Читать книгу Fragile Families - Naomi Glenn-Levin Rodriguez - Страница 8
ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
“Worthy” Migrants
I first met Alba in 2008 as she ran into the living room of her parents’ home, followed by her father, who was waving a hairbrush playfully at her head of tangled curls. The social worker I was accompanying had explained to me on our drive over that Alba’s foster parents were technically Alba’s cousins. They were in the process of adopting Alba, a process slowed by her status as a non-U.S. citizen. Alba was born in Tijuana to two parents who were both heavily addicted to methamphetamines. Her mother disappeared shortly after Alba’s birth. Alba was a little over a year old when her father, purportedly for drug money, agreed to sell her to Esther, a Guatemalan woman with U.S. citizenship, for $400. Esther then brought Alba into the United States using her own biological daughter’s birth certificate. Alba’s extended family, aghast at these events, managed to locate Esther, who was living in San Diego. Tatianna, Alba’s cousin, who also lived in San Diego, went to find Alba, and eventually was able to initiate the process of adopting her through the child welfare system.
As I learned more about Alba’s case over the next three years, it became clear that she was a child about whom many stories could be told. She was at once an adopted child and an abandoned child, a smuggled child, a trafficked child, a stateless child, and a migrant child.1 As Boehm (2008) notes, the legal categories that define an individual’s status in the United States serve as a central node for the assertion of state power that shapes migrant families in profound ways. As such, Alba was poised at the brink of multiple possible futures. The path eventually chosen for her, as I discuss below, both shaped her future and reworked her past.
In this chapter, I consider the force of these narrative frames, and the ways they shape differential outcomes for children in seemingly similar circumstances. Outcomes are affected not only by the stories that are told but also by the positionality of the (adult) advocate who tells the story and successfully reframes the child. The frameworks available and the impact they have on a child’s trajectory are, of course, historically contingent. They are shaped by economic conditions, geopolitical relations, and the political moments in which they emerge. As Kelly (2004:97) notes, government efforts to keep people “in place” are central to state-making processes. Demarcations about which children are eligible to cross into the United States and eventually pursue a path to citizenship are shifting and unstable, changing in response to economic and political circumstances. Yet these boundaries are central to the production of the nation, and the limits of U.S. citizenship.
As such, the categories that confront a child like Alba become key sites for situating citizens and noncitizens, for making and unmaking racially marginalized families, and for policing the fragile boundary between deserving children in need of protection and threatening young criminals who do not merit the state’s care.2 And although the granting or denial of citizenship is experienced as a profound and permanent response, the production of these boundaries is tentative, fragile, and always in process, as policy and judicial rulings shift the landscape. I juxtapose divergent framings of child migrants to examine the strategies through which some children are categorized as worthy of protection and citizenship, while others are not. I consider the way the extension of humanitarian intervention, through the provision of citizenship for particular children, is enacted not in relation to the specific suffering of an individual child. Rather, pathways to citizenship are mobilized through the advocacy work of well-positioned adults who draw on powerful narratives to frame children as worthy of humanitarian protection.
The cases I describe in this chapter involve children caught up in overlapping institutions and geopolitical relations that shape ongoing interactions between the United States and Mexico. These relationships delimit the terrain on which claims to protection and to citizenship can be made. Mexican minors who migrate to the United States are typically seen as children who are not qualified for refugee status and are assumed to be primarily “economic” migrants. The category “economic” is used in the contemporary moment to delineate “deserving” migrants from “undeserving” migrants.3 In the contemporary United States, framing migrants as an expense and a burden on the mythical “tax payer” is a key political strategy for facilitating an avoidance of the complex conditions that promote migration. Thus, legal immigration agreements between the two nations allow U.S. immigration officials to return Mexican citizens to Mexico through expedited procedures, denying them many of the legal protections available to other immigrants who are believed to have potentially valid claims for remaining in the United States.
These issues could not be illuminated more clearly than by the influx of unaccompanied minors from Central America across the Texas-Mexico border in 2014, ongoing at the time of this writing.4 In response to an over-whelming number of young children arriving in Texas from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, lawmakers’ concerns focused on the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 7311), a provision that “gave substantial new protections to children entering the country alone who were not from Mexico or Canada by prohibiting them from being quickly sent back to their country of origin” (Hulse 2014). In other words, the perceived “crisis” of a surge of unaccompanied minors in the United States highlighted that children escaping dangerous situations in Central American countries could not be summarily deported as their Mexican counterparts could be, because of the potential that they might possess “valid” claims to protection, such as claims to political asylum (Rodriguez and Menjívar 2014).
Congressional reactions to these circumstances demonstrated that concerns about taxation and government spending were sufficient to override broad concerns about Central American children fleeing circumstances of poverty and violence. Claims to political asylum are based on the presence of a well-founded fear of persecution in relation to particular protected categories, such as religious or political affiliations. Notably, asylum claims rule out victims of structural violence, such as those facing widespread conditions of poverty or violence that cannot be said to target a specific individual, including, for example, the generalized violence that accompanies gang activity and drug trafficking. This specificity of victimhood is necessary to make an individual migrant legible as deserving of citizenship. It is on these grounds that legislators lobbied for the return of these minor migrants, without concern for the specifics of their individual circumstances. As I discuss below, the particularities of each child’s experience and specific needs become subsumed into state-based categories; Mexican or Honduran affiliation determines a child’s reception at the border, rather than do the specifics of their potential claims to immigration relief.5 It is the translation of an individual’s story into broad categories of “worthy victim” or “economic migrant” within a legal state framework that drives the extension or denial of citizenship on humanitarian grounds.
In my analysis, I focus on what I call “narratives of worthiness,” the stories told about Latina/o children on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border that have the potential to position them as eligible for legal protection and U.S. citizenship. These narratives bring together conceptions of humanitarianism, tropes of children as innocent victims, and racialized visions of immigrants and their sending countries. These narratives contain elements of what Natalia Molina (2014) refers to as “racial scripts,” the stories we tell to situate various racialized groups across time and space. Such scripts work to situate racialized groups in relation to others, in ways that shape their experiences, rights, and access to resources and to citizenship status. These scripts are imbued with a force that helps to locate particular subjects in a broader racialized milieu. The stories told about child migrants both draw on and depart from racial scripts as they situate children within the economic and political landscape that shapes the contours of citizenship and protection. Children, as I explore below, are caught up in particular narratives while also uniquely positioned, in some cases, to transcend them through the work of an effective advocate. In the stories that follow, I attend not just to the narratives themselves but also to the actors who put these stories to work for child migrants.
