Between obligations and aspirations: unaccompanied immigrant teen workers’ transnational lives and imagined futures

ABSTRACT

Relying on ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with undocumented Latinx young adults (18–31) who arrived in Los Angeles, California, as unaccompanied minors (11–17), this study examines immigrant youth workers’ migration motives, their transnational ties and transnationalism’s effect on their imagined futures. Findings show that, in the context of structural and community violence and poverty, Central American and Mexican youth migrate alone at young ages, in part to fulfill moral obligations to provide financial and emotional support within networks of care for the families they eventually leave behind. For many, left-behind family’s needs increase as parents and siblings age into new life stages. Unmarried transnational youth workers are especially likely to shoulder moral obligations. This is while they transition into young adulthood in the US and weigh their own prospects for education and occupational mobility in Los Angeles or their home communities. Maintaining moral obligations established in adolescence throughout the transition into young adulthood can cause youth to reimagine futures to include the possibility of staying and other alternatives. This research offers important insights into the changing nature of transnational families, unaccompanied minors’ coming of age, and the lives of migrant youth workers in the US.

KEYWORDS:

• Unaccompanied minors
• immigrant youth workers
• transnational families
• moral obligations
• imagined futures

Much scholarly and policy attention on the rise of unaccompanied minor migration to the US in the last decade has focused on those who migrate without a parent or guardian and are apprehended by Customs and Border Protection, including minors separated from family units in transit, and detained in federal facilities, and the nearly 600,000 resettled children with sponsors across the US (Migration Policy Institute 2023). Still marginalized, but coming to the fore, are migrant youth who entered the US clandestinely, knowingly leaving their families behind in their origin countries in search of full-time work in their destination country. As youth workers growing up in the US without parents present, they must secure their own survival. In the case of transnational families in which ‘migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands’ (Levitt and Jaworsky 2007, 129), youth also work to support their left-behind families (Canizales 2021a; 2021b; Martinez 2019).

Unaccompanied youth’s transnational labor migration is distinct from the more common pattern in which the parent(s) migrates to labor on behalf of the left-behind family, a migrant family form that has been amply studied (Abrego 2014; Dreby 2010; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Levitt 2001; Schmalzbauer 2005). Young people who migrate to the US in search of work tend to originate from impoverished households and communities in Central America and Mexico and begin working as children alongside their families to alleviate the poverty, violence, and displacement rooted in centuries of Spanish colonization and US imperialism and compounded by contemporary modernization (Martinez 2019) and securitized development (Heidbrink 2020) policies. It is within these macro sociopolitical contexts that labor migration allows young people to meet everyday basic household needs and set their sights on opportunities for stability in the immediate and mobility in the future.

Twenty-one-year-old Lucas was among the transnational migrants I met during my fieldwork who grew up as a teen worker in Los Angeles, California, while supporting his left-behind family in Guatemala. Lucas stood at just over five feet tall, with fair skin and freckles that sprinkled across his cheeks and nose. When we met at a McDonald’s in Pico-Union, Los Angeles, Lucas meticulously recounted his migration and arrival to the city as the room bustled around us, occasionally swaying his head to his right side to move his long black hair from his eyes. He shared that he began living in Los Angeles at the age of thirteen, working a series of jobs in construction, landscaping, and, finally, garment manufacturing to survive. Speaking generally to teen migrants’ imagined futures, he explained that, ‘Our mentality was that we would come to work here for five years, then go back.’ Lucas focused his gaze while saying, ‘I and many other jóvenes (teenagers) have that same mentality: “Oh, I am going to the United States for two years … for three years … ”’ During that time, Lucas intended to work to build a house ‘because there aren’t houses’, he said, ‘Well, there are houses, but they aren’t that good.’ In what he described as a typical conversation between jóvenes planning their unaccompanied migration to the US and their parent(s), likely their mother, Lucas revealed his imagined future, one with a promise of economic mobility and eventual return to his origin country:

We say, ‘I am going to the United States, mom, and I promise you that I am going to build you a house. When I get back, we are going to have a car, a business. I promise, mom, that everything is going to be okay.’ That’s our mentality. She says, ‘Okay, hijo.’ And that’s how we leave our moms.

Despite anticipating returning to Guatemala while still a teenager, Lucas transitioned to young adulthood as an unaccompanied, undocumented, low-wage worker in Los Angeles, California. He explained that ‘The years go by quickly. Five years become ten, and you say, ‘Wow, what happened?’’ This study sets out to answer Lucas’ question.

Studies of immigrant family transnationalism have largely focused on adults’ experiences of parenting, childrearing and caregiving, community collectivism, and political engagement across borders and how these practices coincide with financial, social, political, and emotional remittance sending (Abrego 2014; Andrews 2018; Dreby 2010; Duquette-Rury 2020; Levitt 2001). Here, I focus on transnationalism as immigrants’ financial and emotional ties to kin and communities across borders. I conceptualize these ties as bound by immigrants’ moral obligations to care for themselves and their families. Through ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews conducted in Los Angeles with undocumented Central American and Mexican young adults (18–31) who arrived in the US as unaccompanied minors (11–17) between 2003 and 2013, this research examines: (1) how moral obligations motivate youth’s unaccompanied migration as minors; (2) how youth’s transnational ties change over time; and (3) the role of transnational ties in shaping youth’s aspirations for their futures once in young adulthood.

