The Politics of Deservingness

Culturalizing Exclusion and New Restrictions in the Netherlands

Over the past two decades, the Netherlands’ reputation has shifted from a country open to migrants and cultural diversity to an exemplary case of the “backlash” against multiculturalism and immigrant rights (Uitermark, 2012; Vertovec & Wessendorf, 2010). The trend has been marked by the growing prominence of a “culturalist” discourse in the public debate. This discourse maintains that immigrants from “non-Western countries” possess cultural attributes that impede their cultural, social, and economic integration into the country, and with the resulting “foreign communities” (especially Muslims) threatening the cohesion of the Dutch nation (Schinkel & van Houdt, 2010). It follows that the threat to national cohesion requires restrictions to be placed on immigrants deemed “too different” in terms of their culture and religion. “Culturalist” discourse emerged in the 1980s, but became prominent in the 2000s with the growing popularity of neoliberal and hard right politicians like Pim Fortuyn, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rita Verdonk (“iron Rita”), and Geert Wilders (Uitermark, 2012). While these politicians used similar discourses to frame problems and solutions, their central arguments were relayed through the interventions of sympathetic intellectuals and media personalities (Uitermark, 2012).

A second discourse emerged during this time that called into question the authenticity and veracity of claims made on the basis of family and asylum rights (Versteegt & Maussen, 2012). National politicians and opinion makers argued for a sharp distinction between “genuine” and “fake” asylum seekers, and “fake” and “real” cross-national marriages. This discourse contributed to creating a context in which immigrants’ rights claims made on the basis of marriage and asylum became suspicious, thereby tainting and devaluing rights claims in the eyes of the Dutch government and public. Immigrants and their advocates now operated in a discursive arena in which rights claims were viewed as likely “fakes.”

As immigrants became framed as cultural threats and likely cheats, Dutch governments introduced policies to restrict immigration, scrutinize the veracity of rights claims, and compel cultural assimilation among “non-Western” immigrants. Although the trend over the past two decades has been toward more restriction, the timing, modalities, and motives for policy changes have differed. As early as the mid-1970s, attempts were made to regulate and minimize labor migration. However, family reunification and family formation gained prominence as entries for immigration, both for postcolonial immigration from Indonesia and Surinam, and when many Turkish and Moroccan “guest workers” brought their spouses and children (Bonjour, 2009). Family reunification and formation continues to be a major part of the total number of immigrants per year today (see Ministry of Security and Justice, 2014). Still the overall orientation of policies with regard to family migration has been increasingly restrictive, including measures to detect “fake marriages,” raising the minimum age for foreign spouses, income requirements for partners in the Netherlands, and introduction of language requirements prior to granting spousal residency visas. These measures have allowed the Netherlands to reduce the number of people eligible for the “right” to family reunification while allowing the country to fulfill legal and international obligations.

Facing a rise in the number of asylum requests in the early 1990s, national institutions were set up to coordinate asylum reception centrally. In 1996, the Central Agency for the Reception of Asylum Seekers and the Immigration and Naturalization Service were both founded. The New Aliens Act (Vreemdelingenwet) of 2000 shortened procedures, ended governmental support and shelter for many refused asylum seekers, and introduced preventive detention. Stricter procedural criteria were also introduced to detect “fake” cases. New rules, procedures, and institutions and a rhetoric of “toughness” did not solve all issues: asylum procedures tended to drag on for many years, a greater number of failed asylum seekers continued to live in the Netherlands with limited status, forced deportations proved difficult to execute, and situations in detention sometimes became inhumane.

These new restrictions presented problems and spurred efforts to clear existing “files” through a Pardon in 2007. The Pardon concerned people who had applied for asylum before 2001 and who had lived in the Netherlands continuously (resulting in residence permits for about 28,000 people). The Pardon was coupled with the creation of new expulsion centers and a special Return and Departure Service (in 2007), and with a shortening of the procedure (first to 48 hours, but after protests from rights organizations to 8 days, as of July 2010). In addition, an agreement was made with the Association of Netherlands Municipalities (VNG) that municipalities would no longer provide support and accommodation to “failed asylum seekers” (Kos, Maussen, & Doomernik, 2015). The Pardon was not a way to loosen restrictions but rather part of a general strategy to produce a more efficient and effective system of exclusion.