In exploring the ways these narratives are mobilized, I examine the cases of two children, Alba and Tommy, both of whom were born into precarious family circumstances in Tijuana. Using a detailed examination of their cases as a starting point, I consider what sorts of children, under what sorts of circumstances, are positioned as deserving of U.S. citizenship or safe harbor. This approach, I suggest, enables us to glimpse one of the processes through which the boundaries of citizenship are produced via determinations about child citizenship and child custody. Finally, I consider how social axes such as race and nationality both inform and are produced through these determinations.
The cases of Alba and Tommy include circumstances that appear to be sensational or extreme. Both children, at first glance, seem to have strong grounds for protection due to the particular conditions into which they were born. These circumstances, I argue, highlight the centrality of narratives to the outcomes of their cases, a feature particularly foregrounded in these examples, but that was a crucial element of every case I observed throughout my research.6 Before examining the cases of Alba and Tommy, I begin with a discussion of migration and the politics of worthiness.
Child Migrants
The image of a child in need of rescue exerts a powerful pull. Images of abandoned, dirty, hungry, and needy children animate human rights campaigns, war efforts, philanthropic organizations, and trends in international adoption, shifting, to some degree, the anti-immigrant discourse that surrounds the plight of adult migrants. Yet children occupy a complex position in relation to U.S. immigration law. With the exception of international adoptees, child migrants have not generally been treated distinctly from adult migrants—they have been similarly subject to detention and deportation, and, until a class action law suit in 1996, were held in detention conditions along with adults and those with criminal convictions.7 Children who are categorized as “economic” migrants are routinely detained and deported without any special rights to representation or counsel to support their ability to apply for immigration relief.8
It is not the circumstances of a child’s migration experience alone that make that child legible within a framework of humanitarian rescue. Rather, this framework is constructed through a complex process of translation, a narrativization co-produced among immigrants, lawyers, and advocates (McKinley 1997; Cabot 2014). It is also shaped in profound ways by the circumstances of the children’s arrival, and the agencies—immigration authorities, homeless shelters, or social service providers—with which they come into contact. Through the work of an effective advocate, international adoptees, child refugees, and children labeled as victims of trafficking appeal to universalist notions of suffering and of the innocence and desirability of children in a manner that circumvents the economic and racialized discourses that so often guide immigration policy and practices.9 These children who are categorized as worthy of “rescue” include both international adoptees and some child migrants and refugees who are positioned as victims. The question of what sorts of children, from what nation-states, in what sorts of circumstances, shifts year-to-year and case-to-case in response to political events, legal climate, and global pressures. These actions occur even in the context of increasingly polarized contemporary debates about the worthiness of child migrants. However, as Orellana and Johnson note in relation to the political discourse surrounding the DREAM act, “there is evidence of a shift away from a view of all children as deserving of protection and care and toward one in which children must prove that they are deserving, either by birthright or by merit” (2011:20).10 Geopolitical relations, national political climate, and narratives of worthiness position only particular children as subject to a story that supersedes the anti-immigrant sentiment directed at those perceived to be “economic” or “voluntary” migrants.
Care, Worthiness, and the Immigrant as “Victim”
In the case of child welfare services in both the United States and Mexico, protection is extended to children regardless of their citizenship status. That is, each state takes responsibility for child “victims” within its borders, regardless of their citizenship status or country of origin. However, as the case of the Central American minors recounted above demonstrates, children who are caught up in the immigration system, rather than child welfare services, and get framed as “economic” migrants, are often not extended protection.
These policies for child “victims” are driven by a universalist notion of human suffering and the unique vulnerability of children that supersedes the details of each particular case.11 This was made evident in Alba’s case, where her framing as a trafficked child through her initial “sale” to Esther was more important to her legal case for citizenship than any details about her actual treatment while in Esther’s care. This vision of humanitarian intervention necessitates a moral obligation on the part of the receiving country. Here, humanitarian intervention draws on a notion of human suffering that separates those who are legitimate victims from those who suffer economic hardship.
Children are not exempt from this maneuvering.12 Yet the distinction between economic migrants and “rights-worthy” migrants, and the disentangling of economic factors from those circumstances recognized as legitimate forms of persecution, is an increasingly impossible endeavor.13 Of course infants and very young children, like Alba and Tommy, cannot be easily framed as economic laborers, but the presence of young, unauthorized migrant children in the United States is often explained through the economic needs of their parents in a way that narrates young children as present in the United States primarily due to economic need. These sorts of narratives evade the story of a rights-worthy child by focusing on the narrative of the undeserving economic migrant that surrounds the parents’ migration. Children as young as eight years old are effectively framed as “economic” migrants and summarily deported to their countries of origin. The cases of Alba and Tommy, and other children in similar circumstances, suggest that the mobilization of a narrative of worthiness may hinge on the action of a U.S. citizen adult positioned to compel the state in a way that a non-U.S. citizen, or a U.S. citizen child, is not equipped to do, a point to which I return below.
State Interactions with Citizen and Non-Citizen Children
The cases recounted below, and throughout this book, involve institutions, families, and legal systems that span both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Although both Tijuana and San Diego have well-established child welfare support systems, they are each structured differently and emphasize different sorts of programs. The child welfare system in San Diego County provides support services to families with children who have experienced, or have been alleged to have experienced, abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Children typically enter the system through a call to the child abuse hotline, often made by a concerned neighbor, teacher, medical authority, or anonymous third party. A child abuse hotline call prompts an investigation by a county social worker, which may lead to the provision of family maintenance services, such as parenting classes, therapy, or regular social worker visits. Alternatively, in cases where the child is determined to be in “imminent danger,” the social worker may remove the child from the home, making the state the child’s temporary legal parent. In these cases the child typically resides in a foster home or in the care of an agency-approved relative while the parent pursues a “case plan,” designed by the social worker, that may involve drug treatment programs, anger management counseling, or separation from an abusive partner, among other possible requirements. Eventually, the social worker makes a recommendation to the court about whether the child should return to the parent’s custody or be placed in a guardianship arrangement or an adoptive home. A dependency court judge makes a final ruling.
In Mexico, child welfare services are provided by Desarrollo Integral de la Familia (commonly referred to as “el DIF”), a system that provides a variety of support services including nutrition programs, legal services, a temporary shelter for children, and a network of private orphanages, many of which are run by religious organizations and supported by U.S. donors, volunteers, and staff. Although the vast majority of Tijuana orphanages are privately run, they are certified and overseen by the DIF Tijuana agency. Children are placed in orphanages and out for adoption by DIF social workers. Although DIF social workers do visit private orphanages, because there are only a small number of DIF Tijuana social workers—eight during the time of my research for the entire city—their oversight of the daily care and medical needs of the children is infrequent at best. As one orphanage director, Carlota, told me, “El DIF es como el Papá, y nosotros como mamá” (The DIF is like the father and we [the orphanage] are like the mother).14 Carlota, who had grown up herself in the very orphanage she was directing, went on to explain that the orphanage provides the daily care, keeping the DIF informed and asking for permission for issues regarding schooling, placement, or medical treatment. She clarified, though, that unlike a traditional “papá,” when a child needs expensive surgery or school fees the orphanage goes to donors rather than to the DIF for funding.