Findings show that, in the context of structural and community violence and poverty, Central American and Mexican youth migrate alone at young ages, in part to fulfill moral obligations – informed by gender, sibling order, and marital status – to provide financial and emotional support within familial care networks. Once in Los Angeles, California, unaccompanied young people strive to uphold their transnational obligations alongside their obligation to care for themselves in the destination society. For many, left-behind family’s needs increase as parents and siblings age into new life stages. This is while teenage migrants transition into young adulthood in the US and weigh their own prospects for mobility in Los Angeles or their home communities. I argue that moral obligations established in adolescence and maintained throughout the transition to young adulthood – a period in which young people are learning their social roles, the structure of opportunities, and establishing their identities – produce uncertain future aspirations ranging from settling in the US long-term, returning to the origin country, and, in some cases, an imagined in between. These findings contribute to the scholarship on transnational labor migration and (im)migrant families’ and youth’s life courses in three ways. First, by centering the case of unaccompanied youth’s transnational labor migration and transitionsto adulthood as low-wage workers in the US in migration scholarship. Second, by expanding our understanding of the dynamics of unaccompanied migrant youth’s transnational care work as financially and emotionally intertwined. And third, by offering insight into how transnationalism shapes migrant teen workers’ aspirations for the future as they come of age.

Literature review

Minors have migrated to the US from Latin America alone in pursuit of adventure, mobility, and safety in the face of extreme violence and poverty since the early twentieth century (Martinez 2019; Padilla-Rodríguez 2022; Ruehs-Navarro 2022). Many of these young people arrive in the US with prior work experiences after having worked alone or alongside their parents or adult caretakers in their origin country and thus can anticipate entering full-time employment (Canizales 2021b). Their growing up as workers contrasts the idealized characteristics of Western childhood, such as school-going, delayed workplace entry, and dependence on an adult caregiver alongside sentimentalization in the family and community (Zelizer 1985). Instead, unaccompanied youth join the ranks of undocumented labor migrants who experience exploitation, financial hardship, and emotional distress while sustaining themselves and their families across borders. Despite the rise in unaccompanied minor migration and increased notice of their entry into low-wage labor institutions rather than schools, their experiences are underexplored in research on transnational labor migration and family life, which tends to focus on the experiences of adult migrants who support left-behind children.

Adult migrants’ experiences aid in explaining the extent to which immigrants retain transnational ties following migration and how ties shape immigrants’ relationship to origin and destination countries (Waldinger 2015). One strand of this research concludes that maintaining ties across borders facilitates immigrants’ incorporation into their host society and vice versa (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 1994; Hagan and Wassink 2016). Others find that as immigrants become more established in their destination country, their social, political, and economic activities in the origin country decline (Soehl and Waldinger 2010). More recently, scholars have advanced a cross-border perspective highlighting how migration – and the flow of people, resources, and ideas – creates tensions for individuals, communities, and nation-states (Duquette-Rury 2020; Waldinger 2017). Immigrants’ social position, including their ethnorace, gender, and legal status across transnational societies, shapes whether and to what extent these pathways are possible (Andrews 2018).

Parents who endure these conditions while sacrificing their bodies, intimate relationships, and family lives on behalf of their children’s well-being are at the center of existing research (Abrego 2014; Dreby 2010; Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997; Oliveira 2018). A class mismatch can occur within families wherein children experience class mobility as they come of age abroad while migrant parents remain socioeconomically stagnant (Schmalzbauer 2005). The passage of time and aging across borders can alleviate the financial pressures felt by parents whose children ‘age in place’ and transition into adulthood and self-reliance (Bryceson 2019) but can also increase migrant adults’ vulnerability to poverty and marginalization in the destination country (Ciobanu, Fokkema, and Nedelcu 2017). Children might eventually migrate to reunite with their parents (Foner and Dreby 2011; Orellana 2009). Yet depictions of left-behind, reunited, and parachute children reinforce frames of children’s material and emotional dependence on adult caregivers (Canizales and Diaz-Strong 2021).

Today’s unaccompanied youth workers must independently negotiate their transnational obligations within a structure of opportunities shaped by their intersecting unaccompanied, undocumented, and low-wage worker statuses (Canizales 2021b). Young people do so during a critical period in their lives when they are transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood alongside their transition from newcomer to long-settled migrant. Both transitions are ones in which individuals are finding their place and (re)imagining their futures. All the while, left-behind families, and especially aging parents, are becoming more dependent over time (Bruhn and Oliveira 2022), and the origin country conditions that initially prompted migration continually worsen.

Theorizing unaccompanied youth’s transnationalism

Though scant, studies of unaccompanied Latin American youth’s transnationalism demonstrate that young people actively participate in family and community life at young ages. To make ends meet in their origin countries, they often leave school at early ages to find employment in privatized labor markets that have historically displaced workers by eliminating livelihoods and deteriorating environments within societies rife with political repression and gang violence that live in impunity (Batz 2020; Martinez 2019). In her work with Indigenous Guatemalan young people, anthropologist Lauren Heidbrink (2020, 35) establishes that children act as ‘contributors to household economies by such means as domestic labor, childcare, work in family businesses, and piecemeal tasks such as sewing or bundling spices, often with minimal financial compensation, if any’. Similar observations are made among Mexican migrant teens employed full-time in New York City, New York (Martinez 2019) and Central American- and Mexican-origin children coming of age as low-wage workers in Los Angeles, California (Canizales 2021b).

