The plight of unaccompanied minors has become the latest challenge raised by the continuing European migration crisis. In Greece, arrivals of teen migrants and children have increased by 400 percent this year, according to the international child advocates Save the Children.
One in four of these young people made the journey alone, without the help and protection of a parent or other adult relative. On Spain’s Canary Islands, arrivals of unaccompanied migrants are on track to reach a historic high this year, and caring for the migrant youth has become politically contentious. In Belgium, adolescent migrants, particularly from North Africa, are at risk of being lured into work in the booming drug-trafficking trade.
Save the Children’s analysis of monthly figures from UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, found that in the first six months of 2024, 5,580 refugee and migrant children arrived at the Greek border by sea and about 830 arrived by land—four times the number compared with the first half of 2023, when 1,280 migrant children arrived.
Unaccompanied minors are acutely vulnerable. According to Save the Children: “Until a guardian is appointed [by Greece immigration officials], these children have no one to bring them clothes, shoes or even a cell phone to call home and talk to their family.”
Migrants arriving irregularly at European borders typically first spend two to three weeks in a fenced-in area, known in Greece as a closed controlled access center, before being moved to a shelter for refugees. These young people face an uphill battle in receiving asylum status or otherwise gaining documentation for a legal stay in Greece.
“Imagine that when an unaccompanied child is placed in the safe area, they are still wearing the wet clothes they wore during the boat journey,” said Fileri Kyriaki, a lawyer with the Greek Council for Refugees, describing the condition of unaccompanied minors he has met with in a statement to the press.
“There is nothing to do in the safe area, no activities at all, recreational or otherwise,” Mr. Kyriaki said. “They are bored, and the place feels like a prison; it’s not at all child-friendly. It is a container with barbed wire around it.” He explained that children who traveled with their families can quickly exit the camp, “while unaccompanied children cannot.”
A joint report from Save the Children and the Greek Council of Refugees found that in 2022 only 981 out of 3,175 asylum applications filed by unaccompanied children were accepted. The remaining applications were either rejected or became mired in a lengthy asylum process. The European Union’s recently approved Pact on Asylum and Immigration has placed a time limit on the processing of asylum applications to avoid such situations, but member states still have two years to fully implement the new standards.
At the other end of Europe, approximately 20,000 people arrived irregularly at Spain’s borders by the end of May, according to figures from the Ministry of the Interior cited by Save the Children. That number is 187 percent higher than during the same period of 2023, which had already seen an 82 percent increase in migrant arrivals compared with 2022.
In Africa, the young hope for Europe
So far this year, 80 percent of irregular arrivals have landed at the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean—a mere 60 miles from Africa’s shores at its closest point. Among these new migrant arrivals are hundreds of unaccompanied minors, and the pace of boats arriving in Spain is expected to increase over the rest of the summer.
Last year, a record 5,151 minor migrants reached Spain. Many more are expected in 2024, according to Catalina Perazzo, a policy director at Save the Children Spain.
According to Ms. Perazzo, most of these latest arrivals of unaccompanied migrants to the Canary Islands are adolescents between 15 and 17 years old from the sub-Saharan African countries of Senegal, Mauritania and Mali—nations that have been assailed in recent years by conflict, slumping economies and food insecurity. African youth who see little hope for a future in their home nations, some as young as 12, are attempting the dangerous ocean crossing without their parents. Ms. Perazzo estimates that there has been a 10 percent increase this year in the number of minors coming alone.
Senegal was on the verge of civil war in 2023, and although a new government has come into power, change is not coming as quickly as many young people had hoped. Many dream of emigrating to Europe, according to Augustine Ndour, a Senegalese man who emigrated to Spain in 2000 and now advocates for other immigrants.
According to Aid to the Church in Need, conditions in the Sahel region of Africa, which includes parts of Mali and Burkina Faso, continue to deteriorate. Large swaths of territory in the Sahel are held by Islamist insurgent groups. In addition to hunger and lack of economic opportunity, Christians in these territories face persecution and displacement.
“It is truly distressing to see internally displaced people with all their worldly goods roaming the streets and looking for somewhere to stay. In my diocese, there are hundreds of thousands of them. The majority are women and children,” Bishop Prosper Ky of the Diocese of Dédougou, in Burkina Faso, recently told A.C.N.
U.N. officials also worry over the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan—another new source of unaccompanied minors among migrants—where it estimates that half the population requires humanitarian aid.
Ms. Perazzo said that in many cases, the youth from sub-Saharan Africa have spent as long as a year living on the streets of cities on the East African coast, waiting for a chance to escape to the Canary Islands. Government officials on the Canary Islands estimate that as many as 70,000 people are even now waiting for a chance to cross the ocean to the Spanish islands, among them as many as 20,000 unaccompanied minors.
Once in Spain, unaccompanied minors are placed under the care of the state until they reach the age of 18. Many end up living in government group homes. In Spain there are already approximately 13,000 unaccompanied minors under the guardianship of the state, with about 6,000 of them warehoused on the Canary Islands, where shelters have become overwhelmed.
Save the Children works with unaccompanied minors from their arrival in Spain through their release from state care at the age of 18 and beyond. With youth centers overcrowded and the 80 emergency centers understaffed, these young people often find themselves left to their own devices, without opportunities for even basic formative activities such as Spanish-language classes.
“I hear from youth: ‘I didn’t come here to stare at the ceiling,’” Ms. Perazzo said.
She explained that despite the difficult journeys they have endured, they arrive in Spain eager to learn Spanish, work, or engage in educational and professional formation programs. But orienting and connecting them to available opportunities takes a level of personalized attention the overburdened centers are not able to offer.
