Toward a child-centric migration agenda

This position paper for the Princeton/Rockefeller conference “Migrant Youth and Children of Migrants in a Globalized World” offers a tentative framework for organizing research directions on the subject of children and migration. This is informed by several themes that are a part of the position paper by Tienda, Taylor, and Maughan (2007), as well as of the survey papers by Harttgen and Klasen (2008) and Rossi (2008). In particular, I pick up in a general way on two broad issues: the need to inform the migration literature with an understanding of the child development literature; and the need to appreciate that policy relevant research must not only bring new facts and trends to the awareness of the broader community, but also to formulate and investigate the underlying causal relationships. These issues also span a third that is also very much at the centre of the conference papers: the need to develop appropriate information sources.