Youth are critical contributors to the survival of their multigenerational households (Canizales and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2022), and migration is an extension of youth’s self and familial care. For many, transnational migration is not their first attempt to influence their individual and familial circumstances, as teens might engage in seasonal, local, and regional migration patterns as they and their families attempt to survive (Escamilla Garcia 2021). Teens, relative to tender-aged children and younger adolescents, are more likely to be the first in their families to migrate alone (Hamilton and Bylander 2021), enacting agency as they make decisions to migrate (Heidbrink 2020) and interact with systems of power and institutional agents in transit and settlement into destination countries within care networks (Ruehs-Navarro 2022). Yet, children in the US are typically viewed as receptacles of parents’ and other adult figures’ resources until the age of individuation at eighteen (though this age threshold is rising alongside inequality in the US; see Silva 2013).

The roles and responsibilities youth take in the transition into adulthood within resource-impoverished families in the US are complex, as families rely on children’s paid and unpaid work to support household economies (Delgado 2023; Estrada 2019; Kwon 2022). Children face the tension between fulfilling roles and responsibilities typically thought of as reserved for adults while still not feeling like adults themselves (Diaz-Strong 2020; Martinez 2019). Further, giving back expectations and practices, especially at young ages, can affect individuals’ life chances regardless of immigrant generation by shaping the aspirations youth develop and the decisions they make to achieve them.

This is no less true among unaccompanied, undocumented migrant youth workers whose status as workers and the work conditions they endure while maintaining financial ties to left-behind families forge a cycle of work primacy (Canizales 2021b). In work primacy, workplaces become the central organizing institution that determines how immigrant youth experience work and engage in non-workspaces like schools, community, and family life. Unaccompanied youth workers might, for example, face time and resource constraints, including lack of access to accurate information about schooling, to enroll in school consistently (Canizales 2021a; Diaz-Strong 2020). Additionally, migrant teens’ sense of self and their health and well-being are shaped by the physical conditions of work and the ongoing financial stressors they endure. Their increasing awareness of how their unaccompanied status relegates them to exploitative labor and hardship while young people with parents and other adult caregivers enter schools and follow a normative transition into adulthood adds to emotional distress (Canizales 2022). Those who are financially and emotionally tied to left-behind families might strategically pause or seize remittance-sending practices to achieve stability in the face of extreme hardship, developing feelings of guilt or shame as families’ conditions persist or worsen. Some might re-engage families and remittance-sending practices once financial stability and a sense of well-being are achieved.

I add to this line of research on unaccompanied minors’ migration, incorporation, and coming of age a theorization of how transnational moral obligations shape youth workers’ aspirations for the future across origin and destination country societies. This is important because many migrate to the US with the initial hope of returning to their home countries like their adult counterparts who have been found to possess mutable social imaginaries about their futures of origin country return (Moran-Taylor and Menjívar 2005). Additionally, because of their age at arrival (Diaz-Strong and Gonzales 2023), migrant teens are simultaneously imagining their futures within migrant and individual life cycles – from departure to potential return in the former and the transition into adulthood in the latter. Yet punitive and restrictive political and economic structures paired with low wages in the US, along with the persistent political and economic uncertainties in their origin countries, keep youth in the US longer than intended. Time in the US can expose immigrants to laws and social processes that shape their sense of safety (Valdivia 2019), while communities of inclusion and spaces of belonging can positively influence their sense of self (Bruhn and Gonzales 2023). These experiences may uniquely influence how youth imagine their futures in adulthood.

To advance a theory of unaccompanied minor transnationalism, I examine the dynamics of moral obligations that prompt unaccompanied minors’ labor migration and reinforce the maintenance of transnational financial and socioemotional ties as they come of age. I highlight the interconnectedness of youth’s financial and emotional labor while acknowledging that youth’s lives and labor are not static but change over time as young people’s sense of self and their family dynamics across borders also change. I also consider how migrant teens’ moral obligations to family are not evenly experienced, recognizing that unaccompanied youth occupy diverse social locations and are differentially situated within hierarchies of power (see Collins’ (1990) ‘Matrix of Domination’ for more on this).

Like migrant parents to left-behind children (Abrego 2014), migrant children’s sense of moral obligations to left-behind families can be informed by factors such as gender expectations and marital status. Corroborating previous work on low-income immigrant and non-immigrant families in the US in which older siblings prioritize supporting families and/or siblings (Agius Vallejo 2012; Canizales and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2022; Delgado 2023), I examine how sibling order might shape unaccompanied young people’s moral obligations and transnationalism in turn. In the transition to adulthood, where time in the destination country can approximate or exceed the time spent in the origin country in childhood, imagined futures can include return, stay, or hope for the possibility of both.

Data and methods

This paper draws on data collected in the Pico-Union and Westlake/MacArthur Park neighborhoods of Los Angeles – two miles west of Downtown Los Angeles and a primary site of residence for Latin American immigrants in Los Angeles. Research began with observations of an informal support group for unaccompanied, undocumented Indigenous Guatemalan youth workers, expanded to include two Catholic churches in the area and the Central American and Mexican unaccompanied youth workers who attended religious gatherings, and eventually to an array of community spaces, like community gardens, book clubs, family gatherings, and others where unaccompanied young people gather across Los Angeles. I gained access to the support group from which this study stems through its coordinator – a Salvadoran immigrant and well-recognized community leader in his late forties who recognized the social, financial, and legal precarity of this population and sought to establish a support system among them. A snowball sampling strategy followed interviews with support group goers, which connected me to the abovementioned community spaces and to interviewees across them.

