The Immigrant Childhood As Subject in Social Policy in Chile

This paper presents part of the results of a FONDECYT investigation, conducted by the author who has been financed with public funds, and whose objective is to analyze the integration of the immigrant children and adolescents, addressing the public policy and social interventions carried out by the State and ONG with migrant communities.

The study is based on the Sociology of Childhood that covers the childhood as a three dimension concept. The first one, as a social construction, which is distant from the essential idea of the childish being, and expressed in different ways across the history in every sociopolitical context

The second one, as a permanent sociological category of the social structure, although his members are constantly renewed, and the third dimension, which comprises children as “social actors with an agency capacity”, that open generational and gender relations of power with other actors, in their families and other social areas. Nevertheless, that social action is not often recognized in the society and in the academic field, due to the adultcentrism that discriminates them against because of their age and economic dependence (Jenks 1982; Qvortrup 1994; James and Prout 1997; Mayall 2002; Gaitán 2006; Unda 2010).

Across semistructured interviews to migrant children aged 8 to 15, and by participant observation in state Offices of Rights Protection, and in an ONG, the social integration of the migrant childhood is analyzed and taken to be the exercise of its rights and the development of transnational practices and how the social intervention hinders and/or provides that integration.

Finally it is completed that migratory trajectories and diverse social factors (such as gender, age, language, place of birth, nationality, social position among others) have an impact on the accommodation and social integration of the new immigrants generations, living in Chile.