics of bordering and citizenship and the exclusions produced. Across these cases, migratisation was enacted to unchild racially minoritised children and young people who held a range of citizenship and residency statuses. I suggest that these processes have enabled the bordering of Britain by delineating which children are part of the national ‘community of value’ (Anderson, 2013) and the future of the nation-state. Finally, I contend that examining the case of Britain’s child migrants helps to further develop theories of migratisation by taking account of childhood, which has been under-explored in this scholarship, as it intersects with race, gender and migration status. While belonging to the nation can be evidenced through a myriad of indicators, I focus on the starkest delineator of belonging which is the right of residence in Britain.

Making migrants

Reflecting on the role of sociology in addressing social inequalities, Menjívar (2022) observes that legal status – whether someone is categorised as a citizen or migrant – has become a key axis of stratification that shapes life chances today. Critical migration and citizenship scholars have explored how some people are enacted as ‘migrants’ through legal classification but also through wider social and political practices of bordering which Tazzioli (2019, p. 2) describes as the ‘making of migration’.

Critiquing methodological nationalism and explaining the ‘normalisation of difference’ between citizens and migrants, Dahinden (2016, p. 2207) notes that the ‘migration apparatus’ – institutions, laws, administration and discourses – has been central to the nation-state’s formation and its maintenance through institutionalising differences between migrants and citizens. This normalised differentiation has become a focus of much migration research as seen, for example, in the preoccupation with questions of migrant and refugee ‘integration’ into nation-state communities. In contrast, critical migration and citizenship scholarship has shown that in practice there is greater complexity in the everyday lived experiences of bordering and citizenship. Legal citizenship, while conferring formal recognition of citizenship, does not necessarily overlap with other markers and practices of citizenship such as social, economic and political rights, and a sense of belonging (Fortier, 2021). In examining citizenship’s inclusions and exclusions, we need to look beyond a binary model of legal ‘citizenship’ and ‘non-citizenship’ to recognise complexity within each condition and shared experiences that span across the formal boundaries between legal statuses (Sirriyeh, 2019). It is in this vein that theoretical interventions exploring the production of the social category of ‘migrant’, the ambiguities this holds, and implications for migration research, become particularly pertinent.

Anderson (2019) and Dahinden (2016) call for research that shifts away from a sole focus on migrant populations to recognise wider and connected impacts of migration and citizenship policies and practices. To this end, Dahinden (2016) has called for the ‘demigrantizing’ of migration research, that is shifting from a focus on migrants as a distinct unit of analysis to look at whole populations, which include migrants within them. Meanwhile, Anderson (2019) notes that the instability of the category of migrant also destabilises its binary partner category, ‘citizen’. She proposes ‘methodological de-nationalism’ as ‘an approach that does not assume difference between state differentiated categories and seeks to investigate what this does for theory, politics and practice’ (Anderson, 2019, p. 6). She examines the ‘migrantizing’ of citizens to explore how immigration controls and connected discourses and policies also impact citizens. Anderson (2019) observes that there are distinctions between social and legal understandings of who is a ‘migrant’ and who a ‘citizen’ which can overlap but not always. Someone who is a citizen in law may be perceived as a migrant and treated as such because of where they or their parents were born and/or because of how they are racialised or classed.

Taking the ‘social’ understanding as her focus, Anderson (2019) explains how ‘migrantizing the citizen’ places social processes of categorisation under the lens for investigation. She notes that scholarship on race has explored the processes by which race becomes salient in social structures and people’s lives. She proposes the concept of ‘migrantizing’ to turn our attention to the ‘active social – and state endorsed – process[es]’ (p. 7) through which some legal citizens also become differentiated from the ‘us’ of the nation as they struggle to authorise their legal citizenship. Racially minoritised citizens may be migrantised by being described through terminology such as ‘second generation migrant’ (Anderson, 2019). Citizens or legally authorised residents may be caught up in the immigration enforcement net despite not being the target population imagined in the policy design. As Anderson (2019, p. 8) observes, ‘who sheds and who retains their migrancy is often bound up with nationally specific ways of encoding and remaking of race’. In the British context this must take account of the history and legacy of the coloniality of citizenship and immigration policy (Mayblin, 2017).

