Chinese Difference and Deservingness

Introduction: Establishing the Chinese Threat (1882)

With the 1848 discovery of gold in California, Chinese immigrants began to arrive in significant numbers to the United States. By 1880, nearly 140,000 Chinese male laborers had entered the country (Liu, 1953). Though still a relatively small percentage of the total immigrant population, these individuals were quickly set apart by their American counterparts. They were identified as crafty and dishonest, and as economic and racial threats. As Erika Lee (2003) argues, such fears about the threatening Chinese “other” coincided with and undergirded a larger campaign to sustain White supremacy in the West. To Californians who envisioned their state to be “unspoiled,” Chinese laborers were strange and unassimilable. They were successful in occupations traditionally assigned to women, wore unfamiliar clothes, and had an “inferior” diet (see Gyory, 1998). Racializing Chinese immigrants as perpetually “foreign” (Tuan, 1998) and “incapable of attaining the state of civilization [of] the Caucasian,” ¹ politicians contended it was their duty and right to exclude Chinese for the good of the country.

Though the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barred the entry of nearly all Chinese immigrants to the United States, a new opportunity for citizenship emerged with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Because state birth records were destroyed in subsequent fires, Chinese laborers in the United States could now claim they had been born in California and were citizens. With this new status, a man could report he had a child born in the United States and receive a piece of paper establishing the existence of a “paper son.” Often, the document was sold to a friend, relative, or stranger in China, and the new paper son journeyed to the United States. Before immigration officials, he recited the detailed family history he studied and memorized. He took on the surname of his sponsor. He might bring a wife and children to the United States, and sometimes other paper sons (see T. P. Chin & Chin, 2000; See, 2009; Poy, 2013).

Paper Lives: The Language of Exclusion as Protection (2015)

Though the Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, youth who today migrate alone and clandestinely from China to the United States are in a sense like their predecessors: “paper” people prioritizing certain family narratives to establish their deservingness of U.S. citizenship. If apprehended, designated unaccompanied alien children (UAC), ² and placed in removal proceedings, these young people have only a few options for legal relief: asylum, Special Immigrant Juvenile Status (SIJS), or a T-visa. ³ In this article, I focus on SIJS, which allows qualified unaccompanied minors to obtain lawful permanent residency on the grounds that family reunification is not viable due to abuse, neglect, or abandonment and that it is not in the child’s best interest to return to her previous country of nationality. ⁴ While ostensibly enacted to protect uniquely vulnerable children now in the United States, ⁵ I argue that SIJS elicits—and in a sense demands—the same language once used to exclude.

In what follows, I consider a manifestation of the racialized hierarchy first instituted via Chinese exclusion laws, namely the role of Orientalist discourse in legal advocacy on behalf of unaccompanied Fujianese youth in removal proceedings. While the pejorative public image of “John Chinaman and his smugglers” legitimated efforts to keep or turn Chinese immigrants out of the United States (Schrag, 2010), I argue that parallel stereotypes of Chinese parents as racially inferior and coercive are used by immigration cause lawyers—and sometimes, youth themselves—to distinguish young people as vulnerable to, victims of, and ultimately separate from their now suspect families and cultures of origin. Not only do these legal narratives necessarily preclude the appearance of young migrants as relational, mobile, and agentive (Boehm, 2008; Ticktin, 1999), they also move beyond the legal realm to powerfully impact and even compromise what Green and Dohrn (1996) describe as “the child in her context,” the personality, family system, history, and daily life of the client (p. 1310; see also Appell, 2006; Statz, in press). By examining who is constructed as worthy of legal status and how, this article confronts the demands of humanitarian immigration laws, contemporary ideologies of childhood and the nation, and the exclusion these things together engender.

Unaccompanied Fujianese Migration

Approximately 1,500 Chinese youth (typically age 15-17 years) migrate alone and clandestinely from Fujian Province, China, to the United States each year. ⁶ Most of these young people intend to raise the socioeconomic status of themselves and their families through migration, but not all are immediately successful: Some are apprehended and placed in removal proceedings. Here, legal advocates—typically lawyers who work for nonprofit immigrant advocacy organizations—are tasked with presenting clients who might otherwise be viewed as “economic migrants” as uniquely vulnerable and in need of legal status. ⁷