In total, 75 in-depth interviews were conducted with Central American and Mexican young adults ages 18–31 who arrived in Los Angeles as minors (ages 11–17) between 2003 and 2013. Of the total sample, five received financial support from a long-settled relative, which enabled their K-12 school enrollment. The other 70 grew up as full-time workers. I focus on the latter in this study. Among the full-time workers, participants arrived in Los Angeles from the Central American countries (84% of the total sample) of Guatemala (n = 48), El Salvador (n = 9), Honduras (n = 2), and Mexico (n = 11, 16% of the total sample). The overrepresentation of Guatemalans results from my entry into the field and preliminary study focused on the Guatemalan unaccompanied minors. Among the Guatemalan participants, 36 identified as Maya. These young people grew up speaking the Indigenous languages of K’iche’, Q’anjob’al, Mam, and Akateko, four of the twenty-one Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala.

The full-time workers in this research entered low-wage occupations with prior work experience gained in the origin country, making the work that they did in Los Angeles seemingly familiar. Study participants worked in three primary occupations: garment manufacturing (n = 30, 43%), restaurant service (n = 10, 14%), and domestic and janitorial work (n = 8, 10%). Others (n = 20, 34%) were scattered across occupations such as construction, carwashes, mechanic shops, day laborers, and the like. Two (3%) were unemployed at the time of our interview. Youth who are not received by a financially supportive relative do not enroll in K-12 schools, though some eventually enroll in adult schools centered on learning English as a second language for a few hours each day, Monday through Thursday. This was the case for 22 (31%) of full-time workers in the study sample.

Reflecting the historical dominance of adolescent males in unaccompanied youth labor migration flows (UNHCR 2014) as well as the gendered expectation that men are financial providers (Abrego 2014), the full-time workers in the sample included 51 men and 19 women. The median age of interviewees was 23. The median age at migration was 16, with the youngest participant migrating at eleven years old and the oldest at seventeen. As Lucas explained above, and as the data will reinforce, unaccompanied immigrant youth workers often expressed an initial hope of returning to their origin countries but found that the structure of the low-wage labor market, low wages coupled with familial obligations, and their undocumented status, combined with the persistence of political and economic precarity in their countries of origin kept them in the US longer than intended. Interview participants reported an average of 8.6 years in the US.

Interviews were organized as a life history that moved through the following themes: family dynamics, relationships, and responsibilities before migration; school and work experiences in the origin country; reasons for migration and the migration journey; school and work experiences in the US; relationship dynamics and responsibilities to left-behind families; local and transnational community involvement; and aspirations for the future. All but one interview was audio recorded and transcribed verbatim in Spanish. The interviewee who chose not to be recorded did so out of shyness about me hearing her voice back while transcribing. She allowed me to take notes during our conversation, which I later transcribed and supplemented with field notes. All interviewees received a ‘thank you’ card and a cash honorarium for their time. Only the portions of the Spanish-language interviews reported in this manuscript have been translated into English. All names are pseudonyms to protect participants’ identities. These methods were approved by the University of Southern California Institutional Review Board [UP-15-00606].

I integrate interview data with observational data across four years with low-wage youth workers who participated in support groups, church youth groups, and community cultural events throughout Los Angeles. Data collection included jotting notes either in a small notebook or using my phone while conducting observations, audio recording and transcribing interviews, and typing detailed fieldnotes of participant observations and interviews immediately after leaving the field. Fieldnotes and interview transcripts were coded using a flexible coding approach (Deterding and Waters 2018) in the qualitative data analysis software Dedoose. Coding began by indexing the main themes of pre- and post-migration experiences in work, school, family, and community. Existing literature informed an abductive coding approach for themes such as migration goal(s), transnational family dynamics, remittances- financial, remittances- social, and aspirations for the future. A concurrent inductive analysis produced the emergent theme ‘costs of incorporation’, which included the subcodes: field notes sickness/death, sibling married, niece/nephew born. These life events were coded as ‘costs’ because participants expressed grief about being absent for them. This coding illuminated the relationship between youth’s transnational obligations and changing family dynamics over time. Subsequent analytical memos drew my attention to how changing family dynamics over time reconfigured youth’s transnational obligations and could inform their aspirations for the future. I then analyzed the data coded as ‘aspirations for the future’ using the subcodes: transnationally oriented, locally oriented, or uncertain. The final code referred to youth caught between transnational and local aspirations. I elaborate on these below.

Findings

Forming transnational moral obligations

Arriving in Los Angeles, unaccompanied migrant youth workers’ need for survival paired with aspirations for personal or familial mobility prompt them to quickly take jobs in the secondary labor market while their status as unaccompanied and undocumented youth means they do so with extreme disadvantages (Canizales 2021b). They are exposed to violent labor practices that can exacerbate their vulnerabilities in everyday life but remain in these sub-par occupations because of their obligation to provide shelter, clothing, and food for themselves, as well as to pay off their migration debt, and any expenses they accrue in the US and support their left-behind parents.

Youth’s earnings were sent to origin countries with specific aims, including establishing businesses, building homes, supporting their siblings’ education, or toward everyday living expenses. For Benito, who migrated at seventeen, migration debt amounted to $8000. On top of a monthly debt repayment of $200, Benito paid ‘renta, luz, gas (rent, light, gas). When you don’t have anyone in your family here, you have to find any way to pay [the bills]’. Despite challenges in making ends meet, memories of growing up in poverty motivate the persistence of youth’s transnational ties. Benito committed to sending ‘aunque sea 50 o 100 dólares … Even just 50 or 100 dollars [per month] because living in poverty is very difficult.' Participants attempted to, on average, send 100 US dollars to their families ‘cada 15 días (every 15 days or two weeks)’ or ‘100 a 200 cada mes (100–200 every month) ’.