Like Anderson, Tudor (2018, 2023) also interrogates processes by which the social category of ‘migrant’ is produced and developed, with particular attention to racialisation in the context of postcolonial migration in Europe. Tudor observes that discrimination against migrants has often been described through the term xenophobia and studied within race and racism scholarship. However, they contend that the categorisation of certain people as ‘migrants’ and the discrimination they experience because of this categorisation is not simply an aspect of racism; it is produced through a distinct (although overlapping) process that Tudor (2023) terms ‘migratism’. ‘Migratism’ is the ‘power relation that ascribes migration to certain people, constructing them as migrants and discriminating against them’ (Tudor, 2023, p. 230). Migratism and racism are closely entwined with both playing key roles in the construction of Western nation-states. The theory of ‘migratism’ makes it possible to analyse ‘both migration-based discrimination and discrimination based on perceived migration’ (Tudor, 2023, p. 230). ‘Migratism’ assigns (unwelcomed) migration to some people irrespective of their actual migration biographies and legal status. It assumes that migrants belong to cultures that are essentially incompatible with the Western nation-state. Tudor (2023) argues that migratism can be experienced by Black and other racially minoritized people but can also impact white people from Eastern Europe or Latin America. However, they suggest that describing practices of migratism as ‘racism’ or ‘xenophobia’ is inaccurate since although migratism and racism can overlap, ‘not all ascriptions of migration are racist’ (Tudor, 2023, p. 242). Both Anderson and Tudor invite us to shift our attention to processes that take account of legal classification but also social and political processes of classification, enabling us to connect and analyse the experiences and discrimination against people who are legally designated as migrant but also citizens who are perceived and read as such, prompting us to enquire how, why and on what terms.

While scholarship on migratisation delineates examples of how migratisation can be mobilised through classed or racialised understandings of migranthood and citizenship, children and childhood are largely absent, including the racialised and gendered articulations of childhood. I suggest that foregrounding the experiences of children as they are racialised and gendered and as they encounter migratisation can help to further develop theories of migratisation and our understandings of how these are being mobilised in contemporary bordering. I do this through an intersectional analysis of the experiences of migratised children and young people discussed in the cases presented here. Intersectionality describes how multiple axes of differentiation (class, gender, race, sexuality, etc.) operate together in interlocking systems to produce inequalities (Crenshaw, 1989). The key here is that these are understood as interlocking parts rather than simply an additive approach to different systems of oppression – for example, race plus gender plus class.

Unchilding

McLaughlin (2018, p. 1759) observes that childhood is not only a social construct but also a site of ‘contested social and cultural meanings and political agendas’. This is most apparent in debates about the nation where children and childhood are invoked in concerns about the nation’s security, identity and future. Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) explores such interventions as she powerfully demonstrates how attacks on Palestinian childhoods are mobilised to serve Israel’s settler-colonial interests. She identifies and investigates the various practices and sites through which the Israeli state asserts power over the bodies and lives of Palestinian children. Situating her analysis within critical scholarship on colonial and settler-colonial projects, she introduces the term ‘unchilding’ to describe Israel’s ‘settler-colonial invasion of Palestinian childhoods’ (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019, p. 1). As she observes, ‘children matter and are indeed valuable subject/objects’ in colonial and settler-colonial projects (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019, p. 1). Children represent and embody the continuity and future of a people and, therefore, indigenous children have featured centrally as targets of colonial and settler-colonial projects of disposition and elimination. Efforts to eradicate indigenous childhood and children have been pursued through supposedly compassionate efforts to ‘save’ indigenous children through civilising and assimilating them into settler society, or violent state repression (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2019).

Situating the unchilding of Palestinian children within these global practices and historical legacies, Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019) shows how Palestinian children have been represented as dangerous threats to Israel’s security and future and consequently targeted through state and settler violence. She explores the devasting capture and erasure of Palestinian childhoods from the Nakba² in 1948 through to the present day, as Palestinian children are caged, maimed and killed, while every aspect of their life – from pre-birth to their families, friendships, homes, education, health and future – has become subject to invasion and occupation. This occupation of childhood occurs through different spheres of life and is enabled at different scales from the local to the global, and through different modes including legal frameworks, government policies as well as direct physical violence.

To some degree there are similarities between Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s theory of unchilding and theories of ‘adultification’. ‘Adultification’ was coined to describe the experiences of children growing up in poverty in the US; Burton (2007, p. 329) used the term to describe how children and young people were prematurely exposed to adult knowledge, roles and responsibilities in their families. The term has also been used in the US and Britain to describe how Black and other racially minoritised children are perceived as ‘being more adultlike’ (Davis & Marsh, 2020, p. 255), often leading to them not being afforded the same care, protection and rights as other children. Adultification is a significant feature of unchilding, particularly where children are treated as adults and responded to as security threats or not recognised as vulnerable. However, unchilding extends beyond adultification in describing not only how children can be exiled from childhood and misrecognised as adults, but also how their actual life stage of childhood is impacted and experienced. Through unchilding, even children who are recognised as children can have their childhood devalued, intervened in and depleted across every sphere of daily life.

