Suffer the Little Children: Child Migration and the Geopolitics of Compassion in the United States

Abstract

In Suffer the Little Children, Anita Casavantes Bradford, Associate Professor of Chicano/Latino Studies and History at the University of California, Irvine, examines the United States’ unaccompanied child migration policy from 1930 to 2020. Through a transnational, comparative, and relational approach, Casavantes Bradford addresses how governmental and non-governmental actors operating in different domestic and international contexts developed responses to a range of child migrants, including European Jewish and Protestant children; Hungarian youth; Cuban evacuees; Southeast Asian unaccompanied minors; former child soldiers; and Haitian, Mexican, and Central American children. Across seven chapters (and an epilogue) Casavantes Bradford articulates how “the United States’ response to unaccompanied child migrants has been consistently driven by a ‘geopolitics of compassion’ that selectively highlights U.S. benevolence toward suffering people outside the nation's borders while simultaneously prioritizing foreign policy and domestic political objectives over asylum seekers’ best interests” (p. 3). While acknowledging that Gil Loescher and John Scanlan as well as Carl Bon Tempo have previously noted this connection, Casavantes Bradford convincingly establishes the need to understand child migrants’ distinct treatment and experiences (pp. 3–4).Using clear and engaging prose, Casavantes Bradford's work is grounded in an extensive amount of research in federal archives, international and voluntary organization papers, university collections, and periodicals and government publications. The text also evinces the range of personnel involved in unaccompanied child migrant policy. Of note is an emphasis on adult, state perspectives, rather than those of children, which Casavantes Bradford deems necessary to underscore “the predominant role of the state in shaping the experiences of forced migrants of all ages” but particularly of children (p. 11). However, she is also careful to detail voluntary agencies’ contributions and the entrenchment of a “‘public-private’ bureaucratic infrastructure”—as well as child migrants’ role in this development (p. 7).One of Casavantes Bradford's strongest interventions is her discussion of unaccompanied child migrants as “individual rights-bearing subjects” who need specific protections (p. 9). This focus further distinguishes her argument from previous work on refugee policy and relates to her exploration of the concepts of “refugee” and “child” (contributions which will surely also be helpful for scholars of childhood). Adding yet more rigor to her analysis, Casavantes Bradford interrogates: “how did changing notions of refugees and children's rights interact with Americans’ shifting understandings of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, class, gender, and age over time?” (p. 9). She ultimately concludes that the failure to acknowledge children in this way “played a powerful and persistent role in shaping” the United States’ “treatment of unaccompanied minors” (p. 10).Especially important to this analysis is Chapter 6, “The Most Difficult Type of Refugee: Southeast Asian Unaccompanied Minors and the Reinvention of U.S. Refugee Policy, 1975–1989,” which addresses, in part, how this status came to be imperfectly recognized under law and in practice. Casavantes Bradford focuses here on unaccompanied Southeast Asian minors, including Vietnamese and Cambodian children who fled to countries of first asylum in the late 1970s. Connected to her discussion of these populations is the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act. Specifically, the Act provided for the formation of an unaccompanied refugee minor program under the purview of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (located within the Department of Health and Human Services), which “reflected and reinforced the belief that unaccompanied refugee minors were entitled to priority admissions as well as specific forms of care and protection” (pp. 185–86). However, the Act was flawed in guaranteeing this protection: it did not create child-specific standards “for determining whether children qualified for refugee status”; defined “‘unaccompanied’ . . . narrowly”; and did not “establish procedures for dealing with unaccompanied minors who arrived as part of a major refugee influx entering the country without pre-authorization” (p. 186). In practice, these factors, as well as the racist categorization of unaccompanied minors as “anchors” who enabled family migration, limited resettlement (pp. 188–89). In the epilogue, Casavantes Bradford contends that the United States must act further to reassess its treatment of asylum seekers and “codify the internationally accepted principle of children's best interests in . . . immigration law” (p. 225).Suffer the Little Children is a rich contribution to the literature on unaccompanied child migration and complements scholarship by Laura Briggs, Arissa Oh, and Allison Varzally. This text will certainly “serve as a catalyst and foundation for further studies” on child migrants, especially those centering child voices (p. 11). Future research could engage with the “politics of childhood” and unaccompanied minors’ politicization and political capacity—a concept Casavantes Bradford developed in her first monograph The Revolution Is for the Children: The Politics of Childhood in Havana and Miami, 1959–1962 (2014). Suffer the Little Children will certainly appeal to scholars of immigration, political, and foreign relations history, childhood studies, critical refugee studies, and critical migration studies, as well as individuals wanting an explanation of the United States’ unaccompanied child migration policy.