Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State. Lauren Heidbrink
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my return from visiting his mother and siblings in El Salvador, when Julio joked, “You must be a socialist like my dad if you traveled all the way to see my family.” When I asked what he meant, he replied, “You care about me and my family and my future.” He said that neither the facility staff nor the attorney in Texas ever called him to see how he was faring with his father whom he had not seen in eight years. Facility staff routinely reported that ORR does not permit staff to maintain communication with children following their release from detention. My relationship with Julio shifted over time and space. It was only on his release from detention and over a year’s time that he grew to trust me. And while I maintained that I had no power or influence over Julio’s legal status, I helped him navigate the local school system that refused him admittance because of unauthorized status. Helping Julio and his father manage the legal and social particularities of their community in small ways communicated, I felt, my enduring receptiveness to learning from him. I believe my approach helped to enable him either to accept or to refuse my presence over time.
I tried to engage both detained and nondetained youth as ethnographers of their own lives, employing methods of journaling, game playing, kinship mapping, auto-ethnographies, and storytelling projects.18 Youth as ethnographers helps to deflate perceptions of youth as incomplete social subjects and as potentially dangerous and delinquent. Furthermore, these activities served as a constant reminder of what I could learn from and with children rather than about them (Freire 1970; Tilton 2010: 11). The methodological strategies I enlisted helped me understand how the state enters into the domestic sphere in the everyday and how children actively shape and navigate their environments. By engaging youth directly in the research and examining the practices of youth migrants, not just the structures that attempt to direct and confine migration, I was better able to analyze the dynamic and complex nature of child mobility. I could better recognize child participation in local, national, and transnational processes (Bourdieu 1977; Ortner 1984). Each of the subsequent chapters opens with an excerpt from these activities, framing the thematic content of each chapter through the voices of youth themselves. The pieces were also chosen to remind us of the profound human stakes of how the law, institutions, and we as individuals respond to youth as people deserving of respect.
The Chapters Ahead
Chapter 2 begins with the examination a pivotal historical moment within immigration law—the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement—and the ways it specifically shapes political and institutional discussions of the social agency of unaccompanied children. Competing perspectives of law enforcement and legal advocates force to the surface a critical question: are unaccompanied children humanitarian refugees or unauthorized aliens? The competing discourses of victimization and delinquency create a false binary that does not account for the multiplicity of experiences and narratives of unaccompanied children. Unaccompanied migrant children cannot be characterized as a monolith category; rather, they represent a diverse cross-section of migrants whom legal and governmental institutions homogenize by virtue of their unauthorized presence and the absence (whether perceived, real, or constructed) of their parents. This homogenization derives in part from juridical indolence and a lack of political will but also rests quite comfortably in social constructions of childhood and of deviancy among youth of color. Neither approach allows space for thoughtful consideration of a child’s agency or the cultural significance of the decision to leave the home country or the need to do so. Untangling the multiple ways in which the state and social discourses entrap youth between law enforcement and care sheds light on public imaginations of youth; Chapter 2 challenges these problematic conceptions of youth as either dangerously susceptible to delinquency or as victims due to their malleability and status as not-yet adults.
Acknowledging children as important social actors is a critical step; yet to conceptualize children and adults as equivalent social actors is also problematic in that it downplays the disparity in power between children and adults. Adults and children do participate in distinct power hierarchies that also shape their everyday lives. Discussions of delinquency provide a clear example of the court’s differential recognition of youths’ ability to enact violence (delinquency) versus their ability to speak on their own behalf; the courts recognize the agency of youth as both legally and morally responsible for their transgressive behaviors, thus necessitating harsh punishments (Coutin 2000; Terrio 2004: 10; Terrio 2009). In such instances, the youth temporarily is granted the full agency of an adult, in spite of his or her limited power in many daily circumstances. In the adjudication of cases, judges view youth agency as approximating that of adults, not as a separate type or quality of agency identifiable as belonging to youth. However, the court’s recognition of a youth’s ability to speak remains confined to certain contexts and only when adults with disproportionate power consider it appropriate or fitting to their agendas (Neale 2002: 458). Thus, the youth’s access to “adult” capabilities shifts and slides depending on the court’s will, which often seems to arbitrarily assign rights as well as to rescind them. None of these shifts actually account for the youth’s experience of agency or (dis)empowerment in his daily life or what sorts of rights are available to him.
A careful theorization of unauthorized child migration necessitates situating migration and illegality in the social, historical, and political context in which the law produces migrant “illegality” (De Genova 2002: 419). Chapter 3 locates the analysis of child migration within a broader field of historical knowledge in terms of the circulation of people but also within the often-absent context of immigration law. Early American law did not recognize children as individual rights holders independent of their parents. Treated as property, “children were parental, or more specifically paternal, assets who were under the direct and extensive control of their fathers” (Thronson 2002: 982). A shift occurred with the late nineteenth-century reformist discourse that “viewed children not so much as individual property … but as a form of social investment in which custody produced … social duties on the part of each parent, the performance of which the state could supervise” (Fineman 1988: 737). It was during this time that the still-prevalent legal principle of “best interest of the child” emerged, rooted in the presumption that children were inherently weak, dependent, and vulnerable. In 2001, the development of special legislation for unaccompanied children marked another historical shift in American law in which, for the first time, immigration law recognized the migrant child as potentially independent of his or her family despite decades of court records replete with such cases. Chapter 3 details the evolving relationship between the state, the family, and immigrant children, examining the relevant laws and judicial cases that have shaped the ways the state enters into or mediates domestic life of unaccompanied children and their families.
Chapter 4 traces the journey of one youth from his home in Guatemala to an Illinois courtroom and his simultaneous experiences of disempowerment and agency. The chapter details the ways he navigates a complex network of actors and institutions in pursuit of safety and security for himself and for his sister and the ways the law affords him some rights by virtue of his being a child while restricting other rights due to his independent presence in the United States. His narrative reveals how he negotiates the imposition of the law on his everyday life. Perceived as unruly, delinquent, and somehow dangerous to society and the nation-state, he embodies the intersection of the law’s attempts to contain and to reintegrate those existing outside of the law. At the same time, he is not merely a passive recipient of the law; he actively shapes legal discourses on migration in his everyday negotiations of institutional and community networks.
In Chapter 5, I enter federal detention centers for detained unaccompanied migrant children to examine the complex, everyday negotiations between the federal government, NGOs, and youth. These subcontracted, nongovernmental facilities are a direct response to the incarceration of immigrant children prior to 2003 under the INS, creating a less restrictive environment for children while they await family reunification, foster care, or deportation. I examine the institutional practices of the facility