Because concerns in Mexico about child abuse or neglect must be made by a public “denuncio,” as opposed to the option of making an anonymous call as in the U.S. child welfare system, many observers of child maltreatment are understandably hesitant to involve themselves. For this reason, many children are put under DIF’s protective custody by the extended family when concerns about abuse or ongoing parental drug use become too extreme to ignore. It is also quite common for family members simply to provide care for children without involving the state agency in any way. Abandoned children, or children living on the street, are often brought to orphanage shelters by concerned neighbors. Although DIF offers parenting classes and reunification plans for parents, orphanage directors reported to me that reunification was a rare occurrence in Tijuana. Many children were regularly visited by their parents but did not return to their custody. Instead, they completed their youth and their schooling within the orphanage system, leaving at age fourteen of their own accord, often to live with extended family members with whom they had stayed in touch, once they were old enough to contribute to maintaining the household through their labor.
The child welfare systems in both Tijuana and San Diego took shape through extensive public-private partnerships. In Tijuana, this took the form of privately funded orphanages, often run by U.S. church groups and staffed by a mixture of local Tijuana residents and U.S. volunteers. In San Diego, it took the form of nonprofit foster family agencies (FFAs). FFAs recruited and trained foster parents, and supervised the placement of foster children, through a subcontracting relationship with the county-run child welfare system. As in the Tijuana system, the public system in San Diego retained exclusive control over the initial intervention and removal of children, the selection of a placement option, and the court process associated with decisions about reunifying families, terminating parental rights, and pursuing adoptions for children.15 Foster family agencies took on some of the county’s workload by providing and overseeing additional foster homes, but they did not replace the work of the county social workers or reduce the number of children on a county worker’s caseload. Furthermore, while the subcontracting relationship was monitored through a formal contract process, the financial relationship was complicated. Nonprofit FFAs, like Tijuana orphanages, received no funding from the county system for the services they provided. Although each foster family received monthly government funds for the provision of food, clothing, and other incidentals for their foster child, none of this money went to the agency itself.16 Recruitment and training of families, program maintenance, building rental, and staff salaries were all underwritten by private donors or grant funding.
Figure 1. The child welfare system: key agencies and actors.
Esperanza, the agency through which I met Alba and where I conducted the bulk of my research on the San Diego foster system, was one such FFA. Esperanza’s mission incorporated a focus on children under age five with the primary goals of keeping siblings together, addressing the specific needs of Latina/o foster children, maintaining small social worker case loads, and obsessively pursuing the goal of “one home for one child” to counteract the trend of foster children moving through multiple homes in the first few years of their lives. Esperanza aimed to provide specialized care for Latina/o foster children through the provision of bilingual social workers, specialized training for foster parents about “Hispanic cultural needs,” and recruitment strategies that targeted Latina/o families through media campaigns on local Spanish-speaking TV and radio stations, as well as Mexican grocery stores and other such venues. When I asked Esperanza social workers and staff members to speak more explicitly about what they saw as “Hispanic cultural needs,” their responses focused on the importance of bilingual social workers, service providers, and therapists who could work with both child and family, maintaining the ability of a foster child to communicate with biological parents even after a substantial period of separation.
Esperanza social worker Corinne explained to me, “As a bicultural social worker, being raised on both sides of the border, I just get things. The [foster] parents sometimes imply things to me that I don’t think an English speaker would get.” Corinne went on to note that this was important to county social workers who placed children from Spanish-speaking families at Esperanza. When I asked whether this was primarily to preserve their native language skills, she replied, “I think it’s more practical than that. They want the kids to keep up the same language practices as they do at home so that it eases the transition back home and doesn’t create more work for the bio[logical] parent.”17 Esperanza staff also mentioned such things as understanding the importance of extended family in the Latino community as well as the sorts of foods children would likely have been exposed to in their natal home or the language-based challenges they might face in school. The official Esperanza mission statement outlined the following goals for foster parent training around the issue of the specific needs of Latina/o foster children:
• Assure each child’s healthy identity development by connecting him/her to her heritage, language and culture.
• Orient parents about the importance of home language development especially as it relates to school success in English.
• Offer families strategies for dual language development.
• Infuse concepts and strategies for achieving cultural and linguistic continuity into other topics of training.
• Acknowledge and celebrate the funds of knowledge, skills, and resources the families already have and can share with their foster and/or adoptive child.
• Every effort will be made to secure culturally and linguistically appropriate services when referring families for additional social, support, health, and educational services.
Esperanza’s founder, Becky, contended that the county system repeatedly failed to address these sorts of specific needs for the Hispanic population. She took the position that “private money allows for better recruitment, screening, training, and support,”18 and gave her the flexibility to address these concerns without the restrictions and cumbersome bureaucratic procedures of the public county agency.
Importantly, children were brought into these public/private partnerships, and provided with services including food, shelter, schooling, and medical care, by the child welfare systems in Tijuana and San Diego without regard for citizenship status. While each system was expected to alert the other to the presence of minor citizens across the border, they were not authorized to reclaim their own citizen children without express authorization by the other state or to repatriate noncitizen children of their own accord. In the U.S. context repatriation was not typically pursued for children within the child welfare system, and thus under state guardianship. However, children who were apprehended by border patrol authorities were frequently repatriated across the border into DIF custody, where they would commonly reside in temporary shelters while their family members in Mexico were located and contacted to collect them. Adults, and older youth who could pass as adults, were simply returned to the border and released into Mexico. The cases I turn to below involved Alba, a Mexican citizen child entangled in the San Diego child welfare system, and Tommy, a U.S. citizen sheltered in a Tijuana orphanage. The divergent trajectories of their two cases illuminate the ways that narratives of worthiness, under particular conditions, are mobilized to compel state actors to address the citizenship status of a child migrant. I argue that in that process the ever-shifting boundaries of the nation are reworked and reinforced.
Alba’s Story
I first met Alba and her foster mother and biological cousin, Tatianna, in the summer of 2008, when Tatianna and her husband were still in pursuit of adoption and U.S. citizenship for Alba. Alba’s story was unique because it had largely been resolved outside the law enforcement and federal bureaucracies typically involved in trafficking cases. According to Tatianna, this was partly because after arriving in the United States with Alba, Esther, who had allegedly “purchased” Alba, managed to register Alba under her legal guardianship and was able to receive some support services for food and housing through the social service system without raising any red flags about Alba’s origins.19 This meant that Alba was already enmeshed in the child welfare system, a circumstance that did not protect her from the threat of deportation but did enable her to sidestep the immigration bureaucracy that would normally attend to the circumstances of a child migrant or a trafficked child.
