Children's Rights, Parental Agency and the Case for Non-Coercive Responses to Care Drain

Worldwide, many impoverished parents migrate, leaving their children behind. As a result, children are deprived of continuity in care and sometimes suffer from other forms of emotional and developmental harms. This chapter explains why coercive responses to care drain are illegitimate and likely to be inefficient. Poor parents have a moral right to migrate without their children and restricting their migration would violate the human right to freedom of movement and create a new form of gender injustice. It proposes and defends an institutional solution. Taxes levied on the remittances sent by temporary migrants ought to be used to provide migrants’ children with psychological counseling in order to mitigate the harm resulting from discontinuity in care.