Like Benito, Justino thought back to the living conditions he left his family in – the same ones he grew up in and so desperately wanted to escape – when remitting. Migrating at fifteen, Justino explained: ‘I remember how we suffered there. That’s what came to my mind. They are in need. That’s why I send money. It’s not because anyone tells me to. It’s because I remember. So, I say, you know what? Manda, manda, manda (send, send, send).’ The establishment and maintenance of transnational financial ties are motivated by youth’s socioemotional ties and collectivist ideologies. Like other immigrant and immigrant-descendant young people of poor and working-class backgrounds who grow up with a sense of obligation to ‘give back’ to families facing financial hardship (Agius Vallejo 2012; Lanuza 2020) or to vindicate their parents' sacrifices through an immigrant bargain (Dreby 2010; Louie 2012), remembrance is the foundation for transnational unaccompanied youth workers’ commitment ‘send, send, send’.

Children feel a moral obligation to support their aging parents and work together in doing so. This was the case for Ander and his family. In Guatemala, Ander grew up with a father who struggled with alcoholism and a mother who worked as a homemaker and caretaker for Ander and his nine siblings. When Ander left Guatemala at fifteen, he was the fifth sibling to migrate to the US to meet the family’s financial needs. As older brothers and sisters married and their financial priorities shifted, Ander and another brother worked together to remit money to their mother:

We send money to my mom because sometimes my father drinks and he can’t support her. He doesn’t help her. He just spends money when he drinks, and that’s it. So, I told my brother we needed to take responsibility to grow the corn. We need to buy the supplies to grow the corn. And thank God, my brother helped me buy it, and we are helping my family other there [in Guatemala]. We are only able to help a little bit, but we do it con todo corazón (with all our heart).

A sibling’s marriage marked the decline in obligations to remit to left-behind families. While living separately in Los Angeles, Ander and his unmarried brother shared the role of financial provider and head of household in their father’s stead.

Another participant, Mikaela, migrated at seventeen and took on a similar role but did so with the help of her left-behind brother. She explained that:

From the moment I arrived, I did what was possible to help my mom because, well, since my mom left her first marriage, she faced a lot of obstacles. My dad never had a career. He worked in construction, but that’s not something you get paid well in over there. We were poor. Anytime I had money, I used it as an opportunity to help my mom. I always sent her money, and she would store it away for little things she needed around the house.

Mikaela’s younger brother devised a plan to construct a home quickly: he would take out a bank loan and oversee the construction of their family’s new home while Mikaela’s remittances would repay the loan, plus interest.

I was doing well at work, and I was able to pay for her house. I was working at a company in Carson [a city in Los Angeles County] where I worked on a production line. I got a lot of overtime, and my checks came out really good. It gave me the chance to help my mom alongside my brother.

Together, the two built the house in one year. With a proud grin on her face, Mikaela reported that ‘Y ahorita está bien mi mamá. No sufre de nada, pienso yo (My mom is doing well now. I don’t think she lacks anything)’. After building their mother’s house, Mikaela’s brother migrated to Los Angeles to help her support their mother, which Mikaela describes as ‘taking the weight from my shoulders because as the eldest daughter, I feel a great sense of responsibility. Do you get me? But now I feel the weight is taken off’. The presence of more than one sibling who can support left-behind families alleviates the pressure of transnational moral obligation on an individual unaccompanied young person.

Older siblings felt responsible for their parents but also for their younger siblings, especially in cases where a parent was absent. Unlike Ander, who stepped in to support his mother despite his father’s presence, Gael was pushed into the provider role at a young age when his father passed away. Gael’s educational trajectory ended in sixth grade when he entered the workforce full-time, which eventually prompted his migration. Gael explained that he did not want the same for his siblings. He made it his goal to see his four brothers and one sister through completed education. While spending ‘a lot of money’ and ‘really working hard for them’ to succeed in Guatemala, Gael knew that, ‘A lot of people say that I don’t have a house, I don’t have my own education. I have been here for five years, and I have accomplished nothing’. This meant little to Gael. ‘You know what?’ he asked me, ‘I always think about what I am doing for my family.’ With completed education, Gael hoped his siblings’ would be deterred from unaccompanied migration, and that they would support the family’s prospects of economic stability in the origin country.

Though some youth, like Ander, Mikaela, and Gael, describe leaving their home countries with the hopes of starting businesses, building homes, and funding education, many found themselves remitting small but frequent sums of money to ensure families had access to everyday items. One participant put it simply: when he sends money, his mother and grandmother, ‘Usan el dinero para comprar comida, ropa, jabón para lavar (use the money to buy food, clothes, soap to wash [their clothes]).’ Another participant said, ‘My mom uses the money for water, the telephone, to pay for some little thing here and there, but also for food and bills’. Unaccompanied youth’s transnational moral obligations included concerns for everyday survival. Their ability to provide support and fulfill financial obligations is a meaningful source of pride that justifies their enduring life as unaccompanied youth workers in the US. This was clear when eighteen-year-old Anthony said that after three years of struggling to find a job in Los Angeles, he feels ‘happy because I am making money and I can send money to my mom so that she can pay the rent, the bills, and all of that’. Youth workers value their contributions to their families, which informs how they navigate changes to the nature of their obligations as they and their family members age across borders.

