Citation

Palmary I. S. Afr. J. Psychol. 2019; 49(1): 7-9.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, SAGE Publications)

DOI

10.1177/0081246318795827

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In recent months, there has been widespread media attention to parents and children who have been separated as a consequence of Donald Trump’s ‘tough on immigration’ policies. There has been an outcry that more than 2300 children have been separated from their parents and sent to shelters across the United States while their parents are in detention (see The Guardian, 2018). Closer to home, in February of 2018, a truck was found carrying 8 Zimbabwean children between the ages of 2 and 12 into South Africa. The children were travelling to meet their parents in Cape Town when a passer-by heard one of the youngest children crying and alerted the authorities. The children were held separately from their parents for 3 months before they were deported back to Zimbabwe. The truck driver was charged with human trafficking.1 Commenting on the matter, Lumka Olifant, the spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs, emphasized the negligence of the parents who sent their children across borders under such dangerous conditions (Washinyira, 2018). The parents, on the contrary, emphasized that they wanted to provide a better life for their children and had resorted to smuggling them across the border as they had been unable to obtain passports for them from the Zimbabwean government. The US case in particular has generated much debate about the human rights violations that can and do take place through the restriction of human movement. There are a number of points that are important that have not been adequately discussed. In particular, what has been largely missing from these debates has been the ways in which changes in migration policy making has created these risks for children and families – even in instances where the intention is to protect them. Let me elaborate this using two examples.

The first example comes from our research on South African borders with unaccompanied child migrants (Mahati & Palmary, 2017). This research shows that children cross rural land borders frequently (sometimes daily), and this is not inevitably a risky activity. In some instances, it can mean crossing a border to reach school each day, visit a relative, or even simply make a telephone call. Often the distances are not very long and they move through easy to navigate terrain. And yet these children faced daily risks. These risks included violence from gangs and smugglers, extortion from border officials, and arrest from police. However, the dangers they faced came not from their decision to ‘migrate’, but rather from the existence of a border which meant that these simple everyday activities were rendered illegal and bureaucratically complex. Because movement has become so heavily restricted, this created the conditions under which smugglers saw the opportunity to make money off or rob migrants who have little recourse to police, and border officials saw the opportunity to extort bribes from children who needed desperately to attend school or see a relative. As the children told us, the officials ignored their movements until it was exam time, when they knew that attendance at school was very important to them and then they started checking documents and extracting bribes from children. Without the presence of the border and its associated border management practices, the children would not have been at risk but rather would have been carrying out a very ordinary activity. This is perhaps the greatest myth of popular migration debates, namely, that porous borders are a risk and intensely managed or policed borders make us safer. This is only highlighted when we consider that the most heavily policed border and the border with the largest humanitarian interventions, the Musina border (between South Africa and Zimbabwe), is also one of the most dangerous and has become notorious for sexual and other forms of violence from Magumaguma ...

Language: en