For over three years, I chronicled the work of these attorneys. In this article, I refer to them as “cause lawyers,” as their clients, unaccompanied Chinese youth, represent both a meaningful professional and moral “cause” (see Sarat & Scheingold, 2005). I conducted in-depth interviews with over 100 immigration cause lawyers in gateway cities such as New York and Chicago and in new immigrant destinations in the South and Midwest. I observed these individuals in immigration courtrooms and professional gatherings, and I analyzed the policy and practice advisories they published. I also conducted concurrent fieldwork with 20 unaccompanied Chinese youth who were released from detention centers and whose removal proceedings were ongoing or had concluded. I interviewed these young people and accompanied them to the spaces they identified as important, including court, workplaces, shopping centers, restaurants, and friends’ homes. In this way, I attended to youths’ complex socioeconomic obligations, their sophisticated management of kin and community networks, and the influence of various contexts of reception on youths’ daily lives and labor.

These individuals arrived in the United States from Fujian Province, which comprises the majority of China’s overseas emigrant population (K. Chin, 1999; Liang & Ye, 2001). Fujianese migrants typically pay smuggling fees (currently about US$80,000) up front—collectively, through family and neighbors, or through loan sharks. They also have easy access to “snakehead” smugglers and to well-established employment networks in the United States. Through these connections, youth tend to have a relatively accurate sense of the economic realities of migration. This includes an awareness that even if the young person obtains some form of legal relief in the United States, she or he will likely still lead an “illegal life” (Sanghera, 2005) with regard to her or his labor. Workplaces may not comply with labor laws and safety regulations, for instance, and employers or coworkers may be undocumented.

Yet without diminishing the exploitative and isolating conditions of their employment, many of the young people I spoke with simultaneously recognize their work in Chinese buffets or construction sites as personally and socially—and of course, economically—meaningful. Complicating dominant narratives of Fujianese migrants as inevitably poor, itinerant, and illegal (Guest, 2004), these youth identify the workplace as a space to practice English and develop new job skills. It is where young people often create and foster long-term relationships, and also how they raise the socioeconomic status of themselves and family members abroad (Chu, 2006).

Collective but Unaccompanied

The immigration cause lawyers who represent unaccompanied Fujianese migrants tend to locate responsibility, and blame, for a youth’s migration on her or his parents or smugglers. Yet as my data demonstrate, it is often the young person who initiates and largely manages her or his migration journey. Bingwen, a young Fujianese man, explained,

If you try to [migrate], make yourself a better future, then [raises his forearms in a gesture of defeat, imitating a Fujianese parent], “My hands are off, you’re on your own. If you cannot make it, come back, bring me some money. Otherwise, I’ve raised you to a certain point and now you can be on your own.” . . . Now that I think about it, from a westerner’s standpoint, what my parents or any parents from the area did might be almost evil, like sending your little kids out abroad to work. But I think, you know, part of that, it’s the local culture. . . . It’s like, if you stay in this place, you’re just going to be stuck here, your worth is like everybody else. And there’s more stuff out there. . . . Maybe you can come back a wealthier person. Because in the U.S., even a very poor person makes far more money than a very wealthy person where I came from.

Like Bingwen, the majority of the young people I interviewed claim relatively straightforward migration and legal journeys. ⁸ While these individuals identify the decision to migrate as one ultimately made by the youth herself or himself, most still frame migration as a collective venture.

As a number of young people described, the migration journey is shaped and informed by family and community members at home and abroad, by smugglers, and by other young migrants. Arrival and employment in the United States is correspondingly understood as a personal and familial accomplishment. Indeed, while many individuals express pride in their increasing autonomy, purchasing power, and skilled management of labor networks, taxes, health care, friendships, and romantic relationships in the United States, they simultaneously recognize and commend these efforts as providing meaningful forms of status and security to family members in Fujian Province. In this sense, then, Fujianese youth must be viewed both as agents of migration as well as important actors in the ongoing construction of transnational social fields (Boehm, 2012; Coe, Reynolds, Hess, & Rae-Espinoza, 2011; Fass, 2005; Heidbrink and Statz, in press).

In 2012, I met Hua, a young Fujianese woman, in Arkansas. After being apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2008, Hua had been placed in a detention center in Chicago. She was released after a few months and found work at a Chinese buffet in the South. As we sat together in a café near her workplace, I asked Hua about her journey to the United States, “So you’re from Fujian,” I began.

“Yeah, from Fuzhou.”

“Were there a lot of people in your community who had come to the U.S.?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “A lot of them are older, like 30, or 24. A [few] are like me, younger. They have family here. They don’t have green cards. So they have to . . .” She paused, searching for the English equivalent. “They have to feifa yimin [migrate clandestinely]. You know?” she asked. I nodded. “They don’t have parents here,” she continued, “but they want to go out. They don’t want to stay in China.”