Maintaining moral obligations over time

Unlike migrant parents who experience a decline in economic obligation to left-behind children who age into the workforce and become more self-sufficient (Abrego 2014; Parreñas 2005), youth migrants’ moral obligations to left-behind families strengthen as parents and siblings age. This is, in part, because as parents (and grandparents) age in the origin country, their ability to work declines. They might also become ill or require medical attention, which increases the household’s expenses. The decline of parental work occurs as children who remain in their origin country might require more financial support through their life stage transitions, including marriage and child-rearing. And while many study participants had siblings in Los Angeles, the presence of a sibling did not mean transnational financial obligations were evenly distributed. As introduced in Ander’s case above, the reliability of sibling ties in Los Angeles weakened when siblings formed new families. Forming new families further constrained undocumented workers’ already limited financial resources. For men, the gender ideology that the newly formed family would become the sole focus of men’s resources was activated, while women, with limited employment opportunities and expected subservience to their husbands, deferred decisions to support their partners (Abrego 2014; Dreby 2010). In these cases, the unmarried sibling(s) took on a greater financial responsibility, common among descendants of immigrants from diverse national origin backgrounds (Eunsook 2021). Only one study participant was married. Youth’s responses to changing moral obligations demonstrate their acute understanding of the family’s interdependence across borders and their agency in responding materially and emotionally.

Esmeralda was among the participants who inherited the weight of supporting her left-behind family as her siblings living in Los Angeles married and formed families. The third in her family to migrate, Esmeralda’s older siblings (a brother and sister) migrated as unaccompanied minors before her. As each married in Los Angeles, they stopped remitting to her family in Guatemala, which prompted the next oldest sibling to migrate. Esmeralda migrated to Los Angeles when she was fourteen and recalls having some expectation that her siblings would receive her. Instead, tension arose among siblings when confronted with their inability to do so. Without her siblings’ support, Esmeralda was unaccompanied in her settlement in Los Angeles as well as in meeting her family’s financial needs. Thirteen years after her arrival, Esmeralda remembers, ‘When I came here, I made a promise to my mom. I told her: if you let me go there, I will send you money for your expenses. You won’t need anything.’ Despite making what seemed like a reasonable promise, Esmeralda worked as a piece-rate garment worker who earned only a few hundred dollars per week and struggled to make ends meet: ‘My mom needs everything right now because I didn’t keep my promise. Sometimes, I don’t send any money at all.’ The guilt weighed heavily on Esmeralda and isolated her from her family. Matters were made worse as Esmeralda’s parents got older and fell ill:

Now my dad is sick, and I am sending them a little bit of money. Sometimes, my sister will send money, but it’s not enough. It’s not enough for my mom to make ends meet. When I talk to her, she tells me that it isn’t enough. She says, ‘I owe a lot [of money]. It isn’t enough to take care of your dad. Your dad isn’t eating, he’s going to die.’ […] So, my mom takes him to the doctor, and I try to send her money for that, but it’s not enough. My brother is in debt, my sister only sends money sometimes, and … yeah, it’s not enough.

Signaling her desperation, Esmeralda repeated ‘it’s not enough’ several times while explaining her family’s financial situation and her futile attempts to help her mother’s efforts to keep her father healthy.

While Esmeralda’s opportunities were constrained by punitive immigration policies and an exploitative labor market that cumulatively disadvantaged undocumented immigrants, including unaccompanied minors, she understood her family’s condition as a personal failure. Esmeralda expressed grief about her father’s looming death, her mother’s distress, and her own inability to keep her promise that her mother would not ‘need anything’. ‘I feel really sad,’ Esmeralda said, ‘because sometimes I think about my final words to her and how I haven’t sent her anything’. Making matters worse was that Esmeralda’s unfulfilled promise resulted in her mother’s re-entry into low-wage agricultural work in Guatemala. ‘My mom must work in the field,’ Esmeralda shared solemnly, ‘You know how in Guatemala, there are cows?’ I nodded my head, and she continued: ‘There are so many cows and other animals. People go out to the field and cut grass to give to the animals. Well, my mom goes out and cuts the grass to sell it so that she can take care of herself.’

Esmeralda’s telling demonstrates how the weight of financial obligation compounds and the inability to fulfill promises to left-behind families can have ripple effects. Not only is Esmeralda’s family suffering because her father is sick, but because her mother is forced to work. This causes Esmeralda pain, too: ‘A veces me estreso mucho aquí … ’ Esmeralda said, ‘I get very stressed here sometimes. And on top of that, in the garment industry, you get so tired and sometimes you get sick … ’ Attempting to fulfill promises made in one society within the structure of opportunities in another can cause financial, physical, and emotional distress for unaccompanied teen workers. Some family dynamics, such as those in which multiple siblings are unmarried, might allow for a shared weight of these obligations. Yet obligations can compound for unmarried siblings if others marry and redirect their financial and emotional labor to new partners and growing families.

Moral obligations also change as left-behind siblings express a desire to migrate, either as a rite of passage or a matter of survival like their siblings before them. A demonstration of their agency, youth workers might decide to increase their financial remittances to delay a sibling’s migration, which was the case for Efraín, who migrated at age sixteen:

I always send money to Guatemala so that my younger brother, the littlest one, keeps studying because life isn’t easy here. You get here, and you realize that it is hard. When I got here, it wasn’t easy for me. I spent six days in the desert. To bring my brother here? No, I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t do that to anybody. It hurts me to hear them say, ‘I’m leaving [home], I’m leaving.’ I worry about them. But my brother is sixteen. That’s how old I was when I left. That’s when people who are in school decide whether to keep taking classes or to migrate. I don’t want my siblings to come here, but I cannot tell them what to do; they don’t want to hear what I have to say. It’s something very difficult for me. I remember when I got here, no one was there to help me. It was hard. I am here now, but I try to help my brother and tell him, ‘Do this’ or ‘Do that’ so that maybe he doesn’t come here.

