Migrant Youth, Transnational Families, and the State. Lauren Heidbrink

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СКАЧАТЬ dependent, and vulnerable. In 2001, the development of special legislation for unaccompanied children marked another historical shift in American law in which, for the first time, immigration law recognized the migrant child as potentially independent of his or her family despite decades of court records replete with such cases. Chapter 3 details the evolving relationship between the state, the family, and immigrant children, examining the relevant laws and judicial cases that have shaped the ways the state enters into or mediates domestic life of unaccompanied children and their families.

      Chapter 4 traces the journey of one youth from his home in Guatemala to an Illinois courtroom and his simultaneous experiences of disempowerment and agency. The chapter details the ways he navigates a complex network of actors and institutions in pursuit of safety and security for himself and for his sister and the ways the law affords him some rights by virtue of his being a child while restricting other rights due to his independent presence in the United States. His narrative reveals how he negotiates the imposition of the law on his everyday life. Perceived as unruly, delinquent, and somehow dangerous to society and the nation-state, he embodies the intersection of the law’s attempts to contain and to reintegrate those existing outside of the law. At the same time, he is not merely a passive recipient of the law; he actively shapes legal discourses on migration in his everyday negotiations of institutional and community networks.

      In Chapter 5, I enter federal detention centers for detained unaccompanied migrant children to examine the complex, everyday negotiations between the federal government, NGOs, and youth. These subcontracted, nongovernmental facilities are a direct response to the incarceration of immigrant children prior to 2003 under the INS, creating a less restrictive environment for children while they await family reunification, foster care, or deportation. I examine the institutional practices of the facility staff in simultaneously caring for and detaining migrant youth and the ways these practices produce migrant children as a category of persons. The facilities embody the competing frameworks of care and law enforcement through the increasing bureaucratization of care and containment amid minimal transparency and oversight. Yet youth resist the facility staff’s socialization programs, which attempt to “rehabilitate” youth into a specific image of a child that reflects socioeconomic and culturally specific American norms. The dynamics of a child’s agency are defined in a context of social interactions that emphasize reciprocity of individuals and structures while recognizing asymmetrical distributions of power between the facility’s staff and detained children. I focus on both the context in which youth interact with other social actors and institutions and the forms these interactions assume. Chapter 5 reflects on perceptions of institutional practices from “below” (Griffiths 2002), questioning how youth make sense of and shape legal and institutional practices.¹⁹

      One of the few benevolent aspects of immigration law is that children may be released from “shelters” into federal foster care, group homes, or with sponsors who may or may not be family members. Chapter 6 turns to institutional policies and procedures that determine the conditions of release and the viability of certain kinship ties. In tandem with the law, institutional policies reformulate kinship ties both in the United States and abroad. I trace the lives of unaccompanied children on their release from immigration detention, examining the ways children reconcile their aspirations in the United States with their roles as children and providers for their transnational kinship networks. Departing from the study of highly visible youth cultures marked by deviance from social norms, Chapter 6 considers everyday life as a theoretical framework that will allow for, as Veena Das and Pamela Reynolds argue, an examination of the ways children enact cultural belonging and express discord “repeatedly and undramatically” (2003: 1). To these ends, this book argues that children are not merely passive recipients of the law and institutional practices but actively shape legal discourses on migration and kinship in their everyday negotiations of institutional and community networks. By failing to recognize the legal personhood and social agency of unaccompanied children, the state undermines the rights of children and compromises their pursuit of justice.

       A Note on Terminology

      Illegal Alien

      While the term “illegal alien” appears throughout the U.S. Code, it is not explicitly defined. However, “alien” is defined as “any person not a citizen or national of the United States.”²⁰ The popular usage of “illegal alien” has become increasingly politicized as someone who willfully trespasses on national sovereignty. Among the migration and human rights networks, “no human is illegal” has become a rallying cry against the derogatory connotations of the term, often associated with criminality or along specific racial lines. In the United States, rhetoric has begun to define the debate on immigration—dehumanizing the “illegal” or the “alien” as one without due process and without rights. Such politicization resulted in the Associated Press changing its stylebook to end its usage of the term “illegal alien.” The Associated Press, followed by the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, now distinguishes that actions are illegal and people are undocumented.

      In legal terms, the boundary between citizen and illegal is porous. Under some conditions, such as Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or certain types of visas, individuals can transform their illegal status to legal, just as individuals with legal status in the United States can lose that status through committing certain crimes. Unaccompanied children can lose their eligibility for the Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) status simply by turning eighteen.²¹ Kitty Calavita (1998: 531) adds that not only does the law create illegality, but, in the case of Spanish immigration law, actively “regularizes and ‘irregularizes’ people, by making it all but impossible to retain legal status over time … the boundaries between legal and illegal populations are porous and in constant flux, as people routinely move in and out of legal status.” As such, illegal alienage is not a preconditioned set of rules and regulations but is culturally informed, derived, and constructed. For these reasons, I enlist the term “unauthorized migrant,” which is a more neutral term that recognizes both the integrity of individual migrants and the fluctuation of their legal status in the United States.

      Unaccompanied Alien Children

      The U.S. legal code defines “unaccompanied alien children” (UAC) as those under age eighteen who have no lawful immigration status in the United States and are without a parent or legal guardian in the United States who is available to provide care and physical custody (6 U.S.C. §279(g)(2)).

      The juridical category of the unaccompanied child and those who assign it to specific children are particularly problematic. With the 2003 transition of the care and custody of unaccompanied children from the INS to the ORR came several points of conflict, which my research details. One such tension derives from the determination and classification of a child as accompanied or unaccompanied at the point of apprehension. ICE (formerly INS) maintains exclusive power to determine if a parent or legal guardian accompanies a child or if the child is alone in the United States; yet, this practice is teeming with contradictions. Advocates have accused ICE of misclassifying children, determining them as accompanied in order to deport them quickly with family members or to prolong detention of those suspected of criminal activities. In other instances, advocates claim that ICE misclassifies children as unaccompanied to avoid the expense of family detention (shifting the expense for children from ICE to ORR) and unnecessarily separating a child from his or her family. For example, ICE may detain or deport a biological parent traveling with his or her children, leaving a child unaccompanied and in the care of ORR when, at the point of apprehension, the child was accompanied. During the period of my research in ORR facilities, there were two cases in which ICE classified children as unaccompanied in what appeared to be an effort to bait their СКАЧАТЬ