“How old were you when you came to the U.S.?”

“Almost 17.”

“Is this something you thought about doing for a long time? You wanted to do it? Or, was it, ‘I’m going to go!’” I clapped my hands, indicating a rush decision.

Setting down her coffee, Hua tilted her head to the side. “It was just . . .” she paused. “Just my parents asked me, ’Do you want to go to America?’ And I’m like, ‘Whatever.’ I don’t really understand what is different about here and China. I know it’s different, but I’m young so I don’t really understand. They say, ‘You don’t want to go? We’re not going to push you.’

“Do you think they knew about America? Did your parents know people who came to the U.S.?”

“A lot of people.”

“What did they hear about the U.S.?” I asked.

“Just work, work, work. And tired. Not rest, just work for everything. Tired, but it’s much better than China. In China you have to work, but it’s not really good.”

“I understand,” I replied. “You won’t make as much money.”

“Right.”

“How did your parents feel, do you think?”

“My dad was just a little bit worried and sad. My mom is sad, so worried. And when I left, we cried for a long time . . .”

Hua looked down, quickly wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. She pushed the remains of her lunch back and forth on the plate with a fork. I changed the subject.

Later, Hua shared her experience of being apprehended at the border, describing the U.S. Border Patrol officials who stopped her group of Chinese migrants and a Mexican coyote, or smuggler.

“Where did [the U.S. Border Patrol officials] take you?” I asked.

“Immigration jail or something. They do everything. Take your picture, ask you some questions. They use the Chinese translator.” She paused, then added, “On the phone.”

“Did you understand the translator?”

“Yeah. They asked me, ‘Do you want to speak Mandarin? Or Fujianese?’” Suddenly, Hua changed her voice to a whiny whimper. “I said, ‘Mandarin is fine.’ I ku [cry].”

“What did they say on the phone?”

“They ask you some questions, like, ‘In China somebody hurt you?’”

“And what did you say?”

Here, Hua took on a pitiful, almost mocking tone. “Yes, somebody hurt me!” She snickered as she recounted the phone call to me. I stared at her, startled. “‘I have to come to America!’” She sniffed twice.

Knowing Hua’s awareness of her options for legal relief, I perhaps should not have been so surprised by the transition I witnessed—from quiet, discrete tears as Hua described saying goodbye to her mother, to her shrewd and almost brash production of abuse in China during the telephonic intake with a legal aid provider.

I asked Hua about her parents. “Do you think they’re proud of you?”

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded quickly.

“Think about when your parents are talking to their friends,” I continued. “What do you think they say about you? Or what do their friends say?”

“They say, ‘Oh, your daughter in America? Amazing! You don’t have to worry about your life right now. Much better right now.’ My mom says, ’I hope so.’ Hua slowed her speech. Imitating her mother, she shrugged weakly. “‘But she’s tired. My daughter’s tired.’”

In subsequent conversations with Hua, the individual accomplishments she identified included paying off a debt of $80,000 plus interest, obtaining a visa and, eventually, Lawful Permanent Resident status, and getting a driver’s license. Essential to these successes, of course, are Hua’s resolve and equanimity as a young migrant; her savvy navigation of the legal process; her determination to master English; her industrious work at a Chinese buffet; and even her deliberate decision to seek out employment in Arkansas, a region where she would have fewer opportunities “for fun” but would be more efficacious in saving money.

Despite the noteworthiness of Hua’s efforts and achievements, in the legal realm these complex negotiations are largely extraneous. Here, a young person’s valued relationships and transnational contributions are strategically dismissed or rejected as cause lawyers “script” Fujianese clients—and by extension, their parents—within the demands of humanitarian immigration laws (Lakhani, 2013). While this process reveals much about the legal and bureaucratic constraints immigration cause lawyers must navigate (Statz, in press), it is also necessary to consider the intimate, and at times unexpected, impact these family narratives have on youths’ lives—even the lives of youth who, like Hua, are at times complicit in the practice. Lawyers’ claims prove not only emotionally inaccurate, but they often undermine the transnational personal and financial commitments young migrants themselves prioritize (Heidbrink, 2014).