Youth are often transferred from the Canary Islands to centers in mainland Spain, but the transfers require the cooperation of the regional governments. That cooperation has been less forthcoming as migration became a politically charged issue in recent years, particularly with the arrival of the far-right Vox Party on Spain’s political scene.
Vox holds only 33 seats in the national parliament. Until recently, the party co-governed with the center-right People’s Party in several regional governments. Vox has put the question of unaccompanied minors at the heart of its electoral campaigns, claiming that migrant youth create a serious security problem and cost burden for Spanish society.
Displeased with the transfer of 400 migrant youth from the Canary Islands, Vox broke away from its regional coalition governments with the People’s Party in July. Vox leaders charge that the redistribution of migrant youth would only spread insecurity around Spain and create a knock-on effect of encouraging more migration.
But at least 2,000 youth need to be relocated from the Canary Islands to address overcrowding in shelters there, even as more migrant youth continue to land. A bill to mandate the transfer of youth from overcrowded centers in one region to centers in other regions failed to pass the Spanish Parliament in July.
José Luis Cámara from Caritas Tenerife challenges a suggestion pushed by some politicians and media reports—that unaccompanied minors create a serious security risk for Spanish society.
“Yes, there are a few that do cause trouble,” he said of the youth. “But we don’t have a crime problem on the Canary Islands. Islanders have been living with immigration for 30 years, since the first migrant dinghies arrived. Contrary to some media reports, there is not a palpable sense of fear or insecurity in the streets.”
He added that the immigrant youth have become a welcome addition to the island’s workforce. Caritas offers Spanish classes and orientation for migrants to help them understand their rights and to normalize their residency status in Spain.
Through these programs the organization often also works with unaccompanied minors who have aged out of the government’s guardianship. Though the Spanish government has been more generous in recent years in granting legal residency and work permits to the migrant youth, they still face significant obstacles integrating into Spanish society, Mr. Camara said.
Migrant youth are not guaranteed work visas or residency permits even after living under the care of the state and participating in state-subsidized educational or professional training programs, according to Ms. Perazzo. Without work authorization, they can neither participate in the practical internships needed to complete many professional programs nor access legal work once they turn 18. Having reached legal adulthood, many end up unemployed and homeless.
The bishops of the Canary Islands called for solidarity with these young migrants as they are dispersed across Spain. They urged an end to the instrumentalization of migration and fear-mongering in political rhetoric, reminding the faithful in a letter on the issue that the causes of contemporary migration are complex.
The Spanish bishops pointed out that insecurity, inequity in trade, conflict over resources, corrupt rulers, and lack of educational and job opportunity—a chance for a “dignified future”—are among the many drivers of migration.
“Without living conditions, work, and dignity for the populations of the sending countries, it will not be easy to reduce migratory flows,” the bishops said in a statement to the media. “Many of these brothers of ours would not begin such an uncertain and dangerous journey if more just situations were experienced in their towns and countries and if Spain and Europe more effectively promoted paths for one legal, orderly and safe migration.”
Reaching unaccompanied migrants
In Belgium, far from the Mediterranean nations of Spain and Greece where many migrant youth first land, the situation of young unaccompanied migrants has also become a concern.
“Here in Belgium we saw a peak in arrivals of unaccompanied minor migrants last summer,” Joke Dillen of Caritas Belgium told America. According to Eurostat, 1,568 unaccompanied minors filed for asylum in Belgium in 2023, continuing a trend that has doubled their number since 2019. According to Ms. Dillen, in recent months the number of new arrivals of unaccompanied minors seems to have stabilized.
Ms. Dillen notes that Belgium’s official tally only includes youth working through formal channels to regularize their residency. It does not count the many youth who landed irregularly and who live in the shadows of Belgian society.
The government has struggled to find enough legal guardians to help unaccompanied migrants through the asylum process and integration into Belgian society. Caritas Belgium maintains a team that serves as guardians for unaccompanied minors who are formally registered with the government as asylum seekers. Most of these youth come from Eritrea and Ethiopia, but unaccompanied minors are also arriving from Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Afghanistan, Guinea, Cameroon and Burundi, Ms. Dillen said.
“Most are between 16 and 17 years old, but in recent years we have seen more and more minors aged 15 and younger,” she added.
Caritas also runs a program called Xtra Mena that reaches out to youth who are evading authorities. The program focuses on informing migrant youth of their rights and the possibilities of establishing legal residency in Belgium or other European countries with the goal of helping these youth find a path forward to self-sufficiency and “reducing the number of worrying disappearances.”
Reports are emerging that Algerian, Moroccan and, to a lesser degree, Afghan youth are being recruited into the booming drug trade in Europe. Responding to the vulnerability of these young people, Caritas’s teams reach them where they have found shelter—whether that means a formal reception center or urban squats where migrant youth have created precarious housing.
The migrant flow among unaccompanied minors is not likely to subside anytime soon, as conditions in sending countries remain hugely difficult. The European Union’s Pact on Asylum and Migration provides some additional legal protections for minors once they arrive in Europe, but the new pact mostly proposes more of the same crisis measures that have been in place for years. They include agreements with third-party countries to deter migrant departures and facilitate returns of migrants, along with increased patrols by Frontex, the European Union’s border service.
The ink is still drying on migration enforcement agreements worth 500 million euros worked out among Frontex, Spain and Mauritiana even as migrants, among them many unaccompanied teens and children, continue to arrive on the Canary Islands by the hundreds each day.
“It’s clear the policy of the externalization of border control is not working,” Ms. Perazzo said.
Correction: José Luis Cámara’s name was misspelled in the original version of this report.