Children who are under the custody of the child welfare system are technically vulnerable to detention and deportation if they are not U.S. citizens. However, in practice it is quite unusual for children in foster care to be detained or deported while in care, and they are formally eligible for the same treatment and services provided to citizen foster children. Undocumented parents and family members attempting to regain custody of their children did experience profoundly differential treatment within the child welfare system; these distinctions form one of the central concerns of the chapters that follow. However, during my research I never observed undocumented foster children being treated differentially or denied access to services available to U.S. citizen foster children during their time in state custody. Although foster children were almost never detained or deported, it was much more likely that this might happen once they aged out of the foster care system at eighteen, particularly given high rates of homelessness, incarceration, and unemployment for former foster youth, and thus the likelihood of their increased visibility to law enforcement officers.20
Alba’s story, as I recount it here, is full of gaps, unanswered questions, and inconsistencies. The depiction I present is primarily Tatianna’s narrative, supplemented by my own observations while Alba’s case was open, conversations with two Esperanza social workers involved in the case, case notes in Alba’s file, and documents Tatianna shared with me, including a written exchange from Alba’s biological father to Esther. However, substantial gaps in the story do remain, and without access to the county social worker’s version of events, the story is partial at best.
Tatianna, Alba’s cousin, was living in San Diego, where she had attended college. She lived in the city with her husband, with whom she co-owned a business, and their three-year-old daughter. Tatianna’s extended family, living in Tijuana, did not initially know what had happened to Alba when she disappeared. However, they were hesitant to involve law enforcement in their family circumstances, concerned that Alba might be placed in a Tijuana orphanage instead of with her extended family. Tatianna’s involvement in Alba’s case began when one of Tatianna’s aunts discovered a letter from Alba’s father to Esther, requesting more money than the funds that had already been exchanged for Alba. Based on the name and address, Tatianna’s aunt managed to locate Esther, who was living in San Diego. With this new information, Tatianna went to check up on Alba. She explained, “Look, I wanted to adopt Alba. But I would have been content to leave her there, with Esther, if things had seemed okay. But I just wasn’t comfortable.”21
When Tatianna arrived at Esther’s house she was not happy with Alba’s circumstances—she didn’t feel that the home had enough room for the whole family, she didn’t like that Esther said she was relying on welfare payments, and she wasn’t comfortable with the fact that though Esther had told Alba’s father she was married, she in fact lived in San Diego with an undocumented boyfriend. Tatianna felt that Esther had misrepresented her situation to Alba’s father and that Alba was not as well cared for as she could be. When Tatianna explained who she was and refused to leave Esther’s home without Alba, Esther called the police. Officers soon arrived, hands on their guns, to evict Tatianna from the property. Tatianna explained to the police that Esther had illegally smuggled Alba into the country, but they told her the situation was beyond their jurisdiction and would have to be settled in family court. Tatianna was then escorted off Esther’s property.22
Tatianna then began the long, arduous process of petitioning for Alba’s custody. She explained how surprised she had been that the social worker for Alba’s case did not seem concerned by Alba’s circumstances and the lack of clarity about how she had come to be in Esther’s care. Even Tatianna explained, however, that Esther’s intentions seemed good: “I really do think she just wanted another daughter,” Tatianna told me, “She wasn’t really trying to exploit her, I don’t think. It wasn’t a money situation.”23 I was never able to speak to the county social worker involved in this case, so I do not know what her perspective was on Alba’s condition and Tatianna’s claims. From Tatianna’s perspective the social worker was dismissive of what amounted to human trafficking and did not feel she had any reason to be concerned about Alba’s situation. Tatianna, for this reason, appeared to be nothing more than a hassle the social worker was forced to deal with in the context of an otherwise relatively straightforward, unproblematic case. Tatianna initiated a letter-writing campaign to Alba’s social worker and her supervisor, eventually pressuring the social worker to move Alba to a foster home while the case was pending in dependency court. Tatianna realized she needed help navigating the legal complexities of the child welfare system. She happened to see an ad for the Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) program in San Diego, an agency that provided volunteer advocates empowered by the court to make recommendations on behalf of foster children. Tatianna requested an advocate for Alba, and was connected with a CASA without whom she felt she would not have been able to navigate the complex legal obstacles to gaining custody of Alba.
CASAs could be requested by anyone involved in a child’s case, or by foster children themselves. They were charged with representing the interests of the child to the court, because children, according to the view of social workers and legal actors, were often not able to distinguish between what they wanted and what might be best for them in the long term. The role of the CASA was to get to know and to advocate for the child, effectively bringing the “voice” of the child into the courtroom. As the recruitment director at a CASA organization explained during an orientation session:
It is not that the paid professionals are at fault it is just that they don’t have the time, and this is why CASA volunteers are so important. You’ll be given a badge and a court order to have access to legal, medical, educational records as well as social worker and judge’s files.… [We] receive referrals for kids who need CASAs through teachers, social workers, foster parents, attorneys or even kids themselves. But, you cannot be a CASA if you work with any aspect of foster care or dependency court due to conflict of interest; the key to a CASA is that you are serving no one but the child.24
CASAs were officially appointed by the court to the cases of foster children who were determined to be the most in need. This typically included children who had experienced more placements than usual, children who were separated from siblings, children who were experiencing severe educational or emotional difficulties, and children involved in cases in which various parties disagreed about how the case should proceed. As noted above, CASAs were unique in that they had court-ordered access to all information pertaining to the child’s case, including county social worker and FFA documents, medical files, psychological assessments, and school reports. Furthermore, county social workers were compelled by formal policy to respond to any inquiries from CASAs within 48 hours. Additionally, CASAs were volunteers, not limited by time, institutional resources, or government regulations. In Alba’s case, her CASA worked with Tatianna to navigate the complexity of Alba’s legal circumstances and to advocate for her eventual adoption by Tatianna.