Creating a Paper Person

It is important to note that what I trace here is not the creation of an identity. Instead, it is the careful negotiation and selection of an identity, one that emerges discursively through the questions cause lawyers do and do not ask, the responses youth offer, and attorneys’ subsequent “scripting” of a legal narrative (Heimer & Staffen, 1998). The author of an influential policy report described the process more simply, and with audible bitterness: “It’s attorneys’ conforming of kids’ stories. That’s what it is.” While the process generally abstracts the young person from her or his broader context, I argue it simultaneously distorts this context, normalizing an image of Chinese parents as dysfunctional and Chinese children as uniquely needy (Timmer, 2010). Throughout, the United States is upheld as an implicit standard, one in which childhood is maintained as a private, familial, developmental stage of dependence (Appell, 2009). What results from this process is an institutionalized identity; “The Fujianese UAC” is now both a collective representation and an unequivocal moral narrative.

In what follows, I identify the choices lawyers make as they interpret and disaggregate the shifting obligations and accomplishments of young Fujianese migrants, and I consider the ways in which “the language of the law” (White, 1990) demands and reinforces these decisions. I also highlight the decisions made by Fujianese youth themselves. Rather than emphasizing the “extreme vulnerability” and presumed “non-participatory nature and powerlessness” of immigrants in processes of bureaucratic legal labelling (Zetter, 1991), I understand the youth I interviewed as active and informed—and sometimes misinformed—participants in the selective scripting of legal narratives and identities (Calavita, 1998; Menjivar, 2011).

“Can you tell me about what you shared with your attorney?” I asked Hua. We were discussing her smuggling debt, and how her mother turned all of the money Hua wired her over to loan sharks.

She nodded. “My mom never keeps the money. But when I talk to my lawyer—” She altered her tone once more. “She used all the money! She doesn’t pay the smuggler, and I have to work a long time.”

“You change your voice like that?”

“Huh?” She squinted at me.

“Whenever you tell me about how you talk to your lawyer, you say, ‘Ohhhh, ohhhh, ohhhh,’” I mimicked Hua’s mournful cadence.

“Oh. Yeah. A little bit.” She sat back thoughtfully, then tried again: “I have to work a long time. I’m tired.”

“Do you think your lawyer believes you?”

“I’m not sure,” Hua answered. “But it’s good for me.”

In this instance Hua cleverly put forth the account she knew her attorney needed, one in which her mother could be reframed as abusive or neglectful and which emphasized the crushing smuggling fees Hua was obliged to pay. ⁹ Yet significantly, Hua clearly never intended or expected to mislead her lawyer. “When I talk to attorneys,” I said to Hua in a later conversation, “many of them say the same thing: ‘Chinese kids come here because they’re Christian. Or because they have bad parents.’”

“No,” she quickly replied. “No. They know more. I think they know more. . . . They’re doing their job.”

I waited.

“They do a lot of different cases,” she added. “A lot different. So I think they know why you come to America. It’s because you’re poor. You don’t have a lot of money. And you don’t have choices in China. Coming to America is a good choice. It’s much better than China.” She paused. “I think they know.”

Aware that her ambitions and spatial strategies complicate the necessary “paper” image of a vulnerable Chinese child, Hua deliberately reproduces her attorney’s expectations, lending her case a sharper, more tragic focus. In this sense, both she and her legal advocate prioritize and extend what Fraidin (2012) calls “the Grand Narrative of Child Welfare” to the immigration context: “The narrative is one of brutal, deviant, monstrous parents and children who are fruit that doesn’t fall far from the tree” (pp. 98-99). This narrative, Fraidin writes, has little to do with parental authority and instead emphasizes parental culpability. It also has an implicit corollary, the portrayal of youth as “child-victims” (Fraidin, 2010, p. 14; see also Best, 1993).

The “Deviant Chinese Parent” and Uneasy Motives

The coupling of the “deviant parent, child-victim” emerged often in my conversations with immigration cause lawyers, as these interview excerpts demonstrate:

Childhood is an immutable status at the time that you migrate. Eventually you’ll outgrow this, but at the time that you’re a child, you can’t change that. And that vulnerability is certainly part and parcel to why you’re the target. And the fact that a child’s been sold to snakeheads? They don’t make that decision. It’s the parents that make the decision for them.

And this is the difference: If a parent chooses to come—if you are an adult and you want to sacrifice everything to come to America and work to the bone and send money back to your kids, fine. You chose to have those children. If you’re an adult and you say, “My child’s obligation is to do that for me,” well, I think that’s the fundamental difference. . . . The idea that you belong to and for your parents is very strong [in China], that’s a big cultural thing.

I do think the snakeheads are very predatory. But I think that coercion happens less often than the parents being the ones who take advantage of their kids.

