cannot be said to target a specific individual, including, for example, the generalized violence that accompanies gang activity and drug trafficking. This specificity of victimhood is necessary to make an individual migrant legible as deserving of citizenship. It is on these grounds that legislators lobbied for the return of these minor migrants, without concern for the specifics of their individual circumstances. As I discuss below, the particularities of each child’s experience and specific needs become subsumed into state-based categories; Mexican or Honduran affiliation determines a child’s reception at the border, rather than do the specifics of their potential claims to immigration relief.5 It is the translation of an individual’s story into broad categories of “worthy victim” or “economic migrant” within a legal state framework that drives the extension or denial of citizenship on humanitarian grounds.
In my analysis, I focus on what I call “narratives of worthiness,” the stories told about Latina/o children on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border that have the potential to position them as eligible for legal protection and U.S. citizenship. These narratives bring together conceptions of humanitarianism, tropes of children as innocent victims, and racialized visions of immigrants and their sending countries. These narratives contain elements of what Natalia Molina (2014) refers to as “racial scripts,” the stories we tell to situate various racialized groups across time and space. Such scripts work to situate racialized groups in relation to others, in ways that shape their experiences, rights, and access to resources and to citizenship status. These scripts are imbued with a force that helps to locate particular subjects in a broader racialized milieu. The stories told about child migrants both draw on and depart from racial scripts as they situate children within the economic and political landscape that shapes the contours of citizenship and protection. Children, as I explore below, are caught up in particular narratives while also uniquely positioned, in some cases, to transcend them through the work of an effective advocate. In the stories that follow, I attend not just to the narratives themselves but also to the actors who put these stories to work for child migrants.
In exploring the ways these narratives are mobilized, I examine the cases of two children, Alba and Tommy, both of whom were born into precarious family circumstances in Tijuana. Using a detailed examination of their cases as a starting point, I consider what sorts of children, under what sorts of circumstances, are positioned as deserving of U.S. citizenship or safe harbor. This approach, I suggest, enables us to glimpse one of the processes through which the boundaries of citizenship are produced via determinations about child citizenship and child custody. Finally, I consider how social axes such as race and nationality both inform and are produced through these determinations.
The cases of Alba and Tommy include circumstances that appear to be sensational or extreme. Both children, at first glance, seem to have strong grounds for protection due to the particular conditions into which they were born. These circumstances, I argue, highlight the centrality of narratives to the outcomes of their cases, a feature particularly foregrounded in these examples, but that was a crucial element of every case I observed throughout my research.6 Before examining the cases of Alba and Tommy, I begin with a discussion of migration and the politics of worthiness.
Child Migrants
The image of a child in need of rescue exerts a powerful pull. Images of abandoned, dirty, hungry, and needy children animate human rights campaigns, war efforts, philanthropic organizations, and trends in international adoption, shifting, to some degree, the anti-immigrant discourse that surrounds the plight of adult migrants. Yet children occupy a complex position in relation to U.S. immigration law. With the exception of international adoptees, child migrants have not generally been treated distinctly from adult migrants—they have been similarly subject to detention and deportation, and, until a class action law suit in 1996, were held in detention conditions along with adults and those with criminal convictions.7 Children who are categorized as “economic” migrants are routinely detained and deported without any special rights to representation or counsel to support their ability to apply for immigration relief.8
It is not the circumstances of a child’s migration experience alone that make that child legible within a framework of humanitarian rescue. Rather, this framework is constructed through a complex process of translation, a narrativization co-produced among immigrants, lawyers, and advocates (McKinley 1997; Cabot 2014). It is also shaped in profound ways by the circumstances of the children’s arrival, and the agencies—immigration authorities, homeless shelters, or social service providers—with which they come into contact. Through the work of an effective advocate, international adoptees, child refugees, and children labeled as victims of trafficking appeal to universalist notions of suffering and of the innocence and desirability of children in a manner that circumvents the economic and racialized discourses that so often guide immigration policy and practices.9 These children who are categorized as worthy of “rescue” include both international adoptees and some child migrants and refugees who are positioned as victims. The question of what sorts of children, from what nation-states, in what sorts of circumstances, shifts year-to-year and case-to-case in response to political events, legal climate, and global pressures. These actions occur even in the context of increasingly polarized contemporary debates about the worthiness of child migrants. However, as Orellana and Johnson note in relation to the political discourse surrounding the DREAM act, “there is evidence of a shift away from a view of all children as deserving of protection and care and toward one in which children must prove that they are deserving, either by birthright or by merit” (2011:20).10 Geopolitical relations, national political climate, and narratives of worthiness position only particular children as subject to a story that supersedes the anti-immigrant sentiment directed at those perceived to be “economic” or “voluntary” migrants.
Care, Worthiness, and the Immigrant as “Victim”
In the case of child welfare services in both the United States and Mexico, protection is extended to children regardless of their citizenship status. That is, each state takes responsibility for child “victims” within its borders, regardless of their citizenship status or country of origin. However, as the case of the Central American minors recounted above demonstrates, children who are caught up in the immigration system, rather than child welfare services, and get framed as “economic” migrants, are often not extended protection.
These policies for child “victims” are driven by a universalist notion of human suffering and the unique vulnerability of children that supersedes the details of each particular case.11 This was made evident in Alba’s case, where her framing as a trafficked child through her initial “sale” to Esther was more important to her legal case for citizenship than any details about her actual treatment while in Esther’s care. This vision of humanitarian intervention necessitates a moral obligation on the part of the receiving country. Here, humanitarian intervention draws on a notion of human suffering that separates those who are legitimate victims from those who suffer economic hardship.
Children are not exempt from this maneuvering.12 Yet the distinction between economic migrants and “rights-worthy” migrants, and the disentangling of economic factors from those circumstances recognized as legitimate forms of persecution, is an increasingly impossible endeavor.13 Of course infants and very young children, like Alba and Tommy, cannot be easily framed as economic laborers, but the presence of young, unauthorized migrant children in the United States is often explained through the economic needs of their parents in a way that narrates young children as present in the United States primarily due to economic need. These sorts of narratives evade the story of a rights-worthy child by focusing on the narrative of the undeserving economic migrant that surrounds the parents’ migration. Children as young as eight years old are effectively framed as “economic” migrants and summarily deported to their countries of origin. The cases of Alba and Tommy, and other children in similar circumstances, suggest that the mobilization of a narrative of worthiness may hinge on the action of a U.S. citizen adult positioned to compel the state in a way that a non-U.S. citizen, or a U.S. citizen