Reflecting on these practices and the justifications offered, Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019, p. 41) observes that ‘the racism in colonial logic often creates “differentiation” between those people who are allowed to have a category of childhood and those who are at the margins of humanity and so are denied such a category’. While avoiding a conflation of distinct contexts and differences in the ideological mobilisation of power, I argue that the question of who is allowed or not to have a category of childhood also holds resonance for children who are migratised in Britain, particularly through legal and policy frameworks and discourses. In the remainder of this article, I apply and connect the theories of migratisation and unchilding to discuss how child migration has been mobilised in the bordering of Britain. In each of these cases I focus on the most essential delineator of belonging – which is their right of residence in Britain.

Bordering childhood – not a child

Despite the political appetite for restrictive policies towards some immigrants and refugees, the plea that migrant and refugee children are ‘children first’, and therefore worthy of inclusion and protection in the nation-state, has held some sway. In Britain, advocacy for a compassionate response towards refugee children has become incorporated within a celebratory narrative of British humanitarianism. During the declared ‘Refugee Crisis’ in 2015–16, discussed in this section, this was often advocated for as a continuation of Britain’s supposedly compassionate and welcoming reception of Jewish refugee children in the Second World War (McLaughlin, 2018). In a major part this was because former Kindertransport child, Lord Dubs, became a leading proponent of the call to welcome refugee children and young people into Britain. In this section I examine how theories of migratisation help to reveal and explain limits to this strategy for inclusion. I examine how processes of migratisation were mobilised to ‘unchild’ teenage boys arriving to Britain from Calais, France during the declared ‘Refugee Crisis’. I explore how they were expelled from the relatively protected category of childhood by their migratisation, through which they were reimagined as dangerous threats to the nation.

Border securitisation and restriction have impelled people seeking asylum to use increasingly dangerous routes in desperate attempts to reach their destination (McMahon & Sigona, 2018). In 2015, this garnered global media, political and public attention when there was a rapid escalation in the numbers of people undertaking treacherous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. There was a proliferation of ‘crisis’ talk, with different terms emerging to categorise and represent these events over the time of ‘the crisis’, including ‘Mediterranean migrant crisis’, ‘European migrant crisis’ or ‘refugee crisis’ (Goodman et al., 2017). I argue that unaccompanied asylum-seeking teenage boys arriving in Europe at this time were migratised and ‘unchilded’ in this declared ‘crisis’ via the same discourse and allied policies and practices through which expressions of concern, conditional welcome and care were extended to very young children.

As the ‘crisis’ was declared, humanitarian organisations, campaign groups and some politicians intervened to express care and extend support to those on the move, but a discourse of securitisation continued to dominate government and media responses to the situation (Hintjens, 2019). This was interrupted on 2 September 2015 when a three-year-old Kurdish refugee child, Alan Kurdi, drowned with his family off the coast of Turkey. A photojournalist who was at the beach that morning photographed his body and these photographs were rapidly circulated around the world. These images of his body led to a global outpouring of grief and expressions of compassion towards people making these journeys, with particular concern voiced for the children. This prompted a temporary shift in public commentary and media reporting on this issue (Goodman et al., 2017). In the public commentary on Alan Kurdi’s death, journalists, politicians and others reflected on his embodiment of the seemingly universal characteristics and qualities of small children – his small stature, his clothing, his facial expression in family photographs, his posture in death as if sleeping, his innocence. In doing so they expressed their sense of care and duty towards this child and other children who were attempting to seek refuge in Europe, including in Britain (Sirriyeh, 2018). The descriptors of Alan lacked the stigmatising markers of migratisation commonly referenced; his clothing – t-shirt and shorts – were often noted and described as ‘European’ clothing, while pain and care were often expressed by European commentators through reflecting that he reminded them of their own children (Sirriyeh, 2018). Care and inclusion were practised through an imagined and cultivated proximity to Alan. Not quite the universal child, he did not shed his migration status, but rather this was prefixed by his young age which anchored him into a politics of welcome rather than migratisation and exclusion.

