Transnational children and the right to family life: lessons following the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic, and, specifically, the drastic border regulations that accompanied it, posed unique challenges for transnational families. Based on a socio-legal study of the struggles of such families against COVID-19 regulation, this paper exposes the relative visibility of hardships caused to children from the Global North who were separated from their stay-behind grandparents, compared to the invisibility, both in the law and in public discourse, of the hardships suffered by stay-behind children from the Global South. The comparison demonstrates once more the global power imbalance that structures two classes of children, those from developed, wealthy nations, whose right to family life is protected, and those from impoverished parts of the world, whose right to family life is disregarded. This paper calls for lasting normative lessons to be drawn from the crisis based findings, which challenge the dichotomy citizen/alien and go beyond the borders of the nuclear family, for the sake of transnational children from all parts of the globe.