Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State. Lauren Heidbrink
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Attorneys must grapple with how to distill a child’s narrative into the requisite eligibility criteria without reifying the child victim into the law.
Claims of victimhood and vulnerability carry significant risks. In the humanitarian and legal arenas, a child’s victimhood becomes problematically synonymous with the child’s social, economic, and political rights as detailed in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The absence or violation of those rights constitutes a child’s vulnerability. Pervasively, advocates fail to recognize the fraught history of the drafting and ratification of the CRC, which embodies Western social, cultural, and legal norms of childhood and ignores cultural or historical variation. While inherent victimhood justifies protection, care, and legal advocacy in the name of a child’s best interests, it also diverts advocates from inquiring how children view their own best interests (Ensor and Gozdziak 2010). Denying the social agency of children by advocating for their rights rather than their wants discounts social and kinship dimensions of migration and ignores divergent cultural meanings. In claiming rights on behalf of vulnerable children, advocates struggle to solicit adequately their desires, perspectives, choices, and decisions and to recognize the very social agency that led them to the United States.
In contrast to humanitarian or legal advocacy realms that view children’s social agency as either violated or biologically undeveloped, law enforcement criminalizes a child’s social agency as either delinquency or indistinguishable from adult “criminal aliens.” In the law enforcement regime, a child’s social agency has led to a social and legal transgression of the law that requires punishment and rehabilitation. The production of the legal category of the “unaccompanied alien child” and the institutionalization of children in federal custody is a product of the overlapping enforcement regimes encapsulated by the wars on drugs, immigrants, and terror. The past fifteen years have seen record levels of U.S. government funding of immigration enforcement ($18 billion in 2012); the militarization and technologization of the U.S.-Mexico border; the fluid collaboration between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities; and an infusion of U.S. funding, technology, and training to Mexican authorities to thwart migration through Mexico. The stakes in the detention of migrants have intensified.
Relying on modes of behavioral pathology or biological and developmental models of childhood rooted in universalized and romanticized ideals of childhood glosses over the complexity and variation in experiences of migrant children. In order to penetrate the powerful discourses, an analysis of the social agency of children allows for a transcendence of the clashing binaries of dependency or independence, natural or pathological, delinquent or victim, positive or negative that are the basis of institutional policies, professional practices, and legal frameworks. A contextualization of the ways children and youth navigate structural constraints and express agency may begin to deconstruct the oversimplifications that underpin the institutional interventions and legal frameworks that shape migrant children’s everyday lives. With such an exploration, we may begin to understand how children comprehend and express social agency rather than the ways those in power assign meaning to it. These often diverging, moralized meanings attributed by “stakeholders” to a migrant’s social agency routinely come into conflict in courts of law, institutional practices, and on the bodies of children.
Unaccompanied children as a juridical category justifying institutional and legal intervention discounts the significant variation in experience, context, and social relatedness of children across cultures. “Always embedded in broader structure, child agency, like adult agency, is inevitably partial and conditioned by multiple factors” (Coe et al. 2011: 9). Categorically ignored, the agency of migrant children and youth is conditioned by their upbringing with notable differences across culture, age, gender, family position, sources of caregiving, and social obligations. Financial and social indebtedness, language, emotionality, and household economy may encourage, deny, or make relevant or irrelevant child agency (Coe et al. 2011: 15–16). A child’s agency may be contextualized by his or her experiences of (dis)empowerment, access to knowledge and information, employment or labor, and exposure to trauma or violence. Children maintain individualized capacities for innovation, creativity, strength, and resilience that may shape their ability and willingness to express agency either actively or passively.
The burgeoning field of new childhood studies recognizes children and youth as actors in their own right and whose worldviews are worthy of inquiry. Scholars have argued that youth are both “makers and breakers” engaged in dynamic social processes of making and being made (Honwana and de Boeck 2005; Maira 2009). In this vein, I engage youth less as agents in process of “becoming,” instead focusing on their “being.” Youth negotiate complex networks of actors and institutions that may aid them in evading deportation, earning income, and contributing to household economies in the United States and in their home countries. Considering only the structural forces on youths’ lives and reducing childhood and youth into periods of transition or molding threaten to negate their contributions as social actors. Youth challenge, resist, or shape the law and institutional practices. Youth may understand the law differently than adults and their experiences may differ across time and space, and through an examination of their everyday interactions and confrontations with institutional networks and legal systems, youth shape the very laws that govern their everyday lives. Through my research, I came to realize that migrant youth reflexively understand social agency, not as an act of one’s own free will but as a responsibility, a form of belonging, or a mode of being. Thus, an analysis of agency and rights becomes central in the narratives of migrant youth in the ways they cross physical, social, and metaphoric borders and reside in overlapping spaces of impossibility—be it social invisibility, illegality, or independence.
Methods
Research methods employed in the study of youth often adopt either “adult” scripts for understanding youth or “child” scripts for understanding a child’s perspective on adult domains. Yet, as social actors, youth negotiate and develop ways of understanding conflict, the law, and justice all their own. As Samantha Punch (2002: 337) cautions, anthropologists should employ “research participant-centered” methods rather than “child-centered” approaches (see also A. Best 2007). Instead of segregating youth from other social actors, developing a particular set of methods exclusively for youth is not only patronizing, Punch warns, but negates their competencies. Taking heed, I adapted methods based on research contexts, not on assumptions of the capacity or character of migrant youth as a category of persons.
This three-year ethnography is based on fieldwork with four principal groups. First, I conducted research in three federal detention facilities (euphemistically called “shelters”) for unaccompanied children in Texas and Illinois and in four federal foster care programs in Texas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania (periods 2006–2009). At the facilities and foster care programs, I observed children in their everyday activities: at intake, class, mealtime, recreation, medical appointments, house meetings, legal appointments with their attorneys, at court hearings with immigration judges, and with foster families and peers. I conducted a survey over multiple, one-on-one interviews with eighty-two detained and nondetained children, tracing demographic data, detailed family histories, migration journeys, and the expectations reported by all migrant youths entering the facility regardless of country of origin. The survey provided a distributional analysis of the population of children entering the facility, the variations in experiences, and a baseline from which I tracked change over time. I compared the narrative structures of surveyed youth and identified key terms to track throughout my research. I conducted interviews in Spanish, Portuguese, or English and enlisted a Mandarin interpreter as needed. All translations from Spanish and Portuguese are my own.
Since the completion of this research, I have visited five additional facilities in Arizona, Texas, and Illinois and maintained communication with individual children and staff of fourteen facilities and seven foster care programs in Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, New York, Texas, Virginia, Utah, and Washington, D.C.
Second, I conducted one-on-one structured and semistructured interviews with nearly 250 “stakeholders”—individuals engaged in the apprehension and detention of migrant children, including government bureaucrats, nongovernmental facility staff, attorneys, guardians ad litem, judges, members of Congress, community leaders, Border Patrol agents, ICE agents, consular officials,