Since 2007, the government consistently presented its immigration and asylum policy as “restrictive, yet just.” With regard to immigration related to asylum and demands for refugee status, this slogan simultaneously emphasized that the Netherlands was living up to the requirements imposed by international and European legal standards, but that “fair procedures” inevitably meant that some applications for asylum would be rejected and that those applicants would have to leave the country. As policy makers explained clearly: “Those who cannot stay will have to leave” (DT&V, 2013, p. 13). Nongovernmental organizations and others consistently pointed to the humanitarian consequences of these stricter and exclusionary policies, which included detention, the creation of deportation centers (uitzetcentra), and forced expulsions. Their protests occasionally intensified, notably around major incidents, including the death of an asylum seeker because of suffocation due to excess violence by the accompanying officers on a flight, and in October 2005 when a fire at the Return Centre of Schiphol airport in Amsterdam killed 11 undocumented migrants awaiting expulsion and injured many more (Versteegt & Maussen, 2012). Additionally, those carrying political responsibility for the asylum procedure, notably Gerd Leers (Minister of Immigration and Asylum between 2010 and 2012, Christian Democrat Party, CDA) and Fred Teeven (Secretary of State of Justice between 2012 and 2015, Liberal Party, VVD) increasingly were confronted with public protests by advocacy organizations, municipal authorities, and groups of citizens who were saying that the social reality on the ground was at odds with official policy declarations circulated by the Ministries. Governments in the major Dutch cities increasingly signaled that many of the “failed asylum seekers” who had allegedly had been “expulsed” were in fact living in their cities in precarious conditions. Between 2008 and 2013, no less than 50% of the rejected asylum seekers had merely been “administratively removed” (the official bureaucratic term), meaning that they had left a reception center “with unknown destination,” thereby entering life as undocumented migrants (Kos et al., 2015). Attempts by the government to force municipal authorities to support national policies of exclusion by ending existing emergency care facilities that provided “bed, bath, and bread” to homeless migrants were unsuccessful. Eventually, these national policies were condemned as a violation of European regulations by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. ³ But also, as we show later in this article, with regard to some heavily mediatized examples of young “failed asylum seekers,” the human consequences of restrictive asylum policies were forcefully exposed and sparked intense emotions, compelling the responsible politicians to come up with justifications for their restrictive policies.

Culturalizing Exclusion and New Restrictions in the United States

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, anti-immigrant associations, media personalities, and prominent intellectuals developed overlapping arguments, which congealed into a coherent discursive frame (Chavez, 2008; Massey & Pren, 2012). While some asserted that immigrants presented a material threat to the country, most presented immigrants as a major cultural threat to the country’s national identity and interests. In a now famous article in Foreign Affairs, Harvard professor Samuel Huntington made the following argument:

The extent and nature of this immigration differ fundamentally from those of previous immigration, and the assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America. This reality poses a fundamental question: Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish). (Huntington, 2009, p. 1)

For Huntington and others, the inability to assimilate into the “core Anglo-Protestant culture” undermined a unified identity and contributed to fracturing the country.

John Tanton, the architect and sponsor of the country’s modern anti-immigrant movement, expressed a slightly different concern than Huntington. He believed that immigrants would Hispanicize the country, which would in turn weaken institutions. He argued,

If through mass migration, the culture of the homeland is transplanted from Latin America to California, then my guess is we will see the same degree of success with governmental and social institutions that we have seen in Latin America. (Italics added). ⁴

Thus, anti-immigrant intellectuals and advocates stressed that the problematic culture of immigrants made them a threat to a conception of citizenship and national belonging firmly tied to “Anglo-Protestant culture.”