Over the next three years that I was in weekly communication with Efraín, he successfully delayed his brother’s migration to Los Angeles by preoccupying him with schooling. Only in one case did a participant agree to send money to support migration, which he did begrudgingly after finding out his cousin was already making his way through Mexico. Another participant, Alejo, was unaware of his younger brother’s migration until he arrived in Los Angeles. Just as other participants mentioned, Alejo recalled his own suffering when he explaining why he agreed to take on the financial responsibility of supporting his brother once in Los Angeles. Alejo’s plans to enroll in an adult English-language school were derailed when his brother arrived. Yet Alejo framed his educational setback as a moral achievement, explaining that ‘many others wouldn’t do this. They would disappear or something like that. But I think that my own experiences, what I went through because no one could help me, makes me want to help him. I am doing what I can’. The passage of time and aging borders changes the nature of youth’s moral obligations. Youth are actively negotiating the terms of their transnationalism as they come of age and reimagining their futures as they pursue or forego opportunities that enable them to meet their moral obligations.

(Re)imagined futures

Youth’s transnational moral obligations shape the futures they imagine for themselves while moving to and through young adulthood. Like transnational adult migrants who can experience simultaneous (dis)integration in destination and origin societies over time (Waldinger 2017), time in Los Angeles opened youth workers up to the possibility of remaining in the US, which they had perhaps not imagined pre-migration. In the opening vignette, Lucas spoke to the patterns that he noticed among unaccompanied youth who came of age as workers in the US with financial ties to the origin country. He turned his focus onto himself as our interview progressed. Illuminating his own uncertainty about whether he would, in fact, return to Guatemala, he explained that he sent money to his family while working ‘in construction and landscaping for five years. I built a house over there. I have my own house in Guatemala’, just as he had promised his mother he would. ‘I have everything,’ he continued:

If I go to Guatemala, I will have somewhere to live. I am just thinking now about what kind of business I would have and where. I have to think about what kinds of things I would do there. I know I lost the time I could have gotten an education here, but I gained a little bit of economic [stability] there. But then I ask myself, ‘Why do I have [stability] there if I am living here?’ So, listen, that’s another way of thinking. I know that if I want to stay here, I need an education so that I can have a better future. If I go there, I need to have another plan to have a good future there.

Lucas achieved the future he imagined when he left Guatemala: he built the house he promised he would. But he was now reimagining his future as including the possibility of staying alongside that of return, and as such, requiring different resources, namely education and employment opportunities, that would be negotiated across Guatemalan and the US societies.

Raúl imagined a future of return to Guatemala when he arrived in Los Angeles at sixteen, which changed multiple times over the years that we were in frequent communication until he ultimately decided to stay. I met Raúl when he was nineteen. At the time, he often talked about wanting to send for his parents so that he could look after them as they got older when we met in 2012. That would not come to be. Raúl was twenty-two when his father died in 2015. Raúl’s mother said that after six years of supporting them, he had done enough to care for them, including building a house that his mother and older sister, who had a two-year-old child, would live in moving forward. While his father was still alive, Raúl steadily worked in the Downtown Los Angeles garment industry, not wanting to risk losing earnings if he were to take a shot at another job as this would destabilize his own life in Los Angeles and that of his parents in Guatemala (see Canizales 2021b for more). After his father’s death, however, Raúl took a job in landscaping in the San Fernando Valley, northeast of where he lived in Pico-Union, which required over an hour on the bus each way.

Being outdoors reminded Raúl of his hometown in Guatemala, which soothed him as he mourned his father’s passing. By 2017, Raúl was hired by a high-end landscaper who worked strictly on multimillion-dollar homes in cities like Encino, Calabasas, and Hidden Hills. Proud of and inspired by his occupational and earnings mobility, Raúl enrolled in a forklift driving course in 2019 and received a completion certificate. With new skills, Raúl imagined that he would stay in Los Angeles and perhaps own his own landscaping company in the future. A chance encounter in 2023 revealed that Raúl continued to work as a forklift driver at an even larger landscaping firm. Raúl’s case speaks to how migration and coming of age are interconnected and that migrant youth’s imagined futures are in constant evolution as structure and agency interact in the transition into adulthood.

Other youth became accustomed to life in Los Angeles but planned to take their skills and newfound capital, especially English-language skills and business savvy (Canizales 2021a), back to their origin countries. Throughout my time in the field, men and women often talked about returning to their hometowns to find partners, marry, and have a family, which they felt was impossible to achieve in Los Angeles given how much they work and how little they earn (Canizales 2021b). Only one participant returned home in a fit of defeat in November 2017. While I did not speak to him again after he left Los Angeles, by the Spring 2018, there was chatter among youth groups that he was unsatisfied with his life in Guatemala. He, too, had become ‘acostumbrado', and he planned to return to Los Angeles. In 2018, two young men returned to their homes in El Salvador and Guatemala, respectively, in hopes of getting married. When I checked in with them via Facebook in 2020, both had married and each welcomed their first child in the two years that passed.

Finally, having only worked to meet immediate needs across borders, some youth felt that they had not acquired sufficient skills or achieved sufficient mobility to imagine a future of stay or return. Without financial stability or signs of mobility in the future, youth struggled to see themselves moving through life stages of cohabitation, marriage, and family formation. This corroborates previous research that shows unaccompanied youth do not see themselves as adults despite leaving home and being financially independent (Diaz-Strong 2021). Even in young adulthood, undocumented immigrants who grew up as unaccompanied youth workers wanted more time to devise a plan.

