Authors: Zana Vathi and Veronika Duci

1

Authors: Zana Vathi and Veronika Duci

To cite this paper: Vathi, Z. and Duci, V. (2016). Making other dreams: The impact of migration on the psychosocial wellbeing of Albanian-origin children upon their families’ return to Albania. Childhood 23(1): 53-68. DOI: 10.1177/0907568214566078.

Making other dreams: The impact of migration on the psychosocial wellbeing of Albanian-origin children and young people upon their families’ return to Albania

Abstract

Return migration has not been associated with negative psychosocial outcomes, while the experience of children involved in this process has been largely overlooked. This paper looks at the migration experience of Albanian-origin children and young people upon their families’ return to Albania. Contrasting with a primordial understanding of‘homeland’, ‘belongingness’ and ‘return migration’,which is focused on the nation-state, the findings show that a lack of(diasporic) belongingness affects children’s wellbeing upon their families’ return to the country of origin. While children show remarkable mechanisms of coping and resilience,contextual factors moderate the links between migration and psychosocial wellbeing.

Keywords

children, (return) migration, belongingness, psychosocial wellbeing, Albania

Return migration came to the attention of migration researchers in the late1970s (Gmelch, 1980). This type of migration is often romanticised;‘the myth of return’ (Anwar, 1979), denoting a proneness of the first generation towards returning ‘home’, is now a well-known term in migration studies. When the descendants of migrants have been included in this research, the focus has been on adults, andtheir transnationalism has been associated with ‘roots migration’– migration of the adult secondgeneration to the parents’ country of origin (Wessendorf, 2007).

Children’s migration in the context of families’ return to the country of origin is rarely studied.Indeed, as Hatfield (2010: 243) puts it, children in the context of return migration have, for a long time, been ‘doubly invisible’, in line with a late arrival of children to the attention of social scientists, and a late inclusion of children in studies on return migration. The limited research available has analysed: children’s adaptation, children’s difficulties with language and cultural differences encountered upon return (King, 1977); their gendered experiences of returning (Ní Laoire, 2011a); alleged experiences of being ‘picked on’ because of their accents (Ní Laoire, 2011b); and the meaning of home (Hatfield, 2010). Other research has looked at the experience of children separated across borders as a result of return migration (e.g. Suárez-Orozco et al., 2002).

Research has hardly ever made reference to the psychosocialissues that children and young people may face when they experience migration as part of a family’s return, instead considering this process as psychologically ‘safe’– a tendency in line with a stance that views return migration as the ‘natural’ end stage of the migration process, as constituting ‘homecoming’ (Koliatis et al., 2003). Existing research on the psychosocial impact of migration on children and young people has focused on children of immigrants in the developed world, or the so called ‘second generation’, and is mostly quantitative, taking a predominantly clinical perspective on the ‘outcomes’ of migration (Stevens and Vollebergh, 2008). The lack of qualitative research is highlighted as an important avenue for future research, and as key to policy-making and training of practitioners in the field (Goździak, 2004).

This paper aims to explore the process of migration and adaptation of children and young people who have recently relocated from Greece to Albania with their families, focusing specifically on their psychosocial wellbeing. The migration of Albanians to Greece dates to the beginning of the 1990s. Until the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008, Albanians in Greece constituted the largest Albanian migrant community in Europe (600,000) and the largest immigrant group in Greece (Government of Albania, 2005). Limited evidence shows that the economic crisis is affecting the lives of migrants and is catalysing their return to Albania. The number of returnees from Greece reported recently by the Government of Albania (2013) is 62,639 in 2009 and 50,735 in 2010.In turn, research has shown that a high number of Albanian-origin children living abroad do not speak Albanianor identify with the culture of the receiving countries, and are unwilling to return to Albania – a tendency particularly strong among Albanians in Greece (Vathi, 2011).

In light of this evidence, the paper analyses the impact of migration on children’s psychosocial wellbeing and their coping strategiesand resilience, discussing these in relation to existing literature. The findings shed light on the factors that affect children’s and young people’s psychosocial wellbeing when relocating to their parents’ country of origin, with age, participation in decision-making, belongingness, and context of relocation appearing as important in determining the ‘outcomes’ of migration.

Children,(return) migration and psychosocial wellbeing

The inclusion of children in migration research contests a tradition in which children have been considered as just an appendage to (the migration of) adults.For a long time, research on children as part of family migration has seen children mostly in the context of ‘becoming’, focusing on future life outcomes and paying little attention to children’s here-and-now experiences, as pointed out by Stephens (1995)and Whiteet al. (2011). These studies focus primarily onthe adult secondgeneration (e.g. Crul and Vermeulen, 2003); child migrants and their agency have been overlooked, apart from the ‘problematic categories’ of unaccompanied minors, and trafficked and refugee children(e.g. Crawley, 2010; Hopkins and Hill, 2008).With regard to socio-spatialcontext, intra-European child migration is even less prominent in this research when compared to the study of children migrating toNorth Western Europe and North America from the developing world (Goździak, 2013). A newer trend in the migration literature concerns children as active agents in their own right (Dobson, 2009); however, the study of children in the context of return migration has occurred only very recently (Ní Laoire et al., 2011).