The cultural threat frame was coupled with the argument that unauthorized transgressions of the border presented a fundamental threat to national security and sovereignty (De Genova, 2007; Inda, 2006; Inda & Downey, 2013). This bordering frame became very prominent during the 2000s when the “war on terror” encouraged immigration foes to connect immigration with criminality and terror (De Genova, 2007; Inda 2006; Inda & Downey, 2013; Massey & Pren, 2012). Dan Stein, an associate of John Tanton and spokesperson of the leading anti-immigration advocacy organization, Federation for American Immigration Reform, was an early influence in producing this discourse. According to him, “Islamic terrorists have penetrated every aspect of our immigration system” (Stein, New York Times, March 15, 2002). By the middle of the decade, this argument had become a normal part of public discourse, with leading senators casually remarking that “migration is viewed largely as a security issue in the United States” (Senator John Cornyn, New York Times, March 23, 2005). This discourse cast suspicion over immigrants and the immigration process as a whole.

The immigrant threat frame strongly affected public perceptions. “The relentless propagandizing that accompanied the shift had a pervasive effect on public opinion, turning it decidedly more conservative on issues of immigration” (Massey & Pren, 2012, p. 8). In response to negative perceptions of immigrants, in 1996 the Clinton Administration signed a wide-ranging law that transformed the country’s immigration landscape: the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA; Durand & Massey, 2003; Fix & Zimmerman, 2001; Massey & Pren, 2012; Nevins, 2002; Varsanyi, 2008). IIRIRA added several crimes to the “aggravated felony” list and lowered the threshold for such crimes. It restricted judicial review and discretion during deportation procedures, and criteria for what meets the “hardship” standard. This limited the abilities of judges to consider hardship on families and others special considerations to offset relatively minor crimes during deportation proceedings. “IIRIRA reduced immigrants’ likelihood of success on appeal, thereby reducing their chances of relief, even if they had family ties in the United States” (Hagan, Castro, & Rodriguez, 2010, pp. 1804-1805). It also streamlined deportation procedures while raising the bar for legal reentry for those who had been living in the country without legal status (10 years for those who had been in the country for 1 year or more). The law barred the possibility to readjust immigration status for those who had been living in the country without authorization. Before 1996, regularizing status on the basis of family unification was a common method to gain legal status. This particular avenue was now closed. Last, IIRIRA introduced a minimum income requirement of 125% above the poverty line on family sponsors, with the income threshold rising with respect to the size of the family. It also required more documentation to meet minimum income standards. IIRIRA did not eliminate family unification. It did, however, facilitate the abilities of authorities to strip people of their legal status and deport people irrespective of their family ties. The law also made it extremely difficult for unauthorized immigrants with citizen spouses and children to regularize their status, and increased the qualifications needed to sponsor family members seeking permanent legal status. For the purposes of this article, the law significantly weakened the legitimacy of the “family” as a basis to make claims to legal status in the country. Whereas many people considered family unification a sacrosanct and unrestricted right prior to 1996 (Fix & Zimmerman, 2001; Hagan et al., 2010), this “right” was effectively made a privilege that could be invalidated for a wide variety of created reasons (e.g., minor crimes, low income levels, high fees, timing and location of application, etc.).

We find similar trends facing refugees and asylum seekers. Scholars have long shown that recognition of status has been driven more by the geopolitical and ideological concerns of the government than the legitimacy of actual claimants (Coutin, 2003; Menjívar, 1997). IIRIRA and antiterrorist measures (USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, REAL ID Act of 2005, etc.) passed during the 2000s contributed to greater restrictions on this category of migrants. “The one-year filing deadline, a heightened burden of proof, new corroboration requirements, and more exclusive definition of social group membership have prevented large members of bona fide asylum seekers from prevailing in and even making their claims” (Kerwin, 2011, p. 1). These restrictions reduced the number of petitioners and grantees (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Number of persons granted asylum.

Restrictive measures and laws multiplied during the 2000s. Congress passed 5 laws, and the Department of Homeland Security introduced 12 different measures to strengthen borders and facilitate the detection and deportation of undocumented immigrants (Massey & Pren, 2012, pp. 10-11). These initiatives combined with IIRIRA to accelerate deportation rates. Deportations increased from 40,000 per year during the early 1990s, to 200,000 immigrants per year in the mid-2000s, and to 400,000 by the end of the decade (Hagan et al., 2010; Massey & Pren, 2012). These laws also contributed to increasing the number of detention facilities. According to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union, the number of beds in deportation facilities grew fivefold between1996 to 2010, housing approximately 363,000 detainees (Rabinovitz, 2011).