How might Alan Kurdi have been received had he survived the journey to Europe and aged through and out of childhood there? By January 2016, attention turned to the plight of unaccompanied young people who had arrived in Europe. In February 2016, Lord Dubs proposed an amendment to the Immigration Bill 2016, which provided for the transfer of some unaccompanied asylum-seeking young people from camps in France, Greece and Italy to Britain. The first young people accepted through this programme, predominantly teenage boys, began arriving in October 2016, but when the programme ended less than a year later only 350 had arrived (Sirriyeh, 2018).

In its short-lived duration, the programme was mired in controversy and hostilities expressed towards the young people. They were accused of being adults and deceiving the authorities about their true age. In October 2016, prompted by media images of the boys arriving in Britain, Conservative MP David Davies suggested that they did not appear to be ‘genuine children’ and expressed concern that British ‘hospitality’ was being abused (Weaver, 2016). In their commentary on the boys arriving from Calais, Davies and others deployed racialised and gendered Eurocentric descriptors of childhood to unchild them. Their claim to childhood was questioned because of their appearance and demeanour; comments were made about their facial hair, their size and physicality, which were deemed ‘unchildlike’ (Glanfield, 2016; McLaughlin, 2018). In these commentaries the boys were ‘unchilded’ through a process of migratisation. They were suspected of being deceptive, a migratising ascription that asylum seekers are often subjected to through the culture of disbelief in European asylum systems (Affolter, 2021). They became subject to scrutiny and assessment. Instead of being perceived as ‘vulnerable’ children, they were seen as risky young men and responded to through this racialised and gendered securitisation lens (Allsopp, 2017).

The trope of deception is a central feature of migratisation. As both official and discursive categories of ‘migrant’ have proliferated, political and public discourse on migrant ‘un/deservingness’ has often centred on binaries of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ migrants, such as good ‘genuine’ refugees and bad ‘economic migrants’ (Negrón-Gonzales et al., 2015). Border control policies and practices are often premised on detecting and guarding against deception, while asylum processes in Britain and elsewhere in Europe are imbued with a culture of distrust as people seeking asylum are assumed to be dishonest and attempting to deceive authorities about who they are so as to have a greater chance of success with their asylum claim (Borrelli et al., 2021). Concerns that adults are misrepresenting themselves as children reflect the wider shift in state responses to refugees, whereby vulnerability has become a core criterion for recognition and protection, and suspicion is levied at people who display agency and autonomy (Sirriyeh, 2018). During the ‘Refugee Crisis’, resettlement schemes were for ‘vulnerable’ persons left behind in the camps, with suspicion directed at ‘the fittest, the fastest and those most able to get to western Europe’ (Former Defence Secretary Liam Fox, HC deb 7 September 2015, c34). Images in the media accompanying such claims were often of groups of boys and young men at border crossings (Chouliaraki & Stolic, 2017). In this context, the teenage boys’ very survival became grounds for the dismissal of the credibility of their claim to be children, for how could vulnerable children make this journey alone? This process of unchilding in itself further reinscribed their migratisation as they were expelled from the relatively protected category and prefix of ‘child’ to become simply a ‘migrant’. Being viewed as deceptive, they were represented as a dangerous threat.

This example from the ‘refugee crisis’ demonstrates how the analytical concepts of migratisation and unchilding can be connected to explain how the exclusion of asylum-seeking young people has been made possible and justified. However, exploring young people’s experiences through these analytical lenses also makes visible connected processes of exclusion that are enacted against racially minoritised children and young people in Britain even when they formally hold British citizenship. In the next case I explore how theories of migratisation can be applied to examine the guarding of national borders and the borders of childhood through a securitised response to British Muslim young people in the context of the war on terror, where young people were also retrospectively unchilded including in specifically racialised and gendered ways – this time through a focus on girls.

Conditional childhood – no longer our child

In the example above, asylum-seeking young people were unchilded and migratised in ways that positioned them as a threat to the nation. In this next example, I explore how the conflation of migration, crime and security has worked through a similar logic to migratise young racially minoritised British citizens through the so-called ‘war on terror’, also positioning them as a threat to the nation to be excluded.

Extensive literature on ‘deservingness’ and rights has shown that being designated as deserving is often conditional and can be withdrawn if someone is no longer deemed to demonstrate eligible qualities (Anderson, 2013; Birkvad, 2024). I argue that through the ‘war on terror’ British Muslim citizen children and young people have also been subject to securitised discourses that migratise them and undermine the rights and care they enjoy as children. Moreover, I argue that unchilding through migratisation has operated to retrospectively unchild some British Muslims by re-narrating their childhoods and relationship to the British nation-state so that they are no longer seen as having been British children who the state had a duty of care towards.

