Adult undocumented immigrants are often confronted with exclusionary rhetorics and assimilationist rhetorics both advocating for a sublimation of their identity cast both socially and legally as visibly transgressive. I argue that Congressional discourse on undocumented, unaccompanied minors demonstrates an amplification of this desire to make the immigrant invisible that specifically draws from dominant cultural
understandings of the child and childhood. In this way, Congressional discourse presents an illuminating example of Roche’s claim that, “despite being social actors … including the taking on of considerable responsibility in a range of contexts, children are often rendered silent and invisible by the attitudes and practices of adult society” (476). Child migrants, especially grouped in such large numbers as unaccompanied, profoundly disturb this naturalized invisibility of the child, and in their disquieting visibility they are treated by adult policy-makers as merely “exhibits in a show of concern or fear” (487).
I argue that the rhetoric of both parties asserts a deep need to reverse the shocking visibility the journey of migration has afforded UACs. For the Republicans, this reversal may be achieved by the wholesale removal of children from the country, while protective legal distinctions between children and adult migrants should be ignored. Such a response
both eliminates the fear migrant children’s disturbingly visible presence on American soil Republicans argue causes American citizens, and supposedly enacts a duty of care for vulnerable children by sublimating them back within the protective circle of their family. For the Democrats, the reversal of migrant children’s visibility involves not deportation, but assimilation within a history figured as profoundly American such that components of their experiences and identities that do not mesh with this story are concealed.
The discursive identity transformation of Central American child migrants, who within the Republican narrative emerge from sheltered family environments in the Northern Triangle to become unavoidably visible in their eventual spatial and cultural transgression of American territory and their prodigious numerical presence, exemplifies Roche’s thesis that “‘the child’ appears for public consumption only as victim and a source of trouble” (478). In this way, the unaccompanied minor of the Republican narrative becomes visible first as a vulnerable victim of trouble in their displacement from their ascribed natural environment within the local family environment to the extraordinarily dangerous space between home and the United States. The spatialized nature of Roche’s dichotomy of visibility, mapped along the trajectory between Central America and the U.S., becomes apparent when the child migrant rhetorically transforms to an ominous source of trouble at the divisive line of the border. The border, acting as such as both a material and rhetorical locus of division and conversion between
naturalized and transgressive identities, throws the difference and uncertain potentiality of the child migrant into sharp relief for the Republican Congressional observer.
The visible, unnatural position of the migrant child is granted a negative moral value within Republican discourse because it is characterized as profoundly disruptive
and unnatural for both the child and the American citizen. It is a situation comprising an unavoidably glaring transgressive displacement of huge numbers of children from their natural environment, the position and experiences of whom were likely beforehand wholly invisible to many Americans. Such a situation, as theorized by Shome, acutely disturbs “commonplace assumptions about spaces being a stable and a coherent source for some coherent identity that can be distinguished from some ‘other’” (44). The Republican anxiety toward expedited deportation, then, becomes understandable, if not commendable, within the hearings I analyze as a solution to the problem outlined by Shome, through which the potentially long-standing presence of unaccompanied minors within American borders causes disquieting doubt. Additionally, expedited deportation simultaneously functions implicitly within Republican discourse as a reversal of the premature growing-up of the unaccompanied minor, a spatialized return to the innocence of childhood and the tempering protection and care of one’s family. The nominally humanitarian objective of deportation thereby serves to sublimate Central American children within the family sphere again, removing them from a visibility that necessarily engages the U.S. as either a forced protector of children in trouble or the victim of children themselves. Deportation, then, functions as an elimination of the Central
American child migrant from view, and thus a re-settlement of spaces and their accordant identities, both in the United States and Central America.
Democratic speakers exhibit a different rhetorical strategy that nonetheless also effectively reestablishes the invisibility of migrant children. They do so by casting UACs’ personal histories and behavior as deeply comprehensible within American history itself, resulting in a sublimation rather than a reification of difference. The
journey path traversed by undocumented immigrants, for the Republicans, is always already a spatial aberration, as it presents a great threat to the receiving nation and forces children to come to embody a profoundly unnatural identity. In contrast, for the
Democrats, the journey path functions as an idealized, historicized, representation of the spatial trajectory. Unaccompanied minors thus take on, within the narrative, the personal characteristics associated with the idealized immigrant figure in U.S. history. While this allows UACs to some extent to escape the charge of racial, cultural, and economic difference, the reductionism of the narrative suppresses the ever-present question of documentation. The way unaccompanied minors are addressed in supposedly progressive discourse as blank slates for the inscription of motives and identity reminiscent of
dominant cultural conceptions of the child results in the regimentation and fragmentation of personal identity to present the child in a way understandable to the American
observer, once again, primarily on her terms (Malkki 61). Such discourse privileges identity characterizations mirroring the intricacies of American social and legal relations. For one young man interviewed by the Vera Institute, this loss of control over
independent self-definition was painfully apparent, encapsulated in the statement, “I am no longer Jose, but now I am a male, Latino, undocumented, person of color”
(“Unaccompanied Immigrant Youth in New York” 22).