Taking cue from the work of Wilfried Lignier and Julie Pagis (2012,2017), this paper seeks to center the experiences of unaccompanied minors from Central-America seeking protections and status in the U.S. and analyze and map the way in which they understand and operationalize concepts of "autonomy," "agency," and "dependence." In doing so, I bridge together the psychological perspective of children, adolescents and developments, the sociological perspective of children and childhoods, and the legal perspective of children, minors, and best interest to conceptually develop what I call "Ages & Stages," which will operate as a theoretical and conceptual tool towards a youth theory of migration. In particular, I focus on conceptualizing "Minors as Brokers," in relaying how they take on the identity of a "client" in interactions with agency and other officials. In outlining this tool, I also highlight ways in which our current theorizing of immigration and migration conflate the adult and child/adolescent experience in culturally and contextually significant ways.
Bridging the three perspectives of law, sociology, and psychology also underscores and addresses tensions in the categorization of this, and similar, populations; for instance, in discussions of whether they are to be treated as "refugees" or "migrants," "children" or "minors," "unaccompanied" versus "independent," etc. The data this paper draws from is an eighteen-month participant observation study of a legal services office which aides unaccompanied migrants, as well as 30 interviews with attorneys which have experience working on cases of unaccompanied minors in New York, Texas, California, and Arizona. The participant-obsevation element of this project allows me to understand the articulation and exhibition of these concepts of "agency," "autonomy," and "dependence" as embedded in children's interactions, as well as frame them with their own words.