Emerging Niches and Deserving Youths in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, restrictions rested on discourses that justify exclusion on cultural (irreducibly foreign) and moral (fake) grounds. Subsequent restrictions have sharpened the symbolic and institutional boundary between Dutch nationals and the immigrant population. In this context, mobilization frames that exclusively stressed the rights of immigrants would not have generated much resonance because of the devaluation of rights based claims (suspicion of “fakers”). While the context stresses that immigrants are ineligible because of their cultural or moral “failings,” moral dilemmas and ambiguities arose when restrictive measures exclude immigrant subgroups that displayed “good” cultural attributes. Such dilemmas provide niche-openings that enabled subgroups to assert their deservingness.

When we look in more detail at the kind of arguments that were invoked by people who stood up to defend the right to stay of a specific (young) person, it becomes clear that particular attributes and cultural resources are invoked to argue why they are particularly deserving. First, the fact that children or teenagers are “studying” and are doing something that is highly valued and that will bring added value to them as well as to the society they will be living in as adults, is consistently invoked. In the Sahar case (see below) the fact that a teenage girl of Afghan origin apparently had decided not to wear the headscarf was presented as an illustration of her level of cultural adaptation (and of her being “Westernized” and “emancipated” and a “young girl benefiting from the opportunities to develop herself in a free society”). In that light it would seem outlandish for the Dutch state to “send her to a country she does not know, and hand her over to the Taliban.” In other cases involving children or teenagers the fact they were participating in soccer teams or school activities, or the fact they had taken up a regional accent or dialect, were taken as illustrations of “rootedness,” “blending in,” and “cultural integration,” which were also represented as something that came naturally to children who had grown up in a particular country.

Among the various immigrant mobilizations over the past decade, those in favor of children and youth have become the most prominent. In the period between 2010 and 2013, a widespread mobilization for a so-called “Children’s Pardon” emerged in reaction to a small number of individual cases of underage “failed asylum seekers” that risked being expelled, sometimes together with their families. The campaign for a “Children’s Pardon” was not necessarily directed by a clear coalition. It brought together three major groups of actors, which pursued overlapping goals, but which sometimes diverted and even clashed in terms of methods and framing strategies: (1) rights-based organizations like Defense for Children and Amnesty International; (2) spontaneous mobilizations by (local) officials, public figures, and citizens around particular cases; and (3) national politicians, notably of the Left (including MPs of the Labor Party, the Green Left Party, and the Christian Union).

Many of the mobilizations for children and youth began through “bottom up” struggles. Friends, classmates, local churches, and local officials stood up to defend a particular individual targeted for deportation (see Versteegt & Maussen, 2012, pp. 53-54). A prominent case involved Sophie Yangala from Congo. In 2001, fearing expulsion, a local group of protesters in her daughter’s school created a committee called “Stop Expulsion Yangala.” Initially the protesters focused on the good grounds for the asylum application. Referring to the torture she and her husband endured in Congo, and the death of her husband. But gradually the attachment of Yangala’s two daughters to the Netherlands was emphasized, as well as the degree of cultural integration of Yangala and her daughters. Other cases involved the teenager Taida Pašić, from Kosovo, who was arrested and put in alien detention during her exams in 2006.

As these and similar mobilizations erupted, national organizations and political officials realized that this issue provided an opening through which to pursue permanent residency status for some immigrant youths. This led them to inaugurate the Children’s Pardon campaign in 2010. A lead advocate with the Green Left Party stressed that the cultural attributes of assimilated immigrant youth made them exceptionally deserving of a pardon.

A child speaks to people. I think that was a massive success factor. . . . No matter how anti-immigration you are, if it’s a child and they speak Dutch well, and they’re integrated then they think “that’s one of us.” (Former parliamentarian, Green Left Party, personal interview)

It was precisely the cultural qualities of children that made Dutch nationals perceive them as “one of us.” Advocates cultivated and intensified a moral dilemma concerning the deportation of people who spoke, looked, and felt like a “normal” Dutch person. Drawing on this, but also stressing the humanitarian implications of deporting assimilated children, another leading advocate remarked, “They are just Dutch children, with a Dutch education and Dutch culture. And now they’d have to leave. Research has shown that this is really damaging for children” (Policy advisor, Christian Union Party, personal interview). This advocate stressed that their cultural assimilation posed a humanitarian problem because it could be “really damaging” for the children.

