Children's Legal Subjectivity
Migrating children present immigration authorities with specific legal challenges that have not been taken into account in geographical research on detention or immigration geopolitics.
Children’s transboundary migration is rarely interrogated in geographical analyses of children’s legal subjectivity and political agency. Recent work on children’s political participation has, however, contemplated the methodological difficulties associated with children’s political agency and argued for a fuller conceptualization of the ways in which children actively make spaces (Aitken 2001; Katz 2004). In immigration law, children’s immigration claims are solely derivative of parents’ claims (Thronson 2007-2008), and for Bhabha (2003), this displacement of children’s “best interests” produces a “citizenship deficit” through which children are rendered de facto stateless subjects.Yet children’s rights and feminist scholars have cautioned against fetishizing existing legal regimes as sources of children’s empowerment, enfranchisement, or political participation. For example, the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) contains an expansive set of entitlements for children, but the realization of children’s political agency has been limited (Stasiulis 2002). Ruddick (2007a, p. 514) argues, further, that the child-subject defined by “best interest” principles is “an impossible subject since, by liberal definition, the child cannot speak for him or herself without adult authorization.” Intriguingly, some citizen children have been vocal spokespersons for their undocumented parents, a form of political theater that dramatizes the parents’ displacement from what is implicitly their proper role as family representatives (Pallares 2009). While child-subjects are always already in a relation of dependence with a series of caregivers (Ruddick 2007a, b), the political agency of children is not materially confined to the childobject of immigration law or the partial subject of domestic family law.
As Katz (2004) argues, analyzing children’s paradoxical legal subjectivity reveals geopolitical processes difficult to see at other scales, allowing us to ask: at the margins of the nation-state, where liberal law is suspended for noncitizens, how do we understand the relationship between children and their caregivers when immigration law considers parents aliens, not persons? How do we understand the position of the precarious child- subject in the context of an immigration regime that suspends constitutional rights for adults? How do we understand children’s legal subjectivity where their immediate caregivers are not full liberal subjects either? Previous legal settlements created contractual relationships between “minors in immigration custody” and immigration officials, while adults’ alien status foreclosed their own federal court protections. Bunikyte reveals not only how US geopolitical agendas mobilize immigration law to create wide spaces of administrative discretion over noncitizens’ bodies but that specific constructions of childhood and adulthood undergird immigration law and enforcement policy. In the context of immigration geopolitics, these categorical differences are directly related to the spatialities of immigration enforcement: policing and arrests, detention center conditions and location, deportation decisions, and the embodied process of physical removal from the United States.
3