Similar concerns and conceptions of children and migration are pertinent to the study of the intersections between children, migration and psychosocial wellbeing. Many studies do not explain the causes of psychological symptoms of children and youth as a result of migration; others medicalise them (Stevens and Vollebergh, 2008), in line with a general approach towards the mental health of children and youth (Coppock, 2002).The limited existing literature seesthe psychosocial wellbeing of children and youthas broadly linked to the specifics of migration.In particular,a distinction is drawn between ‘forced’migration and ‘voluntary’ migration in terms of the consequences theycarry for children and youth (Goździak, 2013), reflecting a general tendency towards dichotomous thinking in migration research in general (Van Hear, 1998). The effect of forced migration on children has often been identified with the devastating impacts that war, ethnic cleansing and human traffickinghave had on children. Vulnerability and damage and, in relation to this, advocacy within a children’s rights agenda have characterised literature and policy-making -the latter focusingon children in the context of large-scale politicallyinduced disasters or major human rights violations (Doná and Veale, 2011).

Refugee children feature prominently in this body of literature (Almqvist and Broberg, 1999; Bronstein and Montgomery, 2011). Trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder are common phrases here, accompanied bya general tendency to overlook the resilience and coping strategies of children and to medicalise their behaviour. Medicalisation refers to the extension of medical diagnosis and care to explain and address children’s emotional responses and suffering regarding migration (Coppock, 2002; Goździak, 2013). For example, Fazel and Stein (2003) report that more than a quarter of refugee children have psychological disturbances but, as with most of the literature on the topic, their research is quantitative and their methods are based on psychiatric definitions of emotional problems. In turn, literature has paid little attention to socio-spatial context and potential ‘confounding variables’ that will affect the link between migration and psychosocial wellbeing for child migrants (Bronstein and Montgomery, 2011).As a result, research increasingly calls for the employment ofpsychosocial wellbeing as a concept that is more considerate than clinical concepts of the emotional, social and cultural aspects of potential outcomes of migration (Wessells, 1999).

Recently, an attempt to do justice to migrants’ coping strategies,to their agency and resiliency, is evident. Several factors have been identified as resilience factors in the context of migration, such as important demographics (age, gender, occupation status), pre-migration preparation, social support, cultural similarity – all having different implications for both first and secondgeneration migrants (Bhugra, 2004). Literature with children and young people, however, argues that resilience and protective factors are best researched when using qualitative methods (Smokowski et al., 1999), but qualitative research on this topic is scarce.

Consequently, alongside the emphasis on agency and resiliency, researchers have attempted to unpack the link between migration and the psychosocial wellbeing of children (Stevens and Vollebergh, 2008). This is in line with research on migration and mental health in general, which looks at the specific effects that different stages of migration have on migrants, and includes time as a factor that plays a role in the occurrence and intensity of such symptoms. A tendency such as this also links with the conceptualisation of adaptation, which is increasingly seen as a process that entails relatively stable changes that take place in individuals or groups, referring to psychological, socio-cultural and socio-economic dimensions (Berry, 2003). In turn, the nature of migration (forced or voluntary), the nature of push and pull factors, and the geographical distance between home and receiving countries are considered as major factors that will moderate the effect of migration on psychosocial wellbeing (Bhugra, 2004).

Nonetheless, research on children, migration and psychosocial wellbeing has mostly looked at the experience of children in the context of immigration in the global North,looking primarily at the second generation and the effect of ethnicity (Stevens and Vollebergh, 2008). Afew studies that exist on this topic see the migration of children to parents’ country of origin as ‘returning home’ and, as such, as psychologically ‘safe’ (e.g. Koliatis et al., 2003); others talk about difficulties upon return (e.g. De Bree et al., 2010; Ní Laoire, 2011b) but do not make reference to psychosocial issues. Indeed, as Ní Laoire (2011b) points out, migrants frame the process of returning to the country of origin as being in the best interests of the children. As shall shortly be illustrated with reference to the data, this assumption is not consonant with children’s belongingness and perceptions of home, which in turn has psychosocial consequences for them.

Methodology

This paper draws on data that derived from the project ‘The return to and (re)integration of Albanian migrants and their children to Albania: implications for policy-making’, which took place in 2013. Research for this project took a qualitative approach, with in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted in four different sites in Albania: Tirana, Albania’s capital; Korça, the biggest town in South-Eastern Albania; Saranda, a prominent town in South-Western Albania, and villages on the Albania-Greece border. The total number of participants was 141, including: 81 children and young people of Albanian origin whose families returned to Albania mostly from Greece; 51adult migrants who returned with their families; and nine teachers and key informants. This paper draws primarily on the interviews with minors. The sample included both participants that were born in Greece (39) and those that had migrated at a very young age (42). With an average age of 14.6 years (participants’ ages ranging from between 11 and 19 years old), this sample consistedof 45 female and 36 male participants. The average time spent abroad was 10.22 years, whereas the average time that had so far been spent in Albania upon return was 1.6 years.