In these reflections, we trace the development of a “grand narrative,” one that unhesitatingly assigns blame to Chinese parents and suggests that they are the real danger to a young person (see Bernstein, 2000). Recall that this moral narrative is never created but selected. This is plainly evidenced below, as an attorney describes the process by which she elicits necessary, ostensibly predicted details about her clients’ families to satisfy the SIJS qualification of “neglect” and “abandonment”:

An approach I’ve started to take is saying that parents who send young people with snakehead smugglers to come to the United States just in and of itself is a form of neglect. So even if there isn’t any past history of abuse, or even if the kids are still talking to the parents, the fact that the parents would put them in such a precarious situation and expose them to such dangers, that . . . should be enough to win a Special Immigrant Juvenile Status case in family courts.

Of course, other attorneys are less convinced of, though no less reliant on, the image of Chinese parents as neglectful or coercive. Lisette, an immigration attorney in Missouri, openly admitted her doubts about the families of her clients. “It’s hard for me to understand why anyone would pay to smuggle their child across so many countries,” she said as we sat together in a humid coffee shop. She fanned her face with her hand and shook her head.

On the other hand, I haven’t lived a day in the shoes of those parents. We’re easy to judge and we’re easy to not actually look at the picture. . . . I mean, you’re the parent, you’re the boss, and you know what’s best for your child and you make that decision. But sometimes [lawyers] are very patronizing of families.

While rare, the notion that smuggling a child to the United States could actually reflect foresight or a parent’s devotion was introduced by other attorneys as well. “Does intent always have to be malicious?” asked Uchechi, an immigration lawyer in Chicago. “I don’t know. Think about parents who may be smuggling their kids in their kids’ best interest.” She tilted her head and raised an eyebrow emphatically. “But it’s still substantive law, and we have kids that are circles in square pegs. They don’t fit, and so we have to create these elaborate cultural accounts.”

Leon, an attorney in Chicago, was similarly uneasy with the “grand narrative” I traced above:

If we take seriously the idea that each family can only have one child, what’s going on with them sending that one child off? It could either be that they’re doing it for the family’s interest, but that seems a little odd because now you’re sending your one child far away. Or you might really think the child being sent away is going to have a better life, in which case it fights this idea of neglect. They’re doing it as a way to have a better vision for their child’s future. . . . I have a hard time, you know, condemning parents, saying that they’re doing it purely for their own fiscal interest. I think older models of Chinese culture would say, yeah, of course. You use your children; the family unit is number one; the children’s interests are not as important, right? But I think it might be different nowadays.

Nearly every attorney I interviewed described some strategic reduction of Fujianese youths’ broader context in the legal realm, typically via the introduction and selection of oppositional moral claims about a client’s parents. Yet as we see above, the practice is not without ambivalence. To some, Fujianese parents are indisputably brutal, deviant, and culpable for a child’s migration to the United States. It’s the parents that make the decision for them. Others identify the sending of a young person to the United States as an act of compassion, a decision parents make in their child’s best interest: [Parents are] doing it as a way to have a better vision for their child’s future. This dichotomy of interpretation reveals much about the language of immigration law— and perhaps most obviously the limited, demanding nature of the SIJS framework.

If we look carefully at these statements, however, we see something else: Both views selectively dismantle or dismiss youths’ participation in their migration journeys. Squarely situating unaccompanied Fujianese migration as the parents’ choice—whether malicious or altruistic—abstracts young people from a critical sociolegal narrative and elides the complex circumstances, responsibilities, and relationships underlying their migration journeys. Even for attorneys like Lisette, who are cautious in their evaluation of parents and aware of the “patronizing” tendencies of legal advocates, the young person remains largely unconsidered as the lawyer attempts to locate the motives and responsibility for the “child’s” migration journey.

Selecting—and Playing—the Deserving Victim

As my data suggest, it is often not enough for the young person to be portrayed as needing legal status. Many attorneys feel that unaccompanied minors must also be portrayed as deserving of legal status. “You have to increase attention to kids,” stated one lawyer. “You must present the many positive sides of the issue.” Consider here the case of Young Sullivan, ¹⁰ a young Fujianese man who had an unusual and heavily publicized legal case.

Fighting his removal, Young’s legal advocates initially submitted court documents that present Young’s family members as acting in Young’s best interest: “In an effort to provide Young with better opportunities and to free him from continued discrimination, Young’s father and uncle arranged for him to be smuggled out of China.” ¹¹ Young’s father is likewise identified in these documents as concerned for Young’s safety, particularly since he urged Young to stay in the United States as the smugglers’ threats escalated in Fujian Province.

