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