In February 2015, a year before the Dubs Amendment, another group of teenagers on the move came under the media spotlight. This time the teenagers were British citizens, born and raised in east London. Shamima Begum (15), Amira Abase (15) and Kadiza Sultana (16) went missing from their homes, having travelled to Syria to join ISIS. As teenagers, the girls, like the boys seeking asylum, were in the ambiguous stage of youth where representations can oscillate between them being viewed as vulnerable or as a dangerous threat (Riddle et al., 2023). Initially concern was expressed for these ‘London schoolgirls’ (Baker, 2022) as they were often referred to, a term that anchored them in childhood still and in place as belonging in Britain in the city where they were born and raised. A London Metropolitan Police commander described the girls as ‘extremely vulnerable’ (Webber, 2022, p. 86). However, four years later when a British journalist found Shamima Begum living in a prison camp in Syria she became a hate figure among the British public, press and political establishment. Following the broadcast of Shamima’s interview with the journalist, the then Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, revoked her British citizenship (Webber, 2022).

Researchers have commonly explored the discrimination experienced by British Muslim citizens because of counter-terrorist measures through the analytical lens of race and racism, specifically Islamophobia. However, I argue that aspects of these experiences can also be understood through the lens of migratisation which overlaps with racialisation. Tudor (2023) and Anderson (2019) have shown that legal citizens of a state can also be subject to migratisation when migration is ascribed to them and when they are impacted by immigration and citizenship legislation and policies. In the case of Shamima, these factors played a role in ways that demonstrate the longue durée of these processes which unchilded her retrospectively to reinforce her migratisation in the present. I examine how as a British citizen born and raised in London, migration was ascribed to her and deployed to retrospectively re-narrate her childhood and further migratise her through stripping her of British citizenship.

In 2019 when Shamima Begum was found and interviewed by a journalist, she was living in a detention camp in Syria and was about to give birth to her third child following the deaths of her first two children (Lloyd, 2019). Her responses to this journalist’s interview questions prompted a public and political outcry over her apparent lack of remorse about the violence committed by ISIS (Williamson & Khiabany, 2024). Williamson and Khiabany (2024, p. 348) comment that while she was denied the status and protections of childhood, she was ‘condemned in language associated with what are considered to be the worst traits of “youth” – arrogance and dishonesty’. She was represented as a monstrous ‘other’ to be feared but also as a figure of disgust. Often referred to as a ‘jihadi bride’ she came to symbolise a new kind of gendered and racialised folk devil representing the specific kind of threat unassimilated Muslim women and girls were deemed to pose to the national community (Williamson & Khiabany, 2024, p. 349). A week after the interview, her British citizenship was revoked (Williamson & Khiabany, 2024).

Over 1000 citizenship deprivation orders were made between 2010 and 2022 (McKinney et al., 2024); many of the people deprived of citizenship were British Muslims, including people born in Britain who had lived there since infancy (McKinney et al., 2024; Webber, 2022). In the past it was only possible to deprive naturalised citizens of their citizenship. However, the Immigration Act 2014 allowed citizenship to be revoked on the grounds that the deprivation order would be ‘conducive to the public good’ even if people had no other citizenship, provided they were believed to be able to acquire another citizenship (Webber, 2022, p. 79). This allowed the Home Secretary to argue that while Shamima was born in Britain, had been a British citizen from birth and only held British citizenship, she would be able to acquire Bangladeshi citizenship because her mother was born in Bangladesh. Shamima had never applied for dual nationality, had never visited Bangladesh, and the Bangladeshi government stated that she would be refused citizenship there if she did apply (BBC News, 2019).

Citizen deprivation orders reveal the existence of a two-tiered model of citizenship where some people are ‘provisional citizens’ with their citizenship always precarious and contingent. This reflects the reconfiguration of citizenship as something that is earned and therefore can be lost through bad behaviour. Speaking in 2013 in reference to citizenship deprivation as a counter-terrorism measure, Theresa May MP (while Home Secretary) stated that ‘British citizenship is a privilege, not a right’ (Webber, 2022, p. 82). It is a disciplinary device that ties rights to conduct and behaviour, emphasizing citizenship’s provisional nature and ‘invoking citizenship deprivation as the ultimate punitive measure with which to sanction unruly subjects’ (Kapoor & Narkowicz, 2017, p. 45). There has been a focus in migration and citizenship scholarship on how migrants are positioned as deserving or not in terms of their prospects of earning citizenship in this context. However, we know less about what happens further down the line for migrants who become naturalised citizens and for their descendants. When is a migrant no longer a migrant?

