Legal Integrity and Recognition

Abstract

This chapter examines the centrality of legal status as a building block for security and constructing a future in Europe. It engages with the realities of living with or without legal recognition in England and Italy and the impact this has on young people. The chapter considers these experiences within international and national frameworks of young people's rights and 'best interests'. It also looks at the serendipitous ways in which access to such rights are in fact socially constructed. As the chapter highlights, the arbitrary allocation of papers generates an inequitable set of life opportunities, or capabilities, as unaccompanied migrant young people become adults within the constraints of immigration control.