Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-31T23:25:43.913Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

11 - Transnational Family and Connections

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2021

Elaine Chase
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Jennifer Allsopp
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access

Summary

‘She sits next to me and strokes me hair and says, “Son, I can't believe it's you, that you’re here, that it's really you, that you’re real.”’

This message arrived from Abugul via Facebook one afternoon. His location revealed that he was now in Belgium, and the picture that accompanied a string of excited messages informed us that after ten long years he had finally been reunited with his mother and brothers from Afghanistan. We read the messages and took in the emotional weight of the moment. He had captured it with a camera phone and sent it to us over 4G. We Facetimed. Everyone was crying with happiness.

Abugul had found his family through a non-governmental organization family tracing programme after losing touch with them when he left Afghanistan on his own 11 years previously. It had been a decade since he arrived in England as an unaccompanied minor at the age of 14. In the six years since he had turned 18, he had lived an undocumented life. As he moved in and out of immigration detention, he had ‘learnt to be illegal’ (Gonzales 2011: 602). When the research began in 2015, Abugul was working in a phone shop in a part of London he described to us as ‘mini-Africa’. He stayed in a small room with other young Afghan men. He worked seven days a week for a poor wage and rarely got out into the city. He was supported by a group of Afghan and English friends who accompanied him to legal appointments and a doctor's clinic for undocumented migrants (he was entitled to primary health care, but was too afraid to use the National Health Service). Because he had absconded and been off the radar for years, Abugul's prospects for regularization were not favourable in the United Kingdom (UK). In what we have elsewhere referred to as a tricky temporal game of ‘tactics of time and status’ (Allsopp et al 2015), his was a strategy of wait and see. During this time, he frequently wrote on social media of his loneliness and thoughts of ending his life.

Type
Chapter
Information
Youth Migration and the Politics of Wellbeing
Stories of Life in Transition
, pp. 191 - 208
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×