Young and the family would only be safe if Young stayed in America. . . . His father told him on May 19, 2005, not to come home, that Young is not his son anymore. If Young is deported to China, the smugglers have said that they will find him, torture him, and eventually kill Young and his family. ¹²

As Young’s case progresses, however, Young’s father comes to be framed as responsible for Young’s smuggling journey. Significantly, this coincides with Young’s lawyers’ decision to pursue SIJS. “[H]is father told him . . . that Young is not his son anymore” is now presented as abandonment.

Together with the increasingly deviant parent, we also find the emergence of a dependent, deserving child:

Young has nowhere to turn for help other than this Board. . . . Even if Young played a role in the decision to come to the U.S. via smugglers, which he did not, Young was only fourteen years old at the time . . . ¹³

Young is a good, well behaved teenaged boy . . . ¹⁴

It is important to note, however, that even though Young’s legal advocates intended to pursue SIJS, Young is not exclusively portrayed in case documents as a child only acting at the adult’s direction, as many Fujianese youth tend to be characterized by their attorneys. Indeed, to reiterate the smugglers’ threats, Young is at times celebrated for acting independently, for not doing what was expected of him: “In the eyes of the smugglers [by attending school] Young squandered his opportunity to go underground and work off the terms of the smuggling contract.” ¹⁵ Elsewhere, his lawyers emphasize, “Young is not like most smugglees who are returned to China because he was released from detention and could have gone underground, worked illegally, and paid the snakeheads but did not, instead going to school . . .” ¹⁶

Interestingly, while Young’s counsel worked to demonstrate to the government Young’s “perseverance, dedication, resilience, and heart” in spite of the tremendous fears he had about the smugglers, Young was himself strategically emphasizing a fear of the U.S. immigration system to justify attending school to his family. As he explained to me,

Fortunately enough, my record was with immigration. I actually had to go to school. It’s not an option. It worked out in my favor. Because otherwise I would not have an excuse to tell all the people in my family why I go to school, because I was supposed to be working, pay back the money. So I never told them that. I kept it secret. I’m really happy that [I was apprehended]. So I get up at six, I go to school, take the bus to Akron, come back, take the bus, you know—snowy day, same thing.

Expectations and Exceptionalism

Used by Young’s lawyers to incite sympathy and admiration, and by Young to deflect family expectations and economic obligations, Young’s American education is a significant component in the development of his case. This is not surprising: School is a recognizable space in which to chart developmental markers and, as we find in the supplemental letters of support provided by Young’s teachers, to distinguish an individual’s propensity for hard work, cooperation, responsibility, rationality, and other qualities associated with good citizenship (see Cuevas and Cheung 2015; Gonzales, 2010). “Young Sullivan is a very ambitious young man who has great educational plans for his future,” wrote one teacher. ¹⁷

As a key element in the presentation of a qualified or deserving individual, consider the ways in which education arguably promotes “self-management.” Schools are nexuses of internal discipline, surveillance, and order (Foucault, 1991); they are sites where contemporary “entrepreneurial selves” are cultivated. According to Michael Peters (2001), the entrepreneurial self represents a necessary cultural—or moral or civic—shift from dependency to self-reliance; it is the sort of “responsibilising [sic] of the self” (p. 60) that promotes a nation’s economic competitive advantage. In tracing Young’s case documents we can distinguish between what is clearly a “proper” kind of “responsibilising,” namely the fostering of a self-controlled, globally competitive, highly skilled citizen (or citizen aspirant) via education—Young is a good, well behaved teenaged boy—and “improper” responsibility, the illicit, underground employment Young might otherwise pursue, a commitment that will benefit neither the state nor, presumably, the individual.

Young’s lawyers are not unique in focusing on his education; indeed, the topic emerged often throughout my research. Not only does education provide a means by which to establish a young person’s “deservedness” of legal relief but it also extends to and permits a further moral claim about young migrants’ families. Discussing the frustration she feels when encountering youths’ narratives about parental pressure to work, one cause lawyer confided,

I say to [Fujianese clients], you know, “People are people. Your mom might be a good person, but once parents choose to have children, that’s a job they’re choosing to fulfill. And so we’re not saying anyone’s a bad person, we’re saying that maybe they just weren’t as good at this specific job in their life.”

