Disposable Subjects: Law and Child Migration to the United States, 1890s-1920s

Abstract

Disposable Subjects argues that foreign-born minors at the US border found themselves increasingly at the disposal of others, first and foremost the state, from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s. It explores the intersection of child protection and immigration control to examine questions that remain all too relevant today: How did minors experience border crossing differently from adults because of their childhood status? Moreover, how did the federal government address childhood at the US border? Disposable Subjects connects immigration history with the history of children and childhood to trace the making of what I call the guardianship principle: to enter the United States, children required support from their parents or legal guardians socio-economically capable of giving them post-entry protection and care. Amid growing concerns about child labor, the Immigration Act of 1907 prohibited entry to unaccompanied alien minors under sixteen years of age, and US immigration authorities instituted a more thorough inspection of child migrants’ identities, chronological ages, and family backgrounds. As such, the guardianship principle coalesced more into an ever-growing scheme of immigration restriction, where having a credible guardian in the United States was a necessary but insufficient condition for children’s entry. Disposable Subjects uncovers the multiple threads of changes that reinforced the guardianship principle’s restrictive effect, including the medicalization of border control, the federalization of the naturalization process, and the implementation of passports, visas, and quotas. Through these developments, it evolved into a convoluted set of legal and administrative arrangements that continue to inform the ways in which the federal government handles issues of child migration. Disposable Subjects offers a fresh perspective on the history of child migration to the United States and the centrality of childhood therein. In doing so, it challenges entrenched assumptions about childhood as a carefree or educative stage of life and exposes the contradictions between its imagined universality and historical diversity. Childhood as a period of legal dependency differentiated children’s experiences at the US border from their adult counterparts’, whether it resulted in their entry or deportation.