The legal process was complicated by the fact that Alba had no birth certificate. This missing document posed two distinct problems. First, it affected Tatianna’s ability to prove herself to be Alba’s kin. Tatianna pushed for a DNA test that the county of San Diego did not pursue. Tatianna never received an official reason why her request for a DNA test was rejected but she told me that she assumed it was due to the expense of the procedure. She would have pushed the issue farther if the county agency had not eventually recognized her as Alba’s kin, largely due to Esther’s acknowledgment of Tatianna as Alba’s relative. Tatianna explained “If she [Esther] hadn’t admitted to the [social] worker, if she had just said ‘I don’t know who this crazy woman is’ then I don’t think I would have ended up with Alba.”25 Tatianna noted wryly to me that this was one favor Esther had done for the family. Second, Alba’s lack of a legal birth certificate complicated her citizenship status and unsanctioned entry into the country. The pursuit of legal status for Alba was exacerbated by the fact that she was not legally recognized as a citizen in either the United States or Mexico. Particularly because she was located by family outside the bounds of a legal investigation of child trafficking, Alba’s story exemplifies the difficult circumstances of non-U.S. citizens entangled in the child welfare bureaucracy, one in which families must doggedly pursue a legal solution to a series of illegal or unsanctioned circumstances. Thus began Tatianna’s long engagement with child welfare services, law enforcement, and immigration authorities, in an effort to gain legal custody of Alba.
Paper Trails
Although the sale of a young child followed by that child’s migration across an international border is an event unlikely to be accompanied by concrete documents, the provision of official documents for Alba, including a birth certificate and passport, was crucial to her case. Identity documents such as passports and birth certificates occupy a relationship to their holders that is partial and unstable at best.26 Documents may be entirely at odds with an individual’s lived experience and sense of self and place, and they may erase prior nationalities, birth dates, and parentage. They may be constructed in error or intentionally forged. Nevertheless, they are foundational to an individual’s claim to recognition as a citizen of a nation-state and a crucial element in making claims for protection, such as for those in pursuit of asylum or refugee status.27 Alba’s existence as a trafficked child, a child worthy of protection, could not be validated if a formal paper trail could not establish her as a resident of Mexico. In other words, Alba had to be trafficked from somewhere in order to be granted protection, in the form of citizenship, by the U.S. state. This circumstance is one that Jacqueline Bhabha (2011:1–2) refers to as “effectively stateless,” a situation where a child may in fact be a citizen of a specific nation but lacks the paperwork to prove it. As Bhabha asserts, effective statelessness is necessarily accompanied by a reduction of enforceable rights. In this sense, Alba’s ability to call on her rights as a Mexican citizen, which was a necessary precondition to be recognized as a victim of trafficking, were inhibited by her paperless status.
Eventually, with the help of the Mexican consulate, it was determined that Alba had not been born in a hospital and thus there was no legal record of her existence. This complicated both Tatianna’s claim that Alba had been trafficked and the possibility of Alba applying for U.S. citizenship—both claims hinged upon her recognition as a citizen of another nation. After some effort on Tatianna’s part, the Mexican government issued Alba a certificate for unregistered births, a document Tatianna referred to as a “retrospective birth certificate.” The Mexican consulate in San Diego also worked on Alba’s case to verify that there were no missing person searches out for Alba within Mexico. This was necessary in order for the U.S. dependency court to terminate parental rights without the presence of Alba’s parents, as neither parent could be located by Mexican authorities despite the cooperation of Alba’s extended family in the search. The court eventually determined that Alba’s presence in Esther’s custody, and the lack of missing person inquiries, were sufficient to establish that she had been abandoned by her parents.
The determination that Alba had been abandoned was central to Tatiana’s ability to frame her as a child both eligible for, and worthy of, citizenship. I suggest that it was through Tatianna’s advocacy work to narrate Alba’s abandonment and her subsequent trafficking experience, that Alba was effectively positioned as a victim of mistreatment. As such, she belonged to a broad category of children in need of protection, a category that was distinct from the care or treatment she may have actually received under Esther’s custody. Once Alba’s position as a victim was established, she was eligible, via Tatianna’s advocacy, to be salvaged from the precarious status of statelessness (Kerber 2007) through a retrospective assertion of Mexican citizenship. Tatianna described the period during which Mexican authorities searched for Alba’s biological parents as a time of great anxiety for her, as she held the erroneous belief that the Mexican government would want Alba to be returned to Mexico. However, Tatianna came to understand that the Mexican government not only lacked the authority to repatriate Alba but was also not inclined to intervene in a situation where a child’s care was being addressed by her country of residence. As I discuss below, this is not a circumstance particular to the Mexican government. Rather, it reflects the limits of repatriation and nation-states’ abilities to intervene extraterritorially on behalf of their citizens.
Statelessness
It was not Alba’s position as a Mexican citizen that made her the responsibility of a specific nation-state or government agency. It was, rather, her status as a child in need of protection, officially due to “abandonment” by her father, and her physical presence within U.S. borders that made her potentially eligible for the protection of U.S. child welfare services.28 As such, the territoriality of state protection, activated through Alba’s physical presence within U.S. borders and compelled by Tatianna’s efforts, came together with universal principles of humanitarianism and the generalized state responsibility to protect “vulnerable” children. Ironically, Alba’s ability to take full advantage of this form of protection ultimately hinged on the Mexican state formally recognizing her as a citizen. In this way, Alba’s worthiness seemed to rely upon circumstances that were outside the bounds of citizenship, yet Mexican membership was central to her ability to advance these claims.
Alba’s status as a child in need of state protection, coupled with her position as a Mexican citizen abandoned in the United States, made her eligible for further protection through immigration relief. Because of the uniqueness of Alba’s history, she in fact had several possible paths by which she could qualify for U.S. citizenship. Because she had allegedly been sold to Esther and then brought into the United States, she was potentially eligible under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) as a victim of human trafficking. This act, established in 2000 and reauthorized in 2008, was intended to decrease the number of individuals being returned to their home country without assessment of whether they had been victims of trafficking or had legitimate claims to asylum.29 With respect to children, it provided for the transfer of minors from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) custody to the Office of Refugee Resettlment (ORR) within 72 hours and specified procedures for assessing claims for protection. However, a narrow definition of trafficking and uneven application of interview and assessment protocols have limited the reach of this provision.30
A second available pathway was Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), a provision created in 1990 and expanded to its present form in 2008. Referred to as the “J-visa,” it provided the most readily available path to citizenship for children who were dependents of the state or victims of abuse, provided they were unable to reunify with at least one of their parents and that it was deemed in their “best interest” to remain in the United States. Though SIJS is notable for centering the “best interest” of the child and the right to protection from abuse, this provision is not without its limitations.31 SIJS is complicated by the fact that it relies on coordination between state and federal courts—state courts make the initial dependency ruling before federal immigration courts approve or deny the SIJS application. There is confusion among child welfare authorities and legal actors in terms of the initiation and coordination of the SIJS application, which has drastically reduced the number of children benefiting from this unique form of relief.32 Alba could qualify for this status due to her “abandonment,” her presence in state custody, and her likely history of neglect due to parental drug use. Or she could simply immigrate, though, of course, she was already present in the country, as the adoptee of U.S. citizen parents. Tatianna and her husband, in consultation with Alba’s CASA and attorney, chose citizenship through adoption for Alba because it was the simplest and quickest route, primarily because an adopted child experiences the shortest wait time to U.S. citizenship.