Leading advocates of the Children’s Pardon began to build on local struggles by constructing a common discursive framework, creating a website, developing a petition, and initiating a lobbying effort. One leading advocate describes the strategy:

We released the Kinderpardon.nu [Children’s Pardon] website with all the Dutch celebrities and interviews in the newspapers. Before this, maybe at most a month before that I thought up the phrase Children’s Pardon. It just came to me. And then I sat there with my assistant, and we wrote really short, really simple things like, “more Fries than the Elfstedentocht.” we started thinking about all these super Dutch things. . . . And then we got permission from the parliament group to put it online and then boom, it was done! (Former parliamentarian, Green Left Party, personal interview)

A total of 130,000 people, including mayors from 120 municipalities, ultimately signed the petition. National advocates and local mobilizations remained relatively disconnected from one another, but the efforts of national advocates helped provide local struggles with a frame to structure their particular interventions in the public sphere.

Advocates were conscious about using major media outlets to diffuse frames throughout the country.

Did you see “Uitgezwaaid”? It was a TV show that we worked on with Defense for Children and UNICEF. That also made a big impact on people. We wanted people to become aware of this and the producers [of the show] were brilliant. They did so well and I think people started to see that these were just Dutch children. (Policy advisor, Vluchtelingenwerk, personal interview).

As efforts to stress the Dutchness of immigrant youths gained traction, sympathetic journalists used these frames to depict the cases of other children and youths in the country, further extending the legitimacy of culturally centered frames.

In 2011, a local newspaper mobilized support for the case of a Sudanese boy, Yossef, from the small city of Alkmaar. Yossef was being presented as very “Dutch” and eating “peanut butter and pink cake” (a common treat in the Netherlands). A local politician of the Labor Party lobbied for Yossef in the Alkmaarse Courant in the following words:

Yossef is a boy with a Sudanese nationality who has become a Dutch child, an Alkmaar boy who has his friends in this city, who is a member of the soccer club and is attending school here. Let him live with his mother in Alkmaar as long as there is no clarity about possible expulsion to his country of origin. This child should not be more damaged by this procedure, which has been dragging on for years; children have rights too. (Alkmaarse Courant, 2011, translation by Inge Versteegt)

The politician employs cultural frames to structure his argument and turns to the rights of children at the end, almost as a residual afterthought.

Two other cases received even more media exposure. The so-called Sahar case came up in 2010 and concerned a 14-year-old Afghan girl whose family unsuccessfully applied for asylum three times since 2000, and was requested to return to Afghanistan. The case of Mauro involved an 18-year old boy from Angola. He arrived alone in the Netherlands at the age of 8, put on a plane by his mother, and requested asylum. However, he only obtained a temporary status as an “Unaccompanied Minor” (AMA) and lived in an AMA center and later in a Dutch foster family. Unaccompanied minors cannot be expelled, but, upon reaching the age of 18, Mauro was scheduled to be sent back to Angola because all of his asylum applications had been turned down.

Various frames have been used to argue that these youths (and their families) deserved to stay in the Netherlands. Most important, advocates highlighted the youths’ mannerisms, speech, and sociocultural activities as ways to stress their Dutch cultural habitus. While highlighting the dispositions of the youths, advocates also stressed their “rootedness” and that the Netherlands has become their natural home. In December 2010, for example, the national newspaper De Pers published a long and sympathetic article about Sahar that introduced her as a typical Dutch schoolgirl: intelligent, hardworking (resulting in excellent school performance), and loved by her classmates. Her “rootedness” in the local community was illustrated by a remark about her grade for Frisian (the regional language), which contrasted with her lack of proficiency in Afghan:

Sahar is sitting at a table in the City Gymnasium in Leeuwarden. Behind her is a flag on which is written “Sahar must stay” made by her classmates. She wears a leather coat and keeps her long hair out of her face with a small braid. At her feet rests her schoolbag. She never had a bad grade during her first year and a half at the gymnasium. Or just once, but after a re-trial she got an A+. For Frisian language, she holds an A. “I can understand it but cannot speak it. I have better command of it than of Afghan language anyway.” (Trouw, 2012, translation by Inge Versteegt)

In the interview and the picture that accompanied it, her “long hair” presented a subtext. Namely, that there was a risk that this “Westernized girl” would be obliged to wear a Burqa upon her return to Afghanistan.