Another attorney stated,

Chinese families don’t trust pro bono help. They don’t understand that shelter care is good, that even if it delays kids working it gives them the opportunity to learn English. I don’t think families quite get that. Or they may not value education, which is a big issue, too.

These sentiments figure prominently throughout Young’s case. By expecting Young to work rather than pursue an education, Young’s parents are presented as not fulfilling their role as parents. They are different from Young; their personal goals are not as commendable as his. This is an exclusive interpretation, of course—one that effectively rejects other conceivable claims about Young’s family, including the notion that if Young performs well in school, a symbolically “American” endeavor, ¹⁸ his parents could be presumed to have helped cultivate their child’s character and aspirations (Lakhani, 2013). It also puts forth and perpetuates an arguably Western, “sacrilized” childhood ideal, one that negates the socially specific value accorded youths’ labor and may even render youth more vulnerable to underground employment and exploitation (Nieuwenhuys, 1996; Zelizer, 1985).

In many of Young’s case documents, his family and, more broadly, his community and culture of origin are inferred as negligent, dangerous, and corrupt. The expected corollary emerges: Young is at once capable, resilient, educable, and in need and worthy of justice (i.e., citizenship). Just as his parents represent all that is assumed to be wrong about China, Young arguably symbolizes all that is right and exceptional about the United States.

It is in Young’s best interest to terminate Young’s father’s rights because . . . Young [should] be cared for by individuals who, unlike his father, desire to have Young be a part of their family . . . Young has plans to eventually become a biologist and those who seek his custody [in the U.S.] are likely to help him pursue those goals. ¹⁹

It is well-established that torture and murder by smugglers in China occurs and occurs with the acquiescence and support of the Chinese government. . . . Within Fujian, family pride and community pressure have led to a general complacency by local officials and the community toward snakehead activities . . . ²⁰

In the U.S., we do not allow fourteen-year-olds to be sentenced to death for their crimes. . . . The U.S. should protect all children within its borders from the evils of torture and murder. ²¹

As I argue elsewhere (Statz, 2014), Young’s case is exceptional. The advocacy he received was both legal and profoundly personal, and it was remarkably long-term. Indeed, over a decade later, Young now refers to his lawyers as friends, mentors, and even family. These individuals in turn continue to extol the ambition, professional success, and good humor of Young. What is less exceptional about Young’s case, however, is the assertion of American exceptionalism ²² I highlight above. Powerfully rooted in the history and ideology of American gatekeeping, this exceptionalism is intimately connected with early Chinese migration to the United States. Just as stereotypes of Chinese as crafty and dishonest reinforced White supremacy in the early 20th century, the claims many lawyers make about Chinese parents also reinforce implicit assumptions of the superiority of U.S. law, education, and family systems today.

Uneasy Paper Lives

Though youth, or more specifically, youths’ volition, are often omitted from the family narratives attorneys put forth, every cause lawyer I interviewed grappled with the role that her or his Fujianese clients play in their migration journeys—journeys that extend prominently into the legal realm. Not only are attorneys unsettled by youths’ insistence on their participation and management of migration—and, naturally, by the fact that these assertions could inhibit or undermine a lawyer’s own work on a youth’s behalf—but some lawyers are also frustrated and perhaps threatened by the legal knowledge and skilled maneuvering their young “victim” clients demonstrate. “Half of the kids I work with never thought they’d be apprehended [at the U.S.-Mexico border],” said one lawyer. “But half of the kids tell me they were ready to be caught because, like they say, they wanted to get an asylum case.” Whether her expression conveyed disbelief or defeat, I could not tell. “I guess some of them know the system really well.”

During a conversation with Leon, I asked, “What is your sense of the role of youth in making the decision to migrate?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s a good question. It’s always difficult because the children themselves are always going to say it wasn’t their idea.”

“Yes?”

“Because it helps their case.” He shrugged, indifferent.

If [a youth] says, “It’s my idea,” it’s not, oh, you were afraid to come. I mean, obviously the argument can be made: It doesn’t matter if they wanted to come, they’re not adults. They don’t have that agency to make that decision. But I’ve said before, I am always confronted with this notion that it is a strange, paternalistic view of a people to say that they would deliberately put their children in harm’s way, without at least some sense that it’s for the children’s good.

Leon was quiet for a moment, then continued,

I think most [youth] say it’s not their idea. And do I think most of the time they’re sincere? Probably. But I am not ignorant of the fact that it helps their immigration case for them to not take agency or ownership over that decision.

“Which is interesting,” I noted, “because the very fact of a young person deliberately not taking agency is a pretty savvy move.”

