to her ability to advance these claims.
Alba’s status as a child in need of state protection, coupled with her position as a Mexican citizen abandoned in the United States, made her eligible for further protection through immigration relief. Because of the uniqueness of Alba’s history, she in fact had several possible paths by which she could qualify for U.S. citizenship. Because she had allegedly been sold to Esther and then brought into the United States, she was potentially eligible under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (TVPRA) as a victim of human trafficking. This act, established in 2000 and reauthorized in 2008, was intended to decrease the number of individuals being returned to their home country without assessment of whether they had been victims of trafficking or had legitimate claims to asylum.29 With respect to children, it provided for the transfer of minors from Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) custody to the Office of Refugee Resettlment (ORR) within 72 hours and specified procedures for assessing claims for protection. However, a narrow definition of trafficking and uneven application of interview and assessment protocols have limited the reach of this provision.30
A second available pathway was Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), a provision created in 1990 and expanded to its present form in 2008. Referred to as the “J-visa,” it provided the most readily available path to citizenship for children who were dependents of the state or victims of abuse, provided they were unable to reunify with at least one of their parents and that it was deemed in their “best interest” to remain in the United States. Though SIJS is notable for centering the “best interest” of the child and the right to protection from abuse, this provision is not without its limitations.31 SIJS is complicated by the fact that it relies on coordination between state and federal courts—state courts make the initial dependency ruling before federal immigration courts approve or deny the SIJS application. There is confusion among child welfare authorities and legal actors in terms of the initiation and coordination of the SIJS application, which has drastically reduced the number of children benefiting from this unique form of relief.32 Alba could qualify for this status due to her “abandonment,” her presence in state custody, and her likely history of neglect due to parental drug use. Or she could simply immigrate, though, of course, she was already present in the country, as the adoptee of U.S. citizen parents. Tatianna and her husband, in consultation with Alba’s CASA and attorney, chose citizenship through adoption for Alba because it was the simplest and quickest route, primarily because an adopted child experiences the shortest wait time to U.S. citizenship.
Adoption Narratives
Adoption of non-U.S. citizen children such as Alba privileges the citizenship status of the adopting parents while erasing the former citizenship of the adopted child (Yngvesson and Coutin 2006). These children are reframed, through such processes as reissuing of a new legal birth certificate, as nonimmigrants.33 Yet this reframing elides the similarities in the trajectories and lived experiences of children who move from one country to another as the children of labor migrants or as the international adoptees of citizen parents.34 Though these two categories of child migrants may have similar questions about their national belonging, their official reception and the ideologies that surround their presence could not diverge more drastically. The children of labor migrants are all too frequently categorized as dangerous, unruly threats, while adopted migrants are held up as redemptive and celebratory instances of multicultural inclusion. Yet the absorption of these international adoptees requires an explicit framing of them as “not-migrants.” The divergent discourses that surround adoptees as opposed to other migrants separate international adoption from labor migration. This delineation enables a narrative of humanitarian rescue to surround international adoption even in the context of blatant xenophobia and racism in relation to an immigrant labor community from the same sending nation.35 In this way, adoption circumvents the narratives that can be mobilized to frame even young children as “economic,” and thus “unworthy,” migrants.
The migration pathway of international adoption is not primarily based on the worthiness of the child’s own claim to citizenship status. Rather, inherent in these adoptive practices is the valuation of children as coveted items, who should not be held accountable for the circumstances that they were born into, and whose merit is based on their youthfulness and value to U.S. citizen parents.36 As such, the state authorizes international adoptees to enjoy full citizenship rights in a manner not readily available to children who migrate through other avenues. The economic conditions that may frame the context in which children become “adoptable” do not, in this case, erode their worthiness or impact their reception in the United States, perhaps largely because any future economic needs they may have are expected to be a burden on their adoptive family, not on the state. An explicit distinction between “adoptees” and “migrants” justifies the presence of one group while excluding the other.
Although the details of Alba’s case would have supported a strong argument for framing her as a victim of trafficking, it was primarily through Tatianna’s advocacy and her availability as a willing adoptive home that the case was set into motion. Alba’s “rescue” and path to citizenship was not put into motion by outrage at her tale as a trafficked child. As noted above, it was quite unusual for a child from Mexico to be framed as anything other than an “economic” migrant. Only recently have such pathways as the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act and the Violence Against Women Act been successfully claimed by Mexican citizens, who tend to be framed as “economic” migrants regardless of the specific circumstances of a given case. As such, these migration categories are shaped more forcefully by political trends and perceptions about which nations produce “legitimate” asylum-seekers and refugees than by the specific details of an individual’s experience. Alba’s framing as an adoptee positioned her as an object of value to her adoptive parents, and circumvented broader questions about the “worthiness” of her specific case.
Tommy’s Story
When I told Alba’s story to social workers in both Tijuana and San Diego, it often elicited tales of the dysfunction of the child welfare system, which focused on how the system’s task was so extensive and sprawling that children would invariably “fall through the cracks.” Yet underlying these reactions was a common perception, held by bureaucrats and lay people I spoke with on both sides of the border, that the Mexican state was less competent than the U.S. state—Mexico was, for example, the nation without documentation of Alba’s existence, a nation where selling a child could seemingly happen without consequence. Both U.S. and Mexican nationals described the Mexican government as an inadequate bureaucracy. However, Tatianna’s shock at the Mexican state’s lack of interest in returning Alba to Mexico was echoed by the U.S. government’s lack of efforts to repatriate U.S. citizen children in Mexico. Tijuana orphanage directors and staff introduced me to U.S. citizen children in their care and told stories of repeated calls to U.S. consulate workers who were responsible for collecting U.S. citizen children abandoned across the border. Those consulate workers never returned calls or appeared to claim these children. Thus, if Mexico was seen as disorganized and disempowered to make claims on their citizens’ behalf, the United States was framed as capable but uncaring, empowered to ignore Mexican officials and its own citizens residing outside national borders.
I met Tommy during my weekly visits to a Tijuana orphanage, where I helped the staff through their busy days by soothing crying babies, reading books, and chasing toddlers around the small concrete patio where they played on sunny days. The orphanage was in the southern part of the city, at the top of a pothole-marked dirt road. The facility was almost entirely staffed by local Tijuana residents with the exception of the official director, who was a member of the U.S. church that funded the orphanage project. The buildings housed children from infancy to ages twelve to fourteen, and efforts were being made to create separate housing units that would allow older children to remain on site.37 The infant room, where I spent most of my time during weekly visits, consisted of a playroom, a large kitchen, and an open room lined with twelve cribs and a single rocking chair. Children remained in the infant room under the watchful care of