A similar emphasis on the level of acculturation was put forward in the Mauro case. A leading Dutch newspaper, NRC Handelsblad, presented him as a young boy who was integrated in the Netherlands through family and education:

Angolan Mauro Manuel (18) has been living with his foster parents for eight years [ . . . ] At nine years old he was put on a plane to the Netherlands by his mother. Mauro never had a residence permit. The judge prevented attempts by his foster parents to adopt him. Friends, family and classmates have requested attention for his case. Mauro wrote a letter to Leers [the Minister of Immigration] requesting permission to stay. Leers refused. Mauro speaks Dutch (with Limburg accent), went to primary school in Venray and to the VMBO (secondary school). He currently attends a vocational education. (NRC-Handelsblad, 2011, translation by Inge Versteegt)

National advocates of the “Children’s Pardon” employed Mauro as a “poster child” for their campaign. “It all started with Mauro because you know, he had that Limburg accent and the idea that a child like that would be put on a plane is really nuts” (Policy advisor, Vluchtelingenwerk, personal interview).

The Dutch culture of Mauro and Sahar were illustrated repeatedly by drawing attention to their physical attributes (“Limburg accent,” “long hair”), which indicated that these youths not only subscribed to Dutch culture but also that Dutch culture had become a part of their habitus. They were fully Dutch, advocates argued, in every way except their passport. They were deserving of special treatment not because their inalienable rights were being violated but because advocates had transformed them “normal” Dutch kids. This, and not that their inalienable rights were being violated, made their imminent deportation morally reprehensible.

The advanced cultural assimilation presented a dilemma because the “Western” values of these youths made them targets of repression if sent back to their native countries. This frame resonated with broader culturalist discourses that “non-Western culture” was a threat to “Western culture.”

If we don’t do anything, their future lies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Angola. Countries of which they don’t know the language, where they know nobody, where they are aliens. We will not let this happen. These children belong here. We want to get them out of insecurity and welcome them into their country. (Children’s Pardon petition)

The anticipated humanitarian disaster associated with their deportation would be the result of successful cultural assimilation. This argument draws on and validates a core of logic of the “culturalization of citizenship”: people in foreign countries are indeed opposed to Western culture and values (often violently), Westernization makes youth vulnerable to persecution when deported, and this should make assimilated and rooted immigrants into a protected category eligible for asylum status. Rather than critiquing the logic of culturalization, advocates mobilize it to secure the inclusion of some immigrants even if this comes at the expense of sharpening exclusionary boundaries.

Culturalist frames were coupled in effective ways but advocates also drew on secondary frames to further bolster their arguments. The various cases stressed that the youths were not “profiteers” but were making contributions to the country by attending school. In the case of Sahar this frame was most pronounced because she had excellent grades and was planning to pursue a university education. In the Mauro case, however, it was not so obvious because he was a mediocre student. Instead, advocates stressed his “innocence,” tapping into the broader assumption that children cannot be held morally or legally accountable for their precarious legal status.

This combination of being a child and being in the Netherlands for too long and just being so powerless. Because look, parents choose—I don’t know what kind of choice you have when you are a refugee but okay—but the children? No choice at all. And they’re victims of the system. (Policy advisor, Vluchtelingenwerk, personal interview)

The Children’s Pardon campaign and associated mobilizations resulted in a new regulation issued by the government in February 2013. This measure provided permanent residency permits to children of refused asylum seekers who had lived in the Netherlands for a minimum of 5 years before reaching the age of 18. Direct family members of these children (e.g., their parents) can obtain a “derived” (afgeleide) residency status. The government’s decision builds on two parliamentary motions: one issued in 2010 (the so-called “rootedness motion”; wortelingsmotie) and the other in 2011 (the so-called “Children’s pardon motion”; motie kinder-pardon). A special measure was introduced with respect to the Sahar case. A court in Den Bosch ruled in January 2011 that Sahar and her family could stay, mainly because she had become too Westernized. Not much later, a study by the Minister of Immigration into “Westernized girls in Afghanistan” concluded that there were genuine dangers upon return. The Ministry estimated that about 400 more girls “like Sahar” lived in the Netherlands and should also qualify for a residence status. What was remarkable about this case is that the degree of cultural assimilation became a new criterion to evaluate asylum claims.

