[ARTICLES] Migrants and Young Carers: The Reconfiguration of Reproductive Labor and Children's Social Position

This article examines the issue of young carers in migrant families in Japan by situating it within the reconfiguration of reproductive labor and the social position of children. While previous studies on reproductive labor have primarily focused on gender and migrant women, the concept of young carers draws attention to children as active yet vulnerable participants in caregiving. Drawing on population statistics of foreign residents and qualitative case studies, this article analyzes how children in migrant households are drawn into sustained caregiving and mediation roles that resemble processes of parentification. The analysis shows that these practices are not simply the result of family norms or individual choices, but are structurally produced through the interaction of immigration regimes, welfare policies, educational institutions, and unequal power relations within families. Children frequently function as indispensable mediators between parents and public institutions, performing intensive emotional and interpretive labor. Such roles tend to become routinized and internalized, shaping educational trajectories and life-course transitions. By conceptualizing young carers in migrant families as a form of structurally induced parentification within contemporary regimes of reproductive labor, this article highlights how children's rights, participation, and developmental opportunities are constrained. The findings contribute to sociological debates on care, migration, and childhood by clarifying how children's social positions are reconstituted under transnational and institutional conditions.