Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States. By Anita Casavantes Bradford

Abstract

Immigration historians have examined individual case studies of child migration to the United States (Operations Peter Pan and Babylift, for example), but absent in the scholarship is a broader and more comparative treatment that discusses the change in policies over time. Anita Casavantes Bradford Suffer the Little Children provides this long overdue historical analysis. In seven chapters, the author offers a detailed history of the child humanitarian “parolees,” refugees, and asylees who gained admission to the United States despite the many legal barriers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chronological sweep offers the reader a sense of the diversity and complexity of children’s experiences of displacement and resettlement. According to Casavantes Bradford, child migration policies in the United States evolved over time from a series of “ad hoc, voluntary agency-directed child-saving schemes targeting specific groups of endangered foreign children” (like the Hungarians, the Cubans, and the Vietnamese) into a more conceptualized set of federal laws, policies and programs regulating the treatment of unaccompanied minors (p. 3). She argues that U.S. diplomatic and foreign relations—or what she calls the “geopolitics of compassion”—were as important as humanitarianism in shaping immigration policies (p. 3). This is not a novel conclusion—scholars of refugee history have argued this before—but the reader sees more clearly the consequences of these foreign policy agendas on displaced minors. In addition to examining the international and domestic concerns that shaped U.S. policies toward unaccompanied minors, the author discusses the governmental and nongovernmental actors who advocated on children’s behalf and the emerging notions of children’s rights in U.S. society that contributed to the often heated debates on policy. We learn who was prioritized for entry in a country with a well-honed “architecture of exclusion”—and why (p. 4).