Surviving through the kindness of strangers: can there be “wellbeing” among undocumented refugee children?

Abstract

Purpose: The paper exames notions of health and wellbeing in the context of radically retracted rights to political asylum. It questions the tendency in previous research to regard the political economy of refugee protection as a parallel issue to a range of factors affecting children’s health. Methods: Based on ethnographic research with 19 undocumented refugee children in Sweden, the paper illustrates ways in which the deportation regime conditions participants’ health. Results: Findings show that children lived with precarious status for the better part of their childhoods, alternating between undocumented and asylum seeking statuses. Participants accessed formal rights to education and health through complete or relative strangers at risk of exposure to authorities. The paper argues that conceptualisations of refugee children’s suffering in terms of risk and protective factors are redundant in this context. Moreover, deportability, protracted refugee situations and deprived material conditions are not unique to undocumented refugees, but characterise most refugee children’s lives in welfare states today. Conclusion: In relation to the plight of the refugee child, wellbeing seems to refer to an abstract ontology of desirable states of the human experience, far removed from the real day-to-day lives of individuals shaped by social suffering and structural violence.