Migration as Resistance to Global Capitalism: From Cause to Action in the Migration of Central American Children to the United States, Summer 2014
When thousands of unaccompanied child migrants arrived at the Mexico- US border in summer 2014 a single question seemed to dominate the news—why did they come? This article suggests perspectives that relied on nation-state and binational paradigms are far too limited to explain this migration. Rather, the children’s arrival is argued to be a form of resistance to global capitalism, where the inherent subordinating relations of capitalist globalization engendered resistance in the form of migration. Children from communities with extreme poverty responded to structural and direct violence by migrating north as a way to seek alternatives to their lived experience of globalization.