“Yeah,” he continued,

And that’s the thing, too. As lawyers we tend to sometimes not give our clients enough credit. . . . I think our clients, for the most part, despite how difficult and how confusing immigration law is—and it certainly is—our clients know in general what’s going to get a judge on their side. And they know that if they say, “It’s my idea,” it makes it very difficult to make the argument about fear and abandonment. It makes it very difficult to make this argument about being a victim, as traumatic as [migration] is. I’m certainly not placing any kind of blame or any kind of judgment on it. . . . Now, it doesn’t matter to me, right? I think they’re not old enough to make that decision. They’re not old enough to take ownership over that decision, so it shouldn’t matter to me whether or not they want to do it, or they have agency to do it.

While Leon rather swiftly solves this tension by relying on social or legal standards regarding youths’ capacity to consent, other attorneys are less convinced by this argument, noting the relatively older age of unaccompanied Fujianese minors. “If the child has never disclosed any sort of red flag for trafficking,” one attorney stated,

We could talk [again] to the child and say, “Look, are you sure there’s nothing going on, do you want to tell us more?” in the hopes that they will kind of put their guard down. . . . But if the child very solidly maintains that everything is fine . . . our hands are tied and we can’t move forward with anything at that point.

Her colleague added,

When working with minors, there are certain ethical provisions that do allow us to kind of dig a little bit more and kind of collaborate with other actors and with other stakeholders [like detention center staff]. But because the Chinese minors are . . . 15 to 17, they have the sufficient capacity, and they have the competency to make their own decisions and to speak for themselves. Because of the age of these minors and the capacity and competency levels, we have to work with what they give us.

Rather than be dismissive or wary of the “capacity” or “competency” their Fujianese clients demonstrate, a few attorneys appreciate these qualities and even admire them. “Framing kids [as victims] has been going on for a long time,” said Angela, an attorney in Alabama. “For the lawyers representing kids, SIJS is great! It’s excellent that we can use it. And [some youth] play the victims, right?”

“Right!” I said, startled by so forthright a question. “And to me, doing so is the opposite of victimhood.”

“Yes,” Angela replied. “In this case, children are the interpreters of the law, and the ones with power.”

“The Ones With Power”: Constructing and Contesting Paper Lives

As the young people in this project demonstrate, and as many of the cause lawyers I interviewed acknowledge, young Fujianese migrants skillfully manage transnational networks and expectations throughout their migration and legal journeys. Providing themselves and their families with meaningful forms of economic and social status, these youth must be identified as important actors in communities of destination and origin. Why their complex maneuvers are strategically dismissed in the specific space of removal proceedings, and to what effect, is equally important to consider. Here, valued family relationships, individual motives, and collective responsibilities are decontextualized and contorted to satisfy a limited legal framework that demands a choice between the state (and partial citizenship) and existing kinship ties (Heidbrink, 2014). A paper life emerges, one in which youth are inherently dependent, vulnerable children who are victim to abusive or neglectful Chinese parents.

When I asked a young woman named Lixue to describe the legal protections available to her and other youth designated UAC, she nodded and stated,

[There] is something for children. Not adults. And it’s because in China, your parents—or somebody—hurt you. You can’t stay in China anymore. So you have to go to America. It’s something like, Your parents don’t like you. They hurt you. They try to kill you. Or it’s like, Nobody wants you. You don’t have anywhere you can stay. You have to go to America.

While ostensibly used to “protect” some Chinese, the legal reality Lixue described simultaneously excludes others, namely those parents framed as deviant, coercive, and uneducated. Even though many young people and attorneys acknowledge these “paper parents” as just that, recognizing that an adult might be acting out of concern for a child’s best interest in “sending” the young person to the United States, this exclusion is real and legal, ²³ and the naming violent (Dawes, 1999).

Examining the process by which a young person is “scripted” as in need of—and deserving of—legal relief illuminates the complex participation, negotiation, and strategic rejection of young migrants (and their migration and family narratives) in the legal realm. For legal advocates and Fujianese youth, the scripting of “paper lives” is at once a source of both possibility and anguish, a demanded choice between valued membership here or there. Not only does this process illuminate the consequential constraints of immigration law, but it simultaneously reinforces a professional and public image of the United States as safe, civilized, and exceptional, and of China as inherently suspect—a hardly novel process when we consider the development of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s. However “paper,” this scripting calls attention to the meaningful extent by which discursive practices in removal proceedings rely on and perpetuate hierarchies of age, nation, and culture.