ABSTRACT

Family reunification is the main reason youth independently migrate from the Global South to the Global North. Research on family reunification adheres to policy definitions of the phenomenon that portray reunification as something that happens within the destination country and within the nuclear family. Yet by following youth mobility trajectories, we show that young people experience many types of family reunification. This paper draws on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Belgium and Ghana with young people of Ghanaian background. We find that for young people, family includes multiple caregivers who are not necessarily nuclear family members, family reunification can at the same time entail family separation, and multiple family reunifications may occur in both the origin and the destination country. Many of these reunifications and separations are significant for youth yet they remain unseen when employing a policy definition of family reunification.

摘要

家庭团聚是青年独立从南半球向北半球迁移的主要原因。对家庭团聚的研究坚持将团聚描述为发生在目的地国和核心家庭中的现象的政策定义。然而，通过跟踪青年流动轨迹，我们表明年轻人经历了多种类型的家庭团聚。本文借鉴了在比利时和加纳对具有加纳背景的年轻人进行的 18 个月的民族志实地考察。我们发现，对于年轻人来说，家庭包括多个照顾者，他们不一定是核心家庭成员，家庭团聚可能同时导致家庭分离，并且在原籍国和目的地国都可能发生多次家庭团聚。