Introduction: Immigrant Latina/o Youth and Illegality: Challenging the Politics of Deservingness

On September 23, 2015, 5-year-old Sophie Cruz made headlines when she crossed security lines to run to Pope Francis during his visit to Washington, D.C. Despite heavy security, Sophie successfully delivered her message—an appeal for his support for the implementation of Deferred Action for Parents of US Citizen and Legal Permanent Resident Children (DAPA). Sophie’s undocumented parents stand to benefit from the legislative action announced by President Obama in November 2014, but at the time of this writing, anti-immigrant forces in Congress have mounted legal challenges to indefinitely stall the implementation of the program. As this political spectacle plays out at the federal, state, and local levels, draconian immigration policies continue to tear families apart, create a climate of fear, and criminalize the immigrants whose labor contributes crucially to keeping this nation afloat. In this context, children like Sophie have fought for—and at times won—the opportunity to make their case in the court of public opinion for greater inclusion. Not all children, however, are represented in the media with sympathy, nor are their messages received so enthusiastically by those in power. The notions of innocence and inherent value that are commonly associated with white children in U.S. society have often been denied to immigrant Latinos and other children of color. In this special issue, we bring together a set of papers that examines the particularities of how Latino immigrant children and youth are both included and excluded from rights and protections in this country, particularly on questions of “illegality.” The authors in this issue critically explore the boundaries that are constantly being drawn and redrawn to include and exclude children of immigrants and immigrant young people, for whom age alone does not guarantee basic rights. Within the dialogue across regions, disciplines, and age groups that the papers represent, we center the notion of deservingness. Deservingness, as we apply it here, refers to a method of discipline that is based in a politics of respectability. Deservingness sets the rubric against which society determines the worthiness of immigrants to access basic human rights; it is a process with roots in decades past, part of an ongoing effort to further re-entrench borders both literal and figurative. In the summer of 2014, tens of thousands of children and families made headlines as they crossed into the U.S. through the southern border fleeing multiple forms of violence. The sorting of bodies takes place at various points throughout the process, in countries of origin and as U.S. trade and foreign policies stratify migrants’ designations of worthiness by nationality, class, race, gender, and sexuality. In this special issue, our focus is on designations of worthiness that begin at the border but stretch beyond this entry point; where Mexican youth are summarily deported without the possibility of any official review of their claims; where unaccompanied Central American children and youth are detained and then allowed to remain with sponsors around the country only while they await court hearings that will likely lead to deportation orders; and where adult women travelling with their children are transferred to now-infamous for-profit immigrant family prisons. Although such movement across borders is not new, the summer of 2014 was the first time in recent memory that mainstream media exposed large numbers of the U.S. public to images of refugee children in this country packed into bare rooms, sleeping on the floor, in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in makeshift detention centers. A collective, if short-lived, outrage at the treatment of these Central American children was simultaneously accompanied by angry nativist protests that blocked buses of children and their families from entering towns, inspiring counter-demonstrations by people who argued for their basic human rights as refugee children. Anti-refugee protestors spoke of the children as dangerous, germ-carrying invaders, while supporters invoked