The Best Possible Immigrants: International Adoption and the American Family

Abstract

Rachel Rains Winslow provides an ambitious and wide-ranging analysis of the rise of international adoption from the 1940s to the 1970s. She suggests that the practice of international adoption became an accepted and enduring practice during these years because it provided an appealing solution to humanitarian crises abroad. From prospective adoptive parents seeking to avoid the low supply of children and long wait times for domestic adoptions to relief organizations and nongovernmental organizations (Ngos) trying to save needy children to Cold War policy makers seeking to portray the United States as a prosperous, welcoming, and color-blind society. Further, Winslow argues, the system of international adoption that emerged was, by design, ad hoc and adaptable so that it could continue to meet diverse and changing interests. Winslow emphasizes the centrality of voluntarism to the uneven development of international adoption practice. Private social service agencies, charities, and religious organizations observed the plight of needy children abroad and the demand for adoptable children at home, and took advantage of the lack of coherent federal-level adoption legislation to resolve both problems. Policy makers then followed volunteers' lead to legitimize what was fast becoming a popular practice by crafting laws that welcomed foreign adoptees as refugees and providing workarounds to restrictive immigration policies. Politicians described foreign children as moldable, adaptable, and the “best possible immigrants,” making international adoption an arena where public and private interests merged—though not always in ways that were best for the home country or the children.