The sentiments and assumptions behind the permissibility of the deprivation order issued against Shamima Begum echoed the terminology of ‘second generation’ and ‘migrant young people’ which Anderson (2019) and Tudor (2023) identify as migratising language when used to describe people who are citizens. The legislation on citizenship deprivation reveals how racially minoritised young people like Shamima, born and raised in Britain, can be migratised from birth without even crossing an international border. This shows how ‘migratism’ as an analytical concept captures and reveals connections between discrimination based on both migration and perceived migration (Tudor, 2023). Webber (2022) observes that citizenship rearticulated in these terms is not equally precarious for everyone. Reflecting on the position of white British-born citizens who are sole nationals, and who have no (visible or immediate) family migration histories, Webber (2022, p. 82) writes that, ‘the statement is nonsensical: for them, citizenship is an inalienable, irrevocable and unconditional right’ (Webber, 2022, p. 82). The law does not permit the state to deprive people who are born British of their citizenship if it would leave them stateless and unable to acquire another. In effect, this measure can only be used against British citizens who have biographical ties to another state, most commonly through their own or their families’ migration histories (McKinney et al., 2024). While white young people of migrant heritage can in theory also be deprived of their British citizenship, they are less likely to be funnelled through the racialised infrastructures of securitisation and criminalisation that place Muslim and other racially minoritised young people at risk. In this case, following Tudor (2023), migratisation is a strategy of racialization.

In another media interview a few days after giving birth to her third child, Shamima reflected on her former child self when she stated, ‘I didn’t know what I was getting into when I left’ (Sky News, 2019). Young people’s experiences of the present are anchored and made meaningful not only by their past experiences but also by their anticipated future. The anticipated future productive capacities of young migrants, including refugees, are often highlighted in campaigns to secure their rights and protections (Sirriyeh, 2019). However, in Shamima’s case, a biographical fracturing took place where the ‘failed’ future that had materialised for her was mobilised to retrospectively unchild her by unanchoring and erasing her past as a British child to whom the state had a duty of care. Her childhood was rewritten. She was no longer the vulnerable London schoolgirl born, raised and educated in Britain, but instead she became the daughter of a migrant who could be sent ‘elsewhere’ (Tudor, 2018, p. 1064). There was no recognition of the conditions of childhood in Britain which had shaped her.

While most British Muslim children and young people are not deprived of their British citizenship, the surveillance and conditionalities they have been subjected to post-9/11 reflect a devaluing of their childhood and the contingency of their citizenship. They are reminded that their membership in Britain is precarious and conditional on them displaying the right values. This is done, for example, through the surveillance of their behaviour at schools, and in their interactions with youth workers and the health service, who, since 2015, have had a legal duty to report suspicions of ‘radicalisation’ (Heath-Kelly, 2017). Children’s language errors, such as calling a terraced house a terrorist house, or expressions of care extended to Palestinian children take on a sinister quality when engaged with through a securitised lens and viewed as potential threats to the nation and national security (Archer, 2024: Prevent Watch, 2016). In the next and final case, I examine further how unchilding is enacted through the devaluation of some childhoods and I explore the relation between this and migratisation.

Devalued childhood – not our child

In each of the cases of migratisation discussed so far, young people were expelled from the category of child. In the final case explored here, Zambrano families after Brexit, I examine how migratisation can also lead to unchilding even when the subject’s status as a child is uncontested. In this case unchilding describes the undermining and erasure of the rights of child citizens as they were devalued through migratisation.

In 2016 the British electorate voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. In the subsequent negotiations on the terms of Brexit and the EU Settlement Scheme (created to protect the residency of EU citizens in Britain), there was considerable public debate about the fate of EU citizens who had been recategorised as ‘migrants’ rather than ‘citizens’ (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018). This included reflections on the impact on British citizen partners or children in mixed status families (Godin & Sigona, 2023). However, as Solanke (2020) argues, the threat to the rights of one group of EU citizens was completely absent from these considerations and negotiations. These were Black British citizen children, including young children and babies, being cared for by a non-EU citizen parent – so-called Zambrano families. I look at how their ability to exercise their right of residence in Britain was placed at risk through Brexit. I argue that the racial and gendered logics in the migratism (Tudor, 2018) experienced by Zambrano families led to these children being unchilded through the devaluation of their childhood. It foregrounded their ascribed ‘migrant’ identity and devalued their rights as children as they became seen as migrant first (despite being citizens from birth). While asylum-seeking and Muslim children and young people have been hyper-visible in debates about race, migration and citizenship, in contrast, migratisation operated to devalue and unchild Zambrano children through their invisibility and abandonment.