Adoption Narratives
Adoption of non-U.S. citizen children such as Alba privileges the citizenship status of the adopting parents while erasing the former citizenship of the adopted child (Yngvesson and Coutin 2006). These children are reframed, through such processes as reissuing of a new legal birth certificate, as nonimmigrants.33 Yet this reframing elides the similarities in the trajectories and lived experiences of children who move from one country to another as the children of labor migrants or as the international adoptees of citizen parents.34 Though these two categories of child migrants may have similar questions about their national belonging, their official reception and the ideologies that surround their presence could not diverge more drastically. The children of labor migrants are all too frequently categorized as dangerous, unruly threats, while adopted migrants are held up as redemptive and celebratory instances of multicultural inclusion. Yet the absorption of these international adoptees requires an explicit framing of them as “not-migrants.” The divergent discourses that surround adoptees as opposed to other migrants separate international adoption from labor migration. This delineation enables a narrative of humanitarian rescue to surround international adoption even in the context of blatant xenophobia and racism in relation to an immigrant labor community from the same sending nation.35 In this way, adoption circumvents the narratives that can be mobilized to frame even young children as “economic,” and thus “unworthy,” migrants.
The migration pathway of international adoption is not primarily based on the worthiness of the child’s own claim to citizenship status. Rather, inherent in these adoptive practices is the valuation of children as coveted items, who should not be held accountable for the circumstances that they were born into, and whose merit is based on their youthfulness and value to U.S. citizen parents.36 As such, the state authorizes international adoptees to enjoy full citizenship rights in a manner not readily available to children who migrate through other avenues. The economic conditions that may frame the context in which children become “adoptable” do not, in this case, erode their worthiness or impact their reception in the United States, perhaps largely because any future economic needs they may have are expected to be a burden on their adoptive family, not on the state. An explicit distinction between “adoptees” and “migrants” justifies the presence of one group while excluding the other.
Although the details of Alba’s case would have supported a strong argument for framing her as a victim of trafficking, it was primarily through Tatianna’s advocacy and her availability as a willing adoptive home that the case was set into motion. Alba’s “rescue” and path to citizenship was not put into motion by outrage at her tale as a trafficked child. As noted above, it was quite unusual for a child from Mexico to be framed as anything other than an “economic” migrant. Only recently have such pathways as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and the Violence Against Women Act been successfully claimed by Mexican citizens, who tend to be framed as “economic” migrants regardless of the specific circumstances of a given case. As such, these migration categories are shaped more forcefully by political trends and perceptions about which nations produce “legitimate” asylum-seekers and refugees than by the specific details of an individual’s experience. Alba’s framing as an adoptee positioned her as an object of value to her adoptive parents, and circumvented broader questions about the “worthiness” of her specific case.
Tommy’s Story
When I told Alba’s story to social workers in both Tijuana and San Diego, it often elicited tales of the dysfunction of the child welfare system, which focused on how the system’s task was so extensive and sprawling that children would invariably “fall through the cracks.” Yet underlying these reactions was a common perception, held by bureaucrats and lay people I spoke with on both sides of the border, that the Mexican state was less competent than the U.S. state—Mexico was, for example, the nation without documentation of Alba’s existence, a nation where selling a child could seemingly happen without consequence. Both U.S. and Mexican nationals described the Mexican government as an inadequate bureaucracy. However, Tatianna’s shock at the Mexican state’s lack of interest in returning Alba to Mexico was echoed by the U.S. government’s lack of efforts to repatriate U.S. citizen children in Mexico. Tijuana orphanage directors and staff introduced me to U.S. citizen children in their care and told stories of repeated calls to U.S. consulate workers who were responsible for collecting U.S. citizen children abandoned across the border. Those consulate workers never returned calls or appeared to claim these children. Thus, if Mexico was seen as disorganized and disempowered to make claims on their citizens’ behalf, the United States was framed as capable but uncaring, empowered to ignore Mexican officials and its own citizens residing outside national borders.
I met Tommy during my weekly visits to a Tijuana orphanage, where I helped the staff through their busy days by soothing crying babies, reading books, and chasing toddlers around the small concrete patio where they played on sunny days. The orphanage was in the southern part of the city, at the top of a pothole-marked dirt road. The facility was almost entirely staffed by local Tijuana residents with the exception of the official director, who was a member of the U.S. church that funded the orphanage project. The buildings housed children from infancy to ages twelve to fourteen, and efforts were being made to create separate housing units that would allow older children to remain on site.37 The infant room, where I spent most of my time during weekly visits, consisted of a playroom, a large kitchen, and an open room lined with twelve cribs and a single rocking chair. Children remained in the infant room under the watchful care of a rotating staff of female workers and U.S. volunteers until they transferred at school age to separate boys’ and girls’ dormitories on the other side of the main courtyard.
Each day I arrived at the orphanage and parked my aging Honda in the dusty front entrance. I’d forgo standing at the locked main entrance gate and head for the outer door to the kitchen, where I would lean my head on the metal bars and holler “Buenas Dias, Doña Mari!” until I heard a faint, “Mande?” from the kitchen and saw Mari moving over to the door with her large ring of keys. Mari was the main cook and spent her early morning hours chopping meat and vegetables for lunch for the children and staff, cooking big pots of soup or spaghetti. We got to know each other as I came and went through the kitchen. Mari was often working with donated ingredients and a chaotic assortment of groceries, and I’d often pause on my way out to help her decode some of these mystery goods. One afternoon we stood together as I translated the directions on a military-issue bag of sugar cookie mix, and I wondered how these packages had arrived in her kitchen and how she managed to feed so many children out of such an unpredictable jumble of ingredients. Usually Doña Mari let me out of the kitchen and left me to repeat my hollering procedure at the entrance to the nursery, but that day she walked me across the courtyard and unlocked that door as well, muttering, “Este hombre, todo cerrado!” (This guy, with everything locked up!).38
The “hombre” Mari referred to was the U.S. orphanage director. I had been told by various staff that there was some tension between him and the Tijuana staff—he was a good decade or two younger than most of them and had instituted policies, such as locking all the doors throughout the day, that many staff members felt made the place feel more institutional and less like home while also creating a huge nuisance for letting people in and out.39 Part of the reason I entered through the kitchen was to align myself clearly with the staff and avoid being escorted to the infants’ room by the director each day. Though he had been nothing but kind and welcoming to me I wanted to understand the space of the orphanage through the eyes of those who worked most closely with the children.
