Bordering through unchilding : the case of Britain's child migrants

Sirriyeh, Ala (2025) Bordering through unchilding : the case of Britain's child migrants. The Sociological Review. ISSN 0038-0261

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.