Irregularity and Civic Stratification among Child Migrants in France

Tatiana Eremenko , University of Salamanca

Although child migrants arriving in Europe benefit from certain rights and protections linked to their minority status, such as access to education and health care, they also face exclusion due to increasingly restrictive migration and citizenship policies. This exclusion often deepens as they transition to adulthood, particularly when they fail to meet legal residency requirements and become undocumented. While quantitative studies have demonstrated the effects of such policies on migrants’ legal statuses and life outcomes, few have examined the specific experiences of irregularity among those who arrived as children, largely because of limited data. This paper explores the experience of irregularity among migrants who arrived as children in France, focusing on how it is shaped by individual, family, and contextual factors. Using the “Trajectories and Origins (TeO2)” survey conducted in mainland France in 2019–2020, we analyze a sample of 2,556 immigrants from non-EU countries who arrived before age 18. Preliminary findings indicate that 17% of this group have experienced being undocumented (“sans papiers”), with those coming of age after 2012 more likely to face irregularity than earlier cohorts (turning 18 before 2000). However, experiences vary considerably depending on family migration patterns (parental migration and undocumented status) and individual characteristics such as age at arrival, gender, and educational trajectory. Overall, the results suggest that recent migration and citizenship policy changes have heightened irregularity among child migrants, reinforcing legal status as a major dimension of social stratification in contemporary European societies.

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 Presented in Session 46. Migrant Populations, Legal Trajectories and Civic Stratification