State Ambivalence and the Production of Family Separation and Reunification
In her expansive study of child migration and human rights, Jacqueline Bhabha notes that “it is surprising, even shocking, to learn that state policies, rather than dysfunctional or incompatible individuals, are major sources of family separation” (2014, p.
23). The state policies that structure this disruption of family life are specific to particular places. For instance, Hernandez (2015) notes with respect to the heightened media and political attention given to the “crisis“ of or “surge” in unaccompanied child migrants to the United States from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in spring and summer of 2014, that these increases have been underway since at least 2009. Rather than an exceptional crisis or surge, the patterns are better understood in his view within long-term US geopolitical-economic interventions in Central America, including US support of the military coup in Honduras in 2009, neoliberal economic arrangements and free trade efforts (including NAFTA), and anti-crime and anti-drug initiatives endorsed and facilitated by the US government. Likewise, the enthusiasm of the Philippine government for exporting temporary labor as a means of securing foreign currency through remittances can only be understood in the context of the debilitating effects on the economy of a history of colonialisms and neoliberal structural adjustment policies, the latter dating from the 1970s (Guevarra 2010; Rodriguez 2010). Within the specificity of these regional histories, however, two global policy trends have exacerbated the tendency towards increased family separation and child migration: a generalized enthusiasm for temporary labor migration, encapsulated in the 2005 International Commission on Global Migration report characterization of circular labor migration as a win-win situation for sending and receiving countries, and the securitization and militarization of national borders since September 11,2001. Ifthe former has increased family separation because temporary work visas allow only individual family members to travel abroad to work as temporary foreign workers, it is arguable that the latter has simultaneously exacerbated family separation and pushed many families towards reunification and undocumented status in the global north.Bhabha is able to find the effects of these two policy trends “surprising” because they run counter to other policies and values in the liberal democratic societies that deploy them. The European Court of Human Rights determined in 2008, for instance, that 2 years of separation between mother and child violates the state’s obligation to protect the best interests of the child (and thus is at odds with the commitments made by signatories to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child - of which, it should be noted, the United States is not one). The International Commission of Jurists confirmed this assessment, noting that “a waiting period of three years is capable of rendering almost void the right to respect for family life, particularly in cases involving children” (cited in Bhabha (2014), p. 23).
But as Bhabha and others note, liberal democratic states can be profoundly ambivalent in the face of competing priorities, and temporary foreign workers and children are key sites of ambivalence about citizenship entitlements and human rights. Linda Bosniak (2006), for instance, has written extensively about the contradictions between two distinctive meanings of citizenship. One meaning is tied up with the boundary or threshold question of who is rightly included or excluded from membership within a particular liberal democratic community. This is distinct from the meaning of citizenship within that community, as a bundle of entitlements and responsibilities. The two notions of citizenship exist within different regulatory and normative frameworks, one exclusionary, the other inclusive (i.e., all members are supposed to have equal entitlements and responsibilities).
As Bosniak has put it, liberal citizenship is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. The two meanings of citizenship are usually kept separate: one regulates the border, and the other operates within the territory. But because temporary foreign workers patently do not share the same entitlements as citizens within the territory (for instance, capacity to vote, access social welfare provisions, the protections of employment standards, rights to mobility, etc.) in Bosniak’s view they “most directly and graphically” reveal the contradictions between the two notions of citizenship (2006, p. 124).The balance between inclusion and exclusion is mediated by competing geopolitical and economic priorities and principles. The expansion of temporary foreign worker programs has been in line with neoliberal policies that strip back social welfare entitlements and place responsibility on individual subjects to invest in themselves and take the necessary risks to optimize their potential. Anna Guevarra (2010), for instance, examines the proliferation of governmental techniques deployed by the Philippine state to produce overseas migrant workers as responsible, entrepreneurial subjects who take the initiative of seeking “greener pastures” elsewhere. So-called receiving countries in the global north are simultaneously able to shed the costs of social reproduction: for instance, the costs of educating these workers, as well as medical, childcare, and other expenses of family life. Likewise, the receiving country need not feel the obligation to protect the family life of the migrant worker if the assumption can be made that this is the responsibility of the state to which the migrant worker belongs.
What it means to be a child citizen, Bhabha (2014) argues, is another key site of ambivalence. One perspective assumes that children are included within the universal rights and obligations entailed by membership within a community. The other, which Bhahba identifies as the republican model dating back to Aristotle and Rousseau, assumes that children are unable to participate actively or fully in public deliberation and thus are not yet citizens. They are citizens in training. Both of these approaches inform law and public policy: the former is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, while the latter tends to inform domestic family and social welfare practice. The ambivalent framework, in Bhabha’s view, has “many unambiguous consequences” for children and youths, such that “no other group of citizens in the developed world today has such legally sanctioned partial access to the benefits of membership” (2014, p. 65).
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