Young people are on the move, with few roadmaps and fewer clear destinations. They are the majority and often the most powerless amongst people fleeing war, violence, ecological disaster, and economic marginalization. Their movement is paradoxically sensationalized and invisible, critical, and ignored.

Much of the global media is focused on Syrians. The civil war there, along with the less civil war waged by multiple other countries, social movements, and extremist groups, has captured global newsfeeds. Dramatic images of killed children, human lines at European borders, and the chaos of refugee camps in neighbouring countries dominate news stories. Local and national charitable campaigns and also the politics of intolerance and hate propagated by right wing political movements in Western countries in particular compete for top billing in responding to the crisis.

It would be foolish, however, to limit our attention to the difficult context faced by Syrians seeking a way out from the horrors unfolding in that country. The reality is that people, including children and youth, are on the move everywhere. In Africa, states on the verge of collapse abound. Within functioning states, large geographic areas are increasingly characterized by unpredictable violence and unspeakable crimes, as exemplified by the regions in Nigeria and Mali controlled by Boko Haram. In Central America, Honduras is quickly deteriorating into mayhem, and people are seeking safe haven elsewhere. The narco-violence in Mexico has given rise to ever-increasing numbers of people making their way North, striving to arrive before the US-built fence becomes impenetrable. And Asia continues to produce large numbers of people desperate for a different life, as evidenced by refugees from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, by the Rohingya in southeast Asia, and countless others. All of these places and all these people count the young among them; teenagers and young adults, sometimes accompanied by family and sometimes not, are at the forefront of this global migration.

Young people are arriving somewhere; countries in Europe, and to a lesser degree the US and Canada, are welcoming them in large numbers. Welcoming is, of course, a relative term, one that almost never comes without conditions. And assimilation is perhaps the core condition for these young people; demands to become more “like us” and less like who they were before are intense and unambiguous. Perhaps more strikingly, what is aimed for is not merely assimilation, but the adopting of new national identities. Young Syrians become Canadians, American, Germans, and Dutch. They are absorbed whole, made to conform to the national psyche of their new home country. The fundamental premise has not changed for quite some time. Everything is possible, except the idea that young people changing their residency from an unsafe place to one that offers much more safety cannot maintain identities that transcend the nation-state model of the global community. Transnationalism, the idea that one can exist between nation-states, continues to be greeted with great suspicion.

This framework for responding to the current reconfiguration of global populations has implications that we may not have considered fully. It has implications for other, non-state institutions and relationships that one might argue are far more significant to global community than the clear categorization of people according to national identities and arbitrary borders. We (the Editors) are concerned about this imposed nationalism – framed as a precondition to welcome and reprieve from violence at home – and its potential to destroy transnational relationships that may otherwise offer alternatives to our increasingly precarious adherence to nation-state models of organizing the global community. What will happen to family relationships that unfold over multiple geographies, national identities, and borders? The unaccompanied minor in Germany remains connected to the mother in Syria and the father in a Turkish refugee camp; his or her relational identity is neither German, nor Syrian nor Turkish. The family communicates in the virtual ecology of Skype or some other internet-based application. Bonds and feelings of belonging remain uncontained by state containers. And yet, nationalism and its cousin, assimilation, provide no language to frame these relationships and in fact threaten their legibility and stability.

What will happen to peer relationships, common histories, interest in geographically dispersed religious or faith communities, languages that have spread over the continents? What lessons learned from previous diasporic experiences will be forgotten, and therefore fated to repeat? What will happen to the billions of data bytes in the virtual ecology that connects people not to national identities but to relational affinities, communities, and places of belonging?

The current global movement of young people is unparalleled in recent history. It has quite different implications for the global community than previous population movements, largely because it is unfolding in the age of a virtual ecology characterized by communication structures and processes that are far more accessible, open, and global than ever before. Contemporary young people's geographic movement differs from that of previous generations. They have a lifetime of global engagement before them. They provide knowledge, wisdom, and the lived experience of moving through space from one place to another, in the process encountering their peers with similar contexts but very different identity characteristics. They have been closer to the environmental changes of our time than most of us, having frozen while waiting for borders to open to them, having fought through natural disasters without the opportunity for escape, and having touched the manmade ecological destruction that arises from the bombings of oil fields, farms, and cities.

We believe that these young people are not victims in need of absorption into our national identities. Quite to the contrary, they are human resource we will require moving forward in a precarious world order. They have the relationships that transcend our divisions based on race, culture, faith, lifestyles and other things. They have the lived experience of ecological destruction. Their transnational relationships are the one resource we cannot do without. Far from nationalizing their identities, we ought to celebrate their exceptional status as young people liberated from the chains of national boundaries, interrupted relationships, and physical and metaphorical fences that seem to perpetuate all that is wrong on our planet.