Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State. Lauren Heidbrink
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response to the presence of unaccompanied children reveal how the state operates through an ideal of a unified entity yet splinters into a multipronged labyrinth with potentially conflicting objectives for solving the “problem of migrant youth.” By interrogating child welfare initiatives and legal interventions, this book argues that state practices enforced by nongovernmental organizations and the forms of legal relief available to migrant children trap the unaccompanied child at the intersection of the family and the state by denying or restricting their social agency. I detail how youth distinguish among state and nonstate actors staking varied claims on their behalf and contend that children are active and creative subjects engaged in constant negotiation with state power. While those in power, be it the state, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or parents, may assign meaning to their social agency, youth may acquiesce, push back, and, at times, evade normative positioning in their everyday interactions. This ethnography of youth migration traces the ways youth understand and express their social agency in highly restrictive spaces, such as immigration detention. Amid contentious national debates on immigration and security, this ethnography argues that the state’s criminalization of immigrants and bureaucratization of care challenge the historic reputation of the United States as a place of refuge for the most vulnerable—children.
Child Migration: A New Phenomenon?
Although children have migrated throughout history, migration studies remains a predominantly presentist endeavor, focusing on historical migration trends only enough to situate existing changes in population-level movements. The presumption that mass migration is a new phenomenon that places childhood itself at risk is unfounded.2 Historically, government programs have facilitated and even actively encouraged the movement of children. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the United States were marked by an influx of migrants, from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. African child slaves and children kidnapped from the streets of London alike were forced into indentured servitude in the United States (Bailyn 1986: 302–12); both groups fundamentally altered labor practices of local children working on plantations. At the time, the migrant child, just as the migrant adult, became a vital unit of labor necessary for economic growth in predominantly agricultural regions. Ship captains and plantation owners viewed children as vital cargo or units of labor, not distinguishing them as more vulnerable than adults to harsh labor conditions as we do today (Fass 2005: 939; Haefeli and Sweeny 2003). Similarly Native American children suffered physical displacement from their homes on reservations due to institutionalizations of disease and war. In effect, migrant children and Native American children were expendable and allowed to suffer, just as their adult counterparts were, not warranting special treatment or intervention. Disruption was inescapable in the lives of many children during this period.
From the 1850s to the early twentieth century, the U.S. government orchestrated the transfer of children, mostly teenagers, from overcrowded orphanages in northeastern America to live on small, family-owned and -run farms in western states. Many of these children had biological parents who were unable to care for them due to poverty; some parents enlisted orphanages as temporary shelters for their children during particularly difficult times, later claiming them from institutional care to return home. Government programs removed some of these children from institutional care and sent them west via train with the justification of an anticipated “better life” with their adoptive families. Beyond its perceived altruism, the state was invested in the perseverance of the nuclear family, removing children from orphanages near their families and often placing them with predominantly childless couples. In this context, the state investment was the child’s “well-being,” but ultimately a means of ensuring the “proper” place of the child within the family. The orphan train riders also became an essential source of labor to struggling farmers and, critics argue, a national strategy for population redistribution (Patrick, Sheets, and Trickel 1990).
Nara Milanich (2004) provides a detailed account of how Chilean courts in the nineteenth century mediated disputes over the care and custody of predominantly illegitimate, orphaned, and poor children, who had been “sent out to be reared.” According to Milanich (2004: 312), the unremarkableness of this phenomenon stems from the normality of child circulation between multiple households, care providers, and, at times, the street. Such cultural and historical variations in the roles of institutions in the care of children persist in the contemporary context (e.g., Fonseca 1986; Leinaweaver 2007, 2008). For example, following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Haiti in January 2010, the international community misinterpreted children living in orphanages as orphaned by both parents. Several children were misclassified as available for international adoption or as “unaccompanied children,” evacuated to the United States, and placed under the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), despite having intact families who desired to maintain custody of their children.
Yet, not all child migration was forced; for some, migration actually held allure and promise. In seventeenth-century Britain, urban areas were “magnets to young people drawn by dreams of employment, excitement and entertainment” (Coldrey 1999: 32–33). The early eighteenth century brought millions of immigrant families from Europe to the United States in pursuit of change and prosperity, while the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought migration of predominantly Africans and Amerindians. Paula Fass (2005: 940) reminds us that, although families willingly migrated to the United States during this era, “migration had highly varied consequences for children with some becoming successful beneficiaries of the migration, while others became its victims, and that many of the differences were sharply etched along racial lines.” It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that both antislavery movements and organizations against abusive factory conditions for children gained purchase among middle-class Americans, forcing a shift in sensibilities toward childhood. This nineteenth-century sensibility, cloaked in discussions of culture, race, and religion, continue to pervade in child protection interventions, which rely on a particular, privileged ideal of childhood still valued in the West (Fass 2005: 939).
Since World War II, the United States has admitted thousands of children in ad hoc programs or under the auspices of refugee resettlement programs. Such programs range from the 1940 evacuation of British children; Operation Peter Pan, which evacuated over 14,000 Cuban children following Fidel Castro’s 1959 coup (Rumbaut 1994); and Operation Babylift, which evacuated over 2,500 Vietnamese children during the Vietnam War, placing them in American adoption agencies (Ressler, Boothby, and Steinbock 1988: 142). Each of these examples illustrates how orchestrated rescues of children align with strategic government interventions in politically charged contexts of war and political conflict. The state maintains a political investment in the protection of certain children, while others remain ignored or marginalized. Why, for example, was the United States justified in intervening in the lives of British children, while Guatemalan children during genocide did not benefit from formal resettlement programs? Is it acceptable or beneficial to monitor children from other countries only when it is in the geopolitical or economic interests of the state?
Only in the past thirty years have U.S. legislators acknowledged children as migrants to the United States outside established refugee resettlement programs.3 Between the mid-1950s and the 1990s Asian and Latin American migration, both authorized and clandestine, significantly increased to the United States. Among these groups were children migrating without adults whom authorities regarded with suspicion. Challenging assumptions that the natural state of childhood is stable, dependent, and innocent, the figure of the migrant child has become one to be feared and cast as Other. Pejorative labels, such as “parachute children” (children who migrate to a new country to live alone or with a caregiver while their parents remain in their home country), “anchor children” (children of Vietnamese refugees following the Vietnam War), and “anchor babies” (who by virtue of birthright citizenship in the United States become a future means for their families to secure legal status in the United States), evidence the politicization of the migrant child. Such terms not only dehumanize the migrant child but also condemn parents’ reproductive choices as benefit seeking. The per sis tent use of derogatory terms in the media and legislature has only emboldened conservative efforts to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which grants birthright citizenship to individuals born in the United States (Lacey 2011). Immigration policy analyst Angela Maria Kelley analogizes, “But to say that you want to change the Constitution