Zambrano children are EU child citizens being cared for by a non-EU national parent. While Britain was a member of the EU, these parents and children held rights resulting from the 2009 Zambrano case (C-34/09) ruling where the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) established: (1) EU citizenship rights for non-migrant Member State nationals; (2) the right to residence to non-EU nationals to care for their children holding national and EU citizenship. In Britain a significant majority of the Zambrano families are single parent families in which Black British children are being cared for by mothers who are Nigerian, Jamaican or Ghanaian citizens (Solanke, 2020). Solanke (2020, p. 156) observes that their situation was overlooked by the mainstream media in Brexit reporting and was absent from consideration by politicians and campaigns for EU citizens’ rights. Their legal status and rights were not addressed in the Brexit negotiations and were thus not protected in the final Withdrawal Agreement (WA) of October 2019. The EU Settlement Scheme was only amended at the last moment to include the rights of Zambrano mothers to comply with international obligations on child welfare (Solanke, 2020).

Since the Brexit vote, research studies have explored how Brexit has affected the residency plans, and sense of belonging and family lives of people in mixed status families, including British citizen partners and children (Godin & Sigona, 2023). However, with some exceptions, research with ‘Brexit families’ has largely overlooked the impacts of Brexit on families, like Zambrano families, who were mixed status before Brexit (Solanke, 2020; Zambelli, 2020). While theories of migratisation make visible processes and experiences that are shared across legal statuses, ascriptions of migration differ in their logics and power. It is important to retain an analysis of differences within these overarching processes of migratisation, and in doing so to embed a racial lens and take account of longer term trajectories of inclusion and exclusion (Benson & Lewis, 2019). Tudor’s (2018) discussion of ‘migratism’, through its engagement with racialisation, offers such an approach.

Exploring the experiences of racially minoritised British citizens living in Europe during Brexit, Benson and Lewis (2019, p. 2219) remind us that, ‘Brexit did not instigate racism and xenophobia, but brought it to the surface in a state-sanctioned way through the referendum’. For the people they spoke with, Brexit was understood as ‘business as usual’ (Benson & Lewis 2019, p. 2211). Ascriptions of migration and immigration status are not all equally precarious and racially minoritised people are overrepresented in more precarious immigration categories. While EU citizens were shocked to find themselves newly migratised, prior to Brexit, Zambrano parents already held a precarious status, gaining their rights of residence as derivative rights holders through their status as carers for EU citizen children. The Zambrano category is also highly gendered since there are more single mother led households and mothers are more likely to be taking on caring roles (Yong, 2023). Unlike EU citizen parents, these predominantly Black women and their children had already been punitively targeted through British immigration law. In 2012, when the EEA Regulations 2006 implementing Citizenship Directive 2004/38 were amended to give effect to the Zambrano decision, the Coalition government introduced the Immigration (European Economic Area) (Amendment) (No. 2) Regulations 2012 (the ‘Zambrano Amendments’) (Solanke, 2020). These amendments excluded Zambrano carers from being able to access mainstream housing benefits and social welfare. Their children were unable to receive entitlements such as free school meals and travel passes. Through these measures, these Black British children were unchilded as they were locked out of entitlements afforded to other citizen children. As (often young) children they could not exercise their residency and other citizenship rights without their mothers (the whole point of the Zambrano ruling). They were collapsed into their mothers’ precarious migrant categorisation and effectively migratised out of their citizenship rights, becoming forced with their families into destitution and relying on emergency funding to survive. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) 1989 enshrined the universal rights of the child (Article 2) and state duties to protect children (Article 4). Article 3 of the CRC declares the ‘best interests’ of children must be the primary concern in making decisions that affect them. However, as migratised children, the best interests and rights of Zambrano children as British citizens were overruled by the Brexit agenda of immigration restriction.

