The strengthening in recent years of the legal position of children in the asylum regulations and the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child has been accompanied by a renewed emphasis on immigration control throughout Europe. In this article, we shall shed light upon the growing conflict between asylum seeking children’s rights on the one hand and immigration control on the other, by analysing asylum applications involving children with long residency in Norway. Based on a deconstructive analysis of asylum cases, qualitative interviews and legal texts, we investigate the Norwegian Immigration Appeals Board’s assessments of asylum-seeking children’s affiliation (ie attachment) to Norway. We explore in what way the Board’s understanding of children’s affiliation to a given society is tied to the child’s age. The analysis reveals a contradiction in the Board’s decisions. Preschool children are regarded as affiliated to the broader society whilst living in their ‘home country’, but not while living in Norway. In order to understand this discrepancy, we explore and discuss the Board’s presuppositions about children’s affiliation to a society. The assumption that children do not affiliate to Norwegian society until they reach school age seems to stem from a simplified ‘commonsense’ understanding of attachment theories, even though this has been disputed in more recent theories of childhood, which state that even preschool children are capable of affiliating to the society in which they live. The Immigration Appeals Board underestimates the significance of affiliation to the society that the children develop by attending kindergarten. By automatically concluding that preschool children do not affiliate to Norwegian society, the Board avoids the difficult task of assessing whether depriving these children of their social network and the society in which they have grown up, is in the best interests of the child. © 2016 Norwegian Centre for Human Rights.

Legal Texts Asylum-seeking children Best interests of the child Immigration control Deconstruction Affiliation to Norway Textual analysis UN convention on the rights of the child

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