Tommy was the blond haired, blue-eyed terror of the infant nursery. He was four years old and almost ready to move into the boys’ quarters, and had a lamentable habit of tearing the toys he was interested in out of the arms of younger and smaller children. I spoke often with Sonia, a veteran staff member who handled the intake of new children to the orphanage and mediated all contact with the state in her role as the DIF liaison at the orphanage. Sonia and I were chatting about the “adoptability” of the children currently in the infant room, and Sonia surprised me by stating that, in her opinion, Tommy would never be adopted. She explained that Tommy was not Mexican, but was in fact the child of a U.S. citizen. His mother had contracted HIV doing sex work in Tijuana, where Tommy had been born HIV positive. Sonia said, with a wave of her hand that his mother was likely “indigente, andando por las calles” (indigent, wandering the streets of Tijuana).40 Tommy had arrived at the orphanage, like most children, without documents. He had been brought by a concerned neighbor, and it was from this neighbor that the basic circumstances of his life had been learned. This was quite common for children in Tijuana orphanages, and in fact, Sonia felt she had more information about Tommy than many of the children in her care. Although some children are brought to orphanages by relatives or concerned neighbors, others are simply abandoned at orphanage gates where young children, because they are unable to communicate with orphanage staff, are given names and assigned birthdays, their age roughly estimated by height, appearance, and basic skills. Sonia explained this process, miming measuring a child’s height with her hand, saying “Me parece como seis” (He looks about six to me).41
Tommy, like Alba, was effectively stateless and assumed to be a citizen of a nation-state from which he did not possess formal documents. Like Alba, who was afforded the protection of the child welfare system in San Diego, Tommy was provided with the shelter of his Tijuana orphanage without concern about his citizenship status. He received the same food, shelter, and medical care, and would likely follow the path of his fellow orphanage residents—out to work on the Tijuana streets in his teenage years, provided that he continued to receive the medical care needed to manage his HIV.
Although Tommy ostensibly had a right to U.S. citizenship through his perhaps still living, but, according to Sonia, likely deceased mother, there was no known relative to make that claim for him. Sonia explained that there might in fact be relatives in the United States, but there was no way for the orphanage to find them. She had, in the past, made telephone calls based on the name of a child in her care but these attempts proved entirely unsuccessful. Sonia’s institutional authority in Mexico did not translate into the leverage necessary to pursue U.S. citizenship for Tommy. Similarly, the U.S. consulate authorities had the right to make a citizenship claim on Tommy’s behalf, and to bring him into the U.S. foster care system, but Sonia laughed at the idea that the consulate workers would go through the effort of repatriating an HIV positive orphan with no known relatives.
Had there been someone well positioned to advocate for Tommy, he would have been a clear candidate for framing as a victim, deserving of U.S. citizenship on humanitarian grounds due to both his illness and his abandonment. The categories of an abandoned, neglected, or abused child would likely have been available to Tommy had he been found within U.S. boundaries. In that case, his physical presence would have necessitated the care of the state, likely resulting in Tommy being placed in a long-term foster care situation, locating any existing relatives, and attending to his medical needs. But because of his presence in Tijuana, and his lack of an empowered advocate, those categories did not have the force to move him into the United States or into a status that would enable him to draw on his ostensible claims to U.S. citizenship. Movement across state lines was theoretically possible, largely because Tommy was already assumed to be a U.S. citizen. However, unlike Alba, he lacked an advocate equipped to make those claims on his behalf. And, as discussed in further detail below, repatriation of Mexican citizens from the United States into Mexico was decidedly easier to facilitate than movement of U.S. citizen children from Mexico into the United States.
Enacting State Care
According to Sonia and other orphanage workers I spoke with in Tijuana, the challenge in addressing the circumstances of children with ambiguous citizenship claims like Tommy was not what the law allowed but rather the absence of an effective protocol for cross-border collaboration. Movement of children in social welfare systems is a complex problem due to the fragmentation of social service providers, which, in both Mexico and the United States, are governed directly at state, city, and, in the United States, county levels, and only loosely regulated at the federal level. Cross-border and crossagency collaborations are challenging not only across international borders but also from state to state or county to county. This is due to varying protocols among local agencies as well as complex funding streams that do not transition well between regions. The net result of this variation is that regional authorities are hesitant to take on the expense of caring for a child who is already being provided for by another regional agency.
This fragmentation of service providers meant that there were substantial obstacles to considering the extensive network of relatives, friends, and neighbors in which children and their families might be enmeshed, since these networks, particularly for Latina/o children, often extended across not only county and state borders but international borders as well. It presented challenges to working with families whose daily lives and social networks extended across the U.S.-Mexico border due to the practical need for individuals to be traceable and locatable in order to be provided with services. Additionally, cross-border collaboration took time, and children would often establish strong relationships with temporary care providers while waiting for agencies to work across borders. Child Welfare authorities’ prioritization of stability and permanency of relationships between children and their care providers often reduced the appeal of the lengthy process of working with family members and social service agencies across international boundaries. For children like Tommy, this fragmentation meant that his presence in Tijuana was placed solely within the purview of the Tijuana orphanage staff and the Tijuana social service agency, the DIF. His status as an alleged U.S. citizen did not in itself call forth the involvement of U.S. social service providers, nor was there a clear protocol for his care providers to collaborate with U.S. social workers to pursue other possible care options for him.
Orphanage directors had no recourse in the face of unresponsive U.S. state agents and state agents had no compulsion to be responsive. Notably, the impotence of state agents to act across borders on issues of child welfare extended in both directions. Ben, a former San Diego County social worker, told me the story of a teenage girl who had, due to allegations of abuse, been removed from her parents’ care while they were living in San Diego. While in foster care she disappeared and was believed to have returned to live with her parents, who had moved back to Tijuana. The judge, lawyers, and social worker involved in the case were concerned but had no jurisdiction to intervene across the border. They convinced DIF officials to accompany U.S. consulate staff on a visit to the girl’s Tijuana home. Ben, a native Spanish speaker, accompanied the group as the liaison between the San Diego child welfare agency and the DIF. Upon locating the girl, and speaking with her and some neighbors, the group determined that she was safe and well cared for. The U.S. consulate workers wanted to bring her back to the United States, but Ben and the DIF representatives felt satisfied she was safe from harm. Ben explained that had they found circumstances to be otherwise, there was nothing U.S. officials could have done, regardless of the girl’s status as a U.S. citizen.