Importantly, whereas “spontaneous” supporters (friends, school teachers, sports instructors, class mates) of particular immigrants would be inclined to invoke these types of arguments to explain why this particular individual “deserved to stay,” people we interviewed from advocacy organizations often said they struggled with the ethics of these lines of argumentation. They were inclined to support the idea that asylum requests should be dealt with on the basis of existing (legal) criteria, not on the basis of subjective and/or affective reasoning. In the case of Mauro, who lived with his foster parents and became represented as a well-intended young boy, one interviewee who works for a Christian nongovernmental organization, worried that the demands for granting asylum on the basis of emotive arguments centered on “how well he speaks Dutch” and “his innocent eyes.” This, according to her, would imply a grave injustice toward people who, despite the fact they were older, less good looking, not able to speak Dutch, and so on, had more grounds to see their demand for asylum recognized (Official, Church in Action, personal interview).

Emerging Niches and Deserving Youths in the United States

Prominent rights organizations (National Immigration Law Center, Center for Community Change, among others) launched a campaign to pass the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act in 2001. The DREAM Act promised to place undocumented university students and youths performing community service on a path to citizenship.

In 1996, IIRIRA placed enormous pressure on the country’s enforcement agencies because the law contributed to a sharp upturn in the number of people being processed by the system. This spurred officials with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to use prosecutorial discretion to prioritize cases and better allocate resources. In a precedent-setting memorandum to regional directors, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner provided guidelines for when to exercise discretion. A key factor to consider was what she called, “Humanitarian Concerns.” These concerns were defined as follows:

Relevant humanitarian concerns include, but are not limited to, family ties in the United States; medical conditions affecting the alien or the alien’s family; the fact that an alien entered the United States at a very young age; ties to one’s home country (e.g., whether the alien speaks the language or has relatives in the home country); extreme youth or advanced age; and home country conditions. ⁵

The INS memorandum also included a list of “triggers” to help INS officers “identify cases at an early stage that may be suitable for the exercise of prosecutorial discretion” (p. 11). Among these “triggers,” the memorandum included: “Juveniles; Aliens with lengthy presence in United States (i.e., 10 years or more); or Aliens present in the United States since childhood” among others.

While the INS was developing methods to address the special conditions of certain immigrants, DREAM Act advocates believed that the public seemed ready to appreciate the exceptional case of undocumented youths. The 1982 Supreme Court case Plyler v. Doe recognized that undocumented immigrant children had equal substantive rights to an education (Gonzales, 2011; Hagan et al., 2010; Motomura, 2014). This ruling made primary and secondary schools a sanctuary for undocumented immigrant children. School subsequently became an important space of social and cultural integration, with children developing various ties with citizens, internalizing national cultural norms and values, and creating a strong sense of belonging within their new country (Gonzales, 2011). Just as important, since most undocumented youth migrated as children, advocates believed that they could not be held morally or legally accountable for their status. Discourses that stressed the inadmissibility of immigrants on the basis of their “foreign” culture and “illegality” closed down the roads for many immigrants but they also introduced a niche for established youths because this subgroup possessed the attributes (i.e., American culture and innocence) that made them admissible in the national community. Thus, the actual discourses and measures that spurred the exclusion of many presented slight openings for youths with the right set of attributes.

