Immigration and Emigration: Canadian and Mexican Youth Making Sense of a Globalized Conflict

This paper discusses findings from focus groups with youth located in underprivileged surroundings in one large multicultural city in Canada and in a moderately large city in Mexico, examining their understandings and lived experiences of migration-related conflicts. Canadian participants framed these conflicts as a problem of racist attitudes towards immigrants in an otherwise welcoming city. Mexican youth understood emigration as a questionable individual dream to overcome precarious economic conditions, bringing about violence to those travelling and family fractures for those who stay. We identify tensions between these dominant narratives about mobility and conflict--usually also present in intended curriculum--and students' first-hand, every day experiences with migration in each setting. We point out to youths' contrasting imaginaries of citizenship--sense of agency and identity positions--with regards to migration in each setting, showing the limited opportunities they have to make sense of their lived (globalized) conflicts beyond their own localized cultural explanations. We argue that connecting the recognition of cultural differences in the world with the power imbalances, unequal positions, and historically structured global inequities revealed by issues such as migration, must become a crucial effort in citizenship education on global issues.