This project observed the ethical requirements of research with children and vulnerable groups prescribed by the code of ethics of Edge Hill University.In order to ensure double consent attempts were made to ensure that both parents (or teachers) and children agreed to take part in the study(Lindsay, 2000). Following Christensen (2004: 165), children in this research were viewed as ‘fellow human beings’; therefore, they were treated equally in terms of informed consent, but also in terms of their opinionsthroughout the research process.

Research in the field was conducted by a bilingual researcher. From a practical point of view, securing double consent required that copies of information sheets and informed consent in both languages – Albanian and Greek–were prepared and delivered to both parents and children. Care was also shown towards children’s emotional state during interviews;the researcher was trained in psychology and counselling and, in addition, a list of psychosocialservices available in the area was prepared in advance to provide support to children during the interview process. Most of the interviews took place in home and school settings; often parents attended the interviews, although participants in their mid and late teens expressed a wish to be interviewed alone so as to be able to express themselves better.Potentially, parental presence will have affected the narratives of those younger participants interviewed in their parents’ presence;nonetheless, visits in family homes, and interviews with parents and children and young people, showed that the topic ofreturn to Albania had been extensively discussed in family settings, as the children interviewed in the presence of their parents did not show any difficulties in articulating their ideas and in responding to the interview questions.Indeed,researching children in their home setting and in the presence of their parents observes crucial ethical requirements, as well as methodological developments that call for a ‘children-in-families’ approach which values the importance of the home environment for understanding children (Bushin, 2009).

Moving to Albania: impact onpsychosocial wellbeing

Interviews with children and young people in this study show that their psychosocial wellbeing is affected by theirmigration to Albania. Participants’ experiences varied,depending onthe time that had passed since they had moved to Albania and the locality in which the participants were settling. For a high number of them, facing a new environment has created confusion, sadness and stress-related symptoms, and, for some, even more serious consequences, such as anxiety, symptoms of depression, and anorexia. As Erind (male, 14, Korça) comments: ‘It was very difficult, I didn’t… I didn’t have friends, I didn’t understand many words and I had difficulties at school with most of the subjects’.

Apart from these evident emotional problems upon migration to Albania, participants report that they had experienced emotional oscillations from the moment that their parents had communicated to them that they were returning to Albania. Some children were separated from members of their family who had postponed return to Albania for logistic reasons – typically, one parent, but sometimes also siblings, who were obliged to stay on in Greece because of work or educational commitments;this separation placed stress and emotional demand on the children (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2002). Sadness is the first emotion that is reported by the participants, with some of them experiencing initial signs of depression.

Ana (female, 14, Tirana): One of the saddest moments when I left…. was when I was saying good bye to my best friends… I was on the bus, they were standing outside and I would see them crying; I was crying, too… It was such a sad day, the day I left… I still remember my best friend that came to the bus and said ‘Please, don’t go’… I still feel so sad…

Different from other studies of migrant families’ return to the country of origin, in which the benefits of returning to a better quality of life for the children is emphasised (e.g.Ní Laoire, 2011bon Irish migrants), the economic crisis in Greece and the financial difficulties of the families were reported as the main reasons for Albanian families returning, making this a not-so-voluntary migration. This case of return migration, therefore, intertwines aspects of both forced and voluntary migration (Van Hear, 1998); although return to the country of origin was not the result of armed conflict or other factors that are associated with forced migration, the participants were ‘forced’ to return to Albania due to difficulties resultant of the economic crisis.

In the minority of cases in which children did not face serious psychological consequences, a main factor appears to be the age of participants upon departure. In general, children of the age of 12 years or younger were less psychologically affected than were the older ones, who suffered the disruption of their social ties in Greece. Younger children did not have a well-established social network prior to migrating, while social networks appeared to be of a great importance to those in their mid and late teens.

Furthermore, the overall preparation of families for return (Cassarino, 2004)and the involvement of children in the process of decision-making have significantly moderated the effect of migration on children’spsychosocial wellbeing. Similar to the findings of Ebata et al. (1996), when participants had motivation to migrate – more evident in cases where parents had transmitted the language and held positive opinions on Albania, or among those who had experienced harsh discrimination in Greece – they did not show severe psychosocial consequences upon return. However, very little is known about the positioning of children in the migration decision-making process of their parents (Bushin, 2009; Hutchins, 2011). For some participantsof this study, the process of moving to Albania was abrupt – for instance, Erika (female, 16, Korça) was on holidays in Korça when her parents decided not to go back to Greece where they had been living for a number of years. For Glenisa (female, 15, village) relocating to Albania was sudden and upsetting: