"Illegal Limbo": Childhood and Immigration Status

Interesting short piece on the ASA (American Sociological Association) blog "Contexts" about the life-course of the children of non-status ("illegal") immigrants in the US.

In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that children of undocumented immigrants have the right to a free public school education alongside native-born children. But when these undocumented kids leave high school, they transition from protected child to illegal immigrant. That is, the laws support the undocumented child, but not the undocumented adult they’ll eventually become. Roberto G. Gonzales (American Sociological Review, August 2011) explores how these youth experience their status transformation through interviews with 150 “1.5-generation” Latinos in California.

 A man and his son wave the flag of El Salvador at an immigration rally in New York City.

Adolescents, Gonzales writes, first recognize their illegal status in their late teens, when their lack of a Social Security number prohibits such rites of passage as getting a part-time job or a driver’s license. Assimilation alongside their native-born peers led these kids to believe they would have more opportunities than their parents, but undocumented youth get a harsh reality check at graduation: no papers means no future. The young adults must “learn to be illegal,” which includes re-evaluating their future goals. And parents—who often believed that their children would have citizenship by the time they reached adulthood—don’t prepare them for this transition.

Despite speaking fluent English and earning high school (and sometimes college) degrees, undocumented young adults end up no better off in the labor market than their uneducated parents. Gonzales argues that the system has created a “new disenfranchised underclass”—2.1 million young adults who are stuck in what might be called “illegal limbo.”  Link

It's an interesting and little-discussed side of the "illegal immigration" debate in the US.  It also highlights  the arbitrariness of much of the discourse about "saving the children", and of children's right to fair treatment and equal opportunity, a set of entitlements that have a clear and definite expiry date (your 18th birthday). You see this false distinction again when it comes to popular discussions of children and gangs, imprisonment, poverty, etc.  After that point, the discourse shifts from "victim" to "perpetrator", from "innocent" to "guilty" as arbitrarily and suddenly as we go from child to adult. Am I right?

All this has interesting (and expansive) cultural roots in the West - dating back as far as I know, to the Victorian Era, before which childhood was not necessarily associated with innocence.  Okay, this is from Wikipedia, I know, but it's kindof "common knowledge" among sociologists, so trust me ;)

The man usually credited with - or accused of - creating the modern notion of childhood is Jean Jacques Rousseau. Building on the ideas of John Lockeand other 17th-century liberal thinkers, Rousseau formulated childhood as a brief period of sanctuary before people encounter the perils and hardships of adulthood. "Why rob these innocents of the joys which pass so quickly," Rousseau pleaded. "Why fill with bitterness the fleeting early days of childhood, days which will no more return for them than for you?"

The Victorian Era has been described as a source of the modern institution of childhood. Ironically, the Industrial Revolution during this era led to an increase in child labour, but due to the campaigning of the Evangelicals, and efforts of author Charles Dickens and others, child labour was gradually reduced and halted in England via the Factory Acts of 1802-1878. The Victorians concomitantly emphasized the role of the family and the sanctity of the child, and broadly speaking, this attitude has remained dominant in Western societies since then. Link

It's all very ironic, of course, given how prevalent and brutal child labour practices were, but also highlights the bourgeois origins of the discourse.

But why 18, you may wonder? Why is that most often the magic number? I just downloaded a bunch of papers, mostly from legal history journals, which I am too tired to read tonight. But I'm making a mental note for a future post entitled perhaps "Why 18?" or, alternatively, "Boy you 18 now, you grown,  and you need to get yo'self a J. O. B.".  Probably the former, though.