RAISING CHILDREN ALONE AS AN IMMIGRANT: Challenges to Ensuring Real Access to the Right to Care
The challenges of raising children alone faced by many families in our country—there are approximately 2 million single-parent families,81% of which are headed by women—are exponentially more severe when migrant women must shoulder this responsibility. This heightened vulnerability is driven by various factors.
Being a migrant woman means facing migration-specific challenges that permeate every aspect of life, such as the transnational nature of caregiving, greater exposure to discrimination based on racialization, or the situation of administrative irregularity that leads to total exclusion from protection systems and access to rights. Being a single mother also subjects them to a severe lack of resources to meet basic needs for sustaining life, greater overload and lack of time, greater difficulty in accessing employment, and greater precariousness, among other factors.
It is our responsibility as a society to understand these situations and take measures to reverse them.
This study, conducted through a process of documentary analysis and with the participation of key organizations and individuals, aims to highlight, with data, the specific situation of lack of rights faced by migrant mothers raising children alone in Spain. We also make concrete proposals that can be implemented and incorporated into laws and regulations, enabling changes in the daily lives of these mothers.
Our focus on this issue stems from a process that began in 2020 in Andalusia, bringing together women from different backgrounds and immigration statuses: ALIADAS por la Cuidadanía. It was prepared by Beatriz Suárez Relinque (an expert and activist in migrants’ rights, with a focus on care).
