The education journeys of migrant youth and the overlooked role of educators
By Danielle Dimcheff
Marsal Family School of Education
While headlines—and research—often focus on border crossings and immigration policies, much less attention is paid to what happens in the communities migrants leave behind. That gap matters—because migration doesn’t just reshape borders, it reshapes schools, families, and entire communities.
Most research on education and migration focuses on young people’s educational experiences in “destination” countries. Education scholar Michelle Bellino takes a different approach. As a professor at the Marsal Family School of Education, her work looks at how migration affects young people’s lives and education—not only when they arrive somewhere new, but also before they leave, as they move within and across national borders, and in cases of return. Through multisited research in Honduras, Mexico, and the US, she documents how students, teachers, and schools are all deeply involved in the migration experience, with important implications for migrant youth’s educational opportunities.
Michelle J. Bellino
Associate Professor, Marsal Family School of Education
In a recent study of two rural Honduran communities, Bellino looked at how educators are coping with large-scale migration out of the country. At the same time, the Honduran government has launched a campaign that recasts teachers as frontline agents of migration prevention. Teachers are urged to persuade families to stay and build futures at home. Yet many educators question whether this is fair or effective, especially given the conditions they are working in. Schools are often under-resourced, and teachers see firsthand the reasons families consider leaving: poverty, violence, limited opportunities, and political instability. By focusing on individual decisions to migrate, prevention campaigns can overlook these deeper structural issues.
Instead of treating migration only as a border issue, we need to better understand migration as an education issue.
The other direction of the journey adds another layer. Many young people return to Honduras, often after being deported. When they try to reenter school, they face missing paperwork, stigma and ongoing economic hardship at home. Teachers are again expected to support these students, but they frequently lack the resources or guidance to do so effectively. Despite these challenges, many educators respond with empathy, seeing themselves not as enforcers of government policy but as community members trying to support families facing difficult circumstances. That finding shapes the second part of Bellino’s work. Schools, she argues, are quietly absorbing the stress, uncertainty, and fear generated by immigration policies.
She teaches an experiential U-M course built around a shared border-crossing experience between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico, the busiest land port of entry between the U.S. and Mexico. Students examine how enforcement and return policies shape education on both sides of that line. They then bring those questions back into their own research and teaching.
“One of the goals of the course is to show how immigration policies, policies of enforcement and policies of return shape school access, experiences and aspirations for young people and their families,” Bellino said. “Schools play a role in constructing borders, and this means we also have an opportunity to contest and complicate these divides.”
Her work points policymakers and educators toward a different question than the one prevention campaigns ask. Rather than whether teachers can convince students to stay, Bellino suggests, the more useful question is what schools need to support young people where they are, and where they envision their futures.