My last blog, which was on socialedge.org (Engage in Uganda), described my work this past summer with Chaford or Charity for Rural Development, an indigenous community organization in Gulu, Northern Uganda. A group of American students and I worked with Ugandan refugees and students who have been displaced from the over 23-year long conflict in the North. It was the first study abroad program in the North, and a very unique program as it combined studies, academic research and an internship with an NGO (Engage Uganda Program). If you’d like to see my blog from my Jordan State Department Trip 2 Summers ago, I recently found it (has a lot of history and current state of Jordan and surrounding area as I wrote it while the “2006 Lebanon War” was occurring between Israel and Lebanon).

I am on another unique study abroad program called Global Cities where I travel with groups of Mexican and French students to Chicago, Mexico City, Shanghai, and Paris to do research in teams, take classes and go on cultural excursions. In each of the cities, I am researching the relationship between the government and immigration and refugee asylum policies with community organizations that work for immigrant and refugee rights. I also will focus on a community organization in each of the cities to use as a case study and do interviews and hopefully research and work for the organization to aide our comparative academic yearlong research on the issue and also a research need they have.

This past fall in Chicago, I researched the relationship between civic society and the unaccompanied/separated refugee children in Chicago, specifically the legal provisions, policies and organizations that are set up to protect them. “Separated Children” are children seeking asylum without their guardian, who they have been separated from them in many ways, such as war, trafficking, etc. A big problem in asylum law and international agreements is that they ignore children. When Refugee Law was being formed (post-WWII), immigrants/refugees were seen as traveling only in families or that kids were not traveling often. In addition, there were no advocates for children at the time.

The separated children phenomenon is considered new, as literature and studies on it have only been occurring for the past couple decades. Recent studies have shown that the issue is extremely important as about 5,000 separated children are detained every year in the U.S. (Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, 2002), and there at least 25,000 separated children at any given time in Europe (Separated Children in Europe Project). It is also a key political issue as there is mounting national and international concern about child trafficking, while there is little academic research on separated children and there are weak policies, throughout the world, in terms of there being few services and funding for these children.

For my work, I specifically looked at the ways civic society has responded to the lack of appropriate care for and attention to separated children. This is important given the gaps in refugee law from decades ago that are still in effect today and the omission of children as a special category for consideration in these laws. There have been many studies done by academics and ex-immigration officials on the failure of past and current policy both in their writing and implementation, but these studies have only focused on the failures of asylum law and what the government and the international community needs to do to strengthen the laws surrounding asylum law and separated children. Yet, none of these studies focus on the role of civic society in providing the services that the law and the government fail to ensure for separated children.

I have worked with refugee children in the past, through my work with an after-school program at Sullivan High in Rogers Park, Chicago, a school with almost one hundred different languages spoken and a huge amount of students who are refugees. I have also volunteered with organizations who work with refugees in Chicago, such as Interfaith Refugee and Immigrant Ministries and Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights. Yet, I have never explored what happens to separated children in Chicago. Through an interview with Dr. Edwin Silverman, Bureau Chief of Refugee and Immigrant Services for Illinois Department of Human Services, I found that there are a few main community organizations in Chicago, specifically for asylum seekers, and how separated children are treated as a subset of that. First, separated children are detained and then referred to the International Children’s Center (ICC) by the US Citizenship and Immigration Service. The ICC is part of the Heartland Alliance division entitled Heartland Human Care Services. Although the disposition and care for the children are the province of the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the US Department of Health and Human Services, civil society plays a role in pushing this Government Office to provide appropriate care. Following the International Children’s Center, the children are either repatriated, united with state-side relatives, or placed in foster care.

There are specific actors in civic society who are ensuring that the government is providing care that takes into account the specifically unique needs of separated children especially given that international law and US government practice ignore the special concerns of these children. One such proponent is Bob Glaves, Director of the Chicago Bar Association Foundation, who advocates the Federal Government for legal support for separated children. Another key actor is Mary Meg McCarthy, Director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, which staffs the International Children’s Center (ICC). Bob and Mary Meg have been instrumental in prodding the federal government to provide appropriate care for the children, service specific sites such as the ICC as opposed to criminal detention facilities, and legal service support for the detained children.

My research this past quarter, which I have described above, has been interesting and there is still much work to be done on the subject, but I look forward to my time in Mexico City (this winter), Shanghai (early Spring), and Paris (into the summer) to continue the research of the relationship between civic society and the government in terms of immigrant and refugee rights. There is still little academic research on the gaps of asylum laws, and it is important to know what is keeping asylum law from being able to protect children and why the community organizations that I have described are necessary to fill the gaps. Academic research on the importance of community organizations and the inefficiencies of asylum law can push these cities to have stronger policies and help their community organizations to have more support for intervening on behalf of separated refugee children.

Finally, I want to end all my blog posts with a link to a talk from ted.com, which shows videos of ideas and work from some of the world’s greatest thinkers. This talk is from Paul Bennett, a British branding and design guru, who describes “how his firm works to reframe the everyday realities of its diverse clients to create results that truly make a difference.” Some questions to think about from this talk are where we, the individual, individual organizations, and society as whole fail to look at issues from the person’s perspective that we are working “for” and hopefully with. For instance, for those are doing development work, how often do you look from the perspective of those your organization is working with?

Peace, Nikolai Smith