While in this state of uncertainty about futures here or there, several youths, including Roberto, talked about wanting to return to their home countries, ‘Solo para visitar (only to visit)’. Long-term family separation and their experiences of growing up unaccompanied in Los Angeles created a longing to be close to family again. Participants recognized that they would likely return to an origin community in a similar political and economic position as when they left. Roberto explained, ‘Si Dios lo permite (if God allows it), I would love to visit.’ ‘It’s difficult for me here because I have my family in Guatemala. My parents are mayores de edad (older). My mom is much older now. I would like to go see them still.’ Turning his thoughts to the siblings he left behind, Roberto lamented that when he ‘was little, my siblings and I didn’t hug each other’. Roberto wished he would have been more affectionate with his siblings and, perhaps more importantly, he hoped to hug them in the future.

Youth’s few mentions of the salience of legal documentation arose during discussions about how visiting home would provide an emotional remedy for young adults still contemplating whether they would stay in Los Angeles or return to their home countries. Mikaela, who built a home for her mother with the help of her brother, and expressed pride in doing so when she said, ‘My mom is doing well now. I don’t think she lacks anything’, continued explaining the worries she associated with her plan to stay in Los Angeles: ‘I think she does get lonely though, and that makes me a bit anxious. Not having papers means I can’t go see her; I can’t check in on her and see for myself. I don’t know. It unsettles me a bit. I worry.’ As if to calm her rising anxiety as she spoke, Mikaela said, ‘But she has her house, and she has money.’ Young people’s experiences and perspectives reveal that there is not one future unaccompanied youth workers imagine once in young adulthood, but that their social position, roles and responsibilities, and experiences of material (im)mobility and social inclusion are salient in shaping whether they imagine futures here, there, or ‘si Dios lo permite’, both.

Discussion and conclusions

In the opening vignette, Lucas described that he and other unaccompanied immigrant youth leave their origin countries in Central America and Mexico with the intention of working in the US for a short time – maybe two or three years – but can remain for much longer. This is a longstanding pattern in international migration (Waldinger 2017). As time passes, some migration goals are met, others are delayed, and, in many cases, new needs arise. Lucas reflected on the unexpected passage of time and asked, ‘What happened?’ Attending to Lucas’s question, this study has examined the contours of unaccompanied immigrant youth’s transnationalism, and how the maintenance of transnational ties over time and during the critical developmental years between adolescence and young adulthood affects youth’s aspirations for their imagined future.

I theorize unaccompanied, undocumented youth workers’ transnationalism as bound by everchanging moral obligations to self and family. The data show that unaccompanied youth maintain transnational moral obligations to left-behind families while also managing their obligation to support themselves. Aging across borders changes the nature of obligations to left-behind families as parents’ ability to work declines, parents become ill, siblings marry and have children, and younger family members contemplate their own migration. Youth workers’ transnational ties are rooted in remembrance of the conditions they left behind, as well as gender, sibling order, and marital status expectations. As unaccompanied youth workers age into young adulthood in the US, their initial hopes of returning to their origin country become mutable. Some might continue aspiring for a return; others imagine long-settled futures as an alternative to return; and others still are caught in uncertainty. Demonstrating young people’s understanding of the US neoliberal mobility structure, participants recognized the need to acquire individual skills and resources that secure mobility, safety, and well-being across origin and destination societies. Hence, transnational moral obligations inform the aspirations unaccompanied teens and young adults develop for the future, as well as shape their opportunities to make those aspirations a reality

This research advances child and labor migration and immigrant family transnationalism in three ways. First, this research allows us to rethink labor migration as a strictly adult practice to one that includes children who support left-behind families out of moral obligation. Theorizing immigrant youth transnationalism as linked to moral obligations across borders that shape youth’s agentic decisions and behaviors as they come of age brings the power of ideologies of care and collectivism in youth’s global migration and labor processes. This frame also demonstrates the distinctness of youth’s emotions toward and sense of responsibility for their individual and familial life chances. Findings emphasize youth’s agency throughout their settlement and transition to adulthood processes by showing how youth make meaning of their moral obligations and work to make ends meet over time as they navigate their local structure of opportunities to both keep the promises made in one society while independently surviving in another.

Second, in drawing attention to the independent wage-earning labor of immigrant children and youth in the US, this study expands our understanding of migrant youth’s social worlds, including their roles within the low-wage labor force. Findings can advance our academic inquiries and policy and program initiatives of unaccompanied youth’s lives in the US by encouraging researchers to move beyond positioning youth as dependents on parent-led households or K-12 schools and look to low-wage labor occupations. Third, this research moves the singular focus on how conditions in the US shape unaccompanied minors’ incorporation and coming of age to consider how origin country conditions, including the needs of left-behind families and communities, influence the decisions youth make in the present considering the aspirations they develop for the future.

Empirically, this study calls for researchers to embrace dynamic representations of undocumented youth’s lives and to consider the role of time in changing roles, responsibilities, and relationships with the individuals and institutions around them, including local and transnational families. While unaccompanied minors continue to migrate at persistently high rates each year, those who arrived in the previous two decades have either already aged or are aging into young adulthood. Understanding long-settled migrant youth’s cross-border ties, familial obligations, and response to familial needs over time is especially important as social and economic conditions in Latin America and the US continue to produce populations that are prone to migration.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the young people who participated in this research for entrusting me with stories of their transnational family obligations and aspirations for the future. Support for the completion of this paper was provided by the Russell Sage Foundation and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Pipeline Grant Program. Thanks go to Amy Hsin, Cynthia Feliciano, Daysi Diaz-Strong, Jennifer Lee, Jody Agius Vallejo, Laura E. Enriquez, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Robert Courtney Smith, and Rocio Rosales for their comments on previous iterations of this work. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their commitment to seeing this manuscript through.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Pipeline Grant [G-2011-28846].