Paper short abstract:

My research considers adoption and immigration as a means of child circulation. My objective is to see how a child, born in Russia, is ¨taken”, “separated” from one culture, family, country, citizenship and “incorporated” into another culture, family, country, citizenship; how he or she participates in the process of constituting a transnational family.

Paper long abstract:

In the modern world children become frequent migrants in and between countries. Along with increasing number of immigrants the percentage of adopted from different countries is on rise. Although immigrants and transnationally adopted might share the same country of origin, they are treated differently. While immigrants have problems with crossing borders and obtaining rights, transnationally adopted "quietly" proceed to receivers countries and have no problems of obtaining rights.

Russian children are the ones of the most circulated in the world. The share of children and teenagers from Russia is extremely high in the emigration flow to the economically developed countries. 40% of the emigration flow from Russia to the USA was children and teenagers. It reveals two tendencies. The first is that the departure for permanent residence has a family character - parents leave with children, and the second - Russia became an "export" country of children for adoption. (Rybakovsky, Ryazantsev, 2005).

My research considers adoption and immigration as a means of child circulation. My objective is to see how a child, born in Russia, is ¨taken", "separated" from one culture, family, country, citizenship and "incorporated" into another culture, family, country, citizenship; how he or she participates in the process of constituting a transnational family. I believe that this cross-cultural analysis will be fruitful for cross-cultural migration studies in Europe, in general, and for the EASA 2008 conference, in particular.