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 in that nation initially responded to the child as it would respond to any child within the nation, providing shelter in Tommy’s case, and social service support in Alba’s case, without specific concern for that child’s citizenship status.45 It was only through the concerted efforts of Tatianna, a college-educated U.S. citizen, that Alba was retrospectively granted Mexican citizenship, recognized as a victim of trafficking, and then granted U.S. citizenship through her legal adoption. Tommy’s assumed rights as a U.S. citizen child, and as a sick and abandoned child, were not realized, I argue, because there was no one positioned to make claims on his behalf, no one to force the gears of the state apparatus into motion. These cases thus highlight the contingent status of vulnerable child migrants, and their comparative voicelessness in efforts to construct and mobilize an effective narrative of worthiness.
The cases of Alba and Tommy illuminate the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the contingent, tentative narratives through which individuals are placed inside or outside national boundaries. And while narratives of poverty and economic need are decidedly problematic for enabling children to move across borders and enter the U.S. national “family,” in many cases decisions about child custody are based on a child’s increased life chances in a certain setting. These “life chances” or “future opportunities,” the subject of the following chapter, are often framed in terms of a child’s “best interest,” and serve as a gloss for the economic circumstances that differentiate one custody setting, one possible future, from another.
CHAPTER 2
Belonging and Exclusion
Esperanza foster parents Trevor and Josh were reflective about their experiences fostering four children over a period of three years and about the pending adoption of their current foster daughter, a petite Honduran toddler named Emma. They spoke frankly about their concerns and reservations with the fostering system. I had spoken casually numerous times with both of them and more extensively with Trevor, since he took charge during most home visits and functioned, in both their opinions, as the primary parent. But when I sat down to interview Josh formally he surprised me with his direct and open reflections on his experience as a foster father and adoptive father-to-be. Josh and I spoke about the shifts in Emma’s case. Although it had never seemed likely to social workers involved in the case that Emma’s mother and father would regain custody, due to ongoing mental health issues and general conditions of family instability, Emma’s maternal grandmother had expressed interest in gaining custody of Emma, as she already had custody of some of Emma’s older siblings. Because she was elderly, Emma’s grandmother felt she could not care for the children on her own, and wanted to bring a daughter, Emma’s aunt, from Honduras to help care for the children. It was for this reason that Emma’s case had dragged on for some time. However, when Emma’s grandmother could not procure the required visa for Emma’s aunt, the county social worker felt she had waited long enough for a family placement, and focused her attention on finding