Arguably, the population of U.S. citizen children abandoned in Mexico was relatively small.42 Yet while U.S. immigration law included a voluntary removal policy written expressly for contiguous states that consisted of driving unaccompanied, unauthorized minors to the border and releasing them into DIF custody in Mexico, a similar policy did not exist for Mexican authorities to send U.S. citizen minors back north across the border.43 And, perhaps more important, there were no Mexican officials with the clout or cross-border authority to put such a process into motion. In general, perceptions on both sides of the border were that government agencies, regardless of available resources, would prefer not to take on extra dependents already being cared for by other governments, unless they were forced to do so. This was not due to a lack of care for the well-being of minors. Rather, it was due to a lack of motivation to intercede in the case of a child who was already under another government’s care, and the lack of resources and state agents with the time to deal with the complexity of cross-border cases.
Contingent Worthiness
The cases of Alba and Tommy, and the cases of other children caught up in state custody in the United States and Mexico, raise questions about which children, in what sorts of circumstances, can be positioned as worthy of citizenship as a form of humanitarian protection. Here I take up Ticktin’s (2006:44) call for an interrogation of the humanitarian regime. She states:
I want to end by suggesting that in this emergent regime of humanitarianism, one must inquire into the consequences of its (often) arbitrary nature, asking what conditions evoke compassion and why and what hierarchies are reproduced by it. The ability of such a system to further a more just world must be seriously interrogated when humanitarianism acts as a form of policing, choosing exceptional individuals and excluding the rest.
Whether Alba or Tommy was individually deemed worthy of rescue was determined less by actual circumstances than by the stories that might be told about them, the advocates equipped to tell those stories, and the legal categories that were potentially available to translate these children into legible victims, worthy of protection. In this sense, at least in the U.S. context, it was not the exceptional circumstances of the individual alone but the way those circumstances were mobilized or silenced due to the presence or absence of an effective advocate, within a specific policy context and historic moment. A child’s citizenship, and territorial presence, may compel the state to act in particular ways to extend protection to that child. However, as the cases of Alba and Tommy demonstrate, that provision of care is enacted not through the nature of a child’s specific circumstances but through the compelling work of an advocate who is able to mold that child’s narrative to adapt to a category that will extend the legal protection the child requires. Of course the force of the narrative was not in itself enough to complete a conversion of legal status—effective policies, legal categories, and institutional procedures had to be in place to support the translation of a child, such as Alba, from noncitizen to citizen.
International adoption, as Alba experienced, skirts these broader issues by positioning the adopting parents, rather than the adopted child, as central to the way the process is imagined and pursued. While international adoption is embedded in narratives of saving and rescue, the worthiness of individual children is determined not by their particular history alone but by their status as an object of desire for the adopting family. In this sense, Tommy’s HIV status makes him seemingly worthy of “rescue” but at the same time unlikely to be an object of desire for adopting parents in the United States. In effect, one might argue that all international adoptees are understood to qualify for special care through their legal status as “abandoned” children or legal orphans, but it is through the desire of adoptive parents that this status is activated. It was at this juncture that the cases of Tommy and Alba most sharply diverged.
Children like Alba, categorized as abandoned, abused, or neglected, are ostensibly framed as particularly deserving of citizenship and protection, while other children are not. Yet, as Tommy’s case demonstrates, children may be framed this way only when a well-positioned adult makes claims on their behalf. This status, which I call contingent worthiness, raises questions about a broader sense of international social obligation rooted in the perceived special vulnerability of children as victims of mistreatment. The social obligation to bestow citizenship as a protective measure is not extended to all children, and in this way the making of these categories of worthy children implicitly demarcates the boundaries of what constitutes a deserving migrant. Importantly, no one I spoke with in relation to Alba’s case ever referred to her as a migrant or an immigrant. Rather, she was described as an adopted child, a smuggled or trafficked child, or an abandoned child.
Children who migrate to the U.S. due to “economic” motivations are regularly returned to their home countries. These children, understood in terms of stories of poverty and economic necessity, do not compel the same humanitarian reaction or the necessity to confront a national obligation to a child in need. At the same time, some children who are understood to be victims of abuse, not necessarily in their home country, are granted special pathways to citizenship. Thus, abused children with well-positioned advocates join those refugees and asylum seekers who are perceived to have legitimate claims, as drawing on social obligations for shelter and protection that are enmeshed in pathways to U.S. citizenship. I suggest here that these “worthy” child migrants are juxtaposed with the popular conception of the unworthy migrant, a symbolic reference to migrants who ostensibly seek to benefit from services and opportunities that they have not, through some broad category of suffering, such as abuse, abandonment, or trafficking, come to “deserve.” As such, legal pathways to citizenship for minor migrants appeal to broader ideals about humanitarian intervention that are denied to migrants understood to be motivated primarily by economic aspirations rather than mistreatment. They are interpellated physically and legally into U.S. families at the same time that they are embraced by the national family in a broader sense. Yet through this selective process, the sense that childhood is a broad category populated by individuals necessarily worthy of protection is unsettled by children who are eliminated from the right to protection through their framing as “economic” migrants.44 Children in need of protection are to be rescued, but only those about whom particular stories, and not others, are told by the right people, at the right time, and in the right place. In this way, minor migrants who are understood to be in need of protection are entangled in broader networks of social obligations, obligations that mobilize sentiments regarding human rights, children’s rights, and the state’s responsibility to protect minors from harm.
Yet as Tommy’s case illuminates, being “deserving” does not, in itself, mobilize state action. Alba and Tommy were both framed as stateless children, without legitimate documents and without a legal presence in the nation in which they were residing. In each case, the government system in that nation initially responded to the child as it would respond to any child within the nation, providing shelter in Tommy’s case, and social service support in Alba’s case, without specific concern for that child’s citizenship status.45 It was only through the concerted efforts of Tatianna, a college-educated U.S. citizen, that Alba was retrospectively granted Mexican citizenship, recognized as a victim of trafficking, and then granted U.S. citizenship through her legal adoption. Tommy’s assumed rights as a U.S. citizen child, and as a sick and abandoned child, were not realized, I argue, because there was no one positioned to make claims on his behalf, no one to force the gears of the state apparatus into motion. These cases thus highlight the contingent status of vulnerable child migrants, and their comparative voicelessness in efforts to construct and mobilize an effective narrative of worthiness.
The cases of Alba and Tommy illuminate the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the contingent, tentative narratives through which individuals are placed inside or outside national boundaries. And while narratives of poverty and economic need are decidedly problematic for enabling children to move across borders and enter the U.S. national “family,” in many cases decisions about child custody are based on a child’s increased life chances in a certain setting. These “life chances” or “future opportunities,” the subject of the following chapter, are often framed in terms of a child’s “best interest,” and serve as a gloss for the economic circumstances that differentiate one custody setting, one possible future, from another.