As the DREAM Act campaign unfolded in the late 2000s, advocacy organizations, a handful of Congressional allies, and a growing network of undocumented students formed a loose coalition to broaden public and political support for the cause. The advocacy organizations took a leading role in crafting a compelling representation that rested primarily on the frame of cultural assimilation. Identifying with the national culture became a particularly prominent way to frame deservingness. Drawing on this frame, the leader of United We Dream (the most prominent undocumented youth organization in the country) argued, “Maybe our parents feel like immigrants, but we feel like Americans because we have been raised here on American values” (Saavedra, New York Times, December 10, 2009). Advocates and activists made explicit references to core American symbols during many of their actions and campaigns. The “cap and gown,” a national symbol of success and opportunity, has become the central identifying symbol of the youth. The youth also displayed flags and other prominent national symbols at their demonstrations.

In addition to embracing national symbols, youth have also sought to create resonance with national values.

In the last campaign, the key values that we stressed were fairness, hard work, and self-determination. Those are our key values that we always try to come back to. Like, “The DREAM Act is a policy that supports fairness and rewards hard work.” These are key American values. (Organizer, Dream Team Los Angeles, personal interview).

Demonstrating Americanness tapped into the moral ambiguities of the public. It was one thing to deport irreducibly “foreign illegal aliens” but it was a different thing to deport people who looked and sounded like full members of the national community. Lawrence Downes from the New York Times justified his support for undocumented youth on the basis of cultural assimilation, “Ms. Veliz is here illegally, but not by choice. By all detectable measures, she is an American, a Texan” (New York Times, March 28, 2009, italics added). Her “illegality” could and should be pardoned because of her deep Americanness (“Texan,” the U.S. equivalent of Limburg) and innocence (“not by choice”).

While a strong culturalist frame dominated the strategy, advocates and youth also stressed the utilitarian value of this population. By putting the stories of the best students out into the media, youths and advocates countered the dominant frame that undocumented immigrants were drains on the national economy and welfare system. They were highly capable and motivated members of the national community. This frame resonated widely with the national public and key allies in Congress. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid drew on this utilitarian argument to justify his support of the DREAM Act, “The students who earn legal status through the DREAM Act will make our country more competitive economically, spurring job creation, contributing to our tax base, and strengthening communities” (Harry Reid, New York Times, November 17, 2010, italics added). While the Dutch advocates employed a similar frame, they did not do so with the same level of regularity. This reflects the peculiarities of cultural and discursive traditions of the two countries, and the long history of justifying immigrants in the United States on the basis of their economic value.

Advocates in the United States also stressed the “innocence” of youths (“not by choice”). Supporters and advocates stressed that parents made choices on behalf of their children, and consequently, these youth bore no guilt for their undocumented status. One prominent supporter of the DREAM Act argued in 2007, “It’s unfair to make these young people pay for the sins of their parents” (Senator Durbin, New York Times, August 3, 2007). While Senator Durbin absolved the youths of the original “sin” of “illegality” because of their lack of “choice,” he directly attributed moral failing and legal responsibility to the parents. The phrase “no fault of their own” became a standard talking point when discussing undocumented youth and their cause.

The efforts of youth activists and their allies did not result in the passage of the DREAM Act but they were able to pressure President Obama to use his executive authority to defer the deportation of undocumented immigrants who had come to the country as children. This measure, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, granted temporary status and work authorization to eligible immigrants. Youths needed to meet the following eligibility criteria: be less than 31 years old, arrival before 16 years old, continuous residence in the United States since 2007, proof of education, no serious misdemeanors (or multiple misdemeanors) or felonies. An estimated 600,000 youth have benefited from this measure, and it laid the legal and political groundwork for a broader relief measure in 2014.

There have been important similarities in the discursive strategies of Dutch and American youth campaigns. Both have stressed that the deservingness of immigrant youth stems from assimilation into the national culture. According to many, deporting people who are “like us” is different, morally speaking, than deporting people who are perceived as fundamentally “other.” By stressing common cultural qualities, advocates and activists successfully rendered “illegal aliens” into “normal” people just like anybody else. This, coupled with the contributions and innocence frames, made them exceptional subjects deserving an exemption from deportation. While we stress the commonalities, there have also been differences in framing strategies. In the Netherlands, the humanitarian frame was used more explicitly than in the United States, and it was often coupled with culturalist frames. This difference speaks to the specific national context of the Netherlands where immigration issues have often been viewed and discussed through the window of asylum seekers and vulnerable minors. In such a context, humanitarian frames have become a more common part of the discursive repertoire.