Unlike the first two cases where there were active efforts to expel young people from the category and protections of childhood and from residing in Britain, in this third case silence speaks. The absence of political and media coverage of their plight reflects an absence of care. They were migratised and unchilded through this abandonment. Even in analysing their case here it is difficult to engage in the same degree of discourse analysis because there is such an absence of discourse to analyse. Unlike children in other Brexit impacted families, we do not see or hear from these children, or indeed their mothers, in the media. At the most they are represented through a generic reference to Zambrano families grouped with the experiences of people in other impacted legal categories and buried a few paragraphs down in a news story (Travis & Hopkins, 2017). Occasionally a hypothetical case is set out to exemplify their predicament (Russell, 2017). Tied to and discussed only through their mothers’ statuses, the children’s presence and rights as full individual citizens are denied. Meanwhile, it is as if their everyday lives, for some children their whole lives, have left no visible imprint. Tudor (2018, p.1064) argues that migratism operates through sending people ‘elsewhere’, but in this case it is as if these children were never here, in Britain, in the first place.

Conclusion

Over recent decades hostile immigration policies have targeted undesired migrants travelling to and living in Britain. However, these policies have also been mobilised in a bordering of Britain in ways which have reanimated the longstanding precarity and contingent inclusion of racially minoritised British citizens with family histories of migration. While there is increasing recognition within critical migration and citizenship studies of the reach of immigration policies into the lives of citizens, there is still a siloing of research into the various migration and citizenship legal categories. This obscures the relationship between policy making across these categories, their longue durée and their connections to Britain’s national politics of identity and citizenship.

In this article I have made two central arguments. First, the siloing of research along legal status means migration scholarship has focused on people who have moved across international borders and are not yet citizens of the state they reside in. This limits understandings of the reach and impact of migration policies, the longue durée of migration and citizenship policies, and the relationship between migration and race. I have argued that theories of migratisation are useful in bridging these silos and making visible connections across legal statuses. They do this by describing the social, political and legal processes by which people are categorised and engaged with as ‘migrants’. This can be seen for example in the criminalisation of asylum-seeking young people and British Muslim young people. Migratisation theories help reveal the complex relationship between processes of migratisation and racialisation, without flattening out differences by conflating the two. Rather than understanding citizenship as a one-way linear trajectory, these theories help to show how citizenship in the nation-state for racially minoritised citizens who are migratised also remains precarious and contingent. Shifting away from analyses structured by reified legal categories makes visible the wider impacts and significance of migration and migration policy for broader sociological analysis of inequalities, discrimination and social justice.

However, I have suggested that despite these strengths, the migratisation of children and young people, including the racialised gendered dimensions of this, has been overlooked within migratisation theories. Children and young people play a key role in the politics of bordering and nation-making. Through a focus on their role in the future of the nation-state and as key subjects of a national moral compass they have become central figures in debates about migration and bordering. Therefore, my second argument has been to advocate for a foregrounding of children and young people’s experiences and representations in discussions of migration, nation, citizenship and bordering. I have shown that through introducing Shalhoub-Kervorkian’s concept of unchilding into migration and border studies, and specifically into conversation with migratisation theories, we can see how interventions into the reception and welfare of children have been central to the restriction and enforcement of national bordering in Britain.

Despite a wider environment of increasing immigration restrictions, the moral grammar of childhood has led to the opening of some corridors of conditional welcome for migrant children. Bringing the concept of unchilding into migration and citizenship studies, this article contributes to building knowledge about the ongoing evolution of restrictive immigration discourse by showing how this discourse draws on unchilding to narrow possibilities for inclusionary practice in this context by rearticulating justifications for the ethical legitimacy of this endeavour. Bringing together theories of migratisation and unchilding shows how these processes connect in a vicious cycle to enable and further reinforce exclusion. Through migratisation children can be exiled from childhood or have their childhoods devalued. Once misrecognised and expelled from the category of childhood the cases discussed in this article have shown how this can further reinforce young people’s migratisation. In the case of teenagers, racialised gendered discourses have enabled the conflation of migration, crime and security to migratise boys seeking asylum in Britain as well as young Muslim British citizen girls, positioning them as a threat to the nation to be excluded, expelled or closely surveilled. Meanwhile, in the third case discussed in this paper, the Zambrano families, which included young children and babies, their migratisation and unchilding were enacted not through the hyper-visibility of the first case, but through their invisibility and abandonment. Barely discussed at all and viewed through their migratised parent’s status, their British childhoods were erased.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was funded through a British Academy Mid Career Fellowship titled Britain’s Child Migrants: Nation and Connected Migrations MFSS24\240067.

ORCID iD

Ala Sirriyeh

Notes

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