A rite of reverse passage: the construction of youth migration in the US asylum process

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research at a legal aid organization, I analyze the legal brokerage of youths' asylum applications. As youths increasingly seek asylum alone, the United States has adopted policy changes allowing them more favorable access to the asylum process than adults. Despite this opening, I argue that mediating youths' asylum claims remains challenging. First, youths have more difficulty sharing their stories than adults, and I identify three youth-specific interviewing strategies that legal intermediaries employ to elicit their accounts of forced migration. Second, I analyze how intermediaries edit these accounts to satisfy the asylum system's expectations about childhood, as well as forced migration, constructing narratives that distance youths from criminalized adult identities and depict them as innocent child-refugees, which configures the asylum process as a victimizing and infantilizing rite of reverse passage.

Humanitarian capital: how lawyers help immigrants use suffering to claim membership in the nation-state

“…279(g)(2))), who are allowed to apply through the non-adversarial process at the asylum office even if they have been apprehended. They have higher odds of winning their cases through this process (Galli 2018). The 28 May 2013 USCIS memorandum established that, once a minor has been classified as a UAC, which usually occurs upon apprehension, she must be guaranteed access to the asylum office even if she is later reunified with parents, which happens in 60% of cases (ORR 2014), or reaches majority of age.…”

“…The attorney thus argues that asylum-seekers fleeing persecution of non-state actors nonetheless satisfy the "state-centric" refugee definition (Gibney 2004) since they are forced to flee because sending state institutions (e.g. the corrupt police) that either do not have the capacity to protect its citizens or may even be colluding with the private persecutors that victimize them (for more on how laywers construct asylum narratives for Central Americans, see Galli 2018). In preparing these types of asylum cases, legal intermediaries continue a decades-long legal struggle for the recognition of migrants from this region as refugees, serving the role of critics of the law as they attempt to broaden interpretations of the refugee definition by filing cases in immigration court, hoping to create expansive precedents in evolving case law.…”

The limits of freedom: migration as a space of freedom and loneliness among Afghan unaccompanied migrant youth

“…Yet, as already discussed in the introduction of this special issue, the figure of the unaccompanied minor unsettles Western assumptions around childhood and adulthood (Derluyn and Broekaert 2008;Heidbrink 2014;Galli 2017). These young people present traits of vulnerability usually related to children, while they also share features which are typically associated with adulthood, such as independence and agency.…”

Waiting and the Temporalities of Irregular Migration

“…The migration of minors has been described by some anthropologists as a form of 'rite of passage,' aimed at making 'real men' of those who go down the road of exile and uncertain adventure (Monsutti, 2007). However, as Chiara Galli (2018) rightly points out in her ethnography of the judicial treatment of minors from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico City in the United States, the preparation of asylum applications by legal actors implies what she calls a 'rite of reverse passage:' The arguments put forward to be legitimately recognised as a child involve forming an infantilising and victimising narrative, thereby erasing any form of agency, in order to gain access to a safe haven.…”