Children, Human Rights and Temporary Labour Migration

Rasika Jayasuriya makes a thorough analysis of how low-wage temporary migration programs currently prohibit family unity and contribute to damaging the parent-child relationship. Outlining the massive scale of this policy-driven violation of children's rights, she offers a remarkably coherent set of policy recommendations for States of origin and destination alike. The urgency of mainstreaming children's rights into labour migration policies by literally leaving no one behind has found a convincing voice. Francois Crepeau, Professor, McGill University, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants. Extended parental absence clearly affects children, but the voices of those separated from parents compelled to migrate for work are rarely heard within the global care chain. In this brilliant study, legal scholar Rasika Jayasuriya gives these children a voice, using a socio-legal approach to illuminate their plight. She demonstrates that while labor-receiving countries pay lip service to the value of all children and their need for parental care and support, their own laws and policies routinely ignore the child development and psychosocial deprivations of those whose parents must travel long distances, often staying away for months and even years at a time, in order to earn enough to support them. A majority of these migrants are mothers who are preferred for jobs as care workers, many as nannies expected to lavish affection on the children of their employers while often barred from communicating regularly with their own offspring-much less being with them in person. And long absences make it difficult for fathers as well as mothers to re-establish strong relations with their children once they do return. In all these ways, Jayasuriya contends, receiving countries participating in the Temporary Labor Migration system clearly violate the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which emphatically protects the child-parent relationship. Since most are signatories to this pact, Jayasuriya uses it as the foundation to lay a path to concrete remedies, calling on wealthy receiving countries to develop social policies that would allow them to assist in supporting children and parents who are separated while also reducing their dependency on migrant workers and investing in economic development in the low-income sending countries so that parents can find viable jobs at home. Legally complex but passionately argued, this is a necessary book for our time. Sonya Michel, co-editor (with Ito Peng) of Gender, Migration and the Work of Care: A Multi-Scalar Approach to the Pacific Rim, Professor Emerita of History, American Studies and Women's Studies, University of Maryland and Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC.