Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State. Lauren Heidbrink
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child. In contrast, ICE and my university’s research review board for this research were principally concerned with the illegality of unaccompanied children as “an indicator of their greater disposition toward criminal activity” and the special measures I would take to report threats of potential criminal activity, as well as my ethical responsibility to report crimes committed. These concerns stem from public discourses on unauthorized migration, which conflate “illegality” with criminality and are bolstered by a shift in federal policies toward the criminalization of unauthorized migrants. Particularly in the backlash following 2006 efforts for comprehensive immigration reform, the politicization of unauthorized immigration brought real traction to the board’s concerns, though most advocates and facility staff working with children strongly disagreed with this perception. The two-year process of permission seeking highlights the often conflicting and always tense relationship between the state, law enforcement, nongovernmental subcontractors, family members, and the often excluded migrant children themselves in decisions about the best interests and legal rights of unaccompanied children.
These very disparate concerns—on the one hand, the criminal potential; on the other, the victim—gestures toward the potential malleability of the image of the unaccompanied child—at once a child and an “alien” in a highly politicized context of racism and xenophobia in the United States. I take seriously the concern of one administrator who warned early on, “Be careful what you find and what you write. They will use it against the very child that we seek to protect.” The malleability of the image of the migrant child—the victim, the delinquent, the “illegal,” the gangbanger, the terrorist—makes me acutely aware of the ethical responsibility I assume in writing about the experiences of migrant children. I have seen firsthand how information about specific children becomes distorted to serve a particular organization or agency’s political or institutional agenda. The impact on the child and his or her family is devastating. For this reason, I have been highly selective in the narratives of individual children I write about in these pages. I have maintained the integrity of the narratives of youth, using their words whenever possible, and of the ways they understand and navigate their everyday lives.13 The narratives balance the unique and diverse experiences of youth migrants with the themes and trends identified during an initial survey of participants in the study.
While in the past decade, the migration of unaccompanied children as a social phenomenon has become increasingly visible, what remains obscured are the perspectives of children on the growing layers of bureaucracy developed to protect or to prosecute them. My ethnographic research attempts to carve out a space in which children’s voices might enter the discussion in a way that accurately reflects their understandings of the law, institutional interventions, and their own best interests while taking precautions to guard against the manipulation of their experiences.
Exposing the Snapshot: Social Agency
Migration studies is not a discipline with a set of well-defined methodological procedures but a topic of great interest to scholars of sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, history, and law (Brettell 2003). As such, myriad approaches to children and migration have merged under the rubric of “migration studies.” Most avoid the complexities of migration as a dynamic process, in which people circulate through time and space with great flexibility and uncertainty (Ong 1999: 10), instead locating the child in social and legal categories of the family, by which they infer the conditions of children from those of the household. Interestingly, the family in migration studies is defined by the presence of dependent children, yet few studies take children as serious contributors to household decision-making processes.
Woven throughout migration literature and immigration law is the presumption that adults are the decision makers and providers for children. The social position of the child as inferior or somehow exclusively dependent stands in marked contrast to the integral roles children often assume in familial decision-making processes as well as the decisions they make as individual social actors. From my research with child migrants and their families, it is clear that the decision to migrate is often a collective one. Children contribute to the discussion on whether to migrate, the destination, and the timing of migration. Children may spark adult migration through a change in the number of household members due to birth, death, adoption, fostering, the departure of older children, or a change in the needs of household members, such as education or illness (McKendrick 2001: 464; Young 2004: 471). Children may be the reason for postponing migration, waiting until they are older, or they may catalyze migration, given a desire for improved living conditions or education (Boyle, Halfacree, and Robinson 1998: 119; Rossi 1980: 178; Tyrrell 2011). At times, adults pursue additional opportunities or resources for their children, such as access to education, health care, or future employment opportunities (South and Crowder 1997). Children may shape migration decisions in terms of the completion of their school year and program of study or in the violence or instability they experience in their everyday lives (e.g., pressure to join a gang). In spite of this rich variation, discussions of household migration largely subsume child migration, in which children are just one of a myriad of factors shaping family migration decisions. Even as they may provide a family with central motives for migration, they remain liminal figures in most interpretations of migration practices.
In this ethnography, I argue that an analysis of the social agency of children and youth is critical to uncovering the shortcomings and dangers of current conceptualizations of child migration. “Social agency,” a term used by social scientists, refers to the actions and choices that individuals (and non-humans in some cases) often make of their own free will. Shaped by upbringing, cultural beliefs and norms, and social status, among other factors, social agency may be conscious, intentional actions or unconscious, involuntary behaviors. I depart from historical, moral framings of agency as exclusively individualized and self-determined by attending to the ways agency may assume historical and collective dimensions. Even in the contexts of extreme isolation—detention and deportability—conversations with youth and their families repeatedly revealed that youth make small and large choices as actors embedded in kinship networks and informed by their cultural context.
Early in my research, I was struck by the ways policymakers, government bureaucrats, detention facility staff, and legal advocates each conceptualized social agency in their descriptions of the conditions spurring, context of, and reasons for migration and how these narratives did not reconcile with my interactions with migrants in the United States and Central America with whom I had worked since the late 1990s. Amid emerging anxieties about childhood and migration, powerful discourses in the media and legal and advocacy spheres have emerged—discourses that either embrace dependency and victimhood (read as a lack of agency) as defining features of child migrants or fold child migrants into the pervasive criminalization of immigrants (read as transgressive agency). On the one hand, civil society has staked a claim in the research of child migration in order to respond to a perceived increase in occurrences of children made vulnerable by their exposure to the “street” (Becerra and Chi 1992; Nann 1982). The pervasive belief among civil society is that the sheer presence of an unaccompanied child marks his or her acute risk of abuse, trafficking, harsh labor arrangements, and sexual exploitation. Discourses of trauma and exploitation frame children as inherently vulnerable, and thus reliant on the interventions of well-meaning (adult) professionals to guide their psychic and physical development into adulthood and to ensure their long-term legal permanency in the United States.
Legal advocates and scholars have also taken interest in child migration, questioning how the law contends with the “illegal” and “unaccompanied” presence of migrant children, as in the notable case of Elian Gonzalez. In particular, attorneys must navigate convoluted and ethically murky terrain that routinely places them in positions of power over children and their narratives. They must balance their professional commitment to zealously advocate on behalf of the child with recognition that the complex experiences of migrant children do not easily fit into the few forms of immigration legal relief available to them. A seasoned immigration attorney characterized the predicament as “having no reliable signage. If I move to the right, I risk having [my client] returned to a place he has left at risk to his life. If I move to the left, I risk exaggerating a truth that I know to be incomplete at best. So, I forge straight ahead but wonder if I’m helping to build more dead ends for these kids by not putting the full story